>> Narrator: From Chicago, it's theCube covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here on the ground covering the Veritas Vision Solution Days in Chicago. Just a couple weeks ago we were in New York City at the iconic Tavern on the Green. We're here at the Palmer House Hotel. Jyothi Swaroop is here, he's the Vice President of Global Marketing for Veritas. Great to see you again. >> Thanks Dave, glad to be here. >> A few weeks ago we saw you in New York. Since then you've been around the globe talking to customers. You just gave a great presentation to about 60, 70 customers here in Chicago. Obviously a lot of your customers here, New York, one of the big NFL cities, so what have you learned in the last couple of weeks? >> Well, a lot. It's been exciting, right. Since New York I've been in Dubai, Milan, Rome, all over the place. Sounds exciting but a lot of jet lag and travel but a lot of exciting customers with interesting challenges that we can solve for. But I guess I would summarize it into three parts. Obviously there are data protection challenges that we solve at Veritas and have done so over 20 years. There are a lot of storage challenges that we talked about and how they're moving to the cloud and how we can assist with that. And lastly, interesting thing is the whole compliance in AI and ML related challenges as to how do they look ahead while staying compliant with what they have already. >> There are some major trends forcing people to rethink their data protection strategies. Obviously, cloud is one, the whole security and data protection world's coming together, the edge, just the whole distributed data trend. Machine intelligence is another one. There are things that you can do with all that data, machine plus data plus cloud really changes the game. You guys have some hard news in that area. Bring us up to date, what are you announcing? >> Right, so we're announcing Veritas Predictive Insights. Really excited about this announcement because when I joined Veritas about 16 months ago, I felt like Veritas sits on top of all these exabytes of data. We protect the largest number of exabytes of data, right. So we have access to the metadata of that data. So my question to the engineering team is what are we doing with that metadata? Are we going to use it, leverage it, so our customers can benefit from it? From all of this user data that we get from other customers. And the answer was, "Yes, we're working on something. Hold on, you're new." And now we have it. So at Veritas, yes it takes 12 to 16 months to build something at scale, right. We have hundreds of engineers that have worked on this. So what we have done now is, especially with our appliances portfolio, we're able to give our customers intuitive, predictive, and proactive maintenance and support of their systems. Now what does that mean? It means firmware upgrades, patches, things like that. They don't have to be a personalized, you know, fly in an engineer in to do kind of things. They can be automated. Oracle recently at Oracle OpenWorld announced this whole autonomous database. Why can't data protection be autonomous, right? So that's how we think, right. Make everything autonomous, make everything predictive and proactive and that's what Predictive Insights is about. >> So let's unpack that a little bit. So what are the enablers that allow you to actually take this next step. Obviously you've got the data, you've got a classification engine that allows you to put data in buckets, if you will. Explain what that is and why it's important. >> I'm glad you brought up the classification engine because that was at the heart of everything Veritas did for the last 20 years, right. We call it Big Veritas Information Classifier where we classified all of the data that came in on Ingest, unlike other people, other customers and other vendors. We classified all of the data that came in from that back up and we told our customers, "Here's PII numbers, your sensitive information is structured data, is unstructured data." We did this really well for a long time. Now we wanted to take that to the next level, right. We wanted to tell our customers what's actually going on with your infrastructure. You've classified the data, you've put it in here, what can you do with it next? Where can you put it? Can you optimize it after the cloud? How much will you pay for it? Can you remove something off of it? How much do you pay for that? Can you put some data retention on prem? How much would that cost you? So we would not only want to give them information about the classification of that data, but how to monetize that data, how much money would it cost to store that data in different areas. >> So this is a case where, if you go back to something you might remember, 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure mandated that you were able to recover and deliver to a court of law electronic records. Well data classification was critical component there. This is one of those cases like, if you've got an older athlete, like Tom Brady, maybe he's not as fast as he used to be, but he's got it all up here, he knows the plays before he sees it. You guys have the experience around things like data classification which are table stakes to allow you to do this but it's still a challenge for many folks in the industry. It's a metadata problem, isn't it? >> Yup, it absolutely is. It is a metadata problem and it's a metadata advantage for us at Veritas because we sit on top of the highest amount of metadata. >> So how do I take advantage of the Veritas Predictive Insights? Where does it live? >> So where we've announced it, it'll be out there the beginning of the year, 2019. We're rolling out with our appliances portfolio first because we have more control over it because the appliances and the hardware have been integrated with our software. So we give our customers predictive insights on all of their appliances that they buy from Veritas and their systems. Going forward, we'll extend that to our software only sales motions, as well. As extending it to other software platforms and other hardware platforms from other vendors, as well. So we're working on some integrations that I can't talk about today but we want to essentially take predictive insights and move it beyond Veritas in the future. >> Okay, so, talk a little bit more about how it works. Using machine learning technology, you're building models and training the data for different customers, how does it all actually come to fruition? >> Sure, so the first thing is, you know, we're generating what we call SRS or a system reliability score, right. So our engine processes all of this information that comes from a customer's data, the usage data, and maps it to the hundreds of other customers, thousands of other customers usage data that we have to find patterns, right. So for example, if a disc hasn't had a firmware upgraded and hasn't done so for months, we can predicatively let the customer know this disc is going to fail if you didn't upgrade this. But that's not enough. We actually allow them to click a button and upgrade the firmware right there to that disc so it's done, right. So it's not only letting customers know that here's something that's going to go wrong, but here's how to fix it, as well. That's just one example of what we can do. >> Well that's key, it's like the old days. You know, you have a pager and you get an alert and then you got to go do something. You're saying you're actually building automation into the process. >> Right, it's like chat bots. You respond to the chat bot right there and it does the action for you. You don't actually have to go somewhere and figure it out. >> So you've got this SRS score. >> Jyothi: Right. >> So what happens when you cross that threshold, it tells the system, "Okay, take some remedial action," or does it allow the customer to sort of make that choice? What's next? >> Sure, so the SRS score is like a credit score, right. There's a lot of complexity underneath that score. So at the highest level we tell the score, the customer if your score is above a certain point, your systems are healthy, they're running well. If they go below a certain point, right, let's say a 700 score for a credit score, you got to go watch or widen your goal below and we'll give them the 10 or 20 reasons why the score went down. Whether it's a firmware thing or a support issue or a hard drive issue. We tell them exactly what's about to go wrong so they can go fix it before it actually goes wrong. >> What do you, actually, before we go there, just some examples, some use cases that you expect in the field, you've talked to customers about. Give us some more. >> Sure, so data, like we talk to a lot of companies with massive data centers. So one of the things that it says with our appliances, simple things like temperature changes. I was in Dubai, look, the temperature there can be crazy. It goes over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. So it says simple things like temperature changes can have massive effect on your hard drives and how that works. If my AI and ML algorithms or my software can proactively tell me the temperatures going up, this is what's going to happen, you increase the cooling, do something different, move the data somewhere, back it up. That's great for the customer. Can I take action just based on a simple thing like temperature. There's another interesting customer, here in New York actually, that came to me and said, we had this problem like every so many weeks, their discs would fail. And they thought it was their temperature because it was in the summer. It wasn't and after a lot of research, it turns out it was the fire alarms that were going off. So the fire alarm and the fire alarm testing that was going on was actually causing discs to fail. >> Because of the vibration or? >> For the vibration and the decibel level. It was interesting, right. And now our AI, ML knows that so it's recorded, we know it and we'll be better off going forward, right. We'll tell other customers now that have data centers with massive, loud, high decibel fire alarms that this could be a potential issue. I'm not saying that is the issue, but this could be a potential issue that they would have never thought of otherwise. >> So what do you expect the business impact to be? When you talk to customers about this capability, you know, under non-disclosure, etcetera, how are they seeing this impacting their business? >> So it's three things, right. Proactive support and maintenance, that's really important. The customers are tired of talking to large vendors where the support connections are horrible, right. They have to go in and raise a ticket and do certain things and then they will ship a guy over to their site who'll come and fix it. That's just too long. >> Dave: Slow and reactive. >> Slow and reactive. We want to make this proactive and autonomous, that's number one. Number two is total cost of ownership, right. So when customers are able to predict these failures, they don't have to have a certain set of money set aside for solving problems when the occur. They're like, "I know this problem has come up. I need to budget for it." So their TCO models get better and more predictable, right. And last but definitely not the least, you know, when we extend this to beyond Veritas, they will be able to do more with their data. Again, what is that more? We don't know yet today. But when we are able to extend this to beyond Veritas, customers will be able to do a lot more with their data centers. >> So a couple of things this plays into. Obviously digital transformation is all about being on all the time, you don't want to have, you don't want planned downtime or unplanned downtime. This allows you to at least plan more effectively and potentially eliminate any downtime so your data is always accessible. And it's also cloud-like in that you're automating a lot of the either recovery from failures, or you know, you're pushing a button and saying okay, remediate this, patch that so you don't have the failure. So that's a sort of cloud-like approach. So you said it's available the first part of '19. And it's available, is it in appliances or? How do I get this. >> So we'll be rolling it out in appliances first, all the Veritas appliances. And then we'll extend it to software only, as well as beyond Veritas going forward. >> Awesome, Jyothi, thanks very much for taking us through the new capability. AI brought to data protection, anticipating problems before they occur, remediating them in an autonomous way. I appreciate your time. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thanks for coming back on. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guess right after this short break. You're watching theCube from Chicago, Veritas Vision Solution Day. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: From Chicago, it's theCUBE covering Veritas Vision's Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Windy City everybody. We're here covering the Veritas Solution Days in Chicago. I'm Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Robert Swanson is here, CUBE alum from DC Vast, he runs sales at the organization. Great to see you again, thanks for coming back on. >> You as well, thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome. So last year we were at the Aria in Las Vegas, we talked a lot about Cloud and the big tent event, now Veritas is doing these Solution Days, going out to where the customers are. It's probably good for you 'cause you're Chicago based, right? >> Absolutely, yeah, it's good to have the event here in my hometown. >> So how was this for you today? What'd you learn, what's the conversation been like? >> Yeah, no, it was a good morning, I like having the regional approach, a little bit more of an intimate event, had a variety of customers here and colleagues of Veritas as well. It was definitely a great event this morning. >> Lot of hot stuff going on in data protection. There's Cloud, there's multi-Cloud security and data protection are kind of coming together. The distributive data center on the Edge, new ways, new modes of protecting data. What are you seeing as some of the big drivers out there as you talk to customers? >> That's a great question and you really can't avoid the subject of Cloud. At first I think we looked at data protection really as, excuse me, Cloud, as an enabler for data protection so thinking about on-premise data and how the Cloud can help protect that. Especially for mid-market companies, it really allowed them to do some really cool retention and disaster recovery things that they might not have been able to do before or afford to be able to do before. Now we're looking it more about, alright, there's workloads in the Cloud, there's Cloud native data, what do you do with that? The Cloud providers are guaranteeing you or providing you some SLAs or guidelines around availability but that's not backup so now what do we do with the Cloud native data? Really though, as workloads start getting put out, not only into the big hyperscale or Clouds, but into Office 365 and different file share services, and in SAS applications. It truly is IT anywhere now which really creates a challenge for data protection. I mean, I feel like data management and data protection, the complexity and challenge of it has just grown exponentially in the last few years because now there is important, sensitive data everywhere that companies have to figure out how to maintain and protect and secure and really work for them. >> Wonder if you could talk about just your businesses, the whole partner channel is just fascinating, something we've been tracking now for a while. Cloud was sort of a shot across the bow to a lot of business models. It used to be, hey, I'm going to take a bunch of margin, and resell a product, and buy a boat. But that's changed, you can't just be a quote unquote box seller, that's a metaphor just for reselling somebody else's technology. You have to be a solution provider. So Cloud was in one regards a threat, but it's become an opportunity. How have you guys responded? Talk about the shift toward a solution mindset. >> Yeah, no, you're absolutely right, it really is. The channel's at a bit of an inflection point with the Cloud and contrary to some popular belief, it's not our mission as a channel company to resell hardware or some piece of software. It's getting more and more important for our partners to be people that can be companies that can offer us technology to help kind of fit in to our model and not necessarily vice versa. So now... the Cloud providers have changed the, you know where the abstraction layer occurs and there's so much automation out there that some things that we might used to provide services or manage services around low-level sys admin type task, keep the lights on kind of things, are done in an automated manner right now. We really have to redefine what we do for our customers and Cloud is important so it's really helping customers identify, where is the appropriate place to run a workload? What's better on PREM, what's better in the Cloud? Make sure you have that data portability. We have to be able to provide them guidance and services and really help in that regard as they're navigating it with us. So helping them identify where to put things, how to protect things, how to manage the data, and really how to optimize the spend as well, is something we've kind of pivoted towards. >> It's becoming more complicated. Okay, it used to be, I've got an application server, I'm going to bolt on some back up because I've got to back up the data, okay, done. Virtualization changed things quite a bit but now you've got Clouds, you've got multiple Clouds, you've got SAS, you've got distributed data. You've got to worry about, okay as you were saying, where do I put that data? You're thinking about recovery. How fast can I recovery, so where does that recovery data live? And then, who's managing this whole thing? So I would think there's a huge opportunity for you guys to come in, consult with customers, architect solutions that actually address every customer's different, their unique situations. Maybe you could discuss that a little bit and how you're helping folks. >> The lines are really starting to get blurred too on what you do with data. What's securing it versus protecting it, versus backing it up, versus replicating it, versus it being discoverable. I think that's one of the areas where we're seeing Veritas really kind of evolve. I have the experience in data management and now with some of the technologies that they're launching kind of a platform with some of their different technologies containerized and put on to a single platform I think is really seeing all of this whole concept of data management converging. >> So where do you see this whole thing going? Last question is, you looked out two, three, four, five years, you're going to have lots of Clouds, you're going to have Edge, you've got all this data, digital transformation. Specifically in the context of data protection, how do you see that evolving and what does it look like in the next four or five years? >> I think I used the term already, data portability, and workload portability, and I like that and I think that's where it's going 'cause as the public Cloud market and even non-PREM private Cloud market continue to evolve, it's really going to be about portability. Where is the most appropriate place to run a workload to have certain data? Is it in the public Cloud, is it on-prem, and maybe that changes, right? Maybe the cost modeling changes, maybe the performance requirements changed, so that needs to be portable but with portability, we have to be able to follow that data and those workloads and be able to have some kind of consistent way to protect them. I really think that's the evolution, that's kind of the arms race with a lot of the vendors in this space right now and what everybody's trying to do 'cause that's where it's all headin'. >> Alright Bob, great, thanks very much for coming back in theCUBE, really good to see you again. 85% I think of Veritas's business goes through the channel, critical partners like you make it all happen. So I really appreciate your perspectives, thank you. >> Thanks again for having me, thanks for coming to Chicago. Hope to see you here again. >> You're welcome. Keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE at Veritas Vision Solution Days from Chicago. Be right back. (digital music)

>> Announcer: From Chicago, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Chicago, everybody. We're here covering the Veritas Solution Days. Veritas used to have a big tent event last year. This year they're going out to, I think, seven cities around the globe. Probably touching more people than they would've with the single event, but they're road warriors, and we're here with them. theCUBE is the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, Roger Dombrowski is here. He's a data protection specialist at dcVAST, one of Veritas' big solution partners based here in Chicago. Roger, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. >> You're very welcome. So, data protection specialist, so you're into it. Data protection is changing quite dramatically. There's cloud, there's the edge... We just talked to Jyothi about AI, and so lots is changing. From your prospective, how are customers responding to those change? What are some of the key drivers? >> A lot of the key drivers... You used to be able to differentiate with backups and things like that. Now it's table stakes, it's an insurance policy. And that's kind of the old classic way of looking at it, but I think with today what we're finding, and I think Veritas is doing such a great job of, is mining value out of stuff that's even been around a while. So while the workloads have changed, our best practices haven't changed, our strategies haven't changed. It's where things are going, but it's also mining that metadata to get more value out of the backups than to just be a insurance policy. >> So I mean one of the obvious things is, I've talked about, is DR, but DR is still insurance. It's just more insurance and maybe you're killing two birds with one stone, but when you talk about mining data and analytics, and getting more out of the metadata, give us some other examples of how customers are exploiting and leveraging that investment in what used to be just backup pure insurance. >> Yeah, and in fact it's kind of interesting 'cause Info Map's been out for a little while, and I think we've been going around to the customer base with a slide stack, maybe a couple of slides, and really underselling the value. And what I've had a great opportunity to do with a couple of customers here very recently, is get into some deep use cases, and it's been an eye opening experience. And what's so amazing is the date we're and the information we're gathering has been in their backups for years, right? It's like the data has been there. It's been on tap, we're tapping that with Info Map. Finding stale data, ransomware, age data, all kinds of better ways to tier. You know some of the discussions were around cloud. And hey do you really want put cat videos in the cloud? Well, we can find those things with the backups. And we've been looking a that data for years. We're finally now pulling the value out of that data. >> And one of those speakers earlier today talked about, he took us all the way back to the federal rules of civil procedure, and bringing together IT and legal. So those discussions now with GDPR, et cetera, coming back to the fore. And it's important you don't want data that could be a legal risk hanging around. Everybody says, oh big data, keep all the data. And General Council's go I don't want to keep all the data. So the backup corpus is a way you're saying to investigate that and reduce risks, and also potentially identify diamonds in the rough. That you can-- >> Absolutely. >> You can mine. >> Absolutely. >> Okay. Let's talk about. I want to ask you about, there was a little company called Network Appliance, I think they were founded back in the '80s, they changed their name in the 2000s to NetApp, got out of that appliance, but appliances are still strong in the marketplace. Everybody's talking about software-defined. I think even Veritas uses it as part of its description of who they are and yet they continue to announce appliances as do others. Why appliances, from your practitioner perspective, what's going on there? >> Well, actually there's a customer whose actually here at the even today, and one of the things that really sold them on that whole form factor was the larger the company gets the more siloed, different aspects of business are. If you know if you wanted to make a change or implement something, you'd have the network team, you'd have change control, you'd have the OS team, the application teams. The appliance form factor's allowing the backup admins to wrangle in a lot of that crazy, hey, I've got to have 20 groups involved in something. Purpose built and performance tuned. I mean see it all the time. Customers, they still look at us and go, well, I think I can do it cheaper, and I've seen them try to do it, and maybe they'll save a few bucks, but the soft cost in terms of headaches, and problems, and tuning, and just limitations of building your own versus the appliance form factor. >> It's still going to run on hardware? So you're saying let the vendor do the integration and that's sort of the appeal of the appliance. There are use cases for PureSoftware based solutions, but if you just want to set it and (laughs) forget it. >> Roger: It really is that yeah. >> The appliance comes to play. What are some of the other big things and trends that you see, but let's talk cloud. You know the whole, I've often said renting is always more expensive than owning. You don't necessarily want, if you want to rent a car for a day, well go for it but if you want to drive at 100,000 miles, it probably make sense to buy it or even lease it. We heard today about cloud repatriation, I mean that's certainly a narrative that a lot of the on-prem guys want to talk about. What are you seeing in the marketplace? >> I'm seeing, I mean even before. I mean, we'll go back four or five years. Everyone's asking me, Roger, I want to get off of tape. Let's go to the cloud. What's been so interesting is to do those calculations, and I think that some people fly over that 100 miles an hour, and Veritas was one of the first ones to actually preserve deduplication all the way through the process. So it really changed, I call it that cost versus rent, or own versus rent ratio where depending on how long you're keeping data, how well the data dedupes, things like that, that's going to affect your cost model. And that's really, in my role at dcVAST, that's a big part of what I do, is to take the feature sets that Veritas brings to the table and apply them, and say, hey, does this make sense to put this in the cloud? Should this be on prem? And the great thing again is Veritas isn't. This isn't your dad's backup anymore. I mean the Access Appliance, the Flex Appliance, some of these things we're bringing to the table, Info Map, these other tools, we're not just doing backups, we're doing ancillary things to all that. >> Just geeking it out a little bit. You just talking about dedupe through the whole process. You mean without having to rehydrate the data. >> Roger: Exactly, exactly. >> Which is just a time consuming and complicated process. >> Roger: Absolutely. >> That's a technology they're pretty proud of, they talk about it a lot. >> Very, very, very much so. And I mean, if you look it, we've always been able to do it but it's the cost, right? If I have to virtualize an appliance in the cloud, it's a very expensive proposition, but if I can dedupe and all I'm doing is storing small fragments in a cheap storage target in the cloud, that's all better for the economics for the customer. >> All right, Roger, I'll give you the last word. Takeaways from today, and any other thoughts? >> Oh, I loved hearing about the telemetry. There's some new features coming in. I've heard some of this material before, but again, to hear the different perspectives, customers talking about the technology and where we're going, I'm glad we got to go and participate. >> All right Roger Dombrowski. Thanks very much for sharing your perspective. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. >> Great to see you. >> Take care. >> All right, keep it right there everybody, theCUBE. We'll be back at Veritas Vision in Chicago right after this short break, I'm Dave Vellante. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Narrator: From Chicago, it's The Cube. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Windy City everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're goin' out to the events, we extract a signal from the noise. We're here at the Veritas Vision Solution Days in Chicago. We were just a few weeks ago we were at the iconic Tavern on the Green in New York City. We're here at the Palmer House Hotel, beautiful hotel right in downtown Chicago near the lake. It's just an awesome venue, it's great to be here. Arista Thurman III is here, he's the principle computer engineer at the Argonne National Labs. Great to see you, thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Yah, good to be here, thanks. >> So tell the audience about Argonne National Labs. What do you guys all about? >> About science, so we're all about the advancement of science. We do a lot of different experiments from technology for batteries and chemistry. The project we're working on is the advanced photon source, which is a light source that's used to collect data in experiments with a photon source. >> OK, so you're an IT practitioner, >> Arista Thurman: That is correct. >> Serving scientists. >> Arista Thurman: Yes. >> What's that like? Is that like an IT guy serving doctors? Are they kind of particular? >> Arista Thurman: A little bit. >> There's some challenges there, but yah it's great. So basically you have a unique customer base, and they have additional requirements. So, it's not like a normal customer base. They're very smart people. They have a lot of demands and needs, and we do our best to provide all the services they require. >> Yah, so given that they're technical people, they may not be IT people but they have an affinity to technology. First of all, it must be hard to BS them, right? (laughter) >> Arista Thurman: No doubt, no doubt. >> They'd cut through that, so you got to be straight with them. And they're probably pretty demanding, right? I mean, they have limited resources and limited time and limited budgets, and they're probably pounding you pretty hard. Is that the case, or are they more forgiving? >> They're great people to work with, but there can be some challenges. I mean, it's unique in the idea that they work on multiple platforms. So it's from Unix to Linux to Mac. Multiple computers in their offices, multiple data requirements. And a lot of things happen without a lot of process and planning. Some things are ad hoc. So, it puts a little bit of strain sometimes on you to try to make everything happen in the amount of time they have. And everything is There's some challenges with regard to how to get things done in a timely fashion when you don't know what's going to happen with some of these experiments. >> I mean I imagine, right? They can probably deal with a lot of uncertain processes because that's kind of their lives, right? You must have to cobble things together for them to get them a solution sometimes, is that the case? >> We do sometimes. I think it's all about getting enough funding and enough resources to take care of all the different experiments. >> Dave Vellante: A balancing act. >> Yah. >> Dave Vellante: Ya so you look after, compute and storage. >> Arista Thurman: Yes. >> Right, so talk about what's happening generally there and then specifically data protection. >> So in general, my primary focus is Linux. Linus administration, Red Hat Linux. And we've seen a lot of data growth over the last five years and we've got projection for more growth as we are planning for an upgrade. So we're going to change our bmine and make it more efficient. Have a better light source and that's all planned in the next two to three years. And so, there's a lot of extra projects on top of our normal workload. We have a lot of equipment that probably needs to be refreshed. There's resources and with IT and any kind of data management things change. So whatever we're doing today, in the next three years we'll be doing something different because things change with regard to CPU speeds, performance of IO networking, storage requirements. All those things are continually growing exponentially. And when scientists want to do more experiments and they get new resources in, it's going to require more resources for us to maintain and keep them operational at the speeds and performance they want. >> Yah, we do hundreds of events with The Cube. We do about 130 events this year, and a lot of them are so-called "big data" orientation. And when you go to those data oriented events, you hear a lot of, sort of the roots of that. Or at least similarities to the scientific technical computing areas and it's sort of evolved into big data. A lot of the disciplines are similar. So, you're talking about a lot of data here. Sometimes it's really fast data, and there's a lot of variety, presumably, in that data. So how much data are we talking about? Is it huge volumes? Maybe you could describe your data environment. >> Primarily we have things broken up into different areas. So we have some block storage, and that provides a lot of our virtual the back-end for our virtualization environments which is either Microsoft or Red Hat RHV. I would estimate that's somewhere in a petabyte range. And then we also have our NAS file systems which spread across multiple environments providing NFS version three and four and also to Windows clients CIFS and some of the Mac clients also utilize that. And that's at about a little less than a petabyte. We also have high performance computing and that's a couple petabytes, at least. And all those numbers are just estimates because we're constantly growing. >> Any given time it's changing. But you're talking about multiple petabytes. So how do you back up, how do you protect multiple petabytes? >> Well I think it has to, it's all about a balancing act 'cause it's hard to back up everything in that same time window. So we have multiple backup environments providing resources for individual platforms. Like for Windows we'd do something a little different than we'd do for Linux. And we have different retention policies. Some environments need to be retained, retention is three years and some is six months, some three months, and so you have to have a system of migrating your storage to faster discs and then layer off the tape for long term retention. It's a challenge that we're constantly fighting with. >> How do you use Veritas? You're a customer obviously? >> Yah, we've been a Veritas customer for many years and we utilize Veritas in our virtualization environments. They kind of help us out with central platform. We've actually explored other things but the most cost effective thing to us at this point has been Veritas. We utilize them to back up primarily our NAS and our black files, our black file systems that provide most of the virtualization. >> Why Veritas? What is it about them that you have an affinity for? There's a zillion other backup software vendors out there, why Veritas? >> I think we have invested a lot in Veritas over the years. Predating my time at Argonne we've been using Veritas. In my previous career, in Sun Microsystems we also had some kind of relationship with Veritas. So it's easy and I think, like I mentioned earlier, we explored other things but it wasn't cost effective to make that kind of change. And it's been a reliable product. It does require work but it has been a reliable product. >> So, you'd mentioned your Linux, Red Hat Linux. >> Arista Thurman: Yes. >> So you saw this IBM announced it's going to buy Red Hat for 34 billion dollars. What were your thoughts when you heard that news? >> I was like, "Wow, what is going to happen now?" I was like, "How is that going to impact us?" Is it going to change our licensing model? Or is it going to be a good thing, or a bad thing? Right now we just don't really know. We're just kind of waiting and seeing. But it's like, OK, I mean that's a big deal. It is a biggest deal certainly from IBM. Their biggest previous deal was I think Cognos at five billion, so this dwarfs that. The deal of course doesn't close probably till the second half of 2019. So it's going to take a while. But look, IBM is known when it buys software companies, saw this with SPSS, you've seen it with other companies that it buys, it often times will change the pricing model. How do you license Red Hat? Do you have an enterprise license agreement? Do you know offhand? >> We do have an agreement with them. >> Dave Vellante: Lock that in. Lock that long term in now before the deal goes down. >> One of my counterparts is in charge of that part of it. So I'm sure we'll be having that conversation shortly. >> Yah, interesting. Well listen, Arista thanks very much for coming on The Cube, really appreciate your insight. >> Thank you. >> It's great to meet you, all right, you're welcome. Thanks for watching everybody, it's a wrap from Chicago. This has been The Cube, Veritas Vision Days. Check out SiliconAngle.com for all the news. TheCube.net is where you'll find these videos and a lot of others. You'll see where The Cube is next. Wikibon.com for all the research. Thanks for the team here, appreciate your help on the ground. We're out from Chicago, this is Dave Vellante. We'll see ya next time.

>> From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE covering Veritas Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome to New York City, everybody. We're here in the heart of Central Park at the beautiful location, Tavern on the Green. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. And this is our special coverage of the Veritas Solutions Day. The hashtag is VtasVision. Veritas Vision last year was a big tent customer event, several thousand customers at that event and Veritas decided this year to go out to the field. 20 of these solution days, very intimate events, couple hundred customers, keynote presentations from Veritas, breakout sessions, getting deep into the product but also talking strategy, and intimate conversations with executives, CxOs, CIOs, backup admins, and of course, New York City is one of those places where you get very advanced customers pushing the envelope, very demanding. I often joke they're as demanding as New York sports fans, and so they have high expectations. But they also have a lot of money, and so the vendor community loves to come to New York, they love to get intimate with these customers in New York, as do we at theCUBE. So we're going to be talking to customers today, we're going to be talking to executives of Veritas, some partners. So I want to talk a little bit about what's going on in the marketplace, in this backup and recovery space. It's transforming quite dramatically. For those of you who follow theCUBE, you know last year at VMworld, last two years, actually, data protection was one of the hottest topics at the event. Of course, multi-cloud, of course there was a lot of AI talk and containers and Kubernetes. But staid old backup, old, reliable data protection was one of the hottest topics. We're seeing VC money pour into this space. We're seeing upstarts like Cohesity and Rubrik trying to take aim at the incumbents like Veritas and Commvault, and IBM, and Dell EMC, so those traditional companies, those enterprise companies that have large install bases are trying to hold onto that install base and migrate their platforms to a modern software-defined platform, API-based, using containers, using microservices, building on top of the code that they've developed, simplifying the UI, and at the same time, allowing for an abstraction layer across clouds and multi-clouds. So what are the big drivers that are really pushing the trends, the megatrends of this space? Well, certainly digital transformation is one of them. The last 10 years of big data, people have gathered all this data, and now that data is in this place and people are now applying machine intelligence to that data. They're doing a lot of this work in the cloud. So digital transformation, data, big data, cloud, multi-cloud, simplification. People want a much simpler experience, so bringing the cloud experience to their data, wherever the data might live. Because of course, you get the three laws of cloud. You've got the law of physics, right? Physics says you can't just shove everything into the cloud. It just takes too long. If I have big bog of data, if I have a petabyte of data, you know how long that's going to take to put into the cloud? So I may not just move it in there unless I stick it on a Chevy truck and it cart it over on a bunch of tapes and nobody really wants to do that. So there's the law of physics. There's also the law of economics. It's very expensive to move that data. You need a lot of network bandwidth, so, you know, you might not necessarily put everything into the cloud, you might keep stuff on-prem. And of course, there's a law of the land. And the law of the land says, well, if I'm in country X, let's say Germany, that data can't leave that country. It's got to be physically proximate inside the boundaries, the borders of the country, by local law. So these three laws are something that was put forth to us by Pat Gelsinger in theCUBE at VMworld this year. We've evolved that thinking, but it's very true when we talk to customers about this. These are trends that are driving their decisions about cloud and multi-cloud and where to put it. We talked in theCUBE about the stat that the average enterprise has eight clouds. Well, we're a small enterprise and we have eight clouds, so I think that number's actually much, much higher, especially when you include SAS. So lots of data, lots of copies of data, so you need a way to abstract all that complexity and have a single place to protect your data. Now, a big part of this, digital transformation is driving more intense requirements on recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives, RPO and RTO, what do those words mean? Recovery point objective, think about... Ask a businessperson, how much data are you willing to lose? And they go, oh, what are you talking about? I don't want to lose any data. But if you think about it and you ask the next question, how much are you willing to spend so that you lose no data, and if they have to spend millions and millions of dollars to do that, they might relax that requirement a little bit. They might say, well, you know, if I lose 15 minutes of data in any given time and have to recreate it, not the end of the world. So that's what RPO is, is essentially the point in time that you go in to recover and how much data loss you're exposed to. And the way this works is you take, let's say, snapshots to simplify the equation, you push those offsite away from any potential disaster, and it's that gap between when you actually capture the data and when that disaster might happen that you're exposed. So to make that as close as zero as possible, that gap as close to zero as possible, is very, very expensive, so a lot of companies don't want to do that. At the same time, digital transformation's pushing them to get as close to zero as possible without breaking the bank. The other part of that equation is recovery time objective, how long it takes to get the application and the data back and running. And because of digital transformation, people want to make that virtually instantaneously. So because of digital transformation, people are re-architecting their data protection strategies to have near-instantaneous recovery. This all fits into the megatrend of cloud. People want it to be simpler, they want it to mimic the cloud-like experience, almost as if I'm on Amazon or I'm on Netflix, so simplifying the recovery process and the backup process is something that we're going to hear a lot more of. Automation is another big theme. People tend to automate through scripts. Well, scripts are fragile, scripts tend to break. When changes are made in software, scripts tend to have to be rewritten and maintained. And so it's a very high maintenance type of activity to do scripts, and over time, they just fade away, or don't, they stop working. So automation through API is very, very important, something that you're hearing much more, is much more thematic in this world of data protection. The other is getting more out of the corpus of data in my data protection infrastructure, because, let's face it, backup and recovery, it's like insurance. I hope I never need it, but if I do need it, it's very valuable at that point in time that I do need it. But it's an expense. It's not driving bottom-line revenue. It's not necessarily cutting cost. It is indirectly in the form of reducing the cost of downtime, but that's harder. That's kind of viewed oftentimes as a soft dollar benefit. So what you're hearing is a lot of the vendor community and the user community are talking about getting more out of the data that they have and out of the backup and recovery infrastructure by bringing analytics, and machine intelligence, or AI and machine learning to the equation. Studying analytics to identify anomalous behavior, maybe identifying security breaches, creating air gaps such that I can potentially thwart ransomware or other malware infections, analyzing the corpus of backup data because it holds all the company's corporate data, it's accessible. If you can analyze that data and look for anomalies, you might be able to thwart an attack. So getting more out of that data through analytics. Predictive maintenance is another example of data analytics that's driving some of these trends beyond just backup and recovery. And also governance. Governance and privacy are kind of, security and privacy are two sides of the same coin, so with GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation that came out, that went into effect in terms of fines going into effect this past May, very, very onerous and expensive fines, people are using their data protection corpus and the analytics around that to reduce their risk and to better govern their data. So these are some of the big trends that we're seeing. So Veritas is a leader here, we're going to be covering this all day. Veritas and some of its other brethren that have been around for decades are getting attacked by a lot of the upstarts, but they got the advantage that the install vendors have the advantage of a large install base. The incumbent vendors have the advantage of a large install base. The upstarts have the advantage of they're starting with a clean sheet of paper. We're going to talk to customers and find out what are they thinking in terms of their backup approach. Industry data suggest that over half of the customers that you talk to are rethinking their backup strategies because of digital transformation. Well, we're going to talk to some customers. Are they thinking about sticking with Veritas or they thinking about migrating? Why or why not? What are some of the advantages and considerations there? So Veritas, a long, rich story going back to the '80s when the company was founded, was a hot IPO, really super hot company, got sold to Symantec for about 13.5 billion, and then Symantec spun it out to private equity several years ago in an eight billion dollar go-private sale, and subsequently, Veritas got off the 90-day shot clock. We heard this from companies like Dell where they didn't have to report and get abused by the street for either missing a number or having one little metric that was off. So they could write their own narrative. They could invest in R&D, they could have more patient capital. And so you saw this from the Carlisle group that took Veritas private and has been sort of this march toward a new platform, spending money on R&D, and now, really going to market very aggressively. Another thing you're going to hear about is partnerships, partnerships with AWS and some of the other cloud-providers. There's a partnership that's being announced with the flash storage company, Pure, today. So we're going to dig into some of that. So we'll be here all day, Tavern on the Green. You're watching theCUBE and we're here in New York City. Keep it right there, we'll be right back. I'm Dave Vellante, back shortly. (digitalized music)

>> From Tavern on the Green, in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day, brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the beautiful Tavern on the Green, in the heart of Central Park. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name's Dave Vellante. We're covering Vertias Solution Days, #VtasVision. Veritas used to have the big, single tent, big tent customer event, and decided this year, it's going to go belly to belly. Go out to 20 cities, intimate customer events where they can really sit down with customers across from the table; certainly, this beautiful venue is the perfect place to do that. Harish Venkat is here as the VP of Marketing and Global Sales Enablement at Veritas. Thanks for coming on, Harish. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> So, we're going to change it up a little bit. Let's hit the Escape key a few times and talk about >> Yeah. >> some of the big mega trends that you're seeing. You spend a lot of time with customers. You had some intimate conversations today. What do you see as the big trends driving the marketplace? >> So at my level, what I observe with the highest thing is simplicity, instant gratification, is two things that customers love. Forget about customers, even we as individuals, we love simplicity and instant gratification. Examples around that, you know, think about back in the days where you had to take a picture, process the film, and then realize, "oh my god, the film's not even worth watching." Now you have digital photography, you take millions of pictures, and instantly you view the picture, and keep whatever you want, delete whatever you don't want. A small example of how simplicity and instant gratification is changing the world. In fact, if you listen to Warren Buffett, he'll say, "Invest in companies that is making your life a lot easier," so, if I spread that across the entire industry, I can go on with examples like Netflix disrupting Blockbuster because it made it easy for customers to watch movies at their time, and making it easy for consumption. You look at showrooming concept, where you go to Best Buy's of the world and many others, and look at a product, but you don't buy it right there. You go to your phone and say, "okay, do I do a price compare?" And then order it on the phone, where someone delivers it to your house So the list goes on and on, and the underpinning result as a result of this is disruption, all right? You look at Fortune 500 companies, just in the last decade. Over 52% of those companies have been disrupted and the underpinning phenomenon is all about instant gratification and simplicity. >> And Amazon is another great example of, I remember when my wife said to me, "Dave, you got to invest in this company." It was like... 1997. >> Yeah. >> Invest in this company, Amazon? >> Yeah. >> At the time, it was mostly books, but they started to get into other retail, so right-- >> We missed that boat, didn't we? >> I actually did, but I sold, ah! (laughs) >> I never lost money making a profit, so okay. So, at the same time, customer... Customers just can't get there... >> Yeah. >> Overnight, so what are some of the challenges that they have in getting to that level of simplicity? >> Yeah, so you look at IT spend, and when you look at the breakdown of IT spend, you'll see that about 87%, and in many cases, even greater than 90%, they spend just to keep the lights on and these are well-established companies that I'm talking about. In fact, I was doing a Keynote in, in Minneapolis one time and a CIO came and said, "Harish, I totally disagree." "In my company, it's 96%." >> (Dave laughs) >> Just to keep the lights on! So you're talking about less than 10% of your IT spend gone towards innovation, and then you look at emerging companies who are spending almost 100% all around innovation, leveraging the clouds of the world, leveraging the latest and greatest technology, and then doing these disruptions, and making things simple for consumption, and as a result, the disruption happens, so I think we have an opportunity to re-balance the equation in the enterprise space, and making it more available for innovation than just keeping the lights on. >> So part of that... the equation of shifting that needle, moving that needle, if you will, just eliminating non-value-producing activities that are expensive. We know, still, IT is still very labor-intensive, so we got to take that equation down and shift it. Are you seeing companies have success in shifting, re-training people toward digital initiatives and removing some of the heavy lifting, and what's driving that? >> Yeah, so I think it's a journey, right? So, I mean, the entire notion of journeying to the cloud is one of the big initiative to take out heavily manual-intensive, data center-intensive, which is costing a lot of money. If I can just shift all of those workloads to the cloud, that'll help me re-balance the equation. I view the concept of data intensity, which is really two variables to it. Back to your point, if I can take the non-core activity, rely on my partner ecosystem to say what is best in class solutions that I can use as my foundation layer, and then innovate on top of it, then yes, you have the perfect winning formula to really have a lot of market share and wallet share. If you're trying to do the entire stack by yourself, good luck. You'll be one of those guys who will be disrupted. There is no doubt. >> So well, okay, that says partnerships are very important. >> Without a doubt. >> You're not too alone. >> Channel is very important. >> Yes. >> So, so what do you see, in terms of the ebb and flow in the industry, of partnerships, how those are forming? Hear a lot about "co-opetition," which is kind of an interesting term, that is now, we're living. >> Yeah. >> What's your, what's your observation about partnerships, and how companies are able to leverage them? What's best practice there? >> Yeah, so just as Veritas, we're a data protection leader company. We have incredible market share and wallet share, amongst the Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies, but even within our incredible standing, we have to rely on other partners. We don't do everything on our own. We have incredible relationship with our cloud service providers, with the hyper-converged system to the world, like Nutanix. We just announced Pure today, so when we combine those partnerships, we can offer incredible solutions for our customers, who can then take care of the first variable that I talked about, and then innovate on top of it. So I think partner ecosystem is extremely important. For customers, it's very important that they pick the right players, so they don't have to worry about the data, and they can continually focus on innovation. >> We were talking to NBC Universal today, and one of themes in my take-aways was he's trying to get to the... he's a, basically a data protector, backup administrator, essentially, but he's trying to get to the point where he can get the business lines to self-serve. >> Yeah. >> And that seems to me to be part of the simplicity. Now... an individual like that, got to re-skill. Move toward a digital transformation. Move that needle so it's not 90% keeping the lights on. It's maybe you get to 50/50. >> Yeah. What are you seeing in terms of training and re-education of both existing people and maybe even how young people are being educated, your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think the young people coming out of college, they're already tuned to this, so to me, those are the disruptors of the world. You got to keep an eye on those millennials of the world because you don't have to train them more, because they're coming out of college, you know. They don't have the legacy background. They don't have the data centers of the world. They are already in the cloud. They're born in the cloud, sort of individuals, so I think the challenge is more about existing individuals who have the pedigree of all the journey that, you and I, we have seen, and how do you re-tune yourself to the modern world? And I think that presents an opportunity to say, "Okay look, if you don't adapt real quick," "you don't have a chance to survive" "in this limited amount of time you have in the IT space," but having said that, we're also seeing that you have some time window, and that time window will continue to shrink, so when we talk about this transformation journey, you can see year after year, the progress that, that's been made in the transformation, this leap and bound, and that's all related to Moore's Law. You think about computer and storage, it's becoming a lot cheaper, and so the innovation rate is continuing to go up. So you have very limited window: adapt or die. >> So, Harish, we were talking about, we've talked about digital transformation. We talk about simplifying; we're talking about agility. We're talking about shifting budget priorities, all very important initiatives. How is Veritas helping customers achieve these goals, so that they can move the needle from 90% keep the lights on to maybe 50/50, and put more into innovation. >> So four major themes: one is data protection. If you don't have your core enterprise asset, which is your data protected, then you can't really innovate anything on top of it. You'll constantly be worrying about what happens if I have a ransomware attack, what if I have a data outage, so Veritas takes care of it, back to the notion that you pick the best players to take care of the fundamental layer, which is around the data. The second thing that I... I would say Veritas can help is the journey to the cloud. Cloud, again, is another instrument for you to take out cost out of your data center. You're agile, you're nimble, so you can focus on innovation. Do you see the trend? So again, Veritas helps you with that journey to the cloud. It allows to move data and application to the cloud. When you're in the cloud, we protect your data in the cloud. The third thing I would say is doing more with less. I talked about the IT equation already. Software-defined storage allows you to do that. And the last thing I would say is compliance. We can't get away from compliance, the fact that Veritas has solutions to have visibility around the data. You can classify the data. You can always be compliant working with Veritas. You take care of these four layers, you don't have to worry about your data asset. You can worry about innovation at that point. >> So it, to me, it's sort of a modern version of the rebirth of Veritas. When Veritas first started, I always used to think of it as a data management company, not just a backup company. >> Right. >> And that's really what we're talking about here today, evolving toward a data-centric approach, that full life cycle of data management, simplifying that, bringing the cloud experience to your data wherever it is. Could be "on-prem." >> Yeah. >> Could be in the cloud, sort of this API-based architecture, microservices, containers... >> Yep. >> All the kind of interesting buzzwords today, but they enable agility in a cloud-like experience, that Netflix-like experience that you were talking about. >> Absolutely, right, so we're super excited. The one thing I would also say is what our latest net backup, 812, the other thing that I talked about, which is simplicity and ease of use: we are addressing both of that in addition to the robust brand that we have around protecting data. So you now you have simplicity, ease of use, instant gratification, all the basic ingredients, and Veritas is here to protect them. >> Harish, it's been a great day. Thanks for helping me close out the segment here. This venue is really terrific. It's been a while since I've been at Tavern on the Green. Some of you guys, I don't think you've ever seen it before. Seth's down here; he's, he's a city boy but we country bumpkins up in Massachusetts, we love coming down here, in the heart of Yankee country. So thanks very much-- >> Of course. >> For helping me close out here, great segment. All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We're out here, from New York City, Tavern on the Green. You've been watching theCUBE; I'm Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (light electronic music)

>> From Tavern On The Green, in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Hello everybody welcome back to the Tavern On The Green. We're here in the heart of Central Park in New York City you're watching theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, big events, small events. We're here at the Veritas Solution Days, #VtasVision. Veritas Vision used to be a very large, big tent conference. They've changed the format now and they go out, they're going out to 20 cities this year belly to belly with the customers and we've got one here. Vishal Kadakia who is the data protection manager at NBC Universal. Vishal thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> No problem thank you for having me. >> So as I say we love to get the customer perspectives, but let me start with this event. Why, you're a busy person, you're managing a lot of data, why do you take time out to come to event like this? What do you learn? >> You always get to learn new stuff, new products that you don't necessarily get to learn, 'cause you're always just zoned into your day-to-day work that you're doing so you don't always get to see what the new features may be or you miss it. These type of events are generally good to come see that. >> So what's the day in the life like these days for data protection manager and really I'm interested in how it's changed over the last five or six years, as you see things like, the buzzwords, digital transformation, big data, cloud, multi cloud, all the vendor buzzwords, but you actually have to live that. So how has that changed the role of data protection and data protection managers specifically? >> It's definitely a lot more complicated. Before you were just backing up om prem, you had tape, pretty much made it simple. Now you have all these different workloads, you're sending out to clouds, multi tenant as they keep calling it, the hybrid, which is another buzzword. Trying to manage the different workloads is a lot more complex than it was five years ago. You have various cloud vendors, you have various storage vendors, so managing all of that, obviously the data growth from the smaller backups to now, big data which could be terabytes, petabytes, to try to back that up has been a bit of a challenge. >> But that's a challenge for someone like you who's, you know, RPO and RTO is not getting relaxed. >> Right. >> Right. And you know people always talk about getting my weekends back so, but now you have to keep up with all of these other technologies so what is it? Is it a lot of reading, is it just going to sessions like this, having vendors come in, how do you keep up with it all? >> I think it's a big mix of both. It's going out to these events, but also having vendors come to you. Doing your own research, so it's a combination of just constantly keeping up. So, I would say it's a combination of all. >> One of the things that I would be concerned about in your roll is to have just more stove pipes. Are you able to just conceptually, not technical, deep technical anyway, I love tech, but are you to create, let's call it a abstraction layer for your data protection. Is that kind of your vision or where you're headed, so that you don't have to have 10 different formats and methodologies and processes around data protection? >> Yeah, I think that's the goal that I think every company's trying to go to, is consolidate, simplify. Whether that's vendor, whether that's hardware. I think that's really the goal of any organization now. And that's kind of where we're headed also. >> So if it's a baseball game analogy, and you're nine inning game, where are you in terms of that journey? Is it early days, kind of first inning, are you kind of warmin' up in the bullpen, are you sort of well into the game? >> I think we're well into the game. We're probably into the middle innings I would say. >> Okay. So you can see sort of that vision becoming a reality. And what are the priorities then in terms of getting to that point? Is it skill sets, is it technology, is it people? >> I would say it's technology. I would say that consolidation is probably the big word. We're all trying to consolidate while trying back up the large data sets. And I think that's where we are right now. That's where we're starting to get to, and see the plan forming, seeing where our methodologies, our strategies on how we're going to go forward. >> As you move toward the cloud, Vishal, whether or not it's even pushing data to the cloud, a lot of times you just can't. But it seems like that cloud operating model is something that's alluring to folks. Simplifying, agility, self service, are those initiatives that you guys have enacted? >> In terms of that, yeah we're I think in that phase, I think we're in our beginning to form that plan, because once you get to a cloud, you have to really have a good plan. Otherwise, your data is going to be all over the place. You're not going to know where it is, and managing that's just going to become that much harder. So I think in terms of that, we're trying to really come out with a good plan of how you migrate to the cloud. 'Cause once you get to the cloud, there's a whole different set of complexities that you have in managing it. >> Like what? Maybe tick off a few, so we can paint a picture. >> So once you get to the cloud, migrating, so you've formulated your plan how to get to, what cloud to use, what vendor you're using. How do you migrate from your on prem to the cloud is I think one of the big complexities, which I think kind of stumps a lot of people. You know you want to go to the cloud, just don't know how to get there. >> Is that just because the volume of data and you got to move data and it just takes so long? I mean to back up your iPhone takes forever and it fails left and right. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So okay. It's the amount of data and the time it takes? >> Right, and you also have legacy applications, which may not be cloud ready and how do you deal with that? So you have that hybrid model you still want to keep some stuff om prem but you want to go the cloud. What goes to the cloud, which cloud do you go to? All of that is where I think we're really at and I don't think it's any different than any other organization, so that's kind of where. >> And how about this notion of multi cloud? I mean is that something that is real in your business? >> Yeah, I think it definitely is. I think our end users are trying to take advantage of where to go best? Some places Azure might work best. Some places AWS might work. There's also Google now that's coming up, so I think you have to kind of consider where the workload would be best to go to. >> Is Shadow sort of IT and cloud creep problematic for you and in other words, you know, lines of businesses saying, it's easy, I can swipe a credit card and I'm up and running in minutes. And then, oh I got to protect this data, it's got to be compliant. Has that been a challenge for you, do you feel like you have that under control? >> No, that has definitely been a challenge area. Different groups that have kind of tried to do their own thing and then found out, oh wait, this is way harder than we thought. Let us go back to our central team. But by then it's kind of all over the place, right so that's definitely been interesting. >> Yeah it's hard, because thinking about that you probably might have done it differently. You might have put in processes and procedures in place and now you've got to clean up the mess so to speak. But okay, so I want to get into Veritas, and you're a Veritas customer? >> I am. >> So how does Veritas help you with all these solutions? I mean a lot of the things I've just asked you, I think are part of either their road map or they're making claims that they can currently help solve some of these problems. Can they, what do you do with Veritas, and how legitimate is their ability in terms of being able to solve some of these problems? >> So we've been able to use Veritas to kind of, as a central location, management of everything. One of their tools as such is CloudPoint. So our biggest thing is if you don't have a central management tool like CloudPoint, which can manage your various cloud backups, then you're left with managing each cloud on its own. So as an operations standpoint, that's like a nightmare. So having a tool such as CloudPoint, right, and then that getting integrated back into NetBackup, which now gives us a central location for all my backups, for reporting, for audit purposes, any of that has been great. And I've been using Veritas since 3.1 so I've been a Veritas customer for a long time. I've seen the evolution of when it was 3.1, a lot of it was manually operated, a lot of scripts, where now a lot of it is automated. So that's helped a lot. We're automating VM policies, we're automating SQL backup policies, all of that has been great. >> Where are you today in terms of these. >> I'm sorry? >> Where are you at today in terms of the release? >> We're, I know they just released eight one two, we're on eight one one. >> Okay so close to current. Yeah I've seen some videos on eight one two. It looks like they've really put a lot of time and effort in to refreshing it. It looks like a microservices architecture, they're talking about containers and certainly you know, saying all the right things. From your perspective have you dug into it yet or is it still early? >> It's still early. I did deploy it on a test environment. Haven't fully played around with it but some of the cool concepts obviously are, you're going away from that Java console eventually, getting to that web based, able to access it from anywhere, the manageability, like a central tool to manage all of that. That I think they're finally gearing towards that and. >> And you guys are a VMware shop? >> We are a VMware shop. >> So when we were at VM World last August, this past year, and even the year before. Data protection was one of the hottest topics, you know, on the show floor. Were you there, I don't know if you were there. >> I was not there. >> I mean it was really a lot of buzz there, sort of a lot of new entrance in that space, and would I imagine a lot of people coming after you for your business, because that's a very large install base. So when you look at the vendor landscape, how do you look at it? Where do you position Veritas, relative to some of the other upstarts? Your thoughts on the competitive landscape, why Veritas? >> Well, my point of view has always been, if it's not broke you don't fix it. There may be other that may be doing something better, but at the end of the day if it's not drastically different, it's a lot of work to move away from one product to another. They'll always come to you and say, hey, we do this better, we do this better. But then when you compare it, to me, Veritas is that all encompassing. It doesn't only do virtual, it does physical well also. It doesn't only do big data, it does all the traditional databases as well. They're always constantly evolving and adding new workloads that it can also be compatible with. >> Yeah so, I would imagine it would be a little difficult to go to your CFO and try to justify a huge migration project given the other priorities that you have. Give me some insight there. I mean what kinds of things do you want to focus on, I mean obviously nobody wants to migrate anything, it's like moving a house. >> Yeah. >> You really don't want to do it, I mean sometimes you get a bigger house or a nicer house or a smaller house, but it's, moving is always a pain. So you'd rather put your effort in your shop somewhere else. Where are you putting that effort? What are some of the priorities that you have either personally or professionally? >> I would say in this sense I think it's I don't want to work the weekends, right. So how do we automate? How do we make operations easier for everybody, the engineering, the solution, the operations. I want to make it simple. I think Veritas allows us to do that 'cause they're an open source, they work with many vendors which makes it nice. So you can, such as VMware, it works with vRealize. All those plugins with VMware and you can eventually just automate and make it simple. >> And kind of get rid of a lot of the scripts which tend to be fragile, they take a lot of maintenance, they tend to be error prone, so if you can through a set of APIs automate programmatically move towards sort of infrastructurous code or a DevOps environment. I'm sure you guys do that internally. And what a difference it makes, from the sort of classic waterfall in terms of speed, agility, quality. I presume that you're seeing that in your shop? >> Yeah, we definitely are and something like a flex appliance would allow us to move towards that. It simplifies, gets us to where we are, but also helps us with our goals of simplifying, reducing our footprint, but still being able to be agile enough to go to cloud, to keep a hybrid model. So something like that is I think where we're seeing. >> Well Vishal, we love the customer perspective, Thank you for coming on. We like to hear the truth, Vertias, truth in Latin, of course. And really appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome. All right keep it right there everybody. We're here at Vtas Vision, #VtasVision, Veritas Vision Days in New York City, Central Park, Tavern on the Green, beautiful location. My name's Dave Vallante. We'll be right back, right after this short break. (upbeat music)