>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The pandemic precipitated what is shaping up to be a permanent shift in cybersecurity spending patterns. As a direct result of hybrid work, CSOs have vested heavily in endpoint security, identity access management, cloud security, and further hardening the network beyond the headquarters. We've reported on this extensively in this Breaking Analysis series. Moreover, the need to build security into applications from the start rather than bolting protection on as an afterthought has led to vastly high heightened awareness around DevSecOps. Finally, attacking security as a data problem with automation and AI is fueling new innovations in cyber products and services and startups. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we present our quarterly findings in the security industry, and share the latest ETR survey data on the spending momentum and market movers. Let's start with the most recent news in cybersecurity. Nary a week goes by without more concerning news. The latest focus in the headlines is, of course, Russia's relentless cyber attacks on critical infrastructure in the Ukraine, including banking, government websites, weaponizing information. The hacker group, BlackByte, put a double whammy on the San Francisco 49ers, meaning they exfiltrated data and they encrypted the organization's files as part of its ransomware attack. Then there's the best Super Bowl ad last Sunday, the Coinbase floating QR code. Did you catch that? As people rushed to scan the code and participate in the Coinbase Bitcoin giveaway, it highlights yet another exposure, meaning we're always told not to click on links that we don't trust or we've never seen, but so many people activated this random QR code on their smartphones that it crashed Coinbase's website. What does that tell you? In other news, Securonix raised a billion dollars. They did this raise on top of Lacework's massive $1.3 billion raise last November. Both of these companies are attacking security with data automation and APIs that can engage machine intelligence. Securonix, specifically in the announcement, mentioned the uptake from MSSPs, managed security service providers, something we've talked about in this series. And that's a trend that we see as increasingly gaining traction as customers are just drawing in and drowning in security incidents. Peter McKay's company, Snyk, acquired Fugue, a company focused on making sure security policies are consistent throughout the software development life cycle. It's a really an example of a developer-defined security approach where policy can be checked at the dev, deployment, and production phases to ensure the same policies are in place at all stages, including monitoring at runtime. Fugue, according to Crunchbase, had raised $85 million to date. In some other company news, Cisco was rumored to be acquiring Splunk for not much more than Splunk is worth today. And the talks reportedly broke down. This would be a major move in security by Cisco and underscores the pressure to consolidate. Cisco would get an extremely strong customer base and through efficiencies could improve Splunk's profitability, but it seems like the premium Cisco was willing to pay was not enough to entice board to act. Splunk board, that is. Datadog blew away its earnings, and the stock was up 12%. It's pulled back now, thanks to Putin, but it's one of those companies that is disrupting Splunk. Datadog is less than half the size of Splunk, revenue-wise, but its valuation is more than 2 1/2 times greater. Finally, Elastic, another Splunk disruptor, settled its trademark dispute with AWS, and now AWS will now stop using the name Elasticsearch. All right, let's take a high level look at how cyber companies have performed in the stock market over time. Here's a graph of the Cyber ETF, and you can see the March 1st crosshairs of 2020 signifying the start of the lockdown. The trajectory of cybersecurity stocks is shown by the orange and blue lines, and it surely has steepened post March of 2020. And, of course, it's been down with the market lately, but the run up, as you can see, was substantial and eclipsed the trajectory of the previous cycles over the last couple of years, owing much of the momentum to the spending dynamics that we talked about at our open. Let's now drill into some of the names that we've been following over the last few years and take a look at the firm level. This chart shows some data that we've been tracking since before the pandemic. The top rows show the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ prices, and the bottom rows show specific stocks. The first column is the index price or the market cap of the company just before the pandemic, then the same data one year later. Then the next column shows the peak value during the pandemic, and then the current value. Then it shows in the next column where it is today, in percentage terms, i.e., how far has it pulled back from the peak, then the delta from pre-pandemic, in other words, how much did the issue earn or lose during the pandemic for investors? We then compare the pre-pandemic revenue multiple using a trailing 12-month revenue metric. Sorry, that's what we used. It's easy to get. (laughs) And that's the revenue multiple compared to the August in 2020, when multiples were really high, and where they are today, and then a recent quarterly growth rate guide based on the last earnings report. That's the last column. Okay, so I'm throwing a lot of data at you here, but what does it tell us? First, the S&P and the NAS are well up from pre-pandemic levels, yet they're off 9% and 15%, respectively, from their peaks today. That was earlier on Friday morning. Now let's look at the names more closely. Splunk has been struggling. It definitely had a tailwind from the pandemic as all boats seem to rise, but its execution has been lacking. It's now 30% off from its pre-pandemic levels. (groans) And it's multiple is compressing, and perhaps Cisco thought it could pick up the company for a discount. Now let's talk about Palo Alto Networks. We had reported on some of the challenges the company faced moving into a cloud-friendly model. that was before the pandemic. And we talked about the divergence between Palo Alto's stock price and the valuations relative to Fortinet, and we said at the time, we fully expected Palo Alto to rebound, and that's exactly what happened. It rode the tailwinds of the last two years. It's up over 100% from its pre-COVID levels, and its revenue multiple is expanding, owing to the nice growth rates. Now Fortinet had been doing well coming into the pandemic. In fact, we said it was executing on a cloud strategy better than Palo Alto Networks, hence that divergence in valuations at the time. So it didn't get as much of a boost from the pandemic. Didn't get that momentum at first, but the company's been executing very well. And as you can see, with 155% increase in valuation since just before the pandemic, it's going more than okay for Fortinet. Now, Okta is a name that we've really followed closely, the identity access management specialist that rocketed. But since it's Auth0 acquisition, it's pulled back. Investors are concerned about its guidance and its profitability. And several analyst have downgraded their price targets on Okta. We still really like the company. The Auth0 acquisition gives Okta a developer vector, and we think the company is going hard after market presence and is willing to sacrifice short-term profitability. We actually like that posture. It's very Frank Slupin-like. This company spends a lot of money on R&D and go-to-market. The question is, does Okta have inherent profitability? The company, as they say, spends a ton in some really key areas but it looks to us like it's going to establish a footprint. It's guiding revenue CAGR in the mid-30s over the mid to long-term and near term should beat that benchmark handily. But you can see the red highlights on Okta. And even though Okta is up 59% from its pre-pandemic levels, it's far behind its peers shown in the chart, especially CrowdStrike and Zscaler, the latter being somewhat less impacted by the pullback in stocks recently, of course, due to the fears of inflation and interest rates, and, of course, Russian invasion escalation. But these high flyers, they were bound to pull back. The question is can they maintain their category leadership? And for the most part, we think they can. All right, let's get into some of the ETR data. Here's our favorite XY view with net score, or spending momentum on the Y-axis, and market share or pervasiveness in the data center on the horizontal axis. That red 40% line, that indicates a highly elevated spending level. And the chart inserts to the right, that shows how the data is plotted with net score and shared N in each of the columns by each company. Okay, so this is an eye chart, but there really are three main takeaways. One is that it's a crowded market. And this shows only the companies ETR captures in its survey. We filtered on those that had more than 50 mentions. So there's others in the ETR survey that we're not showing here, and there are many more out there which don't get reported in the spending data in the ETR survey. Secondly, there are a lot of companies above the 40% mark, and plenty with respectable net scores just below. Third, check out SentinelOne, Elastic, Tanium, Datadog, Netskope, and Darktrace. Each has under 100 N's but we're watching these companies closely. They're popping up in the survey, and they're catching our attention, especially SentinelOne, post-IPO. So we wanted to pare this back a bit and filter the data some more. So let's look at companies with more than 100 mentions in the same chart. It gets a little cleaner this picture, but it's still crowded. Auth0 leads everyone in net score. Okta is also up there, so that's very positive sign since they had just acquired Auth0. CrowdStrike SalePoint, Cyberark, CloudFlare, and Zscaler are all right up there as well. And then there's the bigger security companies. Palo Alto Network, very impressive because it's well above the 40% mark, and it has a big presence in the survey, and, of course, in the market. And Microsoft as well. They're such a big whale. They skew the data for everybody else to kind of mess up these charts. And the position of Cisco and Splunk make for an interesting combination. They get both decent net scores, not above the 40% line but they got a good presence in the survey as well. Thinking about the acquisition, Al Shugart was the CEO of of Seagate, and founder. Brilliant Silicon valley icon and engineer. Great business person. I was asking him one time, hey, you thinking about buying this company or that company? And of course, he's not going to tell me who he's thinking about buying or acquiring. He said, let me just tell you this. If you want to know what I'm thinking, ask yourself if it were free, would you take it? And he said the answer's not always obviously yes, because acquisitions can be messy and disruptive. In the case of Cisco and Splunk, I think the answer would be a definitive yes It would expand Cisco's portfolio and make it the leader in security, with an opportunity to bring greater operating leverage to Splunk. Cisco's just got to pay more if it wants that asset. It's got to pay more than the supposed $20 billion offer that it made. It's going to have to get kind of probably north of 23 billion. I pinged my ETR colleague, Erik Bradley, on this, and he generally agreed. He's very close to the security space. He said, Splunk isn't growing the customer base but the customers are sticky. I totally agree. Cisco could roll Splunk into its security suite. Splunk is the leader in that space, security information and event management, and Cisco really is missing that piece of the pie. All right, let's filter the data even more and look at some of the companies that have moved in the survey over the past year and a half. We'll go back here to July 2020. Same two-dimensional chart. And we're isolating here Auth0, Okta, SalePoint CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Cyberark, Fortinet, and Cisco. No Microsoft. That cleans up the chart. Okay, why these firms? Because they've made some major moves to the right, and some even up since last July. And that's what this next chart shows. Here's the data from the January 2022 survey. The arrow start points show the position that we just showed you earlier in July 2020, and all these players have made major moves to the right. How come? Well, it's likely a combination of strong execution, and the fact that security is on the radar of every CEO, CIO, of course, CSOs, business heads, boards of directors. Everyone is thinking about security. The market momentum is there, especially for the leaders. And it's quite tremendous. All right, let's now look at what's become a bit of a tradition with Breaking Analysis, and look at the firms that have earned four stars. Four-star firms are leaders in the ETR survey that demonstrate both a large presence, that's that X-axis that we showed you, and elevated spending momentum. Now in this chart, we filter the N's. Has to be greater than 100. And we isolate on those companies. So more than 100 responses in the survey. On the left-hand side of the chart, we sort by net score or spending velocity. On the right-hand side, we sort by shared N's or presence in the dataset. We show the top 20 for each of the categories. And the red line shows the top 10 cutoffs. Companies that show up in the top 10 for both spending momentum and presence in the data set earn four stars. If they show up in one, and make the top 10 in one, and make the top 20 in the other, they get two stars. And we've added a one-star category as honorable mention for those companies that make the top 20 in both categories. Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and Okta make the four-star grade. Okta makes it even without Auth0, which has the number one net score in this data set with 115 shared N to boot. So you can add that to Okta. The weighted average would pull Okta's net score to just above Cyberark's into fourth place. And its shared N would bump Okta up to third place on the right-hand side of the chart Cisco, Splunk, Proofpoint, KnowBe4, Zscaler, and Cyberark get two stars. And then you can see the honorable mentions with one star. Now thinking about a Cisco, Splunk combination. You'd get an entity with a net score in the mid-20s. Yeah, not too bad, definitely respectable. But they'd be number one on the right-hand side of this chart, with the largest market presence in the survey by far. Okay, let's wrap. The trends around hybrid work, cloud migration and the attacker escalation that continue to drive cybersecurity momentum and they're going to do so indefinitely. And we've got some bullet points here that you're seeing private companies, (laughs) they're picking up gobs of money, which really speaks to the fact that there's no silver bullet in this market. It's complex, chaotic, and cash-rich. This idea of MSSPs on the rise is going to continue, we think. About half the mid-size and large organization in the US don't have a SecOps, a security operation center, and outsourcing to one that can be tapped on a consumption basis, cloud-like, as a service just makes sense to us. We see the momentum that companies that we've highlighted over the many quarters of Breaking Analysis are forming. They're forming a strong base in the market. They're going for market share and footprint, and they're focusing on growth, at bringing in new talent. They have good balance sheets and strong management teams and we think they'll be leading companies in the future, Zscaler, CrowdStrike, Okta, SentinelOne, Cyberark, SalePoint, over time, joining the ranks of billion dollar cyber firms, when I say billion dollar, billion dollar revenue like Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and Splunk, if it doesn't get acquired. These independent firms that really focus on security. Which underscores the pressure and consolidation and M&A in the whole space. It's almost assured with the fragmentation of companies and so many new entrants fighting for escape velocity that this market is going to continue with robust M&A and consolidation. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to my colleague, Stephanie Chan, who helped research this week's topics, and Alex Myerson on the production team. He also manages the Breaking Analysis podcast. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, who get the word out. Thank you to all. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. Check out ETR's website at etr.ai. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. @dvellante is my DM. Comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week. Be safe, be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>live from San Francisco. It's the Q covering Micron Insight 2019 to You by Micron. >>Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. We're here. Appear 27 covering the micron inside. 2019. I'm David Lot day with my co host, David Flores. Sanjay Moreau chose here. He's the president and CEO of Micron. Sanjay, great to see you again. Good to >>see you, too. >>I love the show because you guys are a highly technical company. You get you get down in the weeds and talk about nano meters and cycles and things like that. But we're here talking about technology, how it's changing people's lives. I mean, you see, that is your mission. So tell us a year on what's new from this >>event. You new at this event is so many new products that we announced today. You know, you see, Micron, I'd like to say that my clone 41 year old, but it has a new heart beat and you see that new heartbeat coming through New innovations, new products, you know, several new solid state drive solutions. Breakthrough speeds portable. SSD renounced our tent, a security solution as well as demonstrated test platform a platform for deep learning algorithms to be applied, enabling influence at EJ. So you see my front continuing to focus on driving high value solutions, engaging deeper with the ecosystem, engaging with our customers to understand what are the main points off the future and bringing innovative technology solutions. And, of course, during the course of last year in a while it was a year where memory pricing went down substantially because of some excess supply forces demand. But my crone, actually in that year produced the second best year in the history of the company. And during the year, he also had the second best year for free class cash flow for the company, >>about $13 billion in nearly 12 months. I want to get into some of that. But before I do our industry and you know this well has marched to the cadence of Moore's law for decades and decades of that has been the innovation engine. It no longer is. You talked about that on your panel today, the innovation engine is now data applying machine intelligence and a I and machine learning to that data scaling with cloud. Now the edge comes into a whole new innovation cocktail. I wonder if you could comment on that in terms of what it means for your business. >>So, yes, in terms of innovation, challenges you to Morse law scaling, but also the workloads that are there today, driving the eye of the future required, nor the solutions of yesterday. They require new, innovative architectures. I like to call them be spoke processors like you have a new custom suit for that fits a particular individual. Now baseball processors that actually meet needs off the specific workloads. But what is important is that as these new innovations, new architectures proliferate through the ecosystem. Memory and storage is key because the trends off the eye, after all, are about drawing deeper insight and creating greater value from all the data that billions of devices the coyote devices are creating around the world. So tremendous support unity for memory and storage. We are focused on bringing solutions with Denham with flash that meet the needs of our customers in terms of performance be announced today. You know the highest clocking speed for our ballistics. Dylan. You know, a delight to the gamers, but we also announce new SS D's for enterprise application, we announce a three d cross point x 100 solid state drive with the fastest in the industry kind of performance. So these are the kind of things were focused on. Yes, technology is getting more complex in and, you know, event from 64 layers to 96 layers. And next year, going 228 layers on Dedham side were the first ones to introduce the ones e technology Norden the industry and actually forced ones to start shipping already in production in the industry. This one z dina nor has the smallest feature size. So these are new, exciting things that are happening at my crime. >>I mean, Sanjay's right. They see all these alternative processes going on. You see, cos tech companies building their own custom silicon, right? I mean, >>so yes, way we're seeing these hybrid solutions being put together on dhe, seeing that the rise of new players completely like arm, for example, now taking a more and more important part in that. So But I'd like to just ask one question on three D cross point that that was an interesting one. How you gonna get volume in that is there going to be through working with some of these other vendors? Because Intel have just combined it with The process is essentially, Are you looking at new ways that you can use that at the lower end to get volume up? >>Where's that fit in your overall strategy? >>Certainly, as we said in the memory hierarchy, TV Cross Point fits in very nicely between NAND on one end and Di Dam on the other end city cost point as a persistent memory gives the benefit that it has capacities, ship densities that can be higher than Denham. Yet it has performance that is close to Denham and much faster than then. And it has the persistence, the non volatility that man has as well. So you can imagine with those kind of attributes, it will have exciting new opportunities in the future. But these new technologies do take several years before they become mainstream technologies. This is still early innings for three D plus point technology. Be engaged with the ecosystem partners with the customers in terms of understanding how this will fit in best in terms of their data center applications. This is what we have started working on This is what we announced the product. And we'll, of course, continue to evolve. The road map are pretty cross point technology. I just also want to touch upon what you said that Yes, you do see that compute now is not being just done like yesterday with CP use. Yes, you do have that idea of solutions. Si pues gp used tp use a six and f bjs. And here's some of the social media giants and those tech giants that are driving innovation in various industry segments, including transportation. They have their own silicon, you know, to address their deep learning requirements, and that creates new. Unfortunately, for us, this is what we call putting silicon back into Silicon Valley. Silicon is driving the innovations today that are coming out of Silicon Valley, regardless off world and market segment and Member Lee and storage is very much at the heart is at the center of yours. >>So you know I want to retire about vertical integration and one of my business early business heroes was Al Shugart. When I was a young puppet, i d. C. And he educated me on the importance of vertical integration and his market, which of course, was spinning destroys heads, media, etcetera. That was a game changer for that that you know, emerging company at the time. See gate. How is vertical? What your philosophy and vertical integration And how does it affect your business and your customers? >>So vertical indication enables us to bring value to our customers, bring greater value to our customers. We have a massive scale off manufacturing that is built on a very comprehensive and actually the world's most unique technology platform. Now taking this vertical integration of the technology platform manufacturing scales off, you know, more than six million acres a year and extending it to controller and form their expertise deep packaging expertise to bring high bandwidth Delia memory solutions for data center applications as well. A solid state drives and multi chip manage nan solutions for smartphone and automotive applications. These are just examples off how we're leveraging our vertical integration, extending it into controllers and firmware and packaging and assembly capability to really bring a diverse and expanded product for a full year to the market, do air just the markets needs from cloud to the edge. And now we're extending our work till indication capabilities even deeper from we have gone from silicon two solutions and now going from also silicon. Two solutions to system and software working with customers to understand water, the hardware and software intricacies involved that can help bring out even more power from the memory as they look at, you know, driving their deep learning algorithms for training as well as for influence. I think this is the vertical integration on build on the most unique platform of technologies. Nobody else in the world has Denham, NAND and CD cross point now building vertical indication on this gives us tremendous defense created opportunity to bring value to our cast. >>A troll more value or being able leveraged. I wanna ask you about your business. You mentioned a record number two free cash flow year for you guys. Two summers ago, I listened to you at the analyst, the Wall Street analyst meetings in you. We're very much aware of the demand and supply pending imbalance that was coming. And you said at the time we're gonna manage through that much better than we have. Historically, it reminds me of airlines when you go when you fly now there's no empty seats, so and you've done a masterful job. The stock prices stayed up. Now, granted, you know you've reduced share count. But how have you done that? What is the new discipline that has allowed you to navigate through those icebergs? >>Soviet Full focus on accelerating our technology development. We're focused on making, for example, technology development exploration. I mentioned earlier being the forest to the market with one C D M, which has the smallest feature size, right. That ability to accelerate technology development and deploy it in production to meet our CUSTOMERSNEEDS gives us ability to manage cost reduction ability as well. So Micron has actually in terms of cost reductions on a year over year basis has led the industry both on the same side as well as the NAN site. This has contributed to stronger financial performance of the company. During 2019 there, prices came down due to some excess supply in the industry, and yet Micron, due to its healthy cost position, was able to produce better financial results as well. Another very important element is increasing the mics off high value solutions, infusing the mics off SS D's and Managed man for mobile applications, as well as bringing more high performance memory to the Bennett, did a memory to the benefit of our customers. High value solutions, Cost positioning, technology acceleration. These have bean the elements that will give us long lasting advantage in terms of continuing to weather the potential ups and downs in our industry. And, you know, yes, we're proud of the fact that, unlike in the past, in an environment like will be experienced in 2019 with respect to price declines, Micron would have had media challenges Micron actually delivered, as I said, the second best year in terms of revenues profits as well as free cash flow. And I want to highlight that we narrowed the gap with our competitors. We narrow the gap with our competitors in terms of orbital margin again as a result, off a stronger, more diversified high value product portfolio and our cost reduction capabilities. >>Yeah, and you've also done a great job communicating to Wall Street. So my last question I know you gotta go is around tech for good. Mark Betty of's been really front center on this. You said that are really jar job is to make lives better, because I still say your job is to increase shareholder value as well. Whoa is the CEO who Mrs 4/4 in a row, but then points to tech for good at the same time. New new workers millennials expect checked for good. How do you see those fitting together? What's your philosophy? There >>were very passionate at Micron that it is important for us that we support the communities that be working where our team members 11. Yes, we want to dry for betterment of humanity through bringing the benefit off our technologies and products, you know? And of course, you see your life's changed with the benefit of more memory and storage, whether it is in your smart home or your smartphone or all of the benefits that you're getting from advances in technology today. But we also absolutely have a social responsibility going from customers to communities, really making sure that we had a good corporate citizen. So at my crone, philanthropy is important doing this year. A microloan foundation is matching our team members contributions, and through that through our team member contributions as well as our match, we have given two and 1/2 $1,000,000 to the communities during the course of the year. We have also supported several new initiatives related to stem education as well as basic human needs again in all the countries and sites where micro nasty members. And actually Micron Foundation has given $11 million during our fiscal year 2019 for supporting various causes toward basic human needs, as well as advancement of science, technology and generating and map. And, most importantly, microphone team members more white have contributed 165,000 hours in community giving, volunteering activities, and we are trying to continue to take our engagement with the community to the next level. I considered it very, very important that and our responsibility that is not only about producing best business results, but we need to help our communities and people in need get to the next level off betterment as well. And it's part of there's diversity and inclusion and equality is a very, very important initiative at the company as well. And we're making tremendous progress in that respect as well. That's >>a great story, Sanjay. Thanks. Um I know you're super busy. Get a bunch of customers to see you're an awesome CEO and doing a great job. Really appreciate you taking the time to come on the Cube. Thank you. Thank you >>for being here with you today. >>Fantastic. All right. Thank you for watching. Everybody will be right back with our next guest. Live from Micron inside. 2019. You're watching the Cube?

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's the Cube covering Veritas Vision 2017 brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and this is our second day of Veritas Vision in 2017. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Jason Buffington is here, good friend of the Cube, Senior Analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group, otherwise known as ESG. Jason, good to see you again. >> Thanks for having me back. >> We've been bumping into each other a lot lately, a lot of storage stuff going on and you you gave a panel discussion today. You had, you know, three of the four big Cloud guys up there, no Amazon, Stu. They weren't up on the panel, but that was good, you had an interview with those guys. >> Jason: Yeah. >> So, congratulations on that and welcome again. >> Yeah, everyone wants to talk about data protection, right? So, there's... >> Dave: Hottest topic, isn't it? >> It is, every time you go to a show, the last show that I was at, it seemed like over half the booths were talking about data protection. So, to come here, you know, Veritas kind of owns that as a name. And so it's been fun to just be part of the participants. >> Yeah, Jason, you know, you cover this base, and you know Veritas well. There are people I talked to getting ready for this, and they said, "We remember Veritas back in its hay day." You know, back pre-acquisition. During the virtualization era, it kind of got quiet. I mean, they got acquired by Semantic, things went down, but now they're an independent company, and one of the shows that, you know, we've been at VMWorld, absolutely. Data protection is super hot, you know, product of the year was one of those companies, whole lot of startups there, a lot of investment. What's your take on kind of the new Veritas, you know, where they fit in that ecosystem with all those startups and everybody else? >> No, that's a good read, so let's talk about the market first, and then I'll put Veritas in it, right? So, I think you're spot on that when the virtualization wave came through, most of the really big established data protection vendors were not first market, right? And in fact, every time that we see this, I've been doing this for 28 years, I've been backing stuff up, right? And for most of it, every time the platform shifts, the traditional dominant data protection vendors are not the first ones to jump on that new gear, right? Windows versus NetWare, now we're into virtualization. So, we saw Veeam, and PHD and vRanger, and a few others that barely get an honorable mention in that line, right? We're in a really interesting time, though, this time around because every time, in the past, when you moved off of the old platform, the presumption was, you turned it off, right? This time around, we're on the, here's a fancy word, we're on the precipice of a new shift again because we're looking at Cloud as the new platform to move to. But here's the fun part. We're not leaving the old stuff behind, right? We're not turning off all the virtual servers and the physical servers are on their way out the door as we go to Cloud. We're embracing Multicloud as the new destination, not this mid-step along the way. And I think that's really interesting because, just like in every time past, it means we're going to get a reset of the leader board when it comes to data protection. And, just like in times past, the secret sauce that made you dominant on the last platform, doesn't necessarily give you an edge technology-wise on the next platform. All it really does is give you momentum, right? So, yeah, there's a few other folks that we could list that they've got some momentum going for one reason or another along the way, but for the marketplace, if physical and virtual and Cloud are all going to be together, Veritas has been doing some of those for 20 some odd years. They've made some announcements around the rest of the suites. I think they're in a good place here. The thing I'm excited about from Veritas, and I do, I'm a fan, you want to root for them, right? I mean, 25 years on the bench, you want to see them keep going. I think the opportunity is that, since the divestiture from Semantic, they have a lot more focus, right? You know, it's really hard to tell a story that's everything from Malware and cyber security, all the way through to a breadth of data protection. But if you look at how they're talking about things now, and I really like the 360 narrative that kind of pulls it all together. Every part of their portfolio kind of pulls the other parts together, right? It doesn't matter, in data management, whether you want to start with backup, or you want to start with storage, or you want to start with availability, anywhere you look on that circle, it's going to pull the rest of the line in, and these are all the things that folks are asking for from a customer base. So, I like the tech that they've got. I like where the market is headed, and I think they've got a real shot to be one of those top three dominant names that we talk about moving forward. >> Yeah, so, I mean it's a 30 plus year history. >> Jason: Yeah. >> And pretty amazing, I mean this is an amazing story, this company. I mean, they came out, kind of a small company, and then there was that relationship which they bought Seagate. You know, Seagate's backup business. Seagate actually had a piece of the company for a while. >> Jason: Yeah. >> You know, Al Shugart, when he sold that stock, basically saved Seagate cause of the cash infusion. So, it was a long history, and then they kind of went dormant... >> Jason: Yeah. >> For a while under the Symantec Governance. And now, so the big question is, can Veritas get its mojo back in the space and become that super hot company again? >> So, by the way, sidebar, you talked about Seagate. I actually have a copy of Seagate Backup Exec sitting on a shelf in my office. (Dave laughing) And one of these days, I will open up the data protection museum, cause I think I've got most of the pieces and parts laying around. So, can Veritas get is mojo back? The thing that Veritas has to consistently remind people, one, we are not your daddy's or your granddaddy's backup company anymore, right? So, they're working on things like, they announced this week a new UI coming for NetBackup 8.1, and I thought they were going to crowd mob out of affirmation for that. People were so excited for, you know, finally we're going to get a contemporary UI that doesn't look like 1995 coming in, in that backup. So, certainly, some of the cosmetics, the sterilization of that UI going across as many of those products as possible in order to provide more of a contemporary feel. That's an easy place to dig on, right? But I think what Veritas really needs to think about is, they need to remind folks that, while they are not the stodgy presumption of what people might think, this is not their first rodeo in any of these areas, right? We had new announcements on software to find storage this week. Things like storage foundation and VCS, they've been doing that for 25 years, right? I mean, they've been doing to software to find storage before it was a thing, right? Availability, right? So, we talk about, I like the VRP product. I think it's a cool architecture, and something certainly that powers a lot of the Cloud mobility type capabilities that are there. And the idea of a heterogeneous platform to enable higher levels of availability, I think the market is just now growing into that, right? So, the trick is, we're not the old folks, but, oh by the way, we have reams of experience like you can't imagine. Let's put those things together and have an enterprise level conversation. >> So, let's lay the horses out on the track here. I mean, we were all at VMWorld, and we saw the, it was the hottest... That and security, backup and security are the two hottest spaces in the business right now. We saw the startups, the Cohesity's, the Rubrik's, the Zerto's, and sort of, the upshots. The Veeams, you know, a lot of action at their booths. Obviously, Veritas getting its mojo back. Where's Commvault in all this, so how do you lay out the horses on the track, what's the competitive landscape look like? Paint a picture for us. >> Yeah, so, first and foremost, I always go back to what ESG calls the data protection spectrum, right? So, the behaviors of archive, backup, snapshot, replication, availability. They are not interchangeable mechanisms. We call it a spectrum as a rainbow kind of feel. You know, when is the last time you went outside, saw a rainbow in the sky, and one of the colors was missing? You know, these colors do not replace each other. Snapshots and replications, etc. When you look at where the market's going, imagine a capital Y. In fact, if you go look up on your favorite blog site, I have a blog on, why does data protection have to evolve? This is the answer to your question. The base of that Y is just backup. Can you make copies of all of your stuff? And even that, I think a lot of folks have a challenge with. The next step up is that idea of data protection. So, backup plus snapshots plus replications, single set of policies. Where the market's going, and how it kind of lays out the horses, is now we're at that fork in the road in the capital Y, right? And some of the folks are moving down the availability path. And think about that word for a second, you can remember the vendors who like to go that direction. We're going from reactive recovery to proactive assured productivity, right? Because all the backup folks are just as down until somebody hits the restore button. That's the thing that no one really wants to talk about, as opposed to, if you have monitoring, if you have orchestration, if you have failover and rapid recovery mechanisms. Now, you really do have an availability story that comes out of that. And not all the vendors that you mentioned have that. >> Dave: Well, who are the leaders? >> Yeah, so, certainly, from a momentum and brand perspective, Veeam is definitely on the front line of that, you know, I think car racing is more easier... >> Dave: Cause they've got growth and... >> Yeah, they have momentum, they have, certainly virtualization is still a sweet spot for the data centers... >> Obviously, Veritas is... >> Veritas is absolutely... >> They said 15 years in a row in the Gartner Upper Right... >> Yeah. >> Okay, check. >> Dell EMC, broad portfolio there. Those are kind of the biggest three from, who has all the checked boxes they need to make sure they have a dialogue for the next conversation. >> And Commvault, you wouldn't put in that? >> So, well, I always think of three, you know, bronze, silver, gold, not in that order. >> Yeah, it's like baseball playoffs. Who's going to get in, who's the wild card, you know. >> So, Commvault checks all the right boxes, right? They have all the right narratives along the way. I think the challenge is, organizationally, they're a little siloed in how they tell the stories, and so sometimes it's hard to remember that they're actually the only ones who have a single code base. The ones that, you know, one set of tech that can check all the boxes. Everyone else actually has some myriad of pieces and parts that have to be assembled along the way. >> Dave: So, that's both a strength and a weakness... >> Yeah. >> Dave: For Commvault, right? >> Yeah, the opportunity is there to increase the marketing to tell one narrative. >> Kind of Tivoli, same thing, right? >> Yes, same kind of idea there. And by the way, I don't count, let's call them Spectrum Protect now, but I don't count them out. So, Spectrum Protect took a facelift a couple years ago and really got virtualization savvy. They took the, they had the same gap that everyone else that you mentioned had, and, what is it, six, four, a couple years back, they finally got around to that. And then they just announced Spectrum Protect Plus, which is really built for that V-Admin role. So, certainly we've got a good lens there. On the other side, just like in every other generation, you've got some upstarts that are looking pretty good. >> Well funded, some of them paid 100 million. >> Yeah, well funded, some of them I think have kind of a little bit of a puffer fish, right? They feel bigger than they are for the moment, and yet, the tech looks really good. They want to have a dialogue that says, don't start with backup and try to grow forward. Start over, right? Reimagine what storage might look like in the broader range of things. And by the way, data protection is one of the outcomes for that. And so, you put the Actifio, Cohesity, Rubrik, kind of mix, along the lines for that. You also get the... Catalogic stuff that goes into, that's OEM by IBM, kind of gets on the other side. I think that's going to be probably the coolest thing to watch in 2018. So, you hear the buzz words of copy data management. Everybody wants to talk about some version of those three words. We think that the market's going to go either evolution versus revolution. So, evolution is, start with the data protection folks that you know, and those technologies are going to grow into data management type folks. Here at the show, right, so we saw Veritas Velocity. It's their first foray into that. Cloud Point starts to come into that mix as well. So, the idea of keeping all you need, getting rid of it when you don't, and enabling, and here's the fun part, enabling those secondary use cases so that you can get more value out of that otherwise dormant data. Mike talked about that during the day one keynote. I thought he was spot on for that. So, that's the evolution approach. Revolution, start over, better storage, gets you the same results. Those other guys are old anyway... >> So, Bill Coleman's saying, "It's ours to lose." He said that to us on the Cube. They're obviously an evolution play. >> Jason: Yep. >> I've also heard, they've got, they've made the claim, "We've got the best engineering team in the business." Comments? >> So... >> Dave: It's a very competitive market. >> Yeah, it's hard to say best. I never like ultimate superlatives, but here's what I will say. I meet an amazing number of engineers at Veritas who have been doing this 15, 20, 25 years. There's a lot of wonderful institutional knowledge that comes out of that, that you don't get when you're three, five years, even if you come from multiple vendors, and you kind of pop along the way. There are folks that their initials are still in the source code of NetBackup, and I think that gives them an edge from that perspective if they have a vision from an architecture and from a message perspective on carrying it forward and growing beyond just backup. >> Yeah, Jason, want to get your commentary on the customers. So, one of the things we're trying to reconcile here is, they've got a lot of NetBackup customers. >> Jason: Yeah. >> And then they're pitching this new Cloud hyper-scale, distributed architecture world. Are the customers ready for that? Are they, you know, Bill Coleman told us, five years, ten years, maybe five years from now, every single product that's selling today will be obsolete. So, are the Veritas customers today ready to make that move? What are you hearing? Or are they just going to, you know, go to Microsoft and Amazon and, you know, come in that way? How does this, you know, it goes that kind of revolutionary, evolutionary, discussion you were having. >> Good read, so working backwards, I don't think the answer for better backup for the enterprise is clouding. Cloud managed, absolutely. Disaster recovery as a service, as a secondary tier for the people who don't want to have dormant data centers, yeah probably. But we're still going to have a significant majority of infrastructure on-prem that's going to demand for current SLAs to have recoverability on-prem as well. So, I don't think it starts from a Cloud angle. What I do think, from the Veritas customer perspective is, certainly, you know, Veritas is, their homies are the NetBack of admins. That role is evolving. Or maybe I should say it's devolving. You know, you're not going to have backup admins in the same way. Honestly, more and more, we see that data protection should be part of a broader system's management platform management conversation, right? Cause if I'm an IT generalist, that means I don't have a Ph.D. in backup, and I don't want one. I'm an IT generalist, and I'm the one who's responsible for provisioning servers, and patching servers, and providing access to servers. When those green lights turn red, I want to be able to be part of that process and not wait on somebody else. And if I want to be part of the recovery process, it means I better be part of the protection process as well. So, certainly, Veritas is going to have to grow into some new personas of who they're going to be adding value to. IT ops is the big one, right? So, the backup admin is starting to decline a little bit, the V-Admin for the virtualization role is starting to decline a little bit. That IT operations role is really taking a much more dominant share. That said, Veritas's best route to market is to go through the backup admin, and not in spite of because you can turn that backup admin into a hero by saying, "Look, you have a certain set of problems." "Your adjacent peers have a wider set of problems, "and aren't you going to be the smart one "to walk in somebody who can fix "the rest of the problems while we're at it." And that's that 360 story... >> Well, to your point, evolve or devolve, that role. So, we're out of time, but how about a plug for some recent research, what's hot, what's new, anything that you've worked on that you want to share with the audience. >> Yeah, so ESG, we just finished research on real world SLAs and availabilities. So, how are people doing that proactive lens, as opposed to just reactive? Today, earlier today, I kicked off research with the research team on copy data management, so all that evolution/revolution, we're in that right now. And then the next two projects we're working on, GDPR readiness and data protection drivers in Western Europe. Appliance form factors for data protection, so turnkey versus dedupe, is kind of the next one. And then we're going to refresh our Cloud Strategy Data Protection intersection, so BaaS, DRaaS, STaaS, IaaS, and SaaS, and how the protection traction moves. >> Awesome, sounds like a good lineup. I'd be interested to see that GDPR readiness. We'll have to forecast that and... >> That'll be fun. >> And then hit you up after that comes out cause there's going to be some big gaps going on there. >> Yeah. >> Hey, thanks very much for coming back in the Cube, good job. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, you're welcome. Okay, keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back. This is day two, Veritas Vision. You're watching the Cube.