>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, David Vellante here and welcome to the special CUBE conversation with a colleague and friend of mine, Randy Seidl is a accomplished CEO, he's an executive, sales pro, and he's a founder of the Sales Community, this newly formed social network, Randy, good to see you again, welcome. >> Hey, great to see you, it's been a lot of great years, great relationship with you and congratulations with all your success with SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. I was remembering back, I think it's been probably since 1985, so 35 years ago when we were both Cub Scouts, I was at EMC, and you were at IDC. >> Yeah, I mean, first of all, I love where you are, your man-cave there, we heard you held a great little networking event that you do periodically with some of our joint colleagues. And yeah, wow, we were both in our twenties, I was a young pop and Dicky Eagan, and Jack and Mike, and they would have me talk to you guys, you know, sort of brief you on the market, what little I knew now looking back. But wow, Randy, I mean. >> We knew! >> Right, I mean, and then just the whole thing just took off, but we had a good instinct, that storage was going to matter, everything back then was mainframe and IBM was the king of the world, and then you guys just crushed it. Wow, what a run, amazing. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So tell me about Sales Community. What are you trying to accomplish with this new social network? >> Well, it was kind of really my COVID moment. I was talking to Peter Bell I know, you know well as well, and it was right in the beginning of COVID we were kind of comparing notes and long story short, he said, hey Randy, you do all this work with these technology companies, and channel partners, and use your customers, CIO, CTO, CSOs, but you're really not doing much for those that you know the best, which are really technology sales professionals, CROs, STRs kind of up and down the food chain. And that really got me thinking, then he introduced me to one of his companies that sells to CROs and I was going through with them and they were kind of calling me on the carpet saying, okay, do I really know these people? I'm like, oh my gosh! They basically just said, I'm a dope, I haven't really done anything here. So, one thing led to another and ended up developing a Sales Community, a big thing and big help for me was talking to probably 150 or so during the course of the summer, CROs, VPs of sales, Reps STRs to really kind of help get some feedback from them in terms of I caught now they call product-market fit, but kind of what they think it's missing, what's needed, what are their teams need, what do they want? So, it's kind of all a perfect storm, which to be honest without COVID probably wouldn't have created Sales Community. >> Well, I joined and it was a great onboarding experience and love participating with colleagues. I mean, sales is hard, I mean, you've got your ups and your downs and you just got to keep pressing on, but who's participating in Sales Community. >> We're targeting STRs on up to CROs and the kind of the tagline is learn more so you can sell more. We have a lot of great different kind of content areas and we're going to kind of bob and weave based on the feedback that we get, but we've got some great virtual events and interviews. We have an executive coach, Tony Jerry, who's doing nine sessions on designing your life. We did a recording, a live session last week on personal goal setting. We did one yesterday, it was a live session that'll be posted shortly on strategic health. Next one's on branding, so that's not necessarily specific to tech sales, but kind of adding value. We also have Dave Knorr, another executive coach doing a weekly interview series that we're calling tech sales insights with some of the leading CROs, CEOs, Jim Sullivan, who I know you know well, he's going to be the first one, it's going to be next Wednesday, he runs a NWN and he's done a lot of great things and a lot of other great leaders from there. Also still on the interview virtual events side, Michael Cotoia from Tech Target he's going to do a CMO insights series. His Tech Target International editors are also going to do regional ones. So CIO interviews from AMEA, Asia Pac, Latin America, Australia, also on the CSO side, we have somebody focused on doing a CSO interviews, Paul Salamanca of channel interviews, I think this channel, by and large gets missed a lot. CEO's and then Steve Duplessie, I know you know well as well is going to do and focus on CIO, sub-CIO insights, but basically creating virtual events and interview series that are really targeted at people that we sell to. So that covers the kind of virtual event and interview side. And I maybe more quickly go through some of the other key segments. So another one is a content library. There's the guy who's a STR at ServiceNow went through, send me note the other day that said, hey, I found out you have some great feedback on prospecting cold calling, I shared it with my team helped me a lot. So a lot of good things in terms of content library, also opportunity to network. So you could be say selling to Fidelity, you could send a note to the community and members and say anybody else trying to sell the Fidelity, let's network, let's compare notes, also great opportunities for channel partners. So channel partner could raise their hand and say, hey, I know Fidelity, let me help with you. A lot of sharing of best practices. And also just in terms of communication, slack channels, and then opportunities to create round tables. So you might have CROs from startups that want to have maybe six to 10 of them get together. So they can kind of commiserate, ask questions, you could have CROs, companies that are maybe transforming going from on-prem to kind of SAS model. So a lot of different great things, ultimately really to serve the folks in the tech Sales Community. >> Yeah, it sounds like, I mean, first of all tons of content, the other thing I like about it is we all read books on sales, some of them are so like gimmicky, some of them are inspirational. Some of them have really great suggestions. Some of them can be life changing, but what's always been missing in my opinion, is this notion of a network, a social network, if you will, where people can help each other, you just gave a ton of good examples. So you're really trying to differentiate from a lot of the things that have worked over the years, but have really sort of one way communication, some sales guru either training or you're reading his or her book. >> Yes, and we're also fortunate on the content side, we have some of the best kind of consulting sales methodology companies that love what we're doing. So they're likewise providing a lot of content and as you said, it's crazy. You think of any other industry, restaurant, hotel, lawyers, landscape, they have these big, kind of user groups, even technology companies user groups within the larger field of technology sales enterprise B2B sales, there's really nothing that looks like this that exists. So far the feedback's been great. >> Well, so just to what you're describing, I mean, I've known you for a long, long time, and one of the principles of great salespeople is, you help others, right? You make as many friends as you can, and you're the master of that. But essentially you're bringing a lot of the things that have worked, a lot of the principles that have worked in your career to this community. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, I mean, especially I think some of the younger sales folks, it's not kind of off the cuff as we know, but it's really kind of training, being disciplined, being prepared, what are you going to do, how are you going to do it in this COVID moment? You know, I'm seeing lots of friends where the companies that have great relationships, they can do really well and kind of lean in a lot. If you're kind of cold calling and this environment, and it's tough, so kind of, how can you be best prepared, how can you do the best homework? How can you have the kind of right agenda, when you're going to do the sales calls? And then it's not really as much follow up, but really follow through in terms of what you do afterwards. So kind of what is the training? What can you do, how can you do it? And, you know, it's crazy, a lot of companies spend lots of money on training, but if you think about it they're really tied in specifically to tech sales, hopefully this will be great. Plus being able to just kind of throw out questions here and there works out well as well. >> Well that's what I'm looking forward to, say, hey, I got some challenges, how do others deal with this? You know, one of the things that is, I think, paramount to being a great salesperson is the attitude you hear it all the time. How do you stay pumped up? (laughing) Like I said before, we've all been through ups and downs, and what do you tell people there? >> In terms of staying pumped up, interestingly enough, the session we did yesterday on strategic health, probably plays a key role. So yeah, there's the work aspects and how are you going to focus and wake up and get fired up. But ultimately, I think you really got to take several steps back and saying are you taking care of yourself? Are you sleeping, are you eating and drinking correctly? Are you drinking enough water, are you exercising? So, in this moment, I think that's probably something that gets missed a lot in terms of getting fired up. And then ultimately just being excited about kind of what you're doing, how are you doing it, taking care of the customers and serving those around you. And you had mentioned in terms of giving it back, but a lot of us that have been around, love the idea of kind of paying it forward, helping out others and seeing a lot of the great younger folks really rise up and become stars. >> I think that's one of the most exciting things is somebody has been around for awhile. Like (laughing) we all get cold calls and say, hey, how you doing today? You know, (laughing) you really had that dead air, and you actually want to reach out and help these individuals. A lot of times they'll call you, they have no idea what you do, well I've read your website, and I think we'd be a great fit for, you know, something that would not be a great fit. So, there's a level of preparation we always talk about in sales, you got to be prepared, but there's also sometimes... I was talking to a sales pro the other day, you know, sometimes you can over prepare he said, I've been on sales calls, I prepare for hours and hours and hours, and then they get there, and it was just a lot of wasted hours. I probably could have done it in 15 minutes. I mean, so there's a really a balance there. And it comes with experience, I guess. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know how anybody could prepare hours and hours, so that's a whole different subject to think. >> Well, he said, my technique now is just 15 minutes before the call I'll jump on and just, you know, cram as much as I can. And it actually, it worked for him. So, different approaches, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. The other thing I'd like to mention is the advisory board I'm fortunate to have a work with, and be friends with several of the best in industry like you. So if anybody goes to the website, you can click on an advisory board and there's a 200 plus and haven't count them exactly. But you know, some of the best in technology, we've got them sorted on the sales side and the channel side, the consulting side, the coaching side, analyst side, but, really just such a tremendous each head of talent that can really help us continue to go and grow and pivot and you're making sure that we are serving our Sales Community and making sure everybody's learning more so they can sell more. And then I guess I should add onto that also, earning more and making more money. >> So I got to ask you where you land on this. I mean, you're a sports fan, I am too and for a while there once the "Moneyball" came out, you saw Billy Bean and it was this sort of formulaic approach. The guy, you know, we would joke the team with the best nerds would win. But it seems like there's an equilibrium. It used to be all gut feel and experience, and then it became the data nerds. And it seems like in our industry, it's following a similar pattern, the marketing ops, Martech, becoming very, very data driven. But it feels to me, Randy, especially in these COVID times that there really is this equilibrium, this balance between experience, and tribal knowledge, gut feel, network, which is something you're building and the data. How do you see that role, that CRO role, that sales role evolving, especially in the context of what I just talked about with the data nerds? (laughing) >> Yeah, absolutely, I think I heard two points there since you brought up Billy Bean, I forgot the guy's name, but in the movie is kind of nerd. I've got Jesse and Tucker who have been tremendously helpful for us putting together a Sales Community. But to answer the question on the CMOs side, the CMOs out there frankly not going to like this answer, but I think more and more, you see CMOs and CROs kind of separated and it's kind of different agendas, my belief is that eventually the CMO function or marketing is really going to come under sales and sales are really going to take a much more active role in driving and leveraging that marketing function in terms of what's the best bang for the buck, what are they doing, how are they doing it? And I've got a lot of friends, I won't name names, but they're not on the sales side and they're doing what they can, but they just see what I'd call it kind of wasted money or inefficiencies on the marketing side. So, if I maybe I spin that a different way, I think given kind of analytics and those companies that do have best practices, and I write things on the marketing side, you know, they're going to continue to go and grow, you know, on cert with the right sales team. So I think that you bring up a great point and that area is going to continue to evolve a lot. >> Does that principle apply to product marketing? In other words do you feel like product marketing should be more aligned with engineering or sales and maybe sales and finance, where do you land on that? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of old school, so I go back to Dick and Jack and Roger and Mike Rutgers, and you all in terms of, hey, you have those silos, but you get everybody at the table, kind of what we're working well together. It is interesting though in today's world, the PLG, Product-Led Growth models, where a lot of companies now are trying to get in maybe almost like a VMware, maybe BMC did in the early days where you're kind of getting into the low level developers and then kind of things bubble up so that you think Product-Led Growth model, having a lower cost insight sales model, works when I'll say the kind of the product sells itself. But I would argue, that I think some of those PLG led companies really miss out on leveraging the high end enterprise relationships, to kind of turbocharge and supersize and expedite larger sales deals, larger (indistinct). >> Well, and you mentioned earlier a channel you said a lot of times that's overlooked and I couldn't agree more, channel increasingly important. That's where a lot of the relationships live, it gives you scale, it just gives you a lot of leverage, maybe you talk about the importance of channel and how it relates to Sales Community. >> Yeah, I mean, it's interesting they're really unto themselves, there's some things that are channel channel, but if you think about, you know, go to market tech sales, pick the company on average is probably half of the business goes through the channel. And it used to be way back when just kind of fulfillment, but now the best companies really are those that have the right relationships, that are adding value, that can help on the pre sales, that can help on the post sales, that can help kind of cross sale. You know, if I'm a customer, I don't want to deal with whatever five or 10 different vendors if I can have a one stop shop with one bar solution provider, partner, SI, or whatever you want to call them, you know, that certainly makes life a lot easier. And I think a lot of companies almost been kind of a second class citizen, but I think those companies that really bring them into the fold as really partners at the table, whether it be an account planning sessions, whether you're doing sales calls, but kind of leveraging that I call it a variable cost kind of off balance sheet, sales force really is where the future is going to continue to go. >> So you've been a successful individual sales contributor. You've been a CEO, you've run large sales organizations. I mean, you basically ran sales at HP for Donna Telly, and so you've seen it all, and you've been helping startups. When you look at hiring sales people, what are the attributes that you look for? Is it intelligence, is it hard work, is it coach ability? What are some of the things that are most important to you, and do you apply different attributes in different situations? What are your thoughts on that? >> Great question in a little plug, maybe for a recruiting business, top talent recruiting, (laughing) but one of the key things that we do, which I think is different from others in the recruiting side is the relationships. So a lot of people don't dig in, when we're talking to candidates, they say, well, nobody really asked me this before. And I would argue a key differentiator, and this is way before COVID, but especially now with COVID is okay, who do you have relationships with? So I could be talking to a candidate that maybe somebody is hiring, wants to cover financial services in New York. And then I'll say, okay, well, who do you know what City JPB Bay and I'll know more people than they know. And I'll probably say, just so you know, that's weird me up in Boston. I know more than the council you probably know the best. So really trying to unearth, really kind of who has the right relationships and then separate from that in terms of a reference check, being able to reference checks sooner in the process with somebody that know well firsthand, as opposed to second hand. And a lot of times I've seen even some of the larger, more expensive recruiting firms, you're kind of wait until somebody is the final say, when do an offer, then they do a reference check and they do the reference check with somebody that they don't know. And to me, I mean, that's totally useless which quite with LinkedIn today, I could be say if we're looking at you for candidate, maybe a bad example, but I don't know, we probably have a 1000 in common, and from those, we probably have 200 that we both know, well, that I could check. And when you do reference checking, it's not a maybe it's either, hey, the person is a yes, or the person's a no. So trying to do that early in the process, I think is a big differentiator. And then last and probably third piece I'd highlight is, if it's a startup company, you can't get somebody that's just from a big company. If it's a big company role, you can't get somebody that just from a small company, you got to really make sure you kind of peel back the onions and see where they're from. And you could have somebody from a big company, but they were kind of wearing a smaller division. So again, you have to kind of, you can't judge a book by the cover. You got to kind of peel back the onion. >> So Randy, how do people learn more about Sales Community? Where do they go to engage, sign up, et cetera? >> Absolutely, it's salescommunity.com. So it should be pretty straight forward. A lot of great information there. You can go subscribe, and if you like it spread the word and a lot of great content and you can ping me there. And if not I'm randy@salescommunity.com. So love to get any feedback, help out in any way we can. >> Well, I think it's critical that you're putting this network together and you are probably the best networker that I know I've seen you in action at gatherings and you really have been a great inspiration and a friend. So, Randy, thanks so much for doing the Sales Community and coming on theCUBE and sharing your experience with us. >> Great, thanks Dave, appreciate it. >> All right you're very welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. I'm happy to welcome to the program someone we've known for many years, but a first time on the program. Priyanka Sharma, thank you so much for joining us. >> Hi, Stu. Thank you so much for having me. >> All right, and Priyanka, let's not bury the lead or anything. The reason we're talking to you is the news. You've got a new job, but in an area that you know really well. So we've known you through the cloud native communities for a number of years. We see you at the shows. We see you online. So happy to share with our community you are now the general manager of the CNCF, so congratulations so much on the job. >> Thank you so much. I am so honored to have this opportunity, and I can't wait to work even more closely with the cloud native community than I have already. I mean, as you said, I've been involved for a long time. I actually just saw on my LinkedIn today that 2016 was when my conversation within the CNCF started. I was then working on the OpenTracing Project, which was the third project to join the foundation, and CNCF had started in 2015, so it was all very new. We were in conversations, and it was just such an exciting time, and that just kept getting bigger and bigger, and then with GitLab I served, I actually still serve, until the 31st, on the board. And now this, so I'm very, very excited. >> Yeah, well right. So you're a board member of the CNCF, but Priyanka, if you go back even further, we look at how did CNCF start. It was all around Kubernetes. Where did Kubernetes come from? It came from Google, and when I dug back far enough into your CV I found Google on there, too. So maybe just give us a little bit of your career arc, and what you're involved with for people that don't know you from all these communities and events. >> Sure, absolutely. So my career started at Google in Mountain View, and I was on the business side of things. I worked with AdSense products, and around that same time I had a bit of the entrepreneurial bite, so the bug bit me, and I first joined a startup that was acquired by GoDaddy later on, and then I went off on my own. That was a very interesting time for me, because that was when I truly learned about the power of opensource. One of the products that me and my co-founder were building was an opensource time tracker, and I just saw the momentum on these communities, and that's when the dev tools love started. And then I got involved with Heavybit Industries, which is an accelerator for dev tools. There I met so many companies that were either in the cloud space, or just general other kinds of dev tools, advised a few, ended up joining LightStep, where the founders, them and a few community members were the creators of the OpenTracing standard. Got heavily, heavily involved in that project, jumped into cloud native with that, was a project contributor, organizer, educator, documentarian, all kinds of things, right, for two-plus years, and then GitLab with the board membership, and that's how I saw, actually, the governance side. Until then it had all been the community, the education, that aspect, and then I understood how Chris and Dan had built this amazing foundation that's done so much from the governance perspective. So it's been a long journey and it all feels that it's been coming towards in this awesome new direction. >> Well, yeah. Congratulations to you, and right, CNCF, in their press release I see Dan talked about you've been a speaker, you've been a governing board member, you participate in this, and you're going to help with that next phase, and you teased out a little bit, there's a lot of constituencies in the CNCF. There's a large user participation. We always love talking at KubeCon about the people not only just using the technology, but contributing back, the role of opensource, the large vendor ecosystem, a lot there. So give us your thought as to kind of where the CNCF is today, and where it needs to continue and go in the future. >> Absolutely. So in my opinion the CNCF is a breakout organization. I mean, we're approaching 600 members, of which 142 are end users. So with that number the CNCF is actually the largest, has the largest end user community of all opensource foundations. So tremendous progress has been made, especially from those days back in 2016 when we were the third project being considered. So leaps and bounds, so impressive. And I think... If you think about what's the end user storyline right now, so the CNCF did a survey last year, and so 84% of the people surveyed were using containers in production, and 78% were using Kubernetes in production. Amazing numbers, especially since both are up by about 15, 20% year over year. So this move towards devops, towards cloud native, towards Kubernetes is happening and happening really strong. The project has truly established itself. Kubernetes has won, in my opinion, and that's really good. I think now when it comes to the second wave, it is my perspective that the end user communities and the... Just the momentum that we have right now, we need to build and grow it. We need deeper developer engagement, because if you think about it, there's not just one graduated project in CNCF. There are 10. So Kubernetes being one of them, but there's Prometheus, there's Envoy, Jaeger, et cetera, et cetera. So we have amazing technologies that are all gaining adoption. Being graduated means that they have fast security audits, they have diverse contributors, they have safe, good governance, so as an end user you can feel very secure adopting them, and so we have so much to do to expand on the knowledge of those projects. We have so much to make software just better every day, so that's my one vector in my opinion. The second vector, I would say it has been more opportunistic. As you know, we are all living in a very unprecedented time with a global pandemic. Many of us are sheltering in place. Many are... Generally, life is changed. You are in media. You know this much better than me, I'm sure, that the number of, the amount of digital consumption has just skyrocketed. People are reading that many more articles. I'm watching that many more memes and jokes online, right? And what that means is that more and more companies are reaching that crazy web scale that started this whole cloud native and devops space in the first time, first place with Google and Netflix being D-to-C companies just building out what eventually became cloud native, SRE, that kind of stuff. So in general, online consumption's higher, so more and more companies need to be cloud native to support that kind of traffic. Secondly, even for folks that are not creating content, just a lot of the workflows have to move online. More people will do online banking. More people will do ecommerce. It's just the shift is happening, and for that we, as the foundation, need to be ready to support the end users with education, enablement, certifications, training programs, just to get them across that chasm into a new, even more online-focused reality. >> Yeah, and I say, Priyanka, that tees up one of the ways that most people are familiar with the CNCF is through the event. So KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, really the signature event. Tremendous growth over the last few years. You actually had involvement in a virtual event, the Cloud Native Summit recently. For KubeCon-- >> Yes. >> The European show is announced virtual. We know that there's still some uncertainty when it comes to the North America show. Supposed to be in my backyard here in Boston, so we'd love for it to happen. If it happens-- >> Of course. >> If not, we'll be there virtually or not. Give us a little bit your experience with the Cloud Native Summit, and what's your thinking today? We understand, as you said, a lot of uncertainty as to what goes on. Absolutely, even when physical events come back in the future, we expect this hybrid model to be with us for a long time. >> I definitely hear that. Completely agree that everything is uncertain and things have changed very rapidly for our world, particularly when it comes to events. We're lucky at the CNCF to be working with the LF Events team, which is just best in class, and we are working very hard every day, them, doing a lot of the lion's share of the work of building the best experience we can for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon EU, which, as you said, went virtual. I'm really looking forward to it because what I learned from the Cloud Native Summit Online, which was the event you mentioned that I had hosted in April, is that people are hungry to just engage, to see each other, to communicate however they can in this current time. Today I don't think the technology's at a point where physical events can be overshadowed by virtual, so there's still something very special about seeing someone face-to-face, having a coffee, and having that banter, conversations. But at the same time there are some benefits to online. So as an example, with the Cloud Native Summit, really, it was just me and a few community folks who were sad we didn't get to go to Amsterdam, so we're like, "Let's just get together in a group, "have some fun, talk to some maintainers," that kind of thing. I expected a few hundred, max. Thousands of people showed up, and that was just mind blowing because I was like, "Wait, what?" (chuckling) But it was so awesome because not only were there a lot of people, there were people from just about every part of the globe. So normally you have US, Europe, that kind of focus, and there's the Asia-PAC events that cater to that, but here in that one event where, by the way, we were talking to each other in realtime, there were folks from Asia-PAC, there were folks from Americas, EU, also the African continent, so geo meant nothing anymore. And that was very awesome. People from these different parts of the world were talking, engaging, learning, all at the same time, and I think with over 20,000 people expected at KubeCon EU, with it being virtual, we'll see something similar, and I think that's a big opportunity for us going forward. >> Yeah, no, absolutely. There are some new opportunities, some new challenges. I think back to way back in January I got to attend the GitLab event, and you look at GitLab, a fully remote company, but talking about the benefits of still getting together and doing things online. You think of the developer communities, they're used to working remote and working across different timezones, but there is that need to be able to get together and collaborate, and so we've got some opportunities, we've got some challenges when remote, so I guess, yeah, Priyanka. Give me the final word, things you want to look forward to, things we should be expecting from you and the CNCF team going forward. I guess I'll mention for our audience, I guess, Dan Kohn staying part of Linux Foundation, doing some healthcare things, will still stay a little involved, and Chris Aniszczyk, who's the CTO, still the CTO. I just saw him. Did a great panel for DockerCon with Kelsey Hightower, Michelle Noorali, and Sean Connelly, and all people we know that-- >> Right. >> Often are speaking at KubeCon, too. So many of the faces staying the same. I'm not expecting a big change, but what should we expect going forward? >> That's absolutely correct, Stu. No big changes. My first big priority as I join is, I mean, as you know, coming with the community background, with all this work that we've put into education and learning from each other, my number one goal is going to be to listen and learn in a very diverse set of personas that are part of this whole community. I mean, there's the board, there is the technical oversight committee, there is the project maintainers, there's the contributors, there are the end users, potential developers who could be contributors. There's just so many different types of people all united in our interest and desire to learn more about cloud native. So my number one priority is going to listen and learn, and as I get more and more up to speed I'm very lucky that Chris Aniszczyk, who has built this with Dan, is staying on and is going to be advising me, guiding me, and working with me. Dan as well is actually going to be around to help advise me and also work on some key initiatives, in addition to his big, new thing with public health and the Linux Foundation. You never expect anything average with Dan, so it's going to be amazing. He's done so much for this foundation and brought it to this point, which in my mind, I mean, it's stupendous the amount of work that's happened. It's so cool. So I'm really looking forward to building on this amazing foundation created by Dan and Chris under Jim. I think that what they have done by not only providing a neutral IP zone where people can contribute and use projects safely, they've also created an ecosystem where there is events, there is educational activity, projects can get documentation support, VR support. It's a very holistic view, and that's something, in my opinion, new, at least in the way it's done. So I just want to build upon that, and I think the end user communities will keep growing, will keep educating, will keep working together, and this is a team effort that we are all in together. >> Well, Priyanka, congratulations again. We know your community background and strong community at the CNCF. Looking forward to seeing that both in the virtual events in the near term and back when we have physical events again in the future, so thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right. Be sure to check out thecube.net. You'll see all the previous events we've done with the CNCF, as well as, as mentioned, we will be helping keep cloud native connected at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe, the virtual event in August, as well as the North American event later in the year. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (smooth music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco. Celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMWorld 2019, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Stu: Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host Justin Warren. And you are watching theCUBE. We have two sets, three days, here at VMWorld 2019. Our 10th year of the show. And happy to welcome back to our program, two of our theCUBE Alumni. We were at VeeamON earlier this year down in Miami, but sitting to my right is Ratmir Timashev, who is the co-founder and executive vice president of global sales and marketing with Veeam, and joining us also is Danny Allan, who's the vice president of product strategy also at Veeam. Thank you so much both for joining us. >> Thanks for having us Stu. >> Thank you. >> All right so, Ratmir, let's start. Veeam has been very transparent as to how the company is doing. You know, there's all this talks about unicorns and crazy evaluations or anything like that? But give us the update on, you know, actual dollars and actually what's happening in your business. >> Ratmir: Absolutely, we're always transparent. So actually, there's this term, unicorn, right? So does it mean one billion in valuation, or one billion in revenue (chuckles)? >> Stu: It is valuation. >> Yeah, I know that. So, Veeam is not unicorn anymore, right? Veeam is one billion in bookings. So, yeah, the major trend in the industry, is that we're moving from perpetual to subscription, because we're moving on-prem to hybrid cloud. And Veeam is actually leading that wave. So where we've been always known to be very customer friendly to do business with, easy to do business with, from the channel, from the customer perspective, and that's the major trend. If the customers are moving to hybrid cloud, we have to move to there, from our business model to a hybrid cloud. So we're changing our business model, to make it very easy for customers. >> Ratmir, that's not an easy adjustment. We've watched some public companies go through a little bit of challenges as you work through, you know there's the financial pieces, there's the sales pieces of that, since... Give us a little bit of the, how that works? You know, you just retrain the sales force and go or-- >> That is awesome, awesome question. That that is awesome point, that it's extremely painful. Extremely painful, and for some company, like everybody says Adobe is the best example of moving from perpetual or traditional business model to a subscription, right. So annual, even monthly subscription. For us it's even ten times more difficult than Adobe, because, we're not only moving from perpetual to subscription. We're moving, we're changing our licensing unit, per socket which is VMware traditional to pure VM or pure workload or pure instance, right. What we call instance, basically means, so it's extremely painful, we have to change how we do business, how we incentivize our sales people, how we incentivize our channel, how we incentivize our customers. But that's inevitable, we're moving to a hybrid cloud where sockets don't exist. Sockets, there are no sockets in the hybrid cloud. There are workloads and data. Data and applications. So we have to change our business model, but we also have to keep our current business model. And it's very difficult in terms of the bookings and revenue, when we give a customer an option to buy this way or that way. Of course they will choose the way that is the less expensive for them, and we're ready to do that. We can absorb that, because we're a private company, and we're approachable and we're fast growing. So we can afford that, unlike some of the public companies or companies that, venture capital finance. >> So how do you make that kind of substantial change to the... I mean changing half your company, really. To change that many structures. How do do you do that without losing the soul of the company? And like Veeam, Veeam is famous for being extremely Veeamy. How do you make all those sorts of changes and still not lose the soul of the company like that? How do you keep that there? >> That's an awesome question, because that's 50% of executive management discussions, are about that questions, right. What made Veeam successful? Core value, what we call, core values, there are family values, there are company core values every company has. So that's the most important. And one of them is, be extremely customer friendly, right. So easy to do business with. That's the number one priority. Revenue, projects, number two, number three, being doing the right things for the customer is number one. That's how we're discussing, and we're introducing a major change on October 1st. >> Ah yes. >> Another major change. We've done this major changes in the last two years, moving to subscription. So we started that move, two, two-and-a-half years ago, by introducing our product for Office 365, backup, when that was available only for, on subscription basis, not perpetual. So we're moving in subscription, to the subscription business model in the the last three years. On October 1st, 2019, in one month, we introducing another major change. We are extremely simplifying our subscription licensing and introducing, what we will call Veeam Universal License. Where you can buy once and move or close everywhere. From physical to VMware to Hyper-V to a double SS, ash or back to VMware and back to physical. I'm joking. (lauging) >> All right, Danny, bring us inside the product. We've watched the maturity, ten years of theCUBE here, Veeam was one of the early big ecosystems success stories, of course it went into Multi-Hypervisor, went into Multicloud. You know Ratmir, just went through all of the changes there. Exciting the VUL I guess we'll call it. >> Ratmir: VUL >> VUL, absolutely. So on the product piece, how's the product keeping in line with all these things. >> So our vision is to be the most trusted provider, backup solutions that enable high data management. So backup is still a core of it and it's the start of everything that we do. But if you look what we've done over the course of this year, it's very much about the cloud. So we added the ability, for example, to tier things into object storage in the hyperscale public cloud and that has been taking off, gang busters into S3 and into Azure Blob storage. And so that's a big part of it. Second part of it, in cloud data management is the ability to recover, if you're sending your data into the cloud, why not recover there? So we've added the ability to recover workloads in Azure, recover workloads in EC2. And lastly of course, once your workloads are in the cloud, then you want to protect it, using cloud-native technology. So we've addressed all of these solutions, and we've been announcing all these exciting things over the course of 2019. >> The product started off as being VM-centrical, VM Only back in the day. And then you've gradually added different capabilities to it as customers demanded, and it was on a pretty regular cadence as well. And you've recently added, added cloud functionality and backups there. What's the next thing, customers are asking for? 'Cause we've got lots of workloads being deployed in edge, we've got lots of people doing things with NoSQL backups, we've got Kubernetes, is mentioned every second breath at this show. So where are you seeing demand for customers that you need to take the product next? So we've heard a lot about Kubernetes obviously, the shows, the containers it's obviously a focus point. But one of the things we demoed yesterday. We actually had a breakout session, is leveraging an API from VMR called the VCR API for IO filtering. So it basically enables you to fork the rights when you're writing down to the storage level, so that you have continuous replication in two environments. And that just highlights the relationship we have with VMware. 80% of our customers are running on VMware. But that's the exciting things that we're innovating on. Things like making availability better. Making the agility and movement between clouds better. Making sure that people can take copies of their data to accelerate their business. These all areas that we are focusing on. >> Yeah, a lot of companies have tried to, multiple times have tried to go away from backup and go into data management. I like that you don't shy away from, ah, yeah we do backup and it's an important workload, and you're not afraid to mention that. Where's some other companies seem to be quite scared of saying, we do backup, 'cause it's not very cool or sexy. Although well, it doesn't have to be cool and sexy to be important. So I like that you actually say that yes we do backup. But we are also able to do some of these other bits and pieces. And it's enabled by that backup. So you know, copy, data management, so we can take copies of things and do this. Where is some of the demand coming around what to do with that data management side of things. I know there's, people are interested in things like, for example, data masking, where you want to take a copy of some data and use it for testing. There's a whole bunch of issue and risks around in doing that. So companies look for assistance from companies like Veeam to do that sort of thing. Is that where you're heading with some of that product? >> It is, there's four big use cases, DevOps is certainly one of them, and we've been talking about Kubernetes, right, which is all about developers and DevOps type development, so that's a big one. And one of the interesting things about that use case is, when you make copies of data, compliance comes into play. If you need to give a copy of the data to the developer, you don't want to give them credit card numbers or health information, so you probably want to mask that out. We have the capability today in Veeam, we call it, Staged Restore, that you could actually open the data in the sandbox to manipulate it, before you give it to the developer. But that's certainly one big use case, and it's highlighted at conferences like this. Another one is security, I spent a decade in security. I get passionate about it, but pentesting or forensics. If you do an invasive test on a production system, you'll bring the system down. And so another use case of the data is, take a copy, give it to the security team to do that test without impacting the production workload. A third one would be, IT operations, patching and updating all the systems. One of the interesting things about Veeam customers. They're far more likely to be on the most recent versions of software, because you can test it easily, by taking a copy. Test the patch, test the update and then roll it forward. And then a forth huge use case that we can not ignore is the GDPR in analytics and compliance. There's just this huge demand right now. And I think there's going to be market places opened in the public cloud, around delegating access to the data, so that they can analyze it and give you more intelligence about it. So GDPR is just a start, right. Were is my personally identifiable information? But I can imagine workload where a market place or an offering, where someone comes in and says, hey, I'll pay you some money and I'll classify your data for you, or I'll archive it smartly for you. And the business doesn't have to that. All they have to do is delegate access to the data, so that they can run some kind of machine learning algorithm on that data. So these are all interesting use cases. I go back, DevOps, security IT operations and analytics, all of those. >> So Ratmir, when I go to the keynote, it did feel like it was Kubernetes world? When I went down the show floor it definitely felt like data protection world. So it's definitely been one of the buzzier conversations the last couple of years at this show. But you look, walk through the floor, whether it be some of the big traditional vendors, lots of brand new start ups, some of the cloud-native players in this space. How do you make sure that Veeam gets the customers, keeps the customers that they have and can keep growing on the momentum that you've been building on? >> That's a great question, Stu. Like Pat Gelsinger mention that, number of applications has grown in the last five years, from 50 million to something like 330 million, and will grow to another almost 800 million in the next five years, by 2024. Veeam is in the right business, Veeam is the leader, Veeam is driving the vision and the strategy, right. Yeah, we have good competition in the form of legacy vendors and emerging vendors, but we have very good position because we own the major part of your hybrid cloud, which is the private cloud. And we're providing a good vision for how the hybrid cloud data management, not just data protection, which just Danny explained, should be done, right. I think we're in a good position and I feel very comfortable for the next five, ten years for Veeam. >> It's a good place to be. I mean feeling confident about the future is... I don't know five to ten years, that's a long way out. I don't know. >> Yeah I agree, I agree, it used to be like that, now you cannot predict more than six moths ahead, right. >> Justin I'm not going to ask him about Simon now, it's-- >> Six months is good yeah, six months maximum, what we can predict-- >> We were asking Michael Dell about the impact of China these days, so there's a lot of uncertainty in the world these day. >> Ratmir: Totally. >> Anything macro economic, you know that, you look at your global footprint. >> No we're traditional global technology company that generates most of the revenue between Europe and North America and we have emerging markets like Asia-Pac and Latin. We're no different than any other global technology company, in terms of the revenue and our investment. The fastest growing region of course is Asia-Pac, but our traditional markets is North America and Europe. >> Hailing from Asia-Pac, I do know the region reasonably well and Veeam is, yeah Veeam is definitely, has a very strong presence there and growing. Australia used to be there, one of our claims to fame, was one of the highest virtualized workload-- >> And Mohai is the cloud adapter. >> Cloud adoption. >> Yes, we like new shiny toys, so adopt it very, very quickly. Do you see any innovation coming out of Asia-Pac, because we use these things so much, and we tend to be on that leading edge. Do you see things coming out of the Asia-Pac teams that notice how customers are using these systems and is that placing demand on Veeam. >> Absolutely, but Danny knows better because he just came back from the Asia-Pacific trip. >> Justin: That's right, you did. >> Yeah, I did, I always say you live in the future, because you're so many hours ahead. But the reality is actually, the adoption of things like Hyper-convergence infrastructure, was far faster in areas like NZ, the adoption of the cloud. And it's because of New Zealand is part of the DAid, Australia is very much associated with taking that. One of the things that we're seeing there is consumption based model. I was just there a few weeks ago and the move to a consumption and subscription based model is far further advanced in other parts of the world. So I go there regularly, mostly because it gives me a good perspective on what the US is going to do two years later, And maybe AMEA three years later. It gives us a good perspective of where the industry is going-- >> It's not to the US it comes to California first then it spreads from there. (lauging) >> Are you saying he's literally using the technology of tomorrow in his today, is what we're saying. >> Maybe me I can make predictions a little bit further ahead there. >> Well you live in the future. >> All right I want to give you the both, just a final word here, VMWorld 2019. >> It's always the best show for us. VMWorld is the, I mean like Danny said, 80% of our customers is VMware, so it's always the best. We've been here for the last 12 years, since 2007. I have so many friends, buddies, love to come here, like to spend three, four days with my best friends, in the industry and just in life. >> I love the perspective here of the Multicloud worlds, so we saw some really interesting things, the moving things across clouds and leveraging Kubernetes and containers. And I think the focus on where the industry is going is very much aligned with Veeam. We also believe that, while it starts with backup up, the exciting thing is what's coming in two, three years. And so we have a close alignment, close relationship. It's been a great conference. >> Danny, Ratmir, thank you so much for the updates as always and yeah, have some fun with some of your friends, in the remaining time that we have. >> We have a party tonight Stu, so Justin too. >> Yeah, I think most people that have been to VMWorld are familiar with the Veeam party, it is famous, definitely. >> For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more coverage here, from VMWorld 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)