>> Announcer: From Nice, France, it's theCUBE! Covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Nice, France. Happy to welcome to the program Peter Grimmond, who is the EMEA CTO at Veritas. Peter, thanks so much for joining us. >> You're welcome. It's great to be here. >> All right, so, we had theCUBE at Veritas Vision earlier this year. My co-CEO Dave Vellante and I did a whole bunch of interviews, really re-introducing to a lot of people. I remember Veritas from back in the day, but through the Symantec acquisition, now, back out, you know, a lot of interesting things coming. Obviously a company that's always been a software company at its core, as opposed to, in the infrastructure world, a company like Nutanix. It's like, wait, wait, do you sell appliances or use software? What's your mix, there? Veritas, you're a software company. Why don't you start off with just a little bit about your role, how long you've been at Veritas, and what brings you here to this show. >> Yeah, by all means. I've been at Veritas forever. I actually started with the company in 1994, believe it or not, so, yeah, been here a long time. Spent a lot of time in consulting, working with our customers, installing, configuring backup solutions and delivering consulting around the data center, and then most recently moved into leading teams and acting as the CTO for the business here in ME. >> Wow, yeah. '94, that's many lifetimes in the tech world. Everybody thinks of Veritas back in the day, it was net backups, is what people know. What products are you involved with, when you're meeting with customers, what are the key things you're focused on? >> Our portfolio's grown substantially over those years, and most especially, actually, in the last year or so. We've actually launched seven new offerings in the last year, really expanding our reach to cover enterprise data management very broadly, and extending also out from the data center to really cover the multi-cloud. We can now provide pretty much end-to-end data management capability across the multi-cloud. >> Okay, great. And when you say multi-cloud, you're working with the public cloud providers, well, many of the infrastructure providers. Give us a little bit of the scope, what you do and don't do when it comes to multi-cloud. >> When I talk to my customers about what they're doing with cloud, almost all of them have what we describe as a multi-cloud approach. That means multiple public clouds, plus their own private cloud, and in some cases, more than one private cloud that they're working with as well. Our mission to deliver enterprise data management services to those customers has to also have that reach. We're working with a number of the large cloud service providers, such as Amazon and Google and Microsoft, IBM as well, and, indeed, Oracle, as well as working with private cloud providers such as Nutanix. >> Excellent. Let's connect to Nutanix, there. Nutanix talks about enterprise cloud. Most of their solutions today deployed in customers' data center. It's talking about edge deployments, talking about how they extend public clouds, like, for example, partnerships with Google, support with Microsoft they've always had. Tell us how Veritas and Nutanix, what's the boundaries, how do they connect? >> Ultimately, as customers move their workloads onto hyper-converged platforms, and a lot of our customers are doing that, they need to find ways to protect that data. Now, for those customers who are using a hypervisor such as VMware or Nutanix, we've been able to back up that data for them for a while, and we can back up data that's been on the Acropolis hypervisor in-guest. But what we've done with Nutanix recently is to integrate net backup with AHV, so we can now back up the VVMware level from Nutanix. >> Peter, take us in that, because it's been a discussion with a lot of the ecosystem, and it's like, okay, how much work is it to certify AHV, is this a Nutanix push or is it a customer pull? Take us inside a little bit as to what led to this work. How easy or hard was it, and what's the customer demand for it? >> The customer demand is high. Customers are looking, those that have had Nutanix deployed for some time are now interested in moving to AHV. They want to use that as a platform. There are some good benefits to them in doing that. One of the things that's potentially been stopping them from doing that is the ability to protect their data properly in those environments. Having the ability to do those backups in AHV is important to them, so they've certainly been asking us for that. I believe they've been asking Nutanix for it as well, and that's why we're partnering together. In terms of how complex it is, in the world of RESTful APIs, it actually becomes relatively straightforward. You know, NetBackup is a RESTful API which allows you to back up parallel workloads. Nutanix has a RESTful API that allows you to access their backup API, and we put those two together and get a solution reasonably quickly, actually. >> Awesome. I would assume most of your customers, they're doing multiple hypervisors, though. Veritas, you play well in that environment? If I've got Veritas and AHV, or-- >> We've had support for hypervisors such as Vmware and Hyper-V for some time. AHV's one that we haven't supported, and so, this integration was overdue, and we've now done it. Customers can protect their data, whichever hypervisor they use. >> I guess the question was, if the customer has a multi-hypervisor environment, are there any complications, or it doesn't matter how many of the hypervisors they support? If you support 'em all, it's pretty straightforward. >> Yep. That's the case. We can deploy backup solutions across all of them, and manage all of those from a central management point, so it helps to take the complexity out of it. >> Okay. Want to switch a little bit to hear about customers. I know at Veritas Vision, and especially here at a European show, GDPR is a hot topic of conversation. I've heard some of the Veritas, does Veritas and Nutanix, is there a play jointly on there, or is that more of a separate initiative? >> Look, I think we're both hearing the same thing from our customers, right? Which is that GDPR is something that's exercising them. I've just come from the executive track, actually, where that was a topic of conversation. I think customers are definitely at different stages of maturity on that. When we talk to our customers, there are a lot of them at very early stages in thinking about GDPR, and there are those that have already appointed a data privacy officer and are working for a program to get that done. It's at different stages, but I think, generally speaking, enterprises are still looking for help to get that problem solved. >> Okay. What else are you hearing from customers, you know, big pain points, or areas where they're looking to modernize that Veritas can help? >> I think the big thing that we're hearing from customers is this move to the Cloud, and the thing that's really driving that move to the Cloud is digital transformation. All enterprises are looking to leverage a more digital model. They see cloud as a way of accelerating that, and so they are looking to move aggressively to the Cloud. One of the things that potentially makes that harder than it might otherwise be is assuring the proper management of your data, making sure it's secure and protected and available and performant, and that's where Veritas comes in. We're helping, we believe, to make it easier for customers to adopt a multi-cloud approach by giving them access to their data wherever they need it, by protecting that data, and giving them good visibility into that data wherever it sits, whether that be in Azure or in Office 365 or on-premise. >> Peter, now that Veritas is supporting AHV, what should we look for, really, for the next year? Certain go-to-market initiatives or other integration and engineering work that we should be looking for? >> As you probably heard, when we were at Vision together, our approach around data management is what we call 360 Data Management, which is a suite of tools that we've put together to solve the data management problem. Our aim, certainly, is to extend the 360 Data Management approach to Nutanix, so rather than just covering data protection, we're also covering other areas of data management, such as data access, disaster recovery, data visibility, those kind of areas. >> Okay, great. Peter, I want to give you the final word. At Veritas' show, we talked about the truth in information. What have you been hearing from customers here? What would you want them to take away from the Nutanix show, from a Veritas standpoint? >> I think the key message is that customers get great value from Nutanix HDI platform. Many of those same customers get great value from Veritas. Now they've got that value combined. >> Well, Peter Grimmond, really appreciate you joining us. We'll be back with more coverage here from the Nutanix .NEXT conference in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE. (fast techno music) >> This is Robin Matlock, CMO of VMware.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you be Veritas. (light music) >> Welcome back to the Aria Hotel and Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stewart Miniman. Rama Kolappan is here, he's the Vice, worldwide Vice President of Product Management and Global Alliances. Rama, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. So, 360 is a big topic of conversation. It's a fundamental, strategic evolution for Veritas. Why is 360 Data Management needed? >> So, 360 Data Management is an integrated set of products and solutions, if you will, that helps you with data protection, also with copy data management use cases. If you want to move the data and workload for some of the resiliency services as well, and if you, if a customer is also looking for any of the data visibility, which is a very important part of the 360 Data Management. So, we can offer all of it as part of one platform. So it is a very powerful integrated solution set, if you will. >> So we should think of it as a platform, not a product. Everybody talks about platforms today, the API Economy, Platforms beat Products is sort of the mantra, right? Is that the right way to think about it? >> Correct. And, also, we make sure that the different solutions, which is part of 360 Data Management Suite, works with each other, right? For example, if you actually back up your data, you should be able to use the same copy to do a DevTest. So we have a solution called Velocity that is part of our copy data management solution. It should be used, you should be able to use the backup data to do your disaster recovery if you can, right. >> So how does that resonate with customers? I mean, I get the platform perspective, certainly from a vendor view, you got to have the platform. Do the customers see it the same way? Or do they just want to buy products? >> No, so it is a suite, right? And what customers want, especially enterprise customers, they're looking for, to partner with a vendor, like, for example, us. One is for data protection, primarily, in many cases. Once you protect your data, they're looking for instead of finding the products to use, I can use the same data and how can I get value out of it? So I need to have the visibility about the data itself, so we have our InfoMap solution as part of 360 DM suite, to give you the visibility of what that data is with all the metadata information through that, and once they back up the data, they also have other things to do with respect to moving your data, moving your workload, and especially with the cloud adoption, many of them are going through the transformation. There are some pre-consolidation cloud adoption, and so on, so forth, and they need to move their data and workload, say, from on-prem to cloud, and you can also do it from cloud to cloud also, which is coming soon. So, some of those challenges are very critical, and they are looking for someone like Veritas who can offer that solution for them, which is essentially protect it, move your data, workload, be able to do copy data management on it for DevTest use cases, be able to provide visibility, and the digital compliance is a big factor, which I haven't even gone deeper into. There are lot of solutions to offer for the customers. >> Rama, take us inside how 360 Data Management fulfills the vision that was laid out a year ago. I think back to early in my career it was, like, it was the hardware, you know, you follow the Tick-tock of Intel. Today, software, we can usually talk a little bit further about the roadmap but, you know, customers are going to hold you well, "Can I use it now?" Do you have all those pieces, you know? What kind of pieces have been filled in this week, and, you know, where are the pieces where it's more aspirational than where we are today? >> I'm surprised you remembered the Tick-tock Model, which is essentially go through the process and architecture change, alternating with Intel, right? That's the model, I was there for like nine years or so. >> Marching to the cadence of Moore's law, that's what we used to do as an industry. >> Exactly. So, for 360 Data Management, we announced it last year at Vision and at that point, we are putting in the solutions and the use cases together. And what we did, we worked really hard the past one year to make sure that we put these solutions together. One, they should work with each other. Two, we have a tighter integration. And three, we should be also adding more solutions together and we made it also easier for a customer to buy, it's one SKU, right? So, you don't need to have multiple SKUs to do 10 different things. It's much easier to buy. It'll do all the things that an enterprise customer want with all the stuff that I talked about earlier, and from there on, they should be also, we should be able to also cater to some of the newer problems that customers have, which is, essentially, we launched CloudPoint, for example, which does a snapshot management, and we're adding more capabilities to it, and going forward, you will see that the 360 Data Management will evolve to cater to the customer needs. We always place customer in the forefront and make sure that their needs are met first, and that's the stuff that will design the solution, based on their needs. >> We spoke to Mike Palmer this morning and one of the things he said that kind of matured a little bit is, "That interaction with the cloud, when you get down into it, it's nice to talk about public clouds and people use many clouds but they're all a little bit different." So, maybe take us inside, there's a couple announcements you made, maybe give us a little bit of color on that and, you know, come on, tell us how is it working with all these big players? >> So, I run the technology alliances team here as well, so my team works with the various cloud vendors, which is essentially Azure through IBM to Google, AWS, and so on, so forth, right? So we are already working with AWS on multiple product integration, deeper integration. With Azure we are making sure that from some of the roadmap, like when recently we launched EnterpriseWorld, to make sure that it supports Azure, and then also we launched the VIP release that happened very recently. Support for Azure, as well. And we make sure that the other products that I talked about have the cloud as a significant piece of it, part of the roadmap. We have other vendors that are, we have partners that we are working with like IBM, Google, et cetera. They have their own strengths and we are initially going to go, we already sell on a backup as part of our, with IBM. We've been doing that business with them for more than 10 years, right? So there's a lot of moving parts in the sense that they are coming up with a lot of innovation. We are coming up with a lot of innovation and we make sure that we deliver what the customers want with those cloud vendors. And a very simple example is that if you want to do a data and workload migration on-prem to cloud, we can help with that very critical use case for anyone who's going through, looking at cloud transformation and journey to cloud. And, likewise, basic use cases also like backup to cloud, backup in cloud, disaster recovery, migration, DevTest, and these use cases is what we target, and it is part of the 360 Data Management suite itself. >> Can I ask you, it's kind of a wonky question, but it's something I'm curious about, and we talked to Mike Palmer a little bit about it, the challenge of integrating to various cloud services, in the non-trivial nature that, his answer was actually quite interesting. He said, "Listen, it was a lot harder "when we had a gazillion OS's, a lot easier now." But I want to understand that better. So, when you look at, and I am going to pick AWS only because I know it a little bit better and their services, but when you look at the myriad of data, sort of services that they have, are you just targeting the data stores? Like, an S3 or an EBS or a Glacier, or do you have to also think about integrating with other data types, DynamoDB, Kinesis, RedShift, Aurora, et cetera, et cetera. How far do you have to go, and what are the complexities of doing that? >> It's a very interesting time, right. There are various cloud service providers who are there, and each of them have their own services and their own storage, right? So, there's no one standard. S3 has been a standard for last one or two years or so. What we are doing is that we're looking at the portfolio, and we look at the use cases for what we are trying to solve for the customers in the cloud and based on that, we actually have some basic use cases which you don't need a full integration. You need some integration with some of those services, which is where we have people that are doing a lot of closer integration with AWS, and other service providers as well. Going forward, we will be using some of those, you mentioned about many DynamoDB, and other services that they have, machine learning services that they have. >> Stu: Sure. >> And different cloud providers have their own strengths and where they, what they offer. So, we will be looking to integrate with our existing portfolio with some of those services so that it is beneficial for customer. For example, if a customer wants to use only AWS, we are tightly integrated so that they get the best experience in AWS, same thing with Azure, same thing with Google cloud, same thing with IBM cloud, same thing with Oracle public cloud. So, that's our direction. First things first, get all of these basic use cases catered to for the customer. Going forward, have a tighter integration with their services. >> And your value in that chain is visibility and management. It's not so much optimization of that service, is it? >> So, I wouldn't call it as optimization of services. We focus a lot on the data visibility. I think in the keynote, and in my keynote, you might have heard also, is that some of the things that customers, we talk with customers a lot and we find that many of the, many times, they don't know what they have it. Everyone knows that it's called dark data, right. We provide the visibility so that they know what data they have before they do any migration. They know what needs to be migrated. And, as you all know, there are different storage tiers in cloud, like your S3, S3IA. You have your Glacier and it is expensive to bring data back from, say, Glacier to any other storage tier all on-prem. So, you need to have the visibility before you send the data out, right? So, we helped with that as well. So, visibility plays a very critical role in so many areas, not even just cloud but also on-prem as well. >> Rama, 360 Data Management's vision was laid out a year ago. A lot of the pieces are in place now. How are you tracking success, you know? Can you give us how many customers you're doing or just kind of growth, adoption, and how should we be looking forward to kind of measure and say how good this is doing? >> So, we actually launched 360 Data Management not too long ago. In the sense we put the package together, program together, and, as part of it, we saw extremely a lot of good traction not just from one geo, we actually saw a lot of traction in Asia Pacific, in MER, in Americas as well. A lot of the customers are looking for, I mean, there are three tiers to it, as well. We have bronze, gold, silver, right? And we see equal traction across the board. And, right now, I can't give you the numbers numbers, but, having said that, we see a lot of traction from customers on adoption and we have a huge pipeline where customers are very interested. These are backup customers who are looking to do many other things like resiliency services, like copy data management, and so on, so forth. So, the 360 Data Management really solves the problem, what they're looking for. >> Yeah. Can you give us a little color to that packaging and pricing? It's a subscription model to my understanding. >> It is a subscription model but-- >> Which is a little different than if you have a traditional and, you know, what are you seeing, what's the feedback been from customers? >> So, it is a subscription model when we went to market. We are going to be offering as a perpetual as well. So there is a gold, silver bronze tier, I had mentioned it. We have a Backup, InfoMap, and also EBFile as part of the bronze. And then you have, we have P as part of the silver plus bronze together and then in the gold, we have Access, also, as part of the solution. So, they can pick what they want and from our... Going forward, we do hear feedback from customers that they want perpetual as well. So, we already, we heard them. We'll make it happen. >> How about the small, midsize business, what are you, what are you doing for them? And can you talk about that a little bit? >> I'm glad you asked that because a lot of the 360 Data Management is centered around net backup, right? And with net backup, adark, all the good releases. There are also a lot of SMB and mid-market customers, and we have a solution called BackupExec, and I'm sure most of you are aware of BackupExec, it's been there for many years. So, BackupExec solves their problem and within BackupExec, we make sure that there are a lot of SMB customers who have like three or four backup products. And we want to make sure that there's one product that can protect the physical, virtual, and cloud environments. So, BackupExec does that. >> Last question. So, the ecosystem, it's evolving. You guys have great ambitions. Microsoft was here, had a big, big presence. Maybe just general thoughts on the ecosystem and, specifically, your relationship with Microsoft and other cloud suppliers. >> So, we work very closely from a strategic level with the CSPs. We call them the Cloud Service Providers. With Microsoft, we are doing a lot of, not just product integration for Azure, we'll also be supporting many things for AzureStack going forward. We're working with them on that. Also, I mentioned about BackupExec, we're also going to market. We are spending a significant amount of money to define the goal, to go to market with them, with their partners, and so on, so forth. Not just for BackupExec but across for all other products. That said, we also have other partners from the Cloud Service Provider point of view. There is a lot of effort happening from product integration, defining goal market, and as we define that, we're also engaging with their channel partners, who are also our channel partners, to help with the goal market. >> Cool, alright. Well, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, Rama. Really great to meet you and great to talk to you. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back. (light music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back the the Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman. Angelo Sciascia is here, big Tom Brady fan, Senior Vice President of NetX Information Systems, from Brooklyn, New York, I don't think so. >> Not a Tom Brady fan. >> Thanks for coming on theCUBE do you think it matters, how much it airs at a football. >> No, not at all, Tom Brady doesn't care about that. >> No, well, listen, thanks for coming on. We have a great conversation, we love talking sports on the Cube. So welcome, how's the show going for you? >> Ah, it's fantastic, you know, lots of great material Veritas has been talking about. 360 Data Management, obviously we all know the benefits of that by now. So we have a lot of customers here so I'm glad they they got to see it from a senior leadership perspective, rather than our sales guys and sales engineers going in there and talking to them, and seeing Veritas executives really getting behind what we're talking about. So it backs up our story and, you know, our customers are pretty excited about it, actually. >> What's the nature of your relationship with Veritas. I know you have a relationship, and maybe still do, with Symantec. How's that all, how did it all evolve? >> Yeah, so we are a Veritas Platinum Partner, we would be, what we consider, a solution-provider type partner. A lot of our business today is either directly or indirectly tied to Veritas, which was kind of funny because we started as a security company, so our roots are systems management, you know. That's where we were in 2005 when I joined NetX, that's where we were for many, many years after Symantec acquired a company called Altiris. We just stayed in that vein, you know, managing endpoints, securing endpoints, encrypting data. And then, somewhere in 2013, we said hey, you know, let's try to diversify the portfolio a little bit. And we used to manufacture an endpoint management appliance for Altiris so we said hey, Symantec's got these things called NetBackup Appliances, let's check it out. It's a formed fact that we know how to sell and, shoot, four years later it's been a great partnership for us, great partnership, I'm sure, for Veritas, and for our customers and that's a lot of our business today. >> So, I mean, it's hot market, you know. Data protection is exploding, and security. I mean, you're in two of the sweet spots in the market right now. So how do you approach the business with customers? Do you, are you a specialist around data protection? You deliver services around them. Maybe you can explain it on the model? >> Yeah, you know, that's actually a good question, because it's evolved quite a bit, right? So, you know, when you had a limited portfolio of just one or two products that you can sell to a customer, you're really doing a product sale, right, which, I would say that was probably the most difficult transition from the split from Symantec to Veritas, because at Symantec we had thousands of products in the portfolio, or hundreds of products in the portfolio that we could actually talk to. And for a little while, really we had a handful, you know, we had NetBackup Appliances, Enterprise Vault and ancillary things to bulk on to that, like Clearwell. I think one of the most exciting things for us, as a reseller, is to now be able to go have a discussion with our customers that we were never able to have before. And rather than sit there and try to sell them a backup product or a storage solution, we could sell them a platform that solves many problems for them, right? Rather than sitting there and trying to sell one-off. So, our conversations are significantly more strategic now then they've ever been, and frankly I speak for myself and my whole team, I know everyone enjoys the conversation more now that we have a portfolio to talk about, than just a handful of products. >> Angelo, you've got an interesting viewpoint on this split off of Aritas from Symantec. What have your customers said about it? What's been your interaction with the organization? What can you tell us about kind of the inside going on? >> Yeah, look, I've lived firsthand on a Symantec acquisition of a company, okay. I was, we were not a Symantec partner when they acquired Veritas. Funny enough, I was actually doing Veritas consulting, you know, on my own on the side prior to Symantec purchasing Veritas. So I really, I'd made my career on two products; Veritas for backup and Altiris for systems management. Symantec bought Veritas and I was like okay, you know, I'm just going to stay with Altiris. Symantec bought Altiris and here we are now, so we can talk about all of them. The thing I noticed was Symantec was always going to be a security company, right, and they weren't going to change that no matter how much they try to integrate it. It's two radically different stories. You know, and for many, many years, things that we look at as new products today were kind of already there in the Symantec portfolio, but buried underneath other products that really never saw the light of day because when you have hundreds or thousands of products, like I said earlier, you know, the ones that are going to move the most are the ones that are going to get the attention. So I think the benefit of the split is that it really allowed Veritas to focus on what they do well, which is managing data, and Symantec to do what they do well, which is securing your infrastructure and securing your data. From my perspective, our customers really appreciated that. Sure, a couple of them were a little annoyed that they had to now split contracts and deal with that kind of stuff, but I think that was a momentary blip and for the most part, it's been well-received from everyone we've spoken to. >> Angelo, you said you're having, your conversations are evolving. Who are you talking to? And maybe take us inside some of those conversations. What are the big challenges they're having? >> Yeah, a year ago, a year and a half ago I was talking to either somebody who was on the messaging side and needed to archive emails or IMs, or on the backup side and they just wanted to be able to meet their backup windows and maybe to get some better d dub rates, right. Fun conversation to have, bit mundane. It's not really solving problems as much as backing up data or archiving data. Today, we're having overarching conversations at a C-level, or a senior VP level, or a director level, and talking about dramatic changes to the way they do business, and how we can do business with them. Six months ago, NetX, we weren't doing anything in the Cloud, you know. We were selling to some customers' Vdub space to the Cloud, and that's about it. We weren't talking Cloud strategy with them. Today we're talking to our customers about moving workloads to the Cloud, doing it in a way that's predictable for them, and doing it with Veritas. >> That's a really interesting point. I have to imagine that changed who you're talking with inside the company. Can you walk us through kind of a typical customer's, you know, and how you kind of move up into a more strategic discussion for Cloud strategy? >> You know, so for full transparency, that whole thing's still evolving, right. 360 Data Management is still fairly new. So what we're seeing, the conversations turned, it would start, again we're talking to somebody that we've been talking to historically in the backup side or architecture side, and we talk to them about wanting to do better things than what their backup is, and start to talk about, hey this is what 360 Data Management is. What's relevant to that person he's going to want to talk about but then there's going to be things in there that are not relevant to him. So he'll make that introduction and he'll get other stakeholders in the boat with him. And that's something we've really appreciated because the people you used to talk to are now bringing in stakeholders to offset their own desires and their own budgets, so want to bring in other technology. And typically, when we get to that point when we're starting to talk about strategic pricing, is when you're getting that C-level person to really have that aha moment, and say wow, we're offsetting costs here, we're doing things like truly getting rid of tape, or moving to the Cloud and things like that, and it's a conversation that really evolves and it's still starts at the bottom. But we're figuring out ways to start it at a higher point. >> Well, those strategies are still evolving for most customers; the roles of those people that might have had one role definitely are changing. I'm curious, one of the big transition points, especially for a company like Veritas, is going from licenses to some kind of more of a subscription model. Any commentary you have on your customers; their embrace, or like, dislike of some of those transitions? >> I think the one thing the Cloud has done is it's opened up a different avenue of how people consume IT, right. Cloud is very much consumption-based billing, and while that can complicate our lives from a reseller perspective in terms of how to collect and track monthly billing and things like that, they like it because they feel like, and it's the truth, they're only paying for what they're truly using, rather than paying for products or infrastructure that they're only using part of the day, or software that they're only using for a particular project. A lot of our healthcare systems might have a research project that their going on, and they might like to scale up for some backup licensing and scale back down once that project is done. Consumption licensing allows that, versus having to go to them and saying, hey, well now you got to buy 200 terabytes of perpetual licensing, and justify that capital expense, rather than having an operational expense on just that one particular workload that you have to back up for that one period of time. >> Angelo, Stu and I are always interested in the human capital management aspects of things, and you talked about, you went from sort of talking about having a conversation around email archiving or backup, to one about the Cloud, Cloud strategies. From your internal organization perspective, how did you manage that? Are you rescaling, are you retraining? Is it just you got really supersmart people that can adapt? >> We definitely have supersmart people, because they're all over there, that's right. But I definitely have supersmart people. But, you know, it's a little bit of both. It's a little bit of, you know, you take one of our data protection projects; see Christian Muma, you know, he's been in the data center for god knows how many years, he has seen technology evolve. It was a natural fit to look at Cloud infrastructure. Started taking some classes, consumed it, all the information he could, and now we're out there actively selling it. In some other respects, we had to hire from outside and bring in some services ourselves to actually use, maybe some third party partnerships to help us better understand how we price out Cloud for our customers. So it's a little bit of everything, and I think that that's what's exciting about it, because I think for the first time in a long time, everyone's learning something new at the same time, because, I don't care what anyone said about the Cloud years ago; it's different today, it's going to be different in six months, it's going to be different in nine months. And I think that that's exciting, and I've been in this industry since 1996. I've seen a lot of really cool things come and go. I just think that there's still infancy in the Cloud and I think it's exciting because everyone's still learning. And any time you can still learn, I think that's, I think an important part of your job. >> So when you think about your, sort of, near-term and midterm and long-term plan for the company, how do you sort of describe that? Where do you want to take this thing? >> Near-term, I want to have a solid end of the quarter. >> Business is good, right, I mean market's booming right now. >> Business is very good. Veritas will tell me it's not good enough but they're just never happy. No, business is, business is very good. I think, near-term for us, you said hey, how do we get our head around it? Near-term for us is, as we're absorbing all this information, is start to really figure out what our path is going to be. So near-term, I think we still have to identify other ancillary partners that we need to bring to the table. We've got our partnerships with Azure, Microsoft Azure, and our partnerships with AWS. We'll probably have to look at Google and IBM and see what they're doing, and then we have to look at other partnerships that are not related to Veritas but still drive that home. We maybe look at a different colo partnership or partnerships around outsourcing billing, things like that, that we can make where it's easier for our customers to consume the technology. So I think six to nine months from now if we were to have the same conversation, everything that we're doing today is probably going to be somewhat different. But I just think that there's still a lot of planning to do. >> Angelo, any feedback from your customers on what there's still on the to-do list from the vendors? We talked, you know, the strategy, Cloud's changing a lot, you know. What are some of the pinpoints that they said hey, if we could get this into the offering from Veritas or some of the others it would make our lives a lot easier. >> I mean, that's a tough question, because we're going to them now and changing the conversation already. You know, obviously they're always asking for different features, but I don't like to get into a feature conversation with the customers. I try to solve the problem. >> Dave: You're leading that conversation, is what you're saying. >> Yeah, I don't want to get into the weeds of talking about well, this widget does it at 50% and you do it at 48%. You know, I try to sit a little bit more macro. I think that one of the things our customers have asked us to do a better job at is figure out better ways to make it easier to consume the technology from budget perspective. So we're trying to figure that out now; 360 Data Management is a subscription, Veritas would like them sold in three years, we're trying to figure out ways to get creative with our customers on that. What's the right bundle, what's not the right bundle. One thing that I've noticed, and Veritas have been great at it, is we have to have some flexibility in terms of adding things in and make it seem like it's all part of that bundle. There's been some flexibility and I think that, because of that, we haven't hit that roadblock yet where, well, we really want this product in the bundle. Reality is that we'll work through that and try to add it in there, some way, shape or form, even if behind the scenes. >> The customers see you as the experts, and what we often see is that technology is the technology; it's pretty much understood. What's not understood by the customers is how to apply it to their business, and their business is changing so fast that it seems like they're looking to organizations like yours saying okay, here's our business challenge. How can you help me? You tell me, and then the best answer is somebody he'll be able to work with. Is that a valid, sort of, premise? >> Yeah, it is, it certainly is and I think we're really uniquely positioned in the fact that, here we've got, we've got our partnership with Veritas and we're 100% focused to everything in the Veritas portfolio so we don't compete from within. That's the same thing that we could say, basically, on Symantec and some of our traditional storage partners as well. That'll change most likely, on our storage partners, especially because of what Veritas have been releasing with Access and some of the other software providing storage technology. When we're brought in, we're brought in as the experts in that finite area, so we're not brought in as a generalist-type of reseller. We're brought in as, hey, I've got a data management problem, I've got a data security problem, or I'm trying to do some high-performance workloads on storage. So yeah, we are the experts, but at the same time we're being brought in for those handfuls of things, so we're not having these, hey, can you maximize my span on anti-virus software because I want to sell you commoditized software. It's just not us, it's not our thing. We're not adding any value to the customers, or the poor owners for that matter. >> Angelo, curious that there's a lot of startups in the data protection space. What do you here, your customers asking you about them? You know, what's your thoughts there? >> I guess I got to be nice, right? Because I'm being streamed everywhere. >> Stu: They're not listening, go ahead, be a New Yorker. >> Listen, I challenge Rubrik at any point of time, you know, those guys, Rubrik, Cohesity, those guys, they're new, they're the shiny new toy. The problem, the problem is they have their messaging out there, and the problem we have is that they're the shiny new toy. But when the rubber hits the road and when it's time to actually go and prove out what the technology can do, we'll win all the time. We will win ten out of ten times if we get the seat at the table, right. The problem is is because we were a limited portfolio, a limited product, limited integration type of company before, we weren't getting that seat at the table. I think they see it now, I think they're starting to get a little concerned about, hey, you know what, if this 360 Data Management is what it's going to be, and we all know it is, I think they're going to be concerned. They're new, and they're going to get attention. My honest opinion: I'm glad they came out, I'm glad that Rubrik and Cohesity and all these guys came out and did all this different ways to go to market, because I think it really forced all of us to say hey, we got some real tough decisions to make here, the competition has caught up, in certain ways. Let's change the game, and 360 Data Management does that. I think they should take as much business as they can right now, because it's going to be short-lived. >> You said it makes you rethink your strengths, and like you said, change the game. >> Yeah, it changes the game. >> Yeah. Uh, okay, predictions on the MLB? Yankees won their getaway game today to put the pressure on the Red Sox, two and a half to two and a half games back. You know, the Indians are looking good, my man, Terry Francona. What's your prediction for it? >> The Sox fan's outnumbered two to one here, so go ahead. >> You know, so I shouldn't say that the Yankees are going to win the World Series? >> No, he's a Yankees fan. >> I'm a Yankee fan, too. >> Honestly, as a Yankee fan, I think we all know that they weren't supposed to be this team, so I think this is, that's the team to look out for. >> Dave: Maybe this is their year. >> I think this is the year that they're going to challenge people, I mean, are they going to win? It's Cleveland, do you really think Cleveland's going to win anything? They won one thing in the last, what, 30 years. >> That's what they used to say about us in Boston. Angelo, thanks so much coming on, really appreciate it. Keep right there, buddy, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live from-- (electronic music)