>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, you welcome back to the cubes coverage of combo go 19. We're in Colorado this year. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we have a couple of gents joining us alumni of the cube. We're gonna have a really spirited conversation. Please welcome Avinash locks from the CEO of Hedvig, one of our alumni and Don Foxer, the VP of storage solutions from combo and Ann Campbell. Oh gee, Dawn, you can say that, right? Yes, yes. So guys, just a little bit of news coming out with combo and Hedvig in the last month or so, you guys announced combo, announced they were acquiring Hedvig. We last had you on the cube of an Asha DockerCon 18 talking about had veg. And here we are, the announcement comes in September. Acquisitions already closed, lots of buzz, lots of excitement. I'll finish. Let's start with you. Why Convolt >>good question. Uh, first of all, thanks for having me. Uh, C, the way I look at it, I believe the enterprises are gravitating towards complete solutions. If you look at, uh, data management and backup Conwell's clearly the leader in that space, I don't have to say it, I think the analysts have all attested to it. We bring in a very complimentary set of tools that I think coupled together could be a complete solution for a large variety of workloads in the modern data center. And hence it makes it a ideal fit. And also the cultures from an engineering perspective, being Hedwig being a small company in Cornwall is also a small company. But you know, definitely big when compared to what we are at. Um, the cultures were more or less aligned in terms of the engineering culture, so to speak. And that makes it, uh, it made it a very natural choice. Do you know, feel comfortable going into a bigger company. So it worked out really well. >>So Don way we've seen the slides given in the keynote, they talked about the two halves of the brain, the storage management and the data management. Talked to us a little bit about of Hedwig plus con vault and how that goes together. Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you start to look at the, I mean, I guess you look at the marketplace today and you can tell that, uh, kind of the, the lines of delineation of what vendor a versus vendor B versus vendor seat is doing is completely blurred, right? And you'll see that with the attachment of secondary storage, you see that with way backup companies and are driving more towards sort of, you know, uh, the app dev space. And we really start to look at where, what Combolt's doing and, and, and I always say when we talked about the acquisition of Hedvig, it's accelerating the vision that we've had on be able to provide a really super scalable backend for where you can land information that Combalt protects, but the really interesting and cool part, but as you start to realize the tool set that it has within it, it also keeps us very relevant for the future, for where it, in the shifts with applications are going. >>Then it gives us a chance to really give that complete solution from giving the storage, taking the information as it's being created and storing it in a compliance form, storing it off to the cloud, maybe re-purposing it, reusing it into the future. So that's how this really starts to come together. You have the index in control and management, the understanding of what Combolt provides the data management and you have all the flexibility and control that the Hedvig platform provides and Miriam together just gives you that much more agility for how you can use that information, that data. I want to understand what being part of Convolt will be different for Hedvig. I think back to, I've been talking to you since the company came out of stealth. We're huge proponents of the learnings that the hyperscalers had. You came from Amazon and Facebook. Bringing that to the enterprise is great, but building something that is highly scalable versus frigging something that has repeatability and scalability through thousands of deployment, like convoluted have are two separate issues. So, you know, we'll, we'll being part of Convolt, how will that impact your business and your group? >>I think the latter is what is going to make it really exciting for us. I think we added a point where the product that we are bringing into the market or we are brought into the market, it's pretty mature and most of the customers would deploy it and use it. They've been extremely happy with the way it performs and the way it has performed over time. And I think with the combo, they have a larger footprint in the enterprise, large channel infrastructure already in place makes it a lot more easy to push the product out there into the market. And uh, we will be given and VR given complete autonomy plus you what it would it is at Viva doing. And obviously, you know, when you go into any other organization that has got to be some cross-pollination, which is also something that we will be pursuing. But these two things I think, uh, make it very exciting times for us. >>Didn't you? You mentioned the word acceleration a few minutes ago. I'm just wondering from your perspective being called on as long as you have, do you and maybe customers and partners see the Hedvig acquisition as? Sanjay was saying something that's trending on Twitter today is the hashtag new comm dolls. Yep. So it's actually interesting. At first when the acquisition was announced, there were some partners that were like, Hmm, okay, I need to think about this a little bit. And then as we kind of went through the talk track and sort of explain some of the power with the head of the platform delivers, there were a number of, there was suddenly aha. Like you could just tell the light bulb went off. I get where this is going. And then you see what we're doing from Convolt metallic as well, right? The the SAS offering. And you see how we're continuing to drive all of the innovation in that core product. I don't know if you want to call it a combo to Datto, but I do think we've entered a new era of what we're delivering back to our customers from a solutions perspective. And it's really exciting because you can talk to a customer about backup and give them the best solution in the world, but we can also start to expand and get a whole heck of a lot more strategic and help be thought leaders and some of these new spaces, >>well, some of the commentary that I was reading about the acquisition from analysts say, Hey, this is a potentially, this is going to give Combalt opened the door for a bigger presence in the surge defined space, a big market. Also elevate comm vault from a Tam perspective. Talk to us about those perspectives. As some of the analysts said, when Sanjay came onboard nine months ago, Hey combo, you really got to expand your market share and get a kick out of just cultivating the large enterprises. How do you see that? >>Yeah, sure. I mean that's the easiest place to point to the secondary storage market place, right? So the secondary to storage marketplace, it's double digits in billions of market share. And that can be anything from things like object storage. It could just be scale-out, NAS. It could be, um, it could be, you know, companies like Cohesity and others that have a platform that build out secondary storage is a whole slew of people that play in that space. Uh, it also goes back to like appliances in a whole form of other storage types that are purpose built. So the secondary storage is a fairly broad sort of brush that people paint. You know, something is not running production workloads. But the interesting thing is, and this is kind of something that when the we've talked about we see those lines of private production or primary, secondary, tertiary, that's starting to really blur out. >>Um, so that market share that is in secondary storage, that market share that attaches also to object for where your, where we're going from a even a scale out backup perspective. You know, those are I going to be target areas that we can start to give customers solutions into in a really integrated and complete way. Uh, one of the customer areas that I've heard from Convolt that I'm curious if it might be applicable for your, for your team of an option is the service providers, you know, they've sold and you talk about how many end users actually leverage Convolt technology. It's like almost an order of magnitude more when you go through the service providers and when you talk about scalability and the requirements that that seems to be like it could be a fit for a. >>Yeah, you could even think of someone who is running a private cloud in their own on premise data center as being a service provider for their own internal consumption. Grateful folks working in tunnel. I guess going to an MSB or even do a larger service providers is an extrapolation of the same thing. So it'll obviously make it a very natural fit because you know, everyone understands the cap X game. Operational efficiency is the harder problem to actually crack. And with systems like this you can actually address that very simplistically. And it also allows them to kind of scale with their growth in a very effortless fashion. So it makes an agile mix a lot of natural sense. >>And that's an interesting point cause that aligns well too with the way the Combalt software themselves also attack attaches, right? We do a much better job of running that value back to the larger enterprise or those that are seeing more of that operational efficiency challenge. So it's another reason why this is a great intersection or you know, great, great marriage of the two technologies, um, what want to speak with, I think we talked about Sanjay about he of being at puppet worked a lot with dev ops in that environment. I heard from Convolt COO that five of the 45 developers that are here doing whiteboard session come from Hedvig. So speak a little bit of that, that customer base, the developer community microservices, you know, that kind of modern >>I think we have a, a demo session. I don't know what time, but we're going to give you a comprehensive overview of how, uh, you know, kind of Kubernetes orchestrated containers works with Hedwig. I think if people are here, they're hearing me, they should definitely check it out. And, uh, if you look at some of our larger customers, they deploy us in environments where they want to have practically zero touch provisioning capability, right? Which means that you got your infrastructure ought to be completely programmable, which bitches, what the DevOps movement is all about. And uh, the comprehensive set of APIs that be exposed for control and data plane, it actually makes that pipe dream a reality. >>Let's talk a little bit about the integrations. I mentioned a minute ago. The announcement was in September, the acquisitions close and you guys have already really started to buckle down into the integration between the technologies. Can you talk to us about that? And then I'd love to get your perspective on existing had big customers, you know, what door does this open for them? >>So for an existing customers, they are very happy because they now are convinced that we have a larger footprint and we have a lot more people to help to help support them as they grow and they don't have this field anymore as to how perhaps a small startup would be able to support them. So that fear factor goes away. So they're all very relieved on that front. Second, from an integration perspective, uh, there's a lot of things that we are working on from a technological perspective that is getting deep into the roadmap. I dunno if he can talk much about it at this point, but a non-technology we're all well integrated in, we are all Commonwealth employees now Gunwale badges come while emails so well integrated at this point. >>I guess maybe from a high level perspective, what we probably can say is probably number one, we want to make sure the experiences across both products are merged. So it truly views as you know, one one true company vault and providing that experience. And that's everything from installation to support to how we communicate and manage the, the ongoing relationship with the customer. So that's one there's always work to do there. Right? And the next core piece is just how we can make the two technologies basically make, you know, the had big platform, a part of the combo data platform and make sure those two integrations are as tight as possible. And that will be a longterm path, right? Because as that becomes more integrated, there's going to be new ideas, new innovations, and she's gonna come up with a whole lot of new things that we could potentially do that will meet the needs for the customer. And I think the third piece that ties back into the dev ops conversation is we've got two really solid API stacks. So bringing those together is going to be important in the future as well. So that it really is a crisp and clean sort of programmable infrastructure for customers from how the storage is delivered all the way to how it's managed and potentially even deleted out the back end. >>Well, with how quickly we're seeing Convolt move in the last nine months, I mean this year there's so much innovation from leadership changes in sales and marketing, new GTM routes, et cetera. What can, what can combo customers expect in terms of, I know you can't divulge too much on the roadmap, but you know with faster, shorter cycles of development. >>So I'll go first. I mean I think as you look at the sort of sort of where maybe the easiest way to answers is we're staying in front of where the market is heading and we're making sure we're providing solutions that can get customers to solve those challenges when they hit them. We don't want them to have to hit those challenges, have to then struggle, fight, figure out what it is they can do while everyone in their market moves past them. We want to be there with a solution that answers some of those challenges that day. They hit them more preemptive, preemptive, absolutely more preempted to react. That's a perfect way to put it. Thank you. So that's part of what they can expect from us and we do a lot of research and working with our customers and understanding where their future needs are, where they're going. We spend a lot of time with industry experts and analysts too for what they're seeing across the globe. Obviously we can only go so far and travel and talk to so many people. So we leveraged the collective of the industry to also kind of have a pretty good gauge and I'll say we've got leaders like Amash and Sanjay that are also awesome at just kind of having a really good pulse on where the industry is going and what we should be doing as a company. >>I'm just getting pickled in so too early for me to answer how that roadmap may Michio or how customers may perceive. But I think, uh, what should be very encouraging is that we bring so many, so much more capabilities. The enterprise has always been in this mindset of procuring things with a single throat to choke and this makes it very easy for them. >>What's the question of done for you is some of the things that Sue and I have talked about with guests today is from a partner perspective, there's been a lot of positive feedback in Navarro community we talked with and think we're talking with Rick de Blasio tomorrow. Want to understand, you know, some of the new partner programs, how are his Convolt traditional channel, your VARs, but also all the way up to your. Their reaction to all of the changes and the acceleration that Cohmad is driving is particularly with respect to head veg. >>For the most part it's been incredibly positive and even though the technology partner side, it's, it's fairly positive and also it forces us to have a much closer conversation on. All right, let's continue to talk about how we're successful together in the marketplace because we understand that our customers will need more than one vendor, more than two vendors to be successful as they kind of tackle the challenges that are in front of them. So you know, we're not going to stop our innovation and partnering and technology ecosystem development because that's so important to allow the customer to have the choice. We know that we're only one of many players and so we want to give them the choice to use whatever they need. We just want to help them control and manage the data >>and help them maybe simplify their operations. And especially as you know, we don't, we don't go to any event without talking about multi-cloud. It's the world that most businesses are living in. And, and I'll say, if you're not you Willy, how can what combat is doing now, not just with Hedvig but also just with some of the structural changes and directions that you guys have made it help customers embrace multicloud actually be able to protect, recover that data and >>you know, shift, sift insights from it. Yeah, sure. Please. All right, so multi-cloud, so first it starts off in tying in the ecosystems of the different cloud players offer, right? You need to be able to sort the support their platforms. You need to be able to continue to abstract out the information, the data itself that may be tied to an application or tied to a platform and give that level of portability. It's actually something that Hedvig does a fantastic job on as well and when you start to have that level of portability, well then it becomes a heck of a lot easier to either use other platforms within that cloud or a separate cloud or something you might homegrown build yourself as. That's part of the big value prop. We're doing all of these things not to have the best infrastructure but to make it easier for customers to use that data. So that means integrating and being strong partners to cloud players. It means continuing to be a really technological leader in how you can support all the platforms and services they offer and really allow the data to rise to the top as far as the value perspective goes and that's really where we continue to drive our innovation, at least on the on the data management side. >>That's a good Commonwealth perspective. The Hedvig perspective comes from a different angle. We always look at data portability, be it multicloud or even be at hybrid via met a lot of customers who went down the hybrid pot and then had to pull back. And when you pull back, you don't want to be in a situation where you're rewriting your entire application because your data is persisted in a very different way. But providing that data portability with an abstraction that sits between the application and the underlying physical infrastructure, I think is going to be a very important solution to take. You know, view often in this mix and hence together it becomes a comprehensive solution. >>Well guys, we thank you so much for stopping by joining soon and be on the program telling us a little bit more about this exciting new venture that you guys are going in together and we look forward to hearing more about it as it unfolds and maybe getting some customers on the cube next year. Absolutely. All right. Thank you. Thanks for Sumeta, man. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from convo. Go 19.

>> Live, from San Francisco, it's theCube covering DockerCon 18, brought to you by Docker, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCube, we are live at DockerCon 2018, in San Francisco, on a beautiful day. Lisa Martin with John Troyer. We're very pleased to welcome back to theCube distinguished alumni Avinash Lakshman, the CEO and founder of Hedvig. Welcome back. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So, talk to us about Hedvig, what's new, what are you guys doing, what's exciting? >> Oh, a lot of things, I mean, since the last time we spoke here, I think, some of the improvements have been made in the platform as been pretty significant, in fact we are executing on the vision we had from day one, which is to be the infrastructure for both primary and secondary storage, and I think we are delivering on that promise. And doing so pretty efficiently. >> Talk to us about the case for consolidating primary and secondary workloads on one platform. >> So, everybody understands how capics can be reduced, right, but I think the key to understanding how one can reduce their operation overhead, is going to become very important, and the key to that is to, if you look at how enterprises have evolved, there's always been a vendor they talk to for their SAM needs, a different kind of vendor for their NAS, they're all trying to figure out what their object strategy ought to be, and now there's a lot of disruption happening in the secondary market, we always felt like, what if you go to one platform, on which you can consolidate block, file, and object, and also be the backup target in most of the secondary use cases. Then, all you got to do is to train your folks, on one platform, and just use it for different workloads by changing either policy or adverse queue. Makes your operational overhead very streamlined and very efficient. >> Avinash, sometimes the infrastructure people joke about containers, and they say, well, you know the developers here, they just go, well the storage just exists, doesn't it, I just call, I do a mount point, and it just works, in the cloud, right? And so, but Hedvig is here at DockerCon. Can you talk a little bit about some of the relationship there, and some of the how you work with folks, these folks here at DockerCon, working in containers? >> See, anytime anything is simple to use, they always joke about it, but there's a lot of work that goes behind driving that simplicity. Like they say, you wanna keep things simple, because any fool can complicate things, you know? So, but I think you, people are looking to bring that cloud-like mentality into On Prem data centers, and I think, we are also delivering on that promise. >> To clarify, I was kind of making a joke. The infrastructure people always kind of, they roll their eyes, they say we do all this work, and the developers think it's so easy one it gets to them. >> No, I know, because all hard work is done for them. >> I mean, there's also a joke among the infrastructural community that, eh, it's just an app, that's how they flippantly brush off applications, so, it goes both ways, I suppose. >> Indeed. >> So, I always look at messaging on websites of guests and companies, and I liked what I saw. Finally, a cloud agnostic storage solution. What does that mean from Hedvig's perspective, and how does that give you that differentiation that you want? >> Good question, because, for that one needs to define what multi-cloud is. Everyone has their own definition for multi-cloud. Just the way of, a few years ago, everybody had their own definition of distributed systems, right, I mean, there was a large populace that believed that if a program runs on multiple computers, it's a distributed system. Not the way, we, I, would define it. It has to be multiple machines working together to make believe that there's only one machine behind the scenes, right? And similarly, one may want to set the stage for what multi-cloud is all about. Again, running, there is a popular school of thought, if I can run on Cloud A, and then run on Cloud B, I am multi-cloud, that's not my definition. The way I would like to define it is one fabric that can span multiple clouds, and give you the illusion that that's where there's a whole location transparency thing comes in. You believe everything is local, but it could be anywhere, you know, and that's where infrastructure becomes kind of invisible, and it's a single fabric that spans multiple cloud environments. >> So, that transparency, is that something that really kind of helps Hedvig define some of your key differentiation? >> In the cloud environment, definitely, yes, and here's why: When people typically build applications, if you program to services that are available in one particular cloud environment, tomorrow, you wanna run it on a different cloud environment, there is no API compatibility between different clouds. So you will have to rebuild your applications to a total different set of services, that another cloud vendor provides. At least, what we bring to the table is from a data management infrastructure layer, you could have one fabric, you can run your, you can now move your applications willy-nilly, because you will be programming against an API that we provide, and you don't have to worry about where you are running them. And that's what we enable. And that's done seamlessly today. >> Can you talk about how some of your customers are using Hedvig, and some of the customer use cases, in production? >> Yeah, I mean, there's quite a a few use cases, I think the popular ones are, for those who are in the primary kind of workload space, which are typically used when you to run, when you need fault tolerance across multiple sites. One of the more interesting use cases that we are now deploying in the UK is across multiple clouds and on premise, so it's kind of hybrid and multi-cloud built inside one fabric. And the reason they do it, is basically, not only consolidate their existing On Prem data centers, but also to get, to satisfy data governance laws for certain applications. This leads to a tone that I'm trying to drive and make popular, which is a declarative data sovereignty, which basic means, if you look at things in Europe, for different applications, there are different laws, and that's now becoming kind of common place. We live in a global economy, but the data governance laws are all local. So, people want certain applications and its data not to span certain geographic regions, right? How do you make that happen in a declarative way? And, you should be able to do that by just saying for this app, this volume, and there are some policies you assign to it, and that policy basically dictates what regions that data will live in, and we make it as simple as it possibly can get. >> Nice. So, the policies then drives where the data lives, and on Hedvig, if it needs to stay in Germany, that volume will stay there, and will never be anywhere else. >> Exactly, exactly, and you can even control that across different cloud windows, if you're running, say, for example, this particular customer, I'm not sure if I can mention the name, but so I'm going to err on the side of caution, they run across AWS, Azure, and On Premise. And for certain apps, they want the data to be spread across AWS and Azure, and for certain apps, they wanted data to be stored across On Prem and AWS. You wanna make it as simple as possible, make it declarative, and for those who are more systems savvy, if you look at how computer science has evolved over time, if you look at the late 90s, transactions were a big deal, everyone were trying to figure out how to program transactions into their system. But, over time, people designed run-times, where you can declaratively annotate section of your modules, to say whether it should be part of a transaction or not. And they made it that simple, and the run-time kind of takes care of that delivering those annotations that you declare. We wanna bring the same simplicity for data sovereignty. >> So we're at the fifth DockerCon, and this morning, Steve Singh said it was around 5,000, we've heard upwards of 6,000 attendees here, and I think you said at the first DockerCon, there was only about 300 people. I noticed when I walked out of the general session this morning, and I turned back around the room, it was packed, it was standing room only. I'm curious what your thoughts are about some of the things that Docker has announced, you know, they really talked about what they're enabling with enhancements to enterprise edition, with federated application management, what they're doing with Docker desktop, as really enabling three things: and I heard you kind of talk about one of them for sure, which was agility, choice, and security. From a security perspective, what are some of the things that Hedvig can enable your customers to achieve, because we hear that security is a huge issue. >> Security typically manifests itself in two ways: one is in today's systems, you have data spreading all over the place, so when the data's on the wire, you need to encrypt things on the wire so that nobody can sniff and steal data. There is also an aspect of security where data, which goes onto the sides on any media, needs to be secured, meaning it needs to be encrypted. Now, there's a whole school of people who believe that they've solved that problem by sticking in what is called self-encrypting drives, but that solves only part of the problem, and it's a hacky solution because we live in a world where, you know, BYOD was a big thing, and it's kind of BYOK, right? Bring your own keys, so we can encrypt using the keys that you bring to the table and get out of the way, right? So, if you want to achieve that, then you cannot just SCD's, you have to drive the encryption onto the media on which the data is going to reside, but that's part of the problem. The other part of the problem is: what happens to data when it's on the wire? So you want to be able to encrypt data on the wire, and at rest, so that takes care of one part of security. The other big issue is ransomware, right, and there are also application developers when they want to shown through their features, and they want to build fast and develop features very fast, they could end up corrupting data underneath. How do you protect against, you want to have a feature that even let's you protect your data from yourself, and those are all capabilities that one needs to think through. The way you typically would do that is have the capability of providing managed snapshots, where you can periodically keep taking snapshots of your data, so you can revert to any, it's kinda like Github for data, that's how we look at it. You know, when you look at Github, you put your source code in there, but nobody is working on the same source tree, you create different trees, and then you merge them in when you think the time is right. So, you wanna have different copies of your data, without having copies, and then be able to revert back to any pristine version you deem fit, if you make any mistakes at the application level, or if there are ransomware kind of issues. So, it's a multi-fold problem. So, you've got to look at things holistically and make sure that everything is kind of delivered natively through any infrastructure platform one is building. >> So, Avinash, you are, frankly, you've had a big impact, on cloud computing, you were one of the co-inventors of DynamoDB, at Amazon. >> Dynamo. >> Dynamo, and you were then at Facebook Cassandra, and you actually said the 10th anniversary of Cassandra. >> This is, I didn't even realize, I think it's either this month or next month. >> Nice, nice. Huge impact, right? Whole ecosystems have been built up. So, you have a sense of where the problems are. Now, Hedvig, a few years old now, you know, what are trying to do now with Hedvig, and where would you like to take it? You're in the middle of a very hot market, the data services market, this kind of secondary storage market, is super hot. So, I would just love to hear what your dreams are, where you're trying to take Hedvig, and how did you see that this was a hot place, and where are you going with it? >> Dreams are a difficult question to answer, but at least we know one thing: what we do know, is that we are onto something big, and this a problem that needs solving, and it needs solving from the ground up, and it needs solving in a very different way. I always believed that true innovation comes from people from the outside. I'm not a storage guy, I never was. But, I believe that makes me better suited to go after this problem because I don't have any of the baggage that people typically tend to have. You can't disrupt yourself, right? We believe we are onto something big, and so we are just heads down trying to deliver on that. I don't know where it could go, I'll leave it to destiny, but I think we're onto something big, and hopefully we will reap the benefits of what we are doing. >> Well, Avinash, thanks so much for coming by theCube again and sharing with us what's going on at Hedvig. It sounds like some exciting times ahead, and we wish you the best of luck. >> Thank you, really appreciate it. >> We want to thank you for watching theCube. For John Troyer, I'm Lisa Martin, and we are live from DockerCon 2018 in San Francisco. Thanks for watching, guys. (electronic music hit)

>> Narrator: Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019. Brought to you by Commvault. (upbeat electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are covering Commvault Go '19 from Colorado and Stu and I are pleased to welcome a couple of guys back to theCUBE. We've got David Wigglesworth, a VP, now VP of Global Sales and Emerging Technologies at Commvault for what, a couple weeks now David? >> About a month and five days. >> About a month, and look who's back, it's Don Foster, VP of Storage Solutions, >> Great to be back. from the Keynote stage, welcome back Don. >> Thank you very much. >> Don, and we appreciate you bringing your own personal makeup artist, Sanjay Merchandandi, >> Yeah. >> A man of many skills. >> Indeed. (laughing) >> He really is. So if this whole, like, CEO thing doesn't work, he's clearly got a career in, you know, touch-up makeup. >> In makeup. >> Yeah, all right, so Wigs we'll start with you, you've got a cool nickname, so I got to use it. You've been here for about a month or so. This is a new Commvault. We've heard a lot in the last two days. A lot of news, a lot of leadership changes, obviously, go-to-market changes, new partner offerings, lots of stuff. Tell us first, before we dig in, what attracted you to Commvault? >> That's a pretty easy question to answer, it's the leadership. So, obviously I'm very familiar with Commvault. I've competed with them in my past career. Always been a very formidable competitor. When you walked into an account in my previous life and they said they had Commvault, you usually kind-of wiped your brow, and thought 'Oh okay, I've got to find something else here to talk about' but in all seriousness, for me it was, you know, when I first noticed in the News that Sanjay had come onboard. That peaked my interest, because obviously I knew Sanjay in my previous life at EMC and at VMware. And then when I watched Ricardo join the company, I was like, okay, this is something I really need to dig into. And so when I had the opportunity to meet with them and understand the direction of where they want to take the company, which was also already just a phenomenal IT organization, just a pillar in the IT community, with what the founders were able to do in relatively short amount of time. I was really excited to be able to come over and be a part of it. >> Wigs, you've got a emerging tech under your purview, tell us a little bit about what that's going to mean in your role. >> Right now it means I'm head big, right? So, by now, everyone's heard of the acquisition that was made. That was the other thing also that really interested me, was that technology because I really think that's where the market is going and I just felt like it was a great addition to the Commvault family of products. But it's a different technology. It's calling on a different set of folks with inside of an account and it's primarily an enterprise play. It can be a go-down-market a little bit, and enterprise's is kind of where I spent the last several years of my career, the last 20 or so (laughs) and so what we've decided to do is, because it's so different, we've decided for the time being, that we were going to create a special aid organization globally to go sell that solution so that our existing core sellers can focus on our existing set of products, right? That we can be a specialist organization that can help them with their customers, selling all of the additional emerging tech, right? And so, here at the show, we've obviously spent time talking about Hedvig. Metallic is another new technology for us. Now Metallic is going to handled differently, but as we continue to grow our emerging technologies from the traditional core Commvault family of products, that's what I'm going to be focused on. So it'll begin with Hedvig. >> So for the role that you're in now, you said about a month or so, are you bringing in a brand-new sales overlay team? Are you guys hiring like crazy or are some of the Commvault OG sales-guys-or-girls shifting up, we'll say? >> For the most part, we're bringing in new talent. We're looking for people that have a broad spectrum of the experience, right. Obviously someone with strong storage background, but also people that know virtualization code, people that understand containers. Those skillsets are really important to us. And so we're busy building out both an America sales team and also building out a Nemea sales team. And then my partner, I call him my partner-in-crime, Ediz. Ediz is building out our SE organization for the same two theaters. We'll start in those two theaters and then once we get the product fully integrated, which is part of what this guy is doing, once we get the product fully integrated, then I think you'll see us start to move into some other theaters. But right now we're going to focus on those. So yes, we're hiring. Right now my LinkedIn says, "David Wigglesworth, we're hiring." >> I think I saw that actually (laughing). >> So Don, we got to dig into some of the technology with you and Avinash yesterday. >> Absolutely. >> So we're now getting most of the way through the conference, bring us inside some of the conversations you're having. I know it was one of the biggest question, we had coming in was: 'All right The Hedvig that we knew, what's going to change, how does that fit?' Blurring the lines between primary and secondary and all those discussions we had with Sanjay. So take us to how people, are they kind of getting it at this point? And we know it's a journey for the integration and where it will ultimately end. >> Here's the real interesting thing, is probably in the first, I don't know, maybe 24 hours of having conversations with people from partner exchange all the way through to basically day one of actual Commvault Go, I probably had about four, maybe five if you count one of the service providers from Customers' Partners, come up and say, "Okay look, we looked at this tech about 18, 12 months ago and it was top of our list for what we wanted to do for building out this initiative, but there was a little bit too much risk." Going okay, do we really want to invest that much on a company that is maybe not the largest, most, I wouldn't want to say, reputable, but substantial in the marketplace. Will they be there in the future? And they're like, "Now that we know you've legitimized that business "and you want to keep that technology going forward, "this is fantastic. "We totally want to go and take a re-look back at this "and see how we can apply "that back into our infrastructure." So that's a great feedback to hear, and only serves as validation that when we look at the tech and say "This is good stuff," that we know it's good stuff and then of course the next piece is always, "All right, so now when can I start using this for Commvault and?" >> Right. >> That's when we start getting into the conversations of all right, we've got some integration work to do, the partners are asking when they can start to get access to sell it and again, we've got some work to do just to industrialize what we're doing and make the experience similar and then we'll start to roll it out in a considered fashion. >> I'm curious about the education piece. One of the customers that was onstage this morning, Sonic Healthcare, one of the things he said, on main stage and when he stopped by theCUBE a couple of hours ago, was, he said: "I wouldn't be in my job," and he runs disaster recovery and business continuity for Sonic Healthcare, "I wouldn't be in my job without Commvault's support." And I really appreciated and respected how he talked about some of the failures that they had. I always think failure is a good F-word if you leverage it in that way, (agreement) failure can mean success, if you learn from it. But the support organization and the training he talked about have been instrumental. Talk to us, guys, about how you're going to be partnering together to not just enable the big partners for those large enterprise accounts but maybe even the new sales-guys-and-girls that are coming, David, to your team to help everybody really understand how best to delivery a really stellar customer experience with something as exciting now as Hedvig is. >> You want to start, since you've been working on the integration. >> Yes, absolutely. First and foremost, I've been working with Avinash and his brother, Srinivas, and a lot of their engineering team. You really start to lock in things that are repeatable and scalable in nature, right? So that if we are going to open this up to more people, we do need to have repeatable nature of the building blocks for different use cases. So there's some core work we're doing on outlining, positioning, criteria, success, what the outcome needs to be, how that ties back in to hardware. Making sure as well that we understand how the messaging really does resonate and make sure that we're following and being focused on what our core targets are. Because a solution like what Hedvig offers, you can quickly start talking about a lot of different things that could be all things to many people, and we know that that's probably the worst decision to make, because you go super wide and don't go very deep at all and you end up losing the value prop. So identifying what the real core use cases are, getting deep in how it works, one with what the structure of it looks like, making it repeatable, that's the first and foremost thing, I think, for how we can help both Ediz and Wigs' sales team, and on the support side, doing very similar things but also doing some of the programmatic work of the integration and the experience. I talk about experience, like the sending of logs, the things that Matthew Magby from Sonic Healthcare was talking about how we really helped him. We want that same level of experience tied into where the software storage platform works as well. So there's some work to be done there. But as we get it done, the enablement on the support side, as you know, we deal with storage everyday anyway, so it's not like it's a big leap, but we do have to bring them into the mix of how the actual technology works, where it breaks, why it breaks, and those are all the things that we're really focused on in the next 90 days. >> Yeah, I think the real key for me as we talk to customers and also employees is I want them all to have the same experience with the new Hedvig solution that they experience with Commvault, right? And that goes from training our employees, really getting our SEs up to speed, so they can have a meaningful conversation to be able to get a customer to say, "Yeah, I think I'd like to speak with the Special Aid team. "Please have them give me a call." And also on the enablement for the clients, and having the customer understand that you can dial to 1-800 number for support, you can talk to somebody that can lead you down a path and give you the same quality of support you've been used to whether you're calling about a Hedvig solution or whether you're calling about a Commvault solution. >> Yeah, we talked about it a little yesterday, but the scale of the offering is a little bit different. >> It is. >> And therefore, that has some challenges on the support. And something that I'm sure Commvault is going to work on making that, it's not identical for every customer but a little bit more repeatable to be able to scale out that offering. >> I would agree, I would agree. The hardest thing to do is when you have a product that has so much functionality as Hedvig is to not lose focus and try to talk way too broad. What you've really got to do is, you've got to drill down with the client try to understand where their pinpoints are and because, quite frankly, the Hedvig product can do a lot of things. >> Don: Yeah, it can. >> Who's the ideal target customers, we talked about the theaters in which you're going to be launching first. Enterprise, we talked about that. Commvault has a significant presence in the Fortune 500, I think I read about three quarters of Commvault's revenue today comes from the Fortune 500, and Stu was saying yesterday about 80% of the revenue comes from the channel. So we look at Hedvig and the enterprise for a second, customers that are new to Commvault, those existing enterprise customers, GTM both? >> Yeah, I would say, the primary focus is going to be calling on the existent customer set. It's much easier to have a conversation with someone who knows who you are, even though you may be selling a new solution, at least they know who you are and they have a positive experience with us. So that, number one, we're going to focus on our probably our top 300 global accounts to start, as well as our top enterprise accounts. So there's probably, I would say, in the two theaters I mentioned earlier, there's probably about 35 hundred accounts that we're really going to focus on, and really try to make sure that we get in front of as many as we can and tell the story. I think that's where we have to start. Now, will there be greenfield opportunities? Yeah, I think quite frankly, that the Hedvig offering is different enough that it will enable us to go call on some of accounts that aren't doing business with Commvault today, maybe doing business with some of our competitors. So hopefully we can use that to actually win more traditional Commvault business. That's the plan. >> And the reason the enterprise really makes sense, the global accounts, is most larger companies have figured out how try solve the CapEx problem, right? >> David: Yeah. >> They've figured out just the economies of scale and how they grow and move, they can kind of handle that. What really still becomes a challenging piece is the operational efficiency. So, can I get the right solution at the right cost, but do it in a way that I'm actually making things more simplified? I'm not actually exploding more complexity into my environment. That's really where the Commvault data management platform and the Hedvig solution together really make a really solid story. >> All right, so Wigs, Don's team's really got their work cut out for them with all the integration work and know they've got a cadence and a roadmap. For you, obviously, new logos, there's got to be revenue goals. What are some of the key KPIs to measure how this becomes a successful acquisition? >> Well if my CEO is standing close by, he may be in earshot of this, right now it's trying to drive as much revenue as we can. But we also have to realize that we also have to build a pipeline, right? So right now my main focus here is I got to get a team in place that can go articulate the value of this solution to a client, right, number one, both technically and then working with Ediz to get the SE team in place, so that's number one. Number two, while we're doing that, we need to build a pipeline, right? When you make an investment, as you guys know, you're expected to start getting a return on that pretty quickly. And, it's nice, we inherited some nice pipeline with the acquisition. But with opportunity comes responsibility and so we've got to build that pipeline up and really get out in front of customers and find some opportunities that we can not only try to finish for this second half so we can hit all of our financial metrics, but really build pipeline for FY21, for us which starts in April. >> So the voice of the customer is, really can be really powerful. We've heard from a number of Commvault customers on our program yesterday, today on main stage. Is there a plan, Wigs, from your perspective, to get customers into some sort of data so that you have proof in the pudding to show those large enterprises and those theaters to help build that pipeline. Look at someone who's been an existing Commvault customer for five, 10 years or so, here's the, I don't want to say migration path, but maybe upgrade path to expand footprint in there. Here's how we did it, here's why this was ideal for this customer. Plans to get those early adopters to help you dial up the pipeline? >> So have you been reading my 'Go to market strategy' (laughing) 'cause you kind of you basically just read it. So yes, listen we are inheriting some nice accounts with Hedvig. They have some nice logos out there which is really good. And it's a good foundation for us to build upon. But we're very fortunate in that our core sellers have some really good relationships with some pretty large customers really in all different industries. And so, what we're doing right now is we're trying to identify probably about 10 accounts that make sense. That are really strong partners. They don't have to necessarily be really big customers, but just really strong partners that want to work together with us. And exactly what you just said, let's get in front of them, let's give them an opportunity to play with the technology and have them help us figure out, we think we have a pretty good idea what the go-to-marketing messaging should be for our existing customer base but certainly don't assume that we know everything. So have them help us build that strategy. So that is absolutely the plan. >> We've been hearing a lot about the last couple of days, of just, the openness of Commvault. Whether it's, I really thought it was cool with Metallic that the telemetry that partners can get to help customers, maybe even before a customer knows of an issue or an opportunity, but this telemetry, this 'let's learn from our customers,' couldn't agree as a marketer with you more about, we might think we have a great tagline, great messaging, but it's the users who need to validate that. What I'm hearing a lot over the last day and a half is how receptive Commvault is. We're listening to our customers, whether it's existing and comeback customers that Sanjay's team are dealing with, or even through partners. That message is loud and clear, and that's pretty important. >> Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I'll be honest with you, what's it's also been able to give us an opportunity to do is where we've had some relationships, quite frankly, that maybe we need to work a little harder on. Hedvig has given us that opportunity to kind of start those conversations as well. I think there's a lot of value, both on the existing opportunities as well as growing the business overall. >> Guys, nothing short of a lot of work ahead. But, pretty exciting stuff. We thank you both. Wigs, welcome again to Commvault. >> Thank you. >> Can't wait for next year. Going to bring some cool customers on the program. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Looking forward. The buzz is so amazing this year. So many customers have said, "I know you weren't here last year, but wow," and that's what they've said. I can't wait to see what this is going to be like next year. Thank you for having us on here. >> You've got to come back. >> Absolutely we will. >> Yeah? >> Yeah. >> All right, guys, thank you for joining Stu and I. >> Thank you both very much. >> Thank you. >> For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE from Commvault Go '19. (upbeat electronic music)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, good morning. Welcome to the cubes coverage of combo go 19 I'm Lisa Martin and it was stupid man. Hey Sue. Hey Lisa. Are you ready? I was going to ask you. Yes. Are you ready? >>I believe the statement this morning was, we're born ready. >>We are born ready? Yes. That was a big theme this morning. It's the theme of the event here at con Volvo 19 in Colorado and great parody this morning of all these old video clips of all these actors including the Lego movie stars from saying I'm ready. Even SpongeBob. That one got me, so we had a great day. Yesterday's to love some news came out Monday and Tuesdays a lots of great stuff to talk about. We had there a lot of their C level execs and let a new changes a call yesterday. Really got the vibe of, Hey, this is a new Combalt. >>It's interesting Lisa, because one of the things we've been talking about is the 20 years of pedigree that the company has. This Andre Mirchandani said yet they're doing some new items. I was talking to some of the partners in there like how come metallics like a separate brand, don't you worry about brand spread? We knew a thing about having too many brands on the program so it is the history, the experience, the lessons learned, the war chest as they said of all of the things that have gone wrong over the years and I sure know that from my time living on the vendor side is there's no compression algorithm for all the experience you've had and like, Oh we fixed something in that stays in the code as opposed to there's something brand new might need to work through things over time but metallic a separate brand but leveraging the partnerships and the go to market and the experience of Convolt overall. >>So if you want, my quick take is, you know metallic. I definitely, I think coming out of here is the thing we will be talking the most about their SAS plus model. I want to see how that plays in the marketplace. As I probed Rob, when we interviewed him, customers, when you think about SAS, it should just be, I worry about my data and I get up and running and they said they have a very fast up and running less than 15 minutes. That's great. But some of that optionality that they built in, Oh well I can bring this along or I can add this and do this. It's always worried that a wait, do I have to remember my thing? And as it changes down the road, do I have everything set up right? Those are things that we're trying to get away from when we go to a SAS or cloud model. >>And to your point, another theme of the show has been about operational simplification, not just what Combolt is doing internally to simplify their operations, but what they need to deliver to customers. Customers want simplicity rates. Do we, we talk about that at every show regardless of industry, but there is this, this line, and maybe it's blurring, >>like we talked a lot about blurred lines yesterday of too much choice versus simplification. Where's the line there? >> Yeah and a great point Lisa, so one of the items Sandra Mirchandani said yesterday in his keynote was that blurring the line between primary and secondary storage and I probed him on our interview is Convolt going into the primary storage market with Hedvig. Hedvig has got a, you know, a nice offering, strong IP, good engineering team. I think they want to make sure that customers that have bought head vigor want to keep buying Hedvig we'll do it, but it really, I think two years from now when you look back at is that core IP, how does that get baked into the solution? That's why they bought it. That's where it's going to be there. I don't think we're going to be looking two years from now and saying, Oh wow know Convolt they're going up against all the storage star Walton competing a bit gets HCI and everything. >>They have a strong partnership, so I think I got clarity on that for the most part, even though the messaging will will move over time on that, it will move over time on that. >> That's a good point that the song blurred lines kept popping into my head yesterday as we were talking about that. But one of the things that was clear was when we spoke with Rob Kalusi and about metallic, we spoke with Avinash Lakshman about Hedvig Sanjay as well as Don foster. They're already working on the technical integration of of this solutions and we even spoke with their VP of pricing. So from a customer, from a current Hedvig customer perspective, there is focus on that from Combolt's perspective. It's not just about integrating the technologies and obviously that has to be done really well, but it's also about giving customers that consistency and really for combo kind of a new era of transparency with respect to pricing. >>And another thing we talked about some of that transformation of the channel and Mercer row came on board only a couple of days officially on the job. He's helped a number of companies get ready for multicloud and absolutely we've seen that change in the channel over the last five to 10 years. Know back in his days when he was at VM world at VMware there the channel was, Oh my gosh, you know, when Amazon wins we all lose and today we understand it as much more nuance there. The channel that is successful partners with the hyperscale cloud environments, they have practices built around it. The office three 65 and Microsoft practices are an area that Convolt in their partners should be able to do well with and the metallic will tie into as well as of course AWS. The 800 pound gorilla in this space will be there. Combolt plays into that and you know, setting the channel up for that next generation with the SAS, with the software and living in a broader multicloud environment is definitely something to watch you a lot of news about the channel, not just from a leadership standpoint but also so metallic for the mid market >>really delivered exclusively through the channel but also the new initiative that they have. And we talked a little bit about this yesterday about going after and really a big focus with global systems integrators on the largest global enterprises. And when we spoke with their GTM chief of staff yesterday along with Mercer with Carmen, what they're doing, cause I said, you know, channel partners, all the channel partners that they work with work with their competitors. So you have to really deliver differentiation and it can't just be about pricing or marketing messaging goes all the way into getting those feet on the street. And that's another area in which we heard yesterday Combolt making strategic improvements on more feet on the street co-selling with partners, really pulling them deeper into enablement and trainings and to them that's one of the key differentiators that they are delivering to their partners. Yeah >>and Lisa, he, we got to speak to a number, a couple of customers we have more coming on today. It's a little bit telling that you know the average customer you talk to, they have five 10 years of experience there. They are excited about some of the new offerings, but as we've said many times metallic, the new Hedvig we want to talk to the new logos that they're going to get on board. That is something that for the partners has been an incentive. There were new incentives put in place to help capture those new logos because as we know, revenue was actually down in the last fiscal year a bit and Convolt feels that they have turned the corner, they're all ready to go. And one other note I'd like to make, the analogy I used last year is we knew a CEO was canoe CEO search was happening, a lot of things were in motion and it's almost as if you were getting the body ready for an organ transplant and you make sure that the antibodies aren't going to reject it. And in conversation with Sanjay, he was very cognizant of that. His background is dev offs and he was a CIO. We went for it, he was the CEO of puppet. So he's going to make things move even faster. And the pace of change of the last nine months is just the beginning of the change. And for the most part I'm not hearing grumbling underneath the customer seem fully on board. The employees are energized and definitely there was good energy last year, but a raise of the enthusiasm this year. >>Well Stu, first of all, you have just been on fire the last two days comparing their CEO transition to getting a body ready for a transplant. It's probably one of the best things I've heard in a long time. That was awesome. But you're right, we've heard a lot of positivity. Cultural change is incredibly difficult. You talked a minute ago about this as a 20 year old company and as we all have all experience and the industries in which we're in, you know, one of the things that's important is, is messaging that experience and talking about the things that that worked well, but also the things that didn't work well, that they've learned from that message was carried through the keynote this morning. That three customers on stage that we saw before we had to come to the side. And I, I had, my favorite was from Sonic healthcare. Matthew McCabe's coming on in shortly with us and I always appreciate, you know, I think the voice of the customer is the best brand validation that you can get. However, what's even better is a customer talking about when the technologies that they're using fail because it does happen. How are they positioned with the support and the training and the education that is giving them to make those repairs quickly to ensure business continuity and ensure disaster recovery. I think that to me that speaks volumes about the legacy, the 20 years of experience that combo has. >>Yeah, no, Lisa, you're absolutely right. There's certain products out there that we talk about uptime in 100% in this space. You, I believe the stat was about 94% success rate and we had NASA in the keynote yesterday talking about success versus partial success versus failures and Convolt really embraces that and has customers that we'll talk about that because there are times that things will happen and there are things that you need to be able to recover from ransomware. Often it is not a question of if, when it is going to be happened, at least. The other thing I want to get your comment on Jimmy chin who is the director and one of the, the cameraman of the free solo Oscar-winning free solo documentary definitely gave me a little bit of, Oh my gosh, look at some of the Heights and I was nervous just looking at some of this stuff they're doing. I like a little bit of lightweight hiking. I'm not a mountain climber, nothing like that. But he talked about when the camera goes on, there's that added pressure that goes on and it's sitting there. It's like, yeah, you know, we sit here live all day doing that. There's that, that energy to perform. But you know, we all appreciate the everybody watching and understanding that we're all human here and every time, every once in awhile a word or a mistake gets in there, but we keep going summit. Yeah, >>that's life. But also Jimmy chin, phenomenal. I think at 2018 they just won the Oscar just earlier this year for free. Solo. I have to watch that this weekend. But a couple of things that he talked about is that failure is a huge part of preparation. Couldn't agree more. What a simplified statement for somebody that not only has has skied Everest, the climbed Meru, I think they call it the shark fin of India, but what you talked about with what he documented with free solo and all of the thousands of sequences and he talked about that, Alex, I'm forgetting his last name, the guy who closed, who free soloed, El Capitan, all of these different failure scenarios that he rehearsed over and over again in case he encountered any of them, he would immediately be to remedy that situation and get himself back on track. I thought that message to me, failure is a good F-word if you use it properly. You know NASA, you mentioned yesterday and NASA was famous for coining in the 60s failure is not an option and I always say onto that cause I used to work for NASA, but it's a distinct possibility. And so what Jimmy chin shared this morning was electrified, but it also was a great understatement of what Combolt is helping their customers. We have to help you prepare for this. We can't help you prepare for all of it. As you mentioned, ransomware, it's not if but when. >>Well, right and both NASA and when the climbing is understanding where something could go wrong and therefore what the failures scenarios are. So you know rockets today you can't have a failure and by failure they mean look, if the rocket isn't going to work or something goes wrong, we need to make sure we don't have loss of life. That is something that if you look at blue origin and SpaceX that is pre eminent in there is we can't have another challenger disaster. We can't have some of these environments where we have the loss of human life. So that is number one. Some of the other ones, sometimes we know that the unknown happens or things don't go quite right. So being prepared to understand if something goes wrong, how do we recover from that? And that brings us back to the whole data protection and recovery of the environment because the best laid architecture, eventually something will happen and therefore we need to make sure that that data, the lifeblood of the company is able to be recovered and used and that the business can go forward even if some piece of infrastructure or some attack got through. >>There are, and there's inherent risk in every industry, whether you're talking about healthcare data, we talked with AstraZeneca yesterday, you know, genetics, clinical data, or you're talking about a retailer, doesn't matter. There's an inherent risks with every business and one of the most important things that I got out of the NASA talk yesterday, Jimmy Chin's talked today, some of the customers, is that preparation is key. You can't be over prepared. You really can't act fact. He said that you can't be overprepared in his line of work, but I think it applies to the inherent risks that any business has. Managing data. As we talk about Sue all the time, it's the lifeblood. It's the new oil. It is. It has to be available, accessible 24 by seven if it isn't and can't be. Businesses are massive risk in this day and age. Competitive competitors who have maybe better risk fault tolerance scenario in play. >>So that risk that they have to mitigate comes a preparation. We're going to be talking with Sandra Hamilton in just a few minutes about who leads customer success for combo. Really want to dig into the training, the support. We've heard that articulated from customers on stage that I don't wake up in the middle of the night anymore because I have this support from my trusted vendor combo and that is critical to any business staying up. Absolutely. We're going to hear from number of customers. I'm sure they're ready and we are ready for day two. We are ready. See, let's have a great day. Yeah, thanks. All right, so Sue and I will be right back with our first guest on day two of our coverage of comm Volkow for Stu. I'm Lisa Martin. We'll be right back.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Welcome to the cube. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are in Denver, Colorado, specifically Aurora, actually for the fourth annual comm vault. Go. Stu, I'm super excited to be back hosting with you again. Lisa, it's great to be with you our second year doing Convolt go last year. Keith Townsend with here with me and so glad you're here with me because you've got a little bit of background with this company I was with come out 10 years ago. It's scary to think that it's been 10 years that we're at the Gaylord Gaylord Rockies, which is one of their customers, massive conventions that aren't, as you said, the first conference that the Gaylord that probably heard that this, this convention center just opened up a couple of months ago. I think it holds like 1500 people, the 1500 rooms at the hotel and supposedly this is the first large event that they've done and this was planned last year. >>Last year we were in Nashville at the Gaylord the year before. I think they were in DC at the Gaylord and next year I know there'll be at another Gaylord, so definitely putting their customers first. Just like in the keynote this morning they had the state of Colorado opening up the event. We always love to hear a local customer welcoming us and talking about their partnership with the supplier. Absolutely agree with that. The state of Colorado, the statue share the highest number of micro breweries per capita and I don't know about you, I'm not a beer person. I would be super blown away if that, if I was there is the too much choice in beer. It used to be, you know, you'd go in and say, okay, here's the five or 10 beers I like. Now you go in and it's like, all right, there's a hundred new ones. I haven't tried that because they weren't here last time. >>So many beers here, a greater Denver. I've been to Boulder a couple of times. They say if you want to start a microbrewery, there's one that's ready to hand you over a place because they're going out of business. They just churn and go over and everything like that. So yeah, my first time actually hosting an event of the cube here in Colorado. Super excited for that. It's a great locale. And yeah, we're talking about, you know, so Convolt a 20 year old company, a lot of customers, but a lot of new faces. You look, we're going to be talking to the next two days. They run a whole new executive team. We knew this was coming last year. Our final guest in our two days is going to be Al Bunty, who is the CEO, was one of the original 20 years with the company. So we'll, we'll talk about the Baton and some of the changes in some of the things that are, are the same. >>So yeah. Interesting. You mentioned they started things off this morning with the customer at the state of Colorado. I too, like you always love to hear the voice of the customer. And I also really like it when customers talk about the challenges that they had. They talked about the Samsung attack and all of the exposures and vulnerabilities. I love that because that's what happens. We're seeing data protection as a service, the market positive trends in the market. There are a rise in cyber attacks. I love it when customers articulate, yep, nothing is perfect, but here's how working with Combalt we were able to recover quickly from something like that. A lot of big news, you mentioned a lot of new executive leadership. This is Sanjay merchant Donnie's first go. As CEO came in about nine months ago. He's a cube alumni, said we'll get to talk to him later this morning, but he came in after successfully leading puppet through many rounds of millions and venture funding. >>He took puppet worldwide, but he came into a company with declining revenues and one where folks said combat, you've got pressures to find alternative sources of growth. They said three things specifically. One, you need to upgrade your sales force. Two, you need to enhance your marketing, and three, we need to shift gears and expand your market share and there's been a whole bunch of news, not just yesterday, today, but in the last month or so, last few weeks actually where combo is making headway in all three of them. >> At least so right, because you look on paper and you look in the key, the keynote and say we have 20 years of experience. Here's all of the analyst reports that show us as the clear leader in this space. But then you look at it and say, Oh, 2018 to 2019 declining revenues. There are a lot of competitors both as some of the big stalwarts in technology as well as many startups. >>Heck, I'm even seeing the startups now. They're trying to call the last generation of startups that are going after con vault as the legacy. So if you're not fully cloud native microservice sass base architecture, you're the old way. And that's one of the news from Combolt already is they, they've done a couple of what they call Convult ventures. So the first one you were alluding to is they bought Hedvig, which was a software defined storage company. They just bought them back in September. What was their a two 40 $250 million, which was almost half of the cash that Combolt had sitting there. Hedvig company that had been around for a number of years. We're going to have Avinash who's the founder and CEO on the program here. He was on the keynote stage going through the demo. They kind of sat at this interesting line between software defined storage and actually hyperconverged infrastructure because you could in the early days do either storage only or fully converged environments, but massive scale. >>The customer that he talked about was a very large scale deployment. Those large scale deployments are really tough and can be challenging and they're not something that you just deploy everywhere. Unlike the other announcement that Convolt announced is metallic. If you go to metallic.io, they have this new sass based architecture. They built it in months from the ground up from the internal team. Part of me is sitting there saying, okay, wait, if they could do this and you know, six months or nine months or whatever it was, why hadn't they done it before? What has changed what Convolt technology is under there? It's great. It's working, you know, Azure and AWS as well as you can have a local copy in your environment. They call it SAS plus. Um, and we need to understand a little bit more of the technology. So a lot of exciting things. >>Definitely getting awareness, but both metallic and Hedvig they call Convolt ventures. So new areas, areas that they're looking to add some incremental growth. And one of the things Sandra said in his keynote is we want to, you know, rethink primary and secondary storage. So where is Convolt will they start dipping their toe into the primary storage? Does that line blur? We've got HP on the program, you know, NetApp is up on stage with them. They have partnerships. So changing landscape Convolt has long had a strong position in the market, but as things change they want to make sure that they make themselves relevant for the next era. >>Absolutely. And the Hedvig acquisition gives them a pretty significant, a much larger presence in the software defined space. But it also is going to give them a big Tam expansion. We look at metallic as you mentioned, the venture. I want to, I want to break that down. We've got Rob Kelly's, John Colussy, and on a little bit later, what is this Combolt venture, but also giving them, it sounds to me like giving customers in mid market more choice, but one of the things I mentioned that that analysts were saying is, Hey you guys, you gotta, you gotta expand your market share, you really gotta expand marketing. So we're seeing not just the technology announcements with Hedvig for the large scale enterprises of which I think most of their revenue, at least three quarters of combat revenue does come from that large space, metallic for mid market, but also some of the seals, leadership changes that they've made to are really positioning them. New initiatives, new partner initiatives, really focused on the largest global enterprises. We're gonna break some of that down today. So in terms of routes to market, you're seeing a lot of focus on mid-market and enterprise. >>Well, at least 80% of the convulse revenue comes from the partners. So that is hugely important. How does metallic fit in? Will that be as a SAS offering? Will that be direct? Will that go through the channel? Believe it's going to, you know, the channel's going to be able to be enabled. How do all of these pieces go together? One, one note on Hedvig you talk about Tam expansion. Hedwig was not a leader in the market when it comes to where they are. There's a lot of competition there. You know, they were not a, you know, a unicorn that had a road to $1 billion worth of actual revenue there. So they got bought at a very high multiple of what their actual revenue was. And the question was did they just not have the go to market to be able to bring that and maybe Convolt can bring them there where they miss positioned in the market. >>Should they not be really primary storage? Should they go more to secondary storage where partner closely with secondary storage, because I know some of Combolt's competitors did work with Hedvig. I've talked to a number of partners out there that liked Hedvig and was like, Oh it's a nice complimentary offering to what we have, whether they be a hardware or place. So we'll being in Convolt hyper charge that growth. Obviously they've got some smart team, smart team members, have an Ash, came from Amazon and Facebook and his team. But what will this do to accelerate what they're doing? How will there be hit the word but synergies between the two sides of the company. So Sanjay and team really laying out their vision for where they want to take the company and it's challenging to be, we're the trusted, reliable enterprise and we're going to go down to the lower end of the market and we're going to go on all these cool new spaces and everything. So Combalt only has limited resources just like any other company. And how will they maintain and grow their position going forward. >>We are going to hear from a number of their customers do today who been combo customers for 10 plus years. Some of them who have a number of Convolt competitors within, you know, disparate organizations. I love to hear from them, why are you running, you know, comm vault, the backup exec within these different departments. For example. AstraZeneca is one of them. And what makes Combalt in certain departments really ideal. So going to get a good picture of that, but also love to understand from these customers who've been using Combolt for years. Do you see a new combo in 20 in their fiscal year 2020 talked about the leadership changes. As you mentioned, this is a company that's not only 20 years old but at low run. Some stats by you that Sandra Mirchandani shared this morning, they've got 2.8 million. The virtual machines protected, they've got over 700 millions of petabytes. They're protecting in the cloud, 1.6 million servers on and on and on. How is con vault of fiscal year 2020 different and and really poised at this intersection of unified >>in? One of the answers for that that we'll dig into is it's about data. So while con vault does 45 million weekly backup jobs, we used to know backup is something that you just kind of had, but you didn't necessarily use it. Now it's not just having my data and making sure that it's relied on, but how can I leverage that data? It's, you know, data at the core and you know, Sandra said data is the heart of everything they're doing. So coming from puppet, Sanjay knows about dev ops and agile and he's going to bring some of that in. He's brought in a team that's going to infuse some change in the culture and we'll see. I expect Convolt to be moving a little, little faster. They definitely have made a number of changes in the short time that he has already been there and we'll get a little bit of a roadmap as to where we see them going. >>Yeah, there's certainly seems Stu to be moving quickly. You mentioned, you know, Sonjay being nine months metallic. You mentioned also being developed in house in a matter of months, announcing the Hedvig acquisition in September. It closed October 1st there Q2 earnings come out in just a couple of weeks right before Halloween. So it seems like a lot of momentum carrying into the Denver aura area. Is it going to be a trick or a treat? Ooh, I like that as a marketer, I'm jealous that you thought of that and I didn't, but I liked that. We'll go with that all these years on the cube. You gotta you gotta have the snappy comebacks, right? So, Steve, it's gonna be a great day today we are jam packed session interview after interview with combat executives, really dissecting what they're doing, what's new, what's positioning them to really kick the door wide open and really reverse those revenues, taking them positive and really not only meeting the endless expectations, but exceeding them. So I'm looking forward to an action packed two days in Aurora with use to, can't wait. All right, first two minute, man. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from comm vault. Go 19 we'll be right back with our first guest.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combalt. >>Hey, welcome back to the cube Lisa Martin with steam and man we are live on the show floor of comm vault go 2019 fourth annual event, a couple thousand customers here and Steve and I are welcoming back the COO of combo. Chris pal. Chris, welcome back. Thanks. Great to be here. We're excited to be here. We just came out of the keynote. Some interesting news to talk about but let's, let's to talk about what's happened. Combat is a 20 year young company, tremendous amount of acceleration in the last nine months. Lot of leadership changes he must be going to hold onto the table cause you got like the whiplash, right? So tell us, here we are at the fourth annual go news in terms of sales leadership changes go to market opportunities with metallic, with a new partner programs for the enterprise. Tell us what are some of the things that are exciting to you and how come vault is really in 20 FYE 2020 position? Like, Hey, we're listening to our customers and partners. >>Yeah, yeah. Well, and a lot of the things that you're seeing here at this show is just that it's, it's, it's market-driven. It's us responding to what we're seeing in the market, working with our partners. And a show like this is all about working with partners. Our customers and the, the announcements that we're making here are really releasing a completely new combo that the brand refresh that we've done just over the last month or so is been tied to a lot of the things that are changing with regards to the product portfolio. Uh, that Hedvig acquisition and a lot of the different leadership changes that you're seeing and the leadership changes are really driving a lot of this shift of focus. And really, I shouldn't say shift really extended focus for the organization from a technological standpoint as well as from working with our partners. >>Yeah, it's interesting. The news ahead of the show of metallic Convult now a SAS providers. So it's interesting to get you give us your, your view as a marketer. On the one hand you need to be the trusted enterprise supplier with a lot of customers. And the other one, you know, they've got cloud microservices, all the latest buzz words and you know sasses the model that a lot of customers want to be able to consume their software standpoint. So, so >>I know you have Rob Kalusi and who's going to be coming on. So I'll steal some of his thunder and I'll try not to steal too much to don't tell them the what excites me so much about the metallic product when leap, when we first started down this path, it was we, we really started looking at the market and the challenge that came from Sanjay when he just first entered the building really was we have industry leading technology. A lot of folks will talk about how we have industry leading technology. But if you really took a step back, you would have to have an honest view and say, sometimes they would say, well look, if it's a, if it's a really straight forward installation, maybe Commonwealth and might be a bit bring too much to the party, so why don't you look at some of the other solutions. >>And as we were talking to different customers out there, they were looking for SAS solutions and but they at the same time, they didn't want to make any compromises. And so much of the research that Rob and team working with Janet and with David, no, we're seeing is that as they were going out there, the Seuss solutions that were available today, and this sounds like marketing spin, right? But it's really what we were hearing back, that they weren't very good there, that they weren't SAS solutions. They're supposed to be easy. The customers really didn't see them as easy. They were running into scale issues, they were running into flexibility issues. So from the standpoint of building the solution, what we quickly realized is if we could reach Sanjay's challenge to us, which is bringing this fundamentally solid technology to a broader audience with a simplified use cases that there's a great opportunity for us to bring value to more companies. So that's, that's where this went. And then the beginning reviews of this as we brought this into beta and different people were seeing at different customers, different partners, they even came into the conversation a little bit pessimistic and they all left excited about what they were seeing. It's it's, it's really good. It's really good. >>So targeted towards mid market companies with around 2,500 or 500 to 2,500 employees. Give me just a little bit of a perspective on the choice that Commonweal is now offering the midmarket with complete backup and recovery. That's one of your flagship and metallic. >>So the the metallic offerings your men for some of the most common use cases that are out there. So 65 and the what we're, what we're trying to inject into the market and the target of 500 to 2,500 employees is really just where we see the sweet spot of most of the customers of those sizes are the ones that are looking at SAS solutions right now. But that's not to say as we've talked to larger enterprises, many of them are considering the addition of metallic as into their either subsidiaries or other areas of their business. And what Sanjay talks about, he sort of refers to as the data brain is really bringing this together where you can add SAS solutions onto your existing on prem solution. So if you're running combo complete, you can also be running metallic across other aspects of your business. So that's, that's one of the things that makes it powerful upmarket, but then we're also targeting the more common use cases that are more turnkey down-market. Yeah. >>Let's switch gears a little bit. So your team had a little bit of fun opening up the keynote. You had some of the stunt doubles a for Thor from Starwood and the woman has done both star Wars and Marvel on and talking about the unsung heroes behind the scenes. Kind of like your, your customers here. But there was another connection because they were vendors and con vault is, I believe it's the global Avengers and it has to do with sustainability, which I know is something near and dear to your heart. So explain a little bit about why that's important in what it is. >>So it's definitely a passion of mine and something that we accumbent are looking to every company as we're driving this should try to stand for something bigger than themselves. And as we look at this all started two years ago when we sponsored and I joined Robert Swan's expedition to the South pole. We were the data sponsor for that expedition and it was the first expedition to rely solely on renewable energy. And what has evolved from that from different conversations, we started having discussions throughout about the carbon footprint of data and with 5g the internet of things coming and more and more data on the horizon. The people that we're speaking with. And the reality I think that tech has come to is that we can't be part of the problem. We have to be part of the solution. So through a series of connections, we ended up speaking with the folks who were responsible for the UN global goals. Um, it's the 17 global goals around the world that were endorsed by all of the UN countries five years ago and there's 10 more years of it. And Kamahl is extremely proud to be joining some of the largest companies in the world. Coca Cola, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, many in our industry and outside, obviously to sponsor one of the global global goals. But the way the program works is it 17 global goals and there's one company for each one of them in order to try to represent it and drive it forward. >>Chris, you actually took a few of us around the show floor before it opened last night. We know conferences can have a bit of an impact from a negative standpoint. So tell some of what Combolt's doing to make sure that this conference, you know, doesn't have such an impact. >>So as you mentioned before, it's about 2000 people that are here and I was shocked to learn and a lot of this is all in education. As you go through life, the, an event of this size typically will generate 25,000 pounds of rubbish of trash. So what we've done is partner with our good customer, which is the Gaylord Gaylord hotel systems and leaf put together a model where we're trying to minimize the overall footprint. So we donate a lot of what you see around here. Construction materials are donated to schools and local organizations. We're using all of the natural plants that will go back into the, uh, into the environment after this. Um, no plastic. I'm trying. And then the, uh, the cups you see here on the table are all plant based. So we're, we're trying to be very conscientious about everything that we're doing here at the show and minimize the footprint. >>When you're talking with customers, as I'm sure as cou are doing a lot, we talk, we often Sue and I and the rest of the cube crew. Sustainability is a topic that comes up at every event. We're, is that when you're talking with customers in any industry, whether it's healthcare or oil and gas, where is sustainability in >>terms of conversation? Is that one of the key things that comes up? That was also really important for Commonwealth to say, Hey, we want to be able to make sure that the technologies we're delivering are going to help our customers meet their sustainability goals. >>Absolutely. And it's, it's increasingly part of some, a number of RFPs. They will come in for Combalt. So they're there. Companies are looking to have us be able to really represent what our sustainability, what our corporate social responsibility systems are and what we put in place. And so we look at this through the lens of what do we do within our facilities? What do we do in events like this? And then also what can we do with our customers? So it's increasingly relevant and their sons of research, I'm sure you guys have seen the, the, as the millennial generation becomes more and more part of either significant influencers or decision makers, they're looking for companies that have a mission, you know, and that that stand for something all. >>So Chris, we're talking about sustainability is something you're passionate about. How does that tie into the broader brand discussion of Convolt companies going through, we talked about the executive change and you've got a lot of new products. So when people leave Combalt go 2019 how do you want them to think of Convult? >>That's a great question. I think what we're hoping that we were really using combo Alco as a combination of so many of the things that have been happening over the last couple of quarters. And certainly as I looked through what we're representing now, it's what are we as an organization, what's the story we're trying to tell? So we launched just in the last few weeks a new tagline, which is be ready. And that whole concept of data readiness is something that we're having within this show and it'll be in a lot of our messaging as we move forward. So this, I'm thinking of as the organization that enables you to be ready and then extending that should of saying, well what does that mean? And that's around how we protect the data, help you control where it resides, help you manage it for compliance and different regulatory needs, and then help you use it and get value from it. So that's the big takeaway we're hoping that people have. The other piece of this that we have each year is we expose people to such expertise here at the show. This is not combo talking about combo. 70% of our sessions in the breakout theaters are partners or customers or other influencers. So we want people to come here and really see convolve as data experts, as the people who are willing to work with them. >>Yeah. One little nugget you shared also, you've been growing. How many developers you bring from internal to the show. I have to think that Sanjay has a little bit of push from that based on his last. Yeah, yeah. >>Roll. Yeah. Certainly the DevOps community is increasingly, especially with some of the moves we've made in Hedvig, the dev community is going to be increasingly an audience for us to, to engage with. But the, we bring 45 developers to the show this year. It's about 40 from a combo and five more that have joined with Hedvig and they have 30 or 60 minute whiteboard sessions and they're completely jam packed. There's, I think last year there was over 150 whiteboard sessions over two days with customers just coming in and going through the details of this because a lot of organizations, they're there, they're faced with right now and in Sanjay's words, they have to move from something to something and they need people to be able to sit down and have honest conversations with them. Um, I joke with people sometimes that one of the terrible things that happened has happened to marketing with the advent of technology is we have to be truthful now when you know you can't, you can't just spin things. And so we're stuck having to tell the truth. But, but combo has a great truth that sets, we've got a really solid truth to tell. We just need to tell it. >>Well, and I love how marketing is so scientific these days. You're right, you have to tell the truth. But you also have, if you have the right foundation within your organization, the ability to access data actually glean insights from it, develop, whether it's a new partner program or new technologies, new routes to market. That's the power of that. Having visibility and access to the data can deliver to any type of organization. When you, when you talk with customers who've been, we've got some on the show today, Hey, we've been using Convolt for 10 years. When you talk to them today, this theme of be ready more than ready. How are they perceiving their foundation with combo and all of the changes that you've made, not just in the last 10 years, but in the last nine months alone. Which like customer feedback. Yeah, >>the customer feedback has been tremendous. I think they, they, so many customers are something that's so great about combo. Does our customers want us to succeed and they, they see this market shifting tremendously. They've been with us for a while and they want us to succeed. When they look at the changes that they're having to overcome, they're excited about really beginning to learn that as they move from something to something that we can help them on that journey. That they don't have to go somewhere else for that journey. So whether that's looking into SAS areas, whether it's modernizing their infrastructure, whether it's moving to multi-cloud and those environments, we, we have the right solutions in the right way for them to be able to make this transition for their company. So >>Chris, we're relatively early still in this show, so I hate to ask, but give us a little bit of a go forward. Lot of change in the last nine months. What should your customers be expecting from comm vault through the rest of the year? And by the time we come back to Convolt go 20, 20? >>Well, I think when you talk to Sanjay, he always says, puts me back on my heels a little bit and tells me that it's a, there's more coming, there's more coming, we're going to keep going. So it, Sanjay is a very dynamic leader and he's looking to make sure that the company isn't just driving to combo go and then it's going to sort of be smooth sailing with these things. I think this is an exciting time to be here at combo. This is an exciting time to be in the industry. So as we look forward to, um, the new leadership that's come in and some of the things they'll be able to do in terms of our go to market, I think we're going to be exciting. Avinash coming into this organization and his expertise, his skill set and all of the brilliant engineers he's, he's brought in to sort of join our industry leading engineering team. Uh, it's, it's going to be, uh, I can't wait to see what they come up with from a marketing standpoint. You know, we, we had a solid product for a number of years, but it's always challenging to sort of continue to tell a story and come up with new ways to tell it. As you get new things in your, in your box to be able to talk about, it's, it's great to be here. >>Well, Chris, we want to thank you for joining us on the queue today. We're excited about the next two days of all of the folks, leaders, new leaders, customers, partners that we're going to be talking to you and really unpacking what being ready means to them. So we thank you for your time and we look forward to a great event. Thanks very much for Steven. Amen. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the Q from ball go 19.