>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE! Covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to the windy city, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here covering VeeamOn 2018, #VeeamOn. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Stu Miniman, my co-host, Brian Kuhn is here. He's the chief digital officer at OVH US. Thanks for coming to theCube. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Yes, so OVH, a lot of people might remember OVH vCloud Air >> Yeah, that whole thing happened almost a year ago actually so the acquisition of vCloud Air happened May eighth of 2017 so we're just a little over a year since the acquisition happened. >> Dave: Alright, how's it goin? >> It's going great! What it means is we've been running that business for about a year now, the European side of the business came a little bit later, but learning all about our customers, learning what they need, and finding new ways of making them happy. >> The epic nature of the return that VMware gave to its ecosystem is well documented. Tod Nielsen, the former COO if VMware used to talk about how every dollar spent on a VMware license 15 dollars was spent in the ecosystem. Everybody was really freaked out that the Cloud was going to destroy that ratio, it was going to decimate the ecosystem. Fast forward, I don't know five-seven years later, VMware is certainly growing, the ecosystem seems to be thriving. What's your take? >> Well I agree with you, the ecosystem is thriving, we're here at a conference that's part of that ecosystem. In terms of what we do, in terms of what OVH is, as an infrastructure provider, we're thankful that it's thriving. Because we have other opportunities to serve customers needs based based on that VMware stack, and based on the services that that ecosystem provides to the customers. >> Why is the data center booming right now, in your view? >> Why is the data center--what do you mean by that? >> Well the data center business, the enterprise business is cranking! >> Well, I think that's partially because you have that next wave of customers that are figuring out that being in the Cloud is a better thing than being on-prem and having to need those resources to manage that type of activity. >> And the data! >> Brian: And the data, yeah. >> Brian, maybe you could expand a little bit that ecosystem, because some people looked at the VMware stack and were like, ope, they're gonna--not close it, but, we've done all these integrations, we've done all these things in the data center and now when I put it in the OVH or the IBM or the AWS Cloud how many of our services can we move with them? What use is--Veeam obviously is there, partnering with you and with VMware heavily but, can you speak to kind of the breadth and depth of what did come along, and anything that doesn't come along for that journey. >> What came along as part of the acquisition, or it comes along with customer migration. >> No, no, the things that, if I did these here in my data center versus going to the OVH Cloud. I can do Veeam and interplace, there's other parts of the ecosystem that I can, but there's some things I'm--you know if I go to OVH, I'm not saying hey can I throw in my storage array with it, so that's where we're trying to understand what part of the ecosystem, when do you get it? >> Yeah, let's go with the positive side first, so it certainly as moving to a Cloud provider and someone to host your private Cloud or host your software defined data center stack. You don't have to worry about power, you don't have to worry about, in our case, water, cuz we're water-cooled technology, you don't have to worry about the network. So the infrastructure piece of managing this great, you don't have to worry about, I would say, maybe some of the redundancy-type issues or having the data center that's available. OVH manages its own network, so we don't have to worry about capacity or throughput in that means. I think on your other flip-side you're saying what can't I do, because I'm in a hosted private Cloud environment versus a co-lo or on-prem-- >> I'm just saying there's a part of my stack that I was building myself, and now you take care of it, or Amazon takes care of it, or IBM takes care of it, and maybes there's not a way for that software or hardware to come along to the Cloud. >> Yeah, your point is it hollows out the value proposition of the traditional ecosystem and moves everything into the Cloud, right? >> Stu: So somebody like Veeam's makin that transition well, but not everyone has. >> But we haven't seen that. You see well--you've certainly seen the Cloud exploding, maybe it's moderated some of the growth in the data center, but it still seems to be thriving for those companies that are well positioned. >> I don't disagree, and I'm thankful that it is, because that gives us more opportunity to help those customers out. >> So why does a Cloud service provider like yours, wrong question. What does a chief digital officer in a Cloud service provider like yours do? I started to say why does it need one, but everybody needs a CDO! But what's your role within the company? >> OVH US is a separate, standalone company than OVH Group, partially because of, how we want to make sure the, data sovereignty is covered and protecting our European customers. So we are bringing up a standalone company. So Russ Reeder was here, you spoke with him at VMWorld last year, he's the CEO, so he has his own staff, and one of the people on his staff is me, as the chief digital officer. Up until recently I managed marketing so that was part of my portfolio but we still have my title as chief digital officer so that we can serve strategy. So what are we going to do, how are we going to serve our customers, what are the segments that we're going to tackle, and how are we going to take and go to market and take those service offerings forward, and what is the market doing, and how is it moving? And so I have a team that's working on strategy, and that's a separate strategy than what Group has because we're tackling a different market segment. I also have a team of product managers, so looking at, okay this is our strategy, what are the offerings that we have at our disposal? What do customers--more importantly, what are their needs? How do I serve those needs and get those needs met, and how do I work then, with the engineering team, to actually build those products? So I have a team of product managers. I also have a team of, what I'll call, the sales enablement team. So technical marketing managers, or solution architects, find a term for them, but these are the folks that are ensuring that we have good strong hand-off between product and sales. To make sure that the sales team is trained, that they understand the value propositions not only at the marketing level, but at the technical level. And then they're also the ones that are really paying attention to everything it takes to get that product out into the market the right way. >> And you still have marketing, under your?-- >> No I do not have marketing anymore, but that was a function I managed for a while. >> So strategy, product management, the specific offerings, and the sales enablement, tactical marketing-- >> And I have one last thing, customer intelligence. So once we put that product out into the market, how do we know it's being accepted, how do we know it's being adopted, what new insights can we gain to feed back into the system? >> We often say that the difference between a business and a digital business is the way in which a digital business leverages data. And so if I go through these four. Your strategy, I presume data is part of the strategy when I talk about that, the offerings, there's, maybe not, well maybe there are data offerings, but maybe how data contributes to the health of the offerings? Sales enablement, we talked about that, but then customer intelligence obviously is a lot of data, it seems like data cuts orthogonally through each of these, can you talk about the data? First of all, do you buy the premise about what a digital business is? How do you leverage data, how do you, as part of your strategy, understand as the CDO, how much time do you spend, how data effects monetization? >> Yeah, so let me take this at two angles. One, what data do I use through that process, right? So the strategy team is certainly looking at data from analysts, customer data. I like a, I've seen an analogy of a school bus, you're looking forward, you're looking in your side-view mirror, you're looking in your rear-view mirror. So forward is where is everyone going, where's the industry going? So that'll be your analyst reports. Sideways is, your side-view mirrors, what's your competition doing? So, what is the data about the competition and what movements will they be making? My rear-view mirror is what are my customers doing? So that'll tie back into that the customer intelligence team that I have, is how do my customers actually behave, and how do they stack up with where the industry is going? So there's just one set of data points and then of course my product team is taking the inputs of those strategies, and having then one-to-one conversations with customers and finding out first-hand what there needs are. So as a product management professional, there's no ifs, ands, or buts, you always want to hear it first-hand from the customer, what they have to say. >> The role of marketing, sorry, the role of data in marketing. It's not your current per view, but it's your former one, so you can speak to it I presume, can you talk about that a little bit? >> Sure, so also, two different ways. We can look at this from the perspective of an E-commerce business, or we can look at this as a B-to-B business in generating leads, right? Then there's the ecosystem of all the data around marketing beyond that. So in the E-commerce business, of course I'm looking at what's coming through the funnel, and what traffic sources are feeding into it and what's my best conversion rates and those are all great data points for something like the E-commerce business. >> Dave: For transactions? >> For transactions. Similarly, on the leads side of the business, you're still looking at traffic, you're still looking at events or whatever feeds your funnel. So what are the sources, what are the channels of leads, and how are they converting? And as I nurture the customer, how many touches does it take to bring them back, what exactly is bringing them back? So these are all further data points to feed something like the leads side of the story. If I think outside that ecosystem, you think of an event such as this is, what are going to be the best traffic drivers, and how do I know what reach I've hit? So all sorts of data points around brand, and touch, and things that'll effect that as well. >> And it's definitely a lot of affinity between marketing and digital. In fact, if I were the head of marketing, I would come to you and say, hey can you help me, with my, whether it's legion, demand gen, are there new techniques I can use besides, you know, hitting the same old cookie approaches, etc. Do you guys have that discussion and how do you participate? >> Oh yeah, and I think that my head of marketing's watching me here now is probably saying yeah and I've got some tricks that I need your help with because I've got new things up my sleeve that we need the product angle for, right? And the right product marketing spin. >> Talk to us a little bit about your customer set, there's certain GOs and verticals that OVH targets a little bit more? And any kind of use-cases customer success stories you might be able to share? >> Yeah, that's great. So, as opposed to OVH Group, and France, and the European business, where they've really come from the web hosting industry up, and they have a very specific way that they've encountered the market and penetrated. At least here in the US, we're coming into the market really from scratch, and the acquisition is really what's bringing us in. So our prime market is the market that we first got from the acquisition, so these mid-sized and enterprise companies, so defining who that demographic is first as the type of customer, second then what need are we serving for them? So in the vCloud Air experience, vCloud Air was selling data center extension, data center replacement, disaster recovery, and that is certainly what we keep selling cuz we have those thousand customers that still need that story, and that's an opportunity then to tackle more customers just like that, that have the same types of needs, that same, perhaps niche need, or common day every need because you were asking earlier, like why are all these customers-- why are all these people moving to the Cloud? It's because they're discovering that if they don't they're going to be left behind, or they've got some need inside their company that is forcing them to do that, whether it's to save cost or what have you. So, in the case coming back to our customers is, it is the mid and enterprise-sized companies, we're still serving everything that is will lead in with private Cloud technology, and bring to them those data center extension, data center replacement, disaster recovery stories and we'll augment that because, what's different about us now is, we're OVH, and we have not only that hosted private Cloud product, but we also have dedicated servers, we also have public Cloud, and then we have this really fantastic backbone: we own our own network. We have this huge amount of capacity, 14 terabytes per second with that, we have an anti-DDoS solution behind that, and these are all things that we get to bring to those customers and introduce them to. So for a customer who's doing their digital transformation, migration to the Cloud, it's not just hey we can bring you over on your VMware stack and migrate you in, but it's hey we can do that plus a lot more that maybe you didn't know that we could do for you. >> Let's talk about that a lot more, are those professional services or other offerings that you have? >> Sure, so it's primarily the offerings themselves, the services. You asked me about customer so I'll give an example. We have a customer today that has come to us because of the data center consolidation need. They brought that in and also needed disaster recovery, but what they're finding now is they have a large amount of data. And what is best for them is an object storage solution, so augmenting the host to private Cloud with our Cloud offerings to solve that need. >> Last question is, so how do you guys position, relative to some of the other things that you know, for instance Vmware, we just had IBM on, IBM Cloud obviously they make a big deal out of AWS because they're such a hot company right now. How do you guys differentiate from those other offerings? >> That's a really intriguing question, right, because that's the key is how are we different? We wanted to come in and be your trusted Cloud provider, to help you do what we're going to be first, really good at, so we're really good at that VMware stack, we're going to bring you in, help you migrate to the Cloud, we're going to run and manage that business for you, or the operation of your data center, and your infrastructure. But what goes around that then, is you know, that is our core, infrastructure is our core business, so we build our own servers, we build our own data centers, we own our own network, so that is what we do best for you. But that's coupled with the fact that we're doing innovation with purpose. We've learned how to do the building of those data centers, and do water-cooling to save on costs, we've learned how to do all of this at high-capacity automation capabilities so that you have lightning speeds to get your provisioning up and running. Then we also have this concept where OVH is really about being open, so something that does differentiate us and set us apart is the freedom for you to build your infrastructure, and the freedom to choose your offerings and your providers. So OVH sponsors an open Cloud foundation and we believe in the opening of that, we use opensource technology, we use OpenStack in a lot of our products so that you have that there, we're believing that, we have the inner connectivity with our pops to other networks, if you so desire. That openness is something that sort of permeates through us and then lastly, it's our passion for our customers. We're serving 1.3 million customers around the world today, from fortune 500 companies to top-tier educational institutions, and in the case, in France, with small/medium businesses and individuals. So we have a very wide range of customers that have trusted us to host their infrastructure, and we like hearing feedback. We love operating on that feedback, and we love solving the needs for our customers. >> Alright, Brian we'll leave it there, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Great, thanks so much for having me! >> You're welcome! Okay, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break, you're watching theCUBE, live from VeeamOn 2018, be right back. (bubbly music)