(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of VeeamON 2020. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of VeeamON 2020. Veeam Online 2020. And Danny Allen is here, he's the CTO and Senior Vice President of Product Strategy and he's joined by Anton Gostev, who's the Senior Vice President of Product Management. Gentlemen, good to see you again. Wish we were face-to-face, but thanks for coming on, virtually. >> Thanks Dave for having us. >> Always love being on with you. Thank you. >> So Danny, I want to start with you. In your keynote, you talked to, about great quote by Satya Nadella. He said "We basically compress two years of digital transformation in two months." And so, I'm interested in what that meant for Veeam but also specifically, for your customers and how you help. >> Yeah, I think about that in two different ways. So digital transformation is obviously the word that he used. But I think of this a lot about being remote. So in two months, every organization that we're ourselves included, has gone from, in person operations going into the office doing things to enabling remote operations. And so, I'm working from home today, Anton's working from home today. We're all working from home today. And so remote operations is a big part of that. And it's not just working from home, it's how do I actually conduct my operations, my backup, my archiving, my hearing, all of those things remotely. It's actually changed the way organizations think about their data management. Not just operations from the sense of internal processes, but also external processes as well. But I think about this as remote offering. So organizations say, "How can I take where we are today "in the world and turn this into competitive advantage? "How can I take the services that I offered today, "and help my customers be more successful remotely?" And so, it has those two aspects to it remote operations, remote offerings. And of course, all driven by data which we backed. >> So Anton, you know there's a saying "It's better to be lucky than good." And I say, "It's best to be lucky and good." So Danny was talking about some of the external processes, a lot of those processes were unknown. And people kind of making them up as they went along, with things that we've never seen before. So, I wonder if we could talk about your product suite, and how well you were able to adapt to some of these unknown. >> Well it's more customers using our product in creative ways. But, one feedback we got most recently in our annual user survey is that like, one of the customers was using tape as the off-site backups. And they had a process where obviously someone had to physically come to the office, pick up the exporter tapes and put them on the truck and move them some off-site location. And so this basically, the process was completely broken with COVID because of lockdown. And in that particular country, it was a stricter on the ground than in most and they were physically unable to basically leave the home. So they basically looked at, Luckily they upgraded already to version 10. And they looked at what version 10 has to offer. And then we're able to switch from using tape to fully automating this off-site backup and going directly to the public cloud to object storage. So, they still have the same off-site backups that, effectively air-gapped because of the first house you provide in virtual time for mutable backups. As soon as they created that they automatically ship to object storage, completely replacing this manual off-site process. So I don't know how long it will take them, if not COVID, to move to this process. Now they love it because it's so much better than what they did before. That's amazing. >> Yeah I bet, there's no doubt. That's interesting, that's an interesting use case. Do you see, others use cases that popped up. Again, I was saying that these processes were new. I mean, and I'm interested in from a product standpoint, how you guys were able to adapt to that. >> Well, another use case that seems to be on the rise is that the ability for customers to deploy the new machines to procure new hardware is severely limited now. Not only their supply chain issues, but also again, bring something into your data center. You have to physically be there and collaborate with other workers and doing installing the, whatever new hardware you purchase. So, we see a significant pick up of the functionality where that, we had in the product for a while, which we called direct resorts to cloud. So we support taking any backup, physical virtual machine. And restoring directory into cloud machine. So we see really the big uptick of migration, maybe a lot of migrations, maybe, not necessarily permanent migrations, but when people want to basically this, some of the applications start to struggle on their sources and they're unable to update the underlying hardware. So what they do is that they schedule the downtime, and then migrate, restore that latest backup into the cloud and continue using the machine in the cloud on much more powerful hardware. That's a lifesaver for them obviously in this situation. >> Yeah so the cloud, Danny is becoming a linchpin of these new models. In your keynote you talked about your vision. And it's interesting to note, I mean, VeeamON, last year, you actually talked about, what I call getting back to the basic of, backup, you kind of embrace backup, where a lot of the new entrants are like, "No no backup's, just one small part, it's data management." And, so I'd love to get your thoughts on that. But the vision you laid out was, backup and cloud data management. Maybe you could, unpack that a little bit. >> Yeah, the way I think about this is step one, in every infrastructure, it doesn't matter whether you're talking about on-prem or in the cloud. Step one is, to protect your data. So this is ingesting the data, whether be backup, whether it be replication, whether it be, long term retention. We have to do that, not only do we have to do that, but as you go to new cycles of infrastructure, it happens all over again. So, we backed up physical first and then virtual, and then we did, cloud and in some ways, containers we're going towards, we're not going backwards but people who are running containers on-prem so we always go back to the starting point of protect the data. And then of course, after you protect it then you, want to effectively begin to manage it. And that's exactly what Anton said. How do you automate the operational procedures to be able to make this part of the DNA of the organization and so, it doesn't matter whether it's on-prem or whether it's in the cloud, that protection of data and then the effective management and integration with existing processes, is fundamental for every infrastructure and will continue to be so into the future, including the cloud. And it's only then when you have this effective protection and management of it, can you begin to unleash the power of data, as you look out into the future, because you can reuse the data for additional purposes, you can move it to the optimal location, but we always start with protection and management of the data. >> So Anton, I want to come back to you on this notion of cloud being a portion of that, when you talk about security people say you layer, how should we think about the cloud? Is it a another layer of protection? And then Danny just said, "It doesn't really matter whether it's on-prem "or in the cloud, it well, it doesn't matter "if you can ensure the same experience." If it's a totally different experience well then it's problematic though. I wonder if you could address, both the layers. Is cloud just another layer and is the management of that, actually, how do you make it, quote, unquote, "Seamless"? I know it's an overused word, but from a product name? >> Well, for larger customers, it's not necessarily a new challenge, because it's rare when the customer had a single data center. And they had this challenge for always. How do I manage my multiple data centers with a single pane of glass? And, I will say public cloud does not necessarily mean that some new perspective in that sense. Yeah, maybe it even makes it easier because you no longer have to manage the physical aspect, the most important aspect of security, which is physical security. So someone else manages it for you and probably much better than most companies could ever afford. In terms of security answer, so then data center. But as far as networking security and how those multiple data centers interact with each other, that's essentially not a new challenge. It is a new challenge for smaller customers for SMBs that are just starting. So they have their own small data center, small world and now they are starting to move some workloads into the cloud. And I would say the biggest problem there is networking and VeeamON, sure provides some free tools to call Veeam PN to make it easier for them to make this step of, securing the networking aspect of public cloud and the private property also that they are in now as workloads move to the cloud, but also keeping some workloads on-prem. >> The other piece of cloud Danny, is SaaS. You weren't the first you were one of the first to offer SaaS back up particularly for Office 365. And a lot of people just, I think, rely on the SaaS vendor, "Hey, they've got me covered. "They've got me backed up", and maybe they do have them backed up, but they might not have them recovered. How is that market shaping up? What are the trends that you're seeing there? >> Well, you're absolutely right Dave. That the, focus here is not just on back up, but on recovery, and it's one of the things that Veeam is known for we don't just do the backup, but we have an Explorer for Exchange , an Explorer for SharePoint, an Explorer for OneDrive. You saw on stage today we demoed the Explorer for Microsoft Teams. So, it's not just about protecting the data, but getting back the specific element of data that you need for operations. And that is critically important. And our customers expect to need that. If you're depending on the SaaS vendor themselves to do that, and I won't, be derogatory or specific about any SaaS vendor, but what they'll often do is, take the entire data set from seven days ago, we'll say, and merge it back into the current data set. And that just results in, a complete chaos of your inbox, if that's what they're merging together. So having specific granularity to pull back that data, exactly the data you need when you need it, is critical. And that's why we're adding it, and the focus on Microsoft Teams now obviously, is because, as we have more intellectual property, in collaboration tools for remote operations, exactly what we're doing now, that only becomes more critical for the business. So, when you think about SaaS for backup, but we also think about it for recovery. And one thing that I'll credit Anton and the product management team for, we build all of this in-house, We don't give this to a third party to build it on our behalf because you need it to work and not only need it to work, but need it to work well, that completely integrated with the underlying cloud data management platform. >> So Anton, I wonder if I could ask you about that. So, from a recovery standpoint, there's one thing, is Dan was saying, you've got to have the granularity, you've got to be able to have a really relatively simple way to recover. But because it's the cloud, there's, latency involved and how are you from a product standpoint, dealing with, making that recovery as consistent and predictable and reliable as you have for a decade on-prem. >> So you mean recovery in the cloud or back to on-prem? >> Yeah, so, recovery from data that lives in the cloud. >> Okay. So basically, the most important feature of any cloud is the price of whatever you do. So, whenever we design anything, we always look at the costs even more than anything else. But, it in turn always translates into better performance as well. To give you example, without functionality where we can take the on-prem backup and make a copy in the public object storage for disaster recovery purposes, so that for example, when a hacker or ransomware wipes out your, entire data center, you have those backups in the cloud, and you can restore from them. So when you perform the restore from cloud backups, we are actually smart enough to understand that, we need to pull that and this in that block from the cloud backup, but many of those blocks actually shared with backups in another machines that are in your own prem backup repository. So we do this on the fly analysis, and we say, instead of pulling the 10 terabyte of the entire backup from the cloud, we can actually pull only 100 gigabytes off unique blocks. And the rest of the blocks we can take from on-prem repositories that have still survived the disaster. So, not only reduces the cost 20 times or whatever. The performance, obviously, of restoring from on-prem data versus pulling everything from the cloud through the internet links is dramatic. So again, we started from the cost, how do we reduce the cost of restore, because, that's where cloud vendors quote, unquote, "Get you." But in the end, it resulted in much better performance as well. >> Excellent, Anton as well in your keynote, you talked about the Veeam availability suite, gave a little sneak preview. You talked about continuous data protection. Cloud Tier, NAS recovery, which is oftentimes very challenging. What should we take away from that sneak peek? >> Three main directions basically, The first is Veeam CGP is we keep investing a lot in on-prem, data Protection, disaster recovery. VMware is a clear leader of on-prem virtualization. So, we keep building these, new ways to protect your web VMware with lower RPOs and RTOs that were never possible before with the classic snapshotting technologies. So that's one thing we keep investing on-prem. Second thing, we do major investments in the cloud in object storage specifically, from that regards, again, put a couple keynote in Google Cloud support. And we're adding the ability to work with coldest tier of object storage, which is Amazon Glacier Deep Archive or Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, archive tier. So that's the second big area of investment. And third, instant recovery Veaam has always been extremely well known for its instant recovery capabilities. And this race is going to be the biggest in terms of new instant recovery capabilities, that were introduced as many as three new major companies with capabilities there. (mumbles) >> So, Danny, I wonder if I could ask you. I'm interested in how you go from product strategy to actual product management and bring things to market. I mean, in the early days, Veeam. Very, very specific to virtualization. That of course, with the Bare-metal, you got a number of permutations and product capabilities. How do you guys work together in terms of assessing the market potential, the degree of difficulty, prioritizing, how does that all come to your customer value? >> Well, first of all, Anton and I, spend a lot of time together on the phone and collaborating just on a weekly basis about where we're going, what we're going to do. I always say there's four directions that we look at for the product strategy and what we're building. You look behind you, you have a, we have 375,000 customers and so those are the tail winds that are pushing you forward. We talked to them on all segments. What is it that you want? I say we look left and right, the left who are alliances. We have a rich ecosystem of partners and channel that we look to collect feedback from. Look right, we look out at the competitors in this space, what are they doing to make sure that we're not missing anything that we should be including and then look forward. Big focus of Veeam has always been not just creating check boxes and making sure that we have the required features but innovation. And you saw that on stage today when Anton was showing the NAS Instant Recovery in the database instant recovery and the capabilities that we have, we have a big focus on, not just checking a box but actually doing things better and differently than everyone else in the industry and that serve to see incredibly well. >> So I love that framework. But so now when you think about this pandemic, you look behind your customers have obviously been affected, your partners have been affected. Let's put your competitors to the side for a minute, we'll see how they respond. But then looking forward, future, as I've said many times, we're not just going back to 2019. We're new decade and really digital transformation is becoming real, for real this time around. So as you think about the pandemic and looking at those four dimensions, what initial conclusions are you drawing? >> Well, the first one would be that that Veeam is well positioned to win, continue to win and to win into the future. And the reason for that I would argue, is that we're software defined. Our whole model is based on being simple to use obviously, but software defined and because of the pandemic, as Anton said, can't go into the office anymore to switch your tapes from one system to another. And so being software defined set this apart positions as well for the future. And so make it simple, make it flexible. And ultimately, what our customers care about is the reliability of this end to the credit of research and development and Anton theme is, "We have product that as everyone says, it just worked". >> So Anton I wonder if I could ask you kind of a similar question. How has the pandemic affected your thinking along those dimensions and maybe some of your initial thinking on changes that you'll implement? >> Yes, sorry I wanted to add exactly on that. I will say that pandemic accelerated our vision becoming the reality. Basically, the vision we had and, I said a few years ago, one day that Veeam will become the biggest storage vendor without selling a single storage box. And this is just becoming the reality. We support a number of object storage providers today. Only a few of them actually track the consumption that is generated by different vendors. And just for those few who do track that and report numbers to us. We are already managing over hundreds of petabytes of data in the cloud. And we only just started a couple of years ago with object storage support. So that's the power of software defined. we don't need to sell you any storage to be eventually the biggest storage player on the market. And pandemic is clear accelerated that in the last three months we see the adoption, it was already like a hockey stick, but it's accelerating further. Because of the issues customers are facing today. Unable to actually physically go back to the office, do this backup handling the way they normally do it. >> Well guys, it's been really fun the last decade watching the ascendancy of Veeam, we've boarded on it and talked about it a lot. And as you guys have both said things have been accelerated. It's actually very exciting to see a company with, rich legacy, but also, very competitive with some of the new products and new companies that are hitting the market. So, congratulations, I know you've got a lot more to do here. You guys have been, for a private company, pretty transparent, more transparent than most and I have to say as an analyst, we appreciate that and, appreciate the partnership with theCUBE. So thanks very much for coming on. >> Thank you, Dave. Always a pleasure. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE in our coverage of VeeamON 2020. Veeam Online. Keep it right there, I'll be right back. (upbeat music)