>> 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. (rippling music) >> Welcome back to The Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stuart Miniman, who's my cohost for the week. Bob Swanson is here, he's the head of sales for dcVAST out of Chicago. Bob, thanks for coming on theCUBE! >> Thanks for having me, guys. >> So, well first of all, the show, how's it going for you? We've now got enough data, it's been a couple of days, a few days perhaps for you. What's the vibe like, what are the conversations like? >> Yeah, it's been a great week. This is the very tail end of the event, so a little exhausted. But it's been exciting, there's been a good buzz at the event and we get a lot of our customers here, and just kind of seeing the buzz and the pace of innovation that's goin on here with Veritas, you know, it has been exciting. >> Tell us more about dcVAST. You're focused on IT infrastructure services, but dig a little deeper. Right, yep, so we're headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and you're right, we do infrastructure and cloud services. So we do support-type services with a seven by 24 call center, have different managed service offerings, different cloud offerings, and certainly do consulting and project work as well. >> Yeah, and Bob, so what does multi-cloud mean to your customers? (chuckles) >> It's only natural that if they're not there today, then they're going to be multi-cloud at some point. So, Veritas here is pretty uniquely positioned. to be able to get customers there. It's all about flexibility and data portability. So, I think where infrastructure and storage and data protection is sometimes not that exciting of a conversation, now kind of changing the conversation, the data management, 'cause everybody needs their data to become more productive for them. It changes the conversation, has a little more sizzle. >> Okay, but you know, your primary area of focus is infrastructure services, so that means first and foremost, every year you got to help me lower my costs, right, you've been hearing that, I'm sure, for years, and help me improve my operational efficiency. And you do that, and really attack my labor problem, IT labor problem so I can focus on my business, right? Are those still the big overriding themes? Oh, yeah, there's no question. I mean, I think the public cloud has been probably the most disruptive thing in our space since the internet. And it's making customers re-evaluate all cost and really how they're doing things, and different consumption and financial models. So, the technology is cool, and we like that conversation, but it naturally brings a big financial and cost savings, and do-more-with-less element to all the conversations. >> So what are the big trends that you're seeing in marketplace, what are the conversations like with your customers? >> Yeah, and I'll give you an example. I think customers have different approaches to cloud, right, some cloud-first, everything's got to go. Others maybe want to keep more of their workloads on premise. And in one customer example, where they said, hey, we want to move all non-production out to the cloud and it was a single cloud provider. And they got about 40% of what they were looking to move out there and they reached what they thought their estimated budget was going to be. So at that point, having that portability and having the tool sets to be able to move those workloads around becomes very important from a financial standpoint. >> So, I wonder if we can unpack those. Cloud first, and then these other guys on-prem. The motivation for cloud first, and the type of company. Do they tend to be a smaller companies, or do you see larger companies saying hey, we're going all in? I mean, you've seen some stories in the press, you know, large company, GE's going all to the cloud, okay I'm sure there's still a lot of on-prem going on there. What do you see? >> Yeah, you're right. A lot of small business is certainly, it makes sense for them, any startups too are pretty much born in the cloud now. You're not going to have too many financial backers that are going to want a startup to be spending too much money on data center, or buying hardware. But the established large enterprises, too, are kind of all over the map, but there are already some of them that are taking this cloud first approach. But, the large enterprises and companies that have been around, where it's not kind of a clean slate, naturally it's going to be hybrid and ultimately there's probably a lot of predictable static workloads that are, at the end of the day, going to be cheaper to run on-prem than they are out in the public cloud. Public cloud's great for the stuff that's not predictable, or is very dynamic, so we're seeing, and I am from Chicago and so we say the coasts move faster, maybe, than the Midwest does as well, but we're seeing varying degrees of adoption and strategy. >> But the business in the data center's good right now, I mean, the market's sort of booming, but if you roll back a few years, you guys must have thought, and maybe you're still thinking it, okay, see this cloud that's coming. Like you said, it's one of the most disruptive, if not the most disruptive in a while, and it's aiming right at the heart of your business, infrastructure services. So how have you responded to that, you must be riding the wave now of data center growth and investment, but strategically, what are you thinking about in your firm? >> Yeah, I mean, there's no question. We've had to pivot. But it does create opportunity. And we do need to help our customers be able to be most cost-effectively managing their workload, right, helping them with that. So where there's challenge and change, there's certainly inopportunity. And we've seen it. >> So, but my understanding, your firm also offers managed cloud offerings. That's been one of the things we've looked at is the channel, can they get on board, can they offer that, how is it working with the big cloud providers, and yeah, let's start there. >> Yeah, that's a good question, and a lot of people have a misperception that the cloud is kind of the easy button. (laughter) But at the end of the day-- >> Stu: Maybe 10 years ago we thought that-- >> Dave: You have your hoodie. >> Right, but I mean, people need to realize the same architecture and security considerations are there as they are for on-premise, so it's not the easy button, and you can just kind of set it and forget it. So some people that are underestimating that still need help from a third party like ourselves to be able to help them manage it. >> Could you speak about the maturation of your support services? >> Yeah, we started doing a lot of hardware support years ago when the business was founded in 1989. And at that time, it was a lot of Unix-based engineering workstations and kind of morphed into servers and storage and other data center equipment, and then started doing a lot more software support, which all can be delivered remotely, for the most part. From time to time, you may need to be onsite for something, so that kind of changes the logistical model, and now with the cloud as well, we've just kind of evolved in that direction. >> And how about the Veritas relationship? What's that been like, you know, the Symantec sale, any comments on how that's evolved, and where do you see that going? >> Yeah, we've been a long-time Veritas partner, and really the reason why we first got started with them was because they were relatively platform-agnostic, and supported and endorsed heterogeneity. And in the old Foundation Suite days, which now their InfoScale product, it's obviously had some name changes, it didn't matter what operating system, didn't matter which array vendor you used. And it's good to have friends in the industry and alliances, but there's also some benefit of staying relatively agnostic like Veritas has, and that message resonates now more than ever with all the different cloud providers out there, and just being able to be interoperable with a lot of different technologies. >> What's your customer's reaction been to all the announcements that Veritas has been making here? >> Yeah, yeah, everyone's excited. Now it's getting the word out. And I mentioned pace of innovation earlier, and it seems to have gone from zero to 100, really, really fast. So, that's exciting. It shows commitment, I think, from the new executive leadership team at Veritas, and their backers at Carlyle as well. So, you know, I think it's an exciting time for Veritas, and for us as a partner as well, and our customers. >> And anything you want to see out of those guys? From your perspective, in the partner standpoint, in the voice of the customer, what's on their to-do list? >> Yeah, and I mean, the concept of data management, looking at it holistically is important. After people and intellectual property, data's the most valuable asset a company has, and a lot of the intellectual property resides in the form of data as well. So, it's an exciting place to be as we kind of see the industry shift. >> Dave: Cubs or White Sox? >> Bob: Cubbies! >> Hey, well, congratulations on that! >> Yeah, it's been a-- >> Really, really Cubbies, not just White Sox, oh, the Cubbies won it? >> No, Cubbies all the way. >> Hardcore Cubbies fan. >> Diehard, absolutely, yep. >> Well, you're welcome for Theo Epstein. We gave Theo, and Lester, you know. And Lackey. (laughs) >> You know, Theo seems to have the Midas touch, you know, and it's interesting too, you can use sports analogies for a lot of things, and Theo's a guy who was a little disruptive by using data and analytics in his approach to managing a baseball team. >> Right, right, well, good. That's great. It was an exciting World Series last year. Hope it can be as exciting again. Must have been insane in Chicago. >> Absolutely, yep, getting ready for another run this year, hopefully. >> Excellent, well, Bob, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks again, gentlemen. >> You're welcome, all right, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back to wrap up Vision 2017. This is theCUBE. (rippling 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)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Veritas Vision 2017, #VtasVision. Jyothi Swaroop is here. He's the vice president of product and solutions marketing at Veritas. Jyothi, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thanks, Dave. I'm an officially an alum, now? >> A CUBE alum, absolutely! >> Two times! Three more times, we'll give you a little VIP badge, you know, we give you the smoking jacket, all that kind of stuff. >> Five or six times, you'll be doing the interviews. >> I'm going to be following you guys around, then, for the next three events. >> So, good keynote this morning. >> Jyothi: Thank you. >> Meaty. There was a lot going on. Wasn't just high-level concepts, it was a lot of high-level messaging, but then, here's what we've done behind it. >> No, it's actually the opposite. It's a lot of real products that customers are using. The world forgets that Veritas has only been out of Symantec, what, 20 months? Since we got out, we were kind of quiet the first year. That was because we were figuring our strategy out, investing in innovation and engineering, 'cause that's what Carlyle, our board, wants for us to do is invest in innovation and engineering, and build real products. So we took our time, 18 to 20 months to build these products out, and we launched them. And they're catching on like wildfire in the customer base. >> Jyothi, Bill came on and talked about, he made a lot of changes in the company. Focused it on culture, innovation, something he's want. What brought you? You know, a lot of places you could've gone. Why Veritas, why now? >> Well, Bill is one of the reasons, actually. I mean, if you look at his history and what he's done with different companies over the years, and how the journey of IT, as he put it during his keynote, he wants to make that disruption happen again at Veritas. That was one. Two was just the strategy that they had. Veritas has a Switzerland approach to doing business. Look, it's granted that most Fortune 500 or even midmarket customers have some sort of a Cloud project going on. But what intrigued me the most, especially with my background, coming from other larger companies is, Veritas was not looking to tie them down or become a data hoarder, you know what I mean? It's just charge this massive dollar per terabyte and just keep holding them, lock them into a storage or lock them into a cloud technology. But, we were facilitating their journey to whichever cloud they wanted to go. It was refreshing, and I still remember the first interview with Veritas, and they were talking about, "Oh, we want to help move customers' data "into Azure and AWS and Google," and my brain from previous storage vendors is going, "Hang on a minute. "How are you going to make money "if you're just going to move all of this data "to everyone else?" But that's what is right for the customer. >> Okay, so, how are you going to make money? >> Well, it's not just about the destination, right? Cloud's a journey, it's not just a destination. Most customers are asking us, "On average, we adopt three clouds," is what they're telling us. Whether it's public, private, on-prem, on average, they have about three separate clouds. What they say is, "Jyothi, our struggle is to move "an entire virtual business service "from on-prem to the Cloud." And once we've moved it, let's say Cloud A is suddenly expensive or is not working out for them. To get out of that cloud and move it to Cloud B is just so painful. It's going to cost me tons of money, and I lost all of the agility that I was expecting from Cloud A, anyway. If you have products like VRP from Veritas, for example, where we could move an entire cloud business service from Cloud A to Cloud B, and guess what. We can move it back onto on-prem on the fly. That's brilliant for the customers. Complete portability. >> Let's see. The portfolio is large. Help us boil it down. How should we think about it at a high level? We only have 20 minutes, so how do we think about that in 15, 20 minutes? >> I'll focus on three tenets. Our 360 data management wheel, if you saw at the keynote, has six tenets. The three tenets I'll focus on today are visibility, portability, and last, but definitely not the least, storage. You want to store it efficiently and cost-effectively. Visibility, most of our customers that are getting on their cloud journey are already in the Cloud, somewhere. They have zero visibility, almost. Like, "What applications should I move into the Cloud? "If I have moved these applications, "are they giving me the right value? "Because I've invested heavily in the Cloud "to move these applications." They don't know. 52% of our customers have dark data. We've surveyed them. All that dark data has now been moved into some cloud. Look, cloud is awesome. We have partnered up with every cloud vendor out there. But if we're not making it easy for customers to identify what is the right data to move to the Cloud, then they lost half the battle even before they moved to the Cloud. That's one. We're giving complete visibility with the Info Map connectors that we just announced earlier on in the keynote. >> That's matching the workload characteristics with the right sort of platform characteristics, is that right? >> Absolutely. You could be a Vmware user, you're only interested in VM-based data that you want to move, and you want role-based access into that data, and you want to protect only that data and back it up into the Cloud. We give you that granularity. It's one thing to provide visibility. It's quite another to give them the ability to have policy-driven actions on that data. >> Jyothi, just take us inside the customers for that. Who owns this kind of initiative? The problem in IT, it's very heterogeneous, very siloed. You take that multi-cloud environment, most customers we talk to, if they've got a cloud strategy, the ink's still drying. It's usually because, well, that group needed this, and somebody needed this, and it's very tactical. So, how do I focus on the information? Who drives that kind of need for visibility and manages across all of these environments? >> That's a great question, Stu. I mean, we pondered around the same question for about a year, because we were going both top-down and bottoms-up in the customer's organization, and trying to find where's our sweet spot. What we figured is, it's not a one-strategy thing, especially with the portfolio that we have. 80% of the time, we are talking to the CIOs, we are talking to the CXOs, and we're coming down with their digital transformation strategy or their cloud transformation strategy, they may call it whatever they want. We're coming top-down with our products, because when you talk visibility, a backup admin, he may not jump out of his seat the first thing. "Visibility's not what I care about, "the ease of use of this backup job "is what I care about, day one." But if you talk to the CIO, and I tell him, "I'll give you end-to-end visibility "of your entire infrastructure. "I don't care which cloud you're in." He'll be like, "I'm interested in that, "'cause I may not want to move 40% of this data "that I'm moving to Cloud A today. "I want to keep it back, or just delete it." 'Cause GDPR in Europe gives the citizens the right to delete their data. Doesn't matter which company the data's present in. The citizen can go to that company and say, "You have to delete my data." How will you delete the data if you just don't know where the data is? >> It's in 20 places in 15 different databases. Okay, so that's one. You had said there were three areas that you wanted to explore. >> The second one is, again, all about workload data and application portability. Over the years, we had storage lock-ins. I'm not going to name names, but historically, there are lots of storage vendors that tend to lock customers into a particular type of storage, or to the company, and they just get caught up in that stacked refresh every three years, and you just keep doing that over and over again. We're seeing more and more of cloud lock-in start to happen. You start migrating all of this into one cloud service provider, and you get familiar with the tools and widgets that they give you around that data, and then all of a sudden you realize this is not the right fit, or I'm moving too much data into this place and it's costing me a lot more. I want to not do this anymore, I want to move it to another local service provider, for example. It's going to cost you twice as much as it did just to move the data into the Cloud in the first place. With VRP, Veritas Resiliency Platform, we give our customers literally a few mouse clicks, if you watched the demo onstage. Literally, with a few mouse clicks, you identify the data that you want to move, including your virtual machines and your applications, and you move them as a business service, not just as random data. You move it as an entire business service from Cloud A to Cloud B. >> Jyothi, there's still physics involved in this. There's many reasons why with lock-in, you mentioned, kind of familiarity. But if I have a lot of data, moving it takes a lot of time as well as the money. How do we handle that? >> It goes back to the original talk track here about visibility. If you give the customer the right amount of visibility, they know exactly what to move. If the customer has 80 petabytes of data in their infrastructure, they don't have to move all 80 petabytes of it, if we are able to tell them, "These are the 10 petabytes that you need to move, "based on what Information Map is telling you." They'll only move those 10 petabytes, so the workload comes down drastically, because they're able to visualize what they need to move. >> Stu: Third piece of storage? >> Third piece of storage. A lot of people don't know this, but Veritas was the first vendor that launched the software to find storage solution. Back in the VOS days, Veritas, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, we had the first file system that would be this paper over rocks, if you will, that was just a software layer. It would work with literally SAN/DAS, anything that's out there in the market, it would just be that file system that would work. And we've kept that DNA in our engineering team. Like, for example, Abhijit, who leads up our engineering, he wrote the first cluster file system. We are extending that beyond just a file system. We're going file, block, and object, just as any other storage vendor would. We are certifying on various commodity hardware, so the customers can choose the hardware of their choice. And not just that. The one thing we're doing very differently, though, is embedding intelligence close to the metadata. The reason we can do that is, unlike some of the classic storage vendors, we wrote the storage ground-up. We wrote the code ground-up. We could extract, if you look at an object, it has object data and metadata. So, metadata standard, it's about this long, right? It's got all these characters in it. It's hard to make sense of it unless you buy another tool to read that object and digest it for the customer. But what if you embed intelligence next to the metadata, so storage is not dumb anymore? It's intelligent, so you avoid the number of layers before you actually get to a BI product. I'll just give you a quick example in healthcare. We're all wearing Apple Watches and FitBits. The data is getting streamed into some object store, whether it's in the Cloud or on-prem. Billions of objects are getting stored even right now, with all the Apple Watches and FitBits out there. What if the storage could predictively, using machine learning and intelligence, tell you predictively you might be experiencing a stroke right on your watch, because your heartbeats are X and your pulse is Y? Combining all of the data and your history, based on the last month or last three months, I can tell you, "Jyothi, you should probably go see the doctor "or do something about it." So that's predictive, and it can happen at the storage layer. It doesn't have to be this other superficial intelligence layer that you paid millions of dollars for. >> So that analytic capability is really a feature of your platform, right? I mean, others, Stu, have tried it, and they tried to make it the product, and it really isn't a product, it's a byproduct. And so, is that something I could buy today? Is that something that's sort of roadmap, or, what's the reaction been from customers? >> The reaction has been great, both customers and analysts have just loved where we're going with this. Obviously, we have two products that are on the truck today, which are InfoScale and Access. InfoScale is a block-based product and Access is a file-based product. We also have HyperScale, which was designed specifically for modern workloads, containers, and OpenStack. That has its own roadmap. You know how OpenStack and containers work. We have to think like a developer for those products. Those are the products that are on the truck today. What you'll see announced tomorrow, I hope I'm not giving away too much, because Mike already announced it, is Veritas Cloud Storage. That's going to be announced tomorrow, and we're going to go deep into that. Veritas Cloud Storage will be this on-prem, object-based storage which will eventually become a platform that will also support file and block. It's just one single, software-defined, highly-intelligent storage system for all use cases. Throw whatever data you want at it. >> And the line on Veritas, the billboards, no hardware agenda. Ironic where that came from. Sometimes you'll announce appliances. What is that all about, and when do you decide to do that? >> Great question. You know, it's all about choice. It's the cliched thing to say, I know, but Veritas, most people don't know this, has a heavy channel revenue element to what we do. We love our partners and channel. Now, if you go to the channel that's catering to midmarket customers, or SMBs, they just want the easy button to storage. Their agility, I don't have five people sitting around trying to piece all of this together with your software and Seagate's hardware and whatever else, and piece this together. I just want a box, a pizza box that I can put in my infrastructure, turn it on, and it just works, and I call Veritas if something goes wrong. I don't call three different people. This is for those people. Those customers that just want the easy button to storage or easy button to back up. >> To follow up on the flip side, when you're only selling software, the knock on software of course is, I want it to be fast, I want it to be simple, I need to be agile. How come Veritas can deliver these kinds of solutions and not be behind all the people that have all the hardware and it's all fully baked-in to start with? >> Well, that's because we've written these from the ground up. When you write software code from the ground up, I mean, I'm an engineer, and I know how hard it is to take a piece of legacy code that's baked in for 10, 20 years. It's almost like adding lipstick, right? It just doesn't work, especially in today's cloud-first world, where people are in the DevOps situation, where apps are being delivered in five, 10, 15 minutes. Every day, my app almost gets updated on the phone every day? That just doesn't work. We wrote these systems from the ground up to be able to easily be placed onto any hardware possible. Now, again, I won't mention the vendor, but in my previous lives, there were a lot of hardware boxes and the software was written specifically for those hardware configurations. When they tried to software-define it forcefully, it became a huge challenge, 'cause it was never designed to do that. Whereas at Veritas, we write the software layer first. We test it on multiple hardware systems, and we keep fine-tuning it. Our ideal situation is to sell the software, and if the customer wants the hardware, we'll ship them the box. >> One of the things that struck me in the keynote this morning was what I'll call your compatibility matrix. Whether it was cloud, somebody's data store, that really is your focus, and that is a differentiator, I think. Knocking those down so you can, basically, it's a TAM expansion strategy. >> Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, TAM expansion strategy, as well as helping the customer choose what's best for them. We're not limiting their choices. We're literally saying, we go from the box and dropboxes of the world all the way to Dell EMC, even, with Info Map, for example. We'll cover end-to-end spectrum because we don't have a dollar-per-terabyte or dollar-per-petabyte agenda to store this data within our own cloud situation. >> All right, Jyothi, we got to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE. It's good to see you again. >> Jyothi: No, it's great to be here. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE. (fast electronic 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)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington DC, it's the Cube, covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to .NEXT everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day two of .NEXT. Dr. John Bates is here. He's the CEO of TestPlant, and author of Thingalytics. Sir, welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks. >> Nice to have you on. >> Nice to be here. >> Thingalytics, everybody's talking about things. >> This thing, that thing, the refrigerator, the iode things. What's Thingalytics? >> Well, things, i.e. connected devices, sensors and so on. They're not very interesting unless you actually do something with them. So you search through all that data that's coming out for the opportunities and threats to your business, for example, and then you act on it, while you've got time and perhaps, beat your competitor. So, Thingalytics is about smart, big data analytics, and the internet of things coming together. >> Okay, and what's the premise of the book? >> Well the premise of the book is, you know, everybody thinks, I mean if it's one message from it, it's IoT is not so hard to get into. So get started. You know, start small, and here's some lessons of how you can do it. And here's some stories from different industries of how thought leaders, you know, like Coca Cola, or GE, or many different companies, Medtronic, in different industries have actually got started and really been extremely disruptive in what they've done. >> And is this getting started, is this all for companies, or are you seeing individuals that can also participate? >> You know, I do have a chapter in there about the Smarthome. So, obviously that's the aspect where the individual is going to come. But you know, I think it's really the real winner in this will be the industrial and the enterprise, Internet of Things. I guess that the key message is for business leaders. >> Do you think that given that there's, the internet of things requires things, and there's so many things that are installed by these big, industrial companies that the whole IoT thing will be maybe less of a disruption than it will be an evolution of companies like GE, and Siemens and Hitachi, and guys like that. Is that a reasonable premise, or will we see a whole new wave of companies? Certainly we'll see startups come in, but will they attack these big industrial giants, that have been around for a hundred years? >> You know, this is a really great question, and I think that, at the moment, the opportunity is in the hands of the big buyer. You know, keynoting at .NEXT, Bill McDermott coming in to do his presentation. I sold my IoT platform company to SAP. And why, for example has SAP got an amazing opportunity? Because they've got all these applications, they've done an amazing job of taking ERP and adding a whole load of applications: financial planning, supply chain, business networks. But those applications model the real world. But they're not connected to the real world. So what happens when you take a model of a financial model about the value of a factory or a mine, and connect it to the real world. Suddenly, it's not theoretical. It actually is calculating in real time, the value of those assets. The supply chain is really about that. So, SAP is an unbelievable opportunity. IBM has an unbelievable opportunity. GE has an unbelievable opportunity. But it's going to be how they execute, and is someone going to come in, and do something unbelievably disruptive we haven't even thought about. So, those guys need to make all the running right now to really protect themselves. >> I wonder if you could comment on this. I see some of the execution risks as what Jeffrey Immelt said, "I went to bed an industrial giant," "and woke up a software company." >> John: (laughs) Yes. >> Wow, it's hard to be a successful software company. So, is that one of the many execution risks? Are there others? >> I think you're absolutely right. I mean, if you take GE for example, my friend, Bill Ruh. He's the chief digital officer, the CDO of GE Digital. >> Dave: We know him, yeah, sure. >> Yeah, he's awesome. Completely new business, but it's really hard. I think that's taken longer than they expected to build up that Predix platform. And are they going to be the people, it depends what business you're in. If you're the business of buying aircraft engines, then rather than buying an aircraft engine, you want to buy engine as a service. So that's the kind of the thing that maybe you'll buy from GE, or maybe it's one of GE's partners and GE provides the infrastructure. But I think they've learned that's really much harder than they thought. And I think everybody's sort of discovering that. It's not so much the thingalytics, I've realized, it's the thingonomics, the economics of the internet things. That's the really important thing to get right. >> We actually worked with GE when they were coming out with the Industrial Internet, and we did a lot of interviews. There's some of these barriers that we're going to hit along the way. As a matter of fact, at Wikibon, our team that works on it, they call it the Internet of Things and People because there's so much that needs to happen to be able to move forward. Some of them are just old industrial things, some of them are regulations, some of them are the mindsets. How do you see some of these, what do you see as some of the major barriers, and how do we knock them down to be able to accelerate this even more? >> Absolutely. Well, first, you're absolutely right. One of the key barriers is a cultural barrier, or a, oh, that's just too hard, getting back to why did I write Thingalytics. And I think it's a question of people have just got to get started, not try and boil the ocean, and try and get some successful projects going. But definitely there's a cultural thing, and you just have to get those people together that think differently. And there's a reason why this new role of the Chief Digital Officer was created, but you can have many Chief Digital Officers throughout your company, just sort of get them together with that thought. One of the other things I can bring up that is really, really hard and why I went from being in the core of the IoT platform world into a company that's a software testing company, when you're going to launch this stuff, how do you, de-risk it, how do you make sure, in this world where there's all these sensors at the edge, all these strange mobile devices on the front end, and the cloud in the middle, how do you make sure you test that? It's a really complicated distributed architecture, that requires completely new technology. You don't even own the code, so how do you test that? So there's a whole load of issues there, but I think you have to put at the heart of it, think differently, think digitally. >> So what's the company you sold to SAP? Tell us about that. >> So the company's called Plat.One, and it was one of the leaders in platforms, software platforms, to enable Internet of Things application. So the idea is that you're going to build an Internet of Things application. You could start and hardwire, start writing some code and hardwire against all these devices and sensors, but then you start shipping your applications. What about if you made the wrong decisions? What about if you spent years just writing all the integrations to your factory floor, or your logistics networks? So, there's a whole load of common protocols out there, in machine to machine, and they call it a new Internet of Things protocols. Plat.One, new and could talk to all these protocols and make machines talk to each other. It could virtualize that, so that you disconnect those protocols from the application you write. So you're modeling things like, in a Smart city, truck and streetlamps, rather than bits and bytes. So then when you change the implementation from one city to another, you're future-proofed. And then graphical tools to model and plug them together, and a platform that manages microservices at the edge and the cloud. So you're managing an adaptive platform that you can place logic, depending on what it is. And that enabled SAP to rapidly roll out ITOs. >> And your company had customers? >> Yeah, a lot of customers, people like, you know, a great customer, Pirelli. Pirelli, obviously a tire manufacturer as you know them, but what they can do, if they plug sensors into their tires and have telematics boxes on tops of trucks or vehicles, suddenly they can go to the fleet management markets and sell them big data analytics because they know where the trucks are, they know how they're being driven, and what's more, rather than selling you a tire, they could lease you a tire as a service because they can track it, they know how much use you've got out of it. Unbelievable new thingonomic models. So, that's an example, flextronics, T-Systems, we had a whole lot of interesting smart cities using it, logistics, manufacturers. So yeah, it was a great, but early stage company, and you have to ask yourself the question, can you, as a small company, win, or would you be better off partnering with an SAP with that unbelievable reach? >> One of the things, I've got a networking background, we hear all these new protocols and the maturity there, there's the security risk there. I hear the fleet of trucks that was like, oh wait, I might turn off these sensors or do something malicious. The surface area has just grown by orders of magnitude. How do we address this as the industry? What is some of the advice you're giving for this? >> You're absolutely right, 'cause when we were talking about the issues earlier, that's a corker, isn't it, you know, the security of it. And as a Tesla owner, it was great when hackers tried to hack into the Tesla and they couldn't. All they could do was make the horn go beep. Which you can do from your app on your phone, anything that was publicly there, but couldn't take control of the car. That was great, that was nice. But with all this highly distributed model, you've got to be able to have end-to-end security. So in Plat.One for example, we had the ability to have role-based, end-to-end security right from the application to the device. And that was part of the platform, so you got that for free. But you've got to make sure that's the case in your applications. >> What's the opportunity for jobs in the growing IoT economy? >> You know, IoT giveth and IoT taketh away. (Dave laughs) We're all thinking let's bring more jobs back to America, which is a political thing at the moment. But are these jobs are going to be replaced by robots? I mean, is there a global issue, which is, are these jobs going to be replaced by robots, and by algorithims? The answer is yes, but on the other hand, are more jobs going to be created? Are people going to become much more productive? So I think humans are going to become more productive, for sure, for things like smart factories, smart cities, and life's going to get better in smart cities, but yeah, we're also going to lose jobs. I draw an analogy to trading, financial markets trading, where we used to have traders in the pits waving pieces of paper, then it went to Bloomburg terminals where people entered their trades automatically, then it went to algorithmic trading and high frequency trading where algorithms run it. Still humans involved, but less and less. But the humans are more productive and more coordinated. >> Hey, what if we put a 30% tax on all IoT-related initiatives, that would help preserve jobs. (John laughs) So tell-- >> Wouldn't slow down innovation or corporate profit or anything like that. >> Hey, here's an idea for you, Since we're in Washington I thought I'd throw out some good ideas. >> (laughs) Yes, exactly, very topical. >> So, tell us about your software testing company, TestPlant. >> So, the reason I was really excited to join TestPlant is there's this new world, you put IoT together with the mobile world and the cloud world, and you have the world of digital. How do you make sure that in this new digital enterprise that everybody's going to compete in, that you're, how do you make sure you're doing well, and how do you make sure your stuff works, and how do you make sure you're beating your competitors? So, TestPlant's all about end-to-end testing of the digital experience. It's taking testing to a new level, 'cause if you think about testing, it used to be about, does your code work? Now, it's about, are you offering up an unbelievable, delightful digital experience to your customers, because testing now has become a profit center. It's the differentiator between you doing an amazing job of launching an app and getting five stars in the app store, or crashing and burning because something's gone down, or there's a usability issue or there's a problem. So that's what we do, we test applications using artificial intelligence through the eye of the user, we actually, our algorithms actually use the applications and connect to the APIs and can take control and automate the testing process and discover these business metrics and show customers what good really is. >> So John, you were the founder of Plat.One, is that right? >> So I was an early joiner of Plat.One, I was the CEO, I wasn't the founder, we have two amazing founders. >> Okay, but you helped do the initial raise? >> Yes, exactly, and I took it from an early interesting technology to the company that got bought by SAP >> Made it viable, and sellable, you're an investor, I heard you say. >> John: Yes. Okay, now you're an author, you're CEO now of an more established company, right? >> John: Yes. >> Jack-of-all-trades here, well, maybe that's not a fair term, but you do a lot of different things. What are your thoughts on which things you enjoy the most, where do you see all of this headed? >> Well-- >> Polymath is the word I was looking for. (John laughs) >> Well, I started off actually as a professor, a university professor, and I took some of my research and started my first company. I loved building a start-up from scratch, and taking that as a first streaming analytics or real-time analytics company, and I then spent over a decade as a C-level executive in public software companies. But I haven't had so much fun as what I'm doing right now. It's beautiful, it's sort of mid-sized, really great private equity, backers, the Carlyle group, so I love what I'm doing right now, it's definitely my favorite gig, so far, I think that's the nice sweet spot for me. >> That's great, well, John, we love having big brains in the Cube, Stu and I, and it rubs off a little bit, at least we think it does, so thanks very much for coming on. >> John: Thank you gentlemen. >> You're welcome, alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Nutanix NEXTconf, this is the Cube.