(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Aria in Las Vegas everybody. This is the CUBE, the leader is live tech coverage. And we're here covering Veritas Vision, #VtasVision. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Bill Coleman is here. He's the CEO of Veritas. Bill, thanks for coming on the CUBE, good to see you. >> My pleasure, thank you for hosting us. >> Well, you're very welcome. And so, hot off the keynote, how do you feel, how's the show going for you so far? >> Well, I'll tell you what. I feel verit-awesome! >> (laughs) Verit-awesome is the watchword here. Get the crowd talk of Verit-awesome. I love that you started out with a little retrospective from last year. You used the term digital twin. We love that term, and you said it's sort of grown up now. I like to think the digital twins are sort of in their adolescent or even teenage years. The data is sort of out of control. We're not hearing today a message of legacy backup. We're hearing a vision of the future. Talk about that and what that vision looks like. >> Our customers obviously need data protection. They need resiliency. They need everything they've needed in the past. But that's not what they're interested in. That's assumed, that has to work. What they're interested in is the power of information. We like to say that our mission is to harness the power of information. And it's what's called digital transformation. Being able to use all that data out on the internet with all of their data, to change how they do business. To change what their products are. To change their supply chain. It's all about machine learning, predictive analytics, and the power of information. >> So I started in this business the same year that Veritas was born. And so I saw the ascendancy of Veritas and the many different forms that the company had taken. But I used to use Veritas as an example. You want to be like Veritas, with no hardware agenda. You want to be the glue that brings things together. And I saw in the conversation today a little bit of BEA-like thinking. The binder, if you will. Binding clouds together. My term, you guys didn't use that term, but to us, that's a critical value-add, and it's all around the data. You guys talked about digital business. To us, digital business means data, and it seems like we sort of share that common belief. >> Absolutely. You know, we've called this the information age for 50 years? But it's not been about information, it's been about technology. We finally have the ability to address that information, and do it over the internet, everywhere and everything. That's really what our vision is. You know, at BEA, we saw the internet emerging. And the world had to distribute, and take advantage of all that power across the whole world. And we invented that. But the key was, when I came up with the first concept of BEA in '93, I said, "You know, by the year 2000, "the network is going to be the computer." The network needs an operating system to make it all work. Well the concept here, and the reason that I actually took this job, is looking ahead ten years. Everything's going to be about information. No organization's going to be able to exist without leveraging the power of that information. Because that's the only way they'll bring their customer the value they need. That's the only way they compete, and without it, their business is just going to go down. >> Yeah, Bill, how are customers going to leverage data? You mentioned it's about the information, it's not about the technology. But you know, I look at customers. They've had storage people, they have network people. You know, "Oh, I'm excited about containers." We spent the last 15 years focused on virtualization. Is it Chief Data Officer? Or is it some other structure that customers, how are some of the leading customers that are going to be able to adopt this, how are they changing to be able to leverage that data and information? >> Well first, you have to understand, the technology has been complex, hard to use, hard to manage. As we saw earlier in the keynotes, it's like building a Rube Goldberg device. They had 27 different software products, and 14 different hardware products to sort of work together. Well, that's all disappearing. With cloud and the internet, it's becoming like a utility. You just subscribe to it. So that goes away. Now what you have to do, what we have to do, is we have to give them the tools that they can easily, visually look at that data, determine what's in that data, be maneuvering it, move it around, like in the movie, uh-- >> Stu: Minority Report? >> Minority Report. And literally, the things we talked about today, the demos we showed can lead to that. With machine learning predictive analytics, our biggest customers are already investing billions of dollars to do that. 'Cause they know if they don't jump ahead, their competition's going to do it. It's the power of information. >> So one of the things I might take away today was not only is Veritas hardware agnostic, but in many respects, you're workload agnostic. In other words, what I mean by that is, a lot of the events that Stu and I and the CUBE goes to, the enterprise companies are talking about on prem and that's where their business is, and much of your business, of course, is on prem. But we heard a message today of, "We really don't care where it lives. "We want to be the innovator "to help you get value out of your data "no matter where it lives." Now a lot of people will say that, but you really don't care where it lives. Is that true? >> And we can't. Look at, data's not just in an enterprise's data centers anymore. They're using clouds. We've surveyed our customers. Our average enterprise customer is using three public clouds already. And they have dozens of SASS applications like Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow. Their data's in there too. That's really complex. What we've done is we've take and build the products that run in the cloud, across the cloud, to and from the cloud all by one policy orchestration. So you don't have to think about any of that. You can discover the data, categorize the data, manage the data and analyze the data all from one interface, end to end. >> So the obvious hard question follow-up is that what give you confidence that the cloud guys, once they get that workload, aren't going to just sort of usurp that agenda? What do you have to do to maintain that customer delight? >> Well, the first thing is the cloud, the public cloud providers, are our very close partners. You know, the first month we started this, Bill Voss, who heads storage for AWS, and I worked with him and Sun, came down to us and said, "Look, our customers need backup." You know, snapshots are great, but if somebody deletes a snapshot, it's gone. Your data's gone. How are you going to protect that? How are you going to analyze that data? When we want to partner with you? So we partnered with them. But the other thing he said was, "And if we do it exclusively, "the enterprises aren't going to use us." I had the CIO of one of the top five banks in the world tell me right after I started this, "We've got to be using three clouds simultaneously. "We never want to be stuck in the cloud." So the cloud service providers know that the enterprise customers want and demand that portability. And we become their, we're the premier partner for Amazon, for Microsoft, for Google, and for IBM. >> So, it's relationships. >> Right. >> But it's also innovation. >> Absolutely. >> So talk about where you are with R & D. You're purchased by a private equity company. You might have heard the narrative beforehand. A lot of the old private equity model is to suck all the cash out. Kind of the new private equity model is to invest, grow the valuation of the company. I think that's where I see you guys going. But talk about how you're able to innovate. Talk about the R & D mojo that you guys have. >> You had several questions there. >> Yeah (laughs). >> But let me start with that, with the last one. When we carved this company out 19 months ago, it became apparent that we weren't a real player in the cloud. We weren't in some of the more modern workloads. And we had to change rapidly. So, we created a strategy that led to this whole 360 data management integrated platform, software-defined storage. Integrating it with a restful API interface. And then in one year, we built seven new products from scratch that operate in the cloud, on prem, or across cloud. Automated that entire thing. We literally took the startup mentality. Now I've been a startup guy most of my life. I spent the last five and a half years before this funding early-stage startups, and the thing is being agile, and moving fast. We can move faster than anyone around now. We're a big company. Let's take Cloudpoint. We just introduced our Cloud Snapshot. That was a thought in somebody's eye in February. We defined what we needed to do, working with our customers. We put together the team. We built a micro-service end to end archistructure, and we shipped it, supporting the major, all the major cloud snapshot capability in five months, end to end. Totally new product. Now that is a startup mentality. >> Yeah, Bill, can you explain to us a little bit some of the internal plumbing of how you've managed that. On the one hand, Veritas, trusted company, strong engineering culture, product like NetBackup, you know. 15 years, leader in it's space, versus brand new stuff, whole new spaces. What staying the same, what's changing? How do you manage some of those transitions? Because you know, typical company, it's like, "We've got 7500 employees." It's like, "Well, I've got revenue streams "and product lines that I know how to do "and can keep chugging, but I've got the new stuff too." So how do you manage that internally? >> I've have a very simple philosophy of what it takes to lead a major company. You got to have a direction to go in, you have to draw higher-grade people, and you have to organize around the first two. But the key is where are you going? Where's the puck going to be in five to 10 years? And I call that the three V's. WHat's the vision of where the market's going to be? And number two, what's the value that brings to customer? The value that will justify their switching costs. And the third is, what are the values that you build your company on, that customers and partners will be able to trust and count on. So, when you start with that, we created the vision. It has to be a compelling and urgent vision. Ten years from now, all of our products are going to be obsolete. They're going to mostly be obsolete in five years. All of our traditional products. It's all going to be a microservice. Change on the fly, customers never have to upgrade kind of environment, right? There's an urgency there. And customers want to transform. There's an urgency there. The key is, based on your values, you have to develop a culture that embodies the norms to execute your strategy. And then you keep those things and balances. The cultural change has been the most profound and the most important thing we've done in this company. And this company now has a startup, win-in-the-marketplace, customer-first culture. >> So you laid out the vision. In terms of the value to customers you said, when you talk to your CIO customers and other customers, three things came out. Cut costs, deal with governance and compliance, and then help us with the digital transformation. Help us become a digital business, essentially. >> Yeah. >> So those two are pretty clear. Talk about the values that you espouse. What are they? >> So, when you start with values have to be built around what you're providing to a customer. And there's sort of three aspects of that. I'm going to give them the best possible products. I'm going to give them the lowers possible price, or I'm going to give them the best possible service that they can count on. I'm asking our customers to bet their future. So it has to be the third. So it starts with, we produce customer value, right? Then the next aspect of it is, they have to believe that what you're doing is going to be there for them, that it's going to really work. So our next one is, we're going to do that by inventing the future, to bring them the customer value. We're not going to look back and try to add features and functions where we are. We need to help them jump ahead to where they need to be. The third part of that, the pyramid there is customers are going to rely on you. So trust, accountability, ethics, integrity. Those three things come together. Then, we're all about employees, right? So, how do you empower employees to succeed, grow, and be accountable. And you put these values together, and the values will never change. The culture will evolve as strategy moves, and keeping in balance means you're going to have to reorganize on a continual basis around where you are in your strategy. I told this company, we're going to be reorganizing continuously, at least once a year. We're about to do a pretty fundamental reorganization in parts of our company. And this is second time in six months. But you have, you know, you have to be an agile organization. >> Bill, the venture community thinks that this is a hot space. There's a whole number of startups, highly focused. Obviously they're smaller than you, don't have the breadth of products. How do you look at the marketplace? What do you say about that aspect? >> Well, as I said, I spent five and a half years in early-stage venture. >> Yeah. >> We had the highest return fund for our first fund of multiple of any venture capital company. I really love that world. Venture capital is the the center of invention, the center of innovation in this country, in the world. You know, back in the 40s, 50s and 60s, you used to have these big corporate labs. You know, Bell Labs, Sarnoff Labs, et cetera. They don't exist anymore. It's all done by these. So they're inventing the future. Now the difference between the pre-dot-com era and after is, the vast majority of startups are, well, the the vast majority have failed. >> Will fail. (laughs) The vast majority of what's left are acquired, and a few go public, right? So to me, number one, they are the laboratory. They are in the areas that we that are merging, and that we don't necessarily have a core competence, we want to look on how to do that. In BEA, in six years, I did 24 acquisitions to build the company. I never acquired anything that came to us. It was all, here's part of our strategy, we need this competency, we need this time to market. How do we make it work, right? Matter of fact, there was a joke. BEA stood for Built Entirely on Acquisitions. (hosts laugh) >> Well, people used to, Larry Elison himself used to denegrate people for writing checks, not code. And then, of course, he changed the software business with (laughs) some big checks. Well, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the team. So when you took over here at Veritas, you mentioned off camera, you started with the team. How did you go about that? Maybe describe, add some color to the team. >> You know, like I said, one of the three pillars of my management is hire great people. And if you're going to transform a company, if you're going to do a turnaround, it has to start with the leadership team. Period, you can't start anywhere else. But you have to have a leadership team that shares the vision, shares the drive, knows how to work hard together. And when they walk in that room, there's not one thought about my organization or my career, or my compensation. Because they all know, if we make this work, all the rest can take care of itself. Now, when you're doing these sort of things, there are certain times in certain organizations, that people's skills are optimal. You know, the group that was managing this as part of Semantec, they weren't necessarily the best people to manage it as a change in culture, change in strategy. So I had to go out, and I brought in a couple of folks that I've worked with before. We brought in some real amazing people. Mike Palmer is just unbelievable at all dimensions of product development. Scott Genereux, he knows sales back, forward. He knows every customer out there by name, and he knows how to really motivate a sales force. Well, every member of my leadership team except Todd Hauschildt, the CIO, has come in with the same vision, the same, and of course that works down the organization as you're building. And that's how you change the culture. With that, here's the vision of where we're going. Here's the values, what we are going to do. This is how we're going to lead it. >> So major objectives. Obviously you want to keep moving fast. >> I presume you're going to, >> Yeah. >> You're reorganizing frequently to support that. But what are the main objectives that we should be looking for as outside observers over the next six, nine, 12, 18 months? We are changing the agenda of the information management industry. The first place is, for digital transformation, corporations have to switch. They have to get off what they're doing today ultimately and go to something new. And in an enterprise, that can only be one platform. You can't have two platforms deleting, moving data asynchronously. So, its going to be a major transformation. Now that has to be a platform. We've put the stake in the ground. We have that platform. Now, this is our battle to lose, because the incumbents in a transformation get to win if they're good enough. You know, in the disruption, only a startup can win. That's how I won at BEA, how we won at Sun. But this isn't disruption. Nobody's going to throw away all their data centers and jump into somebody before who said, "Oh, I've managed 100 terabytes. "Give me your 50 pedabytes." (Dave laughs) You know? And no customer is going to trust them. So this is our battle to win. We're changing the entire agenda with 360 data management. What we, our number one challenge is, we have to change the positioning in our own customers' minds, because they know us as the 30 years of that legacy, backup, recovery and archiving company. And it's really working. But that's number one. That's my number one objective. 'Cause the rest will take care of itself. >> And as a private company, do you feel like you're in a more advantageous position to do that, and why? >> Well, I don't think I could do this as other than a private company. Because it changes the economics dramatically. Also, at the same time, we're switching from mostly licensed revenue, to mostly rateable avenues, we move to subscription. In a public company, that's a, "Oh, our revenue's going to go down for awhile, "and so is our profits, but trust me." >> Hang with us. (laughs) >> Yeah, hang with us. There are companies like adobe that did that flawlessly, but it's not an easy thing to do. >> Yeah, it's not easy. >> And I'll tell you, I have the best partner in the world. When I, when we started this whole carveout, and I figured out, "Whoa, we don't have the right products. "We got to build this whole thing." I went to Carlisle with the strategy and the vision of what we needed to do. And I said, "Look, because pricing pressure is so high, "We're not going to be able to grow based on your plan." How you invested. "But if you want me to do that, "I can do it, and you need to invest this much more. "But I recommend that we invest as fast as we can "to get to digital transformation." They chose the third. They chose to, we're spending 99 million more dollars in R & D and go-to-market this year than was in the original plan. I wouldn't be able to do that in the public markets. >> Yeah. >> You know? But they are the perfect partner. They build for growth. They stay in two to four years after an IPO. Their return is based on multiples of growth, and that's what, so our goals are totally aligned, and aligned with what the customers are going to need. >> Bill, great story, I know you're super busy. A lot of customers to meet. So thanks very much for taking time out and joining us on the CUBE. >> Bill: This has been a pleasure. Thank you, >> You're welcome. >> Bill: you got me all stimulated. >> All right, good deal. All right, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is the CUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. We'll be right back. (electronic rhythmic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois; it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to the Windy City, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, where we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. This is our second day at VeeamON 2018, our second year. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, my co-host. Phil Goodwin is here, he's a research director at IDC's storage systems and software group. Phil, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Pleasure to be here today. >> So you've been to more VeeamONs than we have, so you've seen even a greater evolution, although we've been to a lot of VeeamUGs. We saw a lot of green. This company has painted Chicago in green. What's your take on the progression and ascendancy of Veeam beyond just being a virtualization specialist? >> Sure, obviously the most interesting thing about Veeam is how they really have become the high growth leader of this industry, and in many ways, kind of the darling of the industry because they've got a lot of the momentum, a lot of the attention that's going on in the data protection and recovery software space. I think what has really struck me over the years of these VeeamON conferences, and really from the very first one that I attended three years ago, is the degree to which there is an ecosystem that's been built up around the products that they have for things like disaster recovery as a service, backup as a service and so forth. Where people take the Veeam software, build it into their own products and go to market with that, and I think that's totally unique in the way they've done that compared to many of their competitors. >> Let's see, we're talking about 800 plus million dollars in bookings, mid-30% growth rates. I presume the data protection market's not growing that fast. >> No, although it's surprisingly strong. Last year it grew at about 7% rate. We don't expect it to keep going that fast but if you compare that to other stores' software, which is 1% to 2% or in some cases even negative, it's actually an area that's quite bright. >> Yeah it's grown much, much faster than the overall IT business, right? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> And so, why? Why is it growing faster? >> Well part of it's driven by capacity. A lot of the vendor models are associated with the capacity and so they charge upgrades every year and as data is growing at about 40% per year on a compound annual growth rate, that does cause customers to upgrade their licenses. But we're also seeing an acceleration in the deployment of applications so we expect IT organizations, according to our research, to add an additional 200 applications over the next 36 months. That's not a lot of new applications. What we find in many cases is what we would call the traditional incumbent vendors, who have their footprint within the enterprise, maintain that footprint in many cases, but those new applications have the opportunity to bring in new products and that's really where the opportunity for Veeam is. >> So part of the growth is somewhat artificial if I understand it in that it's pricing driven, and so that would suggest, given that data protection is largely insurance, that the CFOs are going to look at that line out and say, "Oh, this isn't sustainable." Unless, and I want to run this by you, research indicates that Fortune 1000 companies leave, over a three to four year period, billions of dollars each on the table because of not the most end-to-end or well-thought-out architected data protection solutions. Maybe that expands the TAM a little bit, but is that kind of growth sustainable? You've already sort of indicated it's not, but maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Right. The nature of threats has really changed a lot over the years too, so if you look back on computing, it used to be system failure, human error, and to some degree natural disaster were your biggest threats. Nowadays it's actually ransomware, malware, and other things that are much bigger threats than the traditional types of threats that organizations have dealt with. As the evolution of data protection has come about, what we've found is very much a willingness among IT organizations to not simply try and go with a single product, but to rather buy a best-in-class product for specific platforms. In the case of Veeam, I think they really did a very successful job of riding the virtual infrastructure wave when most of their competitors were architected specifically for second platform types of applications. >> Phil, one of the interesting things to watch in Veeam is their expansion beyond that virtualization. What insight can you give us about data protection and SAS and public cloud and service providers? A lot of those environments you would think that the platform or the provider might have a choice, so how does Veeam get in there? How much do customers really have choice there? >> That's really a great point because what is happening is we're moving data protection from the system level. We've moved it up to the virtualization layer and now it's really moving to the application layer, where it is the application developer whose building that data protection directly into their application. So what we're seeing is those application developers, which as you mentioned many are SAS applications on the web, building the data protection into their specific environment. But the other thing that's happening is IT organizations are suddenly realizing that much of that data that is in the web or with those SAS applications is not being protected according to the SLAs of the organization. They're using third party tools and applications like Veeam to bring that data back on site and to protect it according to what the requirements and government's requirements are. >> Okay, so let's unpack some of this. If I understood it correctly, going back to the developers, as architecting in the data protection approach, is that a result of the DeVops trend, infrastructure as code, or is it something else driving it? >> I think it's more being driven by the fact that these are discrete applications outside the data center. So if I'm inside the data center and I'm trying to protect 100 different applications, I may try and apply the same techniques to all of them, the same policies. But these are applications like Salesforce.com, or Payday, or other applications that are really, for lack of a better term, a single application. That environment really doesn't have to consider the other systems within a data center. >> So it's the SAS guy saying "one size fits all." >> Phil: For them, yes. >> Which, by the way, is an age-old problem inside the data center. Either you were not protected enough or you were paying too much. Do companies like Veeam solve that problem by providing more granularity and maybe aligning better with that? >> Yeah. They go attack the problem in a couple of different ways. First of all, they certainly have their traditional business within the data center, but they're also partnering with many of the cloud-based organizations like Azure and Amazon and others to be able to help organizations protect data they have in the cloud. Plus they're working with specific applications to be able to provide that kind of protection for a SAS app. >> I want to come back to something you were talking about with Stu about best of breeds. We do a lot of these shows. You talk to a lot of customers and a lot of technology companies. You get two ends of the spectrum. You get the best of breed guys like Veeam say, "Hey, we're best of breed, "why would you buy that old, clunky, "outdated backup capability?" And then, without naming names, you get the integrated full stack companies going, "Why would anybody buy from some tiny little company? "Oh yeah, okay they're 800 million, "but they can't do digital transformation and big data "and SAS and blah blah blah! "So why would anybody, who cares about backup?" So you have two completely counterpoised positions. How can you help us parse through that? >> I think a lot of it comes down to who is the actual consumer and buyer of the solution and that's indeed changing. What we're seeing much more is it is the application developer, the application provider, or even the line of business making the decision as to what applications are being deployed, as opposed to the central IT organization. So whereas the central IT organizations say "This is part of digital transformation," the business unit may be buying other applications. >> We talked a little earlier about money being left on the table. I don't know what your research shows but clearly there's opportunities there that's not being harvested today. From a cost-benefit analysis standpoint, I know it's one area that you focus on and spend some time there, is it a reasonable expectation that CFOs will actually look at that lost opportunity, that soft revenue that they're losing, which really is not that soft, and say, "Hey, we actually need "to increase our spending in this area?" >> Some of them, yes. What you really find is a maturity curve, of course, where you have some organizations that really have a very traditional view and have not tried to move forward. But our research is showing that about 60% of organizations have embarked on some kind of digital transformation, and that about 70% have a cloud-first perspective. Those organizations really are looking at those kinds of opportunities, both in terms of cost, opportunity cost or absolute cost, and saying, "How can we optimize this environment entirely?" >> If I were the CFO, and let's say I had the cash so I wasn't capital constrained, I would still say, "Look, this is insurance, "so figure out a way to get more value out of this data. "You got all of this data in the backup repository, "what can we do with that? "What analysis can we do? "Can we maybe be more efficient "with regard to how we do security?" It's like the US government. "Can we have this agency talk to that agency "and figure out a way we can get more leverage?" and really be putting pressure on them to do that. Is that an unreasonable expectation for CFOs? >> No, and in fact what our research has shown is that about 40% of organizations use their backup data sets for analytics. They also, about 30% of them, 33% use it for other purposes such as development and test, staging, others. So organizations really are trying to leverage that vast amount of information that they have for other purposes. One of the challenges that come out though is GDPR, the European regulation to the right to be forgotten and the way organizations have to be able to manage that data. Going into those data repositories, including backup data sets, to say "Okay, this is data "that we have to expunge by regulation." >> Phil, I wonder, we've been talking about the threats of GDPR and you might get sued or everything. The last few years, we've really been talking about how we get insights and data. Insights can transform businesses around data. Is GDPR a threat to this whole wave of getting value out of data? >> I don't think it's a threat to getting the value out of the data, I think it's a threat to how you manage that data. And the threat is much more widespread than many organizations realize. If you're doing business with anyone who is European or has traveled to Europe, and really any kind of footprint in that regard can potentially put your organization at risk if you're capturing any of that data. >> But that stat you just threw out was pretty interesting. The 40% percent of organizations that you surveyed are actually doing some types of analytics with their backup data. I would think that governance and compliance and GDPR related stuff, they're going to take, those 40% are going to take a similar approach to GDPR. Say, "Okay, guys, we got to do this. "Find some more value out of it, "or else get you in a headlock." Right? That's a huge number! >> Right, and one of the ways you do that is, and that Veeam has done is to open up APIs, application programming interfaces, to allow third party organizations to leverage that data repository and do that kind of analytics. Veaam, themselves, or any other backup vendor can't really leverage, or can't really do that, but by opening that up to third parties it increases that ecosystem and increases the value that IT organizations can get from their data and their investment. >> Some of your research. Maybe you can highlight some of the stuff you're proud of, fun stuff you've been working on, things that are current, recent, that you want to highlight to the audience. >> I think some of the interesting things, the trends in the industry really are that the kinds of things like backup and recovery and high availability and disaster recovery, we see really going into a continuum of availability. Where, if I can move data across geographies, and I can recover my application seamlessly regardless of where the data is, why do I ever need to have disaster recovery again? And in fact, that's where we believe availability is going, and in fact the theme for Veeam at this show is hyper-availability. One of the ways you do that is by placing the data in the right locations for that kind of recovery. Watching from the days of backing up once a day onto tape to continuous availability is actually a pretty interesting development. >> So who's doing a good job in this place? Sounds like Veeam is getting it done obviously, and the numbers speak for themselves. You got the startups, Cohesity, Rubrik, Zerto obviously plays in there. You have Veritas is supposedly retooling. You had Bill Coleman in there, former BEA guy who's supposedly put a lot of R and D into that. You got the leader in Dell EMC. Obviously they have a lot of resource, spend a lot of money, they're going through a retooling process. IBM has software defined everything. It seems like it's jump ball right now instead of wide open. >> It really is. You look at, you mentioned Dell EMC, they're focusing on IOT. Well IOT generates a phenomenal amount of data. What data needs to be captured, how does it need to be captured, protected, managed, is going to be a huge issue for organizations so that's a very interesting target. Veritas has been looking at their 360 data management and really taking a holistic view of data management and they're doing some very interesting things there. Commvault has done actually a pretty nice job of getting into some cloud-related kinds of things. And then finally as you mentioned, Rubrik and Cohesity, I would put them along with Veeam as probably the three companies that right now are disrupting this industry the most. There are probably certainly some other ones that are up and coming, but in terms of those that are really providing some disruption, I would probably go with those three. >> Alright, they're breaking down VeeamON 2017. Phil, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great stuff, really good analysis. Appreciate you having on. >> Pleasure, guys, take care. >> The trains are backing up. We're trying to jam everything in before they shut down our studio, so we'll be right back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's the Cube. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. This is the wrap for Veritas 2017. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Mindeman. And Stu, two days where we're witnessing the evolution transformation of Veritas. Veritas used to be the gold standard for what wasn't known at the time as software design but just software function to deliver storage capabilities, no hardware agenda and now you're seeing investment under the leadership of new management. Some innovation, a cycle that's quite rapid. It's hard to tell how much of that is really taking shape in the customer base. Seems like the channel, partners are picking up on it. Customers are still sort of trying to figure out how to move beyond so their existing legacy situation, it's like Heath Townsend says. The vendor community tends to move at the speed of CIO. It's a great quote. But overall, I think very good show. Some surprises here in terms of specifically the breadth of the Veritas portfolio not just a backup company. Really focused on data management, focused on information management which obviously is relevant in the digital economy. What were your takeaways? >> So Dave the big strategy is the 360 data management. And I think one of the things we teased out in here is first of all, nobody thinks the cloud is simple. Multicloud, where customers are and when you dig into it and what Veritas has learned in the last year is that there's a lot of work to be done. Where are their deeper integrations that they need to have. There's different requirements from the different partners here. See Microsoft, the top level sponsor. Russinovich up on stage, giving kind of his usual hybrid cloud with a lot of open source pitch there but seems a good fit from the customers and partners that we talked to here to say Microsoft aligns well with what Veritas is doing. Amazon big player here. Lot of integration is happening behind the scenes to make sure that Veritas can work there. And then you follow Google of course, big focus around data, good to see where Veritas is going. We had a nice conversation with Google. Google seems very open on a lot of these not as much focus on some of the functionality that Veritas has so it's a good natural fit and then IBM and Oracle kind of rounding out the big players here. The thing I've come in, I think every show I've gone to this year Dave, is where do companies that have been around for more than a couple of years fit in this multicloud world and absolutely that's where the puck's going as Bill Coleman said that's where they're betting the company and putting it forward and we wondered coming in would it be like ah, yeah. This is a net backup and Veritas foundation suite with a new coat of paint on it? And no, I mean they really brought in a lot of new management team sure there's engineers here with a lot of expertise and experience to build on to know how to do this but I was pretty impressed with what I saw this week Dave. >> So no hardware agenda is evolving to no cloud agenda. That's one of the things we learned here and we had a good discussion. Got a little bit awkward at times but good discussion about why Veritas relative to the other players here. And what the answer we got back which we had to tease it out a little bit was essentially the upstart guys, the Rubrics, the Cohesity's to a certain extent Zerto I think they tried to put Veeam in that category we'll come back to Veeam it's kind of interesting Maybe not big enough to deliver on that multicloud vision. And they're really not even trying. Cohesity and Rubric I don't know. >> They've added a lot of cloud recently, actually Rubric's been doing it for a while, Cohesity definitely seen there. They understand that cloud but I think what maybe I'd say Dave, they tend to start from an on premises piece as opposed to you say this Veritas strategy is it doesn't matter and what many of the player, right, where is there natural gravity? Is it on premises or is in the public cloud and Nutanix, they partner with Google, they're doing the cloud. But absolutely, most of their >> Dave: They make more money. >> Stu: Most of their revenue is, you know, is found there. >> So the upstarts I kind of buy the Veritas argument that there maybe doesn't have the Gravitas and the heft to attack that multicloud other than pick at it and grow and they'll do hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and maybe get to a billion and have a great exit. I think that'll happen. And then the other guys, the big guys, HPE, Dell EMC, IBM, they certainly have the capabilities to do that. But is it going to be the main focus of those companies? HPE maybe. We'll see. HPE and Veeam are an interesting partnership. My information suggests that Veeam is driving many tens of millions of dollars through Hewlett Packard Enterprise now that the microfocus deal has been done and they got rid of data protector. IBM they're kind of re-invigorating the storage business, data production is part of that. Dell EMC is I think challenged to invest They can't invest in as much as they used to certainly not in acquisitions. The acquisition pipeline is basically dried up. >> Stu: Dave, Dave, look at the DataMain was a great acquisition by EMC at the time now under Dell EMC. I mean, you're probably closer to it than me. I don't hear a strong cloud message coming out of that group when we talk about backup and the like. Dell corporate, of course they've got Microsoft partnerships Veeam has Amazon partnerships but it very much is tied to appliances or arrays or servers at the main piece, it's not a software message which is where Veritas is. >> Dave: If you look at Dell EMC's acquisitions recently, Isilon a couple billion, two and a half billion I think, Data Domain two and a half billion, DSSD a billion, which really hasn't turned into much at this point in time anyway. Extreme IO, not sure what they paid but you know you're hearing ebbs and flows on that but that my point is that is how under Joe Tucci EMC innovated. They would incrementally add on to their existing platforms. You were there. You saw it. And then they would invest in what Joe Tucci used to call tuck in acquisitions. And all that was well and good and they were able to sort of keep, not sort of, they were able to keep pace with the industry. That's basically stopped. That strategy. We've seen cuts and layoffs but still a financial windfall I think is coming for Dell. And VMware is a secret sauce there so we don't have to dig into that too much but my point is that services is going to be the lynchpin for that company in terms of attacking multicloud services and VMware. So now you >> Stu: And pivotal of course too. >> Dave: And pivotal as well, that's right. Great point. Now you come back to Veritas. Focused on that strategy of information management. Investing apparently in RND. Seemingly patient capital with Carlyle so you know me, I like to unpack the numbers. From what I can tell, my sources and got to do some more digging on this but when Veritas was acquired by Carlyle it was about 2.3 billion dollar company, wouldn't surprise me if on an income statement basis it's actually shrunk. It wouldn't surprise me at all. In fact, Bill Coleman kind of hinted to that. And especially if you start looking at rateable revenue models, maybe bookings could be up and I've heard numbers as high as 2.6, 2.7 billion but who knows. I've also heard now, the evaluation at the time of the acquisition was 7 billion and change. I've heard numbers as high as 14, 15 billion now, maybe a little inflated but I think easily over ten. And I think this company has an opportunity to get to three billion, get the evaluation up to 15, maybe even 20 billion. Big win for the private equity investors and the key to that, I think, is going to be a continuous investment. Go to market that aligns to those new areas that they're talking about and very importantly the ecosystem. I want to see this thing start exploding. The big highlights here were the cloud guys. What else would you highlight? You know, you walk around the shows a lot of smaller partners here Really would like to see that ecosystem grow. That's something that we're going to watch. And the audience grow. I think this show is up from last year next year I believe it's in Las Vegas again moving to the Cosmopolitan little bit better venue, bigger venue we'll see if they can get up to where the big boys go over time but overall I'd say pretty good second year for Veritas Vision. >> Yeah, you know Dave, when you look at the different areas Veritas has a full suite of software to find storage. The analogy I've used all the time storage industry is a knife fight in a dark alley. So you've got some big players out there that all have their software defined storage messaging out there of course Veritas would say they all have the hardware agenda. There's some truth to that but Veritas also has to partner with a bunch of these players to get there so where did they get the reach, how does the channel help them punch above their white, the differences there a two and a half, 2.6 billion dollar run rate company, revenue company that is private. So you know, they're trusted because they have history. They're not a small startup can this innovation and all the new team members come in and definitely the cloud piece is pretty interesting, Dave we see, we'll be back at Reinvent with the Cube and Veritas will have a presence there. Amazon, huge ecosystem, where do they play where do they show up, data, we've said so many times on here it becomes repetitive data is the new oil and customers need to take advantage of them. Can Veritas' message get them at the table and in a conversation where so much, it's about infrastructure and I love the message here at the show. It's not infrastructure technology it's information technology and we want to put a highlight on that so like the message, like where it's going, here are the customers but can they get at the table when there's so many different there's the startups, there's the big players everybody pulling at where the customers are and the GDPR was an interesting angle 'cause it was the crispest, the most crisp conversation I've heard on GDPR. I know you've been talking about it at least the last six months on some Cube interviews, I've done a number of interviews. But it really crystallized for me this week at the show. >> I'm glad you mentioned that because I've done a couple shows where GDPR has come up and I was like okay, yeah we get it. It's coming. It's nasty. How are you going to help me again? And I think Veritas did a really good job this week of saying look, we are here to help. We're going to start with Discovery and they sort of laid out the journey and I think they made a good case for their portfolio aligning well with solving that problem. So this could be a nice little kicker there. One of the things I wanted to sort of riff on a little bit was the tam, the data protection space. It reminds when ServiceNow went public I know it was a story about Gartner Antlis was very negative on and saying a helpdesk is a dead business and then Frank Sluman did a masterful job of expanding the tam, explaining that tam, guiding the company to a massive opportunity. And I see a similar dynamic here. On the one hand I say wow. Got a lot of companies in this data protection space even though it's exploding lot of VC money coming in, you're seeing new entrants like Datrium now gets in the space even though they're not just backup, that's not their primary but I mean you certainly saw SimpliVity with what's kind of their specialty. But guys like Datos.IO and some of these new guys coming in like we talked about Rubric, etc there's a lot of players here. Is the market big enough to support those? Part of me says ehh, I don't know but then I think back to that ServiceNow example. I think the tam is going to explode because it's not about backup. And it's not even just about data protection. It is about information management and I think Veritas got that right. What I like about their chances is they're big. They've got a big install base and I think their vision is right and they don't have that cloud agenda. They're a pure software company even though they do sell some appliances sometimes. And they got what seemingly is good management. I think I'd like to see them attract even more management as they grow and as they start executing this and as I say, the ecosystem has got to grow. >> Yeah, so Dave, IT has to deal with information governance. That's the defense they need to play. There's going to be money thrown at that. Some of the conversation we had this week IT operations becomes one of those tail winds that should lift companies like Veritas to be able to have further discussion and grow those budgets to be able to be a much more important piece. >> Alright good, Stu. Thank you. Good working with you again. It's been a long few weeks here but we're at it again next week. The Cube is at Big Data NYC which is done in conjunction with Strata in New York City. We've got a big party on Wednesday night. Actually we've got a presentation, Peter Burrows, Neil Raden, Jim Cubillas and we got a panel. Talking about software eating the edge. That's on Wednesday at 37 Pillars. Tweet me at @dvellante if you don't have an invitation I'll get you one although I heard there was a waitlist last week but we'll get you in, don't worry. And then we're also at Splunk next week, I'm going to be at Dotconf in DC. We've done Dotconf since I think 2011 was the first year we did Dotconf. >> And I'll be keeping a big eye on Microsoft Ignite next week while we don't have the Cube there. Obviously pretty important things like Aster Stack expected to roll out and got so many shows Dave. >> So the Cube, we love digital content creating content, sharing with you our community. Follow @thecube that handle for the Cube gems, you'll see a bunch of videos. Go to thecube.net, that's where we host all the videos from all of our shows. And then siliconangle.com is where we write up our news and analysis of these events and news of the day and of course wikibon.com is our research site. A lot of really good deep work going on there. So thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Mindeman. We're out from Veritas Vision 2017. We'll see you next time. (music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Veritas Vision, #VtasVision. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and this is our second day of Veritas Vision 2017. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman, my cohost, Jim Livingston is here. Here's the world-wide Vice President of Global Services at Veritas. Good to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Ah, I appreciate the opportunity. >> So we love talking services. We've been talking off camera, and to me it's where the value is when you talk to customers. It's really, I mean, yeah, product is great, features are great, but it's services, at the end of the day are what keeps 'em coming back, keeps 'em happy, solves their problem. It's where the rubber meets the road. So, tell us about-- >> So Dave, I need you to be one of my top sales reps. >> Dave: Right, I mean, you know! >> That's outstanding. >> Well, because you know, services doesn't get the attention I think it deserves. It's sort of undervalued, certainly, in the trade press. I mean, I'm sure you'd agree with that. But when you talk to a customer and say okay, you have 100 points to allocate, how much would you place on service? It's oftentimes well over 50%. Is that what you've seen? >> Eh, so I'd say it varies by solution. You know, I will tell you that from my perspective, running a services business inside a product company is a little bit different. I, first and foremost, I believe my charter is really to ensure that our customers get the most value from the products. They're able to explore and utilize any of the features and functions that really are applicable to the objectives they're trying to solve, the outcomes they're trying to drive towards. And that's a critical piece. And then we just want to make sure they have a great experience. So from my perspective, what I really want to focus on is making sure that we really drive that. What's interesting, though, is I will tell you one of the challenges with that is if you look at, as we ramped up our innovation engine which is phenomenal, all the product launches, all the new products, a lot of which we talked about this week at the conference, is then coming on me to make sure that we've done all the things to continue to refine and redevelop and retrain our people to make sure that they're aligned to those. But also aligned to not just the skills and the new products, and skills necessary to extract the value from those products, but all the things associated with the new environmental aspects, all the cloud platform attributes, container-based complications or things like that. So, it's been phenomenal to build and align to that journey. >> So, we spoke to Bill Coleman yesterday, and he talked about putting in the leadership to help drive not only the innovation, but kind of the culture, the vision, and where you're driving it. What do you see as the opportunity, and how much change needs to happen inside the services organization compared to when it was a piece of Symantec? >> So I think the very first thing we have to do is we have to continue to recalibrate around thinking outcomes. It's a very simple thing to say. It's a very difficult thing to do. It really, what it requires first and foremost is trying to engage earlier in that lifecycle, earlier in that process of engaging and talking to customers and trying to identify, ultimately, what are the objectives they're trying to solve for, what are the outcomes that they're looking for, what's their imperatives? And so for me that's a large piece of this is to engage early. And then focus all those discussions around outcomes versus, fundamentally, that's the basic difference between a product sales motion and a solution sales motion, is really aligning to those outcomes. So it's a cultural shift, no doubt. >> And there's a lot of emerging tech that we're talking about this week. How much is consulting, how much is services, what's kind of the makeup of your organization look like in your engagement with customers? >> So I'd say right now, it's about 50-50. Where about 50% of those services we're trying to engage, and I'm trying to move that to more and more earlier in the process. You know, if I think about, as we develop skills not just around our platform but around the things that are ancillary, cloud, containers, all the different things that are adjacent or add complexity to our world, and most importantly to the customer's world. For me, the earlier we can bring those in so that we can align and ensure that we start their journey, we align to the things that they want, the things that they need in terms of their environment, of serving their customers, aligning to their strategy. So that's a big piece of it, is shifting earlier and driving much more of a consulting base versus just the traditional deployment services. >> So people, process, and technology. We always talk about that on theCUBE. Technology execs always tell us, the practitioners, generally we got that covered. You've been around long enough to know, see different evolutions of technology, and how that technology's applied. The industry's getting so much more complex, things are happening much, much faster. But in thinking about not the technology, but the people and process pieces that have evolved, I wonder if you could comment on what you've seen over your years. Describe kind of where we are today, and where you see it all going? >> Great question. So the rate of change, has been phenomenal. And, it absolutely, it creates challenges every day, which are actually, typically every challenge is an opportunity from my perspective. For me personally, what we really try to focus on is first and foremost develop the skills that are closest, in closest relation to us, so that we can apply those skills and the knowledge and expertise of our engineering team, our consulting team, is ultimately aligned to the customer's. So if you think about things that are happening, for example, without a doubt the one that's happening to virtually all of our customers is a proliferation of cloud. What it really means to them is their information fabric, where their information lies, their charter as an IT organization, our traditional customer, their charter's become much more complex. Just the challenge to identify where all the information assets are is a big opportunity for us to come in and assist them in that process. And then ultimately, to be able to take their strategies around data protection, business continuity or disaster recovery, whatever it is around how they protect and secure that data, to be able to take that into something that has proliferated into so many different areas, both in the infrastructure base and then driven by applications and other cloud deployment methods, so. >> So you guys were both at EMC, where Tucci was always famous for saying we're a products company, not a services company. Veritas, obviously, great engineering team, product company. Talk about services inside of a products company? >> So I'll go back to what I said first and foremost. I believe service is the first charter, although it doesn't have to be the only charter. The first charter that you have to do well is that you have to ensure that you have the skills and capability to guarantee a great customer experience. That for me is the very first piece. So typically that doesn't rise to the occasion of saying it's a services company. It really rises to the occasion of we have a great customer experience, we have a loyal customer base, and we have a customer base that ultimately is so rewarded with the capabilities of the product because they're enjoying them, it's well-integrated in their environment, et cetera, it becomes a sticking customer as well. And that's, I believe that's our first charter. Go ahead? >> Just take us inside some of those customers. What are the real, some of the maintain points you're seeing what are the areas that you find that your team is able to help them the most? >> That's great. Multiple areas. You know, you get started with the very basics, what I would consider very infrastructure-oriented, and very basic around storage. You know, customers are constantly, as clouds are proliferating, so is their storage base. And all of them are ultimately looking for ways that they can lower their costs and still maintain access to the information that they need and protect in the same manner. So, going in and design or architect a solution that allows them to leverage commodity storage, cloud-based storage, et cetera, and still have a lot of the functionality that they're used to, it aligns right into their existing data protection strategy, is one good piece. Monster ROIs on that. Then you get into more complex things around compliance. You know, most notably GDPR being six, seven, eight months out, and it's driving a lot of interest and demand, but in reality if you go around the globe, the vast majority of the countries are driving some level of increased focus on regulations that drive a level of protection of privacy, personal data privacy, et cetera. And again, having the technology is one thing, and Mike does a phenomenal job of building the products that the customers need to be able to locate, classify, protect, et cetera. My job and my charter is to make sure the customers can actually take that technology and use it in that manner, so we're doing, to your question, I'm seeing a huge uptick in that just in the short time I've been here. Tremendous amount of interest, and customers wanting to engage and leverage in that fashion. >> Talk about where Veritas picks up and leaves off relative to some of the SI partners that you have. What's that relationship like? >> So, I'd say we tend to stay fairly focused on our technology, and how we work and partner and align to those types of partners. As a matter of fact, compliance and regulatory activities are a great example of that. If you really think about a typical customer's concerns around how they protect their customer data, their employee data, their supplier data, et cetera. We provide a lot technology and the infrastructure behind that. The overarching process and the business process go much wider. And that's where alignment with systems integrators and things like that that have a much more robust, in terms of breadth and lots of business units, et cetera, becomes an important partnership on our part. We can focus on our piece, really create a solution that's beneficial first and foremost to the customer, and helps complete their solution. >> One of the things Stu and I have been talking about this week is you've got this massive Veritas install base. You're moving towards this vision of modern data protection and information management. Service is going to be key there. How do you get the customer from Point A to Point B, Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." that means pressure's on your organization to make it happen. So what's the conversation like, what's the journey you're taking customers through there? >> A lot of those, what we try and start those journeys first and foremost with assessments or things that are really driven around identifying what the transformational event is. That's all about engaging, bringing the breadth of knowledge around not just the products, but how the products are used and how they can be deployed early in the process. >> And that's a for-pay service? >> That's a for-pay service. But it's something that we really focus on the deliverable, so it's a for-pay service that says hey, we're going to come out with a roadmap, a specific solution, et cetera. >> But that's important, because the customer has skin in the game. >> Jim: They do. >> You know, if it's a freebie, that's nice, but then a lot of times they don't show up for the meeting. >> And that's so true, Dave, and that's a big piece, honestly. And in some cases, candidly, the challenge or the opportunity in terms of for-pay, is to ensure there is skin in the game. I think further down, further into the journey, around what I consider things around driving operational efficiency or optimizing the customer's environment, that actually becomes another great point of entry. And sometimes you go in and just want to ensure that the customers are getting maximum value for their product, that they're continuing to have a great experience, et cetera. But in all cases, ultimately, there's always changes in the environment around, not just environmental changes, changes within the customer around new priorities, new objectives, new imperatives for next year, the following year. And to the extent that we can take that opportunity through assessments and health checks and things like that to identify those, map them up to their business imperatives, and ultimately go in and be sure that they continue down that journey with our solutions is a big piece. >> Jim, one of the things we're also looking at, you sell point products. And then it was kind of a suite, and now we've been talking a little bit about a platform. What's the impact on the services for moving to that integrated platform? >> So it's actually, I'd say, twofold. The first piece is really, first and foremost we want to make sure the customer's are getting maximum value for the solution. And I'd say that's probably charter number one. The other piece is, in many cases, a little bit going to the transformational or the assessment-type services, or more traditional consulting services. In many cases, you buy a platform and you engage and you have three or four pieces of functionality and you're really looking for three. And we just gave you four. One of the opportunities from my perspective is how do we actually ensure that the customer understands the value that they have on that fourth, and then we can deploy it in a manner that they get the most value for it, and it becomes a benefit for us and most importantly a benefit for our customers. >> Feedback from the customers at the event? What have you been hearing? I mean you guys are a year into this 360. What are they telling you? >> It's been phenomenal. Both from customers and partners. I've spent time really probably equally with both. It's been a lot of excitement around the product launches, a lot of excitement around the innovation, not just of the launches for this week, but really the innovation, the changes that have taken place over the last year, even before I joined. I'd say one of the ones that actually has resonated and I've heard most often is when people talk about modernizing data protection. Mike Palmer in yesterday's general session used this slide, it was actually the first time I had seen it as well, and like I got to get a copy of that, because it actually just, it shows with any customer of ours the breadth of change that's taken place in their environment from cloud and hybrid and all the different things. Which is a challenge, and the opportunity for me, to go in and ensure that we continually align to those and we ensure that they're aligned. >> Jim, Veritas has a long history working on lots of different solutions. From a services standpoint, though, I got to think cloud's a little bit different. We've talked to customers. If you're a big customer, you probably get good support. Some smaller ones, well, you're a little bit more on your own. What's your experiences, how is it to work with those hyper-scale partners? >> Uh, so from, one of the things I'd like to do, is I like to ensure that, candidly, we can establish an environment that we can improve and level out the consistency, in some cases, of some of the cloud experiences our customers have. And by the way, I'm also a big fan, and we're really putting a lot of our focus around automation. Which actually takes the burden off of the customers, in many cases. And we'll have a lot of focus in the second half of our fiscal year in the next six months, really around driving automation so that as cloud touches any type of deployment, or interaction with our products, there's all the work, obviously, that Mike and the product teams are driving themselves. There's areas that really fall below that that are really much more aligned to the business process that the customers perform, where I can actually, I believe I can do a lot to improve their service across all the platforms. Whether it's Amazon, Azure, IBM, Google, et cetera. >> We'll give you last thoughts. You talked a little bit about some of the feedback, but Veritas Vision 2017, what's your takeaway? >> Exciting event, great opportunity for me personally to meet a lot of customers in one location. I think a great demonstration of the excitement around the company, where we're at in terms of our evolution as a company, most importantly, where we're at with regards to our product roadmap. >> All right, Jim, we'll leave it there. Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE! >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Thank you, good luck. All right, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Right back. (rippling music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube! Covering Veritas Vision, 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage and we're here covering, wall-to-wall coverage of Veritas Vision 2017, hashtag: VtasVision. I'm Dave Vellante, with Stu Miniman. Lynn Lucas is here. She's the CMO of Veritas; welcome to The Cube. >> I am so excited to be on The Cube for the first time. Thank you for joining us. >> Well, thank you for having us. We're really excited to have you. We were talking off camera and this morning, in our open, about Richard Branson, the keynote. Very inspiring, so interesting, and then you got an opportunity to interview him and it was really substantive. So what was that like, what was it like meeting him, what was he like backstage? Share it with our audience. >> Absolutely. So, first, I, it really was an honor. The man has, when you do the research on him, the number of businesses he's created and disrupted is really amazing when you go back and look at it. The record industry, phone industry, airline industry. I mean, it goes on and on and he's still doing it. What I was most struck with, though, is that he's really humble and approachable. So we spent about 20 minutes with him in the backstage, and he was just a very genuine person. Very concerned, as you and your listeners may have heard, in the keynote, about the impact of the hurricanes. Really committed to philanthropy now, and what I loved is that he really understood what Veritas is doing with data, and he was able to really quickly connect that with how it might help on important issues that he's concerned about, namely climate change, making communities part of businesses, and so forth. It was fantastic. >> Well, I thought he did a really good job, and you guys did a really good job, because he's like, wow, Richard Branson, big name. But why is he at Veritas Vision? And he came, he talked about his agenda, he talked about the hurricane, he connected it to data, to climate change, and he very, like I said off camera, in a non-self-promoting way, let us know very quietly that yeah, of course the fee that I'm getting here I'm donating to the cause, and you should donate too. Right, and it was just really, congratulations on such a good get. >> Well, we were thrilled to have him and really honored to have him, and I truly felt that he understands the importance technology is playing. He actually told us that they were without cell phone and any kind of internet connection right after the hurricane for about, I think what he said was about seven days, and he said it was a very weird, disconnected feeling, because it's become so prevalent in our lives, and then when they all left and got on his plane to go back to London to mobilize aid for the British Virgin Islands, he said that he looked back in the plane, and he said every single person is on their phone like this. And it's such an interesting and powerful tool though, for generating interest in, unfortunately, the very horrible events that have happened, and so the social media, the connectivity that we all experience and getting that word out, I think he really connected with what we do as technologists here, and he had a really fascinating conversation with us about his interest in flying cars, so he's seeing potential for flying cars in the next few years and as a way to perhaps help us reduce carbon emissions and he's excited about technology. So I think he had a lot of fun. >> And we should mention, I think, Bill Coleman and Veritas is matching contributions and then you have extended that through his non-profit? >> Correct, so Bill Coleman also is a great philanthropist like Richard is, and ever since he's arrived here at Veritas he's been very lean-forward with making sure that Veritas is giving back. It was part of the culture, but I really feel that Bill has augmented that, and so for these recent set of disasters, hurricane Harvey, hurricane Irma, Veritas has set up a funding, and then we are doing double matching, and what we did after the unfortunate hurricane Irma came through is Virgin Unite is donating to the BBI's. We've added that to the list of charities and double matching that, as well. >> So people can go to Virgin Unite and donate, or they can donate through your website as well? >> They should go to Virgin Unite and donate, they should go to the, there's also the American Red Cross in the Houston area and the Miami area that are doing donations. Donate, you know, direct through them. >> So please, take a moment, if you can. Donate often, you know, every little bit helps for sure. Okay, so let's get into it. Quite a show, second year of Veritas. It's the rebirth of Veritas, and Veritas, in our view, how do you feel, give us the sort of rundown on the show. >> Oh, I, ah, fantastic. The feedback from the customers, which is what I'm really most concerned about here has been, this year, last year was a great coming out, but this Veritas is much more innovative than we ever thought you could be. We heard the predictions around 360 Data Management last year, but wow, you've delivered. You've got a new set of exciting announcements around what we're doing to move to the cloud. Clearly, the partnership with Microsoft is a huge part of that. New innovations in SDS. And so we've seen a great rise in attendance this year, in terms of our customers, and we've had a fabulous new set of sponsors, which I'm just thrilled to have here. Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, which I think shows the strength of what we're doing to help customers as they move to the cloud, and they really are transforming their datacenter environment. >> So, talk a little bit about digital, as a marketing pro. Every customer we talked to is going through, if you talk to the C-level, they're going through digital transformations; it's real. As a CMO, you're living in a digital transformation. What does it mean from a marketing perspective? How are you addressing, you know, these trends and taking advantage of them? >> It's crucial. I spend most of my time with my staff thinking about: how do we advance our own digital expertise and take advantage of the data that we too have. Really, CMOs are in command of so much data around customers, or should be in command of so much data around customers, in a good way, to provide more content that is directed at what their problems are. I think we've all experienced the uncomfortable feeling where maybe you Google something and suddenly you're getting ad after ad after ad from a company, and it might have been an accidental Google search, right? So we can use it for good in that way, understanding our customers. We're on a real digitization journey. It's a big word, but what it means for me in marketing at Veritas is really advancing and investing in our marketing infrastructure. One of the new things that we've just done is a complete underpinning reboot of Veritas.com, which the audience can see has gone live right here, for Vision. Making the site more personalized and more relevant to those that are visiting it. >> Yeah, Lynn, one of the things we've been digging into a little bit is you have a lot of existing customers with, you know, a very strong legacy. There's all these new trends, and you threw out lots of, you know, really interesting data. You know, the IOT with 269 times greater data than the datacenter, ah, how do you balance, kind of, helping customers, you know, get more out of what they have but bringing them along, showing them the vision, you know, helping them along that path to the future? Because, you know, change is difficult. >> It is, but you know, I have to say, and I think Mike Palmer said this as well, at one point, actually, when I've visited customers, I've been in, this year, I've been to Australia, I've been to France, been to Germany, London, Singapore, all over in the US, and talking to a lot of our existing customers, and what they're telling us is really that: we want your help in moving forward. So, we really embrace our existing customers. We're not in the business of trying to go around them. But they're our best advocates, and I think as a marketer, it's really key to understand that, is your existing customers are your best advocates. So we're helping them understand what we're doing for them today and also helping them learn how they can be advocates and heroes maybe to other parts of the business with some of these new technologies. >> Yeah, that's a great point. I'd love for you to expand on, you know, in IT it was always: up, the admin for my product is kind of where I'm selling, and how do I get up to the C-suite? Conversations we've been having this week, there's a lot of the, you know, cloud strategy, the GDPR, you know, digitization. It's, you know, the person who might have boughten that backup is pulling in other members of the team. Talk to us a little bit about, you know, the dynamics inside the company, where Veritas is having those conversations. >> Yeah, I think actually you brought up GDPR, and that's a perfect example. So GDPR is a regulation that is going to impact any company that is holding data about a European Union citizen, and it's an area that Veritas can really solve problems in, but we didn't know a lot of the legal and compliance buyers, which often are the ones making the purchase decisions in this case. We have been so thrilled to see that our existing advocates in the backup space have been bringing us into conversations and in Europe, what we've done so successfully now is actually bring the two groups together in roundtables and have our current customers bring us into conversations with legal and compliance. And it's creating, for them, stronger connections within the business, and that makes them more relevant to their bosses and those other lines of business, and there's a lot of proactive or positive feedback around that, that I think is what marketers and sales should be thinking about. It's not about how to go around, it's about how do I bring you with me. >> So, as you go around the world, I wonder if, again, another marketing, marketing to me, is very challenging; you've got a hard job. Marketers, I don't have the marketing DNA. But you want to maintain your relevance. You're a 30-plus year old company. Take something like GDPR. How do you think about the content that you serve up your audience? You can scare 'em to death, you know? That's what a lot of people are doing. You can educate them, but it's kind of deep and wonky. How are you thinking about that transfer of knowledge, you know, for the benefit of customers and obviously, ultimately, for the benefit of Veritas? >> So the way I think about that is B to H. Business to Human. So at the end of the day, you know, we talk about B to B marketing or B to C marketing. It's B to H, now, and what I mean by that is: at the end of the day, we're all human, individuals, we have a lot coming at us, as you've pointed out, with information and data, so what we've done is definitely not a scare tactic. Yes, GDPR is coming. But I think that in marketing, my philosophy is: let's work on how we can help you in the positive. I don't believe in the fear, uncertainty and doubt. And what we've done is approach it as we would hope to be approached, which is: let's give you some practical information simply, in amounts that you can absorb. And let's face it, I think Josie was the one that said this, our attention span is about that of a goldfish. I can't remember if it was plus or minus one second. And so, what we've actually gotten great feedback on is that we've broken the GDPR regulation down into very simple parts, and we've said: hey, here are the five parts. Here's how we're relevant and can help you. And we've done that in pieces that are as simple as a one-page infographic. We can obviously go a lot more complex, but at the beginning, when you're researching a topic, you're not looking for the 40-page white paper anymore. You're looking for what we call "snackable" pieces of content that get you interested. >> Yeah, that was good. I remember that infographic from the session yesterday. It was sort of, you know, discover and then four other steps and then, you know, made it sound simple. Even though we know it's more complicated, but at least it allows a customer to frame it. Okay, I think I can now get my arms around these. I understand there's a lot of depth beneath each of them, but it helps me at least begin to clock it. Another topic we want to talk about is women in tech. We had a great conversation with Alicia Johnson from Accenture about WAVE, which is Women and Veritas Empowered. Right? Talk about, again, the relevance of those programs generally and I want to ask you some follow-up questions. >> Sure, so I'm a big believer in those types of programs. We want to sponsor those here and bring together our own Veritas female engineering community, but also our customers that are here. I think that while we would all like it to be a world where we were at a neutral, bias-free, we're not quite there yet. And I think programs that bring people together, whether it's gender or any other dimension, are important to get people to connect in a community, share with each other, learn from each other, and so, I do hope one day for my daughter, who's 11, perhaps that this is a non-topic, but until it isn't, I think the power of sharing is important, and so I'm really pleased to have WAVE. It's our second year having WAVE. It was a bigger program with Accenture sponsoring it. And we look forward to continuing to do that. Veritas also will have a big presence at the Anita Borg Institute, which is coming up next month, as well. >> Yeah, and The Cube will be there, of course. It'll be our, what, fourth year there, Stu? So it's a big show for us and we're obviously big supporters of the topic; we tend to talk about it a lot. And I think, you know, Lynn, your point is right. Hopefully by the time our daughters are grown up, we won't be talking about it, but I think it's important to talk about now. >> Lynn: It is. >> And one of the things that Accenture laid out is that, by 2025, their objective is to have 50 percent, you know, women on staff, and I think it was 25 percent women in leadership positions. I was impressed and struck, and I wonder if you can comment as a C-level executive, struck by the emphasis on P&L management, which, you know, tends to be a man's world. But, thoughts on that and you, as a C-level executive, you know, women in that position? >> Yeah, and again, it's one of these things where I'll have to say it's a little both uncomfortable, but obviously I feel that it is still important to talk about because I wish we were at a place where we didn't have to. I'm really proud of Veritas, because we have myself and Michelle Vanderhar on Bill's staff. So Bill has been a promoter of having diversity on his own direct staff, and I think that top down approach is super important in Silicon Valley and any business that there's real support for that. And Michelle Vanderhar is our chief council, which has, in many cases, not been a position where you would have seen a lady leading that. So we work on that at Veritas, and I personally believe it and I think Mr. Branson said that, as well, in his keynote as well this morning. When we have diversity, we have a breadth of ideas that makes it just a better place to work, and frankly, I think, leads to better innovation in whatever field that you're in. >> Lynn, last question I wanted to ask you, the tagline of the conference is: the truth in information. So much gets talked about, you know, what's real news? You know, what's fake? What do you want people, as the takeaway for Veritas and the show? The truth in information is our rallying cry, and you're right, I think it couldn't be more timely. We're not here to take a particular political stance, but what we find is in the business world, the companies are struggling with: where do I find what's really relevant? Let me give you a story. I was in France earlier this year, sitting with a CIO of one of the very largest oil and gas companies in France. Happens to be a lady who was formerly the chief data officer and she'd moved from that position into the CIO position. And when we talk about the truth in information, the example that she gave us which was so striking is that they've been doing the scans of the Earth, and actually the streets of Paris, for 50, 60 years, to understand the infrastructure, what they may have, and so forth, and at this point, with all of that data, they literally are having a hard time understanding what, out of all of these pieces of information, these topographical scans that they have, is relevant anymore. And this is the same story that I've heard in pharmaceutical companies that are doing drug tests. This is the same story that you would hear in, frankly, media companies that are doing filming, and are trying and all of this is digitized. So, when we talk about that with our customers, it really resonates, is that with so much coming at us, it's hard, in business as well as it is in our consumer lives, to really know: what do I have that's relevant? And I think the opportunity Veritas has is to help customers with a single data management platform, start to get a handle on that and be able to be much more efficient and productive. >> Alright, Lynn Lucas, we have to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on The Cube. We really appreciate it. >> Thank you! I really enjoyed my first time. I can't wait to be back on again, and hope to have you guys here next year, Vision 2018. >> We'd love to be here. Alright, bringing you the truth, from Veritas Vision, this is The Cube. We'll be right back. (uptempo musical theme)

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

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube! Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, everybody. We are covering Veritas Vision 2017, and this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, with Stu Miniman and Mike Palmer is here, he's the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Veritas. Mike, thanks for coming to The Cube. >> Thank you for having me here. >> Great keynote, yesterday. We see hundreds, if not thousands of these discussions, and talking head presentations, and yours was hilarious. Let's set up for the people who didn't see it, yesterday. Mike gets up there, and he's talking about the, there's a video that's playing about the end of the world. And the basic theme is that you didn't take care of your data, and now the world's coming to an end. Las Vegas was in shambles, and there were waterfalls running through the hotels, drones attacking people, and then you picked it up from there and then took it into, just a really funny soliloquy. But, where'd you come up with that idea? And, how do you think, I thought it went great, but how did you feel afterwards? >> Well, I can take only partial credit. I have an amazing creative team, and when you work at a company that's been doing, you know, large-scale enterprise data-center stuff, we know that part of our obligation for our audience is kind of making it more palpable for them, making it feel a little bit more, bringing the emotion to it. So we want to have a little bit of excitement in there. But at the same time, we have a real message, you know, and hopefully that came across, too. >> It did, and then, you know, but again, a lot of good humor, the megabytes, gigabytes, you know, up to zetabytes, yadabytes, Mike Tyson-bytes, on and on and on. (laughing) Very clever, so congratulations on that... >> Mike: Oh, thanks! >> We really enjoyed it. Mixed things up a little bit. So, and again, very transparent. We talked about the UX, not the best. You're not happy with it. >> Mike: Right. >> And again, very transparent about that, I think that's a theme of many successful companies, today. But, so, let's start with, sort of, what does it take as the Chief Product Officer, to transform a company from somebody who's been around since 1983, into a modern, you know, cloud-like, hyper-scale, you know, set of service and software offerings. >> That's a big question, but I can tell you the first thing that it takes, the most important thing that it takes, is the best engineering team in the world. You can do a lot of things around the outside, we need to fix our UX, we know that, often considered that to be the kitchens and bathrooms of our house remodel. But if your foundation's broken, if your framing isn't there, you really don't have much of an asset to put on the market. We have a great engineering team, we are releasing products at a velocity that is incomparable in the enterprise ISV space, and we're super proud of that. So I think that's the number one thing. I think number two is the other thing, that we're the envy of the industry, for, and that is, an amazing install-base of customers. Very hard to name a fortune 2000 company that isn't a significant customer of Veritas, so we have a great basis to collaborate and innovate. You know, the rest, we know we have some work to do as we bring it into the modern age. You know, we talked a lot about the fact that workloads are changing in data centers, architectures are changing, we're establishing new partnerships with some of the sponsors that you see here today, like Microsoft, like Google, like IBM, and Oracle, and others. And, you know, it takes a village and they're helping us move into the next 10 years. >> Stu: You know, Mike, talk a little bit about the transition from, you know, software that lived on servers, to now, well, cloud is just isn't somebody else's servers, I think, is the word for that. >> Mike: Right. >> You know, it definitely, we've talked many times this week, you know, Veritas was software-defined before there was such a thing, used to be the FUD from the traditional players, that it was like, oh, you can't trust stuff like that, and now, of course, they're all software-defined and, you know, talking about that, too, so, what does that mean, going to kind of, being completely agnostic, for where things lived, and some of the intricacies of trying to work with, you know, some of the big and small cloud-players? >> A lot of questions in there, and I think David Noy, who I know you guys are going to talk to later, is going to talk a bit more specifically about this, but one of the first things you have to keep in mind, is if you're building software to be software-defined, then you have to build it without considering the hardware platform that you may deliver it on. And I think that's where some of our competitors get it wrong, they can say that they're software-defined, but the litmus test is, can I really pick up this software without modification, and go run it in one of those hyper-scalers? Or put it on one of the white boxes that I went into the market and procured and integrated myself? Veritas has been doing that for a long time. In fact, if you really look at Veritas's core, we're an integrator. We've been an integrator of applications, through the protection space, in our file-system and our info-scale technologies, we are integrators of operating systems, when you look at hyper-scalers, they're just the next operating system. Someone else's hardware, as you said. So we look to protect our customers in terms of their choices, make flexibility a real part of the multi-cloud architecture they're putting together, still doing the things we do well with protection, and ultimately layer on that last little bit when we're talking software-defined and that is not just focus on the infrastructure, but really aspire to this, how do I better manage data and get value from data? >> You know, Mike, I want to dig one level deeper on that. So, the cloud providers, it's all well and good to say, yeah, I'm agnostic, but each of them have their own little nuances. It's, at least today, it's not like, oh, I choose today to wake up and this one has cheaper prices, and it's not a commodity, it's not a utility, and each one of them have services that they want you to integrate with, have to have deeper, how do you balance that, you know, integration, how much work's done, where the customers are pulling you, how does that product portfolio get put together? >> That's an excellent question and I will be fully honest, that a year ago we thought about the answer to that question very differently than we do today. You know, a year ago, I think we were somewhat naive, and thought, hey, we're going to throw a thin layer of capability on top of the clouds, and in effect commoditize them ourselves, and hope our customers just move around as if there were no underlying services. And obviously if you're a cloud-provider, that is not an approach that you're a big fan of. (laughing) And frankly, it's a disservice to the customers, because they are building some really valuable services, and they are differentiating themselves. Our approach has changed, our approach today is a very deep-level integration with each cloud provider, and the specialization they're bringing to the market, without sacrificing the portability, without sacrificing the built-in protections that the cloud providers aren't putting on their platforms and don't want to put on their platforms. And again going back to this idea of data, ultimately, if it's someone else's hardware, in effect, in some cases, someone else's application, it's always your data, and how we are servicing that data is really the key. >> So, that's really hard work. In a lot of cases, you have to interface with very low-level, primitive APIs from the cloud service providers. How do you, sort of, balance your resources, or a portion of your resources, between doing that, because you guys, I call it the compatibility matrix, all kinds of data stores, all kinds of clouds, every one of those is engineering resources. And it seems that's a key part of your strategy, but you got to be sacrificing something, which is maybe, you know, the next widget on your existing products. How do you think about proportioning those? >> You know, at Veritas, in a way, the emergence of the cloud ecosystem actually improves that situation for us. We're carrying 30 years of operating systems that have come and gone, that have incremented versions, and our customers often strand or isolate single examples of those boxes, from 20 years ago that they expect us to test all of our software against, on their behalf. (laughing) For example, right, and so when you look at where we are today, there are five or 10 cloud providers, versus hundreds of operating system versions, and application, we have no problem supporting the proliferation in cloud, we actually welcome the ability to support those... >> Stu: You're much happier with the one version of AJUR, as opposed to the old Patch Monday. >> Exactly right, and you know, they upgrade the whole thing at once... >> Yeah. >> They issue a couple new services, and we adapt 'em, no problem. >> Am I thinking about it the wrong way? Because, while that's true, and I understand that, but within an individual cloud, you could have 15 data services. I think about AWS data services, their data pipeline is increasingly complex, so. Doesn't that complexity scale in a different direction? >> Mike: It scales differently for sure, but I would give a lot of credit to the cloud providers, because they're taking a lot of the regression testing that we used to have to do, for example, with application providers and operating system providers who didn't think about us when they were building their products. The cloud providers take accountability for regression testing all of the things that they release to their customers. So when we adopt an API, we're fully confident that that API works in the context of that cloud environment. So that's off our plate. It really isolates the need for us to simply test that API against our environment. >> Dave: OK, so much more stable and predictable environment for you. I want to ask you, I've heard the term modern data protection a lot, what is modern data protection? Everyone wants to be next-gen, how do you define modern data protection? >> Mike: And this is something we're super passionate about, because our industry has been around for quite a long time, and you get terms thrown out there, like legacy or modern, and everyone's fighting for brand recognition, and kind of, end of the growth spaces in the market. For us, it actually is very simple. We recognize that there are a lot of different techniques to protect data, we think of these protection schemes like lots of different insurance policies, and lots of different tools in your toolbox. Where Veritas is going to win, and continues to win, is that we can offer our customers all of those techniques. We're not trying to convince them that one technique is so much more special than another one, that they need to diversify and create complexity in their environment, so we talk about modern data protection as the ability to choose snapshots, or back-ups, or copy data management, or workload migration, in the future there will be other ways to do this: continuous data protection, or scale-out platforms for cloud providers. These are just techniques inside of a Veritas portfolio, as opposed to stand-alone companies that create complexity for our customers. So, modernization is choice. >> Dave: OK, so you have this awesome install-base. Bill Coleman said to us yesterday, in response to a similar but related question, that it's ours to lose. And the question that we have is, as you look at that install base, you got to get them onto this modern data platform. How do you do that? Do you write some abstraction layer? You talked about that thin layer in the cloud, you must have thought about doing that. Is that what you're doing? How is that going? What does that journey look like? >> Mike: You know, that is one of the most fundamental strategy questions for Veritas. And one of the things we recognized early on, is that while we do have an amazing install base of customers, and those customers are hyper-scaled themselves, you're talking about customers with tens of thousands of servers running our software, both on the storage and the protection site, so the thing that we cannot ask them to do is continuously upgrade their environment to take advantage of new features. We will put out one-to-two major releases of our software, particularly on a protection side, annually. But we're innovating at a far greater pace than that, so we've made some conscious choices to create new architectures for our customer that are workload-specific, so Cloud Point, being a great example, coming out in July, our Object Store announcements, underpinning our next generation protection solutions. So they have modern storage capabilities, our second example. But pulling them together is where only Veritas can offer a customer a complete catalog of that data. So, combining your net back-up catalog with Cloud Point, for example, with your storage, with what you've put into cloud, provides a customer, for the first time, kind of a complete view of the secondary estate. And so, as long as we get that right, we don't have to upgrade, we don't have to seed, what we have to do is enable our customers, through simple adoption of new tools, provide that visibility over the top, and I think that they'll be good to go. >> So that's kind of like a, I think of a term, backward compatibility, is essentially what you're providing for your install base, is that right? >> Mike: That's exactly right. Providing, and this is where API-based infrastructure and service-driven architectures help us a lot. We don't have to fully instantiate a code-base every time that we want to offer a service to a customer. >> Dave: There aren't many independent, in fact there aren't any independent, is one, two-and-a-half billion dollar software companies in your space, but there are many emerging guys, who are getting a lot of attention, well-funded, some, you know, hitting that kind of, 100 million dollar revenue mark, at least it appears that way. How do you look at those guys? What do you learn from them? You know, Branson said today, you know, you learn by listening and watching, in this case. You're watching the market, obviously, what are you seeing there, it's the hottest space in the infrastructure market right now, is your space and security. Are the two, you know, smoking hot spaces. What are you observing, and what are you learning? >> And I think the direct answer to your question is probably the user. You know, and I think that's the lesson of the industry even over the last 15 years, is that when a new workload arises, it's creating a new user inside the enterprise IT department. And that user often gets to determine all of the services that they need to make themselves successful. If that is a cloud workload, and they need availability services, or they need protection services, they want that to integrate in the same place that they buy in provision their cloud workload. If it's a container workload it's the same. We saw the rise of some of our competitors that got to multi-hundred million dollar revenue streams, by focusing on a single user, and a single type of transaction, with a single type of interface. And Veritas kind of lost its way, I think, a little bit, back in that time. So what we are watching today, is who are our users? What workloads are emerging? What sort of interfaces do we need to develop for those users? Which is why we made our UX statements as strongly as we did. We're committed to those. That is going to be the future of Veritas, it's serving the broadening user-base inside of enterprise. >> Dave: You're seeing a lot of discussion in the industry around design thinking, I know we're out of time, here, but, you know, you see companies, like, for instance, Charles Phillips's company, Infor, bought a company called Hook and Loop, and they're all about design, and, how is design thinking fitting into your, sort of, UX/UI plans? >> I mean, the parlance that we use internally is jobs to be done. Right, we clearly want to create a very consistent user experience, and look and feel, we want our customers to be proud to be Veritas customers. But we have to be super cognizant of, what is the job they're trying to get accomplished? And allow the system to be designed around accommodating that. If that is, I want three workflows in three steps or less, can I do that? It could be, I have a very complicated job and I want the ability to control very granular things, do I have an interface to do that? So, if we know the user and the job to be done, we can create a consistent look and feel, I think that we are, we're going to not only ride the wave, of change inside of our particular industry, but I think we're going to wind up in a consolidation space where we're a big winner. >> All right, last question, the bumper sticker on Vision 2017, as the trucks are pulling away from the area, what's the bumper sticker? >> Mike: Secondary data is your most under-utilized asset, and a platform provider is what you need to take advantage of it. >> Dave: All right, Mike, thanks very much for coming to The Cube. Congratulations, and good luck. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, you're welcome, keep right there, buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. The Cube, live we're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (peppy digital music) >> Veritas Vision 2017 everybody. We're here at The Aria Hotel. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Vtas, #VtasVision, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman who is my cohost for the week. Stu, we heard Richard Branson this morning. The world-renowned entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson came up from the British Virgin Islands where he lives. He lives in the Caribbean. And evidently he was holed out during the hurricane in his wine cellar, but he was able to make it up here for the keynote. We saw on Twitter, so, great keynote, we'll talk about that a little bit. We saw on Twitter that he actually stopped by the Hitachi event, Hitachi NEXT for women in tech, a little mini event that they had over there. So, pretty cool guy. Some of the takeaways: he talked a lot about- well, first of all, welcome to day two. >> Thanks, Dave. Yeah, and people are pretty excited that sometimes they bring in those marquee guests, someone that's going to get everybody to say, "Okay, wait, it's day two. "I want to get up early, get in the groove." Some really interesting topics, I mean talking about, thinking about the community at large, one of the things I loved he talked about. I've got all of these, I've got hotels, I've got different things. We draw a circle around it. Think about the community, think about the schools that are there, think about if there's people that don't have homes. All these things to, giving back to the community, he says we can all do our piece there, and talking about sustainable business. >> As far as, I mean we do a lot of these, as you know, and as far as the keynote speakers go, I thought he was one of the better ones. Certainly one of the bigger names. Some of the ones that we've seen in the past that I think are comparable, Bill Clinton at Dell World 2012 was pretty happening. >> There's a reason that Bill Clinton is known as the orator that he is. >> Yeah, so he was quite good. And then Robert Gates, both at ServiceNow and Nutanics, Condi Rice at Nutanics, both very impressive. Malcolm Gladwell, who's been on theCUBE and Nate Silver, who's also been on theCUBE, again, very impressive. Thomas Friedman we've seen at the IBM shows. The author, the guy who wrote the Jobs book was very very strong, come on, help me. >> Oh, yeah, Walter Isaacson. >> Walter Isaacson was at Tableau, so you've seen some- >> Yeah, I've seen Elon Musk also at the Dell show. >> Oh, I didn't see Elon, okay. >> Yeah, I think that was the year you didn't come. >> So I say Branson, from the ones I've seen, I don't know how he compared to Musk, was probably the best I think I've ever seen. Very inspirational, talking about the disaster. They had really well-thought-out and well-produced videos that he sort of laid in. The first one was sort of a commercial for Richard Branson and who he was and how he's, his passion for changing the world, which is so genuine. And then a lot of stuff on the disaster in the British Virgin Islands, the total devastation. And then he sort of went into his passion for entrepreneurs, and what he sees as an entrepreneur is he sort of defined it as somebody who wants to make the world a better place, innovations, disruptive innovations to make the world a better place. And then had a sort of interesting Q&A session with Lynn Lucas. >> Yeah, and one of the lines he said, people, you don't go out with the idea that, "I'm going to be a businessman." It's, "I want to go out, I want to build something, "I want to create something." I love one of the early anecdotes that he said when he was in school, and he had, what was it, a newsletter or something he was writing against the Vietnam War, and the school said, "Well, you can either stay in school, "or you can keep doing your thing." He said, "Well, that choice is easy, buh-bye." And when he was leaving, they said, "Well, you're either going to be, end up in jail or be a millionaire, we're not sure." And he said, "Well, what do ya know, I ended up doing both." (both laughing) >> So he is quite a character, and just very understated, but he's got this aura that allows him to be understated and still appear as this sort of mega-personality. He talked about, actually some of the interesting things he said about rebuilding after Irma, obviously you got to build stronger homes, and he really sort of pounded the reducing the reliance on fossil fuels, and can't be the same old, same old, basically calling for a Marshall Plan for the Caribbean. One of the things that struck me, and it's a tech audience, generally a more liberal audience, he got some fond applause for that, but he said, "You guys are about data, you don't just ignore data." And one of the data points that he threw out was that the Atlantic Ocean at some points during Irma was 86 degrees, which is quite astounding. So, he's basically saying, "Time to make a commitment "to not retreat from the Paris Agreement." And then he also talked about, from an entrepreneurial standpoint and building a company that taking note of the little things, he said, makes a big difference. And talking about open cultures, letting people work from home, letting people take unpaid sabbaticals, he did say unpaid. And then he touted his new book, Finding My Virginity, which is the sequel to Losing My Virginity. So it was all very good. Some of the things to be successful: you need to learn to learn, you need to listen, sort of an age-old bromide, but somehow it seemed to have more impact coming from Branson. And then, actually then Lucas asked one of the questions that I put forth, was what's his relationship with Musk and Bezos? And he said he actually is very quite friendly with Elon, and of course they are sort of birds of a feather, all three of them, with the rocket ships. And he said, "We don't talk much about that, "we just sort of-" specifically in reference to Bezos. But overall, I thought it was very strong. >> Yeah Dave, what was the line I think he said? "You want to be friends with your competitors "but fight hard against them all day, "go drinking with them at night." >> Right, fight like crazy during the day, right. So, that was sort of the setup, and again, I thought Lynn Lucas did a very good job. He's, I guess in one respect he's an easy interview 'cause he's such a- we interview these dynamic figures, they just sort of talk and they're good. But she kept the conversation going and asked some good questions and wasn't intimidated, which you can be sometimes by those big personalities. So I thought that was all good. And then we turned into- which I was also surprised and appreciative that they put Branson on first. A lot of companies would've held him to the end. >> Stu: Right. >> Said, "Alright, let's get everybody in the room "and we'll force them to listen to our product stuff, "and then we can get the highlight, the headliner." Veritas chose to do it differently. Now, maybe it was a scheduling thing, I don't know. But that was kind of cool. Go right to where the action is. You're not coming here to watch 60 Minutes, you want to see the headline show right away, and that's what they did, so from a content standpoint I was appreciative of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, they brought on David Noy, who we're going to have on in a little while, and went through, really, the updates. So really it's the expansion, Dave, of their software-defined storage, the family of products called InfoScale. Yesterday we talked a bit about the Veritas HyperScale, so that is, they've got the HyperScale for OpenStack, they've got the HyperScale for containers, and then filling out the product line is the Veritas Access, which is really their scale-out NAS solution, including, they did one of the classic unveils of Veritas Software Company. It was a little odd for me to be like, "Here's an appliance "for Veritas Bezel." >> Here's a box! >> Partnership with Seagate. So they said very clearly, "Look, if you really want it simple, "and you want it to come just from us, "and that's what you'd like, great. "Here's an appliance, trusted supplier, "we've put the whole thing together, "but that's not going to be our primary business, "that's not the main way we want to do things. "We want to offer the software, "and you can choose your hardware piece." Once again, knocking on some of those integrated hardware suppliers with the 70 point margin. And then the last one, one of the bigger announcements of the show, is the Veritas Cloud Storage, which they're calling is object storage with brains. And one thing we want to dig into: those brains, what is that functionality, 'cause object storage from day one always had a little bit more intelligence than the traditional storage. Metadata is usually built in, so where is the artificial intelligence, machine learning, what is that knowledge that's kind of built into it, because I find, Dave, on the consumer side, I'm amazed these days as how much extra metadata and knowledge gets built into things. So, on my phone, I'll start searching for things, and it'll just have things appear. I know you're not fond of the automated assistants, but I've got a couple of them in my house, so I can ask them questions, and they are getting smarter and smarter over time, and they already know everything we're doing anyway. >> You know, I like the automated assistants. We have, well, my kid has an Echo, but what concerns me, Stu, is when I am speaking to those automated assistants about, "Hey, maybe we should take a trip "to this place or that place," and then all of a sudden the next day on my laptop I start to see ads for trips to that place. I start to think about, wow, this is strange. I worry about the privacy of those systems. They're going to, they already know more about me than I know about me. But I want to come back to those three announcements we're going to have David Noy on: HyperScale, Access, and Cloud Object. So some of the things we want to ask that we don't really know is the HyperScale: is it Block, is it File, it's OpenStack specific, but it's general. >> Right, but the two flavors: one's for OpenStack, and of course OpenStack has a number of projects, so I would think you could be able to do Block and File but would definitely love that clarification. And then they have a different one for containers. >> Okay, so I kind of don't understand that, right? 'Cause is it OpenStack containers, or is it Linux containers, or is it- >> Well, containers are always going to be on Linux, and containers can fit with OpenStack, but we've got their Chief Product Officer, and we've got David Noy. >> Dave: So we'll attack some of that. >> So we'll dig into all of those. >> And then, the Access piece, you know, after the apocalypse, there are going to be three things left in this world: cockroaches, mainframes, and Dot Hill RAID arrays. When Seagate was up on stage, Seagate bought this company called Dot Hill, which has been around longer than I have, and so, like you said, that was kind of strange seeing an appliance unveil from the software company. But hey, they need boxes to run on this stuff. It was interesting, too, the engineer Abhijit came out, and they talked about software-defined, and we've been doing software-defined, is what he said, way before the term ever came out. It's true, Veritas was, if not the first, one of the first software-defined storage companies. >> Stu: Oh yeah. >> And the problem back then was there were always scaling issues, there were performance issues, and now, with the advancements in microprocessor, in DRAM, and flash technologies, software-defined has plenty of horsepower underneath it. >> Oh yeah, well, Dave, 15 years ago, the FUD from every storage company was, "You can't trust storage functionality "just on some generic server." Reminds me back, I go back 20 years, it was like, "Oh, you wouldn't run some "mission-critical thing on Windows." It's always, "That's not ready for prime time, "it's not enterprise-grade." And now, of course, everybody's on the software-defined bandwagon. >> Well, and of course when you talk to the hardware companies, and you call them hardware companies, specifically HPE and Dell EMC as examples, and Lenovo, etc. Lenovo not so much, the Chinese sort of embraced hardware. >> And even Hitachi's trying to rebrand themselves; they're very much a hardware company, but they've got software assets. >> So when you worked at EMC, and you know when you sat down and talked to the guys like Brian Gallagher, he would stress, "Oh, all my guys, all my engineers "are software engineers. We're not a hardware company." So there's a nuance there, it's sort of more the delivery and the culture and the ethos, which I think defines the software culture, and of course the gross margins. And then of course the Cloud Object piece; we want to understand what's different from, you know, object storage embeds metadata in the data and obviously is a lower cost sort of option. Think of S3 as the sort of poster child for cloud object storage. So Veritas is an arms dealer that's putting their hat in the ring kind of late, right? There's a lot of object going on out there, but it's not really taking off, other than with the cloud guys. So you got a few object guys around there. Cleversafe got bought out by IBM, Scality's still around doing some stuff with HPE. So really, it hasn't even taken off yet, so maybe the timing's not so bad. >> Absolutely, and love to hear some of the use cases, what their customers are doing. Yeah, Dave, if we have but one critique, saw a lot of partners up on stage but not as many customers. Usually expect a few more customers to be out there. Part of it is they're launching some new products, not talking about very much the products they've had in there. I know in the breakouts there are a lot of customers here, but would have liked to see a few more early customers front and center. >> Well, I think that's the key issue for this company, Stu, is that, we talked about this at the close yesterday, is how do they transition that legacy install base to the new platform. Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." And I think that's right, and so the answer for a company like that in the playbook is clear: go private so you don't have to get exposed to the 90 day shock lock, invest, build out a modern platform. He talked about microservices and modern development platform. And create products that people want, and migrate people over. You're in a position to do that. But you're right, when you talk to the customers here, they're NetBackup customers, that's really what they're doing, and they're here to sort of learn, learn about best practice and see where they're going. NetBackup, I think, 8.1 was announced this week, so people are glomming onto that, but the vast majority of the revenue of this company is from their existing legacy enterprise business. That's a transition that has to take place. Luckily it doesn't have to take place in the public eye from a financial standpoint. So they can have some patient capital and work through it. Alright Stu, lineup today: a lot of product stuff. We got Jason Buffington coming on for getting the analyst perspective. So we'll be here all day. Last word? >> Yeah, and end of the day with Foreigner, it feels like the first time we're here. Veritas feels hot-blooded. We'll keep rolling. >> Alright, luckily we're not seeing double vision. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Vertias Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (peppy digital music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Veritas Vision, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is Day One wrap of the Veritas Vision conference. Veritas, as we said earlier, is a company that has gone through a number of changes, Stu. I mean, I remember when the company launched in 1983. It was sort of, you know, it was focused on backup. It was Veritas and Legato. And they kind of grew through the PC era and the client server era, really started to take off. And then they exploded in the internet era. Their evaluation went through the roof. They ended up buying C8's backup business. They really drove that and then got purchased by Symantec for a big number. I mean, I think the number was 15 billion. I mean, it was in the teens as I recall. Really never did much under Symantec, or, Symantec never did much with Veritas. I think they had a vision of information management and that never really panned out. Spun the company back out, devested it, sale to Carlyle and some other investors for, I thought the number was 8 billion, somebody told me 7 billion today. That must be net of cash. 2.3 billion dollars in revenue. My understanding from sources is that valuation is way, way up, nearly double from 2015. Now, maybe that's an inflated number, but I'm not surprised. The market's been booming. So that's sort of the inside organizational issues. We're here at The Aria, what do you say, Stu, a couple thousand people, 2500? >> Yeah, it's about 2000, Dave, and it's interesting, I talked to some people that had gone to the old Veritas Vision, years ago, and gotten up to about 4000 or 5000 people. But, grown since last year, good energy at the show. We got to talk to the Vox community people. They've got 10,000 people online contributing to their forums, participating, launched the VIP program for some of the super users they have here. Definitely good crowd in the keynote. Good people clapping and participating, getting excited. It surprised me a little bit the number one topic of conversation is GDPR. As you said in our last interview, we're going down the deep abyss of how you're going to get litigated out of all of your money if you don't follow this. It's like way worse than Y2K, ah, some stuff's going to break and maybe turn off for a bit. >> Well, you know what I liked about the GDPR discussions though, they had answers. >> Yeah. >> Other events where I've gone to GDPR, it's been scary, scary, scary, scare you, scare you, scare you, and then call us. >> Yeah. >> And we'll give you some services. What I liked about, what I'm hearing from Veritas is, they've got at least a quasi-prescription as to what to do. So that's good. But the more interesting part to me Stu is you've got this enterprise backup legacy, I'll say it, legacy backup install base, enormous. A leader, they've mentioned many times, 15 years in a row leader in the magic quadrant. And I believe it, you talk to customers, what are you running, NetBackup, everybody's running NetBackup. But how they're transitioning into this vision of multi-cloud, data protection resilience across the Enterprise, across clouds, hyper scale. What I'm not fully clear on yet is how they get customers from point A to point B. And we heard from the keynotes this morning and Bill Campbell. We invested a bunch of dough in R&D, we're writing stuff that's cloud-native, container-based, micro services. So sort of all the right application development buzzwords and I believe that they're developing there. But I don't understand how they migrate that install base. Is there some kind of abstraction layer? Is there some kind of new UI? We heard them jokingly say today in the keynotes that, we hear you, customers, we know our UI sucked, we're working on that. I didn't see any announcements on that, but, that's something that, presumably, is a promise they're putting forth. But, I wasn't clear, maybe you could help clear it up, on how you get from point A of legacy install backup software to this nirvana of multi-cloud hyper scale micro services. >> Yeah, I mean, Dave, when we talked to Bill Coleman, his three Vs, value, vision, and that values of the company itself, clearly has got a compelling vision. He said not only ten years from now, but probably five years from now, every product I'm selling is going to be obsolete. And it's an interesting thing to hear because 15 years of experience, we're trusted, but we know that every product that you bought from Veritas in the past is going to be replaced by new things. And, right, how do we get, say okay, I've been buying that backup for a decade, do I get this visualization product, and if I'm looking at AWS, is Veritas the company I turn to? So really it gets down to, Dave, that blocking and tackling. Talked about the consultants, the partners, both on the go to market side as well as the technology side. Can Veritas get in there, can they have compelling differentiated products that solve a need in the market? We've talked to a number of companies this last year where I've looked at is this hybrid multi-cloud world. If you're software, how do you play in this market? Because isn't Microsoft, Google, Amazon, aren't they going to just do this? Information governance invisibility, absolutely. Amazon has a solution for you. Google has a solution for you. Microsoft has solutions. But, if I'm going to be across those environments, we haven't had a solution that goes across all of those environments. So, there's a hole in the ecosystem, and Veritas, along with many other companies, are trying to put that big elephant on the table and eat pieces out of it, so, it's interesting. >> And Coleman's background, from BEA, started at BEA, I think he took the thing up to half a billion dollars, sold it to Oracle for a big number. But you look at what BEA did, they were sort of the application integration glue. And that's a lot of, you hear a lot of similar messaging modernized around multi-cloud, around hyper scale, around micro services and the like. So, Coleman obviously has experience doing that. I thought he's a very clear thinker. I had not met him before. Furrier knows him pretty well, from his VC days. But I thought he laid out a pretty clear direction. So he's got street cred on this. SEEP com, done it before, I think this company has a decent balance sheet. They seem to have some patient capital in Carlyle. It doesn't appear that Carlyle's trying to suck all the money out. They don't have the 90-day shot clock. He basically, Bill Coleman basically said, look, we're fine shrinking to grow. We're shifting from a upfront license model, perpetual license model, to a ratable model. We could never do that as a public company. So it's going to be very interesting to see if and when they emerge as a public company, what that looks like and where they come from. >> Yeah, and Dave, one of the things I've been poking at is where do they sell to? If this was the backup administrator, that's not somebody that's going to help them with the transformation. It's digital transformation, it's my cloud strategy. It's things like GDPR where I'm going to need to get up the stack to the CIO, to the C-suite, prove the value that Veritas has, and therefore they can then get all these new products in where everything, the 360 data management, really at the core of what they're doing, and whole lots of other products. I mean, Dave, we didn't even dig into some of the object and file storage pieces that are in here. I know we've got their chief product officer on the Cube tomorrow. But a lot of products, pretty broad software suite. And for an infrastructure company, it's always interesting to hear them say, really, infrastructure doesn't matter. The no hardware agenda, but it's your data that matters, and we've got a vision here at Veritas Vision to bring you forward and lots of plays on the name of the company. Veritas, the show is the truth in information. >> Yeah, so, let's talk about the lineup tomorrow. A lot of product stuff tomorrow. Mike Palmer's coming on, he gave a great keynote this morning. Very funny, he gave a scenario of the world ending because basically people didn't have their data act together. They had these images of Las Vegas hotels in chaos and waterfalls running through the hotels and drones attacking and just total chaos. So we're going to get into a lot of the portfolio stuff and I think try to answer, Stu, some of those questions that I raised about how do you get customers from point A, where they are today, to point B. Are you going to, how are you going to transition them. Are there financial incentives? Is there some kind of abstraction layer that you're developing? What is that framework that brings us to that nirvana? So, give you the last word here, Stu. >> Yeah, so looking forward to digging in more with some of the customers, some of the partners. Good energy at the show. It's exciting to be here for the first time. And looking forward to Day Two. >> All right, good, good wrap, Stu. Thank you, and thank you for watching. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news. We saw some Oracle news today. Hitachi changed its name or Pentaho changed its name, we're not really sure about that. But all the news on siliconangle.com, go to wikibon.com for all the research. And of course, thecube.net to see this show, replays, youtube.com/siliconangle is where we archive all this stuff. Lot of websites. >> Yeah, and make sure to subscribe on our YouTube channel. >> Yeah, please do subscribe on that YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter, @thecube, @stuminiman, @dvellante. That's a wrap Day One, this is The Cube, we'll see you tomorrow from Veritas Vision from Vegas, take care. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's The Cube, covering Veritas Vision 2017 brought to you by Veritas. (mid tempo electronic tones) >> Vegas everybody, this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering Veritas Vision 2017 at The Aria Hotel. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. Eric Kessels is here, he's the CTO for Fairbanks, a partner of Veritas' out of the Netherlands and Carlos Carrero is Senior Principle Product Manager at Veritas and we're going to talk OpenStack. Gentlemen, welcome. >> Thank you. >> We love this topic, I mean five years ago Stu, it was the hottest thing in the planet, OpenStack came out, many people including John Furrier called it a Hail Mary against Amazon, which it kind of was and now the narrative around OpenStack is well, it's kind of, nobody is really doing it, blah, blah, blah. But there are definitely pockets of interest. The developer community is still, you know, passionate about it and service providers are you know, still glomming on to OpenStack. So Carlos, give us the update from Veritas' perspective. What's your interest in OpenStack and your role at Veritas? >> Yeah, so the good thing is what Veritas has been doing with OpenStack and also what Veritas is doing with containers solves emerging problems for emerging technologies and one of the key things is, with our partners Fairbanks, all the things we have been doing to validate the product and to bring the product into market. So for us, Fairbanks is one of the perfect partners because what the value that we bring with that. So they are OpenStack experts and he will go through all the content, you know, what they do, but they really understand about OpenStack. They really identify the issues that customers have with OpenStack and how they collaborate with Veritas to build HyperScale as a product to bring those gaps into a solution and deliver those enterprise class services to customers that-- >> I mean it's the ultimate in true private cloud visions too but Eric, you guys use to be VMware experts and decided to move beyond VMware to OpenStack. What was that journey like? >> Yeah right, so that was about I think five years ago where we did a lot of VMware implementations but we, at some stage we wanted to be a different chapter in the market, so a lot of people knew VMware was more a commodity in the IT so, we started to design a Blue Ocean Strategy for our company and then we went looking in the OpenSource market, which Open Source initiative was feasible for us to move forward with. We're knowledgeable about infrastructure, so then we went into OpenStack and we did a technical validation and we looked on what the attention was is the market. So from that stage we transferred completely our company from being a VMware house to a complete OpenSource company, but it took us a while of course because it was not like a switch of a couple months. I think it took us about three years to make that complete transition from being a VMware shop to being a complete OpenSource company. >> Eric, can you talk to us about your customers? Did they come saying "I want OpenStack" or are they coming saying "You know, I need to digitally transform." What's the conversation you're having with them that leads to your solution and what are your customers doing these days? >> So when we decided for OpenStack, at that stage we had already made a decision that we would move forward for the private cloud decision, so we were not focusing on public cloud initiative for OpenStack. So we think that OpenStack was initially built for private cloud environments. So one thing that we saw is that the VMware login for VMware or for Microsoft was pretty big and customers didn't like that anymore and the costs were pretty high for the VMware licensing. So then we started talking with those customers and say, "Okay hey, there's a different kind of way of running "your workloads in a different kind of environment. "Would you be interested in it if we can "cut the cost 50 percent?" for example. And of course that's always a good trigger to get in contact with our customers and what we see is that our customers are more like enterprise customers. They're not big service providers but just companies like a customer that is running a customer site so that they can do customer, a call center for that, so that's really an enterprise-like company and I just want to add that for them, that they decided to move to OpenStack because they needed to expand their infrastructure with like, with 20 nodes and if they did it with OpenStack, it was one-third of the price in doing that, so. >> So more than 50 percent. So are these cloud service providers predominantly, or? Describe the customers. >> Yeah, we have of course customers that are service providers because they have a huge price pressure on providing virtual machines, so they need to cut costs on their infrastructure and I think that OpenStack is really suitable for that because it's flexible, it is open, you can incorporate your management systems into OpenStack very fairly easily. So for those companies, OpenStack was a really good choice of doing that. And we have also other kind of customers that are, like we have packaging company, so they print the packaging for McDonald's, for example and they have developer departments in their company that want have really fast VMs for developing their own software and if you go by more the traditional route, it takes too long before that all is in place, so they want to have some self-service functionality and that's also what OpenStack can provide, providing self-service for their departments so to make it more easy. >> Carlos, this morning your CEO Bill Coleman said that the future is software defined, multi-cloud and HyperScale. I'm sure you're sitting there, well my product is HyperScale. So maybe, you've launched the product HyperScale at the OpenStack show in Boston. We got to talk with you on The Cube there. Bring us up to speed as to that product and how it fits into really the portfolio of you from Veritas. Especially I'm kind of curious, the multi-cloud world as opposed to this is very specifically and on premises, you know, type offer. >> So we talked in Boston. In Boston we launched the 1.0 version, last week we launched the 1.1 version. We're going to launch the next one together with Red Hat. It is one of the key things we're doing together working with them and as Bill mentioned, you know it's multi-cloud and it's software-defined. So if you understand the architecture for HyperScale, for OpenStack, HyperScale for containers, it's really pure software. So what that means is that it's the hardware of your choice, we don't have any locking. As Eric mentioned there's no locking into any specific platform, that's one of the key things. But also the architecture we're building is the perfect thing for your private cloud because in a multi-cloud environment you still have to have something in house, so that's the private cloud. With all the data management capabilities that we have with Veritas, we can move the data however we want. So typically and that's the challenge you have with OpenStack, you get the locking, you get a closed environment, how do you move the data? We've got things already with net backup where we can just move the data from the data plane, move workloads somewhere else, do the recover and allow customers to just one click and recover that workloads wherever they want. So that's a perfect thing in all, the 360 Data Management that we got with Veritas. >> So what do you hear from customers around the function? I mean obviously we hear about the V-tax. People don't want to pay the VMware tax. But Eric, you're talking about when you started the conversations with your customers, what if you could save 50 percent? You must've had conversations with customers who said "Well, but I like the functionality of VMware. "I like V-Motion, I like the recovery capabilities and "they're doing a good job of adding capabilities and stuff." So where are we, CTO perspective, in terms of the functionality of OpenStack private clouds versus sort of where VMware is. >> That's a good question because the reason that we get in contact with Veritas for this kind of functionality is because the customer will start running work loads on their OpenStack environment and in the beginning, they don't worry about backups. They don't worry about quality of service and then they get into production and then they get problems with performance. They kept, "Hey, I need to have a backup, how do I do it? And oh, we don't have a backup. So these kind of gaps that were really not good resolved in OpenStack and these were the gaps that HyperScale filled in. So then on functional comparison with VMware, we took away those concerns and have a real good comparison on the functional level between OpenStack and VMware. >> I think that it was interesting. Last week we launched in the OpenStack Benelux Days. I had a keynote presenting HyperScale and I was talking about quality of service and backup data protection really, so focused on that, right? After that we had a panel with three customers and the moderator asks the three customers, "What is your biggest challenge now "you've got OpenStack, what do you need?" And the first answer was backup and the moderator said, "What do you mean, there is no backup?" And the answer for 400 people in the room, he said "No, you got Freezer but that's a project." Well now we can get it from Veritas. So that's the thing is that you need to move those workloads, you need data protection and they saw the demo where with one click, you can recover your workloads and the third customer mentioned that it is quality of service and that's a customer that Eric has been working already, they are already working on installing a HyperScale and they need quality of service because they have a workload and running on the cloud and they have to make sure they get the performance that they need for some critical workloads. And again it's a solved problem that again all the work, what we did together with Fairbanks validate and what needs they have is coming all together now. >> Eric, one of the knocks on OpenStack has been I want simplicity and OpenStack, it's got all these pieces, how do I put it together? Oh it's all software, wait backup, I didn't even think of that. How does Fairbanks help? What does kind of your stack look like and how much is it you can just roll this out and how much is it The customers actually? Some customers like that flexibility. Service providers, oh I've got my management layer and things like that. What's kind of the typical environment? And give us some of the variables. >> So based on of course the journey that we made and of course there were a good projects and bad projects, that's the learning curve that we also needed to do but we managed to build a best practice for OpenStack, so we now can do an implementation of OpenStack in less than two weeks because we know the components, we know what you should do and what you don't have to do and so we have a good starting point about an environment where you have 11 nodes in total as a good starting point for having a production environment for OpenStack and then with HyperScale included, then you need two add to data nodes additionally because then it's necessary for the copy that you need to have. But a 10 or 11 node configuration is from our perspective a very good starting point where you start with different customers with different sizes of course. >> Do you deploy the OpenStack distribution? Does the customer have preference on that? I know Veritas has a couple of options, so. >> So we have a preference for a canonical distribution because it's very open. I think the good thing from canonical is that the function set that they provide as an OpenSource product is exactly the same if you want to add that with the managed service from canonical to it and I think that the real cool thing about canonical is their way of deploying OpenStack because it leverages a really consistent way of deploying OpenStack. So for us it's very important that when we deploy OpenStack, that the result is the same on every customer's side and that's what the tools from Canonical provide us with. >> So I want to ask you about what you just said about you could do an OpenStack deployment in two weeks. I can hear some cloud guy going, "Oh I'll just go to Amazon and speed it up." So I wonder if you could address that and as well, how does that compare for instance to a VMware installation of a deployment of a private cloud? Those two examples. >> I think that when you look at the private cloud from VMware, I think for the installation it takes about the same time I think. But that's all about the knowledgeability of the partner that's doing the installation. Because that's the journey that we had so they can do the implementation fast and that they can rely on that environment because as you know in OpenStack, in the beginning there was a little bit of doubt about if it was production ready or not. And to take that away, it must be a solid implementation and that they can rely on that and then they can make sure that they can put their really important workloads also on top of OpenStack instead of making a decision, yeah, should I run it on that or not? >> So from your standpoint, it's parity in terms of just deployment ease and functionality, we could debate that all day long. What about the public cloud example? How do you respond to somebody who says "Oh, we'll just spin it up in AWS or Azure." >> Yeah, I think the public cloud is still a good thing. It's not a bad thing to have public cloud because I think in most companies you have a hybrid cloud environment, so you will have firmware and maybe you have a public cloud and a private cloud in one company. But it all depends a little bit on the type of workloads that you're going to run inside of that environment. So I think there are workloads that you should, that you can't run on a public cloud. >> Eric, does Fairbanks get involved with how they manage that, you know, kind of hybrid or multi-cloud environment? We know Carlos wants to jump in with the Veritas answer. >> Yeah, we get the question a lot of course because we know the infrastructure, how it works and as you probably know, there are a lot of cloud orchestration products in the market that can do the multi-cloud management. But to be honest, at this moment there is not one real good product that handles all the clouds correctly and managing all the bits and pieces that you need to have for an infrastructure. So, we're still looking on that to find the one that can do that. >> Yeah, what's on your wish list? What are you looking for from the ecosystem? >> I think it's really good to have, that there is no difference anymore about the type of workloads that you can run on different kind of environments. So that you choose based on functionality, what you are going to run on that. Now you see there's a lot about a focus on virtual machines but actually it all goes about the application because that's the, on the end that's something what needs to be run on that environment and having that manageability to manage the application. I think that's more important than managing the infrastructure underneath it. >> How about jumping in with the multi-cloud commentary? >> Well I think it's the customer's choice and what we do as a company is being able to give them the choice is that we don't care and that's in our DNA really. With that in the past as Mike Farmer explained today is that we didn't care about two apparatuses at the beginning, now we don't care if you are using OpenStack containers and what you want to run those. So that is the way we're building products nowadays with Veritas is that user choice. So we don't care about that anymore. >> All right Carlos, Eric, thanks very much for coming to The Cube, appreciate it. >> Thank you >> All right, you're welcome. >> Okay, keep it right there. My buddy Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from Veritas Vision. Hashtag VtasVision. This is The Cube, be right back. (mid tempo electronic tones)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (upbeat techno music) >> Everybody this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here covering Veritas Vision. The hashtag is Vtas, v-t-a-s vision. Little bit of a funny hashtag so make sure you get that one right if you want to follow all of the action. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host this week Stu Miniman. Michelle VanAmburg is here. She's the Director of Global Alliances for Veritas. And she's joined by Daniel Witteveen who is the Vice President of Global Portfolio Resiliency Services at IBM. Folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Michelle, let's start with you. Alliances are a fundamental component of Veritas' strategy. You got to make friends with a lot of different people. What's your general philosophy around alliances? Let's start there. >> Yeah, well specially with IBM, we've had a long term alliance starting back in 2004, around backup and managed services. It's evolved into a very strategic alliance with IBM providing both internal IT support to migrate our key applications into their Bluemix and IBM cloud infrastructure. And then also, evolving the managed service around backup strategically moving into the cloud. We announced something in March to work on backup in the cloud with IBM as part of their Bluemix services. So, each and every partner in alliances has specific strengths and weaknesses. And I think with IBM we're maximizing our partnership around their strengths and that's the services and their play in the enterprise market. We both have about 86% overlap among those customers. >> So, I mean, this is interesting, Daniel, I mean IBM big technology company, huge product portfolio, some of the products competitive with Veritas, but you're part of the services organization so you've got to have the customer's interest first. You guys are sort of technology agnostic generally as a services professional. So, what's your philosophy with regard, maybe I just laid it out, but with regards specifically to data protection and back up? >> So, you said exactly right. We measure ourselves against the business outcomes for our clients. And that truly is vendor agnostic. But when you take a partnership like Veritas, and if you saw the keynotes this morning, they were talking about the leader in the Magic Quadrant for the last several years. IBM's also been the leader in resiliency and in security. So, that's an unparalleled partnership that you can't get from anywhere else. You've got a services firm that can take their software, provide a high-valued outcome to their clients, our clients or mutual clients, and provide it in the cloud. And that could be our cloud, that could be another provider's cloud. Very significant for our clients. >> So, every time we go to these shows you hear about digital transformation. And it's an important topic but sometimes putting meat on the bones is hard. So, let's try to do that. I presume you're hearing this same thing from your joint customers. We got to become a digital business. You hear that from the top. So, what does that mean to your customers? What does it mean to become a digital business? >> So, for me I think a lot of people say that in the context of a one time event. We have to go through digital transformation. >> Voilà! >> Yeah, or suddenly, "Whoo-hoo! We're there!" (laughter) And that's a big, wide definition of what that could mean. I think it's continual transformation. It's innovation. That's a buzz word to me that says, okay, yeah this creates the conversation that's a door opener. But we really have to talk about evolving transformation, cognitive learning, using IBM Watson, always making us better. It's not laying out here's what we're doing and walk away. It has to be continual. >> Can you add anything to that, Michelle? What are your thoughts on digital? We think digital means data. >> Michelle: Mmm-hmm. >> You guys, all we heard this morning is how you're the sort of center of the data universe. What are you hearing from customers on digital? >> Well, I think we're all, including us, Veritas internally struggling with the same thing, right? How do you get there? How do you save cost over time? And how do you keep your business running with all the governance and compliance regulations that are coming down, like GDPR? So, there are a lot of challenges coming out of a lot of these organizations. And I think it takes not only somebody that's the leader in technology, like Veritas, but then it takes somebody who's the system integrator who is monitoring the outcomes for their customers over time. If you look at all the large accounts that IBM manages, we have a huge play for Veritas technology and use of those products in those accounts. So, I think it takes more than just a point, product, or a point in time like Daniel mentioned. It really takes an evolution over time, and a solid plan that can be, again, flexible as GDPR regulations come down the pike. How do we move with the times? How do we manage those outcomes for our customers to be cost effective so that we can keep their business and grow it too. >> Daniel, did you want to comment on that one? >> Yeah, I mean, we mentioned GDPR which I think is kind of the biggest event. It's going to be the Y2K of 2018, right? It's massively significant. But if you throw that under the compliance bucket, we really think about what does that mean for our clients and protecting our clients with those compliance requirements. When you look at IBM and Veritas, our partnership has extensively talked about, Bill Coleman was talking this morning about meeting with the two largest banks. IBM covers 75% of the top 35 banks. We get regulation. That's our job. Customers look for us to lead that example. We have 80% of the Fortune 100 across multiple industries. So, when you combine these technologies together, you combine that regulation overlay, which we have to know not just for one customer but across all of our customers. It's really unmatched. >> So, in addition to kind of the governance piece, what about security? It's been something in my whole career. Used to get a lot of lip service. Today, it's board level discussion. Everybody's handling it. Resiliency services have to believe covers that as well as kind of traditional BCDR type activity. >> Yeah, we define that under cyber resiliency. And that is really going from everything from direct protection all the way to outage to recovery. And I think a lot of customers are struggling with that. We did a study with Ponemon Institute back in May, and 68 of their respondents said they lacked actually reliable foundational way to recover against a cyber attack. And when you really think about it everyone's been in the news over the last several months. You have to respond to that very differently than a hurricane outage or what people think of a disaster recovery which I struggle with that name because it's really any kind of outage. So, cyber resiliency is key. In fact, we have a session tomorrow at 12:30 specifically, talking about our combined approach against cyber resiliency starting from threat protection deterrence. But more importantly when the outage occurs how do you make sure you're actively responding? You're not out for hours, days, and months. You're really, truly out for minutes. >> Michelle, anything around ransomware, the cyber resiliency piece? How does Veritas look at partnering with companies like IBM for these solutions? >> Since we've broken off from Symantec, and we had a lot of security and data protection that was combined, we really look for our partners, like IBM, to to provide a lot of that security specific services around our product. So, one of the things that Daniel had developed, is the cyber resilience offer that we are looking to our joint customers to provide specifically a short engagement around that to help them. So, really, we are starting to look to our partners to offer that security service. >> So, I'm a little bit of an industry historian, mainly cause I'm old. (Michelle laughs) And so, when I look back 1983 when Veritas got started, and we heard today that Veritas has been a leader in the Magic Quadrant for 15 years. So, you had the the PC era, which changed backup when the pendulum swung from mainframe mini to PC. And then obviously clients server evolved that and then virtualization business change that. So, you saw backup evolve, and obviously Veritas stayed with that as a leader throughout. Now, we come to digital business and cloud. And when you think of digital business and cloud, I'm interested in the impacts that it's having on data protection. I think of distributed data, analytics, edge computing, the cloud itself. Whole different set of technologies and processes and skillsets to manage data protection. So, I wonder if you could bring that back to the customer. How are they re-architecting their businesses around, specifically, the data protection side of the business. >> So, I think the first, and we saw this with virtualization we saw it with storage area networks. And we saw it with cloud. The first instinct and the first sales point is well, then I don't need DR. I don't need backup. And it's kind of this false sense of or "I have an SLA, so I'm covered." Which an SLA is just a penalty. It doesn't mean you're covered at all, right? So, we've seen that at every kind of hurdle in our business. But then what we've seen, when you saw storage and virtualization is probably a perfect example, When it's more consolidated, your risk is a lot more condensed. So, before you could have one server outage. You might never have known. But now you have an entire virtual system SAN or even a cloud. We've seen that in the press just being out. It's much more significant. So, customers are taking a lot more serious look at how they're architecting those solutions, making sure their not reliant on one of those consolidated entities. Do I have my data in the cloud? Do I have a way to have that data out of the cloud? Can I run in this cloud, maybe that cloud, on-prem, hybrid IT? Hear that a lot from IBM. But how can I diversify? Which is a very different way of architecting solutions when you've just had client server. >> Stu: Right. Okay, anything you could add to that Michelle, just in terms of what customers are asking you? And specifically, how it might relate to some of your partnerships. >> Michelle: Yeah. >> Maybe, no offense, but broader even than IBM. >> Yeah, from a broader perspective we're seeing all the cloud providers in the market, and we're partnering with all of them at Veritas. Each one of them has their strength. And if you look across our partners, and I've been integral in some of our accounts. Some of them are doing things just as simple as snapshots. They don't have a way to index. They have a hard time recovering. Things like that. Our customers are really on that high end. So, as Daniel mentioned, we have a lot of overlap in the Fortune 1,000. And they are looking for ways to recover their data like they did on-prem but they're moving to the cloud. So, our solutions together, with IBM, are really those heavy-duty enterprise solutions that allow them to have the data recovery, same times RTO, RPO. And also, the disaster recovery programs and the security around those high-end applications that have all the compliance around them. So, from my point of view, IBM's a key partner in that space to allow those highly regulated customers to have the same type of data protection. >> So historically, you guys are in the insurance business. It's a great business, no question. And I always ask, is data an asset or a liability? And the answer is both. But if you had the value pie. Clearly, the pendulum is swinging and things are evolving. Is data still more of a liability in your world than it is an asset? >> Daniel: So, our CEO said it best, data is the new natural resource. So, data is the number one important thing within the customer environment. Without it you don't have intelligence. You don't have machine learning. You don't have predictive outage. You don't have sales force automation. All that is reliant on data. So, it's more critical. Where you could argue it becomes a liability is when you have to be compliant and you have to have that data for the next number of years. A lot of people like to promote backup success. Well, that's nice if you can back it up but can you restore it? Can you make that data active? So, that's where it can be treated as a liability but there's no way I would say it's a liability over an asset. It's absolutely the number one asset in a business. >> Stu: You would Agree, I presume? >> Yeah, I would agree. And we always use the iceberg analogy. The data that you really need is just at the tip of the iceberg above the water. And then you have all this data hidden under the water. How do you make that secure, and understand what you have? And so, I think the analytics, and some of the data protection, and the tiering, the understanding what you readily need available versus what can be archived and stored in the lower cost tier is really important. >> So, where do you guys want to take this relationship? When you sit down ... Give us a little inside baseball here. Where do you see this going over the next 18 to 24 months? >> Daniel: It's only going to be stronger. A lot of conversations in the works about doing a lot more strategic relationships together. I'll leave it as that. We've been very healthy partners for over 11 years, you mentioned 2004 timeframe, I think. We have folks on my development team that are a integral part of Veritas' product offering. Very important to the feedback loop. And vice versa the managed service. So, I think that's going to get tighter. I think that's going to expand just beyond backup. And I'm really looking forward to those possibilities. >> Yep. >> Michelle? So, I'm really excited about our cloud partnership that we announced in March. I see IBM as a key to allowing Veritas to leap into that market, and to provide the enterprise strength solutions. And just really excited about our future. >> Stu: Great. All right, well thank you very much. Good luck with your partnership. >> Michelle: Thank you. >> Daniel: Excellent. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live at Veritas Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE. Be right back. >> Daniel: Excellent >> Michelle: Awesome, guys. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Dave: We're here at Veritas Vision, #VtasVision, The Truth in Information. This is a company that was founded in 1983 and has gone through a very interesting history, acquired by Symantec for around 15 or 16 billion dollars and then spun back out and purchased by a private equity Carlyle Group in 2005 for about 7 billion net of cash; it's about a two and a half billion dollar company with a really interesting growth plan, one that involves transforming from what many consider to be a legacy backup company into a multi cloud, hyperscale, data protection, value of information organization. My name is Dave Valente and I'm here with Stu Miniman. Stu! Good to see you. >> Stu: Great to be here with you, Dave. It's interesting, yeah, Veritas Company, I've known for, I don't know, gosh, about 20 years and they kind of went under the radar a little bit, under the Symantec piece and now back at it, but you know gosh, felt like a time warp hearing about like Netbackup, you know? A product that you know well, entrenched in the market, has lots of customers, so you know, in talking to the people here, people on board Veritas, some, you know, very veteran to the company, a lot of new faces though, and you know, they say it's energy, innovation, bringing as Bill Coleman who we're going to have on shortly, it's about the software-defined, multi cloud, hyperscale word so you know, A for hitting all the buzzwords and excited to, in the next two days, to kind of dig in and see where the reality is. >> Dave: Yeah, and you know, Stu, you know me, Stu. I like to look at the structure and the organizational structure and the market caps and things like that, but I always felt like, you know Veritas kind of disappeared under Symantec's governance and now, it is breaking out. I love the new private equity play, I want to hear from Bill Coleman about that, what the relationship is with Carlyle, you know it used to be that private equity would come in and they would just suck all the cash out of a company, I mean the classic example was ZA, right? They would maybe do some acquiring companies, they would maybe buy cashflow positive companies, take on more debt, suck all of the cash out and leave the carcass. That's not the new private equity way. We see that with Riverbed, we see that with Infor, VMC, and many, many others have said, you know what, the public markets aren't going to give us the love that we need, we're going to go private, we're going to get a deal on the company, we're going to invest in that company, invest in R&D, build the asset value of that company, maybe even in some cases do acquisitions, grow it, and then maybe do another exit, and that is a great way, a better way in fact, for these private equity firms to really cash in and I think Veritas is an interesting asset from that regard. >> Stu: Yeah, absolutely, I think back, you know, Dave, when I worked at EMC, you know Veritas was one of those competitors that EMC was like, we got to keep an eye on them. Veritas would put out, you know, billboards and have people running around in shirts that said No Hardware Agenda. One of the reasons I think that Veritas also disappeared a little bit under Symantec, is while they were great for lots of environments, they didn't really hit hard that wave of virtualization. Interesting thing is that, you know, EMC bought VMware, everybody knows, but the company that almost bought VMware was Symantec, and lots of us say, what if? What if Symantec had bought Vmware, would they, as a software company, really kind of squash that, you know, could Veritas have then really, integrated very deep here, and now as, Dave, you and I were at the Veem show earlier this year, and they said Veem and VREN, you know, the tenures of virtualization, and now hopping on multi cloud, well, you know, a lot of that message I hear from companies like Veem, companies like NetApp, you know, software-based storage companies, if you're not living in that multi cloud world, you know, what is your future, so. >> Dave: Well, to your point. >> Stu: Microsoft and Google, Amazon, and how those all fit. >> Dave: To your point, with no hardware agenda, Veritas was always viewed as the company with that sort of open software glue to bring together the data management pieces, and as I said, it sort of got lost over the last several years under Symantec. When you hear the keynotes this morning, you hear a story of information, information value, leveraging that information, information governance, a lot of talk about GDPR, obviously a lot of talk about backup, multi cloud, really an entirely new vision from the brand that has frankly become Veritas over the last decade, and new management really trying to affect that brand and send a message to customers that we hear you, that we're self-deprecating, talking about their UX not being what it should be, listening to customers, and putting forth the vision around not just the backup, but data management, now, that's always been the Holy Grail. Can you use that data protection backup corpus of data to really leverage that, to turn information into an asset, that's something that we're going to be unpacking all week with executives, partners, customers, analysts and the like. Last thought before we get to our next guest. >> Stu: Yeah, Dave, absolutely, you know, a bunch of new products are out there, it's that balance of how do they build off of their brand, all of their customer adoption, and now they have a lot of new things going on, so how do they fit in that environment, how do they differentiate, because everyone's trying to partner with the mega clouds, and it's not just the big three that we talk about. IBM and Oracle are two big partners that Veritas is talking about here, and something like hyperconverged infrastructure, Veritas has a play there. They came out with an object story, you know, you're asking me like wait, is this an array, or is it, well no, it's Veritas, it's software, it's always going to be software. Joseph Skorupa who was giving one of the super sessions, we're going to have him on to say your infrastructure does not differentiate you, it is your data, and that is what they want to highlight to the top. I think a message that we in general agree with, and looking forward to digging into it. >> Dave: Okay, so we'll be here for the next two days and what we like to do in theCUBE is what we hear in the messaging, and then we like to test that messaging, poke at it a little bit with the executives, talk to the customers about it, see how well it aligns, and then opine on where we think this is going, but if you were at Vmworld, you knew that data protection was the hottest category, it's an exploding area, a lot of dynamism, because it's all about the data, so we'll be talking about that, digital business. Keep right there everybody, this is theCUBE. Veritas Vision, #VtasVision. We'll be right back with our next guest, right after this short break. (electronic music)