>> From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from the Cube and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> A better than expected earnings report in late August got people excited about Snowflake again, but the negative sentiment in the market is weighed heavily on virtually all growth tech stocks and Snowflake is no exception. As we've stressed many times the company's management is on a long term mission to dramatically simplify the way organizations use data. Snowflake is tapping into a multi hundred billion dollar total available market and continues to grow at a rapid pace. In our view, Snowflake is embarking on its third major wave of innovation data apps, while its first and second waves are still bearing significant fruit. Now for short term traders focused on the next 90 or 180 days, that probably doesn't matter. But those taking a longer view are asking, "Should we still be optimistic about the future of this high flyer or is it just another over hyped tech play?" Hello and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights powered by ETR. Snowflake's Quarter just ended. And in this breaking analysis we take a look at the most recent survey data from ETR to see what clues and nuggets we can extract to predict the near term future in the long term outlook for Snowflake which is going to announce its earnings at the end of this month. Okay, so you know the story. If you've been investor in Snowflake this year, it's been painful. We said at IPO, "If you really want to own this stock on day one, just hold your nose and buy it." But like most IPOs we said there will be likely a better entry point in the future, and not surprisingly that's been the case. Snowflake IPOed a price of 120, which you couldn't touch on day one unless you got into a friends and family Delio. And if you did, you're still up 5% or so. So congratulations. But at one point last year you were up well over 200%. That's been the nature of this volatile stock, and I certainly can't help you with the timing of the market. But longer term Snowflake is targeting 10 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2028. A big number. Is it achievable? Is it big enough? Tell you what, let's come back to that. Now shorter term, our expert trader and breaking analysis contributor Chip Simonton said he got out of the stock a while ago after having taken a shot at what turned out to be a bear market rally. He pointed out that the stock had been bouncing around the 150 level for the last few months and broke that to the downside last Friday. So he'd expect 150 is where the stock is going to find resistance on the way back up, but there's no sign of support right now. He said maybe at 120, which was the July low and of course the IPO price that we just talked about. Now, perhaps earnings will be a catalyst, when Snowflake announces on November 30th, but until the mentality toward growth tech changes, nothing's likely to change dramatically according to Simonton. So now that we have that out of the way, let's take a look at the spending data for Snowflake in the ETR survey. Here's a chart that shows the time series breakdown of snowflake's net score going back to the October, 2021 survey. Now at that time, Snowflake's net score stood at a robust 77%. And remember, net score is a measure of spending velocity. It's a proprietary network, and ETR derives it from a quarterly survey of IT buyers and asks the respondents, "Are you adopting the platform new? Are you spending 6% or more? Is you're spending flat? Is you're spending down 6% or worse? Or are you leaving the platform decommissioning?" You subtract the percent of customers that are spending less or churning from those that are spending more and adopting or adopting and you get a net score. And that's expressed as a percentage of customers responding. In this chart we show Snowflake's in out of the total survey which ranges... The total survey ranges between 1,200 and 1,400 each quarter. And the very last column... Oh sorry, very last row, we show the number of Snowflake respondents that are coming in the survey from the Fortune 500 and the Global 2000. Those are two very important Snowflake constituencies. Now what this data tells us is that Snowflake exited 2021 with very strong momentum in a net score of 82%, which is off the charts and it was actually accelerating from the previous survey. Now by April that sentiment had flipped and Snowflake came down to earth with a 68% net score. Still highly elevated relative to its peers, but meaningfully down. Why was that? Because we saw a drop in new ads and an increase in flat spend. Then into the July and most recent October surveys, you saw a significant drop in the percentage of customers that were spending more. Now, notably, the percentage of customers who are contemplating adding the platform is actually staying pretty strong, but it is off a bit this past survey. And combined with a slight uptick in planned churn, net score is now down to 60%. That uptick from 0% and 1% and then 3%, it's still small, but that net score at 60% is still 20 percentage points higher than our highly elevated benchmark of 40% as you recall from listening to earlier breaking analysis. That 40% range is we consider a milestone. Anything above that is actually quite strong. But again, Snowflake is down and coming back to churn, while 3% churn is very low, in previous quarters we've seen Snowflake 0% or 1% decommissions. Now the last thing to note in this chart is the meaningful uptick in survey respondents that are citing, they're using the Snowflake platform. That's up to 212 in the survey. So look, it's hard to imagine that Snowflake doesn't feel the softening in the market like everyone else. Snowflake is guiding for around 60% growth in product revenue against the tough compare from a year ago with a 2% operating margin. So like every company, the reaction of the street is going to come down to how accurate or conservative the guide is from their CFO. Now, earlier this year, Snowflake acquired a company called Streamlit for around $800 million. Streamlit is an open source Python library and it makes it easier to build data apps with machine learning, obviously a huge trend. And like Snowflake, generally its focus is on simplifying the complex, in this case making data science easier to integrate into data apps that business people can use. So we were excited this summer in the July ETR survey to see that they added some nice data and pick on Streamlit, which we're showing here in comparison to Snowflake's core business on the left hand side. That's the data warehousing, the Streamlit pieces on the right hand side. And we show again net score over time from the previous survey for Snowflake's core database and data warehouse offering again on the left as compared to a Streamlit on the right. Snowflake's core product had 194 responses in the October, 22 survey, Streamlit had an end of 73, which is up from 52 in the July survey. So significant uptick of people responding that they're doing business in adopting Streamlit. That was pretty impressive to us. And it's hard to see, but the net scores stayed pretty constant for Streamlit at 51%. It was 52% I think in the previous quarter, well over that magic 40% mark. But when you blend it with Snowflake, it does sort of bring things down a little bit. Now there are two key points here. One is that the acquisition seems to have gained exposure right out of the gate as evidenced by the large number of responses. And two, the spending momentum. Again while it's lower than Snowflake overall, and when you blend it with Snowflake it does pull it down, it's very healthy and steady. Now let's do a little pure comparison with some of our favorite names in this space. This chart shows net score or spending velocity in the Y-axis, an overlap or presence, pervasiveness if you will, in the data set on the X-axis. That red dotted line again is that 40% highly elevated net score that we like to talk about. And that table inserted informs us as to how the companies are plotted, where the dots set up, the net score, the ins. And we're comparing a number of database players, although just a caution, Oracle includes all of Oracle including its apps. But we just put it in there for reference because it is the leader in database. Right off the bat, Snowflake jumps out with a net score of 64%. The 60% from the earlier chart, again included Streamlit. So you can see its core database, data warehouse business actually is higher than the total company average that we showed you before 'cause the Streamlit is blended in. So when you separate it out, Streamlit is right on top of data bricks. Isn't that ironic? Only Snowflake and Databricks in this selection of names are above the 40% level. You see Mongo and Couchbase, they know they're solid and Teradata cloud actually showing pretty well compared to some of the earlier survey results. Now let's isolate on the database data platform sector and see how that shapes up. And for this analysis, same XY dimensions, we've added the big giants, AWS and Microsoft and Google. And notice that those three plus Snowflake are just at or above the 40% line. Snowflake continues to lead by a significant margin in spending momentum and it keeps creeping to the right. That's that end that we talked about earlier. Now here's an interesting tidbit. Snowflake is often asked, and I've asked them myself many times, "How are you faring relative to AWS, Microsoft and Google, these big whales with Redshift and Synapse and Big Query?" And Snowflake has been telling folks that 80% of its business comes from AWS. And when Microsoft heard that, they said, "Whoa, wait a minute, Snowflake, let's partner up." 'Cause Microsoft is smart, and they understand that the market is enormous. And if they could do better with Snowflake, one, they may steal some business from AWS. And two, even if Snowflake is winning against some of the Microsoft database products, if it wins on Azure, Microsoft is going to sell more compute and more storage, more AI tools, more other stuff to these customers. Now AWS is really aggressive from a partnering standpoint with Snowflake. They're openly negotiating, not openly, but they're negotiating better prices. They're realizing that when it comes to data, the cheaper that you make the offering, the more people are going to consume. At scale economies and operating leverage are really powerful things at volume that kick in. Now Microsoft, they're coming along, they obviously get it, but Google is seemingly resistant to that type of go to market partnership. Rather than lean into Snowflake as a great partner Google's field force is kind of fighting fashion. Google itself at Cloud next heavily messaged what they call the open data cloud, which is a direct rip off of Snowflake. So what can we say about Google? They continue to be kind of behind the curve when it comes to go to market. Now just a brief aside on the competitive posture. I've seen Slootman, Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake in action with his prior companies and how he depositioned the competition. At Data Domain, he eviscerated a company called Avamar with their, what he called their expensive and slow post process architecture. I think he actually called it garbage, if I recall at one conference I heard him speak at. And that sort of destroyed BMC when he was at ServiceNow, kind of positioning them as the equivalent of the department of motor vehicles. And so it's interesting to hear how Snowflake openly talks about the data platforms of AWS, Microsoft, Google, and data bricks. I'll give you this sort of short bumper sticker. Redshift is just an on-prem database that AWS morphed to the cloud, which by the way is kind of true. They actually did a brilliant job of it, but it's basically a fact. Microsoft Excel, a collection of legacy databases, which also kind of morphed to run in the cloud. And even Big Query, which is considered cloud native by many if not most, is being positioned by Snowflake as originally an on-prem database to support Google's ad business, maybe. And data bricks is for those people smart enough to get it to Berkeley that love complexity. And now Snowflake doesn't, they don't mention Berkeley as far as I know. That's my addition. But you get the point. And the interesting thing about Databricks and Snowflake is a while ago in the cube I said that there was a new workload type emerging around data where you have AWS cloud, Snowflake obviously for the cloud database and Databricks data for the data science and EML, you bring those things together and there's this new workload emerging that's going to be very powerful in the future. And it's interesting to see now the aspirations of all three of these platforms are colliding. That's quite a dynamic, especially when you see both Snowflake and Databricks putting venture money and getting their hooks into the loyalties of the same companies like DBT labs and Calibra. Anyway, Snowflake's posture is that we are the pioneer in cloud native data warehouse, data sharing and now data apps. And our platform is designed for business people that want simplicity. The other guys, yes, they're formidable, but we Snowflake have an architectural lead and of course we run in multiple clouds. So it's pretty strong positioning or depositioning, you have to admit. Now I'm not sure I agree with the big query knockoffs completely. I think that's a bit of a stretch, but snowflake, as we see in the ETR survey data is winning. So in thinking about the longer term future, let's talk about what's different with Snowflake, where it's headed and what the opportunities are for the company. Snowflake put itself on the map by focusing on simplifying data analytics. What's interesting about that is the company's founders are as you probably know from Oracle. And rather than focusing on transactional data, which is Oracle's sweet spot, the stuff they worked on when they were at Oracle, the founder said, "We're going to go somewhere else. We're going to attack the data warehousing problem and the data analytics problem." And they completely re-imagined the database and how it could be applied to solve those challenges and reimagine what was possible if you had virtually unlimited compute and storage capacity. And of course Snowflake became famous for separating the compute from storage and being able to completely shut down compute so you didn't have to pay for it when you're not using it. And the ability to have multiple clusters hit the same data without making endless copies and a consumption/cloud pricing model. And then of course everyone on the planet realized, "Wow, that's a pretty good idea." Every venture capitalist in Silicon Valley has been funding companies to copy that move. And that today has pretty much become mainstream in table stakes. But I would argue that Snowflake not only had the lead, but when you look at how others are approaching this problem, it's not necessarily as clean and as elegant. Some of the startups, the early startups I think get it and maybe had an advantage of starting later, which can be a disadvantage too. But AWS is a good example of what I'm saying here. Is its version of separating compute from storage was an afterthought and it's good, it's... Given what they had it was actually quite clever and customers like it, but it's more of a, "Okay, we're going to tier to storage to lower cost, we're going to sort of dial down the compute not completely, we're not going to shut it off, we're going to minimize the compute required." It's really not true as separation is like for instance Snowflake has. But having said that, we're talking about competitors with lots of resources and cohort offerings. And so I don't want to make this necessarily all about the product, but all things being equal architecture matters, okay? So that's the cloud S-curve, the first one we're showing. Snowflake's still on that S-curve, and in and of itself it's got legs, but it's not what's going to power the company to 10 billion. The next S-curve we denote is the multi-cloud in the middle. And now while 80% of Snowflake's revenue is AWS, Microsoft is ramping up and Google, well, we'll see. But the interesting part of that curve is data sharing, and this idea of data clean rooms. I mean it really should be called the data sharing curve, but I have my reasons for calling it multi-cloud. And this is all about network effects and data gravity, and you're seeing this play out today, especially in industries like financial services and healthcare and government that are highly regulated verticals where folks are super paranoid about compliance. There not going to share data if they're going to get sued for it, if they're going to be in the front page of the Wall Street Journal for some kind of privacy breach. And what Snowflake has done is said, "Put all the data in our cloud." Now, of course now that triggers a lot of people because it's a walled garden, okay? It is. That's the trade off. It's not the Wild West, it's not Windows, it's Mac, it's more controlled. But the idea is that as different parts of the organization or even partners begin to share data that they need, it's got to be governed, it's got to be secure, it's got to be compliant, it's got to be trusted. So Snowflake introduced the idea of, they call these things stable edges. I think that's the term that they use. And they track a metric around stable edges. And so a stable edge, or think of it as a persistent edge is an ongoing relationship between two parties that last for some period of time, more than a month. It's not just a one shot deal, one a done type of, "Oh guys shared it for a day, done." It sent you an FTP, it's done. No, it's got to have trajectory over time. Four weeks or six weeks or some period of time that's meaningful. And that metric is growing. Now I think sort of a different metric that they track. I think around 20% of Snowflake customers are actively sharing data today and then they track the number of those edge relationships that exist. So that's something that's unique. Because again, most data sharing is all about making copies of data. That's great for storage companies, it's bad for auditors, and it's bad for compliance officers. And that trend is just starting out, that middle S-curve, it's going to kind of hit the base of that steep part of the S-curve and it's going to have legs through this decade we think. And then finally the third wave that we show here is what we call super cloud. That's why I called it multi-cloud before, so it could invoke super cloud. The idea that you've built a PAS layer that is purpose built for a specific objective, and in this case it's building data apps that are cloud native, shareable and governed. And is a long-term trend that's going to take some time to develop. I mean, application development platforms can take five to 10 years to mature and gain significant adoption, but this one's unique. This is a critical play for Snowflake. If it's going to compete with the big cloud players, it has to have an app development framework like Snowpark. It has to accommodate new data types like transactional data. That's why it announced this thing called UniStore last June, Snowflake a summit. And the pattern that's forming here is Snowflake is building layer upon layer with its architecture at the core. It's not currently anyway, it's not going out and saying, "All right, we're going to buy a company that's got to another billion dollars in revenue and that's how we're going to get to 10 billion." So it's not buying its way into new markets through revenue. It's actually buying smaller companies that can complement Snowflake and that it can turn into revenue for growth that fit in to the data cloud. Now as to the 10 billion by fiscal year 28, is that achievable? That's the question. Yeah, I think so. Would the momentum resources go to market product and management prowess that Snowflake has? Yes, it's definitely achievable. And one could argue to $10 billion is too conservative. Indeed, Snowflake CFO, Mike Scarpelli will fully admit his forecaster built on existing offerings. He's not including revenue as I understand it from all the new stuff that's in the pipeline because he doesn't know what it's going to look like. He doesn't know what the adoption is going to look like. He doesn't have data on that adoption, not just yet anyway. And now of course things can change quite dramatically. It's possible that is forecast for existing businesses don't materialize or competition picks them off or a company like Databricks actually is able in the longer term replicate the functionality of Snowflake with open source technologies, which would be a very competitive source of innovation. But in our view, there's plenty of room for growth, the market is enormous and the real key is, can and will Snowflake deliver on the promises of simplifying data? Of course we've heard this before from data warehouse, the data mars and data legs and master data management and ETLs and data movers and data copiers and Hadoop and a raft of technologies that have not lived up to expectations. And we've also, by the way, seen some tremendous successes in the software business with the likes of ServiceNow and Salesforce. So will Snowflake be the next great software name and hit that 10 billion magic mark? I think so. Let's reconnect in 2028 and see. Okay, we'll leave it there today. I want to thank Chip Simonton for his input to today's episode. Thanks to Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman as well. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hove is our Editor in Chief over at Silicon Angle. He does some great editing for us. Check it out for all the news. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me to get in touch David.vallante@siliconangle.com. DM me @dvellante or comment on our LinkedIn post. And please do check out etr.ai, they've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, thanks for listening and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCube's coverage of AWS Storage Day. We're here with a couple of AWS product experts. Covering AWS's migration and transfer services, Randy Boutin is the general manager of AWS DataSync, and Mat Matthews, GM of AWS Transfer Family. Guys, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Dave, thanks. >> So look, we saw during the pandemic, the acceleration to cloud migration. We've tracked that, we've quantified that. What's driving that today? >> Yeah, so Dave, great to be back here. Saw you last year at Storage Day. >> Nice to be in studio too, isn't it? Thanks, guys, for coming in. >> We've conquered COVID. >> So yeah, I mean, this is a great question. I think digital transformation is really what's driving a lot of the focus right now from companies, and it's really not about just driving down costs. It's also about what are the opportunities available once you get into the cloud in terms of, what does that unlock in terms of innovation? So companies are focused on the usual things, optimizing costs, but ensuring they have the right security and agility. You know, a lot has happened over the last year, and companies need to be able to react, right? They need to be able to react quickly, so cloud gives them a lot of these capabilities, but the real benefit that we see is that once your data's in the cloud, it opens up the power of the cloud for analytics, for new application development, and things of that sort, so what we're seeing is that companies are really just focused on understanding cloud migration strategy, and how they can get their data there, and then use that to unlock that data for the value. >> I mean, if I've said it once, I've said it 100 times, if you weren't a digital business during the pandemic, you were out of business. You know, migration historically is a bad word in IT. Your CIOs see it and go, "Ugh." So what's the playbook for taking years of data on-prem, and moving it into the cloud? What are you seeing as best practice there? >> Yeah, so as you said, the migration historically has been painful, right? And it's a daunting task for any business or any IT executive, but fortunately, AWS has a broad suite of capabilities to help enable these migrations. And by that, I mean, we have tools to help you understand your existing on-prem workloads, understand what services in the AWS offering align to those needs, but also help you estimate the cost, right? Cost is a big part of this move. We can help you estimate that cost, and predict that cost, and then use tools like DataSync to help you move that data when that time comes. >> So you're saying you help predict the cost of the migration, or the cost of running in the cloud? >> Running in the cloud, right. Yeah, we can help estimate the run time. Based on the performance that we assess on-prem, we can then project that into a cloud service, and estimate that cost. >> So can you guys explain DataSync? Sometimes I get confused, DataSync, what's the difference between DataSync and Storage Gateway? And I want to get into when we should use each, but let's start there if we could. >> Yeah, sure, I'll take that. So Storage Gateway is primarily a means for a customer to access their data in the cloud from on-prem. All right, so if you have an application that you want to keep on-prem, you're not ready yet to migrate that application to the cloud, Gateway is a strong solution, because you can move a lot of that data, a lot of your cold or long tail data into something like S3 or EFS, but still access it from your on-prem location. DataSync's all about data movement, so if you need to move your data from A to B, DataSync is your optimized solution to do that. >> Are you finding that people, that's ideally a one time move, or is it actually, sometimes you're seeing customers do it more? Again, moving data, if I don't- Move as much data as you need to, but no more, to paraphrase Einstein. >> What we're seeing in DataSync is that customers do use DataSync for their initial migration. They'll also, as Matt was mentioning earlier, once you get your data into the cloud, that flywheel of potential starts to take hold, and customers want to ultimately move that data within the cloud to optimize its value. So you might move from service to service. You might move from EFS to S3, et cetera, to enable the cloud flywheel to benefit you. DataSync does that as well, so customers use us to initially migrate, they use us to move within the cloud, and also we just recently announced service for other clouds, so you can actually bring data in now from Google and Azure as well. >> Oh, how convenient. So okay, so that's cool. So you helped us understand the use cases, but can we dig one more layer, like what protocols are supported? I'm trying to understand really the right fit for the right job. >> Yeah, so that's really important. So for transfer specifically, one of the things that we see with customers is you've got obviously a lot of internal data within your company, but today it's a very highly interconnected world, so companies deal with lots of business partners, and historically they've used, there's a big prevalence of using file transfer to exchange data with business partners, and as you can imagine, there's a lot of value in that data, right? Sometimes it's purchase orders, inventory data from suppliers, or things like that. So historically customers have had protocols like SFTP or FTP to help them interface with or exchange data or files with external partners. So for transfer, that's what we focus on is helping customers exchange data over those existing protocols that they've used for many years. And the real focus is it's one thing to migrate your own data into the cloud, but you can't force thousands or tens of thousands sometimes of partners to also work in a different way to get you their data, so we want to make that very seamless for customers using the same exact protocols like SFTP that they've used for years. We just announced AS2 protocol, which is very heavily used in supply chains to exchange inventory and information across multi-tiers of partners, and things of that nature. So we're really focused on letting customers not have to impact their partners, and how they work and how they exchange, but also take advantage of the data, so get that data into the cloud so they can immediately unlock the value with analytics. >> So AS2 is specifically in the context of supply chain, and I'm presuming it's secure, and kind of governed, and safe. Can you explain that a little bit? >> Yeah, so AS2 has a lot of really interesting features for transactional type of exchanges, so it has signing and encryption built in, and also has notification so you can basically say, "Hey, I sent you this purchase order," and to prove that you received it, it has capability called non-repudiation, which means it's actually a legal transaction. So those things are very important in transactional type of exchanges, and allows customers in supply chains, whether it's vendors dealing with their suppliers, or transportation partners, or things like that to leverage file transfer for those types of exchanges. >> So encryption, providence of transactions, am I correct, without having to use the blockchain, and all the overhead associated with that? >> It's got some built in capabilities. >> I mean, I love blockchain, but there's drawbacks. >> Exactly, and that's why it's been popular. >> That's really interesting, 'cause Andy Jassy one day, I was on a phone call with him and John Furrier, and we were talking up crypto and blockchain. He said, "Well, why do, explain to me." You know Jassy, right? He always wants to go deeper. "Explain why I can't do this with some other approach." And so I think he was recognizing some of the drawbacks. So that's kind of a cool thing, and it leads me- We're running this obviously today, August 10th. Yesterday we had our Supercloud event in Palo Alto on August 9th, and it's all about the ecosystem. One of the observations we made about the 2020s is the cloud is totally different now. People are building value on top of the infrastructure that you guys have built out over the last 15 years. And so once an organization's data gets into the cloud, how does it affect, and it relates to AS2 somewhat, how does it affect the workflows in terms of interacting with external partners, and other ecosystem players that are also in the cloud? >> Yeah, great, yeah, again, we want to try and not have to affect those workflows, take them as they are as much as possible, get the data exchange working. One of the things that we focus on a lot is, how do you process this data once it comes in? Every company has governance requirements, security requirements, and things like that, so they usually have a set of things that they need to automate and orchestrate for the data as it's coming in, and a lot of these companies use something called Managed File Transfer Solutions that allow them to automate and orchestrate those things. We also see that many times this is very customer specific, so a bank might have a certain set of processes they have to follow, and it needs to be customized. As you know, AWS is a great solution for building custom solutions, and actually today, we're just announcing a new set of of partners in a program called the Service Delivery Program with AWS Transfer Family that allows customers to work with partners that are very well versed in transfer family and related services to help build a very specific solution that allows them to build that automation orchestration, and keep their partners kind of unaware that they're interfacing in a different way. >> And once this data is in the cloud, or actually, maybe stays on-prem in some cases, but it basically plugs in to the AWS services portfolio, the whole security model, the governance model, shared responsibility comes in, is that right? It's all, sort of all in there? >> Yeah, that's right, that's exactly right, and we're working with it's all about the customer's needs, and making sure that their investment in AWS doesn't disrupt their existing workflows and their relationships with their customers and their partners, and that's exactly what Matt's been describing is we're taking a close look at how we can extend the value of AWS, integrate into our customer's workflows, and bring that value to them with minimal investment or disruption. >> So follow up on that. So I love that, because less disruption means it's easier, less friction, and I think of like, trying to think of examples. Think about data de-duplication like purpose-built backup appliances, right? Data domain won that battle, because they could just plug right in. Avamar, they were trying to get you to redo everything, okay, and so we saw that movie play out. At the same time, I've talked to CIOs that say, "I love that, but the cloud opens up all these cool new opportunities for me to change my operating model." So are you seeing that as well? Where okay, we make it easy to get in. We're not disrupting workflows, and then once they get in, they say, "Well if we did it this way, we'd take out a bunch of costs. We'd accelerate our business." What's that dynamic like? >> Exactly that, right. So that moved to the Cloud Continuum. We don't think it's going to be binary. There's always going to be something on-prem. We accept that, but there's a continuum there, so day one, they'll migrate a portion of that workload into the cloud, start to extract and see value there, but then they'll continue, as you said, they'll continue to see opportunities. With all of the various capabilities that AWS has to offer, all the value that represents, they'll start to see that opportunity, and then start to engage and consume more of those features over time. >> Great, all right, give us the bumper sticker. What's next in transfer services from your perspectives? >> Yeah, so we're obviously always going to listen to our customers, that's our focus. >> You guys say that a lot. (all laughing) We say it a lot. But yeah, so we're focused on helping customers again increase that level of automation orchestration, again that suite of capability, generally, in our industry, known as managed file transfer, when a file comes in, it needs to get maybe encrypted, or decrypted, or compressed, or decompressed, scanned for viruses, those kind of capabilities, make that easier for customers. If you remember last year at Storage Day, we announced a low code workflow framework that allows customers to kind of build those steps. We're continuing to add built-in capabilities to that so customers can easily just say, "Okay, I want these set of activities to happen when files come in and out." So that's really what's next for us. >> All right, Randy, we'll give you the last word. Bring us home. >> I'm going to surprise you with the customer theme. >> Oh, great, love it. >> Yeah, so we're listening to customers, and what they're asking for our support for more sources, so we'll be adding support for more cloud sources, more on-prem sources, and giving the customers more options, also performance and usability, right? So we want to make it easier, as the enterprise continues to consume the cloud, we want to make DataSync and the movement of their data as easy as possible. >> I've always said it starts with the data. S3, that was the first service, and the other thing I've said a lot is the cloud is expanding. We're seeing connections to on-prem. We're seeing connections out to the edge. It's just becoming this massive global system, as Werner Vogels talks about all the time. Thanks, guys, really appreciate it. >> Dave, thank you very much. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, keep it right there for more coverage of AWS Storage Day 2022. You're watching theCube. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is the birthplace of theCUBE. In 2010, May of 2010 at EMC World, right in this very venue, John Furrier called it the chowder and lobster post. I'm Dave Vellante. We're here at RE:INFORCE 2022, Ed Walsh, CEO of ChaosSearch. Doing a drive by Ed. Thanks so much for stopping in. You're going to help me wrap up in our final editorial segment. >> Looking forward to it. >> I really appreciate it. >> Thank you for including me. >> How about that? 2010. >> That's amazing. It was really in this-- >> Really in this building. Yeah, we had to sort of bury our way in, tunnel our way into the Blogger Lounge. We did four days. >> Weekends, yeah. >> It was epic. It was really epic. But I'm glad they're back in Boston. AWS was going to do June in Houston. >> Okay. >> Which would've been awful. >> Yeah, yeah. No, this is perfect. >> Yeah. Thank God they came back. You saw Boston in summer is great. I know it's been hot, And of course you and I are from this area. >> Yeah. >> So how you been? What's going on? I mean, it's a little crazy out there. The stock market's going crazy. >> Sure. >> Having the tech lash, what are you seeing? >> So it's an interesting time. So I ran a company in 2008. So we've been through this before. By the way, the world's not ending, we'll get through this. But it is an interesting conversation as an investor, but also even the customers. There's some hesitation but you have to basically have the right value prop, otherwise things are going to get sold. So we are seeing longer sales cycles. But it's nothing that you can't overcome. But it has to be something not nice to have, has to be a need to have. But I think we all get through it. And then there is some, on the VC side, it's now buckle down, let's figure out what to do which is always a challenge for startup plans. >> In pre 2000 you, maybe you weren't a CEO but you were definitely an executive. And so now it's different and a lot of younger people haven't seen this. You've got interest rates now rising. Okay, we've seen that before but it looks like you've got inflation, you got interest rates rising. >> Yep. >> The consumer spending patterns are changing. You had 6$, $7 gas at one point. So you have these weird crosscurrents, >> Yup. >> And people are thinking, "Okay post-September now, maybe because of the recession, the Fed won't have to keep raising interest rates and tightening. But I don't know what to root for. It's like half full, half empty. (Ed laughing) >> But we haven't been in an environment with high inflation. At least not in my career. >> Right. Right. >> I mean, I got into 92, like that was long gone, right?. >> Yeah. >> So it is a interesting regime change that we're going to have to deal with, but there's a lot of analogies between 2008 and now that you still have to work through too, right?. So, anyway, I don't think the world's ending. I do think you have to run a tight shop. So I think the grow all costs is gone. I do think discipline's back in which, for most of us, discipline never left, right?. So, to me that's the name of the game. >> What do you tell just generally, I mean you've been the CEO of a lot of private companies. And of course one of the things that you do to retain people and attract people is you give 'em stock and it's great and everybody's excited. >> Yeah. >> I'm sure they're excited cause you guys are a rocket ship. But so what's the message now that, Okay the market's down, valuations are down, the trees don't grow to the moon, we all know that. But what are you telling your people? What's their reaction? How do you keep 'em motivated? >> So like anything, you want over communicate during these times. So I actually over communicate, you get all these you know, the Sequoia decks, 2008 and the recent... >> (chuckles) Rest in peace good times, that one right? >> I literally share it. Why? It's like, Hey, this is what's going on in the real world. It's going to affect us. It has almost nothing to do with us specifically, but it will affect us. Now we can't not pay attention to it. It does change how you're going to raise money, so you got to make sure you have the right runway to be there. So it does change what you do, but I think you over communicate. So that's what I've been doing and I think it's more like a student of the game, so I try to share it, and I say some appreciate it others, I'm just saying, this is normal, we'll get through this and this is what happened in 2008 and trust me, once the market hits bottom, give it another month afterwards. Then everyone says, oh, the bottom's in and we're back to business. Valuations don't go immediately back up, but right now, no one knows where the bottom is and that's where kind of the world's ending type of things. >> Well, it's interesting because you talked about, I said rest in peace good times >> Yeah >> that was the Sequoia deck, and the message was tighten up. Okay, and I'm not saying you shouldn't tighten up now, but the difference is, there was this period of two years of easy money and even before that, it was pretty easy money. >> Yeah. >> And so companies are well capitalized, they have runway so it's like, okay, I was talking to Frank Slootman about this now of course there are public companies, like we're not taking the foot off the gas. We're inherently profitable, >> Yeah. >> we're growing like crazy, we're going for it. You know? So that's a little bit of a different dynamic. There's a lot of good runway out there, isn't there? >> But also you look at the different companies that were either born or were able to power through those environments are actually better off. You come out stronger in a more dominant position. So Frank, listen, if you see what Frank's done, it's been unbelievable to watch his career, right?. In fact, he was at Data Domain, I was Avamar so, but look at what he's done since, he's crushed it. Right? >> Yeah. >> So for him to say, Hey, I'm going to literally hit the gas and keep going. I think that's the right thing for Snowflake and a right thing for a lot of people. But for people in different roles, I literally say that you have to take it seriously. What you can't be is, well, Frank's in a different situation. What is it...? How many billion does he have in the bank? So it's... >> He's over a billion, you know, over a billion. Well, you're on your way Ed. >> No, no, no, it's good. (Dave chuckles) Okay, I want to ask you about this concept that we've sort of we coined this term called Supercloud. >> Sure. >> You could think of it as the next generation of multi-cloud. The basic premises that multi-cloud was largely a symptom of multi-vendor. Okay. I've done some M&A, I've got some Shadow IT, spinning up, you know, Shadow clouds, projects. But it really wasn't a strategy to have a continuum across clouds. And now we're starting to see ecosystems really build, you know, you've used the term before, standing on the shoulders of giants, you've used that a lot. >> Yep. >> And so we're seeing that. Jerry Chen wrote a seminal piece on Castles in The Cloud, so we coined this term SuperCloud to connote this abstraction layer that hides the underlying complexities and primitives of the individual clouds and then adds value on top of it and can adjudicate and manage, irrespective of physical location, Supercloud. >> Yeah. >> Okay. What do you think about that concept?. How does it maybe relate to some of the things that you're seeing in the industry? >> So, standing on shoulders of giants, right? So I always like to do hard tech either at big company, small companies. So we're probably your definition of a Supercloud. We had a big vision, how to literally solve the core challenge of analytics at scale. How are you going to do that? You're not going to build on your own. So literally we're leveraging the primitives, everything you can get out of the Amazon cloud, everything get out of Google cloud. In fact, we're even looking at what it can get out of this Snowflake cloud, and how do we abstract that out, add value to it? That's where all our patents are. But it becomes a simplified approach. The customers don't care. Well, they care where their data is. But they don't care how you got there, they just want to know the end result. So you simplify, but you gain the advantages. One thing's interesting is, in this particular company, ChaosSearch, people try to always say, at some point the sales cycle they say, no way, hold on, no way that can be fast no way, or whatever the different issue. And initially we used to try to explain our technology, and I would say 60% was explaining the public, cloud capabilities and then how we, harvest those I guess, make them better add value on top and what you're able to get is something you couldn't get from the public clouds themselves and then how we did that across public clouds and then extracted it. So if you think about that like, it's the Shoulders of giants. But what we now do, literally to avoid that conversation because it became a lengthy conversation. So, how do you have a platform for analytics that you can't possibly overwhelm for ingest. All your messy data, no pipelines. Well, you leverage things like S3 and EC2, and you do the different security things. You can go to environments say, you can't possibly overrun me, I could not say that. If I didn't literally build on the shoulders giants of all these public clouds. But the value. So if you're going to do hard tech as a startup, you're going to build, you're going to be the principles of Supercloud. Maybe they're not the same size of Supercloud just looking at Snowflake, but basically, you're going to leverage all that, you abstract it out and that's where you're able to have a lot of values at that. >> So let me ask you, so I don't know if there's a strict definition of Supercloud, We sort of put it out to the community and said, help us define it. So you got to span multiple clouds. It's not just running in each cloud. There's a metadata layer that kind of understands where you're pulling data from. Like you said you can pull data from Snowflake, it sounds like we're not running on Snowflake, correct? >> No, complimentary to them in their different customers. >> Yeah. Okay. >> They want to build on top of a data platform, data apps. >> Right. And of course they're going cross cloud. >> Right. >> Is there a PaaS layer in there? We've said there's probably a Super PaaS layer. You're probably not doing that, but you're allowing people to bring their own, bring your own PaaS sort of thing maybe. >> So we're a little bit different but basically we publish open APIs. We don't have a user interface. We say, keep the user interface. Again, we're solving the challenge of analytics at scale, we're not trying to retrain your analytics, either analysts or your DevOps or your SOV or your Secop team. They use the tools they already use. Elastic search APIs, SQL APIs. So really they program, they build applications on top of us, Equifax is a good example. Case said it coming out later on this week, after 18 months in production but, basically they're building, we provide the abstraction layer, the quote, I'm going to kill it, Jeff Tincher, who owns all of SREs worldwide, said to the effect of, Hey I'm able to rethink what I do for my data pipelines. But then he also talked about how, that he really doesn't have to worry about the data he puts in it. We deal with that. And he just has to, just query on the other side. That simplicity. We couldn't have done that without that. So anyway, what I like about the definition is, if you were going to do something harder in the world, why would you try to rebuild what Amazon, Google and Azure or Snowflake did? You're going to add things on top. We can still do intellectual property. We're still doing patents. So five grand patents all in this. But literally the abstraction layer is the simplification. The end users do not want to know that complexity, even though they ask the questions. >> And I think too, the other attribute is it's ecosystem enablement. Whereas I think, >> Absolutely >> in general, in the Multicloud 1.0 era, the ecosystem wasn't thinking about, okay, how do I build on top and abstract that. So maybe it is Multicloud 2.0, We chose to use Supercloud. So I'm wondering, we're at the security conference, >> RE: INFORCE is there a security Supercloud? Maybe Snyk has the developer Supercloud or maybe Okta has the identity Supercloud. I think CrowdStrike maybe not. Cause CrowdStrike competes with Microsoft. So maybe, because Microsoft, what's interesting, Merritt Bear was just saying, look, we don't show up in the spending data for security because we're not charging for most of our security. We're not trying to make a big business. So that's kind of interesting, but is there a potential for the security Supercloud? >> So, I think so. But also, I'll give you one thing I talked to, just today, at least three different conversations where everyone wants to log data. It's a little bit specific to us, but basically they want to do the security data lake. The idea of, and Snowflake talks about this too. But the idea of putting all the data in one repository and then how do you abstract out and get value from it? Maybe not the perfect, but it becomes simple to do but hard to get value out. So the different players are going to do that. That's what we do. We're able to, once you land it in your S3 or it doesn't matter, cloud of choice, simple storage, we allow you to get after that data, but we take the primitives and hide them from you. And all you do is query the data and we're spinning up stateless computer to go after it. So then if I look around the floor. There's going to be a bunch of these players. I don't think, why would someone in this floor try to recreate what Amazon or Google or Azure had. They're going to build on top of it. And now the key thing is, do you leave it in standard? And now we're open APIs. People are building on top of my open APIs or do you try to put 'em in a walled garden? And they're in, now your Supercloud. Our belief is, part of it is, it needs to be open access and let you go after it. >> Well. And build your applications on top of it openly. >> They come back to snowflake. That's what Snowflake's doing. And they're basically saying, Hey come into our proprietary environment. And the benefit is, and I think both can win. There's a big market. >> I agree. But I think the benefit of Snowflake's is, okay, we're going to have federated governance, we're going to have data sharing, you're going to have access to all the ecosystem players. >> Yep. >> And as everything's going to be controlled and you know what you're getting. The flip side of that is, Databricks is the other end >> Yeah. >> of that spectrum, which is no, no, you got to be open. >> Yeah. >> So what's going to happen, well what's happening clearly, is Snowflake's saying, okay we've got Snowpark. we're going to allow Python, we're going to have an Apache Iceberg. We're going to have open source tooling that you can access. By the way, it's not going to be as good as our waled garden where the flip side of that is you get Databricks coming at it from a data science and data engineering perspective. And there's a lot of gaps in between, aren't there? >> And I think they both win. Like for instance, so we didn't do Snowpark integration. But we work with people building data apps on top of Snowflake or data bricks. And what we do is, we can add value to that, or what we've done, again, using all the Supercloud stuff we're done. But we deal with the unstructured data, the four V's coming at you. You can't pipeline that to save. So we actually could be additive. As they're trying to do like a security data cloud inside of Snowflake or do the same thing in Databricks. That's where we can play. Now, we play with them at the application level that they get some data from them and some data for us. But I believe there's a partnership there that will do it inside their environment. To us they're just another large scaler environment that my customers want to get after data. And they want me to abstract it out and give value. >> So it's another repository to you. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So I think Snowflake recently added support for unstructured data. You chose not to do Snowpark because why? >> Well, so the way they're doing the unstructured data is not bad. It's JSON data. Basically, This is the dilemma. Everyone wants their application developers to be flexible, move fast, securely but just productivity. So you get, give 'em flexibility. The problem with that is analytics on the end want to be structured to be performant. And this is where Snowflake, they have to somehow get that raw data. And it's changing every day because you just let the developers do what they want now, in some structured base, but do what you need to do your business fast and securely. So it completely destroys. So they have large customers trying to do big integrations for this messy data. And it doesn't quite work, cause you literally just can't make the pipelines work. So that's where we're complimentary do it. So now, the particular integration wasn't, we need a little bit deeper integration to do that. So we're integrating, actually, at the data app layer. But we could, see us and I don't, listen. I think Snowflake's a good actor. They're trying to figure out what's best for the customers. And I think we just participate in that. >> Yeah. And I think they're trying to figure out >> Yeah. >> how to grow their ecosystem. Because they know they can't do it all, in fact, >> And we solve the key thing, they just can't do certain things. And we do that well. Yeah, I have SQL but that's where it ends. >> Yeah. >> I do the messy data and how to play with them. >> And when you talk to one of their founders, anyway, Benoit, he comes on the cube and he's like, we start with simple. >> Yeah. >> It reminds me of the guy's some Pure Storage, that guy Coz, he's always like, no, if it starts to get too complicated. So that's why they said all right, we're not going to start out trying to figure out how to do complex joins and workload management. And they turn that into a feature. So like you say, I think both can win. It's a big market. >> I think it's a good model. And I love to see Frank, you know, move. >> Yeah. I forgot So you AVMAR... >> In the day. >> You guys used to hate each other, right? >> No, no, no >> No. I mean, it's all good. >> But the thing is, look what he's done. Like I wouldn't bet against Frank. I think it's a good message. You can see clients trying to do it. Same thing with Databricks, same thing with BigQuery. We get a lot of same dynamic in BigQuery. It's good for a lot of things, but it's not everything you need to do. And there's ways for the ecosystem to play together. >> Well, what's interesting about BigQuery is, it is truly cloud native, as is Snowflake. You know, whereas Amazon Redshift was sort of Parexel, it's cobbled together now. It's great engineering, but BigQuery gets a lot of high marks. But again, there's limitations to everything. That's why companies like yours can exist. >> And that's why.. so back to the Supercloud. It allows me as a company to participate in that because I'm leveraging all the underlying pieces. Which we couldn't be doing what we're doing now, without leveraging the Supercloud concepts right, so... >> Ed, I really appreciate you coming by, help me wrap up today in RE:INFORCE. Always a pleasure seeing you, my friend. >> Thank you. >> All right. Okay, this is a wrap on day one. We'll be back tomorrow. I'll be solo. John Furrier had to fly out but we'll be following what he's doing. This is RE:INFORCE 2022. You're watching theCUBE. I'll see you tomorrow.

(upbeat music) >> We're back at VeeamON 2022. We're here at the Aria in Las Vegas Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Bill Andrews is here. He's the president and CEO of ExaGrid, mass boy. Bill, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I hear a lot about obviously data protection, cyber resiliency, what's the big picture trends that you're seeing when you talk to customers? >> Well, I think clearly we were talking just a few minutes ago, data's growing like crazy, right This morning, I think they said it was 28% growth a year, right? So data's doubling almost just a little less than every three years. And then you get the attacks on the data which was the keynote speech this morning as well, right. All about the ransomware attacks. So we've got more and more data, and that data is more and more under attack. So I think those are the two big themes. >> So ExaGrid as a company been around for a long time. You've kind of been the steady kind of Eddy, if you will. Tell us about ExaGrid, maybe share with us some of the differentiators that you share with customers. >> Sure, so specifically, let's say in the Veeam world you're backing up your data, and you really only have two choices. You can back that up to disc. So some primary storage disc from a Dell, or a Hewlett Packard, or an NetApp or somebody, or you're going to back it up to what's called an inline deduplication appliance maybe a Dell Data Domain or an HPE StoreOnce, right? So what ExaGrid does is we've taken the best of both those but not the challenges of both those and put 'em together. So with disc, you're going to get fast backups and fast restores, but because in backup you keep weekly's, monthly's, yearly retention, the cost of this becomes exorbitant. If you go to a deduplication appliance, and let's say the Dell or the HPs, the data comes in, has to be deduplicated, compare one backup to the next to reduce that storage, which lowers the cost. So fixes that problem, but the fact that they do it inline slows the backups down dramatically. All the data is deduplicated so the restores are slow, and then the backup window keeps growing as the data grows 'cause they're all scale up technologies. >> And the restores are slow 'cause you got to rehydrate. >> You got to rehydrate every time. So what we did is we said, you got to have both. So our appliances have a front end disc cache landing zone. So you're right directed to the disc., Nothing else happens to it, whatever speed the backup app could write at that's the speed we take it in at. And then we keep the most recent backups in that landing zone ready to go. So you want to boot a VM, it's not an hour like a deduplication appliance it's a minute or two. Secondly, we then deduplicate the data into a second tier which is a repository tier, but we have all the deduplicated data for the long term retention, which gets the cost down. And on top of that, we're scale out. Every appliance has networking processor memory end disc. So if you double, triple, quadruple the data you double, triple, quadruple everything. And if the backup window is six hours at 100 terabyte it's six hours at 200 terabyte, 500 terabyte, a petabyte it doesn't matter. >> 'Cause you scale out. >> Right, and then lastly, our repository tier is non-network facing. We're the only ones in the industry with this. So that under a ransomware attack, if you get hold of a rogue server or you hack the media server, get to the backup storage whether it's disc or deduplication appliance, you can wipe out all the backup data. So you have nothing to recover from. In our case, you wipe it out, our landing zone will be wiped out. We're no different than anything else that's network facing. However, the only thing that talks to our repository tier is our object code. And we've set up security policies as to how long before you want us to delete data, let's say 10 days. So if you have an attack on Monday that data doesn't get deleted till like a week from Thursday, let's say. So you can freeze the system at any time and do restores. And then we have immutable data objects and all the other stuff. But the culmination of a non-network facing tier and the fact that we do the delayed deletes makes us the only one in the industry that can actually truly recover. And that's accelerating our growth, of course. >> Wow, great description. So that disc cache layer is a memory, it's a flash? >> It's disc, it's spinning disc. >> Spinning disc, okay. >> Yeah, no different than any other disc. >> And then the tiered is what, less expensive spinning disc? >> No, it's still the same. It's all SaaS disc 'cause you want the quality, right? So it's all SaaS, and so we use Western Digital or Seagate drives just like everybody else. The difference is that we're not doing any deduplication coming in or out of that landing zone to have fast backups and fast restores. So think of it like this, you've got disc and you say, boy it's too expensive. What I really want to do then is put maybe a deduplication appliance behind it to lower the cost or reverse it. I've got a deduplication appliance, ugh, it's too slow for backups and restores. I really want to throw this in front of it to have fast backups first. Basically, that's what we did. >> So where does the cost savings, Bill come in though, on the tier? >> The cost savings comes in the fact that we got deduplication in that repository. So only the most recent backup >> Ah okay, so I get it. >> are the duplicated data. But let's say you had 40 copies of retention. You know, 10 weekly's, 36 monthly's, a few yearly. All of that's deduplicated >> Okay, so you're deduping the stuff that's not as current. >> Right. >> Okay. >> And only a handful of us deduplicate at the layer we do. In other words, deduplication could be anywhere from two to one, up to 50 to one. I mean it's all over the place depending on the algorithm. Now it's what everybody's algorithms do. Some backup apps do two to one, some do five to one, we do 20 to one as well as much as 50 to one depending on the data types. >> Yeah, so the workload is going to largely determine the combination >> The content type, right. with the algos, right? >> Yeah, the content type. >> So the part of the environment that's behind the illogical air gap, if you will, is deduped data. >> Yes. >> So in this case, is it fair to say that you're trading a positive economic value for a little bit longer restore from that environment? >> No, because if you think about backup 95% of the customers restores are from the most recent data. >> From the disc cache. >> 95% of the time 'cause you think about why do you need fast restores? Somebody deleted a file, somebody overwrote a file. They can't go work, they can't open a file. It's encrypted, it's corrupted. That's what IT people are trying to keep users productive. When do you go for longer-term retention data? It's an SEC audit. It's a HIPAA audit. It's a legal discovery, you don't need that data right away. You have days and weeks to get that ready for that legal discovery or that audit. So we found that boundary where you keep users productive by keeping the most recent data in the disc cache landing zone, but anything that's long term. And by the way, everyone else is long term, at that point. >> Yeah, so the economics are comparable to the dedupe upfront. Are they better, obviously get the performance advance? >> So we would be a lot looped. The thing we replaced the most believe it or not is disc, we're a lot less expensive than the disc. I was meeting with some Veeam folks this morning and we were up against Cisco 3260 disc at a children's hospital. And on our quote was $500,000. The disc was 1.4 million. Just to give you an example of the savings. On a Data Domain we're typically about half the price of a Data Domain. >> Really now? >> The reason why is their front end control are so expensive. They need the fastest trip on the planet 'cause they're trying to do inline deduplication. >> Yeah, so they're chasing >> They need the fastest memory >> on the planet. >> this chips all the time. They need SSD on data to move in and out of the hash table. In order to keep up with inline, they've got to throw so much compute at it that it drives their cost up. >> But now in the case of ransomware attack, are you saying that the landing zone is still available for recovery in some circumstances? Or are you expecting that that disc landing zone would be encrypted by the attacker? >> Those are two different things. One is deletion, one is encryption. So let's do the first scenario. >> I'm talking about malicious encryption. >> Yeah, absolutely. So the first scenario is the threat actor encrypts all your primary data. What's does he go for next? The backup data. 'Cause he knows that's your belt and suspend is to not pay the ransom. If it's disc he's going to go in and put delete commands at the disc, wipe out the disc. If it's a data domain or HPE StoreOnce, it's all going to be gone 'cause it's one tier. He's going to go after our landing zone, it's going to be gone too. It's going to wipe out our landing zone. Except behind that we have the most recent backup deduplicate in the repository as well as all the other backups. So what'll happen is they'll freeze the system 'cause we weren't going to delete anything in the repository for X days 'cause you set up a policy, and then you restore the most recent backup into the landing zone or we can restore it directly to your primary storage area, right? >> Because that tier is not network facing. >> That's right. >> It's fenced off essentially. >> People call us every day of the week saying, you saved me, you saved me again. People are coming up to me here, you saved me, you saved me. >> Tell us a story about that, I mean don't give me the names but how so. >> I'll actually do a funnier story, 'cause these are the ones that our vendors like to tell. 'Cause I'm self-serving as the CEO that's good of course, a little humor. >> It's your 15 minutes of job. >> That is my 15 minutes of fame. So we had one international company who had one ExaGrid at one location, 19 Data Domains at the other locations. Ransomware attack guess what? 19 Data Domains wiped out. The one ExaGrid, the only place they could restore. So now all 20 locations of course are ExaGrids, China, Russia, Mexico, Germany, US, et cetera. They rolled us out worldwide. So it's very common for that to occur. And think about why that is, everyone who's network facing you can get to the storage. You can say all the media servers are buttoned up, but I can find a rogue server and snake my way over the storage, I can. Now, we also of course support the Veeam Data Mover. So let's talk about that since we're at a Veeam conference. We were the first company to ever integrate the Veeam Data Mover. So we were the first actually ever integration with Veeam. And so that Veeam Data Mover is a protocol that goes from Veeam to the ExaGrid, and we run it on both ends. So that's a more secure protocol 'cause it's not an open format protocol like SaaS. So with running the Veeam Data Mover we get about 30% more performance, but you do have a more secure protocol layer. So if you don't get through Veeam but you get through the protocol, boom, we've got a stronger protocol. If you make it through that somehow, or you get to it from a rogue server somewhere else we still have the repository. So we have all these layers so that you can't get at it. >> So you guys have been at this for a while, I mean decade and a half plus. And you've raised a fair amount of money but in today's terms, not really. So you've just had really strong growth, sequential growth. I understand it, and double digit growth year on year. >> Yeah, about 25% a year right now >> 25%, what's your global strategy? >> So we have sales offices in about 30 countries already. So we have three sales teams in Brazil, and three in Germany, and three in the UK, and two in France, and a lot of individual countries, Chile, Argentina, Columbia, Mexico, South Africa, Saudi, Czech Republic, Poland, Dubai, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, et cetera. We've just added two sales territories in Japan. We're adding two in India. And we're installed in over 50 countries. So we've been international all along the way. The goal of the company is we're growing nicely. We have not raised money in almost 10 years. >> So you're self-funding. You're cash positive. >> We are cash positive and self-funded and people say, how have you done that for 10 years? >> You know what's interesting is I remember, Dave Scott, Dave Scott was the CEO of 3PAR, and he told me when he came into that job, he told the VCs, they wanted to give him 30 million. He said, I need 80 million. I think he might have raised closer to a hundred which is right around what you guys have raised. But like you said, you haven't raised it in a long time. And in today's terms, that's nothing, right? >> 100 is 500 in today's terms. >> Yeah, right, exactly. And so the thing that really hurt 3PAR, they were public companies so you could see all this stuff is they couldn't expand internationally. It was just too damn expensive to set up the channels, and somehow you guys have figured that out. >> 40% of our business comes out of international. We're growing faster internationally than we are domestically. >> What was the formula there, Bill, was that just slow and steady or? >> It's a great question. >> No, so what we did, we said let's build ExaGrid like a McDonald's franchise, nobody's ever done that before in high tech. So what does that mean? That means you have to have the same product worldwide. You have to have the same spares model worldwide. You have to have the same support model worldwide. So we early on built the installation. So we do 100% of our installs remotely. 100% of our support remotely, yet we're in large enterprises. Customers racks and stacks the appliances we get on with them. We do the entire install on 30 minutes to about three hours. And we've been developing that into the product since day one. So we can remotely install anywhere in the world. We keep spares depots all over the world. We can bring 'em up really quick. Our support model is we have in theater support people. So they're in Europe, they're in APAC, they're in the US, et cetera. And we assign customers to the support people. So they deal with the same support person all the time. So everything is scalable. So right now we're going to open up India. It's the same way we've opened up every other country. Once you've got the McDonald's formula we just stamp it all over the world. >> That's amazing. >> Same pricing, same product same model, same everything. >> So what was the inspiration for that? I mean, you've done this since day one, which is what like 15, 16 years ago. Or just you do engineering or? >> No, so our whole thought was, first of all you can't survive anymore in this world without being an international company. 'Cause if you're going to go after large companies they have offices all over the world. We have companies now that have 17, 18, 20, 30 locations. And there were in every country in the world, you can't go into this business without being able to ship anywhere in the world and support it for a single customer. You're not going into Singapore because of that. You're going to Singapore because some company in Germany has offices in the U.S, Mexico Singapore and Australia. You have to be international. It's a must now. So that was the initial thing is that, our goal is to become a billion dollar company. And we're on path to do that, right. >> You can see a billion. >> Well, I can absolutely see a billion. And we're bigger than everybody thinks. Everybody guesses our revenue always guesses low. So we're bigger than you think. The reason why we don't talk about it is we don't need to. >> That's the headline for our writers, ExaGrid is a billion dollar company and nobody's know about it. >> Million dollar company. >> On its way to a billion. >> That's right. >> You're not disclosing. (Bill laughing) But that's awesome. I mean, that's a great story. I mean, you kind of are a well kept secret, aren't you? >> Well, I dunno if it's a well kept secret. You know, smaller companies never have their awareness of big companies, right? The Dells of the world are a hundred billion. IBM is 70 billion, Cisco is 60 billion. Easy to have awareness, right? If you're under a billion, I got to give a funny story then I think we got to close out here. >> Oh go ahead please. >> So there's one funny story. So I was talking to the CIO of a super large Fortune 500 company. And I said to him, "Just so who do you use?" "I use IBM Db2, and I use, Cisco routers, and I use EMC primary storage, et cetera. And I use all these big." And I said, "Would you ever switch from Db2?" "Oh no, the switching costs would kill me. I could never go to Oracle." So I said to him, "Look would you ever use like a Pure Storage, right. A couple billion dollar company." He says, "Who?" >> Huh, interesting. >> I said to him, all right so skip that. I said, "VMware, would you ever think about going with Nutanix?" "Who?" Those are billion dollar plus companies. And he was saying who? >> Public companies. >> And he was saying who? That's not uncommon when I talk to CIOs. They see the big 30 and that's it. >> Oh, that's interesting. What about your partnership with Veeam? Tell us more about that. >> Yeah, so I would actually, and I'm going to be bold when I say this 'cause I think you can ask anybody here at the conference. We're probably closer first of all, to the Veeam sales force than any company there is. You talk to any Veeam sales rep, they work closer with ExaGrid than any other. Yeah, we are very tight in the field and have been for a long time. We're integrated with the Veeam Data Boomer. We're integrated with SOBR. We're integrated with all the integrations or with the product as well. We have a lot of joint customers. We actually do a lot of selling together, where we go in as Veeam ExaGrid 'cause it's a great end to end story. Especially when we're replacing, let's say a Dell Avamar to Dell Data Domain or a Dell Network with a Dell Data Domain, very commonly Veeam ExaGrid go in together on those types of sales. So we do a lot of co-selling together. We constantly train their systems engineers around the world, every given week we're training either inside sales teams, and we've trained their customer support teams in Columbus and Prague. So we're very tight with 'em we've been tight for over a decade. >> Is your head count public? Can you share that with us? >> So we're just over 300 employees. >> Really, wow. >> We have 70 open positions, so. >> Yeah, what are you looking for? Yeah, everything, right? >> We are looking for engineers. We are looking for customer support people. We're looking for marketing people. We're looking for inside sales people, field people. And we've been hiring, as of late, major account reps that just focus on the Fortune 500. So we've separated that out now. >> When you hire engineers, I mean I think I saw you were long time ago, DG, right? Is that true? >> Yeah, way back in the '80s. >> But systems guy. >> That's how old I am. >> Right, systems guy. I mean, I remember them well Eddie Castro and company. >> Tom West. >> EMV series. >> Tom West was the hero of course. >> The EMV 4000, the EMV 20,000, right? >> When were kids, "The Soul of a New Machine" was the inspirational book but anyway, >> Yeah Tracy Kidder, it was great. >> Are you looking for systems people, what kind of talent are you looking for in engineering? >> So it's a lot of Linux programming type stuff in the product 'cause we run on a Linux space. So it's a lot of Linux programs so its people in those storage. >> Yeah, cool, Bill, hey, thanks for coming on to theCUBE. Well learned a lot, great story. >> It's a pleasure. >> That was fun. >> Congratulations. >> Thanks. >> And good luck. >> All right, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2022, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back right after this short break, stay with us. (soft beat music)

>>Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin learn Dubois joins me next VP of product management at Dell technologies. Laura, welcome back to the program. >>Yeah. Thank you so much, Lisa. It's just fantastic to be here and talking about data protection. Um, you know, now that we're coming out of COVID, it's just wonderful to be here. Thank you so much. >>Isn't it so refreshing. So you're going to provide some updates on Dell's data protection software, some of the innovation, how you're working with customers and prospects on that. So let's go ahead and dig right in. Let's talk about some of the innovation and the enhancements that Dell is making to its data protection suite of software, and also how customers are influencing that. >>Yeah, so it's a great question, Lisa and you're right. We have driven a lot of innovation and enhancements in our data protection suite. And let me just level set a second. So data protection suite, you know, is a solution that is deployed by really tens of thousands of customers. And we continue to innovate and enhance that data protection suite data protection suite is comprised primarily of three main data protection, software capabilities, so longstanding capabilities and customer adoption of Avamar, which continues to be a central capability on our portfolio. The second one is networker. Um, so networker is also an enterprise grade, highly scalable and performance data protection solution. And then a couple of years ago, um, we launched a new data protection capability called power protect data manager. So all three of these capabilities were really the foundation of our data protection suite. And as I said, you know, enterprises around the world rely on these three capable sets of capabilities to protect their data, regardless of wherever it resides. And, um, it's really central now more than ever in the face of, you know, increasing security, um, you know, risks and compliance and the need to be able to have an always kind of available environment that customers rely on the capabilities and data protection suite to really make sure their enterprises resilient. Absolutely. >>And make sure that that data is recoverable. If anything happens, you mentioned cybersecurity. We'll get into that in a second, but so thousands of Avamar and networker customers, what are some of the key workloads and data that these customers are protecting with these technologies? >>Yeah, I mean, so actually tens of thousands, tens of thousands, tens of thousands of customers that rely on data protection suite and you know, it really, I think the, the, the strength and advantage of our portfolio is its breadth, breadth and Kip terms with client operating environments in terms of applications and databases in terms of workloads and, and, and specifically use cases. So, I mean, the breadth that we offer is unparalleled. Um, you know, pretty much when a windows, Linux, um, open VMs, NetWare, you know, kind of, you know, going back in time, a long tail of kind of operating environments and then databases, right? So everything from SQL and Oracle and Sybase and DB two to new types of databases, like, you know, the no SQL or, or content store and, and, and, um, key value store types of types of, um, no SQL, uh, schema was if you will. >>And so, and then lastly is the, the use cases, right? So being able to protect data, whether that be data that's in a data center, out in remote or branch locations or data that's out in the cloud, right. And of course, create increasingly customers are placing their data, um, in a variety of locations, on edge, on core data centers and in cloud environments. And, um, we actually have over, uh, six exabytes of capacity on our management, across public cloud environments. So, um, pretty extensive deployment of our, our data protection suite in public clouds, you know, the leading hyperscalers, um, uh, cloud environments on premises as well. >>So let's talk a little bit about the customer influence because obviously there's a very cooperative relationship that Dell has with its customers that help you achieve things. Like, for example, I saw that according to IDC, Dell technologies is number one and data protection, appliances, and software leader in the Gartner magic quadrant for data center, backup and recovery for over 20 years. Now, talk to us a little bit more about that symbiotic customer Dell. >>Yeah. So it's a great question. We see our customers and strategic partners, and we really want to understand their business, their requirements. We engage on a quarterly basis with customers and partners in, um, it advisory councils. And then of course, we are always engaging with customers outside of those cycles on a kind of a one-on-one basis. And so we're really driving the innovation and the backlogs and the roadmap for data protection suite based upon customer feedback and, um, uh, approximately 79% of the fortune 100 customers, our Dell data, Dell technologies, data protection customers. Now that's not to say that that's our only customer base. We have customers in commercial accounts in mid-market and in, uh, federal agencies. Um, but you know, we take our customer relationships really, really seriously, and we engage with them, uh, on a regular basis, both in a group forum to provide feedback as well as in a one-on-one basis. And we're building our roadmaps and our, and our, our, our product releases based on feedback from customers. And, um, again, you know, large customer base that we take very seriously, >>Right to the customer listening obviously is critical for Dell. So you talked a little bit about what that cycle looks like in terms of quarterly meetings, and then those individual meetings, what are some of the enhancements and advancements that customers have actually influenced? >>Yeah, so we, I mean, we, I think, um, continuing, continuing to provide simplicity and ease of use is a key, uh, element of our portfolio and our in our strategy, right? So continuing to modernize and update the software in terms of workflows, in terms of, uh, know common experiences, also increasingly customers want to automate their data protection process. So really taking an API first strategy for how we deliver capabilities to customers, you know, continuing to expand our client, um, database hypervisor environments, continue to extend out our cloud support. Um, you know, things like, um, protection of cloud, native applications with, uh, increasingly customers containerizing, um, and building scale-out applications. We want to be able to protect Kubernetes environment. So that's kind of an area of focus for us. Um, another area of focus for us is going deeper with our key strategic partners, you know, whether that'd be a, a cloud partner, a hypervisor partner, and then of course, customers, in fact, one of the top three things that we consistently hear from, from these councils that we do is the, the criticality of security security and or data protection environment, but the criticality of being able to be resilient from, and, and in the event of a, of a cyber attack to be able to resilient recover from that cyber attack. >>So that is an area where we continue to make, uh, innovations and investments, uh, in the data protection suite. >>And that's so critical. One of the things that we saw in the last year, 15 months, plus Laura, is this massive rise in ransomware. It's now a household word, the colonial pipeline, for example, that meat plan, it's, it's now many businesses knowing it's not if we get attacked, but it's when, so having the ability to be resilient and recover that data is table stakes for, I imagine a business in any organization, I want to understand a little bit more. So you talked about tens of thousands of customers using Avamar and networker. So now they have the capability of also expanding and using more of, of the suite. Talk to me a little bit about that. >>Yeah, so, I mean, I think it starts with the customer environment and what workloads and use cases they have and because of the breadth of capabilities and Dave, the data protection suite, you know, we really optimize the solution based upon their needs, right? So if they have, um, a large portfolio of, of applications that they need to maintain, but they're also building applications or, or, or systems for the future, we have S you know, solution there. If they have a single hypervisor strategy or a multiple hypervisor strategy, we have a, you know, a strategy there, if they have data that's on premise and across a range of public clouds, you know, one large customer we have as a, you know, kind of, uh, uh, uh, three-plus one strategy around cloud. So there's, they, there's, they're, they're leveraging, you know, three different, um, uh, public cloud, I as environments. And then they're also have their on-premise cloud environment. So, you know, we, it really starts with the customer workload and the data and where it lives, whether that's be out in an edge location in a row remote or branch office on an end point somewhere, they need to protect whether it be in a core data center or multiple data centers, or rather that be in the cloud. Um, you know, that's how we think about optimizing the solution for the, for the customers. >>Curious if you can give me any examples of customers, maybe by industry that were, have been with Dell for a long time with Avamar networker and how they've expanded, being able to pick, as you say, as their, or as their environment grows. And we've got, um, now as this blur, right, it's now work from anywhere data centers, edge. Talk to me about some customers, examples that you think really articulate the value of what Dell is doing. >>Yeah, so, I mean, I think one customer, um, in the financial services sector comes to mind. They have a large, uh, um, amount of unstructured data that they need to protect, you know, petabytes, petabytes, and petabytes of data they need to protect. And so I think that's one customer that comes to mind is someone we've been with for a long time, uh, you know, been partnering with for a long time, >>A lot of, of, um, flexibility and choice for Avamar, a networker customers, as things change the world continues to pivot. And we know it's absolutely essential to be able to recover that data. You mentioned 70, I think 79% of the fortune 100 are using, uh, Dell technologies for data protection software. That's probably something that's only going to continue to grow. Um, lots of stuff coming up, as you mentioned, but what are some of the things that you're personally excited about as the world starts to open up and you get to actually go out and engage with customers >>I'm in just looking forward to like in-person meetings, right? I mean, I just love going and trying to understand what problems the customers are trying to solve and how we can help address those. Um, I think, you know, what I see customers sort of struggling with is how do they kind of manage their current environment while they're building for the future? Um, so there's a lot of interest in questions around, you know, the, how do they protect some of these new types of workloads, whether they're deployed on premise or in the public cloud. Um, so that continues to be an area where we, you know, we continue to engage with customers. Um, I'm also really personally excited about, you know, the extensions that we're doing and our cyber recovery capabilities socio can expect to hear more about some of those in the, in the next 12 months, because we're really, um, you know, seeing that as a key, uh, driver to kind of increase, um, you know, increased policies around and, and implementations around data protection, uh, is, is because of these, you know, the, the need to be able to re be resilient from cyber attacks. >>Um, I would say we're also doing some very interesting integrations with VMware. Um, we're going to have some first and only announcements around VMware and managing protection for VMware, uh, you know, VM environments. So we can look forward to hearing more about that. And, you know, we have customers that are deployed our data protection solutions at scale. Um, you know, one customer has 150,000 clients they're protecting with our data protection offerings. Wow. 150,000. And so, you know, we're continuing to improve the, and enhance the products to meet those kinds of scale requirements. And, um, you know, I'm excited by the fact that, that we've had this long standing relationship with this one particular customer and, you know, continue to, to help and, and flow an edge where, where their needs go. >>And that's something that even a great job of talking about is just not just a longstanding relationships, but really that dedication that Dell has to innovating with its customers. Laura, thank you for sharing some of the updates of what's new, what you're continuing to do with customers and what you're looking forward to in the future. It sounds like we might hear some news around the VMworld timeframe. Yes. All right, Laura, thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate your time. >>It's been great to be here. Thanks so much. >>Excellent for Laura Dwight and Lisa Martin, you're watching this cube conversation.

(gentle music) >> Welcome to this Cube Conversation, I'm Lisa Martin. Laura Dubois joins me next, VP of product management at Dell Technologies, Laura, welcome back to the program. >> Yeah, thank you so much Lisa, it's just fantastic to be here and talking about data protection now that we're coming out of COVID, it's just wonderful to be here, thank you so much. >> Isn't it so refreshing. So, you're going to provide some updates on Dell's data protection software, some of the innovation, how you're working with customers and prospects. So let's go ahead and dig right in, let's talk about some of the innovation and the enhancements that Dell is making to its data protection suite of software and also how customers are influencing that. >> Yeah, so it's a great question Lisa and you're right. We have driven a lot of innovation and enhancements in our data protection suite. And let me just level a second. So data protection suite, is a solution that is deployed by really tens of thousands of customers. And we continue to innovate and enhance that data protection suite. Data protection suite is comprised primarily of three main data protection software capabilities. So, longstanding capabilities and customer adoption of Avamar, which continues to be a central capability on our portfolio. The second one is Networker. So Networker is also an enterprise grade, highly scalable and performance data protection solution. And then a couple of years ago, we launched a new data protection capability called power protect data manager. So, all three of these capabilities, really the foundation of our data protection suite. And as I said, enterprises around the world rely on these three sets of capabilities to protect their data, regardless of wherever it resides. And it's really central now more than ever in the face of increasing security, risks and compliance and the need to be able to have an always kind of available environment that customers rely on the capabilities and data protection suite to really make sure their enterprises resilient. >> Absolutely, and make sure that that data is recoverable if anything happens, you mentioned cybersecurity. We'll get into that in a second. But so thousands of Avamar and Networker customers, what are some of the key workloads and data that these customers are protecting with these technologies? >> Yeah, I mean, so, actually tens of thousands. >> Tens of thousands. >> Tens of thousands of customers that rely on data protection suite. And it really, I think the strength and advantage of our portfolio is its breadth, breadth in terms of client operating environments, in terms of applications and databases, in terms of workloads and specifically use cases. So I mean, the breadth that we offer is unparalleled, pretty much whether Windows, Linux, OpenVMS, NetWare, kind of going back in time a long tail of kind of operating environments and then databases, right. So everything from SQL and Oracle and Sybase and DB2 to new types of databases, like the NoSQL or content store and key value store types of NoSQL schemas, if you will. And so, and then lastly is the word they use cases, right? So being able to protect data, whether that be data that's in a data center, out in remote or branch locations or data that's out in the cloud, right. And of course, increasingly customers are placing their data in a variety of locations; on Edge, on core data centers and in cloud environments. And we actually have over six exabytes of capacity under management, across public cloud environments. So pretty extensive deployment of our data protection suite in public clouds, you know, the leading hyperscalers, cloud environments and premises as well. >> So let's talk a little bit about the customer influence 'cause obviously there's a very cooperative relationship that Dell has with its customers that help you achieve things. Like, for example, I saw that according to IDC, Dell Technologies is number one in data protection, appliances, and software, leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for data center backup and recovery for over 20 years now. Talk to us a little bit more about that symbiotic customer, Dell relationship. >> Yeah, so it's a great question. We see our customers as strategic partners, and we really want to understand their business, their requirements. We engage on a quarterly basis with customers and partners in advisory councils. And then of course, we are always engaging with customers outside of those cycles on a kind of a one-on-one basis. And so we are really driving the innovation and the backlogs and the roadmap for data protection suite based upon customer feedback. And approximately 79% of the fortune 100 customers, our Dell data, Dell Technologies data protection customers. Now that's not to say that that's our only customer base. We have customers in commercial accounts, in mid-market in federal agencies, but, you know, we take our customer relationships really, really seriously, and we engage with them on a regular basis, both in a group forum to provide feedback as well as in a one-on-one basis. And we're building our roadmaps and our product release is based on feedback from customers, and again, know large customer base that we take very seriously. >> Right to the customer listening obviously it is critical for Dell. So you talked a little bit about what that cycle looks like in terms of quarterly meetings and then those individual meetings. What are some of the enhancements and advancements that customers have actually influenced? >> Yeah, so we, I mean, we, I think continuing to provide simplicity and ease of use is a key element of our portfolio and our strategy, right? So continuing to modernize and update the software in terms of workflows, in terms of, you know, common experiences also increasingly customers want to automate their data protection process. So really taking an API-first strategy for how we deliver capabilities to customers, continuing to expand our client database, hypervisor environments, continue to extend out our cloud support, you know, things like protection of cloud native applications with increasingly customers containerizing and building scale-out applications. We want to be able to protect Kubernetes environment. So that's kind of an area of focus for us. Another area of focus for us is going deeper with our key strategic partners, whether that'd be a cloud partner or a hypervisor partner. And then of course, customers, in fact, one of the top three things that we consistently hear from these councils that we do is the criticality of security, security and our data protection environment but the criticality of being able to be resilient from, and in the event of a cyber attack to be able to resilient recover from that cyber attack. So that is an area where we continue to make innovations and investments in the data protection suite as well. >> And that's so critical. One of the things that we saw in the last year, 15 months plus Laura, is this massive rise in ransomware. It's now a household word, the Colonial Pipeline for example, the meat packing plant, it's now many businesses knowing it's not, if we get attacked, but it's when. So having the ability to be resilient and recover that data is table stakes for, I imagine a business in any organization. I want to understand a little bit more. So you talked about tens of thousands of customers using Avamar and Networker. So now they have the capability of also expanding and using more of the suite. Talk to me a little bit about that. >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think it starts with the customer environment and what workloads and use cases they have. And because of the breadth of capabilities indeed the data protection suite, we really optimize the solution based upon their needs, right. So if they have a large portfolio of applications that they need to maintain but they're also building applications or systems for the future, we have a solution there. If they have a single hypervisor strategy or a multiple hypervisor strategy, we have a strategy there, if they have data that's on-premise and across a range of public clouds, one large customer we have as a, kind of three-plus one strategy around cloud. So they're leveraging three different public cloud, IS environments, and then they're also have their on-premise cloud environment. So, you know, we, it really starts with the customer workload and the data, and where it lives; whether that's be out in an Edge location in a remote or branch office, on an end point somewhere, they need to protect whether it be in a core data center or multiple data centers, or rather be in the cloud. That's how we think about optimizing the solution for the customers. >> Curious if you can give me any examples of customers maybe by industry that were, have been with Dell for a long time with Avamar and Networker for a long time and how they've expanded, being able to pick, as you say, as their, or as their environment grows and we've got, now this blur of right. It's now worked from anywhere, data centers, Edge. Talk to me about some customers examples that you think really articulate the value of what Dell is delivering. >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think one customer in the financial services sector comes to mind. They have a large amount of unstructured data that they need to protect, you know, petabytes, petabytes and petabytes of data they need to protect. And so I think that's one customer that comes to mind is someone we've been with for a long time, been partnering with for a long time. Another customer I mentioned in the, it was a kind of a three-letter software company that is a really strategic partner for us with on-premise, in the cloud. You know, healthcare is a big and important sector for Dell. We have integrations into kind of leading healthcare applications. So that's another big, whether they be a healthcare provider or a healthcare insurance company, and had a fourth example, but it's escaping my mind right now, but, I would say going back to the cyber discussion, I mean, one thing that we, where we see really customers looking for guidance from us around cyber recovery and cyber resilience is in what the, you know, of course president Biden just released this executive board on his mandate for ensuring that the federal agencies but also companies in the millisecond sector, sectors be able to ensure resilience from cyber attacks. So that's companies in financial services, that's companies in healthcare, energy, oil, and gas transportation, right. Obviously in companies and industries that are critical to our economy and our infrastructure. And so that has been an area where we've seen, recently in the last, I would say 12 months increased in engagement, you mentioned Colonial Pipeline, for example. So those are some high salient highlights I think of in terms of, you know, kind of key customers. But pretty much every sector. I mean, the U.S. government, all of the the agencies, whether they be civilian, or DOD or key kind of engagement partners of ours. >> Yeah, and as you said in the last year, what a year it's been. But really a business in every industry has got to be able to be resilient and recover when something happens. Can you talk a little bit about some of the specific enhancements that you guys have made to the suite? >> Yeah, sure. So, you know, we continue to enhance our hypervisor capabilities. So we continue to enhance not only the core VMware or hyperbaric capabilities but we continue to enhance some of the extensions or plugins that we have for those. So whether that be things like our VRealized plugin or a vCloud director plugin for say, VMware. So that's kind of a big focus for us. Continuing to enhance capabilities around leveraging the cloud for long-term retention. So that's another kind of enhancement area for us. But cloud in general is an ara where we continue to drive more and more enhancement. Improving performance in cloud environments for a variety of use cases, whether that be DR to the cloud, backup or replications of the cloud or backing up workloads that are already in the cloud. There's a key use cases for us, as well as the archive to cloud use cases. So there's just some examples or areas where we've driven enhancements and you can expect to see more, you know we have a six month release cadence for Avamar and Networker, and we continue with that momentum. And at the end of this month, we have the next major release of our data protection suite. And then six months later, we'll have the next update and so on and so forth. And we've been doing that actually for the last three to four years. This is a six month release cadence for data protection suite. We continue with that momentum. And like I said, simplicity and modernity, APIs and automation, extending our workloads and hypervisors and use cases. And then cloud is a big focusing area as well, as well as security and cyber resilience. >> Right, and so a lot of flexibility in choice for Avamar and Networker customers. As things change the world continues to pivot and we know it's absolutely essential to be able to recover that data. You mentioned 70, I think 79% of the Fortune 100 are using Dell technologies for data protection software. That's probably something that's only going to continue to grow. Lots of stuff coming up. As you mention, what are some of the things that you're personally excited about as the world starts to open up and you get to actually go out and engage with customers? >> I'm in just looking forward to like in-person meetings. I mean, I just loved going and trying to understand what problems the customers are trying to solve and how we can help address those. I think, you know, what I see customers sort of struggling with is how do they kind of manage their current environment while they're building for the future? So there's a lot of interest in questions around, how do they protect some of these new types of workloads, whether they're deployed on premise or in the public cloud. So that continues to be an area where we continue to engage with customers. I'm also really personally excited about the extensions that we're doing in our cyber recovery capabilities so as you can expect to hear more about some of those in the next 12 months, because we're really seeing that as a key driver to kind of increased policies around and implementations around data protection is because of these, you know, the needs to be able to be resilient from cyber attacks. I would say we're also doing some very interesting integrations with VMware. We're going to have some first and only announcements around VMware and managing protection for VMware, you know, VM environments. So you can look forward to hearing more about that. And we have customers that have deployed our data protection solutions at scale. One customer has 150,000 clients who they're protecting with our data protection offerings, 150,000. And so we're continuing to improve the, and enhance the products to meet those kinds of scale requirements. And I'm excited by the fact that we've had this long standing relationship with this one particular customer and continue to help in flowing up where their needs go. >> And that's something that even a great job of talking about is just not just a longstanding relationships but really that dedication that Dell has to innovating with its customers. Laura, thank you for sharing some of the updates of what's new, what you're continuing to do with customers, and what you're looking forward to in the future. It sounds like we might hear some news around the VMworld timeframe. >> Yes, I think so. >> All right, Laura, thank you so much for joining me today. Appreciate your time. >> Yeah, it's been great to be here. Thanks so much. >> Excellent from Laura Dubois and Lisa Martin, you're watching this Cube Conversation. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's the CUBE, with digital coverage of Dell technologies world, digital experience brought to you by Dell technologies. >> Hey, welcome to the CUBE's coverage of Dell technologies, world 2020. The digital experience. I am Lisa Martin, and I've got a cube alum back with me talking about managed services. David Mensing is here the senior director of product management for Dell technology services. David it's great to see you. Thanks for joining me today. >> Thank you. Good to be here. >> So here we are very, very socially distant since the whole event is socially distant this year. Talk to me a little bit about what's going on with managed services with (indistinct), you guys have been in managed services for a long time, but there's some new stuff coming out. Talk to us about that. >> Sure. Yeah. I mean, from a Dell technology services perspective, there's a lot that we do from consulting, support, deployment, education managed services has been one of those other areas that we've been working on for over 15 years. We've been managing a variety of different environments for many large enterprise customers. And so what we're trying to do right now is take a lot of that capability and start making it more widely available to more of our customers. And today what we're focusing on is in the data protection space and offering a standard managed service or data protection that's available with our flex on demand consumption model. >> So flux on demand consumption model was announced last year towards the end of calendar year 2019. Remind us what the flex on demand consumption program is. And then let's dig into why data protection was one of the first managed services launched through it. >> Yeah. So last year when we announced flex on demand, what we wanted to do is come up with a different consumption model where customers don't have to pay anything significant upfront as part of a CapEx investment. They pay for what they consume. And so we offering or offering that today on our power protect data, database products are Avamar networking software, as well as our integrated data protection appliances. And so customers can pay only for what they have to consume and then we'll charge them extra as they consume beyond that minimal commitment. And then now we have managed services. That's one of those options that we can provide as part of that solution. >> Tell me about some of the trends. Oh, go ahead. Sorry. >> No, but I think you asked the question though, as well as, you know, why did we choose managed services for data protection to start with versus doing something else? And, you know, it's an excellent question because you know, there's a lot of different environments that we do manage today. I mean, storage data protection, Hyper-converge, cloud, and we're doing that with a variety of different global customers around the world. Now, what we've seen though, is that these customers are running into a lot of common challenges, particularly around the complexity and growth in their environment. And so that's why we've been doing a lot of research with IDC and with others to focus on what specifically they're seeing in their environment. And so what they found particularly IDC came back and told us that, yeah, you know, one of the number one concerns that customers have with a flexible consumption model is backup and recovery. And so that's why we went with the service essentially from what we were already seeing from our existing customers, but also for what we were hearing from analysts. >> So since that survey that you did research with IDC, I'm curious in the COVID era, we've seen so much going on with respect to security. Ransomware is way up, I think a ransomware attack right now happens every 11 seconds. We're seeing hospitals as targets. The New Zealand stock exchange was targeted. The department of veterans affairs, social media, is there any additional or one additional data from IDC or others shows that backup and recovery is even more critical since so many people are working from home accessing networks from personal devices, what's the influence been on COVID on really accelerating this data production managed service? >> Well, I think there's two things to it. Number one with COVID we're hearing from a lot of our customers that their it staff are having to focus on more things than they did before. You know, that like you were saying, there's more security, there's more compliance, there's more other issues. And so by offering a managed service in a space like backup and recovery, we're able to reduce some of their workload free up their time so they can focus on other more critical projects. Now, furthermore, when we survey with these customers, you know, we found that most of them say You know, it was a 64% said, they lack the confidence that they can fully recover systems or data from all their platforms in the event of a data loss. And so that's one of the things that we can provide by being able to troubleshoot monitor it 24 by seven, you know, when a backup job fails, you know, there's a lot of different things that may be going on. And so we'll use the expertise that we have and our tools to go ahead and troubleshoot those so that our customers can spend their time in more important areas. >> So as we look at the multi-cloud world, in which so many businesses across industries live, we talk about multi-cloud, we talk about complex in IT, a lot of businesses have multiple data protection solutions within them, some maybe for on prem, some protecting cloud applications. Talk to me about how this managed service would enable a business in any industry to get that centralized management and that visibility into everything they're backing up from physical servers to SAS applications for example. >> That's a great question there. So, you know, going back to one of the things I mentioned earlier, I mean, we're number right now in the marketplace for data, project software and appliances. And so all of our products provide those different flexible options to whether you're managing an on prem environment that you need to do data protection for, or a hybrid or public cloud environment. And so with that, as part of the managed service, we'll run a series of different reports and monitoring, and we'll be able to unify all those different pieces into a couple of different dashboards and reports provide that visibility back to the customers about what's being backed up what they need to go ahead and restore that particular moment, as well as see some of the other trends that are going on with their environment. >> So let's talk about the actual consumption of this. You talked a little bit about when the flux on-demand program was launched towards the calendar end of 2019. So much has changed since then for many, many months, many businesses globally were really in this, how do we survive mode? The pivot were pivots were so quickly, there were a lot of them they're still happening. So talk to us about how this select on demand program I imagine of the facilitator of some businesses being able to get to survival and eventually to being able to thrive in this new era. >> It's a, it's a great point. You know, it'd be the great thing about the option that we now have with flux on demand is, you know, like I said before, customers don't have to pay everything upfront. You know, generally speaking, when we sell a product, you know, we're thinking about a multi-year commitment that a customer has, that they pay all upfront at that point with this they're only paying month to month, and that could be anywhere from 40% consumption of the box or 80% consumption of the box. And then they can pick and choose whether that's over a one year, two year, three year or even a five year term. And so we'll establish a rate so that, Hey, based off that commitment, you know, you'll know exactly what you pay for 40%. If you exceed that, you'll know exactly what you'll be charged for that as well. So that provides not only some predictability in what the customers need to budget for pay every month, but more importantly, they're saving a lot of money from the standpoint of, Hey, they're not having to pay for that all upfront anymore. They can actually spread that out overtime. And so that flexibility particularly in the economic space we are right now is really, really important. >> So no more risk of over provisioning and then having in three to five years to buy more, even if you haven't used that capacity. And that's one of the challenges that we hear often in that space. >> Correct, Correct. I mean, the great thing with data is we're generating more data every single day, but you know, it takes a lot of the guesswork out of it in the fact that, Hey, you can make a commitment, 40% consumption. You can work with that. If you find a couple of months later that, Hey, we need to readjust that to another level. We can absolutely work with you to do that as well. >> So I'm curious what that the kind of split is between what the managed services group does and what the customers can do. Knowing that there's a lot of experts on the managed services team. What actions can customers take? For example, you talked about we'll determine what them, what percentage between 40 and 80 they've paid per month, when things change on their end, how can they adjust that. >> Now? it's a great point. When we talk about managed services, that's always the first question that comes up of, Hey, exactly what are you going to manage for me versus what does my staff need to continue to look at? And so we're going to go ahead and manage the jobs. We'll make sure that they run. And, you know, if there are issues where we need to go in there and troubleshoot and make changes, we'll go ahead and do that. And really what we're designing here is a process to where the customer doesn't have to call us, we're going to call the customer to let them know when, Hey, we see an issue. We need to make a change in their environment and notify them, but we still want to give the customers the flexibility of, Hey, if they need to make a change to their backup policy. Cause their environment has changed. Call us, submit a ticket. Let's talk through it. Let's make those changes together so that you got the right protection strategy. Furthermore, the customer, if they need to restore a file, they can submit a ticket and we'll go ahead and assist to make sure that we can get that data restored back for them with the right version and the right place as part of that. >> Had any interesting stories. I know we talked a minute ago about, you know, when the pandemic hit, there was this massive pivot to work from home. And suddenly you had people that were either taking a desktop. Out of, their physical location, bringing it home, or they were having to use one of their own devices connecting to a corporate network. We think about endpoints as being even absolutely critical. There's a lot of business, critical data on end points. What are some of the restorations that you've seen? For example, if someone deletes an entire mailbox or a calendar or there's corrupt data on a somebody gets hit with ransomware, how quickly can your data protection managing production service, recover data? >> You know, it's a great question. And, you know, we've got a variety of different ways to approach that, you know, depending on the customer environment, it may be something where it's acceptable to wait a few days or longer to restore files. It may not be critical, but certainly if it is very critical data and it is something that you need up and running right away, you know, you've got to look at not just the managed service approach, but you've also got to look at what is the software and the hardware approach to data protection? How many copies do you have? How closely, located is some of that equipment. And more importantly, have we looked at the networking latency impact of, Hey, if we did have to do a critical restore, how long would that take? And so that is part of what we can do for managed services is address. Hey, is the policy and the strategy we have in place is it actually meeting our customer needs? Is that the outcome that they're looking for? And so at that time, you know, we may find that, Hey, this may not be the right size solution. There may be some adjustments we need to make. Furthermore, it may be just simply making some changes in the configuration, in the policy to make sure that, Hey, we've got multiple copies that we're doing backups maybe a little bit more frequently, but that's always a really good discussion point with our customers to make sure do we have the right data protection strategy in place with not just the hardware and software, but with the service strategy we're applying against it. >> You mentioned in the beginning of our conversation that a survey that I forget if it was IDC or a different one you mentioned that 64% of the IT folks surveyed said, we don't have confidence that we can fully recover. Given what you are talking about here, data protection is a managed service offered through the flux on demand program. Ideal technologies world, those folks in the 64% of we don't have that confidence, what can they learn? What can they expect? and how can this new managed service help move them over the line to getting that confidence that they can recover anything they need? >> Yeah, the confidence that we can help them with on that is transparency. You know, like I'd mentioned, you know, we want to change the paradigm to where customers not having to call us, we're calling them. But even from that standpoint, you know, it's really important for us to be able to demonstrate through the reports through the other work that we're doing, that we are doing the backups that we are restoring and we're meeting the service level objectives that we defined with those customers. And so as part of that, we have a service delivery manager that will work with the customer on a scheduled meeting every month to go through those reports, check with them about their expectations to make sure that we're doing everything that they need us to answer any questions. And then if we need to meet with them more frequently than once a month, we absolutely can. But we want to ensure that the service is totally addressing what the customer is looking for and that they're seeing the right amount of information and data to give them confidence that we're delivering the services they need them to. >> Sounds to me like proactive support. Is that something that you think the customers in that majority who don't feel confident have they not had data protection services. that were proactively saying, Hey guys, here's what's going on in your environment? >> Yeah so, you know, certainly in the, in the industry, I mean, there's a lot that we provide from proactive services We' ll practically notify you when we see a hardware error in your environment. But in the absence of managed services, the customer is in charge, the customer is the one that is running the environment. They're having to monitor all the different events, have a backup job fails they need to figure out well, did it fail because I had a networking issue or because the system had too much IOPS at that point, or was it just, we had two conflicting jobs trying to ride, run at the same time, means the customer takes on all that complexity themselves when they go ahead and manage it. And for a lot of customers that may be the right solution. They may have the right expertise in house. They may have the right requirements or require that, but there's a lot of other customers we're finding, particularly in the state we are right now with COVID that they want to go ahead and move some of that complexity over another partner, which is what we're offering with the managed services. >> Last question at Dell technologies world, the digital experience this year. Tell me about what you're going to be talking about. what can folks expect to learn from you? (laughs) >> We're going to talk a lot more about the managed services for data protection. We're going to talk about how that aligns very, very cleanly with the flux on demand and talk about the benefits you get from both of those different models. >> Excellent. David, thanks so much for joining us on the cube today. Sharing what's going on with flux on demand program, managed services for data protection and how you can help customers navigate their complex data protection needs in a very strange world. We appreciate your time. (chuckles) >> Thank you >> For David Mensing, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage with Dell technologies world 2020. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hi welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios, with our ongoing coverage of the Dell Technology World 2020, the digital experience, we can't be together this year, but we can still get together this way. And we're excited for our very next segment, really talking about one of the big leverage points that the Dell VMware relationship can result in, so we're excited. Joining us our next guest is Guy Bartram, he is the Director of Product Marketing for Cloud Director, for VMware. Guy great to see you, where are you coming in from? >> Thanks for having me on Jeff. >> Where are you coming in from today? (Guy chuckles) >> So this yeah, this London for me, this is from London. >> Excellent, great to see you. >> In the UK. >> And also joining us, Doug Lieberman, he is the Global Solutions Director for Dell Technology, Doug, great to see you, where are you coming in from today? >> Well, thanks for having me, I'm calling in from just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States. >> Excellent, love Philly's lived there for a couple of years and man, there's some terrific food in that part of the world, I tell yah. So let's get into--- >> You say--- >> Are you Pat's or Geno's. >> Actually I'll eat either one but I think I prefer Pat. >> Okay buddy, I used to get one of each and eat half and half and piss people off that were the purest, but that's a difference--- >> That's the right way to do it. (Jeff and Guy laughs) >> Right, so let's get into it, you know, before we turned on the cameras, you guys were talking about this exciting announcement that you've been working on for a really long time. So before we get kind of into the depths and the importance, why don't we just go ahead and tell us, what is the big announcement that we're sharing today? Go to you Guy. >> And so VMware and Dell really have worked together and we both have partner programs that are focused on service providers, Cloud Service providers, and systems integrators and strategic outsourcers. And what we've done is work together to build a solution that is really targeted towards them in the cloud arena, so taking our cloud capabilities and solutions and optimizing it for cloud providers and doing that through what we call, leveraging our Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and putting VMware Cloud Director on top of that. >> So that's pretty amazing, and really, to you Guy, what does that enable Cloud Service providers to do that they couldn't do so well before? >> It brings a whole lot of benefits to a Cloud Service provider, I mean, for cloud providers, historically they've had to have infrastructure services that've been, you know, quite heavy for them to build, taken a long time to get the market, and really had a high burn and operational costs and this solution VMware Cloud Director on Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is going to bring them the multitenancy aspects of cloud director and all of the speed and efficiencies in application and infrastructure delivery to enable them to address the common need now around hybrid cloud management and hybrid cloud operations. >> And you talked about before, I'm sorry, go ahead, Doug. >> No, I was saying, you know, I think that the big key piece is that, there're special requirements that cloud providers really need from their infrastructure, from their cloud, that makes it special to their business model, and what this aims to do, is to provide those capabilities in a easily consumable and rapid implementation format so that they can get to revenue faster and they can get to higher level services faster. >> It's funny, you talked about getting to revenue faster, back in the day I worked at Intel and Craig Barrett was famous for TTM. TTM, everyone used to think it was time to market bringing a new product to market, and he said, no, no, no, it's time to money, right, how fast can you get operational, so that you can basically get this thing to start generating revenue, I always think of that when you look at seven 37 sitting at a gate, you know, how do you get it operational? So Doug, what were some of those special challenges that they have in their market and how are you helping them solve them? >> So it's a great question, Jeff, as we work with service providers all over the world, they've given us a consistent message, that the days of the value in their service being, how they build the underlying cloud and how they do that orchestration automation are really behind us, right, they're expecting today, an end to end capability delivered as sort of an appliance for that underlying infrastructure for the cloud components, so that they can focus on the higher level services and the things that provide more value and more margin for them, and so, you know, the as a service offerings that run on top of the underlying cloud. And so what this joint solution does is really provide a validated design so that they can redirect their engineering resources from figuring out how to make that base cloud work in a service provider format, with multitenancy, chargeback, showback, portals, et cetera, and get that up and running faster and not have to worry about how to automate all that themselves, so they can focus their engineering efforts on those higher level services that provide greater value to their bottom line, to be honest, >> Great, that's great, and Guy, I want to go back to you, you know, the Cloud Service providers probably don't get as much of publicity as you know, we hear all the time about the big public Cloud Providers, you know, the big three or four or however you want to count them and we hear a lot about data centers and staff migrating between those two, we don't hear a lot of conversation in kind of the hybrid or the multicloud discussion about the role of the smaller Cloud Service providers. So I wonder if you can share a little bit about how they play in the market, you know why this is a really important segment for everyone's, you know, kind of architecture and ability to deliver applications. >> That's great common, I mean, one of the things we tend to call on our partners internally is the fall of mega cloud, that you know you really haven't heard of, there's 4,000 partners in our partner program and all of them are providing very valuable cloud services. They provide cloud services they've in all areas of cloud, so this could be into Azure, Google, AWS or in their own data centers, and many of them have come from infrastructure rich environments or what we call asset heavy environments and delivering services in these environments. The recent kind of drive to cloud adoption and digital transformation has meant that there's been a growing demand for Cloud Service providers to deliver valuable managed services and professional services to help customer do that digital transformation and really help the customer identify, where their customer's workloads, would be best apt and running. And, you know, cloud providers specialize in delivering these services like Doug was saying, they're looking at that higher value and they brought a lot of skills and capability in those areas. >> That's great, 'cause it's really good to keep in mind they pay a really important role in this whole thing. And Doug I want to go back to you in terms of working together with VMware in the solution space, right, so it's one thing to talk about a relationship between two companies, it's one thing to see Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger on stage together, it's a whole nother deal to get together and put in the investment in these joint solutions. So I wonder if you could share a little bit more color on not only today's announcement, but what this really means for you guys going forward and more importantly, your customers, and ultimately your customer's customers. >> Absolutely, so Dell and VMware are both committed to really driving the success of our Cloud Provider partners all over the world, and to do that, we recognize that there's an additional level of capabilities that we need to bring together and jointly do that. And so we agreed to work together to go build a series of capabilities that are really targeted at going beyond just the basic HCI market and the basic cloud market and extending that for capabilities that are targeted specifically and built specifically for our service providers. And so this solution that we're announcing today is the first step on a journey, but we both committed to and made investments in, continuing that and adding more and more capabilities as we move forward and really addressing that very specific market. And working with our Cloud Service provider partners to figure out what is the next step, what do they need from us, at the end of the day, we're looking to jointly help them be more successful and accelerate their time to market and their go to market capabilities. >> Right, that's great, and Guy back to you, you actually had some numbers, some IDC numbers that you can share in terms of some of the real measurable benefits of this. >> That's right Jeff, yeah, we have, IDC did a recent analysis for us with about 12 partners interviewed across the globe, and some of the results that came back were pretty astounding actually, this pay-for is available on our VCE product page on vmware.com. But just as kind of summarize, you know, we talk about getting to revenue faster, they found that on average service providers were able to onboard customers, i.e migrate them, into their cloud environment around 72% faster, 57% faster delivery of new services and we all know that, you know, portfolio and construction of services takes a long time, but you get business units to buy in to give it support services, so 57% faster delivery of services is incredible. And then, you know, obviously getting to revenue 32% more revenue from VCD services than without VCD and 51% overall more growth with VCD from things like more efficient operations, which are also marked at like 31%. So, you know, significant advantages to having Cloud Director bringing those economies of scale, bringing that capability to migrate from a customer premise into service providers cloud, and then obviously be able to utilize multiple larger clouds across multiple regions. >> That's great, and Doug, I wonder if you could share, are there some specific applications that are driving this more than others, is there any particular kind of subset of the solutions that you can highlight where you're getting the most demand and where you see kind of the both short term opportunity as well as mid and longterm opportunity? >> A great question, I think it really evolves around a couple of different aspects. So one is from a pure security standpoint and things like data sovereignty, we're seeing an increased demand for the service providers that are our partners, as in the ecosystem of cloud, there will always be a role for the hyperscaler clouds as well as the role of these independent Cloud Service providers that are at the next tier down, both for the data sovereignty issues, things like GDPR, but as well as kind of that personal feel, that personal touch and specialty in applications, some of the specific areas we're seeing are things like business process management capabilities, database as a service, VDI as a service, but even more critically things like cyber recovery and backup as a service we're seeing, especially in the current situation that we're in, really an uptick in the cyber attacks and the ransomware, et cetera, and so solutions such as our cyber recovery are critical in those capabilities and those higher level services tied into and integrated with an overall service provider framework are key. And so in the area that we're really seeing uptake are really the business critical mission functions that enterprises are looking to run in a trusted partner's data center, and that's what we're seeing, where we're a lot of traction for this Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, combining VCD and VCF together to give you all those features and enterprise reliability. >> Right, and I didn't ask you Guy kind of the partnership question about having the opportunity to put your capability, you know, on the Dell Cloud Platform, opens up a whole new set of field resources, a whole new set of technical resources, you know, a whole different resources, not that VMware's short on resources by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly an additive, you know, kind of one plus one makes three opportunity. >> Yeah, I mean, it's great to be doing this and we've actually already been doing this on a couple of other initiatives, so from my perspective, I, you know, I manage Cloud Director Portfolio and we've already integrated Dell, Data Domain Dell, Avamar backup solutions, Data Protection Suite, into VCD as self service and we've already put in quite a bit of work, working together with Dell on that, as we go forward we're going to be putting more work into supporting VCD on the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and integrating more services from Dell and from other vendors into the solution as well. So all we want to really provide is the capability for service provider to have the easy to consume hardware model, easy to consume subscription software model, with our program, and then the extensibility of services over and above just the infrastructure layer. So looking at things like object storage, and as Doug said, data protection, migration services, container cluster services, there's a myriad of services that VCD provides today out the box, and then there's the a whole extensibility framework, which we use when we work with partners, like we've done with Dell to deliver things like data protection. >> Yeah, I want to go back to you Doug, in terms of kind of a higher level, this whole transition to as a service, you've been in the business for a long time, you've been in the solutions a long time, but, you know, switching everything to as a service, as often as we can, and as frequently as we can, and as broadly across portfolio is really a terrific response to what the customers now, are looking for. So I'm wondering if you share some color on, you know, this philosophy of trying to get to, as a service, as much as you can, across the broadest solution set as you can. >> Yeah and if you look over the last decade, and decade and a half, there has been this increasing trend to moving to as a service offerings and the public clouds really drove a large part of that, than in tier two service providers around the globe. The key piece especially in the current business model, then going forward is how do you optimize, your CapEx versus OPEX and how do you really leverage the IT infrastructure to the maximum extent possible, based upon current business conditions, and that means the ability to grow and train and the ability to only consume what you need. In the past, when we had traditional data centers, you basically built for the worst case, and so the worst case was you had, an accounting run that happened at the end of the month that required a lot of processing power, then you built to that and that's what you use, and for the rest of the month, it really mostly idle. The cloud model really gives you the ability to A, improve their, or only use what you need and consume when you want to use it, but also adds in really shifting the responsibility for the management and the operations into someone, people who are experts in that area, so that again, you as a business can focus on your mission critical aspects of what you do whether that's developing a drug, building cars, making pizza, whatever it is, really as a service model enables your business to drive their core competency and not have to worry about the IT infrastructure that other people can do more efficiently and with better value than you could do it internally. And all that drive to that as a service model with the additional financial models that really aligned to the business paradigm that really companies are looking for. >> As you're saying that I'm thinking, wow, remember those days when our worst case scenario, was running a big batch load at the end of the month or the end of the quarter, and that would be re-missed, right, we are 2020, we're spread out all over the country and the world on both sides of the Atlantics. If I didn't say something about, you know, kind of the COVID impacts in terms of this accelerate, 'cause we hear it all the time in social media, right, who's driving your digital transformation, is it the CEO, the CIO, of COVID, and we've moved from this kind of light switch moment and then merged to, hey, this is an ongoing thing, and you know, kind of the new normal, is the new normal. And it's really shifted, a lot of people are talking about, you know, kind of shifts in the cloud infrastructure, the direction of the traffic, right, from going now from East to West and it's North to South, 'cause it's going to everybody's home. I wonder, I'll go back to you Guy, in terms of, the response that you've heard from some of your customers, in a response to, you know, kind of A, let's put a stop gap in early March that was interesting, and critical, and done, but now, kind of looking forward as to, you know, kind of a redistribution of workloads and architecture and users and I think Doug talked about security. How are you seeing any kind of ongoing effects and how is this impacting, you know, kind of you go to market and what you guys are bringing to market. >> Yeah, we're definitely seeing a lot of change in the way that service providers are trying to address this now. At the start of COVID, it was really a struggle, I think, for everyone to get the resources that they required to keep customers up from running, a lot of people started re-examining their disaster recovery contingency planning, and realizing that actually, what has happened in the last couple of years is, you know, workloads have exploded, a lot of patient workloads have completely gone through the roof and container workloads have grown drastically, and what's happened is the contingency plans behind all this stuff haven't changed and they just simply can't keep up the dynamic nature of the way we're doing business. Quite simply put technology is outpacing our weight, our ability to deal with that, so, you know, service providers need to provide a platform solution that enables them to be able to orchestrate at scale and enables them to orchestrate securely at scale, and really that means they've got to move away from this is hardware analog and move into virtual resourcing, cloud resource pooling elasticity, and particularly hypothesy. I know VMware we talk a lot about hybrid solutions and multicloud, but it's a reality when you look at where customers are today in their cloud journey, most of them have a footprint in their premise, have a footprint in a cloud provider premise and have multiple footprints in public cloud environments, so they need to have that consistent security model across that, they need to have data contingency and backup solutions, and someone needs to be in that to manage that, and that's where the service providers come in. They need to move away from the kind of infrastructure day to day operations that they were doing before and scale it out to now application protection and application development environments. >> Right, so Doug, I'm going to give you the last word as we wrap up this segment, you know, it's easy for us and pundits and people to write about multicloud and hybrid cloud and all these concepts, you guys actually have to make it work on the ground with real customers and real workloads. So I wonder if you could just kind of, you know, share your perspective, you've been working on this Dell Cloud Platform, you know, kind of how you see this evolving over time, and again, kind of what gets you up in the morning as you look forward as to what this journey is going to be over the next six months, one year, two year, three years down the road. >> Brought a lot of functionality capabilities to the world, right, the ability to consume things as you need them, the ability to really rely on a combined set of clouds and multicloud, and if you look at any enterprise that by any estimate, any company of any size, it's probably got 12, 15 clouds that contain their multicloud between using hyperscalers, tier two service providers, as well as cloud based services like Salesforce.com or Office 365, and you combine all those together and what that provides is a lot of flexibility, a lot of functionality, but also an extreme amount of complexity. And that complexity is really where Dell Technologies Cloud and Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is looking to help and to reduce that complexity, 'cause ultimately a successful enterprise is going to leverage the best from multiple clouds across multiple different implementations in order to provide the end to end IT experience that they need for both their external facing and internal IT operations. And with Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and working with our service providers, what we aim to do is to simplify the implementation of those multiple clouds and how they work together and make it as seamless as possible to shift workloads where they need to be, see your entire virtual enterprise IT environment, no matter where it's running, and to really optimize on your business to understand how you're using cloud, where you're using cloud, and how those clouds work together. And so the integration of all the different features with VMware and Dell bring together that end to end capability to significantly simplify the multicloud experience, and then ultimately our service provider partners, can help you on that journey to provide that management and orchestration across those different clouds and the data transformation, the digital transformation necessary in order to drive success. >> That's great, well, thank you Doug, for putting a nice big bow on it, and congratulations to you both for getting this release out, I know there's a lot of hard work and effort behind it, so it's always kind of good to finally get to expose it to the real world, so thanks for taking a few minutes with us. >> Great, thank you for having us. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah thanks Jeff, thank you. >> All right, he's Guy, he's Doug, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (soft upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Commvault Future Ready 2020 brought to you by Commvault. >> Hi and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman and I'm joined by David Vellante here. Of course, we just had the keynote for Commvault Future Ready, Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO. Dave, he's been there a little bit over a year. We've been watching the transformation of Commvault as they are trying to go much deeper in the cloud. Of course, the space, data protection overall, backup and recovery, been a super hot one. Especially, if you talk about everybody accelerating what they're doing with the cloud, Dave, from an end user standpoint, as well as for Commvault. So why don't we start with the company first, as I said, the move to subscription, the move to cloud, a lot of change needed, and that's one of the reasons they brought Sanjay into the company. Of course, he'd been at Puppet before that, he was the CIO of EMC before that. So Dave, tell us your thoughts lately on Commvault. >> Okay, so Commvault, obviously Stu, has been around for a long, long time, and it's kind of a diversified player in the data protection space. I've always felt like they've had a more diversified sort of vision and portfolio. Sanjay took over, what was it February last year, right? So he kind of came in and inherited a company in transition. And transitioning from what has largely been a legacy sort of on-prem, perpetual software licensed business to now one that's transferring into a subscription based model, obviously a large maintenance base. I think about 60% of their revenues comes from services, and most of that is maintenance, okay? So he's inherited that, and then they're going into a subscription model. So that's going to hit the income statement, and then boom COVID hits. So Sanjay is getting it all from all sides, but Commvault is a 670, roughly, million dollar company on a trailing 12 month basis. And the market cap's in the 1.7, 1.8 range, so they trade at about 2.7 times revenue. So that's much better than a hardware company, but it should be better than that as a software company. So the challenge that he has is, okay, how do we get the company growing again? How do we transition to that subscription based model? The good news on Commvault is their balance sheet is tremendous. I mean, they have no debt, no debt. I mean, several hundred million dollars in cash, over 300 million and zero debt, which kind of interesting to me, Stu. Because many companies during this COVID pandemic have tapped the credit markets, Commvault has chosen not to. Maybe they should right now with such low interest rates, and maybe that can help get the growth engine going. But I think they're very conservative in that standpoint and obviously very proud of their balance sheet, but with the likes of Cohesity and Rubrik, and I know we're going to talk about that pouring money into the market, trying to attack them, and we'll talk more about their position relative to those guys, you might like to see 'em raise a little bit of money or take on some debt and really go after some of those opportunities that you referred to upfront, it is a hot market. >> Yeah, well, Dave, you talk about some of the newer entrants raised just insane amounts of money when you talk about that space. Not only Cohesity and Rubrik, but also talked about Veem. Of course, we've watched Veem go from a change in ownership and how much money they have. And from a revenue standpoint, Veem actually might be bigger than Commvault at this point, I believe, right? >> Yeah, I think so. I mean, they're billion dollar bookings, they say. I mean, I believe it, but they're a privately held company. Commvault, we can tell actually what their numbers are. Guaranteed Cohesity and Rubrik are losing money. So their cost of acquiring a customer is huge. Commvault is, let's face it, it's servicing its install base, and it's mining that. And that's why it's, it's cashflow positive. I mean, it's a very healthy company financially. The challenge that, again, Sanjay has is how do you get growth? They're a company, as I said earlier, in transition. Let me share with you, if I may, some data from our friends at ETR. What we're showing here is the fundamental methodology of ETR, which is that net score, Stu. We talk about that all the time, ETR is, as I say, our data partner, Enterprise Technology Research. Every quarter, they go out and they say, "Based for each company and their various segments, "are you adopting new?" That's the lime green, that's the 2%. "Are you increasing spending?" That's the 30%, and this is from the July survey so this is relative to the first half. "Are you flat?" You can see that fat middle 56%, and then you can see decrease is 7% and that's in the pink, and then 5% replacing. So good news here is more people are spending more, more customers spending more, than are spending less. Net score's the red subtracted from the green, so it comes out at roughly 20%, which is that's certainly not terrible. It's a legacy company that's been around a long time. So you would see a company that's a newbie, that's hot. We'd always talked about UI path automation anywhere, Snowflake, they're in the 70% range, but they're much, much smaller companies but they're growing very, very rapidly. So this is respectable and very common for a company that has been around as long as Commvault. >> Yeah, thanks so much for sharing that data, Dave. Of course, as you said, huge customer base, they've been around for awhile. I remember when we first did Commvault GO two years ago, very excited, very engaged user base. There was a good strategy discussion and an understanding for what Commvault needed to do to get to the cloud, but there was an understanding that they couldn't keep doing with the same team what had brought them to the place before. You always say, Dave, what got you to where you were isn't going to get you to where you need to go. Talk a little bit about the keynote. Last year at Commvault there were a couple of big pieces. Number one, is they really had their first SaaS offering with Metallic. And what the momentum has been on Metallic is, first of all, they made a big partnership announcement with Microsoft ahead of this event. Multi-year, Metallic has a few different solutions. One of them, of course, is to work on Office 365, so when we go to SaaS and we go to the cloud, we understand that data protection isn't something that just comes inherently. Some people thought, "Oh hey, I did it "in my own data center, but once I go to the cloud, well, "I'm sure it just takes care of things "like data protection and security." The answer is I still need to think about it, and the ecosystem has helped filling that gap. So Metallic was the first step and what we saw, Dave, really looks like a holistic refresh of the product line. Commvault back in recovery, Commvault disaster recovery, Commvault complete data protection, all aligning themselves to be more to what you were talking about, going to that full ratable model, and the other piece was Hedvig. So Hedvig software company, helping them to be in more cloud-native environments. And they launched a Hedvig X, so it's the full integration of that solution. Less than a year from the acquisition to fully integrating it and making it an offering that's ready for what they're doing. >> Is that they're cloud play? Actually Hedvig is sort of in that space, right? As with cloud you think subscription, but also Commvault is basically putting its stack in the cloud, right? And taking advantage of cloud services, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Metallic, specifically is built for the cloud. >> So let's talk a little bit about cloud, I have some other data here. And the cloud, if you pull up that next slide, the cloud has been eating away at on-prem vendors. We know it's been growing at 2000, 3000 basis points higher than the on-prem business. But what this slide shows is that same net score methodology that we talked about before, but it's filtering, you can see in the left hand side here, it's filtering on AWS, Google and Microsoft. So there's 585, AWS, Google and Microsoft customers in the ETR dataset. There's like about 1200 in the overall survey this quarter. And this shows the over time the net score of Commvault in those accounts, so you can see, as I was saying, go back to 2018, you can see prior to Sanjay taking over this thing was dipping and dipping, losing momentum coming into kind of the April survey and then July survey of 2019, and it's kind of bouncing off the bottom now. So it seems like they're making some progress there, and what we want to see is that momentum continue to grow. Again, net score is a measure of spending velocity. So what you want to see is as that transition occurs more sort of a net score increases over each quarter. >> Yeah, well, Dave as you mentioned earlier, there absolutely are some headwinds potentially there, but it looks like Sanjay, at least, has stopped some of the bleeding on this and, stated goal of course, to return to growth. And so we would want to see that go from just up one or 2% to be able to track with the cloud. Probably a good time for us to talk a little bit about the competition, Dave, because if you talk just in cloud markets, are you tracking along with the cloud? So the hyperscales themselves, of course, growing at very huge percent. A company that's been around as long as Veritas isn't necessarily going to be doing 35 to 70% growth as you would see from AWS or Azure. But what do you see out there for some of the competition in general, who were some of the key players that we need to look at? >> Yeah, so I mean, think about the backup guys. I mean, the traditional space, you've mentioned Veritas. Veritas, by the way, in the ETR survey data is not playing well, they're in the red. They've been losing share, the share donors, as they say, you've got some big players, Dell EMC, obviously, kind of living off the data domain base. Remember Dell EMC fell behind, prior to the Dell acquisition, they weren't investing heavily in the data protection business. They were kind of living milking off that data domain base. Back when you were there, they had the networker and they had Avamar, and so there was a bifurcated thing. Frank Slootman came and he tried to clean some of that up, but then he was onto his next big thing, of course, it was ServiceNow. And so, you know, Dell is a big footprint, obviously, but they're very hardware centric, as you know, so they have a big hardware agenda. IBM with Spectrum Protect, Veem was hurting them. They did the deal with Catalogic to kind of stop the bleeding, he kind of did. Again, big install base, and then you got the sort of newcomers. Veem is not really a newcomer anymore. I think they've been around for 15 years, big acquisition. Decent momentum in the market, especially started the Microsoft base, and they're kind of everywhere, so you see them. And of course you see Cohesity and Rubrik spend a lot of money, as you said. And it's interesting, let me pull up this next data point. In the ETR data set this past quarter you saw Cohesity actually overtake Rubrik. Rubrik was very, very strong earlier on. They're kind of neck and neck in this chart, what this chart shows is not net score, it's now market share. Now market shares, not real market shares, Stu. I have to be cautious here because it's not like IDC tracks market share. What it is is pervasiveness in the dataset. So in other words, within this segment, the number of mentions of the vendor divided by the total mentions in the segment, okay? So it's really pervasiveness or presence in the data set. And what this shows is you can see we've got 65 Commvault customers in the survey, and it shows the impact of Veem, Rubrik and Cohesity in the Commvault base. And you can see up through, let's see, that's the recent surveys is you see the increases up to the increasing red line is Veem, and then you got the Rubrik line and then the Cohesity line, but they're all recently, since the October 19th survey, down, trending down. So that says to me that Commvault is holding serve within its own base and actually doing better as these guys are declining in this base. You can see the comment that ETR made, "Rubrik, Cohesity and Veeam are all seeing "market share declines in shared accounts with Commvault," so that's good news. I think this is very important, Stu, and here's why. Is Commvault has got to hunker down and maintain those customers. It does not want to be a share donor much in the same way that Veritas has been. So that's a quick scan of the competitive marketplace. And again, from my standpoint, I'd like to see Sanjay maybe get a little bit more aggressive. I liked the acquisitions. Hedvig, it's great, deal with actually some more subscription, but I'd like to see them go hard after a cloud native. I have to dig into that, maybe you can comment, but really cloud native and multicloud across clouds being able to have that same experience on-prem as I do in the clouds at very high performance, very low latency. >> Yeah. Well, Dave, first of all, one thing, talk about the competitive win rate. That's something you always look at is how are you doing against the competitors? Not only did Sanjay come in, but you saw changes along how the channel chief, I believe, and the salespeople. So definitely reinvigorating that piece of it, as well as, Dave we saw, in the keynote. So the portfolio is updated, an aggressive engineering investment, some through acquisition, some through changing the code and moving in these environments, leveraging partnerships, great to see the Microsoft one, love to see something along the lines of Google. We understand Amazon, you play in that ecosystem, it is challenging to necessarily partner deeply with AWS, unless you're one of a few strong players in the marketplace, but working closer in cloud. And Dave, one thing I'd point out, last year, one of the things that really impressed me at Commvault GO is they did have some good developer actions. So when you talk about cloud native, of course, enabling developers is one of the key things. Like many companies out there, inside the company you've got developers, so how are you unleashing that? So Hedvig, a good acquisition along those lines, but you know, in the middle of the show floor, they had people that you set up with whiteboards and just go at it. So, you know, reminds me of days past when you used to have these engineering-driven shows where you could go in and really understand that. So helping to developers, enable them, backup and recovery just needs to tie into all my DevOps and IT Ops and all my other environments to make things just more automated because also you talk cloud native, Dave, automation has to be a big piece of it. And to your point, we actually have really good guests coming on the program. Not only will we have Sanjay, relatively fresh off the keynote, I've got a panel with the product people to really dig in and understand that. We'll poke and prod at some of the cloud native pieces and understand where that's going, got their head of strategy also on the program. >> Yes, I think you're making a great point about automation. Just speaking about M&A for a moment, I like M&A, I like growth through M&A, I'm comfortable with that as long as it fits into the portfolio. Your point about automation, I see opportunities there for M&A, things like visibility, observability, obviously hot analytics, automated operations, IT Ops, anything that sort of removes labor and complexity and gives me visibility across clouds. That I think is something that could be interesting, again, as long as it fits into the portfolio. I'll say this, I mean, Sanjay was at EMC and knows M&A because I've no doubt they were bringing all their M&A candidates to Sanjay and saying, "Okay, what do you think of this tech, do you use it?" Probably kick the tires a little bit, so he, I'm sure, was a part of those. I'm sure he saw the good, the bad, and the ugly. You were there, EMC was pretty good at acquisitions, but then it got a little out of control. >> And Dave, talk automation, Sanjay came from Puppet. Puppet was one of the early companies along helping people move along from those manual tasks to how can we automate those? So, absolutely, Sanjay now a little over a year in there, starting to see from the product standpoint, and expect to see some of the trailing results as to how that moves forward. >> And then again, blending that, if it's a tuck in or whatever, maybe there's some big chess move out there. I would just suspect given Commvault's conservative nature you wouldn't see that. Although, they could do it. I mean, at their revenue level, their balance sheet would allow them to raise some debt, if they wanted to do that now would be the time to do it. But it's interesting, everybody's doing it and they're not. So I kind of liked the contrarian play. Given the opportunity in the market, given the TAM expansion through, beyond backup into data management, and it's a cloud and multicloud, I do think there's maybe an opportunity for them to be a little bit more aggressive. >> All right, well, Dave, thanks so much for helping us dig in and kick off our coverage. >> You're welcome, Stu. >> All right, stay with us. We have a bunch of interviews here for Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube covering Dell Technologies world 2019 brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Good afternoon and welcome back to theCube day three of our live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019, I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Dave Vellante. Hey, Dave. >> Hey, Lisa, how's it going? >> Good. Day three. >> It's cold here. >> It's cold in here. I agree. But we're going to lighten it up with some really good conversation. We've got Rob Emsley back on thCube, Director of Product Marketing for data protection, Dell EMC, Rob, great to have you back. >> Great to be back. >> We got show and tell you brought Adam Schmitt network architect from customer GEI consultants. Welcome, Adam. >> Thank you-- >> Time to heat it up. >> What a great topic he's out with data protection. >> It's a hot topic. You're right. All right. So before we turn the way up on the seat, Adam, give us an overview of GEI Consultants who you guys are, what you do. >> Sure, GEI consultants is an environmental water resources, structural an engineering firm, we focus on anything and everything under the sun from structural geotechnical, bio chemical, you know, pretty much anything and everything engineering. >> So important stuff. Talk to us about before you were using working with Dell EMC, talk to us about your, your infrastructure, on prem, hybrid, what were you doing in terms of ensuring that that data was protected was accessible, so insights can be extracted from it? >> Absolutely. So GEI has 43 offices East to West Coast, and each of those offices has their own actual infrastructure that we have to protect at each site, ranging anywhere between three to 15 terabytes of size. So we're talking a lot of data and a lot of different geographical locations that I as a network architect had to worry about protecting, and one of the challenges of our older infrastructure, we were running 40 servers, just doing file level backups and restores, and we didn't have the ability to do any offline site backups in any locations. Now, we did have those in our primary data centers, and we were able to cross backup from each location to another when necessary, but it was, again, only a file level backup, it wasn't an actual full image, and we didn't have a full cloud picture yet that we could expand on going forward. >> So not a really robust data disaster recovery strategy in the event that you had to get something like that. >> It took several times and there are examples that I could give you office lost hardware in their actual infrastructure and we had to do a restore by restoring the files out an off site location, putting it on a USB hard drive and shipping it to that location, and then having to rebuild the infrastructure from the ground up and copy the data over not a timely manner of free storage. >> Or inexpensive. >> Robin, in the old days, you'd have an admin in the remote office, they load in a tape and it did recycle the tape every day, you know, you'd have it for a week, and then you'd reuse the same tape over and over again. That was the architecture, state of the art back then. >> Yeah, you probably remember something for those ads, there was a picture of a slightly undesirable individual and says, would you like this person to be your backup admin, which I thought was a little bit strange. But now I think things have moved on a little bit. >> What's the architecture look like today? >> Well, you know, one of the things in architecture is a very key word, because we have a belief in a saying that architecture matters, and when you have a distributed network, where you have lots of edge locations, and you have the requirement to protect them, and bring them back to the edge, the architecture that you deploy, really does make a difference. You know, there's a famous Star Trek line, I've heard it a few times this week that you cannot change the laws of Physics, and the amount of data that you move from the edge to the core, you want to make it as small as possible because if you don't, the amount of time that it takes to get data protected from the edge, especially you have lots of edges becomes a real constraint. So that was something which you know, GEI was able to take advantage of. >> So can you do that at speed? Doesn't that change the laws of Physics anyway? We don't go there, okay, so I wonder if you could share with us kind of how you came to this spot? What was life like before? Did you look at any other vendors, you know, paint the picture for us. >> So working with the Dell EMC technical team, as well as the DPS sales team, we were able to come up with a different strategy going forward. But it wasn't after a lot of trial and error when doing proof of concepts with other companies that, you know, made promises that they could do the backups that we needed off site at different locations geographically, but when it came down to it, we were going to have to fork up a lot of money for infrastructure being installed at every single location, whereas Dell EMC, I don't have to deploy any or any hardware, all I had to deploy was a virtual appliance at each location and we were successful in backing up remotely, we tried various technologies that claim that they could do it, and they didn't work successfully. So after a lot of trial and error, roughly, in total about a year's worth of trying, we finally got Dell EMCs technical team and the DPS came on board and we sat down in front of a whiteboard in Boston, Massachusetts, and said, this is what we're trying to paint as a picture, help me paint this as a full blown architecture and make this happen in this design fashion, and luckily, the Dell EMC team was so experienced and has so many different strategies that they can focus on, they were able to take every little thing that we needed, mark every checkbox and deliver a package with DPS for our solution in our own architecture that answered all of my questions instantly. >> You said virtual appliance it's got to run on something. So what is that actually? It's like serverless, right? >> So we have a physical infrastructure at every location, I deployed a virtual CentOS box, that's proxy that talks back to my data domain and communicates the CVT data changes back for backup. So it's not doing a full consecutive backup. That leaves a lot of headroom left over on your actual production server, so that it's not pegged while staff are using it. So I can kick off backups during the day, it takes a snapshot, and then the data gets backed up without anybody knowing. >> So this is really important as you said, Rob, you can't change the law of Physics. I imagine you got a straw and you got to put all this data through. It's like, it's like when you backup your iPhone for the first time it takes forever now. So you're talking about, you know, changed, just checking the changed data, and putting it through that straw, even though it's maybe a little bigger than a straw, so each day, it's just a smaller amount of data, okay, but what happens on a restore? >> On a restore same instance. So we'll restore that file, if we're doing the file level restore to the data domain, and then copy it wherever we need to on the network. Or if we're doing a full image based backup, we can restore that either to the cloud disaster recovery into AWS or Azure, or we can restore it to the actual data domain and Vmotion it wherever we need to after that point. >> So let's talk about business impact Sounds like there was a lot of trial and error, as you explained, really needing to work with a strategic partner who said all right, I get what you're trying to do, obviously, not easy, but you've been able to implement that. So how is GEI's business positively benefiting from this data protection strategy that you've implemented? >> Well, not just on a financial perspective, because we've eliminated the need for a completely separate off site data center, we have everything running in a cloud environment for CDR, so that we can restore instantly anytime that we need to, so we no longer needed to spend the footprint on another network architect on another infrastructure on all the different things that rely on another infrastructure at a separate location, so on top of financial savings for the company, I mean, we saved a huge amount of money, they're on infrastructure, that's only for disaster recovery, it's not doing anything, whereas we can just spend money on object storage in AWS, and use that as our cloud disaster recovery strategy. When you need it, you pay for it for your instances but otherwise, you're just paying for object storage, it's a lot cheaper than ever having to run a full separate data center. >> Specifically what is Dell's role in that equation in terms of the value chain? >> The data domain, we also got CDR, which allows us to use an appliance on premise to talk to an instance server in AWS or Azure, and it after its normal backup period, the backup completes and then shoots all the data that changed up to AWS in an S3 Bucket, and your data stored there and in a VMDK chunk data, that after need for restore can be turned into an AMI for AWS available, and then online whenever you need it. >> So this is very key, you know, on Tuesday, cloud was a big topic, hybrid cloud reality for the majority of customers and Adam and GEI the leverage of AWS is a great example of what many of our clients are looking to do from their investment in the public cloud. Certainly no GEI today is using AWS as a alternative to having to purchase a secondary disaster recovery site, or having to sign up with a managed service provider that's providing like a co-location service for disaster recovery, so using the public cloud and using the software capabilities around cloud disaster recovery, gives them a tremendous opportunity to save themselves a lot of money and do it very efficiently. >> It's like though friends don't let friends build data centers just for DR. Yeah, if you're going to build it for something that gives you a competitive advantage, okay. >> But it's interesting with some of the plans that Adam's got for the future, you know, you want to share some of those as far as what you're thinking about for the next few years. >> So future plans for GEI is definitely more cloud growth and minimizing the footprint that we have on premise, making it so that we don't have to have infrastructure at every location, consolidation of all of our data, obviously, going forward, GEI is going to continue growing with data, with videos that were modeling for different damn inspections, levy inspections, we're collecting a lot of data. But the problem is having that data geographically everywhere makes it challenging for future admins, including myself to continue to restore and backup and keep everybody happy. It's a really challenging task to continue supporting. So going forward with consolidating all that data into a central location, i.e. multi cloud environments, or Dell EMC cloud that was announced this week, we have the option for leveraging multi cloud instances, and being able to keep all of our instances alive in the cloud, rather than on premise. >> So you said put it on one location you talking physically or is it some kind of logical mapping that you're doing? >> There'll be logical mapping with some type of caching technology at the off site so that it's ready and available-- >> So a mapping that allows you to recover really fast if you need to, what about as part of that future in the roadmap, analytics on that of backup data? >> So the analytics on in terms of how much backups are going on on a nightly basis-- >> So specifically, are you using that corporate for any other reason? Well, let's see, might be looking at anomalous behavior, doing stuff with with air gaps, and you know, investigating that other DevOps activities. >> It's interesting that you say that because we were talking about a Data Domain having an air gap last night, at an event and the air gap method, making sure that your data domain is protected, it puts it in a right only mode, so that nobody can get into your data domain and actually do any damage to your data. Because you're right, you're backing out. There are anomalies that happen. If those anomalies happen to get into your infrastructure into your data backups, you could technically get ransomware or you know, locked out of your own data. Whereas Data Domain does support air gap technology, allowing you to lock down the system and require two admins before any changes are made to it. So definitely going-- >> Read only, read only. >> I think I heard that. But it's it's a good question with respect to data reuse is that, you know, the use case that Adam is currently using is to use AWS as a disaster recovery location, but the ability to spin up his data within AWS, yes, for the purpose of insurance, being able to access those production copies within AWS. But why not be able to use those for other purposes, such as interrogation of the data that was in them? That's all things that really start to evolve the conversation from what do you do for data protection to what do you do for data management? >> Yeah, so let's use some of the tool chains in live in AWS, say for example, apply some machine intelligence and machine learning and see what we find there, maybe anticipate anomalies or find some things that we didn't know. >> Absolutely, especially when users are dumping large amounts of data, we had an instance where before we started to actually seeing large data dumps when our data started to grow in the first place, we were inspecting levees and models in Colorado, and we had three engineers fill up an entire server of 4k videos, and our nightly backup all of a sudden said, Hey, you just got a huge amount of data change in an instant. Were you expecting this kind of change? If not, you should probably start knocking on someone's door, so we were able to use that analysis really quickly. >> So looking at day three of Dell Technologies World lots of announcements, Robbie, you kind of talked about some of those, you know, cloud enabled data protection becoming a big focus for you guys, I'm curious, Adam, to get your thoughts on some of the announcements. You mentioned the VMware on Dell, a cloud on Dell EMC, what are some things that really kind of piqued your interest as, hey, we're going to have more and more data coming, we've got lots of edge devices, they talked yesterday about the edges coming what did you hear that you thought, awesome, this is really going to be integral part of our strategy going forward? >> Definitely, so one thing that was mentioned was Power Protect, and that has everybody's interest right now. Because having the ability of basically an Avamar system with all flash or a Data Domain with all flash gives you obvious IO advantages in the future, that's probably going to be my next hot topic that I'm very vigorously researching everything out to see if in a couple of years or sooner that's going to fit into GEI's infrastructure and give us more benefits going forward. >> What's your biggest data protection challenge in 2019? >> Our biggest challenge up front was definitely moving from one backup strategy to a new backup strategy and that's from file level backups, only to image based backups, that was one of the biggest challenges, because anytime you lift a backup infrastructure out of production, and put a new one in, you're starting from zero, you can't really start from where you left off, you had to get all of that data, and geographically 43 offices doesn't seem like a lot, but when you're collecting data at all of those locations, that was a challenge, getting everything worked out and getting everything backed up in the first place. >> So you're knocking down that problem. If you're in a private meeting with Rob and his engineering team is there, what's the one thing that he could do to make your life easier? >> One thing he could do to make my life easier-- >> Drop prices-- >> Oh, sorry, then I have nothing else to say. (both laugh) >> Sounds like you-- >> Really, is that what you were going to say? >> So if we could enhance the performance of DD Boost, DD Boost already does a lot of performance benefits for what we do, DD Boost, in essence of what your network performance is, if there was a way of tweaking that on new servers, when you implement it, for example, we acquire companies every now and then we're implementing their strategies for their backups, and we have to start new backups, if there was a better methodology of seeding rather than having to go out physically plug in a hard drive and an NFL storage, make a clone of it and transfer it back. If there was a different method of seeding that technology or those backups, that would make things a little bit easier. >> Get on that. >> I mean, nobody can ever have enough performance and then, as Adam said, the big part of the Power Protect announcement yesterday was, you know, the introduction of, you know, the industry's first all-flash purpose built backup appliance with integrated software capabilities, and an all flash, I think, over the coming years is going to get is going to become a definite option for secondary storage workloads, not only for the straight performance of backup and restore speeds, but also for this huge opportunity around data reuse, and I think that you'll start to see more flash appearing in the data center, not just for production systems, but also for secondary workloads and where you're storing copies of production. >> At the end of the day, it sounds like you're probably quite the hero to all those folks that need making sure they have access to that data because that's what is, as we say, it's Michael Dell said it's inexhaustible, it's gold, that's what drives the business forward, that's what allows you to identify new products and new revenue streams. So we'll say congratulations on being an enabler of the business so far, we appreciate you guys sharing what GEI is doing and Rob, we appreciate your insights as well. We thank you for spending some time with us on theCube. >> Thank you very much. >> Oh, our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube live, Dell Technologies World 2019 day three of theCubes coverage continues in just a moment. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante of theCUBE on our second day of wall-to-wall coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019, and we're welcoming one our guests back to theCUBE. We've got Rüya Barrett, VP of product marketing from the Data Protection Division. Rüya, it's great to have you back on the program. >> Great to be here, thank you for having us. >> And from Under Armor, a brand everybody knows, Nick Hennessy, Senior Manager, Compute and Storage. Nick, welcome, it's great to have you here. >> Great, thank you guys very much. >> So Rüya, we'll start with you. We've had, this is, you can hear all the energy behind us. And if you can hear dogs barking, by the way, that's normal. We've got some dogs next to our-- Lots of energy yesterday and today. Everything about data as this asset, and I think Michael said yesterday, that it's inexhaustible. You guys did an interesting recent survey with over 2,000 IT decision makers. With respect to data and getting their hands on it, what are some of the really interesting things that you've learned about that? >> Yeah, there were some really great takeaways. Great question. One, it's not a surprise to anyone, People have more data than ever to manage. There was over 586% growth in the last two years in terms of how much data on the average customers are managing. So that's a given, not a big surprise. One of the key things that we saw was that they value data. These people surveyed value data more than ever. So it was 96% value data more than they ever did, and 36% of them have already started monetizing data. So it's critical for accounts now, and one of the issues that they brought up for not being able to recover data, around data protection, was that if they can't recover data, they have new concerns now. Loss of opportunity, loss of bringing products to market, loss of competitive advantage, which are issues that we have never heard before because this is the third time we did the survey. We did it first in 2014, 2016, and we just did the 2018 survey. So those were some of the key really big takeaways for me from that survey that we did. >> So if they value it, they've got to protect it. >> Yeah. >> Alright, so Nick, Under Armour, a brand I mentioned everybody knows and wears. You guys have a great brand reputation. And you have some great brand ambassadors. I've got to mention Steph Curry. We have established Nick as a Lakers fan. And I have to point out, Dave, that you're wearing a Warriors colored tie today. Just got to say. >> I won't be if the Celtics make it to the finals though. >> But also Tom Brady's a brand ambassador. We've got Tommy boy covered, Lindsey Vonn. So you've got this great brand of reputation. How does Under Armour, to Rüya's point, value that data and leverage that data to keep and grow that brand reputation? >> Well, you know one of the things about data is, at Under Armour, we call the data is the new gold. So to us, it's very important, especially to our consumers, stuff that we're gathering at the retail stores, and kind of tracking all that stuff. So in order for us to protect that data, we're using Dell Technologies as sweeter products. And it's been working out great for us. >> So paint a picture, Nick, what are you protecting? What's the infrastructure look like, the applications, I know big SAP shop. But what's it look like, what are you protecting? >> So in terms of data, we're protecting over a thousand virtual machines, Two plus petabytes of data, everything in our five regional hubs. So it's quite a bit, it's quite a chore, especially for a small team like we have. >> So you mentioned data is the new gold. I have this idea that it's even more valuable than gold 'cause you can only use gold once. You can't spend it multiple places, data. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but Under Armour's ascendancy really coincided with strong technology ethos, very strong use of data, understanding of customers, and technology of sports clothing. So how are you using data to drive competitive advantage? >> Yeah, so very interesting. The brand and the culture is very infectious. So it's like, rah rah, let's go out and get it. That works into how we work IT in our everyday lives. So we kind of take that and kind of run with it. >> So what were you doing before you guys started working with Dell EMC? Talk to us about some of the challenges that you faced before you were using a different solution, so some of those opportunity costs that Rüya mentioned, in terms of if we can't monetize this, we're going to miss opportunities to identify new products our customers want, bring it to market. Walk us through your journey. >> Yeah, so I joined Under Armour about four years ago. And we really set the foundation with our three-year road map. Year one, build the foundation. It was really aligning what we were going to do, right, aligning with Dell Technologies, we're using all of your products. Year two was really architecting the future. And that's where things such as data protection really helped us out. We needed stuff that was easy to deploy, things that, for a small team to manage, that we don't have to think about it. We can sleep easy at night. It really aligned with our road map. >> So historically, data protection has been insurance. Rüya, you and I have talked about this for a long long time. Nobody likes to buy insurance, but you got to do it. Are you trying to move beyond that sort of one use case equation into new areas of value, whether it's compliance, whether it's data analytics. Are you able to use the corpus of data that you're protecting, and the management of that data in new ways? And if so, how? >> Yeah, in terms of the management for our small teams, we need something really easy. But security always comes to mind, so that's built into the product as well. But things moving to the cloud, scalability, things that we want to do in the future, we're really setting that up now. And us doing a huge storage refresh a couple months ago, we really flattened out, and we're using all brand new products. Now we're ready to scale the cloud. >> Rüya, you say that in the customer base, that people are trying to move beyond just straight back-up. >> Definitely. >> It's becoming increasingly new world, digital transformation, hybrid clouds. What are you seeing? >> Oh my god, yeah there's a ton of demand right now for customers to be able to leverage data, regardless of where it lives. So primary data, secondary data, tertiary copies, cloud data. How do you really start gaining business insights regardless of where data is? And how do you make sure that it's constantly recoverable under any circumstance. So one of the other things that we found in that study, again, is that there's new threats. So cyber recovery has become, and ransomware, and cyber recovery has become such a foundational consideration for customers. Being able to also spin up VMs regardless instantly. We just announced the X400 PowerProtect, which is very exciting and was part of today's announcement. It's all flash, and the reason it's all flash is because the use cases such as data reuse, app test and development, being able to test disaster recovery scenarios or cyber recovery scenarios real time, these are all critical use cases that you couldn't imagine doing years ago on your protection data. So we're really excited about both the PowerProtect announcement, as well as the Integrated Data Protection Appliance announcement. So you and I, Dave, have talked a lot about the Integrated Data Protection Appliance and simplicity and efficiency and breadth of coverage and cloud capabilities. Under Armour actually is a big proponent. They use cloud very prolifically, in terms of their IT environment. And IDPA really fit that need for them, in terms of being able to really drive costs out of their environment through efficiency, have that protection performance, just the foundational capabilities, yet still be able to offer some of those new innovation and the cloud capabilities, as well as automation. >> Alright, so we've heard from the marketing pro. Nick, now we got to hear from the customer. I heard simple, efficient, so how simple, how efficient, how do you measure these things? How does it compare with other products that you've looked at? >> Well, the product that we had before, we used Avamar Data Domain, and the problem that we had with it, it was decentralized. So we were managing a regional hub separately. So by refreshing, as we did, it got very simple. Now we have a centralized management. We were able to reduce 40 to 1 ratio. We're getting reductions, before we were getting 92 to 93%. Now we're getting 98, 99%. More importantly, for me, reporting. So able to produce those reports, we didn't have that before, so it's been really great. >> And how do those internal benefits that you talked about manifest out through the organization and really drive, like we talked about earlier, brand reputation or Under Armour being able to use that valuable data to identify new insights and act on the new product streams to delight, say, Tom Brady, for example. >> Well not only does it make-- >> You know he cares. (laughing) >> We certainly care about Tom Brady. >> I know! >> It makes my life a lot easier, right? So I'm able to take this data, it allows me to think, it allows the teams to be agile. Can you use that data to promote other projects, other ideas, things that we really want to do in the future to kind of push the brand even farther. >> When you guys meet privately, what kind of things, Nick, do you ask Rüya and her team at Dell EMC to do that will make your life easier? >> Quite honestly, the Dell team that we work with is wonderful. Really, we ask for a partner, someone that works with us, someone that understands us, understands our pain and is in there with us, so that we can really work on solutions together. >> Okay, obvious question, is that why you work with these guys? 'Cause of the strong partnership? Two part question, and what about the product? Is the product in your opinion, based on what you've evaluated, best of breed relative to other competitive products that are out there. >> Yeah, we did look at some other competitor products. We believe that it is best of breed. And that's why we chose to partner with Dell Technologies. >> So a lot of news yesterday and today, everything around multi-cloud. Customers are in this multi-cloud world for a variety of reasons. With the partnership that you've established with Dell Technologies and Rüya's group, what are some of the things that you've heard from Michael, from Pat, from John, Jeff, that really resonated with you that, ah, Dell Technologies is listening to customers like Under Armour and others as they're developing, helping you to really tackle this multi-cloud world with a lot of success. >> Yeah, so one of the things that was really exciting was part of the keynote yesterday with the SDDC. You can spin up a data center at the click of a button nowadays, and that resonates with us because it's going to make our lives really easy. We're going to be more agile. We can speed up and really take the brand farther. >> So you mentioned cloud before. I think Rüya said you've got multiple clouds. You have multiple clouds, is that right? >> We have a hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> So you've got multiple public clouds, is that correct? Obviously. >> Yes. >> You've got SAS, you've got on-prem stuff, and you try to make them all look the same, substantially similar from a control plan standpoint? >> We try. (laughs) >> It's a journey. >> Yes. >> I get that. But there's also the operating model. And I want to follow up with, are you enabling, whether it's DBAs or application owners, to do their own back-ups, do their own recoveries, do their own analytics, et cetera. Is that where you're headed, are you there today? Is it something that you don't want to do? Can you elaborate? >> That's the idea is to try and make everyone's life a lot easier. And being part of the Compute and Storage team, we're really stuck in the middle of all teams. Applications teams come to us. Sequel teams come to us, networking teams. So we really have a lot of responsibility on our plate. In order to make our lives simpler, we have to enable all these teams to do it themselves, and that's really where we're headed. >> Well, great stuff guys. Nick, Rüya, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program this afternoon. And go Warriors. >> Ahh. >> I said it. (laughs) >> For Dave Vellante, who again is wearing a Warriors colored tie. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from Las Vegas. Okay. >> I do. >> Alright. >> I like the Warriors. >> Alright, good, see and I mentioned Tom Brady-- >> I like them a lot better than the Lakers, sorry Nick. I can't get over that. >> I'm not sorry. I was saying, we're at VM (laughs). No, we're not at VM World, we're at Dell Technologies World. Oh my goodness, Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

(light techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Covering ZertoCon 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is The Cube. We're at ZeratoCon 2018, Hines Convention Center in Boston. My name's Paul Gillin. My guest is John White, the VP of Product Strategy at Expedient. Why don't you start off by giving us just the elevator pitch on what Expedient is all about. >> Sure, Expedient is a cloud-service provider as well as managed service provider, and we also have data centers that we operate here mainly on the east coast. We have seven cities and 11 data centers. Those are in Boston here, locally as well as Baltimore, Maryland, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Memphis, Tennessee. And then we actually, we'll put our private cloud services really anywhere. So we actually will put 'em on the customer's premises to meet that need as well as in partner data centers anywhere over the world, if they have to deal with compliance, security, whatever it might be, we'll go and tackle those problems for them. So our goal is to be an infrastructure as a service provider for, you know, really all the enterprise. >> So, when would a company do business with you verses a Microsoft or an Amazon? >> Yeah, so, if you kind of look at really three ways to kind of go cloud, right? You can still do it yourself. You can build some cloud-based services. And that's, again, you're in it on your own. You can go all the way to the extreme, which is the AWS or the Azures, and that's more, again, you're kind of in a do-it-yourself type of mentality. And your support structure there is a little bit different. It's maybe a little bit more mechanical, a little bit more robotical. If you need help in transitioning and figuring out where your workload should sit, and maybe creating more of a hybrid cloud so it's maybe on your premises, it's inside one of our data centers, and then maybe it's even in one of those AWS or Azures. You're going to work with a company like Expedient to go and help you figure out where you should put your workloads, first off. And then how to create that long-term strategy so you get the best of all worlds that are out there, not just one prescriptive cloud. >> So, you're kind of a high-touch cloud provider then. >> Very, very high touch, yeah. Our whole product service is actually a la carte menus. So you pick and choose what you want. We can manage servers, we can provide virtual infrastructure, we can do things like DR as a service, backups as a service, all those pieces. So you build, basically, your perfect IT strategy with us. And then direct connects into AWS and Azure and some other cool products coming soon to kind of make your life a little bit easier, consuming and running your work loads in public clouds. >> Well we hear a lot these days about multi-cloud, about customers wanting to shift their work load seamlessly around between multiple back-end cloud providers. Certainly vendors talk about that a lot. Do you hear customers talking about it? >> Yeah, we have some customers starting to talk about it. And, you know, in the beginning, they just wanted to see, okay, I'm running workloads in AWS, I'm running workloads in Expedient, I'm multi-cloud. And then they start to understand. well, our management's really hard. And the network's really hard, and the security's really hard. And we're doing backups another way than we've done it traditionally. And we're helping customers bridge that gap and saying, we can take some of the security policies that we've been running internally in our data center, and maybe you've been doing inside your data center, and take those out into the public cloud. Simplifying things with networking. We're a pretty big VM or NXS shop. So doing something where you can create tagging and policies local inside the Expedient data center, and then being able to translate those up into AWS and Azure, to make it, basically, one seamless network, is really, really big and key for our customers. It's something that I think is still new. We have a handful of customers that we're working on a lot of cool research projects on. But I think it's going to be something that's going to be the dominant force here in the next few years. >> You mention disaster recovery as a service. Now is that where Zerto fits into your plan? >> Correct, yeah. We've been working with Zerto for quite some time now really since they were just comin' to Boston. And we worked and spent a ton of time with them getting them to understand the needs of service providers, 'cause they were traditionally enterprise focused. And that partnership that we've built over the years has done tremendous value for not only our customers but our businesses. And we've actually had two year-over-year growth for the last three years with them. And actually, we just won the Service Partner Growth Partner of the Year Award with them. So we're creating some pretty cool solutions around DR as a service, and taking some of our network background and actually simplifying DR for our customers that way. So, we use Zerto as well as VM Ware, and some of our own product connectivity, NSX, to actually simplify the package of DR to get the recovery time objective down into 10, 15 minutes, instead of four hours or eight hours or multiple days that really most people are experiencing right now. >> So when you look at the landscape, there are a lot of disaster recovery solution providers you could've worked with. What does Zerto do that's really different? >> The part, well, on a technology wise, watching them take a look at the change block that's occurring that's out of the VM1 environment, making an agnostic from a storage layer, that was really big for us in the beginning on the technical tip-in. And then the partnership, as of late, really since the beginning, was the big value differentiator that we just couldn't find in other companies that're out there. We locked arms with their product management team and their product strategy team right away. We gave them literally two sheets of paper and said these are the things we need to be successful as a service provider using your software. They went down, checked 'em all off. We started goin' at it, and we started then growing that year-over-year for the last three years. So, it's been an amazing partnership. They have a strategic team that understands where the marketing industry's going. And we're going to use them, and leverage them, as much as we possibly can to help out our customers, give 'em the best outcomes they can possibly get. >> When your customers talk to you about backup, where do you see them going? Where is that market headed? >> So backup, traditional backup is something we've been doin' for quite some time. We do petabytes of backups every year for customers. Still using tape, believe it or not, as well. We have a lot of discs-- >> Tape will never die. >> Tape is still out there. I actually have a bumper sticker that I think EMC made when they bought Avamar saying Tape is Dead. And I don't think it's going to die anytime soon. >> Mainframe was dead, too. >> Yeah, right, mainframe has been dead and we still roll new ones into our data centers on a regular basis and then put cloud beside it. But on the backup side of it, if you look at some of the new disasters, right? Look at Atlanta. Their disaster was different. It wasn't a natural disaster, it was a-- >> Radsomeware attack. >> Ransomeware attack. Right, that's a new disaster. We're going to find new disasters, and you can't go and restore back from 24 hours ago and think that that's good. We don't live in that world anymore. It needs to be from five minutes, seven minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it might be. So, we use their journaling today to actually get those quick recoveries. And if they can extend that out, I think it's going to be pretty powerful for customers to say, okay, I want to go back to two years, three days, and six hours from now. And say, gimme that point in time, snap. That's the way I want to actually restore that data. Succeeding in that vision I think will definitely change the game for how we actually look at doing backup and restores in the future. >> A lot of talk at this conference about resilience. >> John: Um hmm. >> Is that a concept that you think customers, your customers, have really internalized? They understand what that means? >> They're getting it, yeah, definitely. I mean, DR even was something that we had to kind of walk them into. But now, if they have an outage, it's not just money that they're losing. It's the reputation. And as we all know now, reputation is key. And you look at Twitter. When somebody has an outage, or has a problem, I mean, their users essentially just blow 'em up and there's memes and all kinds of other stuff. There's a lot of funny ones for the airlines, from Delta and Southwest havin' those challenges. And so, our customers today are realizing that yeah, we can't go a day or two without having service to our customers. We can maybe go a minute or two, but that's about it. We need to make sure we're being resilient with our data. We need to make sure we're protecting it, we'll be able to create ways to quickly roll it back to make sure our customers are up on line. Because they just can't go down anymore. >> How important is security as a driver of resilience and spending on disaster recovery now? >> Yeah, security is definitely, with being able to quickly restore from like a ransomware, it's startin' to bring that infrastructure that has been, security's been a little different there, and where network security's been a little bit different, kind of bringing them together to create, say, we need to have a full package. We not only need to figure out how we're blocking it at the edge and blocking it internally east west, but we need to figure out, if we're going to get breached, 'cause we're going to get breached, how can we quickly restore from that? How can we make sure we're not being held ransom for Bitcoin or whatever the next currency's going to be that they're going to be held ransom for that they just can't pay because maybe it would knock them out of business. >> So, John, Expedient, being a small, specialized cloud service provider, you're kind of dancing with elephants when you're out there with Amazon and Microsoft. What's the secret? What keeps you guys successful and how do you keep viable? >> There's a lot of different things. I think the way we focus on technologies is a little bit unique. I mean, we're there to design the best technical solution for that customer. And not maybe fit them into a one-size-fits-all outfit. The other side of it is, a lot of our customers like the local touch and feel. Majority of our customers are at and around our data centers. That way they can get to learn the facility, they can, even if they're running cloud services with us, they know where it lives. That maybe eases their minds from a compliance standpoint, security standpoint. Or just in a trust, saying, I'm going to take my data that's been living inside of my data center, that's key to my business, and I'm going to give it to somebody, I at least want a face and a name so I can know who to call and who to talk to if there is ever a problem. >> Face to face still matters. >> It does, and I think it's always going to matter. And I think we're always going to have some sort of high interaction with every enterprise out there. And that's what they're going to need. 'Cause this stuff can never commoditize all the way. Creating the solution is still hard. Maybe the bits and pieces underneath it are a little bit easier, but the whole packages is going to always be unique and really hard to define in a one-size-fits-all for a lot of those enterprises. >> John White, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> We'll be back from Zertocon 2018 here in Boston. I'm Paul Gillin, this is The Cube. (light techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to VeeamON 2018. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. #VeeamON, our second year of VeeamON coverage, this is day one. Carey Stanton this year is the Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam. We're having a great conversation about it. Hockey, Cape Cod. >> Golden Retrievers. Golden Retrievers. >> Oh, I love dogs. >> Dave, how many times do we travel the world and talk to a local? (laughs) >> Boston area guy. >> So welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> And welcome to Boston. >> A year and a half in Boston, right downtown empty nesters. My two children are back doing university in Canada. I've got a sophomore and a junior so my wife and I are living in Boston empty nesters, it's awesome. >> That's great, you've got to love it. And I love the fact that you're from Ottawa, but you're a Bruins fan. >> Yes, I've basically turned into a Bruins fan. I'm a Red Sox fan and a Patriots fan and the Celtics are in the playoffs. >> Yes, love this guy. >> You'd better be if you're working for Peter MacKay. >> Yeah, you have to. It's like you have to sign in. And I've worked for Peter for 17 years, three different companies. >> Okay, so you were at VMware. >> I was at Vmware, I was at Desktone, and then we did IBM and part of that was Watchfire which we sold to IBM. So, a long journey. >> So give us the update, what's happening in alliances. >> Yeah, so it's great. As you know we have our global reseller agreement that we announced most recently with NetApp just in March. We're now on their GPL. We went live on Cisco, we announced Cisco back in August but we went live on November 15th and we have HPE and all three of them are just exceeding expectations as far as the demand and the interest we're getting from our sellers. As you've seen from Peter and Veeam, we're targeted to the enterprise. We have our messaging our own hyper-availability. So these partners bring us a huge opportunity by working into their customer base, but we close 133 customers a day, right you heard Peter mention that. But we're bringing them into our customer base which is traditionally SMB and commercial and we're working with them on their enterprise. But an exciting stat for that one is that we say no naked Veeam. When you sell with an alliance partner it's six to eight times larger than if we sell standalone. So it's working, the messaging and the enabling we have with our field and we're 100% channel. So that's working very well on just the enablement with Jeff Giannetti, Sean, and Olivia, and Ameya. >> Well the other thing that you guys seem to have done is figured out how to take a long view, a strategic view with these partners. Many organizations, they look for the tactical. Okay, how much money >> Yes, yeah. are we going to make this year? You're looking at the lifetime value of a customer. >> Correct. >> It's frankly quite unique in this business. >> Well, the interesting thing we're doing which is not just on the global resellers which is on all of our partners is that we look and say what's a good partnership look like or what's the great partnership look like. And what we have is the investment that we are because we're private is we'll do the front-end investing up front. We'll do a joint business plan, have shared metrics across the table. So whether that's with Pure Storage or with Nutanix, with our VMware, Microsoft, we front-load all of those investments. To your point, is that we're not just waiting to see did we have success year one and then we'll invest year two. We take that three year business case view up front and do the front-end load investment. So, what does that mean? That's a dedicated business development team. We have 25 people working and go to market with HPE or 12 working with Cisco and we take that from technical architects, field marketing, product marketing and to make that in clot entire plot. >> Yeah, Carey, I wonder if you can give us a little bit of a compare and contrast. VMware built one of the best ecosystems out there. We already talked once today. For every dollar you spend on VMware you did 15, 20 dollars with the ecosystem, Veeam's nice vibrant ecosystem >> Yes. getting deeper with some of those partners. Give us a little compare from your previous life. >> Yeah, sure, so at VMware no question that they had that solution so we take that here as well and we call it the Veeam Currency. So when you're going in and selling Veeam, if you're selling an average selling price of $10,000, we're working with our partners where they're seeing that that deal is going to turn into a $50,000 traditional with an alliance partner sale in conjunction with their hard work. So they're managing the entire software process so they're seeing their up leveling the messaging so no longer just pinpointing at a hardware solution. And they're increasing their average selling price by 10x, so Cisco is at a great set. 10x, again I'll repeat 10x with Veeam on doing those deals. First it's just trying to go in and sell HyperFlex Standalone. >> It's just a really critical time in the industry right now. Our research shows that there's a gap between what the business expects in terms of the degrees of automation, the level of quality of services and what IT is actually delivering. So that says that customer base is really ripe for churn in a lot of accounts. And so you guys being aggressive with partnerships in regard to making that investment as a private company, the timing frankly couldn't be better. Especially as you go from what was a virtualized world where you guys did very, very well to now this cloud, multi-cloud digital, you know throw in whatever buzzword you want. But, we are at an inflection point. >> Yeah, we sure are. I think that what we're seeing with our partners especially on HPE and Cisco and Nutanix is they're all near hyper converged and so they're going in a whole different sales motion. We're seeing it on our hybrid cloud, we're a number one close sell partner with Microsoft. So we have our backup, native backup to Azure and so we're seeing this destructive market in the market place and we're also seeing a lot of our partners have competitive takeouts of Dell Avamar, right and their data domain. So we're going in and taking out Dell Avamar and they're going in and data domain so we have a lot of synergy and so as these traditional vendors such as Avamar, Veritas, Commvault, and the IBM Tivoli Solution is that we have those sales motions going with our partners that are going after those hardware solutions. So, again, it's very synergistic with our tier one partnerships. >> Well you see a huge drive towards simplicity. I mean, another thing you guys do really well is, and it sounds so simple, but you're compatible with a lot of different clouds, for example. So more work loads, more environments increases your TAM and your friendliness to partners. It sounds simple, but execution is not. >> Yeah, we're a Swiss based company, we remain. The Switzerland is that we work with all partners in all routes and so we've seen a lot of success in that way. We see a lot of demand coming from our customers, our partners wanting to work with us in these multi-cloud solutions that we have with Microsoft. >> Biggest challenges, is it a channel conflict? Dealing with deal registration, I mean, what are some of the challenges you guys are facing? >> I think that challenge is just enabling our sales teams on how to work with these partners and to understand the sales motion. And some of our sales execs are 20 year veterans that have come in and worked in a traditional place where when you went out to tackle an enterprise deal, you did that standalone. And we realize that we don't take any deals direct. So just getting them in the sales motion with our partners is a challenge, but one that is easily adapting to success that we're having in the field. >> Alright, Carey I know you're super tight on time. We promised to get you out >> Yes, sir. of here. We've got to leave it there, but thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. We really enjoyed having you. >> Okay, thank you very much. >> Alright, keep right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from VeeamON 2018. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Dell Technologies World, 2018, brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. >> Well welcome back to Las Vegas, the Cube, continuing our coverage here of Dell Technologies World 2018, with some 14 thousand strong in attendance. This is day two by the way, of three days of coverage that you'll be seeing here live on the Cube. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls and we're now joined by Alex Almeida, who is the consultant of product marketing at Dell EMC, and Bob Bender who is the CTO of Founders Federal Credit Union, Bob, good to see you as well, sir. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> You bet, thanks for being here to both of you. First off, let's just set the table for what you do at Founders and what Founders is all about and then why Dell, and how Dell figures into your picture. >> Sure, so Founders Federal Credit Union established in 1950 we're a regional financial institution providing basic services for that area in South and North Carolina. We now service over 32 areas and we have about 210 thousand plus members. So I'm Chief Technology Officer and we're looking to Dell EMC to really give us a lift in the cyber resilience of our data, what we're trying to protect today. >> Keith and I were talking too, and said we always like hearing on the customer side of this, especially on the financial side, right? Because your concerns are grave concerns, right? We all care about our money, right? And obviously that's first and foremost for you, having trust, credibility, liability. So tell us a little bit about that thought process in general, what drives your business and how that then transfers over to DIT. >> Sure, and as a member, you look at us, big or small, you expect the same cyber resilience, protection for your personal information, you don't think there's going to be a difference there. So if you look at the Carolina's, you're going to see a significant, or the southeast, we've been picked on with malware, with that data extortion of what the name, ransomware, so we had to find a solution quickly and we looked at Dell EMC for data protection and cyber recovery to really help us in that area and really protect our data. >> So let's talk about some of the threats faced. Outside of malware, typically the line of thought is, you know what, don't assume that you can prevent getting hacked, assume that you are hacked, what personas do you guys wear as a bank, or as a credit union? >> Well, we looked at that and what we did is we get really involved and we go out and we see that event, the breach, the malware, the ransomware, and so we really thought, we lack the ability of bringing assets under governance, so how do we really roll that up so that everybody knows at any point in time, we can recover, that we have kind of a isolated recovery, an air gap, or a data bunker, and then a clean room to bring that up, a Sandbox. And we really saw that our tape media backup recovery was not going to recover for the events that were happening, the old days, you're looking at one or two critical systems that are being recovered. Today, they're locking 500, 1500 servers in a matter of minutes. So, when you rehydrate that data, you know, the deduplication, we're seeing 72 to one and that's done very fast, through the product lines of Dell EMC, significant, but when you want to rehydrate that, the data's gone, it's just not there. Well, if you take away that air gap situation, what're you left with? And if they're smart enough to figure out where your backups are, you're left with no protection, so we really needed to isolate and put off network all that critical data. And because of that 72 to one dedupe rate, and I realize we may be unique, there's others that may have to choose what those critical systems are, we're not going to have to, we're going to protect everything, every day, and so that we have a recovery point that we can point to and show management and our board and our members, such as you guys, that we can recover, that you're going to have trust in us handling your financial responsibilities. >> So what specific technologies are you guys using from Dell to create this environment in which you can recover within these isolated bubbles? >> You know, I'll let Alex talk more specific, but we really looked at the data protection solution, and a cyber solution, we said phase one, we want to stand this up very quickly because it's any minute this could happen to us. It's happening to very smart establishments. We really picked what was going to optimize our first iteration of this, and we did it quickly, so we're talking a roll out in 45 days. We used Data Domain, Avamar, DD Boost, we've got Data Protection Advisor, which gives me, whether I'm here or I'm off at another conference, or I'm showing up at the office, I get instant results of what we did the day before for that recovery. I know that we're in the petabyte storage business, I don't know when we crossed that line, but now we store you know, a huge amount of data very quickly. I mean, we took their product line and went from hours down to seconds and I can move that window any which way I want, and so it's just empowering to be able to use that product line to protect our data the way we are today. >> Yeah, I think the Dell EMC cyber recovery solution really is kind of looking at solving the problem, most people look at it from solving it as a preventative thing, how do I prevent malware from happening, how do I stop ransomware from attacking me? The thing is is that it's all about really, how are you going to recover from that? And having plan to be able to recover. And with the way we approached it, we started talking to customers like Bob, and they were really coming to us and saying, you know, this is increasing, this is an increasing problem that we're seeing and it's inevitable, we feel we're going to be attacked at some point. And you see on the news today, you know, we're only a little bit through the year and there's been a lot of news on cyber attacks and things like that. The key thing is how do you recover? So we took at that in conversations with our customers and went specifically back and designed a solution that leverages the best in industry technology that we have with our data protection portfolio. So when you look at data deduplication, you look at Data Domain, that technology in the industry provides the fastest recovery possible. And from there, that makes it realistic for companies to really say, yeah, I can recover from a ransomware attack. And the more important thing is, we look at this as the isolation piece of the solution is really where the value comes in. Not only is it to get a clean copy of the data, but you can use that for analysis of that data in that clean room to be able to detect early on problems that may be happening in your production environment. And it's really important that that recovery aspect be stressed and really the Data Domain solution is kind of the enabler there. >> It's still a really tough spot to be in, right? Because on one hand you're protecting, you're trying to prevent, so you're building the fortress as best you can, and at the same time, you're developing a recovery solution so that if there is a violation, an intrusion, you're going to be okay, but the fact is the data's gone, you know, it went out the door, and so I'm just curious psychologically, you know, how do you deal with that, with your board, with your ownership, with your customers? How do you deal with it, Alex, to your customer, just saying we're going to do all we can to keep this safe, >> Absolutely. >> But so that but is a big caviada, right? How do both of you deal with that? >> Yeah. >> First off... >> I'll say this, working with the Dell EMC engineers and their business partners, I'm sleeping better at night, and I'm not just saying that being here, what I mean is that they've shrunk my backup window, they've guaranteed me reporting and a infrastructure IQ of that environment that I have more insight, integrated, so across, holistically, my enterprise. So no longer am I adding on different components to complete backups, this backup, this company, this... I never get that insight, and I never really have the evidence that we're restoring, I can do the store and the restore at the same time and see that next day in reporting, that we're achieving that. I hear that but, but that but is a little quieter because you know, it's just a little less impactful because I'm confident now that I've got a very efficient window. I'm not effecting again, with those add on, ad hoc products, not condemning 'em, but, they're impactful to critical applications, I can see response time during peak times, the product doesn't have that effect. And it's really exciting because now I can, you know, I've got to rip and replace, I got to lift and shift, you decide what the acronyms you want to add to it, but we... The big thing I want to add, and sorry to ramble here a little, >> You're fine. >> Yep, yep. Our run books are becoming smaller. And this is, the less complex, now we're taking keep the lights on people that are very frustrated with our acronyms and our terminology and the way we're going and I'm starting to bring them into the cyber resilience, cyber security environment and they're feeling empowered and I'm getting more creative ideas and that means, more creative ideas means we're back as a business solving problems, not worrying if our backups are done at two in the morning. >> And from a Dell EMC perspective, I think we're really uniquely positioned in the industry, in that, not just from Dell EMC, but we look at all of Dell technologies, right? When we incorporate the fact that we have best in class data protection solutions to do operational recovery, disaster recovery, the next logical step is to really augment that and really start looking at cyber recovery, right? And then when you look at that and you look at the power of Dell technologies, it's really a layered approach, how do I layer my data protection solutions to do operational recovery, to do disaster recovery? And then at the same time, throw in a little RSA and SecureWorks in there into the picture and we're really uniquely positioned as a vendor in the industry, no other vendor can really handle that breadth in the industry from a cyber recovery standpoint when you throw in the likes of RSA and SecureWorks. >> So, Alex, let's drill down in the overall capability versus the rest of the industry. There's been a ton of investment in data protection, 90 million, 100 million, we're seeing unicorns pop up over just this use case of data protection. And they're making no qualms at it, they're going right at the Data Domain business. What is the message that you're going out and telling any users like Bob, that, you know what, stay the course, Data Domain, the portfolio of data protection at Dell is the best way to recover your environment in case of a breach. >> Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of that, what I say to customers I talk to every day around this, that are maybe doubting you know, going forward and what they're going to do, is that we are continuing to innovate, that Data Domain platform continues to innovate, you see that in our cloud scenarios, in the cloud, you know, use cases that we're talking about, and really kind of working together with our customers as a partner on how we apply things like cyber recovery for their workloads that go into the cloud, right? And that's really through that working relationship with customers and that very strong investment that we're making on the engineering side with our roadmaps is really what customers, at the end of the day become convinced that Data Domain is here to stay. >> So, Bob I'd love to follow up on-- >> Bob: Can I add on to that? >> Please. >> You know, I think the couple things you pointed on that I probably missed, is one, you've given me options, I can be on pram or off pram or back to on pram, and that is with the product line. And again, that integration across that, I have to have that insight, but at the end of the day, Dell EMC's product line delivers and that's what we experienced in our relationship. We're not talking about... 72 to one dedupe rate, I know that's, I triple checked the facts, it's like really, we're achieving that? That's impactful to my project lines, right? I'm no longer a bottle neck because I'm back at the projects and we're getting stuff moving and we're just not confused by the technology or the way we have to, you know, kind of bandaid them together, it's just one place to go and it delivers. And we see that delivery, especially with the growth of the Data Domain and the addition of the Sandbox, it's very exciting, we're seeing some great performance on our new systems. >> Yeah, and we hear that a lot about the flexibility of the portfolio and the data protection, the fact that, Bob mentioned it many times, making the backup window disappear is really where the heart of it is. And now Bob's team an all the customers that I've talked to and their teams can go off and actually move the business forward with more innovation and bringing more value back to the business. >> Part of security is disaster recovery. Do you guys integrate your disaster recovery practice as part of your Data Domain implementation? >> I think that's a great question. We've challenged our DR group, external also, we saw incident response component, just a big empty hole, it's missing. And I think that's a change in mindset people have to implement, as you pointed out, incident response is going to be before the disaster. And if you don't stand up, you're, look our data's gone mobile, that means it's everywhere, and we have to follow it everywhere with the same protection in the end of the day, no matter where we sit, we own it, we're responsible for it, so we have to go after it in the same protection. So I think it is part of that, we're integrating it, I think we confused a couple companies with that, but you got to stand up those foundation services, the cyber security, the data life cycle has made the cyber security become much more complex. And the use, the business use of that data is becoming more demanding, so we had to make it available, so we had to be transparent with these products and Kudos to Dell EMC and all the engineers making this happen. I don't know what I would be doing if it wasn't there for me. >> Keith: Well thank you, Bob. >> You know, and I'll tell you what strikes me a little bit about this, as we have just a final moment here, is that we think about cyber invasions and violations, what have you, we think about it on a global or a national scale. I mean, you are a very successful regional business, right? And you are just as prime of a target for malfeasance as any and you need to take these prophylactic measures just as aggressively as any enterprise. >> Right, right. If you look at the names, I mean, you just go down the list, Boeing, Mecklenburg County, City of Atlanta, you know, not to name 'em and pick on 'em but they're still recovering. And our business resilience, our reputation is all we have, we're there, you know, our critical asset is your data, that is what we say, you know, the story we tell is how we protect that and that's our services and if at the end of the day you don't trust our services, what are we? >> Alex: That's right. >> Not enough just to protect and prevent, you have to be able to recover. >> So to have a business partner that really understands, and I know I'm a little, maybe a little smaller than some of your others, but you still treat me like I'm... And you still listen to me, I bring you ideas, you say this fits, let's see what we can do. Your engineers go back and they say, you know, we can't say yes, but we can say we're going to take a different approach and come back with a solution. So it's very, very exciting to have a partner that does that with you. >> No, it's a great lesson, it is, it's great. Although, as I say goodbye here, I am a little disappointed when I heard you're from South Carolina I was expecting this wonderful southern accent to come out. (laughing) it just, Bob, what happened? >> You know, I'm an Iowa boy. >> John: You got a little yankee in ya'. >> There you go. Maybe they'll say a little more than a little. >> Alright, gentlemen, thanks for being with us. >> Thank you very much for having us. >> Thanks for sharing the Founders Federal story. Back with more from Las Vegas, you're watching the Cube, we're in Dell Technologies World 2018.

(techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live on day one is Las Vegas, of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. And we have a couple guests joining us now. We've got Ruya Barrett, the VP of Product Marketing for Data Protection at Dell EMC. Welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Lisa: And we've also got Kerry "KJ" Johnson from FieldCore, you are a senior systems engineer. Welcome, KJ. >> Thank you very much. >> So, KJ, we'll start with you. Tell us a little bit about FieldCore. I know you're a GE company but what is it about FieldCore that you guys do that makes you unique and how are you working with Dell EMC? >> Okay, so FieldCore is a global service provider in the power services sector. Our customers are governments and large countries. We service and build power plants all over the world. We're in the power generation business. So, anything that generates power. That could be wind, it could be water, it could be traditional oil and gas, it could be nuclear, anything that generates power. Basically, what FieldCore does is we service it, and we keep the lights on around the world, especially in, we're in 92 countries. So, other countries don't have the infrastructure that the United States has and experience outages a little more frequently than us. So our job is to get the power back on as quickly and as efficiently as possible. >> So last fall in the U.S. we were slammed with a lot of natural disasters, including Hurricane Irma. You guys at FieldCore had a critical situation last fall when that hurricane struck. Tell us about that, and how working with Dell EMC Technologies you were able to recover. >> Okay, so last year, they changed the forecast on Hurricane Irma from coming up the east coast of the state to coming up the west coast. And they were projecting it to hit the Tampa Bay area, which put all of our production systems directly in its path. So with them projecting the storm to hit us within about three to four days, we weren't prepared for it. I was on a call with all of the directors, and they asked me, what was our level of preparedness for this storm. So I told them that as far as data protection, we had replication, that was fine. We were replicating all of our SAP, Oracle, databases, all of our email via Exchange and file systems, to our data recovery center that was in Atlanta, via Dell EMC RecoverPoint appliances, so that was fine. We had a recovery point objective of less than two minutes. We could go back two minutes and be up and running. The problem was, had the storm hit us, and we had to then throw over and go live at our DR facility in Atlanta because Tampa was down, we wouldn't have any way to have backups during that time that we were live. So that was a gap that I identified. They subsequently asked me, is there something that could be done in three days- >> Dave: Got any magic beans? >> Yeah, exactly, so I'm going, I'll do everything in my power to make something happen. So basically I got on the phone and called my Dell EMC Data Protection rep, Matthew Sattler. And he was actually at a Dell management boot camp in Boston I believe, at the headquarters. And he actually took my call. He snuck out of the meeting and answered the call, which was an all-day meeting, which was, that enabled us to do what we did. He offered a solution that we could actually use virtual appliances, because we had not rolled out our DR equipment yet, it was wasn't even scheduled to be delivered for two weeks. So he shored up the licensing, he called a sales engineer, who got in touch with me, his name was Dominic Greco, he's based out of Pittsburgh, great guy. He lined up all of the resources. I got my resources together, and we put a plan together, and we actually had the project started by the end of that first day. >> Just another day at the factory. >> Hey, you know, our customers call us and we answer. That's how it works. >> So, it's common scenario for you guys? >> I think we had an exceptional team on the account, so exceptional teams always make a huge difference, and I think in this case, we definitely had a great team. And I think one of the things that KJ talked about, is how flexible the software-defined data protection approach can be. I think sometimes people think of us as an infrastructure company, infrastructure meaning hardware predominantly, but our data protection capabilities are just as robust on the software-defined data center front. So I think the flexibility of being able to do DR, and put in place a DR environment, that gave KJ all that flexibility, is really a testament to the software capabilities. >> So could we just kind of review exactly what happened? So, if I understand it correctly, you were concerned about the exposure on your remote site, right? You're going to fail over, RPO of only two minutes, so you're going to lose, maybe exposed to two minutes of data loss, you can live with that in business, right, understood that, you communicate it. But then you have no way to back up that failover site. >> KJ: Yeah. >> And so, the team came in and what, you you accelerated a DR project that was sort of in the pipeline? >> Exactly, we had hardware that was scheduled to be delivered to Atlanta, and be deployed within two weeks, but we didn't have the two weeks. >> Ruya: Three days. >> So our DR facility was still running on a legacy product, and that wouldn't work for us, because all of our production data was backed up to data domain and it's not interoperable. So, we went with the virtual appliances, and we deployed a virtual data domain, a virtual Avamar appliance, running Dell EMC Data Protection Software Suite, and an NDMP Accelerator, I always have trouble with that one, for our file systems, and by the end of the day, they were deployed and we were already starting the replication. >> So in this situation did you do you failover proactively, or you just wait for the disaster to hit? What's the- >> Well, the thing was just to be prepared. So, the storm was projected to hit Saturday. Day two, was Thursday, and we convened the conference call, an indefinite conference call, that means I was going to be on it, all of Dell EMC's people were going to be on it, until either we finished, or the storm blew us away. So we monitored the replication all Thursday and by like 6:45 that evening, all of the data had replicated over to the DR, and the next day, the office had closed early so people could go home and hunker down for the storm, look after their families and their property, and we kept the call going from home, but the data had finished by that evening. And the storm hit, started coming around midnight that evening on Saturday. So, fortunately, the storm only hit us as a weak Category 1, so we never even had to throw over to it, but had it hit us as a Category 3, we would have been very much in trouble, had we, weren't able to accomplish that. >> So I wanted to get, kind of an idea KJ, in terms of what is the business impact that you've been able to achieve? You've obviously had to accelerate this part of your security transformation, which you were able to do, what's the business impact that your bosses, and their bosses in the C-suite, at FieldCore, have seen as a result of being able to have the agility, with Dell EMC to implement this so quickly? >> Well, some of the things that came into play with the setup that we had with Dell EMC, one was the Data Protection Suite encompasses everything, hardware, software, licensing, replication, it's all one suite of things. It's not nickel and dime add-ons or bolt-ons, it's one full protection suite. So the package that we had, Matt said, "You already have this package", you know, there's nothing to buy, there was no charge for any of the resources rolling it out because we were on a, what's called a utility mode of billing, and it's basically, it's like instead of a CapEx expenditure, where we buy hardware, we don't buy anything, they bring it out for free, they install it for free, as soon as we start backing up, okay, how much deduplicated data do you have on a data domain? We'll bill you for it. And they send us a bill every month. So that helped us out. >> And you know the data domain efficiency quotient is just through the roof, it's one of the best platforms for dedupe, so it really helps our customers, especially when you're talking about a utility-base model as well, that efficiency, that architecture, that really brings that to bear. >> Dave: What do you call this utility model? >> This utility, it's the utility model, it's just one of our consumption models. It's the flexible consumption models that we offer across data protection software, as well as our platforms. >> So it's a pay by the drink? >> Ruya: Yeah absolutely. >> Now, I'm interested in the ripple effects, and I don't know your business well enough, but it sounds like, not only were you covered, but had a Category 3 hit, your customers, there would've been a ripple effect here to your customers, around the world, 92 countries I think you said. Is that right or is it, is this not a real-time business? >> Well, our users, the vast majority of them, are field technicians, they're field service guys. >> Dave: Oh. They work on turbines, they work on boilers, they work on nuclear plants, they're out in the field. They work on windmills. So they're not very technical people, but all of the laptops that they carry and hook up to this equipment, feeds equipment into our systems, and our systems can't go down. So, the impact would've been pretty great had our systems been offline for any amount of time, because when your global you know, there's really no good time to be down. When I'm sleeping, there's people busting their butts in other countries and you know, middle production hours. >> So last question here Ruya, to you, on this theme of Dell Technologies World, of make it real, KJ you've done a great job articulating how you've been leveraging your partnership as well as the technology, to make your security transformation a reality. Ruya, last question to you is, there was a recent ESG study on IT maturity, can you share with us some of the impacts there that you've seen, and how it kind of relates to FieldCore? >> Yeah, absolutely, be happy to. So we just recently unveiled a study we did with ESG, where we surveyed 4,000 customers, IT professionals, over 16 countries. And it really had to do with the IT transformation maturity curve, and their adoption. And one of the things that was really interesting is customer feedback, was that transformed companies, that have gone through this massive IT transformation, are perceived to be 16 times more innovative, be 2 1/2 times more competitive, perceived as being 2 1/2 times more competitive, and six times more apt to have IT as part of the business decision-making process. And data protection was one of the top areas of this transformation as well, because it's so critical. As data's moving out of the data center and becoming more distributed, we talked about the distributed core today, going to the edge with IOT, and all of those types of applications, there is this massive amount of data moving out, outside of the data center. So data's growing, it's moving out, and it's also becoming more and more critical for customers. So data protection, that recoverability, operational recoverability, disaster recoverability, cyber recovery, are becoming more and more critical. And there was three things in the maturity curve on data protection. Transformed companies are basically protecting data in five types of different applications. So they're not really looking at just physical protection, which a lot of legacy companies are still kind of stuck at physical, and maybe virtual, and starting to really do a lot more on virtual. These guys are looking at data protection across distributed environments, they're looking at public cloud, they're looking at hybrid cloud, they're looking at physical, virtual, so very comprehensive. So that was number one. Two, is really self-service models. Transformed companies, that have gone through IT transformation for their data protection have enabled application owners to be able to do self-service. So that has become a part of how they offer data protection. And the last one was really about automation and automated policies. So when you add a virtual machine, when you bring in a new system, how do you automatically apply policies, so protection isn't something that needs to happen as a backend consideration? And I think KJ talked about some of those things as well. And they're doing a self-service model as part of what they're rolling out, as well as the automated protection policies. So I think they're well on their way to transformation, and this is what makes it great, in terms of the partnership we have with our customers. >> Well thank you both so much for stopping by, sharing, KJ the great successes that you've had with that one very, very potent example, Ruya thanks for stopping by and sharing with us that data protection continues to be hot, hot, hot. >> And thanks for having us again. Thank you, nice seeing you guys. >> Our pleasure. We want to thank you, you're watching theCUBE live, day one, Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, stick around. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We'll be back after a short break. (techno music)