>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live U.S. 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and my name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host Stu Miniman and Lisa Martin is also in the house. This is day three of our coverage, Danny Allan is here. He's the Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam and one of the key thought leaders at the company, one of the main figures at VeeamON, which we were just doing three weeks ago. Danny, great to see you again. >> Wonderful to be here with you. >> That was a really fun show VeeamON, it always is. You guys got a cool vibe. >> You chose the Fontainebleau Hotel this year in Miami, in Miami Beach which is just a great location. Many thousands of customers and you guys hit some milestones recently. You talked about a billion dollars in revenue, it's been something you're going after for a while, you've seen that happen. Of course things change, right? All the subscription stuff started to happen. That slowed you down a little bit but that's awesome that you guys finally hit that, so congratulations. Raised a big pile of dough and you just keep moving that ball forward. Give us the update on Veeam. >> So as you said, Veeam has a great culture, right? There's a passionate green army out there that loves us and we're thankful for that. We hit one billion in bookings for the trailing 12 months, we have 350,000 customers and the business is going well. One of the interesting things about Veeam is because we're private, we actually have the opportunity to decide when and how we do things like switch from perpetual to subscription type bookings. But business is doing great, we love it, we're glad to be here. >> One of the things that you talked about at VeeamON was kind of getting back to the basics. You talked a lot about look, it starts with backup. There's a lot of noise in the market today. You hear a lot about, you know, data management. We talk a lot about date assurance but at the end of the day, it starts with backup. That's something that you gave a lot of thought to. I mentioned that you were one of the thought leaders at Veeam. Double click on that, add some color. What were you thinking in terms of that being the starting point and that really driving a lot of your messaging at VeeamON? >> Yeah, I always say it's three things, right? This is a journey that we're on and I get excited about the end stages of that journey. But how many people actually have a budget for machine learning or blockchain or artificial intelligence? No one has a budget for that. What they have a budget for is backup and so we believe A, it's a journey, B, it does start with backup. There's a budget for that and the key thing is choose a partner for this journey and we believe Veeam is the right partner obviously to choose for that but we really wanted to go back to who is spending money to buy the products and for that, it's the technical decision maker who has the budget for backup today. >> Yeah, all right. So Danny, we talk about the Cisco relationship and budgets like you were talking about there. Cisco UCS was from day one a heavily virtualized environment and therefore had strong affinity with Veeam there. But you've got some great visibility into where UCS is going, what CI and HCI solutions are really starting to gain traction. So talk a little bit about that partnership and which ones of those Cisco solutions are really starting to, you know, kick in the market. >> We have a great partnership with Cisco, first of all and really in two areas, if you're talking infrastructure. So on the HyperFlex, the Converged Infrastructure but also on just the S3260 for example, a storage dense system and we have a target this year, this is public information, we have a target, a joint target of $100 million. We're actually at 80% of that right now. Business has been doing really well. In fact, we've been on the Global Price List now for 18 months and in 18 months, we've actually closed over 350 transactions. Like it's been going really, really well and here's what's exciting about that. Those customers that are spending money on Cisco gear with Veeam software, they might start in the drag, these are quantifiable numbers, it's about five to one. So every dollar they spend on Veeam, it's about $5 on Cisco. But over 35% of those customers within twelve months come back and buy more Cisco gear and actually if you look at the actual drag, quantifiable drag that we're bring for Cisco, it's 11 to one. So for every dollar they spend with Veeam, they're spending $11 in Cisco HyperFlex or S3260. So it's been a great partnership both for us obviously because we're on their resell list but also for them. >> And you said you're 80% of the way there. We're talking a calendar year or is that a fiscal year? >> That is their fiscal year, so that's ending in August or July. I should know the date but I know we're 80%. We're on track to hit that $100 million. >> What do you think is driving that? I mean obviously this is a partnership, which takes time. >> Yes. >> This is not just a press release partnership. What else have you done to really facilitate this? >> Well I would say two things. One is their infrastructure is great. In fact we have one of our Veeam cloud service providers that is protecting over a million VMs right now. So these are massive scale, are using S3260s in the backend as a repository, so their hardware actually works. But I would say the other thing that really resonates is, so they have this Hyper FEX Solution and on top of that they have Intersite and that concept of a cloud management plain that can roll out the hardware, can update it not only at the infrastructure but also the Veeam software is really critical and that resonates with customers. It's again, good for them but it's also good for us. >> Let's see. The last couple years you guys have had a big emphasis on the enterprise and then again we're hearing this theme of kind of back to basics. I mean you heard at VeeamON, it starts with backup. You talk to people at VeeamON, the customers. It's the, you know, a lot of medium sized customers, a lot of smaller customers. Do you feel like you over-rotated to the enterprise or do you feel like hey, we could get there just by slow and steady and still putting the accelerator on our core business? Can you just add some color to that and explain? >> Yeah, so if you back three years, our focus was very much on the small and medium enterprise where we said we wanted to capture the major enterprise and that by the way has worked. If you look, since January of 2017 we've done over a billion just in enterprise, enterprise being 1,000 employees or above. So focusing on the enterprise for a few years was the right thing to do. However, that was all on the messaging side and we had this core constituent that has been with us for over decade now and we didn't want to pivot away from them. So in the last six months, nine months, what you've seen is pivoting back towards the center. So we do a third of our business with SMB, a third with commercial and a third with enterprise. So we believe we're right there on the fairway now and it's a perfect alignment of that messaging. >> Well I mean history would show that the disruptors oftentimes come from, you know, down below and move up. I mean you certainly saw that with Microsoft in the 80s and there are many other examples. Is that part of the philosophy, that you guys just can keep adding value that will appeal to the enterprise customers? It sounds like with a 30 year business, you're actually already there in terms of functionality. Is there a functionality gap though still that you need to close in your opinion? >> I don't think so. We announced as you know probably v10 a few years ago and what we've done is we've introduced that over the years and so the final check box if you will for v10 is coming in our next release later this year. But that really covers off the gambit of everything that needs to be done and that's been resonating really strongly. We believe we have a portfolio that addresses everything from the smallest customer to the largest customer. >> Yeah and you don't live and die, we heard this from Radmere, you don't live and die by your long term product development roadmap. You tend to be very tactical and listen to customers and-- >> We're very agile, so we keep a backlog of all the things that we want to do but we will pivot on a dime if we believe hey, this is really strategic for our customer base. We'll change something that, you know, we had planned for year out and do something else in the interim. >> Dave: Pretty judicious about how you decide there. >> Yeah so Danny, bring us inside some of the customer conversations you're having here to show, you know, when I watch the keynotes, many of the messages about multi-cloud sound like the same kind of things that I've been hearing at VeeamON for the last couple of years. What are you hearing from the customers at this? >> Well, definitely cloud date management is top of mind. I ate dinner last night with an enterprise customer. They're rolling this out across about 100 different locations around the world and they very much wanted a local repository of data but they also wanted to tier that data into the HyperScale public cloud, so that is clearly an enterprise-centric message. But that same capability goes down to the SMB. But if you asked me what is the conversation on everyone's, on the tip of their tongue, it is cloud. How are you addressing cloud? And we've done that a number of ways. One is we take the backup data, we'll tier it into cloud. We'll recover workloads in cloud. It's not so much a lift and shift. You know what's interesting is the cloud is not a charity. If you just take what you had on premises and move it into the cloud, there's merge-in layered in there, right? But for some use cases, disaster recovery, business continuity, you want to be able to turn it on in cloud and then after it's in cloud of course, then you need to protect it. And so we've been addressing all of those capabilities within the Veeam portfolio. >> Do you think there's going to be a backlash? I mean you don't see it in the numbers. You see, you know, AWS's growth and I'm not talking about repatriation but the cloud as a target is just another piece of infrastructure, even though it's kind of virtual, that I have to manage. I mean it does add complexity in that sense. So do you think there'll be, there's maybe somewhat over-enthusiasm now or do you see this as an unstoppable trend? >> I believe that cloud is a tool in the toolbox and it's both the smallest, most precise tool and also the largest tool and everything in between. What I mean by that is this isn't just a lift and shift and move it over to the cloud. It's how do I leverage the cloud to extend my data center? I actually, a lot of people talk about multi-cloud, I actually think that the era is really hybrid cloud. It's how do I extend what I have on premises into the cloud? And we're only now really being pragmatic about how to leverage it. The people that jumped in, all in and said, "I'm going all to cloud," those are the ones that you're seeing a bit of buyers remorse but those that are a lot more pragmatic, they're now saying, "How do I deliver business outcomes?" Because it's not about cloud, it's actually about business outcomes, right? Focus on the services. How do I deliver business outcomes that are improved by leveraging aspects of the cloud? >> Yes. So Danny, I know you've talked to our team. You know, we look at the environment and customers today, they have multi-cloud. But the strategy has been well, I've got some stuff here and I use that service here and wait, I need to spin that stuff over here. We've almost remade multi-vendor into multi-cloud. >> Yes. >> So the goal we've been looking for is the solution should be more than just the sum of the parts. Veeam sits in an interesting layer to help customers leverage that and get value out of their data across all of those environments. So you know, do we see that as a viable future that is not just the state that we're in but be able to get more value out of those pieces in the near future? >> Yeah, so I'm obviously biased 'cause I work for Veeam but I think we sit at the intersection of all of this because what we do is we take services, we take workloads and we make them portable. I can take something from on premises, I can put it in cloud A, I can put it in cloud B, I can take it back on premises, I can move it to a private cloud provider. So we have the ability to be completely flexible and agnostic as to where it lands and the reason why that's important, people don't go out and say "I'm going to put 50% "of my workload in this cloud or this cloud." They say, "I need a data center in this geography" or "I need a data center that has this kind of service." So the reason they end up in multi-cloud is not because of a multi-cloud strategy but because they have a business need that is met by that infrastructure and we allow the portability, the flexibility to move the workloads as the business needs. >> So we have some data here. I want to dig into it a little bit. Can you share with us some of the fun facts? Like when, maybe the timeline of your relationship with Cisco, some of the things you've done. Walk us through that, Danny. >> So, we partnered with, we've had a longstanding relationship with Cisco. Officially we went on their Global Price List like I said, 18 months ago. Since then, 300 and, earlier this week, 359 transactions. But almost a transact, two transactions every three days and we have a great go-to-market program with them right now, so we do a lot of joint activities, both in the channel as well as between. We fund heads with them and vice versa. >> Who's your favorite partner? No, you don't have to answer that. >> We have, we have a lot of partners. They're all of my favorite children. >> So we're hearing kind of this land and expand strategy. We've heard that from many other companies. But it's actually happening inside of or within the Veeam ecosystem and what I heard here was you're selling with Cisco and then people are coming back and buying more Cisco. So that's part of land and expand but another dimension of land and expand is you sell it to an organization. Not only do they buy more but other parts of the organization, you sort of fan out horizontally. How much of that is happening? >> It's happening quite a bit. I would say the most significant expansion right now is actually at a line of business level and so you'll have multiple lines of business and then they will begin to coalesce together and say "Okay, let's supply a central policy to that." So that's what we're seeing. What we do know is that 35% of Cisco customers that are joint Veeam and Cisco customers, they'll come back within the next 12 months and they'll buy more Veeam and more Cisco gear. >> Okay last question, why Veeam? You got a lot of competitors obviously in this market. You and I have talked about that a lot. You got, Cisco has made an investment in one of them. Why Veeam? >> So, simple, reliable, flexible and the flexible is probably the key to all of this because we don't lock people in. We don't lock them into our hardware, we don't lock them into a specific cloud, we don't lock them into any one of our children if you will, we love them all equally and that flexibility, future proofing the organization is a huge deciding point for the organizations. Because they don't know what the landscape's going to look like two, three years from now. Is this still going to be your partner or is it not? So having an organization that will partner with you, that will be flexible in, and this isn't just flexibility at a technology level, it's also at a business level. Licensing, for example. Flexibility to move licenses from physical systems to virtual systems to cloud systems to back again. They want to partner with someone that has that flexibility. >> Danny, great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, always a pleasure. >> Yes, likewise. >> Okay, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin from Cisco Live in San Diego 2019. You're watching theCUBE, we'll be right back. (upbeat electronic tones)

>> Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage, here in Las Vegas, for VMworld 2018, with Day Three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage, two sets. Our ninth year of covering VMworld, we're going to have like 96 interviews, a lot of content happening, lot of updates from the entrepreneurs, from the executives, and also the partnerships. In this segment we're going to be talking Cisco and Veeam. We got Stefan Renner who's the technical director of Global Alliances for Veeam, and Chris O'Brien, Technical Marketing Director at Cisco. Programmable networks, easy-to-use backup restore, disaster recovery, all those great stuff. >> You guys just get here from Omnia? (laughing) >> Welcome to theCUBE. >> It's a good party. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for havin' us. >> Do we look like that? (laughing) >> I feel like that. (laughing) >> You know, you guys have been very successful on the Veeam side. We had Peter McKay, the co-CEO on yesterday. Cisco has been very active and relevant in programmable DevOps, or DevNetOps, as it has been called in there. So the need to make things programmable and easy, are a nice combination. You guys have a partnership. How is the Cisco/Veeam partnership going, how did it start? Take a minute to explain, how it all came together, and what's the current situation of the partnership? Well, I think from a Cisco perspective, the partnership is going great, fantastic. They were Partner of the Year. What we're hearing from our customers is they want us to solve some of their problems around how do they scale and manage their data, right? I'm from the UCS Business Unit. We see an opportunity for us to bring UCS was built on programmability, right? We have the APIs, we have those capabilities. We started out with Veeam a few, I guess 18 months ago, maybe two years ago, really focusing on some solutions around our HyperPlex platform, and we released a number of validated designs. When we do these validated designs, it's not just Cisco doing the work. We're in the labs together, we're developing the solutions. >> With Veeam. >> With Veeam. All the engineering efforts, and then obviously, as you go through and you grow that solution, you really see an opportunity where you can enhance the solution. So things like automation, we want to bring that to the table, certainly, with our partner. >> And what's your contribution on this? Obviously, Veeam's role in the solution. Are you guys doing joint validations, or joint engineering? Talk about the integration piece with Cisco, why it's important. >> If you look back, maybe it's two years, right? I took on Veeam actually three years ago, three-and-a-half years ago, and when actually, we really started to kick off the thing with Cisco. So it's a bit more than two years, I would say it's three years, right? But in these days, a couple of years back, it's more about finding a right data protection platform, where we can host Veeam on. Meaning a backup server, right? And these days, it was more about back and recovery. Well, today we talk about hyper-availability. It's not only about backing up stuff or recovering stuff, it's about providing the whole platform, the whole orchestration layer for data availability. Back in these times, three years ago, it was about finding an s3260 or a c240 server of Cisco, which fits exactly the needs we need for Veeam to run on it, right? But over the last, now, 24 months, since Cisco really started HyperFlex and going into hyperconvergency, we partner with them to make sure we have the right data protection for this kind of solution. That's what you just talked about, talking about integrations. We really invested a lot of time and efforts on both fights, it's not only Veeam development, it's also trying to see Cisco develop, to integrate into HyperFlex, to make sure we can provide the right data protection for the customer needs are. >> So talk about the high availability, I just want to talk about that for a second, 'cause I think this really highlights one, the relationship, and the desire in the market for realtime data, whether it's for developers, or for applications, to integrate. High availability is about having data available and integrating into whatever that would be, whether it's a mishmash of application development, and routing across networks. This is a huge deal, this is not like a punchline. High availability used to be, oh, we have a data center where it's fault tolerant. There's a whole another new level that that's going to. Can you just talk what that means, because backing it up and making it available means something different now. >> Yeah. >> Talk about that. >> I do agree, because again, looking back, it was really about backing up and recovering stuff. If I look back couple of years, customers were looking for a solution, that are able to pull the VM out of the v-stream data center, make sure it's stored somewhere, and they can't get it back once it's deleted, right? >> Check. >> But now, if you look at Vmworld, right, we have it at Vmworld, it's all about automation, it's about APIs being true. I can integrate this data protection platform in my centralized management interfaces, making sure I have an orchestration layer on top of it, so it's not only about backing up and recovery anymore, it's about the whole stack from end-to-end, right? Getting data from A to Z, maybe get it offsite to an S3 storage for longterm retention. So, we really went from an on-premise, very small kind of solution stack to a big solution stack, going from a VM into the cloud, and overlaying that stuff. >> Stefan, I want you to comment on this, and of course I want to get your take as well. Talk about the time aspect of it, because you mentioned, okay, I can get it back, okay, got to get the data back. When you talk about making data available, the time series or the timeframe, is critical, in some cases, latency, nanoseconds, milliseconds. This is the new normal; you guys got to make that happen. Talk about that dynamic, are customers really doing that, obviously that want it, but what are some of the examples? >> No, they are, they are. In terms of speed, like in data protection and availability, if I talk about speed I really talk about SLAs, and the RTOs, and the RPOs, so how often do I backup, how often do I have a recovery point, that's what you just talked about, and how fast can I get a data application back once it's gone, or once it's deleted, or once it's discovered an issue in the data center. Again, over the last couple of years, that really involved because in the early days customers said, you know, I want to have that, but it's luxury, right, I don't want to pay for it, it's too expensive, I can't afford that. But looking in these days, and today, even at the conference, you talk to customers that say, I need it, it's critical, I cannot live a second without my data. So this kind of RTOs requirements, they really went down from, maybe a day, which was usual ten years back, to like five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, right now. That's maybe the maximum you can really afford as a customer, and that's where the integration part comes in, and all the stuff we do with Cisco, because with integration we can actually make sure that we can cover that, and get data back in ten minutes. >> So we're really talking about a whole new way of delivering infrastructure. If I go back to the early days of UCS and conversion infrastructure, yeah, we can support a thousand VMs, and they're like, how are you going to back a thousand VMs up? And they're like, uhhhhh, well, let's see, we're workin' on that. Today, you got your take in this platform approach, it's a fundamental part of cloud, developer, DevOps, and so I wonder if you can talk about, you know, when we were at Cisco Live, the DevNet area was one of the most exciting parts of the show. And if you think about traditional enterprise companies, really, not many, I think even one, has really done a good job with developers, it's Cisco. So where do developers play, is this a platform play, really, for cloud and hybrid infrastructure? I wonder if you can talk about that, the role of developers, and how you're approaching this mindset. >> Yeah, I think from our perspective, there's no downtime window, there's no scheduled windows of downtime, right? >> It's not allowed. >> We don't have that anymore. The way that we look at our infrastructure, we certainly want it to be robust, to address latencies, issues and concerns, and what we're doing with Veeam is really tweaking that infrastructure to make that data available when it's called on, so you can consume it as a developer, as a part of the DevOps team. All of our infrastructure, as you guys probably know, are all open systems, all policy-based models. So with these APIs being available, it allows developers to consume more, if they need to scale-out these infrastructures quickly, we can do it. We're certainly playing in the DevNet space, it's growing, we have our own separate conferences. >> The network becomes more and more important, every day, I mean, at a whole 'nother level. Talk about program ability, you got to be ready for anything Veeam wants to do with you, or whatever the customer wants with respect to high availability. >> Yeah. >> And as the definition changes, you got to be enabling that. >> Totally available if you can get to it through the network. (John laughing) And we certainly carry that all the way through the UCS fabric. >> Talk about Veeam strategy, because I think there's general perception that, oh, Veeam does backup for small- and medium-sized business, that's Veeam. And we had Peter McKay on yesterday, he said, "A third of our business is SMB, a third is commercial, a third is enterprise," number one. Number two is, you guys are getting into the orchestration and management for data availability. Can you talk about the extension of Veeam, in that regard? >> I want to actually grab on your number, because we talked about, oh, we got a thousand VMs, that needs to be backed up and recover. That was a couple of years back, Today, we talk more about ten thousand VMs. Customers actually here at the booth, I talked to customer that talked about ten thousand to twenty thousand VMs that needs to be available. Now I would call a customer that hosts ten thousand VMs no longer an SMB customer, right? That's more of the enterprise, and you're right, and I guess Peter McKay said the same. I didn't actually watch the video, so hopefully, I'm inline with him, but it's really he's, for sure, going into the enterprise, making sure the products actually fit the enterprise's needs. Talking about the orchestration piece, I mentioned before, Veeam Availability Orchestrator we recently announced and released, that's certainly a step into the enterprise market because an SMB customer, even a mid-range customer, they will not invest in an orchestration layer that provides the full capabilities of fade-over secondary data centers, and all that stuff. That's certainly an enterprise play, and that's also where the company's heading to, making sure we have the right fit for the still SMB customers, and mid-range customers, because I think they are still important to the business, right? I'm not saying they're unimportant. But also having the right products, and the scale. And I think scale is actually something we going to talk about anyway, in this conversation. The right scale, to even cover that customer, ten thousand VMs, twenty-thousand VMs, they are approaching us. >> I think the other big trend that we see, and I wonder if you guys could comment, is, again, data protection, backup, used to be an afterthought, and it also used to be kind of a one-size-fits-all. So that'd mean, almost by definition, you're either under-protected or over-protected, spending too much, or too little. Today you're offering much more granularity, and the like; it's a fundamental component of the platform that you're developing, and it's extending beyond just backup. Call it data protection, there's a security component, there's a DevOps and cloud piece, there's a management piece. Maybe you guys could give us your perspectives on those trends. >> Yeah, so short comment on that one, actually, in each and every one of my sessions I speak here, I always say, once you consider to replace your storage system, or your v-stream wired man, or you consider to use HCI, make sure you include data protection immediately, on Day One of your project, because, you're completely right, the last year or so, even still now, a lot of customers I'm going to, they tell me, oh, I replaced all my infrastructure last 6 months, 8 months, and now I want the data protection. Then I get in and I say, yeah, unfortunately, what you did on your infrastructure is completely wrong for the expectations and the requirements you have in data protection. So that's exactly what to talk about, you need to bring together those projects and make sure you bring them under one hood, and talk about this from Day One. Otherwise, you might get in to a wrong direction. >> Yeah, that whole-house view of the world. >> I think, from a Cisco perspective, we really look at, we're unifying the data, we have what your intentions are, your intentions are production apps, your intentions are data protection. I think through ACI we can certainly create the application profiles to make that happen. We carry through our fabric with the UCS system, so for us, we see ourselves as flexible enough to deliver all these options, obviously there's some improvements that we can bring, you know we were talkin' earlier. But that's part of the road map, and part of the way we want to go with Veeams. >> I think one of the things I'm impressed with Cisco about, and looking at the analysis, is that the network guys have always had the keys to the kingdom. You go back to IT, you go back twenty years, if you were a network guy, you ran the show. And you had storage guys came in, they became that same kind of tier, but the network was running everything, everything was sacred. Couldn't let the network go down. It ran offices, it ran branches. And then, when the cloud came, the network now with Cloud Native, and some of the stuff going on up at the stack, makes networking skills, people who think like a networking guy, really valuable, because the data needs to be networked. So, the data's now at the application, that's where the security is, so as you guys have your Veeam, you have needs, you're moving data around, you need more in Cisco, you're going to be better for him, so this is a nice dynamic. >> We're trying to instrument it so we understand what their needs are. If you look at AppDynamics, if you look at Tetration, all these things give us more and more visibility to make the right decisions, and hopefully those will all be automated down the road so we can move as fast as the business wants to. >> Well, and I think of things, you know people talk about air gaps for ransomware, but you need more than air gaps, you need analytics that identify anomalous behavior, and the corpus of backup data has all the data there, and if you can figure out how to analyze it, you're going to have a leg up. >> As you said, that's actually a good point because ransomware, and all that stuff, like Tetration, your project to analyze the network traffic and making sure-- I actually get informed, or I take an action, once I identify ransomware attacks, that's something that we can partner up with, because it would literally mean if Cisco identifies an attack, right, they can trigger automatically a backup or a snapshot backup of the data to make sure we actually have a backup right before the attack happens. So you can see a chain of activities and potential new products, or go to marketplace in the next couple of months and years. >> A lot of opportunities. >> Because there is a lot of stuff, and a lot of potential behind those technologies. >> And there's clear visibility from a customer standpoint, that we would report here on theCUBE, that's lookin' at nanosecs and things of that nature, where at the application, whether it's a V-map, or other things. Security and data has to be centric around the app, it decouples from the network so that you're not bumping into each other, you're helping each other, you're more effective. You help them, you guys help each other. This is the new stack model, this is the way it's going. >> I would say that's all what alliances is about, right? (laughing) It's why we have alliance business, right, because no one, neither Cisco nor us, we couldn't do it on our own, we always need a partner to do that. >> Guys, thanks for comin' and sharing the partnership news. I really think, and Alan Cohen, our CUBE guest this week, said, partnerships used to be a tennis match, now it's like soccer, a lot of things going on, multiple players, certainly you know that, Cisco's been doin' a lot of that for a while. Great stuff, thanks for coming on. Final question for you guys, big takeaways from VMworld 2018 this year. Comment, what's your thoughts, third day now, lookin' back, what's the theme here, what's the big story that people need to know about? >> Just from my experience, I've had a lot of conversations around security, and bringing it to our solution, more embedded within. I'm part of the Validated Design Program, and they're asking, at least the conversations that I've had on the floor here, has really been about showcasing some of the other aspects of Cisco, what we can bring from a security perspective to protect the data. I'm certainly bringing that home. >> Awesome. >> And what are you seeing? I just can continue what he said, because the most conversations I had is around scalability and still the data growth. We've been talking about that the last couple of years, but the more data you have, and the more VMs you have, the more challenging it is to protect it. It's all about scalability and making sure you can really cover and fulfill your needs. >> Well, congratulations on your success at Veeam, the numbers don't lie. You guys are doing very well. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations on Cisco, you guys have a clear line of sight on what you guys want to do with the network. >> Thanks. >> It's great to see, thanks for comin' on. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. CUBE coverage here, live, in Las Vegas. From VMworld 2018, it's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us, more Day Three coverage after this short break. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to day two of live coverage with theCUBE here at Cisco live 2018 in Europe. We're in Barcelona, Spain. I'm John, for the co-founder of Silicon Angle. Co-host of the theCUBE, with Stu Miniman, analyst on wikibon,com. As well as Cube co-host many events certainly Stu is not a stranger to Cisco. Open-sourced. And overall, the discretion that digital is having on the enterprise. Our next guest is Michael Kay, global technologist of product strategy of theme software. Michael it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Hey John, hey Stu. >> So, you guys are here with Cisco Veeam, you guys have been a big success story we've coverd on theCUBE many times. You're up Cisco. What's the vibe here, what's going on in the show? >> So back in mid 2017, October 2017, we announced we were going to be on the global price list, and so obviously that this is different from last year in that we're having more conversations, people know what we're doing. For starters, asking how do we protect the network? How do we protect the ASA? Using the firewall and etc. It's very good to have those conversations with the enterprise guys. And they now understand we're able to protect their workload, their data. So, I imagine that it will be exactly the same when we go over to Cisco Live in the US, but this is obviously the first show that we've had where we are talking about availability with Cisco as a joint partner on their global price list. >> One of things that we always see is that with you guys, your logo is everywhere. You've got the big green Veeam. What's the relationship that you guys have with customers? Because you're playing a lot of great spaces. I mean, what's the main relationship in brand promise that Veeam has? >> So I guess from our point of view is that we come from SMB root, if you'd like. But over the years, over that last 10 years, we've developed that scalable product that allows us to protect the larger workload within the enterprise. We also have cloud offerings to enable our service provider partners. So, exactly that, we want to be able to play and protect data in whatever facet that needs to be. So, whether it be cloud, whether it be on-premises, SMB, commercial, enterprise, we want to be able to protect all of those workloads. >> So Michael, one of the things we've been talking about here at the show, you won't just go look at world's agents. It's a big ecosystem and it's been changing. Cisco has got a lot of pieces of big movement software that's happening to cloud and data center. They have dozens of storage relationships and that's where Veeam ties in a lot. Maybe gives a little bit of an overview, kind of the breath and depth of the relationship where you play in relation to UCS, Converged, Hyper Converged, all those pieces. >> Yeah so I guess Converged first. If we look at the majority of the data centers and the customers that we speak to there is still very much, there is a large footprint of Converged infrastructure where that be FlexPod, VersaStack, Pure FlashStack, or Vblock from a DeliMC point of view. And the good thing where we come in is that we have storage integrated in all of them. So, regardless of like, compute, however it brings a nice simplicity model to the customer from that stack. But for us to just slot into that and be able to leverage the storage integrations and to be able to take an efficient snapshot of those virtual machines and push them onto a, maybe Cisco 2600, that modular, scalable server that will both compute and high density storage really gives us a best of both worlds in terms of plugging it into that fabric interconnector. Making is converge backup story or converge available story. >> Yeah so, you mentioned a lot of options out there. Still, most customers, there are more customers that aren't doing some flavor of Converged drive or Converged than are - there is a lot of buzz behind the Hyper Converged piece of it. What are you hearing from customers? You know, you've said there's a lot of kind of CI versus HI that numbers show that out. I mean, there's a lot more solutions out there. It should be in the market a lot longer. But you know, where are the customers? What are some of the decision points and how has your organization held on them? >> So I guess where we are seeing things that are HyperFlex, where we also have storage integration there from a protection point of view. Seeing many of them feed into that main data center. So, we're protecting the data, we're using our replication engine to push data into that larger data center for hot DR or high ability type solution. And I think that's where we're seeing it. But we are also seeing it more HyperFlex or more HCI come into that main data center for some certain verticals from that point of view. >> Okay, so if I could just unpack what you're saying there, you know, mostly HCIs have been kind of the robust, smaller environments where you know, traditional three tier or CI has been there but we're starting to see that. That blurring of the lines between what is there. >> Yeah, people are definitely bringing that HCI, that simplicity, that scalable simplicity model into their main data center as it kind of merges with that converged offering right? So. >> Yeah, the other thing that's very clear, the Veeam show last year when we covered it really customers trying to bake out their cloud strategy. You know, how does that tie into all this discussion here? Cisco is talking a lot about multicloud, that's really the management plain, how do you see that from an availability solution? >> Yeah, okay, so yesterday I sat in the Keynote and reading some of the stuff, we had our sales kick off last week and some of our stuff really resonates with our message as well that's out there. So the whole multicloud, our tagline is around any app, any data, any cloud. So it kind of resonates with what Cisco is saying. And that's obviously a good thing. But, so whether that be the public cloud, whether it's to enable our service providers to leverage the Cisco technology plus Veeam to offer a service out to our existing Veeam customers. The On-Premise's solution. Or whether that'd just be on-premises they sense that we just talked about whether Converged or whether HCI top plate. >> What the big thing you guys learned at your sale's kick-off because we always wonder what goes on in these sale's kick-off. People like cheering, their making their quota, business is good, but they listen to customers. What's the big used cases that you guys are really doing well with Cisco on? I mean that's ultimately the pattern that has kind of emerged. There is always a best product. What's the hot, used case for you guys? >> So I think one of our biggest things is about how do we partner with the likes of Cisco. How do we leverage that relationship to bring more Cisco validated designs, reference architectures, from a technical point of view up. So when the good door, the numbers being rah-rah as you're in the sale's kick-off but ultimately it's about the vision. How do we go forward with that partnership? Being on that price list is really going to help us get into some of those accounts, from that point of view. But also, we've got, from a technical point of view, I know that we've got the design, we've got the model behind this. >> Yeah, when did you guys get onto the price list? Recently? >> Uh, I believe it was October. >> So just recently? >> So really recently. >> Some deals are just going to be flying in. Right? (laughs) >> Hopefully, right. >> What's the biggest challenge that you find with Veeam's customers? Because you guys have certainly done really well. Again, we've covered your success on theCUBE many times with other events, like Vmworld and others. What's the ah ha moment for the customers with Veeam? Is it just the easiest solution? Is it a technical paid point they saw? What's that moment when the customer really gets it? >> So, I think the simplicity, that easy-to-use, easy to deploy, regardless whether you're three, six tier host shop or whether you're a multi 10,000 VM type enterprise estate. It's being able to use that same tool-set to protect all the way through. That's really simple. We really want to keep that user interface really easy to consume, and use, and scale. So that's one of the key areas that I've seen that we're playing in. >> Alright, so it's 2018 now, we've got a looming, headwind that a lot of customers we are concerned about, haven't heard a lot about it at this show, but GDPR, that's definitely something on everybody's mind. Is this another Y2K that's going to slow down ID bind or are there engagements? How does Veeam work with customers? What's it going to do with the landscape of IT this year? >> So we were, we've been looking at GDBR Compliance and our messaging in those has been, we've been really working on how we start mentioning this and marketing this out from a Veeam perspective. So we're not going to keep, we're not going to get anyone GDBR compline. But what we are going to do is help you understand where that data is, how long has it been kept for, where is it kept, where it's stored, et cetera. So update three that we've released just before Christmas it was around location tag in. So if that back-up comes into a certain GO then we want to be able to tag that, and that tag stays with that back-up data wherever it goes. Then we've got Veeam ONE, the monitors and reports against that. So you know whether you've violated GBDR compliance or a violation of where that data should have be located. But it's one of the things that it's not a day that kind of goes back the moment where I'm not speaking to someone about GDPR. And obviously, it's really, it's coming around very fast. May this year, is when it comes into force. >> Are people shaking in their boots? I mean, I'm hearing, like, a lot of people really nervous. I mean it's kind not has been played up. Certainly the press has been covering it but I mean the Y2K problem, you remember those glory days, you know, the millennial, you know that bug never really happened. But GDPR is a freaking, hard-core enforcement. And the penalties are stiff. >> Yeah. >> I mean it's ridiculous. >> That's a big percentage of your gross income. Right, the people that I speak to are definitely aware and concerned that they need to be in this particular state by the time we get to May. It's not about waiting until that date in May. It's about how do we do it now and start understanding it a bit more about our data. Cisco yesterday, on the main stage said, "it's all about data." And absolutely resonates exactly with what we want to do. We want to be able to do more with that but also we need to understand what that data is and how long do we keep them for. Or why we're keeping it? And ask those questions to these new data protection officers, data-- >> Well people are having more data driven strategies and we were commenting yesterday. We didn't kind of, we didn't hear much here about that Cisco not using that data driven. Is it just not a real big data show or not a lot of AI here yet but if you got data driven, you better have data protection, right? I mean, you can't have both. >> They kind of go hand-in-hand, right? And I think that's another thing where we're coming into the fold. Is that we've got features in our tool-set that allows us to spin up that data, in an isolated network. We had to run test against them. Run compliance checks against them. To make sure that, one, the back-up comes up. So, when you're not waiting until that problem hits. So you can bring it up but also test against updates, et cetera. >> Alright, so here is a question for you. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer. Okay, "Well you know, I really am on-premises, on-prem." Stu, depend on how you want to argue that point. Well Stu and I argued about it yesterday about on-prem versus on-Premises. I'm on-premises, I'm getting my cloud operation. I've got my data protection. But I really got to get into the cloud. I've got some stuff in the cloud now. Cloud is my mision. I'm going to be moving to the cloud in a very big way. How does Veeam help me? >> So, we want to bring the technology that you've been using on-premises, hopefully, maybe Veeam, and we want to take that same, easy-to-use concept, that same UI that you've using and really, hopefully you've seen it as a simplistic approach to your data. We're taking the headache out of the data protection story. But if you are pushing into those public clouds, being able to give you a seamless way-- >> So same dashboard, same-- >> Similar tool-sets, exactly that. And being able to protect that. >> Across multiple clouds as well? Because multicloud is hot. >> Yeah, exactly, we want to be able to be like we are within virtualization. Being able to protect any workload on VMWare, Hyper-V, et cetera. We also want to be able to protect any of those public clouds. From using the same tool-set to be able to protect that same file format that we're backing up to, same fundamentals that we have. >> I want to get your view on Cisco Live here. You're in on Keynote, you go to number shows, you know, this show used to be, it was hard-core networking, it was all networking. CCIEs and everything. We're sitting here in the DevNet zone. They've got developers, got good storage ecosytsems here. How do you look at the audience here compared to say, a VM world or some of the other partner activities that you go to? >> So I think like couple of years ago, they were kind of saying that you need to broaden your knowledge as an IT consultant, IT person, within a company. You have to expand your technologies. You can't just be the networking guy. You can't just be the storage guy. And I think that we're, I don't know if you guys see it, but definitely seeing more broaden people like, again, like I said there, the people that I'm having conversations with at the booth, they're all aware of what we do now. So, they have clearly broaden their knowledge away from that networking. But, also with the likes of the DevNet. So like being able to code, and all of the API driven type stories that we hear. It's also being able to leverage that and push that into whatever that data center needs to be from an automation orchestration point of view. So, and everyone plays a part in that. Whether it's the storage, whether it's the availability, whether it's the compute vendors, whether it's the virtualization. Everyone has a part to play in that, that automation orchestration piece. >> Awesome. Well how has your experience with the show has been as a European flavor year, what's your take away? >> Um, I guess-- >> John: Customer action, good partners? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm speaking to your Cisco reps. Kind of seeing it from a Veeam point of view in your region. Understand a bit more about around GDBR. GDBR is coming in. So there is no way of getting around that. Understand what tools can actually help you be more compliant. Also, look at, I've spoken to a number of people around that conversion, HCI piece, and they weren't aware around the integration. So, go away and see if we do fit in that integration piece. Existing customers go away and find out that information, and yeah. >> So what's the difference between an North American customer and an European customer? Do they have little nuances? Do they have regional issues by sovereignty in countries? Is there a buyer behavior from a Veeam customer standpoint? Difference between a customer in North America versus Europe? >> So, I'm mostly over in Europe but the customers that we speak to over in the US, that's the most concerning part around that GDBR piece, there is still, I have that understanding of what GDBR is doing. If they are holding data. Especially these larger enterprises. They are going to be holding data for those European countries. So they need to be compliant that way. And that's the misunderstanding maybe from some of the people. >> So European are more savvier on the compliance side? >> From the people that I have spoken to they know that it affects them because they're in country and holding that data. However, it affects everyone. It's a global compliance if you're holding data from anyone. >> I think in North America they kicked the can down the road. Oh wow, GDBR's upon Europe. Alright, Europeans are very savvy on compliance. That's a huge issue, data drive, data protection. We're here inside theCUBE with Veeam software. I'm John Furrier and Stu Mimiman live from Barcelona for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. More coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: From Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Here in Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, with my partner in crime this week Stu Miniman, Senior Analyst at Wikibon. Also co-host of many events across the world in terms of networking, storage, Cloud, you name it, Stu is on the developers with me. Stu, thanks. Nice seeing you. Stefan Renner is Technical Director, Global Alliances at Veeam Software is with us with Darren Williams, @MrHyperFlex, that's his Twitter handle, go check him out. HyperFlex-V at Cisco, guys welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Also love the Twitter handle. >> Darren: I live the brand. >> You live the brand. I mean that's got some longevity to it, it's evergreen. So congratulations on that. You guys are together with Cisco Veeam, what's the story? What's going on in Europe with Cisco and Veeam? >> I would say there is a lot of stuff going on between Cisco and Veeam. Especially around the Hyperflex story, obviously is the topic of this session, right? So having integration, Hyperflex, having a good go-to-market, having a good relationship between the two companies. We just joked about how often we've been in front of cameras talking about this exact same topic. So that shows that the relationship between the two of us is really moving forward and in a good shape. >> I think we're in good shape in terms of, you think about not just my product, Hyperflex, but you look at what Veeam can do for the rest of Cisco data-centered products, and be that backup, safer hands around what we need in terms of that data protection layer. But also then, what we can add in terms of that target to be the server of choice for backups so you get the benefits of the speed, performance, and more importantly, you get quicker restores. Because that's the important bit, you need to be able to do the quick restore. >> Yeah, we usually talk about availability, right? We don't talk about backups or recovery. Even if recovery is maybe the most important part of availability, still we talk more about availability than maybe anything else. The good thing about Cisco is that the actually can deliver what we need in terms of performance, in terms of capacity, in terms of compute resources. So yeah, that's a real benefit. >> It's such an interesting time, I mean we look back at history, go back 10 years ago, maybe, or more; backup recover, that's like, "Oh, we forgot to talk about that in our RFP." Kind of bolted on, kind of retrofitted in. But now we've seen it come to the main center. But more importantly, with AI and Cloud, and all the action happening with DevOpps on premises, you hear CIOs and CXOs and developers saying, "We're data driven." >> Yeah. >> Okay, so if you're data driven, you have to be data protection driven too. So those things go hand in hand. So the question for you guys is how does a data driven organization, whether it's in the data center, all the way up to the business units, or the business processes, become data protection built in? How do they design in from day one a data protection system up and down the stack? >> Yeah, so maybe I'll start to answer that question. I think when I'm going to customers, and I fully agree on what you just said, most customers 10 years ago were focusing on getting used to platforms and getting used to org systems. It has to be an isolated project, right? Now in those days when I go to customers I tried to convince them to include data protection in every project the do in data center, because at the end, data protection is one of the core elements. >> So designing in early, at the front end? >> I say whenever you go about having a new Hyperflex system or whenever you talk about replacing your existing environment, whatever you do, right, just look into data protection, looking into your availability story. Because right now, and you mentioned that, it's about data services, right? We don't really talk about restoring of EM, we don't restore to the single file. It's about, the customer wants to have a data availability in terms of a service availability. And that includes more than just the VM, it includes more than just the single thing, right? >> Yeah. So they need to include data protection and the design of that in the whole org chart. From the beginning. >> And you're point? >> Yeah we look at it from a similar thing in terms of where you've got changes happening in terms of the way people are looking at how they want to design their applications, where they want their data to live. And that's the whole messaging around 3.0, is that multi-Cloud readiness platform. Being able to think about an application and go, "Do I want to design in the public, and house privately, "or vice versa? Do I want to house the data "of the application in a private location "and the actual application in public?" Having that being able to be transparent to a user in terms of the way they design it and then position, but also as we look at other applications, not all people on this journey are going to go, "We're going to put everything in the Cloud." They're going to look at about, maybe have a little bit in the Cloud, a little bit of the traditional apps we need to manage and protect. And it's all about that 3.0 that we've delivered the pre-multi-Cloud offering around Hyperconvergence, we've now brought the multi-Cloud element. It's giving you the choice of where you want to position things, where you want to house things, how you want to design things. And keeping it nice and simple for customers, and the agility and performance. >> Darren, some really interesting points that you just had there. When I think back to a few years ago, Hyperconverge, pretty strong in North America. But it was project based, it was like, let's take a VDI, some virtualized environment, it wasn't a Cloud discussion. >> Darren: Correct. >> Take us inside what you're seeing in Europe here, because today Hyperconverge is a lot about Cloud, how that kind of hybrid or multi-Cloud environment, so what are you hearing from your customers? >> Absolutely, and I think if you look at the, what's happened in times of Hyperconvergence up to this point it's the initial building block of this multi-Cloud. And we're seeing more and more customers now, I think the latest IDC survey, surveyed that 87% of all customers have a multi-Cloud strategy. And we're seeing now more of the ability to think of Hyperconvergence as that multi-Cloud strategy, and have that simplicity that people have done in terms of the initial thought around a simple application, how they can collapse the layers, they can now utilize that experience into the multi-Cloud experience. And we're seeing more and more of that. We've now got 2500 users around the world around Hyperflex, and about 700-800 EMEA, and the majority of those are utilizing it as private Cloud experience. They're getting the benefits of what they've had in the Cloud, and getting away from the sovereignty issues, and the shadow IT issues that they all face. They can now bring it back into their own data center. They can start small. They can spin out applications very quickly. They're getting the benefit of that Cloud message, but locally now. >> And I think that perfectly aligns with the Veeam story because as you know we are also focusing on the Cloud. We recently changed and also did some acquisitions on the Cloud, so we're also moving forward in the Cloud story and the HyperCloud area. And that's more or less what Cisco's multi-Cloud's story is also about, right? And I think one thing we should also mention here coming a bit back to how to implement and how to design such solutions as having more of a broad view on all the projects. I think one important thing for customers is the CBD Cisco has, right? And we do have CBD available to beam Cisco on the data protection layer. So we try to make it really easy for customers and for partners to design, implement and actually do the right decisions for those projects. >> Stefan, at Veeam On, of course a lot of partners, a lot of talk about the multi-Cloud, of course Veeam has a long history of VMware, but why don't you talk about Microsoft? I believe there's some things you've been doing lately with Hyper-V and the like, what's the update? >> Yeah, so obviously with Hyperflex there is Hyper-V coming, right? That's one of the bigger things coming to Hyperflex. Now for us, when we started to talk with Cisco, Cisco actually told us that Hyper-V is next and 3.0. We said that's fine for us, because as I said, we are dealing with Hyper-V like we did with VMware since a couple of years. So there is no big difference in terms of features and what we can do with Hyper-V. On the Microsoft side obviously it's around extract, which also is a big story with Cisco and Veeam, because there is a extract solution, and so we tried to get the extract fully integrated in the Veeam portfolio, and it's about effort, right? As we just talked about, making this Cloud journey even easier for the customer, making sure we have data protection forever, or making sure we can actually use our Cloud solutions to provide the full experience in the cloud. >> So the question on European audience, I was just looking at some Twitter tweets, getting in some feedback, is, "Ask the GDPR our question." Which is basically code words for the sophistication between data protection, you know we say as you get bitten in the butt if you don't prepare. And this is one of those things where I mean literally, there's so much data out there, people can't understand their own tables. I mean, if you have accounts, how do I know a user uses a certain name in this one, I got a certain name in this database, I mean it's just a nightmare to even understand what data do you have, nevermind taking someone out of a database. >> Yeah. >> So, the challenges are massive. >> Yep. >> This is coming down and it really highlights the bigger trend is: what do I do with the data, what is my protection, what's my recovery, how do I engage in real time, GDPR issue? Talk about the GDPR issue, and then what it really is going to mean for customers going forward. >> Well, I think if you think about GDPR, and people, I've got the understanding that it's just a mere thing, it's not. It's a worldwide thing. Any data that relates to a European citizen, anywhere in the world, is covered under the GDPR. So you've got to think about the multinationals we work with, have to have this GDPR thoughts, even if they're not based in EMEA. They may house data based around a European citizen. So it's a massive thing. Now, not one person or one organization can fix GDPR. We're all part of a bigger framework. So it looks like if you look at the Hyperflex offering, having self-encrypting drives, having good data protection and replication of the data so it's protected. That protects the actual content of a record, but it doesn't solve everything around GDPR. There's no one organization that can do that. It's about having that framework of you do the right decisions around the architecture, and the data protection, you'll get in there in terms of the protection. >> Well, I mean, I'm just going to rant here and say whoever came up with GDPR doesn't know anything about databases, okay. >> Darren: Yeah. >> I mean I get the concept, but, I mean, just think about how hard it is to deal with unstructured data, and structured data in and of itself within a company. Nevermind inside a company, what's happening externally, it is a technical nightmare. And so, yeah, just hand waving, "Hey, someone came "to your website." Well, did they come in anonymously, did they login, which identity did they login on? There's no - I mean it's a nightmare. This is a huge problem. What do customers do? >> I think if you talk about GDPR it's first of all not about a single solution, right? It's not an issue of just one company, or one vendor, one solution. It goes across different databases, different applications, different software, so as you said, it's database solutions, you need to delete maybe a single table entry, which is almost impossible right now. Especially if that's ina backup, right? How are you going to do that? I think between Cisco and us, and he mentioned that one important part of GDPR is data protection itself. So the customers need to make sure they can actually promise and they can show to the government that they have a proper data protection in place, so they can showcase what does my DR plan look like? How do I recover? What is my RPO? So we can already solve those issues. >> It changes your game because, for you, it turns you into a insurance policy to a proactive; in order to do data protection you actually have to know what the data is. So it kind of creates an opportunity to say hey, this is an opportunity to say we're going to start thinking about, kind of a new e-discovery model. >> If you look at 3.0, the multi-Cloud platform, we were discussing around how Hyperconvergence started very small in certain apps. But when you actually then expand that out into the multi-Cloud, security is a major pillar. And you've got to have the security elements, and Cisco has some great security offerings in the data center and outside of the data center. They all form part of that GDPR message. But it's been baked into multi-Cloud 3.0. as a key component to allow customers that confidence. >> It's going to be a Hyperconvergence of databases. So this is coming. >> Darren: Yeah. >> So this is going to force, I think the compliance is going to be more a shot across the bow, if you will. I don't know how hardcore they're going to be enforcing it. >> It's going to be interesting in the first one. Because at the moment I think a lot of customers are thinking, "Well, we'll wait till we see "how big the fines are, and then we'll decide." >> They're going to create shell corporations in the Cayman Islands. (laughter) >> Alright, so we've talked a little bit about some of the headwinds we're facing in IT. Talk about the tailwinds. A lot of things in the Hyperflex 3.0, got 700-800 customers, what's going to drive adoption, get that into thousands of customers here in 2018? >> So I think it's the simplicity message. Customers want ease of use of technology. They want to get away from what they've had before where they've had tough times standing up applications, where they've had to invest time around different skill sets for the infrastructure, be it networking, be it storage, be it compute. Having 3 teams back leaning against each other, and change windows. So the simplicity message of Hyperflex is you can have a three node cluster up and running in 34 minutes, including the network. We're the only ones that incorporate the network into the solution, and we do it for good reason. Because when we can get predictability in performance, and we can grow the solution very, very easily. And that's the whole point of what they're doing, is they want to be able to start small, and add more nodes when required, around what applications they're going to deploy on. Our tagline is "any application, anywhere" now, and either private location or into that multi-Cloud location. Gives customers choice, and I think as we start seeing more and more customers, 700 in just under 2 years is a phenomenal amount in EMEA, and 2500 worldwide, we've had some great traction. And it's just going to get faster and faster. >> Yeah, I think a lot of customers are obviously talking about moving to the Cloud completely or at least majority of the data. So for the customers that stay for them, and I talked with some customers today, and they told me, "For us right now, we can't focus "anymore on a data center itself. "We do have much more difficult and more important "topics to talk about and to cover in our IT business "than the basic data center itself" That includes compute, that includes digitalization. So it's great to hear you can actually set up a Hyperflex system, no matter if that's Hyper-V or VM or whatever in less than an hour, right? And if I tell you now that if you add Veeam on that to provide the availability for Hyperflex environment that's also less than an hour. So if you know how to configure that you can be done in a couple of hours, and you have more or less the whole data center set up. >> You bring up a really good point. What are customers concerned about? I have to worry about my application portfolio, I have my security issue, my whole Cloud strategy piece, so, if the infrastructure piece is just invisible and I don't have to touch it, tweak it and do that, I'm going to have time to actually grow my business. >> The more integrated it is, the more easy it is to set up and to maintain and troubleshoot by the way, that's also an important thing, right? What if it doesn't work? If there is a consistent layer, a consistent way to get all this information sent to get a troubleshooting thing done, the better it is for our customers. Because again, they don't want to care anymore about what's happening in the back end. >> And that's the next challenge we're addressing, in-app product or Insight, is taking that management solution into the Cloud to make things easier for customers. And being able to take a lot of the things we have in point product into a Cloud model. So the likes of analytics, the likes of Smart Tac. Customers get fed up if when they have an issue they have to go and roll the logs up into Tac, and then go and FTP them. They get away from that, they don't need to do that in Insight. And it's all about, we're talking about the deployment of technology, well one of the fist benefits of Insight is Hyperflex. We can roll out sites without even visiting them. You just do a Cloud deployment, and a Cloud management, and it's job done. >> And this is the whole point we were kind of getting at earlier, connect back to the compliance issue, these agile like things are happening; it's throwing off data too. So now you got to organize the data, you can't protect what you don't understand. >> Correct. >> I mean that is ultimately the bottom line for what's happening here. >> Yeah, you can't protect what you don't understand, I think that's a good conclusion of the whole thing. And I think for us >> By the way when you guys use that tagline I want royalties. But it's true. (laughter) We'll get back to you on that. No, but this is a big problem. Protection is inherently assuming you know the data is. >> Stefan: Yeah. >> Darren: Yeah. >> There it is. >> That's for sure the case, and one thing we worked on and, you know, we announced it a couple of months ago, was the Veeam Ability Orchestrator, which is another layer on top of it. So he just talked about how they can deploy within the site, multiple sites of Hyperflex very easily. And for us it's about, you know, getting the customer an easy solution with all the successful recovery and failovers in areas across the data centers with the Availability Orchestrator. >> Data is the competitive advantage, data is messy if you don't control it and reign it in, of course theCUBE is doing their part and bringing the data to you guys here in theCUBE with Veeam and Cisco partnership. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman breaking it down here at Cisco Live in Europe 2018. Live coverage with theCUBE. Be back with more after this short break. (techno music)

>> Voiceover: Live from New Orleans, it's the Cube covering VeeamON 2017 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans 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 here with my cohost Stu Miniman. Frank Palumbo is here. He's the senior vice president at Cisco Systems. And Andy Vandeveld is the vice president of Global Alliances at Veeam Software. Gents, welcome to The Cube. >> How we doing? >> Thank you. >> It's great to be here. >> Good, Frank, hot off the keynote. It was great, Yankees fan, love it. The rivalry continues. Of course you guys know the Cube, Red Sox fans, some of us. Stu's not. >> Not all of us. >> So we love it. We love the action, and it's always fun. But Frank we had to cut out a little bit before your keynote because we had to get ready to do the Cube. But you put up a slide that was awesome. We could do an hour on The Cube on that, and it's all about the apps, I mean really. But you had this great slide with apps and microservices and virtualization and bare metal and OnPrim and really laying out the complexity today. And you guys are at the heart of that. Maybe give us a quick summary of how you guys see the world. >> When you're talking about the applications, the application profile, it's important, the network kind of brings this together because we do touch everything. Where people are in this kind of application history is some of them are on legacy, mainframe. Some of them are on RISC processors. But as a network provider, we have to bring those in too even with the more modern applications. So you look at what the platforms or workloads are on so move those in. And then you're looking at workload placement, on Prim or in the Cloud. Do we put data in a colo? Do we put the application in the Cloud? There's different hybrid mentalities to do that. Then you get into the systems management where there's just too much stuff out there. Humans can't manage it anymore so the machines and the software have to manage the machines and the software. We'd like to think we're right in the middle of that because of the way we bring things together with the network. >> So Andy, I look at the... Stu and I walked the floor before we come in here, the ecosystem is really quite impressive-- >> Andy: Thank you. >> for a relatively small company. I mean not that small anymore. It didn't just happen overnight. Maybe you could talk a little bit about themes and philosophy with partnerships and some of the things that you're doing with Alliances generally and specifically get into the Cisco partnership. >> Well I think partnerships have been in our DNA since the beginning of the company. We're a 100% channel-lead company. We don't have a direct sales force. That's an important piece of the company's philosophy. These alliances are really key for us because as we start to move into markets that are maybe a little bit higher than where we've been into the large enterprise and mid-enterprise and large enterprise, we really look at partnerships like the one with Cisco that are going to benefit Veeam and the customers by us being together doing joint developments. Some of the things that Frank talked about in his keynote speech, those are the sorts of things that create solutions for that level of customer where Cisco's been resident for many, many years. So we look at these partnerships as really central to where Veeam wants to go as a company and where we think customers want Veeam to participate with the partners. >> What's the specific nature of the partnership? Can you unpack that a little bit for us? >> From my side, certainly we have a robust go-to-market relationship in terms of when we're positioning UCS or Hyperflex, our server and hyper converged platforms, now we can bring to bear the Veeam value problem as we go forward with customers. And customers look to Cisco really to complete the story and offer an end-to-end solution. We weren't able to complete it without the Veeam technology. Then on the development side, some of the things that we're doing, we've integrated so now the Veeam software can work with our Snap technology and hyper converge. So you're starting to see it come together at the screen level with the bits and bytes in terms of the integration. >> Dave: So there's a greater degree of technical integration as well. >> Frank: Yes. >> It's not just go-to, I mean that's important because a lot of times back-up data protection is kind of an afterthought. It's a bolt-on. But if you're going to be a complete solution provider, that's fundamental and it's becoming more important. >> I think you know I was just mentioning to Frank back in the green room before we came out here I look at the start of this partnership as really being about 18 months ago. Although we'd had a partnership for a while, we really kind of started about 18 months ago in this meeting that we had at their partner conference in Maui. And Radmeer and I sat down with Frank and kind of explained why we thought data protection was a solution that Cisco could get behind particularly now that they were coming out with their S-Series devices. But that's just the start of it. It has to come with integration as well. Then we started with Hyperflex. It was a new product for them, 1.0 version. With the 2.0 version, we got integrated with snapshot technology like Frank mentioned. I look at this short runway of time in this relationship that kicked off with our meeting with Frank and he got it right away. We didn't have to explain it. >> Dave: It resignated. >> Frank: Oh, no question. We're very proud of our S-Series storage server. The hardware is nice. The infrastructure piece is nice, but it really doesn't come together unless you got the application on a run with it. That's where Veeam just jumps in and fills that gap perfectly for us. >> Frank, I think back to when virtualization really took off. Networking was one of the things that we had to fix. It put a lot of stress on the network. It's one of the reasons Cisco created UCS and backup also creates a lot of strain on the network. So it seems a natural fit. Can you talk about all the complexities that are coming and how you're going to be, what can we expect to see from jointly going forward? >> I think we've learned a lot from Veeam in terms of they've been able to really attack complex issues in a very simple fashion. Simplicity is the game with customers right now. Things are moving so fast. If you can't be simple, you're going to have a tough time out there. So I think that's where it's really come together for us in that vein. But when you look at the value of data and whether it's a second old or two years old or a year old, there's so many different more paradigms coming out about what you can do with this data. And customers and even customers of customers have now found ways to use this data either to make better decisions, monetize it, to stay away from things. So that's why this whole lifecycle for us is so important. This is where Veeam and us can really do some nice things for customers. >> Andy, can you build on that about the multi-Cloud position that Veeam has? How many of those, do you know, touch what Cisco's doing here and how does the partnership help drive that value of data type offering? >> For Veeam, our message is all about availability, availability of the data which makes the applications available and which basically makes the business stay up and running. One analogy we use is a cell phone. When you're cell phone dies, you can't get access to your email. You can't get access to your instant messages. >> Dave: You freak bascially. >> You feel like you're lost, right? >> Frank: It's getting kind of pathetic. >> Yeah. >> Dave: It is pretty bad. >> So think about not being able to get access to your data or access to your applications because of some outage, not being able to backup and recover. Your business could go out of business. Working with Cisco on solutions that are on premise, that are in the Cloud, that are multi-Cloud is really the value of the partnership that we have that we bring together. It's just at the beginning. We've got solutions that we're building now. We got solutions that are on the horizon. We've got a very strong go-to-market partnership in a very short period of time that are targeting enterprise customers, service providers, the whole gamut. It's really that sort of relationship that you find in an industry every so often. When it comes together like it has with us and Cisco, it's really a very strong, strong value prop. >> Well Veeam capitalized on the original virtualization trend with VMware that was a big transformation, the server infrastructure. You're seeing a huge network transformation now. There are so many forces affecting the network that I wonder, Frank, if you could comment on. You got ScaleOut. There's Flash. There's Cloud. There's Microservice. There's DevOps makes everything go faster. The flattening of the network. Describe what's happening and then maybe you can talk about how your ecosystem is going to take advantage of that. From what were the challenges the network has is exactly like you said. You have certainly the virtualized workloads now. The Microservices containerize workloads. I think the one people forget about is there's still a ton of bare metal out there, right? You look at the Hadoop workloads and such. A lot of these are bare metal oriented, right? Quite frankly, moving a VM around a fabric is actually pretty easy to do. But when you got to move a bare metal workload around a fabric, and that's something we can do with UCS the way we do it statelessly, that's much harder. That's why we have the extraction layer with what we call the fabric interconnection with UCS to do that kind of stuff. I think that's sometimes lost in the translation in terms of how you're going to handle all these different workloads. >> If I understand it, the link then to the opportunity for you guys, Andy, is that the stakes are just much higher now, right? You could do so much more around the networks. Stakes are so much higher. That increases the need for your products and services. Carry that through if you would. >> Well, it is. As we make our way up-market into the enterprise, the amount of data that businesses are spinning off of, their infrastructure and their data center or from robo offices or wherever, is growing immensely. Being able to have a partnership with an infrastructure provider like Cisco, where we can put solutions together that really give the customers the rock solid base for backing up their data and making sure that it's available is really critical for us as we move into those larger enterprise and larger environments. So this is an essential relationship I would say. >> I think, too, if I could mention, this is something our channel wanted to see, too. We're the same. We're at about 98% of our business goes through the channel. So they're selling our full line of infrastructure products. This completes the story for them. So we got a lot of guides to them say, "Hey, yes, Cisco. "We'd like to see you come together with Veeam "so we can start bundling offers out there in the market "and be that kind of end-end-to supplier, too." That was a big impetus especially from mid-market up to enterprise customers. >> Excellent, well, we got to wrap there. The partnerships give you huge leverage as a small, again not so small company anymore. The fact that you can get somebody like Frank to come down, talk about the partnership, is a testament to what you guys have built. So congratulations. Really appreciate you guys coming on The Cube. >> No, my pleasure, our pleasure. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is The Cube. We're live from New Orleans, VeeamON 2017. We'll be right back. (tinkling music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From Barcelona, Spain. It´s theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco Veeam and theCUBE´s ecosystem partners. >> Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE´s exclusive live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain with Cisco´s Live 2018 Europe. I was going to say DevNet, but we´re on the DevNet zone. I´m John Furrier, your host, with Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon.com . Our next guest is Susie Wee, who´s Vice-President, CTO of DevNet. Susie, CUBE alumni, welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Great to see you, welcome to Barcelona. >> John: Thank you for having us, we´re in the hot section of the Devnet Zone, the signs, cause it´s a big part of the hallway here. And it´s really where the action is. >> Susie: It is. >> You guys have continued to do a great job and we´re psyched to be on the ground where the action is. Thanks for inviting us. >> Great, I´m glad that you´re here. There´s so much going on. >> Okay, so Devnet is this renaissance going on at Cisco. But it´s also not just a Cisco phenomenon, the world of software development is seeing an explosion. I mean, from the edge of the network, and crazy fringe of cryptocurrency, blockchain, all the way into app development and then under the hood DevOps. Some really great things are happening, you have it featured here, DevOps, at Devnet. What´s going on at the DevNet zone? >> Yeah, it´s really interesting because what happens is here at Cisco live and here in the DevNet zone, we have basically people who deployed network and Compute Infrastructures, around Europe. And so, it´s pretty amazing that we have the people who are like feet on the street, working in those networks, deploying them, digitizing Smart Cities, putting up new buildings, putting up new infrastructure everywhere. And, what´s really cool is, they´re all interested in learning about APIs and software. And, so, that´s not easy, right? That´s something that´s a big shift in, like, I´m running a network infrastructure, and I´m ready to learn about software and deep-dive into APIs. So, our new products are coming out, which actually have built-in programmability. Like, the network now has APIs, it´s getting built into the network. And whereas you could always like take a Compute Infrastructure and manage it virtually, use, you know, CICD pipelines and everything there with DevOps. But the thing is, now the Network has APIs and you can now kind of flexibly deploy your network in that same way of DevOps but using Net DevOps, and that´s kind of what it´s all about. >> Yeah, Susie, I wonder, there was so much hype for a bunch of years about like, software to find networking. (Susie laughs) But, under the covers, like behind the scenes, you know, it´s the API economy. That´s where the actions happen, it doesn´t seem like it´s gotten quite the attention, you have some interesting things about where Net and Dev go together. What do people miss out there, that, you know, kind of the industry watchers, that, you know, aren´t here, aren´t seeing the people that are, you know, been spending days already doing stuff here. >> Susie: Yeah. >> And obviously you´re really excited. >> Well there was all the kind of excitement and hype, you know, it kind of went through it´s hype curve of what software-defined networking was and would be and could be. But the thing that we have to remember is that there´s like real mission critical networks operating all around the world and people who are out there, who deploy them and run them and manage them. And so, what happens is, you need to do more than just like put out a new protocol or put out a new innovation. You need to kind of bring the community along and kind of still make those revolutions, but, by evolving, right, having the evolutions and the folks who are deploying and making all the right thing happen. So, what happens is, just SDN is now becoming a reality. Because, it took more than just putting a controller on top of an existing network, like, that´s good, that´s an important part of it. But, it´s also just building programmability into the network elements themselves. And then, being able to get that really kind of rapid responses. You´re, you know, deploying new configuration, setting policy, incorporating security, you know. And so, now, just SDN is becoming real and the real world here, all of these folks are picking it all up. >> So I have to ask you, you mentioned Net DevOps, cause, you, we love, we´ve talked about DevOps all day long, Stu and I, with all the shows and, you know, we´re hop the trot for DevOps. But you said Net DevOps. >> Susie: Yeah. >> What is that? (Susie laughs) >> Can you explain? >> Yeah, it´s really awesome, it´s just basically the fact that, you know, with DevOps you´re taking your applications, cloud applications, deploying them fast, right? Rapidly, CICD, using this infrastructure-as-code type of thinking. Well now, it´s not only the Compute but the network plays in that too. So, basically, if you picture underneath that network is a bunch of network devices, a bunch of security, you know, products, all of these things are coming together to really connect everything. And, that´s becoming programmable. And what happens is now with Net DevOps you can create and treat the network as code. So, you want to deploy changes in your network, you´ll do it with a software configuration update. You know, you want to like, add new devices into the network. You want to add new users and set new policies for security, control how apps are done, how cloud, you know, applications are running. You can actually roll that out as software changes. So, what happens is suddently, it´s not only Compute that works in a DevOps pipeline, but the network is also participating in this Net DevOps pipeline. >> You know, I love this new trend, Net DevOps, because it´s kind of like, the old days was you moved up the stack. Now you see the movement down the stack from the applications, to DevOps, now moving lower to NetOps, Net DevOps. >> Susie: Yes. >> But the question is, that makes still no sense, by the way, but I need to ask. Who´s writing that code? The network guys? So, in DevOps, we knew who the DevOps guys were, it was the operators and the developers kind of coming together. >> Susie: Yeah. >> Yeah, pushing code, real agile. Who does that, the same guys doing DevOps? Or is it the network guys, a combination oh both? Would you... >> Oh, my God. >> A lot of people. (says in foreign language) >> Yeah, it´s really exciting the way that it´s evolving. So, what you see is, you know, in Cisco Live, we have a huge kind of community, just people who come to Cisco Live to get trained, to get their certifications on how to deploy the latest networking technologies and operate, manage them. They get certified and their running those networks around the world. They´re now here, picking up the software skills and learning to use these, the new software products, and being able to deploy in Net DevOps. So, they´re all here to learn about how can I put built-in automation. You know, once you have that programmability and automation you can scale and work things out in really big ways. How can I put applications performance monitoring into my network? You know, and make sure that it´s operating properly and we´re getting the right assurance that it´s performing well. So, the network operators, are picking up those skills. But, in addition, there´s actually the app developers, who are coming in and app developers who are writing, for example, management or DevOps or even, you know, Docker, Kubernetes. Folks who are in that, who need the network. And basically now they´re like "the network has APIs, I can actually use that, so that, if I, you know, for Docker and for Kubernetes, you know, we´re working with Google on stuff. Our developers are actually now writing tools to make sure that, as you´re optimizing your microservices, the placement of them, you´re taking the network into account as well. >> So you kind of get both. >> So it´s interesting, and Kubernetes plays an interesting role because you can actually run those functions >> Susie: Yes. >> On Kubernetes, can´t you? >> Susie: Yes. >> So that´s kind of a new trend. >> Susie: Yeah. >> Who´s, I mean, so they´re writing code in here, in DevNet Zone? Or is that, the network operators are coming in banging out code? >> So, network operator are here banging out code. There´s app developers who are coming in and banging out code as well. And this whole thing of like, you know, the infrastructure guys, the app developer guys. And then, the DevOps. There´s this DevOps professional, kind of like the IT folks that are moving on to embrace DevOps and they´re kind of emerging in the middle of here to use all of these tools that are created in open source. >> So you´re appealing to all constituency stakeholders of software. >> We are, we are, yeah. (laughs) >> We are, and actually I that some... >> Is that why DevNet´s so popular? (laughs) >> I think that people have a need, they see a need and (laughs), and basically what I think, like the trend that´s going on that´s kind of making this stuff happen, is that, we know there´s so much exciting, excitement in applications and cloud and all of the developments there, and the internet of things. These applications need the network more than ever before. So, before, they only used the network for connectivity, but now they need the network for security. They need it for scale. They do need more bandwidth, they need good performance. And, so... >> John: And they need to program that too. >> And they need to program it, exactly. And so, that´s what the new network APIs, the fact that you have a programmable network is what´s letting those guys play. And not just say, you know, before it was "here´s your network, like, just do the most you can, given the performance of the network", right? >> So Susie, first of all... >> But now it´s programmable. >> Congratulations on, you know, the DevNet Zone here is awesome. >> Susie: Thank you. >> And, we know it´s challenging to bring developers in and to, you know, pull this community in where, they might not have been before, there´s retraining everything, but, I was wondering if you can give us a little inside into Cisco. So, Cisco, you know, has been around for decades. Networking company. Software has been a piece of it for a long time, I mean, it´s, you know, even when it´s, you know, "hey, we spent a lot of money on building this chip out there", I was who´s what drove that. Software´s a large piece but, the whole developer angle, getting Cisco behind this, give us a little bit of inside as for what kind of transformation, you know, your team has driven inside to get more of Cisco onboard. I mean, you know, people that are used to selling boxes, and things that, you know, the networking industry is about ports and cables and speeds and feeds and, you know, apps are very different. >> It is, it is very different and it´s, um, it was actually really great. So we´ve built DevNet over the last four years. And it was one thing to kind of have a strategy, like, we knew that the products were going to software, that SDN was emerging. And that, the only way it could actually become real is for Cisco to also participate in it, right? Just cause there´s so much network out there that is Cisco. And so, the entire industry has made that become more real. But, you need to build an ecosystem around it, right? The only reason that it´d have software, like, there´s many reasons, but one of the main reasons is actually to make sure that the ecosystem is participating in the innovation. So, yeah, we created DevNet to, not just focus on our internal development but to provide and kind of catalyze the industry to participate and really innovate and build software on top using all the new APIs. So, um, so yeah, it´s been, it´s been amazing to see the growth and what´s interesting is, over the last 4 years, it´s the community. So, from our first DevNet Zone we had a lot of people who are interested. You know, they´re all like, ah! You know, my day job´s been networking. I coded a long time ago, let me get back into it. But now we see that audience, plus much more. Like, if you look at here at how engaged all of these kind of networkers and developers are, is, they´re right in there. They´re just hungry saying, you know, I have applications that I need to deploy. Applications are hitting the infrastructure. My network can make a difference in how well these new applications run. They´re all in. >> Susie, you´ve done this you´ve done this a number of times, now. Do you have like, kind of the hero numbers as to a what percentage of the attendees you know, spend a bunch of time in the DevNet zone, how much code or applications get written? Just, kind of order of magnitude. >> Susie: Oh. >> Kind of the engagement. >> You mean like, kind of like, from before til now? >> Yeah, well, pr just, you know, what expectations... >> Yeah. >> For this show, what you´ve seen at some of the previous events. >> Yeah, well, kind of what´s funny is, what happened is, the DevNet Zone, like having a developer conference within Cisco Live, it kind of grew as like a "What´s going on there?". And people where immediately interested, it was full. But we have just kind of grown and grown it to have learning labs, to have ISV partners in here, to have just kind of, like, you know, resellers. People who are solutions providers, they are kind of all here. This has, actually turned into the busiest area of Cisco Live. >> Yeah, and you´ve got your own events, too. >> Yes, yes, that´s right. And on top of like having the DevNet Zone here, our developer conference within Cisco Live, what other Cisco audience comes in, right? A huge ecosystem. But also have DevNet Create. So, when we´re going out, app developers are also interested in network APIs. So, it´s not just networkers. And, so, we actually have DevNet Create, which is just the dedicated developer conference for IOT, cloud developers, app developers. And they´ve shown big interest in all of this as well. >> And this is a whole new constituency, but it´s kind of the same game, though, right? It´s like, you offering the programmable network to a whole another net new Cisco community? Is that kind of like you guys look at it? >> It is, and, exactly. And like, we´ve gone outside, we´re offering the network. And what we´re doing is, we´re actually, you know, when you´re a real networking geek, like a networking expert. >> John: Like us. >> You can do network talk, right? And you´re talking network, and you´re kind of getting into all of that. And before app developers were like, we don´t care about that, like, just, we need to write our apps. We shouldn´t have to worry about the network. But, now that those APIs are coming too, and again, their apps are dependent on network performance, they´re dependent on security they can get from the network. It turns out that once we express the value proposition to them, like, this is what a network API can do for you. They´re really interested. >> And even though that we´ve observed that there´s a separation between app developers who just want to write apps >> Susie: Yep >> And software engineering, which is under the hood they still need to be involved in the network because of microservices. >> Susie: Yes. >> So now they have the ability to use APIs that they´re comfortable with, they know ABIs. And, make unique changes to the app, based upon unique network characteristics they can tap into. >> Yeah. >> John: This seems to be the glue in the crossover point for you guys. >> It is. >> John: Did I get that right? >> It is, it is. So, what happens is, there will always be a set of app developers, who of course, are not going to use the network. They´re going to write their app, they´re going to want it to deploy everywhere, of course. I mean, that´s what everybody wants. But you´ve already seen it. As someone writes a cloud app, right? They write a cloud service or a cloud app, and it scales, and they´re deploying their app across different clusters and >> They are learning a lot >> John: They´re going to write >> About what´s going on >> John: They´re going to write policy. >> They´re going to write policies >> Yeah >> They have to decide what countries am I going to spin up my servers in, you know. >> Yeah. >> So, actually, they do a lot of that. So, what happens is, this set of kind of cloud developers, and specially as they moved to microservices as you said, their applications are going to a microservices-based architecture. Things can spin up in different places and then it becomes more critical of, you know, how do these different containers talk to each other? What´s the networking policy for what data can go in and out? What´s the security policy? And, you need to build that in. So, the network matters to them. >> Well, a beautiful thing about what you guys are doing is, you´re catering to a whole new generation of developers who are slinging APIs on one end, but also potentially writing Node.js code. And so, the´re very familiar with IO. >> Susie: Exactly, yes. >> So, microservices is like fish to water. And so, you´re just making it easier >> Susie: Yes. >> for them. That´s the, that´s the angle on the app side. >> That´s right, and then we´re just giving them that tool. And they had so much pain with it before because a lot of times people would be like writing their app, right? They´re doing it in their cluster, then they push it to production. Boom, it goes out. And then, it doesn´t work anymore. And a lot of times it´s because the network is not set up properly in their new thing. So they blame the network and the blame... But, once you start to open up the APIs, you can start to move these things and do it, you know... >> Well, Susie, you´ve got a great group. It´s the biggest story here. We believe, we´ve been reporting DevNet Zone. You know, theCUBE, we´re always on the best trends and the best waves, you´re on it. >> By the way, have you seen the security challenge over here? >> The blackhat >> So,the blackhat, white hat security challenge? It´s actually pretty interesting. (John laughs) >> It shows... >> John: Well, we´ll have to go test our chops, too. >> That´s right, that´s right. >> John: Dust off those coding hands. >> That´s right. (laughs) >> We´ll go over there. Well, I love the tagline, all around these classrooms. Learn, code, inspire and connect. >> Yes. >> Great motto, cause you´re building community in one end, and educating on the other spectrum. So, education to community, great spectrum. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Susie Wee, Vice-President and CTO of DevNet, here at Cisco, doing a great job. This is where the action is. This is the transformation of Cisco. It´s becoming software and network DevOps. New term, Net DevOps, heard here on theCUBE. I´m John Furrier and Stu Miniman. We´ll be back with more live coverage, in Barcelona, Spain after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain It's theCUBE Covering Cisco Live 2018 Brought to you by Cisco Veeam, and theCUBE's Ecosystem partner's. >> John: Hello everyone and welcome to a special CUBE presentation here in Barcelona, Spain, we're live at Cisco Live! In Europe, I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stuart Miniman, Head Analyst for Networking and for Wikibon. Stu we're kicking off Cisco Live in Barcelona It's a European show to the main North America show in the US. But really kicking of 2018 for Cisco and some stark changes to Cisco's positioning. Really, they've always been innovative, but you're startin' to see what they're thinking, in terms of cloud, multi-cloud, IOT, and the role of the network and the networking industry, two different things. Again, we're going to break that down. Day one of two days of wall-to-wall coverage. Again, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, Stu, I got to get your take, yesterday was kind of a set-up day, everyone's kind of coming in for these conferences. Big story was the Connected Women's Conference with DevNet and across Cisco. Great turnout, great energy. And then today the keynote, with Rowan who's up on stage for Chuck Robbins who did not make the trip. Really kind of laying out the vision for Cisco. Your take so far on Cisco, DevNet, the Women's Conference, and the Keynote. >> Stu: Yeah, so John, first of all, I know we're excited to be here. So it's the first time we've had theCUBE at one of the Cisco live events. We've done plenty of shows with Cisco, tons of Cisco people in the alumni database. It's actually the second time I've done Cisco live, but the last time was 2009. And my description in 2009 was you had network engineers that were in their wiring closets or somewhere in a dark dungeon. They kind of crawled out, got their CCIE re-certification, got a couple of free beers and t-shirts, and then kind of went back home after they did some networking. It's a very different vibe here. My question coming into this show is how much is Cisco a software company? Used to, you talk about, Chuck Robbins isn't here, but, Chuck and John Chambers before him used to, they talked about the software innovation and then they'd pull a chip out of their pocket and say we spent a billion dollars innovating on this chip. Now, what was nice here, in the the keynote this morning there was a lot of talk about the future. Software is a piece of it. Intent based, content managing the pieces. Meraki getting up talking about wireless. It's not about boxes, ports, cabling. It is about software, but Cisco's going through their transition, John, how do they go from kind of the quarterly sales targets of working with their traditional partners to this multi-cloud software world. Intent, absolutely a big piece of it. Cisco's got such a broad portfolio, John So much to get into in the next couple of days. >> John: And good points too about the software role and then Cisco's always been moving up the stack if you've been following theCUBE, you know we've been talking about this if you look at the old guard companies, Cisco falls in that category. Okay, the new guard companies, Amazon Cloud, and some new start-ups, they're playing with Cloud economics. They're playing with a whole new generation of software developers. Gone are the days of Waterfall, hello Agile, Agile programming and development. But Stu, the big contrast now with Cloud is the perimeter does not exist. This opens up security, which the number one thing on the keynote that Rowan brought up, as well as the main speakers, this is huge, because now there's no perimeter. Classic networking days are changed. Cisco's always been talking internally about moving up the stack, they're finally doing it. They're doing it fast. And they have to because they're under siege. >> Stu: Yeah, John, dig into that a little bit, I mean, you think back, Cisco was one of the four horsemen of the internet era. It was Sun, Oracle, Cisco, and I'm tryin' to remember who the fourth one was. But, I think Intel was there. So Cisco's been there. Security, always been part of the Cisco portfolio. Front and center, any customer I've talked to, I loved, there was a stat up there that 71% of customers said that security might be impacting innovation for customers. And I joked, I said well 29% are living in hermetically sealed underground bunker if they aren't worried about how security's going to impact what they're doing. Maybe they feel that they've solved it and they're not slowing down because of it but absolutely security front and center, a lot going on in the space. IOT, I have to be honest, Cisco's been talking about IOT for many years and I felt like they kind of for years it was like well there's going to be trillions of devices and we're going to network them. And I kind of said, okay, that's nice, but really how are you solving the business problem, how are you helping me and really that's where kind of the update as to where they're going, where's Cisco positioned to where they have the assets. They made a number of acquisitions in this space, everything from the SD-WAN vIPtela's company we followed pretty closely for a number of years as well as, AppDynamics, we interviewed them at Amazon reinvent, over a billion dollars for that acquisition, really a software company, doesn't mesh with the traditional Cisco model, so a lot of changes goin' on. Cisco positioned for a lot of those pieces but definitely a lot of challenges as well as opportunities for them. >> John: Stu, you mentioned IOT, one of the things that people, if you follow the industry, know if you're a historian, like us, they got it right Stu, their vision of internet, of everything was absolutely spot on, just 10 years too early. They had that awesome campaign, it was more window dressing and vision, but it actually was panning out. If you look at what they were talking about 10 years ago about connecting devices, they pretty much nailed it. However they missed a lot of things. So they didn't whoop the stack fast enough, in my opinion. And two, the Cloud came on really really fast. But now, they're already seeing that as an opportunity But it's a double-edged sword like I said on my tweet during the keynote. They could make a lot of money with the Cloud by doing multi-cloud, but it's a double-edged sword if they misfire, Stu, this could be a problem. So let's talk about that. What does Cisco need to do, in multi-cloud, to really be that TCPIP moment. Because you got all kinds of new dynamics with networking. You got end-to-end, but now you have a surface area including IOT that's everywhere, smart cities, sensors, on-premises, and in the Cloud. All over the place, so this is a huge, complex equation but Cisco's not new complexity, your thoughts. >> Stu: Yeah, first of all John, nice job on premises, we got it right. >> John: (laughs) On prem is the shortcut that I always use, Stu. >> Stu: Absolutely, still talking about data centers, talking about edge computing, talking about those, but Cisco like many of the, hate to say legacy companies, had a little bit of falter when we talked about public cloud. The whole inter-cloud message really was a little bit complicated. We talked some really smart Cisco DE's and got to really understand a little bit, but at the end of the day Cisco really understands they have a huge piece of their ecosystem as the service providers and that's who they're working with. Cisco is not selling to Amazon. Amazon buys from some of Cisco's competitors. But they're not selling to a couple of the biggest hyper-scalers out there and that is a risk for Cisco but huge ecosystem, thousands of service providers, that's who Cisco needs to partner with, that was part of the inter-cloud message and that's been rebooted with how they're doing it. They really look at - in Rowan's keynote this morning it was about the management interface. Cisco's always made lots of pieces, but the challenge is is I've got lots of device managers and how do I get multi-cloud. I'm using Amazon, I'm using Azure, I'm using Google, I've got my own data center. IBM, Oracle, Cisco partners with lots of these companies, how are they going to make it easy and why do they have the right to be in the center of a lot of those discussions. >> John: They partner yes, but I would argue that if I'm going to be critical of Cisco, they got to partner smart in a smart way. So the kind of partnerships that they need to do now is really joint engineering partnerships because if you look at the big whales right now, it's Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. The rest are all either customers, like the Facebook and those guys. But the real Cloud that they really need to go after and don't forget Alibaba and all the Chinese and European Clouds as well, with GDPR, a lot of complexity there as well they got to do partnering at a deeper level. So the new Intel Inside model is over. This now Cloud Inside with Cisco, they got to think differently. This is not an alliance with them as a channel partner or them in charge, they have to come in and understand that they have to peer with these clouds. I mean Google's at such a large scale, I met with them last week their site reliability engineering team is freaking phenomenal. They got chops, they know networking, they got to push Cisco hard. Your thoughts. >> Stu: Look Google, when Google Cloud launched, I said Google has the best network in the world. Stop. Bar none. Absolutely. Their SRE's setting the bar for how people look at these environments. I didn't hear much public cloud discussion. Cisco I'm worrying is a little bit over-rotating towards that IOT and Edge piece. Edge does not get rid of Cloud. Amazon's not goin' away at all. >> John: Cloud and Edge go together. >> Stu: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, you think they understand The Edge and what that's going to take there all of them have a play with devices even Microsoft's phone might have failed, but absolutely they've got applications and they know what's happening at The Edge. Google, come on, who created android. >> John: (laughs) >> Stu: They understand how to get there. Amazon's got Alexa all over the place, Google of course has their smart devices So John, didn't hear anything about voice in the discussion here. They talked about things like telepathy, which was struck me as a little bit interesting. Google has communications, they've got WebEx as a platform. They've got Spark on the phone to be able to communicate. They've got a lot of unified communications. Collaboration, I mean John, I know one of your top contenders, not just the networking of devices but the networking of people and Cisco looks a lot at that. Any take you want to have on that piece of it? >> John: Yeah, I mean, here's my take I love this intent networking concept with context I think they're spot on on that. I think Cisco really needs to add attention and reputation because as you have promiscuous devices out there from IOT to wearables, to automotive, you're going to have trust issues around the network nodes, now that these network nodes are going to have different personas if you will. So if you look at that, I think they really need to add attention and reputation to what to pay attention to in real time and the reputation of say a device or node on the network. That has to be added on top of intent because intent is just contextual and they've addressed that. So to me, that's the holy grail for Cisco. They got to build these new stacks with these new software variables so they can scale both in real time and kind of in typical network way which is normal for them, but real time's where it's at low latency, wire speed, this is the language we understand, but bring it to the cars, bring it to those devices, they got to nail that. So Stu, they have to think differently and I think the re-imagining of Cisco, the vision is about looking forward, Rowan's speech today was awesome on that front. He took us to 2015. >> Stu: 2050. >> John: 2050 I mean, Phenomenal. That is what Cisco needs to do. Show their customers that they're not just a gear company. They can't be gear company anymore. They got to move to the software model, and they got to have proof points. They got to look at apps that they don't want anymore and either get rid of them or double down. It would be interesting to see that Stu, what they will double down on. Is it Spark, I mean, I download the Spark app, I have no friends. Is it a social network or is it a collaboration tool like Alibaba Talk, it's not WeChat. I's not Facebook or Twitter. >> Stu: Yeah. >> John: Applications, Stu, they're kind of looking at The Edge, they have to have a position there, your thoughts. >> Stu: Yeah, so John, I think you're right, I was happy not to see a bunch of boxes up on stage talking about that. Now, not to get me wrong, we're going to be talking about a lot of the networking technologies, were is the - intent-based networking lives on the portfolio Cisco products, there is what they're doing with the service providers what they're doing in the campus environment and from a wireless standpoint Meraki obviously center to what they're doing there. They have - UCS has been the workhouse, really, Cisco in the virtualization age, they felt that they missed out on buying Vmware, but UCS really took the virtualization age and drove them into a market that everybody didn't think that they could get into. Kind of expanded the town, but UCS is kind of plateaued out from a revenue standpoint, and where can they go in the future. You don't see - UCS is built for kind of big workloads when we hear Dell and HP talking about how did they take compute to the edge, haven't heard Cisco saying oh, their architecture wasn't built for kind of those small low-cost, low-margin pieces, so where will they add value and get revenue there, I think hardware gets deprecated over time and it really is software. Where are they going to get that move, first of all they made a number of big acquisitions, but John, we haven't talked about, they've got somewhere between 50 and 60 billion dollars that's going to be repatriated back to the United States this year and that can make them even more aquisitive than usual. >> John: Yeah, they're going to have to definitely take that money from overseas, bring it in like Apple did and then go on a spending spree, but Stu, let's kind of wrap the segment up on the kick-off talk about kind of where they should go and to me the big story out of Cisco and following these guys over the past decade or so you've seen them foundationally rock solid on networking no doubt about it and even UCS, you're kind of critical, but also they've done a good job there. They have the foundational footprint and you're starting to see them move the stack and I think the big story to me is what DevNet's doing going into their network engineering community and turning those guys into modern Cloud native developers, to me, that is critical to Cisco. It's an investment. Is it going to be long on the tooth? Will it be real? To me it looks real. DevNet can transform and create an innovation surge Cisco needs that innovation to come from their own community. They need it to come from new developers while keeping their existing. Because that's going to be ultimately what's going to be built on top of the Cisco foundation, that is the network and to me, I don't think they need to be making a lot of moves right now. I think let the developers be creative with innovation use the cash to buy companies and let those flowers bloom To me that's the model. If they try to do the old internet days where they would just integrate companies in there's not a lot of companies out there they can just plug into their model right now. >> Stu: Yeah definitely John and we've been tracking for years a lot of the software pieces that Cisco's been working in. They've been big supporters of us at OpenStack, in Docker, The Container World, at the Cooper and Eddie Show So Cisco absolutely beating the drum towards that software, it just takes a little while for the big tanker ship that is dominant player in networking to move from relying on that hardware there's that big iron. It's not like they can just flip a switch and say hey, we're software and our margins and our sales are all going to be different. UCS, great, but it kind of reached a high-water mark and where does that transition and move forward to and as you said, partnerships are going to be key and not just lip service but true engineering where are they going to develop where are they going to find there - and DevNet great buzz already. The labs here have been just crankin' non-stop since I showed up. Lots of people diggin' in and not just the old certifications, it's really builders, John is something that you hear the Amazon community talk a lot about definitely the DevNet group. >> John: And the community's technical too, so they love to get their teeth on these demos. This Black Hat demos, there's White Hat demos for security always good. I want to give a shout-out to the connected women's group at Cisco, I attended their session they had yesterday it was kind of a get-together. Very inspiring and as a man, inclusion is very key and Cisco actually, Stu, is doing something really I noticed, they've swapped diversity and inclusion and they call it inclusion and diversity and they recognize that the conversations need to include everyone, then the diversity is just going to be addressed. So shout-out to the women's connected network here at Cisco for that great event and got to great group of people. Also want to shout-out to our sponsors that allow us to come to Europe to get all the top stories here at Cisco Live. That's the Cisco team here on the partner group and of DevNet, thank you to those guys at Cisco. So check 'em out. Veeam, IBM, and NetApp thanks for your support, allowed two days of wall-to-wall coverage here in Barcelona, live with theCUBE We'll be back with more coverage and interviews after this short break. (techno music)