(upbeat music) >> Welcome back friends. It's theCUBE LIVE in Las Vegas at the Venetian Expo, covering the first full day of AWS re:Invent 2022. I'm Lisa Martin, and I have the privilege of working much of this week with Dave Vellante. >> Hey. Yeah, it's good to be with you Lisa. >> It's always good to be with you. Dave, this show is, I can't say enough about the energy. It just keeps multiplying as I've been out on the show floor for a few minutes here and there. We've been having great conversations about cloud migration, digital transformation, business transformation. You name it, we're talking about it. >> Yeah, and I got to say the soccer Christians are really happy. (Lisa laughing) >> Right? Because the USA made it through. So that's a lot of additional excitement. >> That's true. >> People were crowded around the TVs at lunchtime. >> They were, they were. >> So yeah, but back to data. >> Back to data. We have a couple of guests here. We're going to be talking a lot with customer challenges, how they're helping to overcome them. Please welcome Kevin Zawodzinski, VP of Sales Engineering at COMMVAULT. >> Thank you. >> And Paul Meighan, Director of Product Management at AWS. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Isn't it great to be back in person? >> Paul: It really is. >> Kevin: Hell, yeah. >> You cannot replicate this on virtual, you just can't. It's nice to see how excited people are to be back. There's been a ton of buzz on our program today about Adam's keynote this morning. Amazing. A lot of synergies with the direction, Paul, that AWS is going in and where we're seeing its ecosystem as well. Paul, first question for you. Talk about, you know, in the customer environment, we know AWS is very customer obsessed. Some of the main challenges customers are facing today is they really continue this business transformation, this digital transformation, and they move to cloud native apps. What are some of those challenges and how do you help them eradicate those? >> Well, I can tell you that the biggest contribution that we make is really by focusing on the fundamentals when it comes to running storage at scale, right? So Amazon S3 is unique, distributed architecture, you know, it really does deliver on those fundamentals of durability, availability, performance, security and it does it at virtually unlimited scale, right? I mean, you guys have talked to a lot of storage folks in the industry and anyone who's run an estate at scale knows that doing that and executing on those fundamentals day after day is just super hard, right? And so we come to work every day, we focus on the fundamentals, and that focus allows customers to spend their time thinking about innovation instead of on how to keep their data durably stored. >> Well, and you guys both came out of the storage world. >> Right. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It was a box world, (Kevin laughs) and it ain't no more. >> Kevin: That's right, absolutely. >> It's a service and a service of scale. >> Kevin: Yeah. So architecture matters, right? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Paul, talk a little bit about, speaking of innovation, talk about the evolution of S3. It's been around for a while now. Everyone knows it, loves it, but how has AWS architected it to really help meet customers where they are? >> Paul: Right. >> Because we know, again, there's that customer first focus. You write the press release down the road, you then follow that. How is it evolving? >> Well, I can tell you that architecture matters a lot and the architecture of Amazon S3 is pretty unique, right? I think, you know, the most important thing to understand about the architecture of S3 is that it is truly a regional service. So we're laid out across a minimum of 3 Availability Zones, or AZs, which are physically separated and isolated and have a distance of miles between them to protect against local events like floods and fires and power interruption, stuff like that. And so when you give us an object, we distribute that data across that minimum of 3 Availability Zones and then within multiple devices within each AZ, right? And so what that means is that when you store data with us, your data is on storage that's able to tolerate the failure of multiple devices with no impact to the integrity of your data, which is super powerful. And then again, super hard to do when you're trying to roll your own. So that's sort of a, like an overview of the architecture. In terms of how we think about our roadmap, you know, 90% of our roadmap comes directly from what customers tell us matters, and that's a tenant of how we think about customer obsession at AWS and it really is how we drive a roadmap. >> Right, so speaking of customers Kevin, what are customers asking you guys- >> Yeah. >> for, how does it relate to what you're doing with S3? >> Yeah, it's a wonderful question and one that is actually really appropriate for us being at re:Invent, right? So we got, last three years we've had customers here with us on stage talking about it. First of all, 3 years ago we did a virtual session, unfortunately, but glad to be back as you mentioned, with Coca-Cola and theirs was about scale and scope and really about how can we protect hundreds of thousands of objects, petabyte to data, in a simple and secure way, right. Then last year we actually met with a ACT, Inc. as well and co-presented with them and really talked about how we could protect modern workloads and their modern workloads around whether it was Aurora or as well as EKS and how they continue to evolve as well. And, last but not least it's going to be, this year we're talking with Illinois State University as well about how they're going to continue to grow, adapt and really leverage AWS and ourselves to further their support of their teachers and their staff. So that is really helping us quite a bit to continue to move forward. And the things we're doing, again, with our customer base it's really around, focused on what's important to them, right? Customer obsession, how are we working with that? How are we making sure that we're listening to them? Again, working with AWS to understand how can we evolve together and really ultimately their journeys. As you heard, even with those 3 examples they're all very different, right? And that's the point, is that everybody's at a different point in the journey. They're at a different place from a modernization perspective. So we're helping them evolve, as they're helping us evolve as well, and transform with AWS. >> So very mature COMMVAULT stack, the S3 bucket and all the other capabilities. Paul, you just talked about coming together- >> Right. >> Dave: for your customers. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And just, you know, we were talking the other day, Paul and I were talking the other day, it's been, you know, we've worked with AWS, with integration since 2009, right? So a long time, right? I mean, for some that may not seem like a long time ago, but it is, right? It's, you know, over a decade of time and we've really advanced that integration considerably as well. >> What are some of the things that, I don't know if you had a chance to see the keynote this morning? >> Yeah, a little bit. >> What are some of the things that there was, and in fact this is funny, funny data point for you on data. One of my previous guests told me that Adam Selipsky spent exactly 52 minutes talking about data this morning. 52 minutes. >> Okay. >> That there's a data point. But talk about some of the things that he talked about, the direction AWS is going in, obviously new era in the last year. Talk about what you heard and how you think that will evolve the COMMVAULT-AWS relationship. >> Yeah, I think part of that is about flexibility, as Paul mentioned too, architecture matters, right? So as we evolve and some of the things that we pride ourselves on is that we developed our systems and our software and everything else to not worry about what do I have to build to today but how do I continue to evolve with my customer base? And that's what AWS does, right? And continues to do. So that's really how we would see the data environment. It's really about that integration. As they grow, as they add more features we're going to add more features as well. And we're right there with them, right? So there's a lot of things that we also talk about, Paul and I talk about, around, you know, how do we, like Graviton3 was brought up today around some of the innovations around that. We're supporting that with Auto Scale right now, right? So we're right there releasing, right when AWS releasing, co-developing things when necessary as well. >> So let's talk about security a little bit. First of all, what is COMMVAULT, right? You're not a security company but you're an adjacency to security. It's sort of, we're rethinking security. >> Kevin: Yep. >> including data protection, not a bolt-on anymore. You guys both have a background in that world and I'm sure that resonates. >> Yeah. >> So what is the security play here? What role does COMMVAULT play? I think we know pretty well what role AWS plays, but love to hear, Paul, your thoughts as well on security. >> Yeah, I'll start I guess. >> Go on Paul. >> Okay. Yeah, so on the security side of things, there's a quite a few things. So again, on the development side of things, we do things like file anomaly detection, so seeing patterns in data. We talked a lot about analytics as well in the keynote this morning. We look at what is happening in the customer environment, if there's something odd or out of place that's happening, we can detect that and we'll notify people. And we've seen that, we have case studies about that. Other things we do are simple, simple but elegant. Is with our security dashboard. So we'll use our security dashboard to show best practices. Are they using Multi-Factor Authentication? Are you viewing password complexity? You know, things like that. And allows people to understand from a security landscape perspective, how do we layer in protection with their other systems around security. We don't profess to be the security company, or a security company, but we help, you know, obviously add in those additional layers. >> And obviously you're securing, you know, the S3 piece of it. >> Mmmhmm. >> You know, from your standpoint because building it in. >> That's right. And we can tell you that for us, security is job zero. And anyone at AWS will tell you that, and not only that but it will always be our top priority. Right from the infrastructure on down. We're very focused on our shared responsibility model where we handle security from the hypervisor, or host operating system level, down to the physical security of the facilities in which our services run and then it's our customer's responsibility to build secure applications, right. >> Yeah. And you talk about Graviton earlier, Nitro comes into play and how you're, sort of, fencing off, you know, the various components of the system from the operating system, the VMs, and then that is designed in and that's a new evolution that it comes as part of the package. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> Paul, talk a little bit about, you know, security, talking about that we had so many conversations this year alone about the threat landscape and how it's dramatically changing, it's top of mind for everybody. Huge rise in ransomware attacks. Ransomware is now, when are we going to get hit? How often? What's the damage going to be? Rather than, are we going to get hit? It's, unfortunately it's progressed in that direction. How does ensuring data security impact how you're planning the roadmap at AWS and how are partners involved in shaping that? >> Right, so like I said, you know, 90% of our roadmap comes from what customers tell us matters, right? And clearly this is an issue that matters very much to customers right now, right? And so, you know, we're certainly hearing that from customers, and COMMVAULT, and partners like COMMVAULT have a big role to play in helping customers to secure and protect their applications, right? And that's why it's so critical that we come together here at re:Invent and we have a bunch of time here at the show with the COMMVAULT technical folks to talk through what they're hearing from customers and what we're hearing. And we have a number of regular touch points throughout the year as well, right? And so what COMMVAULT gets from the relationship is, sort of, early access and feedback into our features and roadmap. And what we get out of it really is that feedback from that large number of customers who interface with Amazon S3 through COMMVAULT. Who are using S3 as a backup target behind COMMVAULT, right? And so, you know, that partnership really allows us to get close to those customers and understand what really matters to them. >> Are you doing joint engineering, or is it more just, hey here you go COMMVAULT, here's the tools available, go, go build. Can you address that? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. There's definitely joint engineering like even things around, you know, data migration and movement of data, we integrate really well and we talk a lot about, hey, what are you, like as Paul mentioned, what are you seeing out there? We actually, I just left a conversation about an hour ago where we're talking about, you know, where are we seeing placement of data and how does that matter to, do you put it on, you know, instant access, or do you put it on Glacier, you know, what should be the best practices? And we tell them, again, some of the telemetry data that we have around what do we see customers doing, what's the patterns of data? And then we feed that back in and we use that to create joint solutions as well. >> You know, I wonder if we could talk about cloud, you know, optimization of cloud costs for a minute. That's obviously a big discussion point in the hallways with customers. And on your earnings call you guys talked about specifically some customers and they specifically mentioned, for example, pushing storage to lower cost tiers. So you brought up Glacier just then. What are you seeing in the field in that regard? How are customers taking advantage of that? And where does COMMVAULT play in, sort of, helping make that decision? >> You want to take part one or you want me to take it? >> I can take part one. I can tell you that, you know, we're very focused on helping customers optimize costs, however necessary, right? And, you know, we introduced intelligent hearing here at the show in 2019 and since launch it's helped customers to reduce costs by over $750 million, right? So that's a real commitment to optimizing costs on behalf of customers. We also launched, you know, later in 2020, Glacier Deep Archive, which is the lowest cost storage in the cloud. So it's an important piece of the puzzle, is to provide those storage options that can allow customers to match the workloads that are, that need to be on folder storage to the appropriate store. >> Yeah, and so, you know, S3 is not this, you know, backup and recovery system, not an archiving system and, you know, in terms of, but you have that intelligence in your platform. 'Cause when I heard that from the earnings call I was like, okay, how do customers then go about deciding what they can, you know, when it's all good times, like yeah, who cares? You know, just go, go, go. But when you got to tighten the belt, how do you guys? >> Yeah, and that goes back to understanding the data pattern. So some of that is we have intelligence and artificial intelligence and everything else and machine learning within our, so we can detect those patterns, right? We understand the patterns, we learn from that and we help customers right size, right. So ultimately we do see a blend, right? As Paul mentioned, we see, you know, hey I'm not going to put everything on Glacier necessarily upfront. Maybe they are, it all depends on their workloads and patterns. So we use the data that we collect from the different customers that we have to share those best practices out and create, you know, the right templates, so to speak, in ways for people to apply it. >> Guys, great joint, you talked about the joint engineering, joint go to market, obviously a very strong synergistic partnership between the two. A lot of excitement. This is only day one, I can only imagine what's going to be coming the next couple of days. But I have one final question for you, but I have same question for both of you. You had the chance to create your own bumper sticker, so you get a shiny new car and for some reason you want to put a bumper sticker on it. About COMMVAULT, what would it say? >> Yeah, so for me I would say comprehensive, yet simple, right? So ultimately about giving you all the bells and whistles but if you want to be very simple we can help you in every shape and form. >> Paul, what's your bumper sticker say about AWS? >> I would say that AWS starts with the customer and works backwards from there. >> Great one. >> Excellent. Guys- >> Kevin: Well done. >> it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you- >> Kevin: Thank you. >> for sharing what's going on, the updates on the AWS-COMMVAULT partnership and what's in it for customers. We appreciate it. >> Dave: Thanks you guys. >> Thanks a lot. >> Thank you. >> All right. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(gentle upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Connections 21. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be hosting the program today. I want to start with a bit of an assessment on the keynotes that we heard this morning, but before I get into that, I want to set the framework for thinking about Commvault as a company. This company has been around for a long time, since the late 1980s, but really came into prominence in the client server era and it has ridden numerous waves, including network backup and recovery, data management, and now cloud data services. It's a company with more than $700 million in revenue and a market value of nearly $3 billion. Since coming on as CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani has embarked on moving the company towards a subscription model, focusing on optionality for on premises, hybrid and cloud workloads. It's launch of metallic and data management as a service are two components that underpin the strategy. At his keynote earlier today, Mirchandani drew on his experience as both a former CIO and current CEO roles to connect with his audience. His major themes hit on data, the value of data, and the imperative to get control of your data. Of course, data protection has become a fundamental component of digital transformations. For years, data protection was an afterthought or a bolt on, but today, organizations are forced to think about their digital stacks in their entirety, which means they have to build resilience into their platforms from the start. Mirchandani said that if we embrace, manage, and properly protect data, it will become the defining disruptive difference for an organization. But he talked about the gap between what the business wants to do and what the technology teams are actually equipped to do and when it comes to data, I couldn't agree more. He called this the business integrity gap and I'll come back to that. He also put out some fun facts and I'll share those here. According to IDC, 64 zettabytes of data was created and replicated in 2020. That's the equivalent of 2 trillion 4K movies. That's a lot of data. Gardner says by 2025, 85% of business will be delivered through SAS applications. Sophos, the security firm, estimates that the average cost of a ransomware attack is approaching nearly $2 million. The security company Proofpoint did a survey and 64% of surveyed CSOs felt that they were at risk of a material cyber attack in the next 12 months. I'm surprised that number was so, so low. I think the other 36% are busy responding to a cyber attack. Coming back to Sanjay's business integrity gap. Here's how I see it. Data by its very nature is distributed, decentralized, and it's becoming more so with hybrid connections, multicloud installations, and edge use cases. This is only going to accelerate in the future. As such, organizations need to rethink their approaches to getting value from data. Instead of building monolithic data architectures and hyper-specialized technical data teams, organizations are beginning to empower lines of business and domain owners to take end-to-end responsibility for data ownership. The underlying technology platform is becoming an operational detail that serves the data owners, where data protection and governance is computationally automated in a federated model. So the policy is centralized, but the implementation of that policy is done by software. This means that data governance, security, privacy, access, and policy are all adjudicated wherever possible by software and our automated, irrespective of physical location. Data silos are not just a technology problem. They're a symptom of flawed organizational constructs, steeped in the notion that highly technical data specialists and centralized teams should be the stewards of the data and serve multiple lines of business simultaneously, without proper business context. Now, this is changing. Data is being used to create a new class of products and services that can be directly or indirectly monetized, or drive other value, for instance, like saving lives. It's about the organizational mission. Now in this sense, data is undergoing a renaissance, where the responsibility for end-to-end data ownership is being distributed and decentralized, where highly specialized technical teams are becoming enablers for generalists that reside within the lines of business, i.e., those who are building data products and services. This is not shadow IT. It's decentralized management with federated governance. Now, by rethinking the data management paradigm, the responsibility for good data protection policy transcends technical teams and becomes a priority for the entire organization. To that end, Commvault laid out its strategy to deliver a comprehensive set of intelligent data services, spanning data protection, security, compliance, governance, data transformation, and data insights. In my view, a huge part of Commvault's strategy lies in automation. That's a key ingredient of cloud and any cloud strategy. In other words, supporting cloud native and cloud-like data management capabilities that can be programmatically deployed, secured, managed, and governed, and applied across an organization's sprawling data empire. The world of enterprise technology is complex and the winning technology companies are going to be those that can abstract the underlying complexity and assist organizations to implement sound data management practices, irrespective of data location, in the most efficient way. So as you hear the stories and examples here at Commvault Connections, you can decide for yourself if the company is on the right track and if what you hear aligns with your digital business skill goals. So let's now get a practitioner's perspective and hear how the CSO is thinking about data protection. Up next is Dave Martin, Chief Information Security Officer at ADP. You're watching theCUBE. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Mhm. Mhm. >>We're here with the Cube covering Calm Vault Connections 21. We're gonna look at the data protection space and how cloud computing has advanced the way we think about backup recovery and protecting our most critical data. Ranga Rajagopalan, who is the vice president of products at Con vault and Stephen Orban, who's the General manager of AWS marketplace and control services gents. Welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Thank you. Always A pleasure to see you here >>steve. Thanks for having us. Very >>welcome, Stephen, let's start with you. Look the cloud has become a staple of digital infrastructure. I don't know where we'd be right now without being able to access enterprise services I. T. Services remotely. Um But specifically how our customers looking at backup and recovery in the cloud, is it a kind of a replacement for existing strategies? Is it another layer of protection? How are they thinking about that? >>Yeah. Great question. David again, thank thanks for having me. And I think you know, look if you look back to 15 years ago when the founders of AWS had the hypothesis that many enterprises governments and developers we're gonna want access to on demand pay as you go I. T. Resources in the cloud. Uh None of us would have been able to predict that it would have Matured and um you know become the staple that it has today over the last 15 years. But the reality is that a lot of these enterprise customers, many of whom have been doing their own IT infrastructure for the last 10, 20 or multiple decades do have to kind of figure out how they deal with the change management of moving to the cloud. And while a lot of our customers um will initially come to us because they're looking to save money or costs, almost all of them decided to stay and go big because of the speed at which they are able to innovate on behalf of their customers and when it comes to storage and backup, that just plays right into where they're headed. And there's a variety of different techniques that customers use, whether it be, you know, a lift and shift for a particular set of applications or a data center where they do very much. Look at how can they replace the backup and recovery that they have on premises in the cloud using solutions like, but we're partnering with console to do or completely reimagining their architecture for net new developments that they can really move quickly for their customers. Um and and completely developing something brand new, where it is really a, you know, a brand new replacement and innovation for for for what they've done in the past. >>Great, thank you, Stephen Rachael, I want to ask you about the d were digital. Look, if you're not a digital business today, you're basically out of business. So, my question to you is how have you seen customers change the way they think about data protection during what I call the forced March to digital over the last 18, 19 months or customers, you know, thinking about data protection differently today >>definitely Dave and and thank you for having me and steven. Pleasure to join you on this cube interview first going back to stevens comments can't agree more. Almost every business that we talked with today has a cloud first strategy, a cloud transformation mandate and you know, the reality is back to your digital comment. There are many different paths to the hybrid multi cloud and different customers. You know, there are different parts of the journey. So I still was saying most often customers at least in the data protection perspective start the conversation by thinking here have all these tips. Can I start using cloud as my air gap long term retention target and before they realized they start moving their workloads into the cloud and none of the backup and record yesterday's are going to change. So you need to continue protecting the clothes, which is where the cloud native data protection comes in and then they start innovating around er, can I use cloud as media sites so that you know, I don't need to meet in the other side. So this year is all around us. Cloud transformation is all around us and and the real essence of this partnership between AWS and calm vault is essentially to dr and simplify all the paths to the club regardless of whether you're going to use it as a storage started or you know, your production data center, all your dear disaster recovery site. >>Yeah, it really is about providing that optionality for customers. I talked to a lot of customers and said, hey, our business resilience strategy was really too focused on D. R. I've talked to all the customers at the other end of the spectrum said we don't even have a D. R. Strategy now, we're using the cloud for that. So it's really all over the map and you want that optionality. So steven and then go ahead. >>Please, ransomware plays a big role in many of these considerations that greatly. It's unfortunately not a question of whether you're going to be hit by ransomware, it's almost we can like, what do you do when you're hit by ransomware and the ability to use the clothes scaled immediately, bring up the resources, use the cloud backups has become a very popular choice simply because of the speed with which you can bring the business back to normal our patients. The agility and the power that cloud brings to the table. >>Yeah, ransomware is scary. You don't, you don't even need a high school diploma to be a ransomware ist you can just go on the dark web and by ransomware as a service and do bad things and hopefully you'll end up in jail. Uh Stephen we know about the success of the AWS marketplace, uh you guys are partnering here. I'm interested in how that partnership, you know, kind of where it started and how it's evolving. >>Yeah, happy to highlight on that. So, look when >>we when we started >>Aws or when the founders of aws started aws, as I said 15 years ago we we realized very early on that while we were going to be able to provide a number of tools for customers to have on demand access to compute storage, networking databases that many, particularly enterprise and government government customers still use a wide range of tools and solutions from hundreds, if not in some cases thousands of different partners. I mean I talked to enterprises who literally use thousands of of different vendors to help them deliver their solutions for their customers. So almost 10 years ago, we're almost at our 10 year anniversary for AWS marketplace, we launched the first substantiation of AWS marketplace which allowed builders and customers to find try buy and then deploy third party software solutions running on amazon machine instances also noticed as armies natively right in their AWS and cloud accounts to complement what they were doing in the cloud. And over the last nearly 10 years we've evolved quite a bit to the point where we support software and multiple different packaging types, whether it be amazon machine instances, containers, machine learning models and of course SAS and the rise of software as a service. So customers don't have to manage the software themselves. But we also support data products through the AWS Data exchange and professional services for customers who want to get services to help them integrate the software into their environments. And we now do that across a wide range of procurement options. So what used to be pay as you go amazon machine instances now includes multiple different ways to contract directly, customer can do that directly with the vendor with their channel partner or using kind of our public e commerce capabilities. And we're super excited, um, over the last couple of months we've been partnering with calm vault to get their industry leading backup and recovery solutions listed on AWS marketplace, which is available for our collective customers now. So not only do they have access to convulse awesome solutions to help them protect against ransomware as we talked about and to manage their backup and recovery environments, but they can find and deploy that directly in one click right into their AWS accounts and consolidate their building relationship right on the AWS and voice. And it's been awesome to work with with Rhonda and the product teams and convo to really, um, expose those capabilities where converts using a lot of different AWS services to provide a really great native experience for our collective customers as they migrate to the cloud. >>Yeah, the marketplace has been amazing. We've watched it evolve over the past decade and, and, and it's a, it's a key characteristic of everybody has a cloud today. We're a cloud to butt marketplaces unique uh, in that it's the power of the ecosystem versus the resources of one and Ringo. I wonder from, from your perspective, if you could talk about the partnership with AWS from your view and then specifically you've got some hard news, I wonder if you could talk about that as well. >>Absolute. So the partnership has been extended for more than 12 years. Right. So aws and Commonwealth have been bringing together solutions that help customers solve the data management challenges and everything that we've been doing has been driven by the customer demand that we seek. Right customers are moving their workloads in the cloud. They're finding new ways of deploying their workloads and protecting them. Um, you know, earlier we introduced cloud native integration with the EBS API which has driven almost 70% performance improvements in backup and restores. And when you look at huge customers like coca cola who have standardized on AWS um, combo. That is the scale that they want to operate in. You manage around 1 50,000 snapshots 1200 ec, two instances across six regions. But with just one resource dedicated for the data management strategy. Right? So that's where the real built in integration comes into play and we've been extending it to make use of the cloud efficiencies like our management and auto scale and so on. Another aspect is our commitment to a radically simple customer experience and that's, you know, I'm sure Stephen would agree it's a big month for at AWS as well. That's really together with the customer demand which brought us together to introduce com ball into the AWS marketplace exactly the way Stephen described it. Now the heart announcement is coming back up and recovery is available in native this marketplace. So the exact four steps that Stephen mentioned, find, try buy and deploy everything simplified through the marketplace So that our aws customers can start using far more back of software in less than 20 minutes. A 60 year trial version is included in the product through marketplace and you know, it's a single click buy, we use the cloud formation templates to deploy. So it becomes a super simple approach to protect the AWS workloads and we protect a lot of them. Starting from easy to rds dynamodb document DB um, you know, the containers, the list just keeps going on. So it becomes a very natural extension for our customers to make it super simple to start using convert data protection for the w >>well the con vault stack is very robust. You have extremely mature stack. I want, I'm curious as to how this sort of came about and it had to be customer driven. I'm sure where your customers saying, hey, we're moving to the cloud, we had a lot of workloads in the cloud, we're calm vault customer. That intersection between calm vault and AWS customers. So again, I presume this was customer driven. but maybe you can give us a little insight and add some color to that. >>Everything in this collaboration has been customer driven. We were earlier talking about the multiple paths to chlorine vapor example and still might probably add more color from his own experience at our jones. But I'll bring it to reference Parsons who's a civil engineering leader. They started with the cloud first mandate saying we need to start moving all our backups to the cloud but we have wanted that bad actors might find it easy to go and access the backups edible is um, Conwell came together with the security features and com well brought in its own authorization controls and now we have moved more than 14 petabytes of backup data into the club and it's so robust that not even the backup administrator and go and touch the backups without multiple levels of authorization. Right. So the customer needs, whether it is from a security perspective performance perspective or in this case from a simplicity perspective is really what is driving this. And and the need came exactly like that. There are many customers who have no standardized on it because they want to find everything through the AWS marketplace. They want to use their existing, you know, the AWS contracts and also bring data strategy as part of that so that that's the real um, driver behind this. Um, Stephen and I hope actually announced some of the customers that I actively started using it. You know, many notable customers have been behind this uh, innovation, don't even, I don't know, I wanted to add more to that. >>I would just, I would, I would just add Dave, you know, look if I look back before I joined a W S seven years ago, I was the C I O at dow jones and I was leading a a fairly big cloud migration there over a number of years. And one of the impetus is for us moving to the cloud in the first place was when Hurricane Sandy hit, we had a real disaster recovery scenario in one of our New Jersey data centers um, and we had to act pretty quickly convert was, was part of that solution. And I remember very clearly Even back then, back in 2013, they're being options available to help us accelerate are moved to the cloud and just to reiterate some of the stuff that Rhonda was talking about consoles, done a great job over the last more than a decade, taking features from things like EBS and S three and EC two and some of our networking capabilities and embedding them directly into their services so that customers are able to more quickly move their backup and recovery workloads to the cloud. So each and every one of those features was as a result of, I'm sure combo working backwards from their customer needs just as we do at >>AWS >>and we're super excited to take that to the next level to give customers the option to then also by that right on their AWS invoice on AWS marketplace. >>Yeah, I mean, we're gonna have to leave it there steven, you've mentioned several times the sort of the early days of back then we were talking about gigabytes and terabytes and now we're talking about petabytes and beyond. Guys. Thanks so much. I really appreciate your time and sharing the news with us. >>Dave. Thanks for having us. >>All right. Keep it right there more from combat connections. 21. You're watching the >>cube. Mm hmm.

>>mhm mhm. Mhm Welcome back to convert connections 2021. This is the power panel. My name is Dave vellante joined by Reza more like a body was the ceo of calm vault. Isabel geese is the CMO of calm vault and john Gallagher he leads global enterprise infrastructure at sing Creon. And folks welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>So john we heard you this morning. You know, great job you guys are in the industrial logistics business. So supply chains at all a hot topic today. It's got to be challenging. Maybe you could talk about what you're seeing there, but specifically how are you thinking about data management in the context of your overall IT strategy. >>Okay, thank you. So in terms of data management, Synchrotron has 100 sites globally. So if we were to rewind by say 10 years we had data residing a lot out of those remote sites. Uh so over the last few years were basically consolidated a lot of that data and also centralist. So we've brought that into our data centers that we now have, which is a very, very centralist model. So that, that makes it a lot easier to understand where all of that data resides. >>So in the decision pie, as it relates to data, it sounds like cost efficiency is pretty, pretty ranks pretty highly. How does that impact your data management strategy and approach? I mean, is is that like the number one consideration? Is that one of many factors. How should we think about that? >>I would say cost is one of many factors. So obviously cost is key, but you don't want to introduce unnecessary risks. So you've got to keep costs at the forefront. But that's just one of the factors. Obviously data protection is one of the factors ensuring that data is protected and safe. And also understanding, is that exactly where that data resides, making sure that data is encrypted. So I would say that cost is just one of the factors. >>So Isabel good to see you again. I wonder if you could talk about how you're seeing your customers and what they're thinking about, how they're thinking differently about data management today, Are they changing the way they manage data giving given the escalation of ransomware that comprise the called the forced march to digital over the last 18, 19 months, but you've got new threats, new business dynamics, how is that affecting organizations? >>It does, it does affect them a lot. It's um we see a lot more. Actually, I asked a lot of virtual coffee talks with our customers so they can share best practices and a lot of C IOS network ending end with sizzles and they have a readiness plan because they know the question is not if they're going to have an attack, but when and how to recover from it is critical. So all the security team is really looking at the prevention but they know that if they can't stop it all, then they have a plan of end of to the data team for recovery. I see a lot more thoughtfulness because not all data is created equal. So which one is in the cloud and you can recover which one you need fast for minimum business was sorry, minimum business disruption and you keep on prime and which one you cannot lose and you have a go. So we see a lot more planning, a lot more collaboration across all verticals. We have also new services that help customers before the attacks to design and plan and also helping them post attack to recover so very much and to end and as we've seen the king out right now it's all about the people enabling them to do the business while you're risking the business too. So >>All right, thank you for that. So Reza and the fact that your Ceo is C I O. Uh so you must have some interesting conversations there but and you can be a sort of tap Sanjay's brain, how did you handle this kind of thing? And and uh that's a nice collaboration I bet. But what advice can you give to other, see IOS or grappling with cyber threats, data volumes and just the ongoing pressure to do more with less that never changes does it? >>It doesn't. And you're absolutely right. And I obviously as part of my job attracted benchmarks about budgets and everything else that before the pandemic used to track about like 3% growth year over year which is a hard to kind of do a whole lot with them. Um What what I can tell you is not for C I O not two areas the areas of investments are not created equal and from my perspective the biggest areas of investment for somebody like me in my position should be data and protecting the data. So that means that you have to find ways of on the budget side, find ways of shifting money whether you reallocate resources, whether you reform or a really organized differently, automate simplified etcetera. My background is operation so when you talk about people process technology outside of things, I leave the technology to the people that are really good at it and I focus on people and process side and for me that's about again efficiencies and finding ways that you can reorganize, you probably have the people that do the work that you want them to do and you just have to think about reorganizing them differently. And the last thing I said is prioritize prioritize initiatives across the board and it is like partner in crime in these things and we don't always say yes to her and what she wants because we need to be transparent so where we put our money >>so rest, I want to stay with you for me, I want to talk about data sprawl was interesting john during your session this morning I was sort of laying down some of my thoughts because I I feel like data sprawl, it's like social change. You can't fight it. You can maybe, you know for a period of time control it. But data is is out of control. So how do you address data sprawl in an organization? Both from a management perspective there's obviously risk. Somebody said this morning we used to keep, I think it was the C. I. A. In New Jersey. We used to keep everything forever. But that's risky. So how do you deal with that result from an organizational and management perspective? >>Yeah. You again, I'm gonna have to agree with you. As as I said in in a morning session, I like it's a natural phenomenon for a company to go through it. I've seen it in companies that are 150% people and I've seen it in companies that have tens of thousands of people. It's like a foundation onto what what entropy is in thermodynamics. It's the natural order of events. If you don't apply structure, organization data is going to go haywire and everything else. The only way. The best way that I know when the pendulum is here and everybody is doing the wrong thing is to push the pedal on the other side at least for a while to centralize, pick a few of your brightest people that know the data in and out, put them in a team and say you're responsible for making sense out of these things. Identify sources of truth for us and architect them differently. But but start with executive level metrics and board level metrics and push them down. >>So I see. I I agree with that with that. I think the people who have the data context are in the best position to add value as to whether it's data quality and how to get the most out of that data. But the problem is uh john I'd love to pick your brain on this. Especially your urine mia. You got all these different regulations and data silos, which I believe are a byproduct of how we organize. Uh, but but anyway, you have a lot of the considerations to deal with whether it's G. D. P. R. Or or or or data sovereignty etcetera. How do you approach that? >>So one of the first approaches we took when we moved over to con vault with our data protection was to reduce the number of products we used for the data protection. So we had six products through various acquisitions that we, we've done over the last 10-15 years. We've now reduced that six products down to one single product. So it means that all of your data is managed through a sort of single pane, which definitely gives you a much better insight. And also just going back to the costs that you mentioned in the previous question. Obviously going down from six products to one product, we managed to strip around $500,000 out of our costs over three years. We also moved data like I said into the center and allowed us to also concentrate the teams. So also the teams became more efficient because less people were dealing with that data as well. But yes you are right around GDP are there is definitely compliance to be considered and you just have to make sure you're up to date on all of those compliance regulations. >>So it's interesting resident here you talk about you know Isabelle, she's got needs but I would say Isabel that you probably know in your team, you know the marketing data better than anybody but there's got to be Federated governance, you've got to enforce policy in this data sprawl world. So anyway this is sort of a side but Sanjay Isabelle talk today about as a service growing like crazy and given your background I wonder if you can share any insights about how and why you think customers are going to be looking towards SAs I mean the whole world is becoming SAs ified you had some data on that this morning from, from Gardner. What are your thoughts? >>Yeah, no, absolutely, you're right experience this percent coming from cell phones and yes angie mentioned in the keynote by I think 2025 85% of business will be delivered through SAAS apps and that's very simple look at the world today the market dynamics of business changes. You mentioned the supply chain is you were talking you know all the line of business people of the business executives have to change fast. And the fastest way to do that is SAS because it has speed agility and you get the value faster problem being then it becomes very complex or I. T. Because you have workloads in multiple clouds on premise multiple apps and and what convo stands for and what everybody should look at is being able to enable all this innovation but at the same time removing the complexity for I. T. To protect this data to recover it and that's really where you know we're focusing our attention that is unavoidable. It's all about business and gT but it doesn't mean that you should compromise on data management. Yeah. >>Yeah I think you know we gotta we have to wrap here but I think the model, you know again it's about you coming from salesforce, we've contextualized our operational systems. You know, whether it's you know the sales cloud, the logistics, cloud, it's the lines of business actually have a good handle on this. And where I see the role of calm vault is that that notion of Federated governance, you've got to have centralized policy but you've got to programmatically and automate that out to the lines of business and I think that is kind of where the where the future is headed. Uh And I think that's really kind of controlled strategy. I'm hearing a lot on automation cloud like services and pushing that out. Um And so I see a new era in data coming and you guys talked a lot about this but but Isabelle will give you the last word. Put a put a bumper sticker on the on the panel for us. >>Well absolutely. I mean you said it's not left for no workload, sorry, it should be left behind and that's why you know you need a single architecture. I think businesses is changing fast and it's exciting. Uh And as long as you know you got a great I. T. Team with a great plan to have your back as a business leader. Every company should really embrace um all the change and innovation. So thank you day for for giving me the last world >>go. Thank you guys. I really appreciate you coming on the cube has been a fun day. We got more here that convulsed connections, keep it right there. We're gonna come back right after this short break my nose and I are going to wrap up and summarize the day. Yeah

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to Commvault Connections. My name is Dave Vellante, and we're going to dig into the changing security landscape and look specifically at ransomware and what steps organizations can take to better protect their data, their applications and their people. As you know cyber threats continue to escalate. In the past 19 months, we've seen a major shift in CISO strategies, tactics and actions as a direct result of the trend toward remote work, greater use of the cloud and the increased sophistication of cyber criminals. In particular, we've seen a much more capable well-funded and motivated adversary than we've ever seen before, stealthy techniques like living off the land, island hopping through the digital supply chain, self-forming malware and escalations in ransomware attacks, necessitate vigilant responses. And we're super pleased today to be joined by Dave Martin who's a global chief security officer at ADP. Dave, welcome, good to see you. >> Thanks for having me today. >> It's our pleasure. Okay, let's get right into it, it's a great topic. I mean, ADP, we're talking about people's money. I mean, it doesn't get more personal and sensitive than that, maybe healthcare, but money is right there on the priority list. But maybe you could start by telling us a bit about your role at the company, how you fit into the organization with your colleagues, like the the CIO, the CDO, maybe describe that a bit if you would. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we're somewhat unusual and both structure and we, one of the ways is we are, I have a very converged organization. So my responsibility extends from both the physical protection of kind of buildings, our associates, travel safety through fraud that we see in attempted in our products all the way through to a more traditional chief security officer in the cyberspace. And the other thing that's a little bit unusual is rather than reporting into a technology organization. I actually report into our chief administrative officer. So my peers in that organization are legal compliance. So it's a great position to be in the organization. And I've had various different reports during my career. And there's always a lot of debate with my peers about where's the best place to report and I think they always come back to, it's not really where you report, it's about those relationships that you mentioned. So how do you actually collaborate and work with the chief data officer, the CIO, the head of product, the product organization, and how do you use that to create this kind of very dynamic angel force to defend against the threats we face today? >> Yeah, now, so let's just want to clarify for the audience. So when you talk about that converged structure, oftentimes if I understand what your point is that the network team might be responsible for some of the physical security or the network security, that's all under sort of one roof in your organization, is that correct? >> So a lot of the controls and operations, something like firewalls is out in the CIO organization, but the core responsibility and accountability, whether it's protecting the buildings, the data centers, the data in our applications, the kind of the back office of all the services that we use to deliver value to our clients and kind of the same things that everyone has, the ERP environments now, all of that, protecting those environments rolls up to my team from an accountability and governance business. >> Got it, so, I mean, as I was saying upfront, I mean the acceleration, we all talk about that acceleration that compression, the force marched to digital that SolarWinds hack. It was like a Stuxnet moment to me 'cause it's signaled almost this new level of escalation by cyber criminals and that had send a shockwave through your community, I wonder you could, if you could talk about at a high level, how did that impact the way that CISOs think about cyber attacks or did it? >> I think we're very used to watching the outside world kind of adversaries don't stand still our businesses don't stand still, so we're constantly having to evolve. So it's just another call to action. How do we think about what we just saw and then how do we kind of realign the controls that we have and then how do we think about our program going forward that we need to address? >> Yeah, so we've seen, when we talk to other CISOs, your colleagues, they tell us, we've made a big sort of budget allocation toward endpoint security, cloud, identity access management and obviously focus on a flatter network. And of course, ransomware, how have you shifted priorities as a result of sort of the last, the pandemic 19 months? >> Yeah, we're definitely seeing that shift in kind of the necessity of working from home and we are kind of thinking by what tools do we need to get to our associates to really make them successful. And then also keep the integrity of our data and the availability of our services in that new model. And so we've made that shift in technology and controls, reinforced a lot of things that we already had. One thing thinking about the supply chain change that we saw out of SolarWinds is thinking about ransomware defense prior to that was very much around aligning the defenses within the perimeter of your network within the cloud environments. And I really thinking about where do I outside that environment where do I exchange files from, what connectivity do I have with partners and suppliers? What services do they provide to support us as an enterprise? And what's going to happen if they're not there at a minimum but then what happens if they had some kind of attack that can actually drive some of this malware and spread into the network or via some of those file transfer, make sure we'd really sure shored up the controls in that area but the response is actually part of that. How am I going to react when I hear from even a client, we're a very customer service focused company, we want to do whatever we can to help. And the instinct of one of our frontline associates say, Hey, send me that Excel file, I'll take care of it. So now yet we still want to help that client through, but we want to think through a little bit more before we start sharing an office file back and forth between two environments, one of which we know to be confident. >> Right, that's interesting what you're saying about the change in just focus on the perimeter to the threats within, without et cetera, because you don't even need a high school degree or diploma to be a ransomware attacker these days, you could go on the dark web. And if you're a bad, bad person, you can hire ransomware as a service. If you have access to a server credentials, you can do bad things and hopefully you'll end up in handcuffs, but that's a legitimate threat today, which is relatively new in the way in which people are escalating, whether it's crypto ransoms, et cetera, really do necessitate new thinking around or ransomware. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the layered approach that you might take, the air gapping, be interested to understand where Commvault fits in to the portfolio, if you will. >> Sure and really it's thinking about this in depth. You're not going to be able to protect or recover everything so really understand, first of all, that if what is most important to be able to maintain service, what data do you do you need to protect and have available, armed with that now you can go through the rest of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, the main thing you're doing the best for prevention, for the detection and response in that area. And then you kind of really interesting when we get to the recovery phase, both from a Commvault perspective and in many attacks where we really want to focus on prevention, but ultimately we'll likely to see a scenario even in some small part of our environment, where some kind of attack is effective and now we're back at that recovery step. And we don't want that to be the first time we're testing those backgrounds, we don't want to be the first time that we figured out that those backups have been on the network the whole time, and they can't be used for recovery. So partnering with everyone in the environment we talk about it takes a village to defend against this kind of threat, getting everyone engaged, the experts in each of these fields to make sure that we're thinking they understand this threat and how real it is and what their role is going to be in setting up that protection and defense, and then come that dark day that we all hope will never happen, when do you need them? When do you need them to be doing so that you can get back to a restoration and effective operation point as soon as possible. >> Yeah, hope for the best plan for the worst. So it's a big part of that is education. And of course the backup corpus is an obvious target because everything's in there. But before we get into sort of the best practice around that, I wanted to ask you about your response because one of the things that we've seen is that response is increasingly have to be stealthy so that you don't necessarily alert the attackers that you know that they're inside. Is that sort of a new trend and how do you approach that? >> Yeah, I mean, it's always a balance depending on the type of data and the type of attack as to kind of how can violent and swift. And obviously you have to be able to protect the environment, protect the integrity of the data, and then also balance again this kind of tipping off the attacker which could potentially make things worse. So always a conversation depending on the different threat type, you're going to have to go through. And it really helps to have some of those conversations up front, to have tabletops, not just at a technical level, to make sure that you're walking through the steps of a response to make it as seamless and quick and effective as possible, but also having that conversation with leadership team and even the board around the kind of decisions they're going to have to make and make sure that you wherever possible use scenarios to figure out what are some of those actions that are likely to be taken and also empower some teams. It's really important to be able to act autonomously and quickly, you don't want to be at 2:00 AM kind of looking for the CEO or kind of the executive team to get them out there to make a decision. Some of these decisions need to be made very quickly and very effectively, and you can only do that with empowered upfront and sometimes even automated processes to do them. >> Dave, describe what you mean by tabletops. I presume you're talking to a top-down view versus sort of being in the weeds but add some color to that please. >> Yeah, definitely it literally is kind of getting everyone around the table and at ADP at least once per year, we actually get the full executive team together and challenge them with a scenario, making sure that they're working through the problem. They know what each of their roles are at the table. And I am lucky to have a fantastic leadership team. We're actually very practiced. We've done this often enough now that they really pull apart really hard problems and think about what that decision is going to mean to me, so come that dark day, if it ever does, they're not kind of challenged by the never thought, they don't know, they've understand the technical background of why being asked to make the decision or the limitations of what their responses may be. >> So a lot of people and process goes into this always the case, but let's talk a little bit about the tech, I mentioned the backup Corpus is an obvious target before, what are some of the best tech practices in terms of protecting, whether it's that backup corpus, other data, air gaps, maybe you could give us some guidance on that front. >> Sure, we're not going to be able to protect everything. So focus on those favorite children is the best advice up front to think about the the critical components that enable you to bring things up, easy to go focus on that critical data and that most important app that everyone in the company understands. But all of that and cannot even start if you don't have the foundation, the network's not up and running, the authentication services is not up and running. So it's good to get a focus in some elements and practice on technical tabletop setting of how do you go through recovering an active directory forest back to a known, trusted state? Because that's one of the foundations you're going to need to build anything else back up on. On the backup side is make sure that you don't use the same credentials that your backup administrators use everyday, ensure there's only the smallest number of people have access to be able to control the backpacks, if at all possible and Commvault and many backup solutions, now make sure they're using a second-factor authentication to be able to get into those systems, and also make sure that some of the backups that you have are kind of offline, air gaps can be touched. And then also you think about the duration. You talked about the attackers being very smart and determine, they know how enterprises prepare and respond. So think about how long you're retaining them and where you're retaining some of the backups, not just incremental as to be able to fully restore a system, basically from bare metal or from that climate. >> And you're using Commvault software to manage some of this capability, is that right? I'm sure you have a bevy of tooling. >> Yeah, we have a wide range of tooling but yeah we are a certainly a combo farmer, >> And somebody said, a consultant said to me today Dave, I'm thinking about advising my clients that their air gap process should be air gapped. In other words, they should have sort of a separate remote removed from the mainstream process just for extra protection and I was like, okay, that's kind of interesting, but at the same time then do they have the knowledge to get back to a low RPO state? What do you think about about that approach? >> So the challenges of any kind of recovery and control design is like making sure that you're not making things overly complex and introducing other issues and also other exposures, if you're moving out of your normal control environment, that you have a 24 by 7, 365 set of monitoring, the more creative you get your plans are in danger of kind of having control erosion and visibility to that other state. But it is really important to think about, even at the communication level is in this kind of attack, you may not be able to rely on email, kind of Teams, all the common services that you have. So how are you actually going to communicate with this village it's going to take to recover, to be able to work through the process. So that's definitely an area that I would advocate for having offline capabilities to be able to have people react, gather, respond, plan and control the recovery even though the main enterprise may not be currently. >> I wonder if I could pick your brain on another topic, which is zero trust prior to the pandemic. A lot of times people would roll their eyes like it's a buzzword but it's kind of become a mandate where people are now talking about eliminating credentials to talking about converging identity access management, and governance and privilege access management. I mean, what are those some of the sea changes you see around so-called zero trust. >> Yeah, I think kind of zero trust has become that kind of call-to-action buzzword. These concepts that are embodied in zero trust journey are ones that have been around for forever and least privilege and it's how we think about you can't go buy a product that I like I'm just implemented zero trust. How do you think strategically about where you take your starting point and then go on this journey to kind of increase the various tools that start to limit, improve the segmentation not only from a network standpoint, from a service standpoint, from an identity standpoint and make sure you're embracing concepts like persona so that you start to break up the, may not get to zero trust anytime soon, but you're able to get less and less trust in that model. And to think about it in many different worlds, think about your product access. If you're a service provider company like we are, as well as kind of the internal employee context. So there is many elements, it's a complex journey. It's not something you're going to buy off the shelf and go implement but it's one that you're going to have to again partner with those other stakeholders that you have because there's user experience and client experience components of this journey, some of which are actually quite positive. You mentioned passwordless as one of those components in the gym certainly something that actually has a better user experience and also can offer a better security and freedom from the traditional passwords that you've come to love to hate. >> Dave, I know you're tight on time. I got two more questions for you. One is what is the CISO's number one challenge. >> Wow, that's getting enough sleep, now, really is, just staying hard with that business environment, that threat environment and the available tool sets and making sure that we're constantly working with those partners that we keep describing to chat that course to the future so that we're, this is a race that doesn't have a finish line. The marathon gets a little bit longer every year and bringing my peers on and making them understand that it's easy to get fatigued and say, ah, we thought we were done when we when we finished this initiative. It's just keeping everyone's energy up and focus on a very long mode. >> One A in that question if I may is many organizations lack the talent to be able to do that. You may not, you may have a firmer, but the industry as a whole really lacks the skills and the talent, and really, that's why they're looking to automation. How acute do you see that talent shortage? >> It's definitely there. And I think it's important to realize the back to that village concept, everybody has a play here. So what is a smaller available talent born in the security industry is we've really got to be that call-to-action, we've got to explain why this is important. We've got to be the consultants that kind of lead through what changes are we going to need to make to be successful? It's tempting to say, oh, they'll never do that. They're like, we've got to do it ourselves. We will never be successful. And just being the security team that tries to do everything, it's bringing everyone along for the journey. And part of that is just going to be this constant socialization and education of what they need to do and why it's so important. And then you really will build a great partnership. >> My last question, I was kind of been keeping a list of Dave's best practice. I saw obviously the layered approach, you want to get to that NIST framework. There's a lot of education involved. You've got to partner with your colleagues, the tabletops, executive visibility. So everybody knows what their role is, kind of the do your job, you've got to build zero trust. You can't just buy zero trust off the shelf and so that was my kind of quick list. Am I missing anything? >> I think that's pretty good. And then just in that partnership this is a tiring kind of hard thing to do and kind of just bringing everyone along, they can help you do so much, especially if you explained to them how it's going to make that product better, how it's going to make that client experience better, how it's going to make the CIO, the internal associate experience better, that this isn't just about adding friction into an already challenging environment. >> Like frontline healthcare workers, the SecOps pros are heroes day-to-day, you don't necessarily hear a lot about the work they're doing but Dave we really appreciate you coming on and sharing some of the best practices. And thank you for the great work that you guys are doing out there and best of luck. >> Thanks for the exchange, it has been a pleasure. >> All right, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>>Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. >>We're back with the notion there to wrap up conv all connections. 2021 the virtual edition. Okay, let's do this. You ready? >>Absolutely. >>All right. I'll get a starting .1. Data. You ain't seen nothing yet. You just wait. We're gonna look back on the big data era of the 20 tens and joke about how trivial was compared to the next 10 years. You know, what are your thoughts on data value and data exposures? >>The data has never been more valuable. Right? The new oil your most critical asset and neither has it been more vulnerable. So you kind of get these two things value increasing. Obviously it becomes more attractive to the to the bad actors and that's the era that we're living in and really, you know what organizations are needed. You know, you kind of think about business resilience and all that. You need the ability to as someone said the anti fragile right? Keep testing it. See, you know, if if your data defenses are now ready to a point where your data is not a liability, but you can make it something that becomes a business advantage. So kind of that business resilience gap that we've been talking about. The business integrity gap uh is really you know what we had focused on. So our customers can really start just taking advantage of the value equation of the data. >>And I think you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna push my community here a little bit and I'm gonna I think we need a new new metaphor because you know why? Because data minnows it's actually more valuable than oil it's not scarce like oil we're never gonna run out of data. So I'm trying to come up with a new a new one but we'll work on that. The cloud. The 2nd point is the cloud is expanding. It's moving to the data center. We got hybrid connections were going across clouds, we got edge nodes, we got new workloads, real time streaming and ai influencing microservices and containers and Ai and all this R. P. A. And hyper automation. All the crazy buzzwords that combined your digital business stack. But the point is data is not only exploding, it's exploding everywhere. You know it's not just in one place anymore. >>Absolutely. And that's that's you know part of the challenge here that our customers space you know unless you know you're a company that was born yesterday you have applications everywhere. Your your pace is different, every customer's journey and the transformation is different. So you might take different directions, different ways. What do you do you have some sass applications you might start there or you start with some public cloud. Maybe you start using some stories in public cloud. So as you transform and as you are now creating more sprawl and that sprawl as we talked about before this is like swiss cheese you got lights that you know people can take advantage of. On the other hand because of that lack of a single unified data services platform. What you lose is the ability to take advantage of all your data, your application, mobility and people die. Let's take the example of containers and kubernetes. What is the point of having you know transportation and ability to move these containers to any cloud if your data is not available in all those clocks. What's the strategy for that? So the problems are also changing their more business centric than just that, you know, what I call the active data management era is really upon us and that's really what's gonna help take it full advantage of all of the other technologies around us. Ai microservices edge, you know, IOT you need to make sure you have a unified data services and intelligent data services platform. >>So what I see is is calm vault is essentially building that that data protection cloud or you might want to call it the data management cloud that starts to get into database and some other areas but but the concept of an abstraction layer that hides that underlying complexity of all the clouds and allows you to protect your data irrespective of location. That's to me that's how you get control of your data which is kind of point number three. And we heard Sandy this morning talking about embrace, manage and protect your data properly. It can be the defining disruptive difference for an organization, which I agree. However, I want to play devil's advocate in the sense that I think the only way you can get control of your data is do you have to embrace that sprawl in that complexity and admit you're not gonna shove it all into a single monolithic source of truth that those days are over. You have to you have to realize that the world is decentralized, It's coming it's here. So we have to implement automation and software to Federated governance and policy and security and privacy and data protection across that abstraction layer that I just just describe someone. Let's talk about that. What are your thoughts? >>Yeah. And I said that earlier too and Sonya is absolutely right. You have to embrace that. You figure out how to make it a competitive advantage. No workload left behind Commonwealth customers are able to protect everything from S 400 to dynamics 3 65 in the cloud and everything in between. Right. So microservices app multi cloud today we're top solution provider for the top clouds. We talked to Microsoft order today, AWS DCP we are driving exabytes of data and protecting exabytes of data. That is our strategic advantage. As you said, you cannot leave you know, strategies behind and say you know what that workload. Not interesting anymore with your data is in there. So that that is the approach that comprehensive platform and then I'm built on that. You start seeing protection grade, not data security, how to use tackle that intelligence from data insights from data compliance challenges my e discovery challenges. So being able to tackle those things ecosystem very key. How do I build on top of this intelligence, data services platform and ecosystem to take advantage of my data. These are all the layers that we believe. You know, it's very differentiated compared to anyone else out there. We're not forcing anyone into a single architecture and saying this is the best because you know what you have learned from 25 years, there's no such thing as one single best architecture. >>Oh, I asked 401 of the most innovative systems in the day. >>Uh but at the >>point of we talked about all the sprawl, this makes ransomware more difficult because an insidious because of the expanding supply chain, the ecosystem, the threat surface. And really the sophistication of the adversary, we've kind of talked about that and and and really new techniques are the Attackers are going mainstream. So but you know, I want to give you the last word here, I want to address two things if you would. Security. Like what's the big news there? Why the big deal and why con vault bring us home with the big picture of your differentiators? >>Absolutely. So you mentioned ransomware? Bad guys always looking to find those exit drawers and break it, Break it down security. I q we're proud to launch this today. It's kind of brings together the culmination of a lot of security that we have done allows customers to be proactive in terms of, you know, we've brought in Gamification into that security i aspect like make it easy and almost make it fun to make sure you're plugging all the holes so that your last mile of defense is secure, then you figure out how you can become more proactive. I have data intelligence that the security tools don't when the bad guys start sniffing around the data or anomaly detection and machine learning the ability to bring that intelligence a highly, you know, relevant signal into the security tools, building that bridge. And lastly, what happens when the, you know, worst case scenario happens almost like a rewind button to go back on your data. Look this is where malware came in and now you're able to just go back and delete that. So that's security, I. Q. Amazing. Or you know, customers are going to try it out and the live hands on lab that's happening and you know, there are feedback has been, this is just brilliant, they love it. So, one more, you know, innovation, we keep doing this, we go we're setting the bar a year ago, we launched them CSS, you know, air gap copy in the cloud, you know, a few weeks ago now we're saying, oh we can also do it right, well we have now innovative to the next level that's combo, you know, bringing it on why combo, 25 years of innovation, you know, it is just amazing how the company had the vision to build a distributed architecture. You talked about a distributed world are beauties, we're not forcing preference customers might have self managed applications that they want, you know, to be used software, they might have the need in some locations to have everything integrated with an appliance, you know, new workloads in the cloud. Let me see if I can start shifting to the data management as a service, which is really the next wave in the industry. And then finally, you know, what about that whole distribution that's happening again. So people will be, you know, we have that unique ability to build a platform. We have amazing ecosystem partners and the biggest companies in the world. Trust us as you heard, you know, throughout the show. So that's what's comin, you know, sustain technology differentiation to make our customers really realize their vision of, you know, leveraging their data as an asset. >>Nice job knows, I love it. Okay, that's a wrap from convoked connections 2021 this is dave vellante from an ocean air and the entire conv all team and the cube team encouraging to come back and check out the on demand videos for anything that you miss tell a friend, let us know what you think for everyone here at convoked connections. 21. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. Yeah. >>Mhm Yeah

(lighthearted music) >> We're here now with Manoj Nair, who's the general manager of Metallic and Dave Totten CTO with Microsoft. And we're going to talk about some of the announcements that we heard earlier today and what Metallic and Microsoft are doing to meet customer needs around cyber threats and ensuring secure cloud data management. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thank you. >> Hey Manoj, let me start with you. We heard early this morning, Dave Totten was here, David Noe, talk a lot about security. Has the conversation changed, how has it changed when you talk to customers, Manoj? What's top of mind. >> Yeah, thank you, Dave. And thank you, Dave Totten. You know, great conversation earlier. Dave, you and I have talked about this in the past, right? Security long a big passion of mine. You know, having lived through nation state attacks in the past and all that. We're seeing those kinds of techniques really just getting mainstream, right? Ransomware has become a mainstream problem in the scourge in our lives. Now, when you look at it from a lens of data and data management, data protection, backup, all of this was very much a passive you know, compliance centric use case. It was pretty static you know, put it in tapes, haul it all over. And what has really changed with this ransomware and cybercrime change rate is data, which is now your most precious asset, is under attack. So now you see security teams, just like you talked with Dave Martin, from ADP earlier, they are looking for that bridge between SecurityOps and ITOps. That data management solution needs to do more. It needs to be part of an active conversation, you know? Not just, you know, recovery readiness. Can you ensure that, are you testing that, is it recoverable? That is your last mile of defense. So then you get questions like that from security teams. You get you know, the need for doing more, signals. Can I get better signals from my data management stack to tell me I might be under attack? So what we're seeing in the conversation is the need to have more active conversations around data management and the bridge between ITOps and SecurityOps is really becoming paramount for our customers. >> Yeah, Dave Totten I mean, I often say that I think data protection used to be this bolt on. Now it's a fundamental component of the digital business stack. Anything you would add to what Manoj just said. >> Yeah, I would just say exactly that. Data is an asset, right? We talked about it a lot about the competitive advantage that customers are now realizing that no longer is IT considered sort of this cost center element. We need to be able to leverage our interactions with customers, with partners, with supply chains, with manufacturers, we need to be able to leverage that to sort of create differentiation and competitive advantage in the marketplace. And so if you think about it, as that way as the fuel for economic profitability and business growth, you would do everything in your power to secure it, to support it, to make sure you had access to it, to make sure that you didn't have you know, bad intent users accessing it. And I think we're seeing that shift with customers as they think more about how to be more efficient with their investments in information technology and then how just to make sure that they protect the lifeblood of their businesses. >> Yeah, and that just makes it harder because the adversary is very capable. They're coming in through the digital supply chain. So it's complicated. And so Dave and maybe Manoj, you can comment as well after, Microsoft and Commvault, you guys have been working together for decades and so you've seen a lot of the changes, a lot of the waves. So I'm curious as to how the partnership has evolved. You've got a recent strategic announcement around Azure with Metallic. Dave, take us through that. >> Yeah, I mean you know, Commvault and Microsoft aren't newlyweds, we've been together now for 25 plus years. We send each other anniversary gifts, all that good stuff. And you know, listen, there's a couple things that are key to our relationship. One, we started believing in each other's engineering organizations, right? We hire the best, we train and retain the best. And we both put a lot of investment behind our infrastructure and the ability to work together to really innovate at real time, rapid speeds. Two, we use Commvault products so you know, there's no greater I think, advantage that if a major supplier or platform partner like Microsoft uses your products. We've used it for years in our Xbox group to support and store the data for a hundred million XBox live users. And we're very avid with it with our data centers, our access to Azure data centers, our Microsoft office products. And so we use Commvault services as well. And through that mutual relationship you know, obviously Commvault has seen the ins and outs of what's great about our services and where we're continuing to build and invest. And so they've been able to really you know, dedicate a team of engineers and architects to support all that Azure as a platform, as a service can provide. And then how to take the best of those features and build it into their own first party products. I think when you get close enough to somebody for so many years right, 25 plus years, you figure out what they're great at and you learn to take those advantages like Commvault has with Microsoft and Azure and use it to your advantage, right? To build the best in class product that Metallic actually is. And you're right, the announcement this week it feels culminating, it feels like it's a major milestone in first off, industry innovation but also in our relationship. But it's really not that big of a step change from what we've been doing and building and innovating on for the past you know, 25 years. >> Yeah so Manoj, that's got to be music to your ears. Because you come at it with this rich data protection stack, Microsoft there's so many capabilities. One of the courses, which is Azure. It's like the secret weapon, it's become the secret weapon. How do you think about that relationship, Manoj? >> Absolutely Dave said it right. We are strong partners, 25 years, founding in Western Commvault, mutual customers, partnership. You know, really when you look at it from a customer lens, what our customers have appreciated, over the last year of that strengthening of that partnership basically the two pillars of Commvault the leader of data protection, or you know, for the last 25 years, 10 out of 10 in the Gartner MQ comes together with Azure, the enterprise secure cloud leader in creating Metallic. Metallic, now with 1,000 plus customers around the world, there's a reason they trust it. It's now become part of how they protect their Office 365. No workload left behind, which is very unique, you know? So what we have architected together and now we're taking it to the next phase, our joint partners, right? Our joint customers, that those are some of the things that are really changing in terms of how we're accelerating the partnership. >> Manoj, you and I have talked about ransomware a lot, we did a special segment a while back on that. The adversary is very capable. And you know, I put in the chat this morning, at Commvault Connections, you don't even need a high school diploma to be a ransomwarist. You can go on the dark web, you can buy ransomware as a service. All you need is access to a server and you can stick you know, some malware on it. So you know, it's very, very dangerous times. What is it about data management as a service that makes it a good fit right now from a customer perspective to solve this problem? >> Absolutely. Bad guys, real life, or in the cyber world, they have some techniques. First thing they do in a ransomware is you go after the exits. What are the exit doors? Now you back up data, they know that that backup data can be used to recover. So they go and try to defeat the backup products in that environment. That's number one game that changes with data management as a service. Your data management data protection environment is not inside your environment. Chances to do two simultaneous penetrations to try and anything is possible. But now you've got an additional layer of recovery readiness because that control plane secured on top of Microsoft, Azure, 3,500 security professionals, FedRAMP high standard only data management and service entity to get it. As one of our customers said, "A unicorn in the wild", that is what you have as your data management environment. So if something bad happens, worst case, this environment is ready. Our enterprise customers are starting to understand that this is becoming a big reason to shift to this model. You know, then it's okay if you're not ready to shift the entire model, you're given the easy button of just air gapping of your data. So if you're an existing Commvault customer, appliance, software, anything, secure air gap Metallic cloud storage on hardened Azure Blob protected jointly by us, start there. And finally things like active directory. Talk about shutting the exit path, right? Take that down, your entire environment is not accessible. We make it easy for you to recover that. And because of our partnership, we're able to get it for free to every one of our customers. Go protect your active directory environment using (speaks faintly) kind of three big reasons that we're seeing that entire conversation shift in the minds of our customers. >> Yeah, thank you for that. That's a no brainer. Dave, how do Metallic and Microsoft fit together? Where's the you know, kind of value chain if you will, when it comes to dealing with cyber protection or ransomware recovery, how are your customers thinking about that? >> Yeah well, first it's a shared responsibility model, right? When you've got the best in class platform like Azure with built in protections, scalable data centers all over the global footprint. But then also we spend 10 plus billion dollars a year in security and defense and our own data center environments, right? And so I always find it inspiring when companies believe that their investments in security and platform protection is going to do the job. That's true, that used to be true. Now with Azure, you can take advantage of this global scale and secure you know, footprint of investment that a company like Microsoft has done to really set your heart at ease. Now, what do you do with your actual applications and who has access to it, and how do you actually integrate like Manoj was talking about down to the individual or the individual account that's trying to get access to your environment? Well, that's where Commvault comes in at that point of attack or at that point of an actual data element. So if you've got that environment within Commvault system backed by the umbrella of the Azure security infrastructure, that's how the two sort of compliment each other. And again, it's about shared responsibility, right? We want every customer that leverages Azure to make sure that they know it's secure, it's protected. We've got a mechanism to protect your best interests. Commvault has that exact same mission statement, right? To make sure that every single element that comes into contact with their products is protected, is secure, is trustworthy. You know, I got a long lesson, long, long time ago, early in my career that says you can goof up a product feature, you can goof up the color scheme on a website but if you lose a customer's data or somebody trust, you never get it back. And so we don't take our relationships with customers very lightly. And I think our committed and joint responsibility to delight and support our customers is what has led to this partnership being so successful over the past couple of decades. >> Great, thank you, Dave. And so Manoj, I was saying earlier that data protection has become a fundamental component of your digital business stack. So that sounds good but what should customers be doing to make data protection and data management, a business value driver versus just a liability or exposure or cost factor that has to be managed? What do you think about that? >> No, and then David added earlier, right? It's no longer a liability. In fact it is you know, someone said data is the new oil, right? It is your crown jewels. You got to to start with thinking about an active data protection strategy, not you know, thinking about passive tools and looking at it in terms of a compliance or I need to keep the data around. So that's the number one part is like, how do I have something that protects all my workloads and everyone has a different pace of transformation. So unless you know, you're a company that just got created, you have environments that are on-prem, on the edge, in CoLOS, public cloud. You got you know, SaaS applications, all of those have a critical data that needs to come together. Look for breadth of data protection, something that doesn't leave your workloads behind. Siloed solutions, create a Swiss cheese that create light for the attackers to go after those gaps. You don't want to look for that, you know? And then finally trust. I mean you know, what are the pillars of trust that the solution is built on? You got to figure out how your teams can get to doing more productive things rather than patching systems. You know, making sure that the infrastructure is up. As Dave said you know, we invest a ton jointly in securing this infrastructure. Trust that and leverage that as a differentiator rather than trying to duplicate all of that. So those are some of the you know, key things. And you know, look for players who understand that hybrid is here, give you different entry points. Don't force you know, the single single mode of operation. Those are the things we have built to make it easier for our customers to have a more active data management strategy. >> Dave, Todd, I'll give you the last word we got to go but I want to hit on this notion of zero trust. It used to be a buzz word now it's mainstream. There's so much that this discussion, is it Prudentialist access? Every access is treated maybe as privileged but what does zero trust mean to you in less than a minute? >> Yeah you know, trust but verify, right? Every interaction you have with your infrastructure, with your data, with your applications and you do it at the identity level. We care about identity and we know that that's the core of how people are going to try and access infrastructure. Used to be protect the perimeter. The analogy I always use is we have locks on our houses. Now the bad guys are everywhere. They're getting inside our houses and they're not immediately taking things, they're hiding in the closet and they're popping out three weeks later before anybody knows it. And so being able to actually manage, measure, protect every interaction you have with your infrastructure and do it at the individual or application level, that's what zero trust is all about. So don't trust any interaction, make sure that you pass that authorization through with every ask. And then make sure you protect it from the inside out. >> Great stuff. Okay guys, we've got to leave it there. Thanks so much for the time today. All right next, right after a short break, we're headed into the CXL Power Panel to hear what's on the minds of the executives as it relates to data management in the digital era. Keep it right there, you're watching theCUBE. (lighthearted music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. On October 28th, we'll be attending Commvault Connections '21. This is a premier industry event and it's focused on hybrid data services. The broadcast will be live from Commvault's Tinton Falls HQ. Now the agenda is packed with educational inspirational keynote speakers. For example, Dave Martin will be speaking. He is in the global chief security office at ADP, Stephen Orban of AWS and Dave Taunton of Microsoft will be sharing insights. And of course Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani, he's a long-time guest of theCUBE and a rare example of a CIO transitioning to a CEO role and having excellent success with Commvault transformation. These sessions that are referencing will engage you on topics like ransomware, SaaS, and hybrid cloud, and more there's something for every data professional. And by attending, you have the chance to have an exclusive consultation with the dev team at Commvault, which is always a hot ticket item. Now you can catch all the action live on SiliconANGLE and thecube.net so go right now, register for connections '21, it takes less than a minute. I just did it. We'll see you there. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) We are entering a new era of cyber attacks. The SolarWinds hack has underscored a rising and very disturbing trend, namely that tunneling in through an organization's supply chain. And you're hearing terms like island hopping and living off the land it becoming mainstream in the world of cybersecurity. And we're going to talk a little bit about ransomware and cyber with Manoj Nair who is the GM of Metallic, a Commvault company. And Tim Carben, as a Principal Systems Engineer with Mitchell International. Gents, welcome. Thanks so much for coming on and talking to me about this very important topic. So, you know, Tim, I got to start with you, you're the practitioner, you got to fight this battle every day. You heard me upfront, it feels like we're entering a new era, the adversary is highly capable, very well-funded. How are you thinking about changes in protecting your data and creating things like air gaps. What are you doing to solve this problem? >> I think the most important part, and this is just to start off with, is patching everything up to date. Most of the time someone's getting in, or most of the time one of these viruses is replicating between the different systems it's due to unpatched environments. And then number two is training. If your resources don't know not to click on something, or to hover over something, to look at it, then you are just going to be exposing your environment over and over and over again. But when it all boils down to it, and it comes back to what I'm doing in the data protection world, in the backup and recovery, I have to look at not only how am I going to get this data back, because if a system gets encrypted we are going to look for recovery first. That's it. Look for recovery first, but we also need to make sure that our environment is protected, lock down our media agents, lock down our storage that we're connected to, and like you had mentioned before, use an air gap. Everyone's been moving away from tape and it's understandable. There's a lot of resource utilization involved. There's a lot of people that you need in there in your data center, moving things around, and it's a robotic machine you have to rely on. Not only that, but recovery times can be slow. What I found is Commvault has gone out there and they've offered us SaaS storage. This SaaS storage is somewhere else. We could be in AWS, we could be in Azure, we could be in GCP but we can still connect to the SaaS storage. And we never have to worry about someone having access to our data center and getting to our tapes. We don't have to worry about someone having tenant access and deleting our backups off of a particular tenant, which is something that we are going to see in the future, if it's not out there already. So there's a lot that we have to do and protecting ourselves is very important and Commvault is making it a lot easier. >> Thank you, Tim. So, these things have probably been around for a while but we're seeing really, I talk about mainstream, and a couple of things that are really disturbing, and we're seeing these malware come in and they're self forming, they're creating different signatures. But we're also seeing this idea of living off the land very stealthily using your own tools against you. And then, really disturbingly, we're seeing when a victim discovers that they're being attacked and they respond, their incident response is triggering a very aggressive counter attack by the hackers, where they've already exfiltrated really sensitive data, they've been stealing and making monetizing your data. And then they'll just encrypt it, hold it for ransom, threaten to release that sensitive data, if you don't let them keep going. It's really, really disturbing. What's your perspective on this raising the bar that the bad guys have done and how we can keep pace? >> And Dave. I lived through the nation-state attack that happened in 2012. The front door seat I was at RSA as part of the leadership team. And, at that time it was considered this is a very unique and it's an advanced, persistent threat. It took the resources of one of the biggest nations of the world to mount something like that. And fast forward, eight, nine years later we're seeing that these kinds of techniques have now been mainstreamed. You've got a lot of people who are figuring out not just that. They may not even care about your data, but they know you care about your data. So they're not trying to exfiltrate the data maybe to look for sensitive data and monetize it. That's just harder. Why not take it directly from you? In Q1 of 2021 the average ransomware ransom went up 43%. It's like $250k or something. That's just the ransom. And we saw now that it's impacting day-to-day lives. You saw the long lines of the gas tanks, gas pumps on the East Coast. You know, the weekend before last. And here's somebody who had a ransomware attack. As the news story say, they'd paid for the ransom. And that was the recovery after paying 5 million was slow, so they had to go and figure out how to recover from the backups. And that was not fast enough. So, you know, defense in depth is something that has really been the mantra, and just like protecting a home, you're not just looking at putting in an alarm on the front door, you have sensors on your windows, you have a fire alarm. You got to see if you got different things too, in terms of really thinking through different threats. And Tim hit on a couple of those things, right? You really think about what is my weak link, what is my vulnerability? That vulnerability is now your software supply chain. So you're thinking about whom am I buying things from? Aren't they taking care of stuff because they are now a new backdoor. And that's kind of the biggest, I would say new thing, that has now been mainstreamed. Like a lot of these techniques are getting mainstream, but the fact that a software supply chain itself that has being deployed in mass is now vulnerable, and that will be monetized. It might've started with the nation-state doing that, but then you'll get people trying take you for ransom will start weaponizing those same vulnerabilities. So really that data and making sure that your crown jewels you have a fail-safe way of protecting them. And it's not just, you know, you need to practice the readiness of that. Like any system, just having that there is not good enough, like, can I detect issues? What is the ecosystem that's part of? How is my identity tracking who has got access to that? We've seen a lot of interesting things and is part of why we started creating services like a air gap service in the cloud. The customer doesn't have to worry about managing credentials, because even those were getting compromised. People were stealing the credentials to go delete the backup. So that the steps keep moving forward. There's a lot of money going in the research and development of malware. And the industry, in partnership with customers and partnership with local and federal authorities, are going to have to figure out how to tackle this together. >> Yeah. So Tim, Commvault. You don't think of it being in the cybersecurity space specifically, but those worlds are coming together, the data protection and security space. And I would imagine for you as a practitioner it's challenging because you don't have a blank checkbook. I mean, yes, you can spend, you have to spend on cyber, but you have all these, you talked about digital transformation in an earlier discussion that we had, and you've got to figure out, okay how do I apply AI and automation? You've got a talent gap. I mean, you can't hire people that have the skills because you just can't keep throwing people at the problem. So, so you don't have this unlimited budget. I saw a stat, there's a company, it's cyber security ventures, they said, "by 2025 we will lose $10.5 trillion annually to cyber attacks." And I think if I look at whosever numbers, you look at IDC, I think has one of the higher numbers out there, It's like 100 billion that we spend each year on cyber. So it's infinitesimal compared to the to the value that the bad guys are extracting. So how are you dealing with that complexity, fragmented, you know, security tooling, lack of talent, turnover I mean, all this stuff, and the budget challenges. How do you deal with all that? >> I do not want to use this word, but it's as easy as research, and staying on top of everything. Everyone knows you update your virus definitions. You keep that up-to-date. You close your firewall holes. You have denies at the very end of every firewall. You make sure you keep track of these small things. At the same time, you leverage utilities that make it easier for you to do your job. The Commvault iDA has a feature that keeps track of changes or modifications on a server. So if I have a server that's actively getting hit with a ransomware, Commvault reports me an alert and tells me , "Hey, we have had this many files modified within this time period. Look at it right now." So on top of everything else we have, because it's not a replacement for our virus protection, but it does help us. And it does keep track of things. And Commvault, as well as a lot of other companies out there are doing some great things in closing up small little gaps, in adding little features that could really help us move forward in the future, and keep us more protected, I guess I should say. >> Yeah. I mean the backup corpus is sort of the last line of defense. So it also could be a first point of attack because all the valuable data is in there. So I'll give you the last word here on the segment. Thanks for doing this with me, guys. How do you think the industry needs to approach this? It's not, you can't go and lead alone. You definitely need to collaborate. Your final thoughts. >> Collaborate, share risk factors, making sure that systems are connected and they're not siloed. And that will really make sure our customers are getting the best out of all of us. And you have to build an intelligence of the product. Anything static, just like you said, if the backup is the crown jewel how are they're going to go after that? So your backup systems need to have AI/ML. They need to be able to detect any kind of suspicious activity. You can't just kind of code it in and just expect that what you thought would work in the lab is how it's going to behave. And in general, unless there's a bigger penalty in terms of the response to these kinds of attacks, as long as they keep getting paid, they're going to keep doing this thing. So you got to follow the money is a simple work. Let's take that rich ecosystem that's funding them, and replace it with a tight partnership between companies and customers and partners and garments. >> Guys. Well, the equation is pretty simple. Value equals benefit over cost. If you can increase the denominator for the bad guys it'll lower their ROI, and that's kind of your job. So keep up the good work, gents. Thanks so much for coming to the Cube and talking to me about this very important topic. I really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for watching this Cube Conversation. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (quirky music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2020 virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Hi, and welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Joep Piscaer, I'm covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon here remotely from the Netherlands. And I'm joined by Commvault, Mathew Pearson, he's a Senior Product Manager, as well as David Ngo, Vice President of Metallic Products and Engineering to talk about the cloud native space and data protection in the Cloud Native space. So both, welcome to the show. And I want to start off with kind of the why question, right? Why are we here obviously, but also why are we talking about data protection? I thought we had that figured out. So David, can you shed some light on how, data protection is totally different in the cloud native container space? >> Sure, absolutely, thank you. I think the thing to keep in mind is that, containers are an evolution and a revolution actually in the virtualization space in the cloud space. What we're seeing is that customers are turning more and more to SaaS based applications and infrastructure in order to modernize their data centers and their data state in their compute environments. And when they do that, they're looking for solutions that match how they deploy their applications. And SaaS for us is an important area of that space. So, Metallic is Commvault portfolio of SaaS delivered and SaaS native data protection capabilities and offerings to allow customers to take the advantage of the best SaaS that is easy to try, easy to buy, easy to deploy, no infrastructure required and combine that with the technology and experience of Commvault. It'll build over last 20 years to deliver an enterprise grade data protection solution delivered as SaaS. And so, with Kubernetes and deploying in the cloud and modernizing applications I think that's very appealing to customers to also be able to modernize their data protection. >> Yeah, so I get the SaaS part. I mean, SaaS is an important way of delivering services. It is especially in the mid-market, something customers prefer, they want to have that simplicity, that easy onboarding as well as the OPEX of paying a subscription fee instead of longer term fees. So, the delivery model makes sense that fits into, the paradigm of making it simple, getting started easily. I get that, but Metallic isn't a traditional backup solution in that sense, right? It's not backing up necessarily just physical machines or just virtual machines. It has a relevance in the cloud native space. And the way I understand it, and please, if you can shed some light on that, Matt, is how is it different? What does it do that kind of makes it stand apart? >> Yeah, look, what we've found is the application developers can be in control now. So it's not like a traditional backup, that's what's changed. At this point, the application developer is free to create the infrastructure that he or she needs. And that freedom has meant that a bunch of stateful applications, the apps that we didn't think were going to live in Kubernetes have made their way to Kubernetes and they're making their way fast. So why is Metallic different? Because it's taking its lead from the developer. So it's using things like namespaces and label selectors. So basically take input from the developer on what information is important and needs to be protected and then protecting it. So it's your easy button to keep that Kubernetes development protected while you keep pace with the innovation within the organization. >> So you raise a valid point, cloud native has many advantages. It also has an extra challenge to account for which is fragmentation, right? In the olden days, let's call it that. We had a virtual machine, maybe a couple dozen that made up an application. And it was fairly easy to pinpoint the kind of the sort of conference of an application. This is my application. But now with cloud native, applications data can basically live anywhere. In a single cloud vendor, in many different cloud accounts, across different services, even across the public clouds themselves, like in a true multi-cloud scenario and figuring out what is part of an application in that enormous fragmentation is a challenge I think is understated and underestimated in a lot of operational environments with customers, with their applications in production. And that's where I think a product needs to figure out how to make sure an application is still backed up, is still protected in the way that is necessary for that given application. So I wonder how that works with Metallic. How do you kind of figure out what part of that enormous fragmentation is part of a single application? >> Yeah, so Metallic effectively integrates and speaks natively with the kube-apiserver. So it's taking its lead from the system of truth which is the orchestrator, which is Kubernetes itself. So for example, if you say everything in your production namespace needs protection, every night or every four hours, whatever that may be, it steps out and asks Kubernetes what applications exist there. It then maps all of the associated API resources associated with that application including the persistent volumes and persistent volume claims, man throws up and grabs the data from them as well. And that allows us to then reapply or reschedule that application either back to that original cluster or to another one for application mobility, where they are. >> So how do you make sure you, it kind of, what's the central point where everything comes together for that given application? Is that something the developer does as part of their release process or as part of their CICD? How do you figure out what components are part of an application? >> That is definitely a big challenge in the industry today? So, today we use label selectors predominantly. We find developers have been educating us on what works for them. And they've said, "Our CICD system is going "to label everything associated with this app, "as namespaced, then non-named space resources. 'So just here, take my label, grab everything under that, "and you will be good." The reality is that doesn't work for every business. Some businesses drop things into a specific namespace. And then you've got the added challenge that all of your data doesn't actually just live in Kubernetes. What about your image registries? What about it HCD? What about your Source Code Control and CICD systems? So we're finding that even VMs as well are playing a part in this ecosystem right now until applications can fully migrate. >> Yeah, and then let's zoom out on that a little bit. I mean, I think it's great that developers now kind of have flipped the paradigm where backup and data protection used to be something squarely in the OPS domain. It's now made its way into the .dev domain where it's become fairly easy to tag resources as application X, application Y, and then it automatically gets pulled into the backup based on policies. I mean, that's great, but let's zoom out a little bit and figure out, why is this happening? Why are developers even being put in a position of backing up their applications? So David, do you want to shed some light on that for me? >> Sure, I think data protection is always going to be a requirement and you'll have persistent data, right? There are other elements of applications that will always need to be protected and data protection is often something that is an afterthought, but it's something that needs to be considered from the beginning. And Metallic in being able to support deployments, not just in the cloud, but on-premises as well. We support any number of certified distributions of Kubernetes, gives you the flexibility to make sure that there was apps and that data is protected no matter where it lives. Being able to do that from a single pane of glass, being able to manage your Kubernetes deployments in different environments is very important there. >> So let's dive into that a little bit. I hear you say, Certified Kubernetes Distributions. So what's kind of the common denominator we need to use Metallic in an environment? Because I hear On-Prem, I hear public cloud. So it seems to me like this is a pretty broad product in terms of what it supports in its scope. But what's the lowest common denominator for instance, in the On-Prem environment? >> Sure, so we support all CNCF certified distributions of Kubernetes today. And in the cloud, we support Azure with AKS and AWS with EKS. So you can really use the one Metallic environment, the one interface to be able to manage all of those environments. >> And so what about that storage underneath? Is that all through CSI? >> Yes. So we support CSI on the backend of the Kubernetes applications, and we can then protect all the data stored there. >> And so how does this, I mean, you acquired Hedvig about a year ago, I want to say. Not sure on the exact date, but you acquired Hedvig a little while ago. So how does that come into play in Metallic offering? >> Sure, the Hedvig distributed storage platform is a fantastic platform on which to provision and scale Kubernates's applications and clusters. And that having full integration with Kubernetes on the storage side, we support that natively and really builds on the value that Commvault can bring as a whole with all of its offerings as a platform to Kubernetes. >> All right. So, zooming out just a little more, I want to get a feel for the cover of the portfolio of Commvault, as we're ushering into this cloud native era, as we're helping customers make that move and make that transition. What's the positioning of Metallic basically in the transformation customers are going through from On-Prem kind of lift and shift cloud into the cloud native space? >> Yeah, so with today's announcements, our hybrid cloud support and our hybrid cloud initiatives really help customers manage data wherever it lives as I've mentioned earlier. Customers can start with workloads On-Prem and start protecting workloads that they either have migrated or starting to build in the cloud natively and really cover the gamut of infrastructure and hypervisors and file systems and storage locations amongst all of these locations. So from our perspective, we think that hybrid is here to stay, right? There are very few customers who are either going to be all on-premises or all in the cloud. Most customers have some requirement that keeps them in a hybrid configuration, and we see that being prevalent for quite some time. So supporting customers in their transformation, right? Where they are moving applications from on-premises to the cloud, either refactoring or lift and shift, or what have you. It's very important to them, it's very important for us to be able to support that motion. And we look forward to helping them along the way. >> Awesome, so one last question for Matt. I mean, Metallic is a set of servers, right? That means you run it, you operate it, you build it. So I wonder, is Metallic itself cloud native? How does it scale? What are kind of the big components that Metallic has made up of? >> So Metallic itself is absolutely cloud native. It is sitting inside Azure today. I won't go into all the details. In fact, David could probably provide far more detail there. But I think Metallic is cloud native with respect to the fact that it's speaking natively to your applications, your cloud instances, your Vms. And then it's giving you the agility and the ability to move them where you need them to be. And that's assisting people in that migration. So in the past, we helped people get from P to V. Now that there are virtualized, applications like Metallic can protect you wherever you are and get you to wherever you need to be, especially into your next cloud of choice. And there's always another cloud. What I'm interested to see and what I'm hoping to see out of KubeCon is how are we doing with KubeVirt and Kubernetes becoming the orchestrator of the data center. And how are we doing with some of these other projects like application CRDs and hierarchical namespaces that are truly going to build a multi-tenanted software defined, distributed application ecosystem, that Metallic I can speak natively to via Kubernetes. >> Awesome. Well, thank you both for being with me here today. I certainly learned a ton about Metallic. I learned a lot about the challenges in cloud native that'll certainly be an area of development in the next couple of years. As you know, that the CNCF will continue to support projects in this space and vendors to work with us in that space as well. So that's it for now. I'm Joep Piscaer, I'm covering for KubeCon here remotely from the Netherlands. I will see you next time, thanks. (bright upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation with Commvault, I'm Lisa Martin, looking forward to having a spirited conversation with my two guests, please welcome Janet Giesen, the VP of Operations and Programs for Metallic, A Commvault Venture. Janet, welcome to theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's happy to be here. >> And joining us from EMEA is Mark Jow, the EMEA VP of Technical Sales at Commvault. Hey Mark, good afternoon to you. >> Good afternoon Lisa, it's great to be here with you. >> So just about a year or so ago, theCUBE had the pleasure of being at Commvault GO 2019 and where Metallic was launched, so happy birthday to Metallic. Some evolution and some recent news. Janet, walk us through what you guys have accomplished recently. >> Absolutely, so last year we launched with three product offerings to Metallic, Office 365 Backup, Endpoint Backup and Backup of Core data like VMs and files. In that year since we started with US only, we're now in Canada and Australia, as well as now in our first set of countries in EMEA which Mark will talk about it a little bit and we've greatly expanded our product offerings. One of the things we did, we just launched the discovery, which is a big deal for folks especially looking for compliance applications and their data protection. So we've had a real journey here and just this quarter, as you see we are doubling our product offerings to Metallic and tripling our country availability. So we're doing a lot and we're a leader in the data protection as a service space. >> A lot accomplished in just a 12 month time period, give me a little bit of a preview Janet, why was metallic launched last year for North America, US expanded to Canada and then I see it was announced... It was launched in Australia, New Zealand in the late summer 2020. I know that the cloud market... Their cloud adoption is quite high but give us a little bit of an overview of the actual go to market sequence from a regional perspective. >> Absolutely, and I'll want Mark to really take this one as well. We started in US only in our initial launch, that's where our first launch event was. That's where a lot of our pilot customers were, and then we expanded to Canada, Australia now EMEA, and this is very thoughtful. You have one chance to really launch in a geography. And we wanted it to take all the steps, whether it was compliance, trademarking, cloud storage availability. We leveraged our partnership with Microsoft and Azure for these launches. And really making sure we had everything lined up to best serve our customers. Mark what would you say about this strategy as well? >> Yeah, I think certainly, I mean the strategy is the right one, it's the right one for following reasons. If you look back to 12 months ago, I think in Colorado, I had a GO user event when we launched Metallic, I was fortunate enough to be hosting a number of EMEA partners and customers, and they were clamoring for the product, they're excited by it, they wanted it. We were (indistinct) some cases pressured to think about releasing it earlier. But all those customers wanted a product that was reversed, secure and coping with specific EMEA requirements that they have for the product in particular GDPR and supporting levels of compliance and data privacy that EMEA has rigorous standards for. And I think if you look at Commvault as a company, you know we take our customer's data extremely seriously. We've got one channels to get this right as Janet said, and I expect our customers absolutely expect and deserve right first time. And so when we launch a product like Metallic with the diversity of workloads, the rigorous high performance and secure environments, we want to make sure it's tested properly, it's compliant in all the jurisdictions. And even in Europe, we think about Europe, it's not one given country, even the EU have different countries with different legal and tax nuances. We want to make sure that when our customers get Metallic, 'cause our customers thankfully first launch in EMEA now can. That purchasing, that user experience is seamless sales and frictionless, and the product stands the promises that we make to those customers. So fully behind half phased release for Metallic as are some of our initial early adopter customers in the geographies that we've launched in already. >> So let's talk about some of the massive changes that we've all experienced since last year, Mark I would stick with you, talk to us about some of the changes that you seen from EMEA customers with respect to data protection and data security 'cause we've seen a lot of things going on globally, ransomware on the rise, every 11 seconds there's a ransomware attack. What are some of the recent challenges that you're hearing from customers that you believe Metallic EMEA is going to resolve? >> Yeah, I mean certainly even before the current COVID crisis, we were seeing a huge increase in uptake of customers wanting to use SaaS applications and to protect SaaS workloads. And the growth thing adoption of Office 365 clearly has driven the need for compelling SaaS based solutions for that market. You overlay on that, the situation that COVID has created for us all. Which in reality is denying our customers with its two most valuable important assets, access to premises and access to staff. And increasingly the staff it does have access to a storing, protecting, generating and creating data, not in the data center, not in the cloud but on laptops. So really for us it's a perfect opportunity and we're seeing an increase in demand from our customers wanting rapid solutions to protecting and managing data, to have low footprint in terms of skills and staff and to reduce the need for them to buy physical infrastructure and to expand an already at capacity set premises. And in many cases they can't even get access to, so it's very much a perfect storm for the solution that Metallic provides. >> Yeah Janet, following onto that and just in terms of when Mark mentioned, you know especially when this first happened, not being able to get access to the premises, this massive pivot to work from home and suddenly millions of endpoints scattered globally. Talk to us about some of the things that you saw here in North America in terms of customer demands changing. >> Oh that's a great question, we absolutely saw changes. I mean I go back to what Satya Nadella said, the CEO of Microsoft. He even said in April and may that what we are seeing is two years of digital transformation happening in a two month period. And that's absolutely what we're seeing, so the interest in fact as Mark mentioned, and then interest in protecting endpoints, your laptops and your desktop, as you have an increasingly remote and distributed workforce has completely changed. I mean when we spoke to you last year ago, we had endpoint backup more for completeness to round out our portfolio. We didn't expect it to be a lead offering and take off the way it has. But now with the changes everyone's seeing and with what IT teams need to do with what security teams and cloud architects need to do, we're absolutely seeing that need for endpoint protection grow. >> Yeah, and just to add to that Lisa is the endpoint potentially is also seeing a change and a shift in the types of markets that are looking to Metallic as a solution, recall that we originally targeted Metallic and SMB mid market, market where people were looking for simple, predictable, low cost but yet still scalable infrastructure. The massive drive to protect endpoints and to maintain compliance and control of data there, is actually driving large enterprise customers to Commvault and Metallic as a solution for protecting not hundreds of endpoints, not thousands, not tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands of endpoints for some of the customers that we're not talking to. >> And that's probably going to be something that we see becomes permanent. You know we're seeing so many leaders, Satya Nadella you mentioned Janet, we've heard other ones, Antonio Neri from HPE saying you know I expect at least 50% of the workforce to stay remote. So this is... Was a big need, it was a big boom and a good amount of this is probably not going to change. How is Metallic positioned to help your customers not just survive this time but be able to thrive and become the winners of tomorrow? >> I think one real advantage of Metallic is the two technologies that it's built on top of, one is Metallic part of Commvault, so what we can do is evolve with the needs of our customers, take all that IP, all those patents decide what workloads are going to help our customers through this times and release those as new offerings delivered as PaaS, it allows us to be agile and to pivot as needed. And that's what you see as I said we're doubling our product offering, we're taking that feedback in real time and that's something we'll be announcing very soon, next month. In addition to that, we're also build on top of Microsoft Azure. So we're leveraging certainly their enterprise scalability, the trust and security that they have because we're really something that flexes from the one terabyte dataset to the 10,000 terabyte as you're looking to scale and protect your infrastructure. So we are poised to take on that agility, that time like these demand. >> Do you think, oh go ahead Mark. >> I think just to add to that as well is if you look at our existing customers that have been traditionally using on-prem Commvault complete software or they bought on a perpetual or subscription basis. A number of those have been looking for Metallic to protect some specific workloads, like endpoint for example, but the way we've done this is, the Metallic solution on the on-prem solution are manageable from a single Commvault interface, a command central interface. So it's not a temporary decision to move to SaaS and then that customer then has to move it back in order to control and manage it in an on-prem environment. They get the best of both worlds from two solutions fit for the purpose they are intended from a company that has a 20 year reputation in designing, building and selling scalable, secure data protection infrastructure. >> Reasonable question in terms of the management console. So for example Mark, the situation that you're talking about customers that may have been using Commvault on-prem for a long time now have had in the last year and now in EMEA the opportunity to leverage SaaS data protection for Office Microsoft 365 for example, endpoints. Talk to me a little bit about the management of that, if a customer, legacy Commvault customer has been using on-prem and now they add Metallic for SaaS, data protection for say Microsoft 365, is that managed by a single console? >> Exactly, it's managed by a command center console. So they can see, manage, control report, all of data that exists within the Metallic SaaS based solution, and that sits within that on-prem or their hybrid cloud environment, giving them that, that total flexibility. And with the recent announcement, the launch earlier in October of MCSS on Microsoft, sorry at Metallic Cloud Storage Solution, that also helps their customers that aren't yet looking to move to metallic, to make the step, to put some of their on-prem data rapidly and easily into cloud as a target, as a metallic cloud storage service. And that's a future stepping stone to a full metallic software as a service solution, should they so choose for a 365 or endpoint? So we're giving customers the ability to move from self-manage to fully managed with a SaaS solution in the middle. >> And for that target market perspective, Mark, some of the things that we've seen globally that are new targets, you mentioned ransomware on the rise, healthcare organizations, schools and governments, are there any specific industries that are going to be leading edge for Metallic in EMEA. >> What we've seen from the initial market data and the market uptake by segment from the America's names that launched is interest from every sector, but a particular interest from the sectors where technology is a key differentiator, particularly finance, banking, insurance, and the telco sector, the tech sector and the retail sector. Interestingly enough, we're also seeing in the government and public services sector from our recent Azure launch and some of the demand and interest in EMEA is validating this, customers in public sector organizations, central and local government who traditionally have been fixated on the CapEx buying model and on-prem solutions, moving and starting to look increasingly at SaaS to get solutions up running, protected and secured rapidly in the cloud. And so we're seeing an encouraging up-taking public sector organizations, which are using SaaS as a way to move from CapEx to OPEX models which is particularly reassuring. >> And Janet question for you if we look at data protection as a service, the fastest growing market segment rather in data protection market, what are some of the things that knowing Metallic's first year in the evolution, the changes that the world has seen, but also this demand for data protection as a service, what are some of the things that we can expect in Metallic's second year? >> Yeah so, first you're absolutely right. Data protection as a service is becoming increasingly popular. You know these are cloud based solutions, also known as backup as a service. And I think what we're finding as we talk to customers is everyone has a cloud based initiative, whether they're starting it or they're well on their way. So having a data protection as a service solution like Metallic can either be your first move into the cloud starting with your backup targets and leveraging MCSS as Mark explained as one way to do that, or it can just be another point in a customer's hybrid story. How they're starting to leverage data protection as a service, SaaS delivery. And there's this whole notion now of SaaS for SaaS. Now you need SaaS backup for your SaaS application to follow how the data moves, and that's what we're doing for Office 365. In the second year, we're certainly aiming to continue increasing our workload, supported the products that... And continuing our geo-expansion as we are right now with the EMEA, this is certainly critical as we continue. We'll also be looking to engage local partners, we work with resellers and distributors today, and we're also going to continue expanding our offerings in Azure marketplace. We went live in Azure marketplace last quarter and we're seeing transactions come through there and we want to continue building out our marketplace model as well. >> Last question Janet, you mentioned SaaS for SaaS and there's been a lot of talk about that recently with customers in every segment. And there was this sort of this a shared responsibility model that Microsoft has in Salesforce right in box. But it's been interesting and a lot of customers I've spoken with in the last few months in salesforce ended support for the data recovery service I think in end of July going, wait we thought it was in the cloud, we have to back it up. So is that another direction in terms of Metallics future of being able to protect more types of SaaS workloads besides Microsoft 365? >> Well that's certainly the idea and starting with Office 365, is how do we compliment what Microsoft already offers. Office 365 Salesforce, all of these tools, they are workflow tools, they're integral in organizations or they're just holding critical data. So how do we compliment that through data backup and protection that give them the controls they need. Whether it's policy customization, smart configurations to help them through this and now E discovery on top to be able to search and manage compliance needs. So we really want to be that kind of extra security blanket for all of these SaaS applications and that's really what we're aiming to do over time but Office 365 is our focus right now. >> Yeah, I think just pick out Lisa on Janet's point about the two points of scale for us about scaling out and launching in new markets and bringing new workloads into the Metallic portfolio. You know one of the things that we understand is we clearly we've seen significant demand for Office 365 and endpoint ussually as for Metallic. But let's also not lose sight of the fact that a number of organizations are coming to us to protect their VMs and their file server environments so being initially in small environments. And they're starting to ask us specifically about our plans to incorporate additional enterprise type on-prem workloads in a Metallic environment. And the fact that we've built 20 years of expertise in IOP in that space, we've been probably the quickest to launch the most innovative and wide this range of workloads in our on-prem and subscription based software makes it far easier for us to pivot and to extend over time rapidly, the workloads that Metallic supports for customers wanting to move traditionally on-prem workloads. That I'll just say 365 endpoint but VMs and other database workloads into the cloud. And that's a unique differentiator for where Metallic can take our customers, not just geographically but in terms of the diversity of workloads that we'll be able to cover. >> Great point Mark, absolutely. >> Well thank you both for explaining the evolution of Metallic, A Commvault Venture in its first year, giving us an insight into some of the recent new announcements and a peek into what's to come. Janet, Mark, we appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thank you. >> That's being a pleasure, thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE conversation. (upbeat music)

(royalty free music) >> Woman's voice: From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman coming to you from our Boston area studio and this is a special cube conversation. I have a special announcement from our friends at Commvault. So welcome back to the program. We have two of our cube alumni. First, we have Manoj Nair, he's actually the general manager of Metallic, which is a Commvault venture. First time Manoj on the program in your role with, with Commvault, welcome back. And also welcoming back Ranga Rajagopalan who's the vice president of products at Commvault. Ranga, caught up with you recently at the FutureReady event that we had over the summer. Thanks so much for joining us again. >> Sure. >> Alright. So Manoj, let's start. Metallic obviously was, you know, the standout you know, thing that everybody talked about last year at Commvault GO. Really helping to, you know, put Commvault clearly into the SaaS marketplace out there. Talking about how, you know, all the wonderful features for managing my data in a cloud environment. So there is an expansion to the portfolio that we're announcing today. Why don't you share the news? >> Yeah, absolutely Stu, you know, it's great to be back here with all of you and Metallic has come a long way from the launch. Just less than a year ago, we announced the creation of Metallic multiple different offerings whether it's protecting SaaS workloads like O365, remote endpoints and a hybrid cloud workloads. You know, the context that we're getting from our customers, especially in the last six months, increased cloud adoption and, you know, remote working collaboration suites being adopted. All of that has been a great accelerator for adoption of SaaS data protection, which is really what the Metallic is offering. We have gone to global countries and expanded to our Commvault customer base who was, you know, using both Commvault software and Metallic now. One of the key things that we're not, you know, today's announcement is focused on a Metallic cloud storage service that as a new service available for Commvault customers are looking to get a, you know, fully managed secure cloud-based SaaS target for protecting all of the data as an air gap copy and this is, you know, is more relevant than ever. >> So Manoj, using the cloud for data protection, for backup isn't new? Ranga, help us understand. I heard in there air gap, I heard, you know, leveraging the cloud. Absolutely, we've seen a huge tailwind for cloud adoption but there's that gap for making sure customers, you know, protect their data, secure their data. Do they have the skillset to be able to leverage that, so help help us drill in and understand what's different about this new service >> You're right Stu. Cloud is absolutely not new but what is really unique about today's announcement with metallic cloud storage service is that we are bringing cloud even closer to our Commvault customers. So thinking from a data management perspective, our customers want to more easily and securely get the benefits of cloud storage. What we are doing today is integrating Metallic cloud storage service as a cloud storage target into our Commvault software as well as our HyperScale X plans. And that lets our customers to seamlessly use cloud storage for their data protection, backup and archival use cases without needing to understand a lot about the cloud, without needing to get through any of the complexities. Think of it as the easy button that is now introduced into the Commvault software and HyperScale X. >> All right, so, if I heard you right, this is a managed service that Commvault is offering. Did I get that right? >> That's fast. >> Yeah >> So, you know, it's a managed service. It's public cloud storage. It's, as Ranga said, the easy button to be able to create your air gap copies in the cloud. And, you know, with everything that we keep hearing about ransomware, and we believe this is one of the, the, the most important steps in ransomware readiness, a lot of our customers are already doing it by bringing their own cloud storage on all the clouds we protect, but it's still not easy. And this is a skills gap, you know, the procurement process and all of that, you know, the management of the credentials, the setting up of the networking, all of that is encapsulated. So now, it's just, you know, it's like a built-in feature, just, you know plug it in and now you've got an on-ramp to the cloud. Make sure you have your air gap copy. >> Yeah, maybe it would help if you'd, if you'd talk about the easy button, give us a little compare contrast 'cause, right, I could go, I could spin up instance of the cloud, but, you know, who has access? What are the security settings? There's a whole litany of things that I need to make sure I've got the right identity management. It's kind of easy, but not necessarily simple to, to be able to do that. So from what you're describing I don't even need to really think, you know, yes, it's in the cloud, I'm leveraging all the wonderful things of the cloud, but I don't have to have that, that ramp up of skillset if I don't already have that in house as... Ranga, sounds like I'm understanding that. >> Yeah >> You know. >> Yeah, you're perfectly understanding and that's all there is to it. And let me expand on the PC part there, right? For us, simplicity is into end-customer experience. So I'm going to break this down from a customer life cycle perspective. Think of a Commvault customer who's backing up pretty much all the workloads in the data center. The first question they have is, you know, "For security reasons "for easy, or because I'm in a transformation project "I need to make, I need to start using cloud storage." So the first complexity they would face is understanding which cloud provider to use, what kind of cloud profile to use? or who their cloud or chasing model, which is very different from how they normally procure their hardware and software. So that's really the first dimension of simplicity that this Metallic cloud storage offer. Our customers can procure their cloud storage along with any other Commvault software and hardware just like they would do any other Commvault software. So that's the first level of simplicity. The second one is "How do I bring "that into my data management life cycle." And again, as I mentioned before, MCSS is fully integrated into Commvault software. So through the simplicity of command center, which is the one UI that brings all our products together, customers can just click to the cloud storage target and start backing up, moving copies, archiving, doing all the data management use cases, the second dimension of simplicity. And the third one really is the predictability. You know, cloud is beautiful, It brings a lot of flexibility, but it also brings in a lot of new terms. What are the egress charges? What does ingress mean? What does egress mean? What happens when I have the V store? What happens when I have the Ricola? So all of that complexity is taken away. We handle all of that in the backend. From the customer's perspective, just like they use CAP, just like they use the Desk, now, they can use cloud. We handled all the egress and all those kind of stuff in the backend. From the customer's perspective, they get a simple, predictable price point. So from the time of choosing, procuring it, using it and continuously getting the best benefits out of it, the easy button extends across that entire dimension. And the beauty in all of this is customers getting all the benefits of cloud without having to really understand much about cloud. So that's really the benefit we bring to the table with MCSS. >> Yeah. Manoj, Commvault has a long history of being able to live on, you know, various infrastructures that customers have. Are you able to share who the, I'm assuming there's a cloud partner for part of this, so who is the, the underlying IS? >> Yeah, so still, you know, end of June doing, we announced the next phase of our strategic partnership with Microsoft. So this is a, you know, one of the first big, new things that is coming out of the giant partnership between Commvault and Microsoft around Metallic and Microsoft Azure. There's a lot of things that, you know, we're jointly doing that are unique that make all of the simplicity Ranga, you know, just mentioned, come to life and, you know, that's, you know, power of the end as I call it. It's Commvault and Metallic and Microsoft, you know, coming together to make this really easy for our customers to start getting the value out of leveraging cloud for the data protection. Yeah. >> Well, Manoj, it seems natural extension of what you've already talked about for what Metallic can protect. Of course, you've got the, you know, the business suite from Microsoft, can you help frame it for us, you know, where this new, the MCSS fits in the Metallic portfolio today? >> Yeah absolutely. So if you look at, you know, what... I'll give you a customer journey and what's been happening. If you are not a Commvault customer today and you're looking at "What's my best 0365 data protection option," if you go to microsoft.com, you'll actually find Metallic in there as the recommended offer. And they, they might start the journey there or you're an existing Commvault customer and you start rapidly adopting teams and O365, you know, post COVID. The, the, you know, Metallic is the default option. So it doesn't matter how you enter in, you're now getting a full, you know, SaaS actual backup as a service, no storage costs, no egress costs. And so our Commvault customers have been asking, "We love that part of it, why not make that available "for all of the other data that is being protected "by Commvault, either appliance or software on-prem?" and, you know, in a very simple way, it's, you know, the best things are driven by customers. And in this case, our customers came to us and said, "We love the simple button "not just what's included in the Metallic service, "we would like that that to be available, even for, "you know, the existing software you're protecting on-prem "for the air gap copy use case is kind of the biggest one." And you know, all of the things that Ranga said in terms of simplicity now comes to bear. And it's something that we were including inside the Metallic SaaS offerings. Now, it's available for software and appliance customers. >> Yeah. I definitely, I've heard of the industry now. Microsoft seems a little bit more amenable to, you know, not charging for egress, with some of their partners, when they put together these solutions. Ranga, Manoj has mentioned air gap a couple of times, can you help us frame, you know, what that means today? You know, I even think back, you know, ape that most people are familiar with. Even, I think about, you know, Google, you know, use ape for many years even in the public cloud to give that air gap. Of course, we've talked to your customers lots about how to protect against ransomware. So how does, how does this fit in the new solution? >> You know, unfortunately, Stu today. It's, it's important reality for us to discuss the ransomware readiness. Number of attacks are going up depending on, you know, which your source you are listening to. So security is a very important concern in top of our customers' minds. Now, MCSS is cloud storage, so it is off site storage. So it comes with all the natural layered security that it's built into cloud storage. Additionally, Commvault brings a complete ransomware protection, protection and recovery framework, which becomes inherently available with the MCSS. And let me explain that in a few very simple quotes. Now, the entire journey from on-prem to the cloud storage is completely encrypted. So that's, you know, a very important part of the order on security mechanism, but here is where it really becomes cool Commvault software is managing the cloud credentials, the cloud keys. So the entire access to MCSS as a cloud storage target is managed to Commvault. So there isn't an independent cloud admin accessing that storage, which opens it up for any kind of an intentional or unintentional access. Anything can happen when you allow that access. So Commvault completely manages that access the keys are owned by the customer, but managed by a Commvault. So it's a really air gap security, layered security mechanism that you get in combination with the entire framework of air gap isolation, anomaly protection, the authentication, everything that is built into the Commvault framework. So when you, when you bring in the simplicity that we talked about earlier, you can apply that to the security angle as well here. Instead of making the customer manage yet another piece in the jigsaw, we are managing it for them. So from their perspective, it is a seamless extension to their data management strategy while it also adds an extra layer of security and a readiness to recover from ransomware attacks. >> While it's being launched today, we already have customers that have, you know, we have accelerated into adoption of MCSS and it's coming exactly for the scenarios Ranga just said. You know, they, they have a requirement for a cloud copy. If you have seen that on the Metallic SaaS side that some of the customers might be in pilot mode. And because they were in pilot mode, they were quickly able to recover from attacks that happened. Unfortunately, those, those things are reality. And we have had customers who after the attack go and say "I want to make sure it's much easier to recover from that." And so we already have our first customers who are starting to adopt the service even as we launch it today. >> Well. I'm so glad you brought up the customer examples. Manoj, give us a little bit just the high level view, you talked about the growth and adoption of Metallic overall, and you just talked about kind of the, the single management. You got any SaaS for us, you know, how much data do you have in the cloud now and, you know, what's the growth looking like? And talk a little bit about, you know, what we can expect going forward from this portfolio. >> Yeah, I, you know, I don't know how many people disclose this or not, but we have disclosed it in the past, we have over an exabyte of data today in the cloud that, you know, our customers are, you know, either using a Metallic or bringing their own cloud with Commvault and writing to the cloud. So, you know, that's probably, you know, best in class out there. What we are also seeing is the acceleration of that, you know, so we look at it's, you know, it's exponential growth over a hundred percent, you know, we're, we're seeing that, that rise in leverage yet it's something that when you look at the overall industry percentages, it depends on whose stats you use, it's probably only 5%, maybe 10% that are leveraging the cloud for anything, whether it's, you know, in this case, it's data, cloud data as a secondary target. So there's a lot of untapped potential. And the things that Ranga said I think really are the ones our customers are telling us as we tested this out. And those are the biggest reasons. Right cost, you know, I'm concerned about it. I've heard that it's unpredictable. It goes up, people start spinning up other things that they shouldn't be. And so I want predictable costs, you know, security and the whole model around it, the, the governance of the keys, and finally skills, everyone's busy, no one's trying to not be, you know, upping their cloud skills yet it's not something that is very, you know, very easy for most people to, you know, become an expert. And if you're not an expert while you're protecting your data, that's not, you know, that's not something you want to do, so you kind of hold back. And I think this is really the biggest thing that customers are looking at, like our cloud expertise packaged in an offering solving all those things? >> And Stu, we discussed this at FutureReady of how the Commvault portfolio continues to come closer and closer together in order to deliver that increased value to our customers. In July, when we were having a similar conversation, we saw how Hedvig came in as the scale load storage in our HyperScale X integrated data protection plans. And we can see that we have Metallic Cloud Storage Service coming in as a cloud extension to our software, as well as HyperScale X. So it's kind of bringing the best of both worlds, customers who want to continue to stay on for them, protect their on-prem workloads with on-prem footprint. You have HyperScale X as a very nice scale, which integrated our plans. And as the capacity needs increase, as the security needs increase, you have MCSS now as a managed storage extension, bringing together those pieces of the portfolio. Now, the thing that is now available already as of September 15 is our ability to manage Metallic as part of command center. So while you want that SaaS flexibility and you're using Metallic to protect the SaaS workloads let's also realize that there are a bunch of other workloads that you might be protecting using Commvault software all through HyperScale. We can now bring all of them together into the simplicity of command center. So it, again, takes away another point of complexity for the customer. Just one UI, go ahead, do protect the workloads the way you want. With the form factor you want. SaaS software, or our plans, and we bring it all together into a single management framework for you. So you're going to continue seeing the portfolio coming closer together because our prime concern is to provide flexibility of choice to customers. Flexibility of choice in so many different ways, you know, you can use software, our plans or SaaS. You can bring your own on-prem storage, cloud storage, or if you want to hit the simple button, use Metallic clouds for it. So, so you're going to see that happen as we move forward. >> Well. Manoj, Ranga, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the launch. Love little tagline leading it. We're we're making the cloud just a little bit closer to us. >> It is, >> It is a lot closer. >> Thank you. Thank you Stu for your time. >> Thank you. >> I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (royalty free music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, one of the hosts of theCUBE, and I just finished a conversation with Manoj Nair, who's the General Manager of Metallic, which is a Commvault venture and Ranga Rajagopalan, who's the Vice President of products with Commvault, and I can't give too much away, but great conversation, and let's just say that tomorrow the cloud is becoming a little bit closer to you. So, we will be releasing the video on our YouTube channel for SiliconANGLE at 11:30 Eastern on Tuesday, October 6, so tune in, make sure you watch it, look for the activity on social media, and thanks so much for joining, I'm Stu Miniman. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of CONMEBOL. Future ready 2020. Brought to you by combo. >>Hi and welcome back. I'm Stew Minuteman, and we're at the Cube's coverage of Con Volt Future Ready. You've got the power panel to really dig in on the product announcements that happened at the event today. Joining me? We have three guests. First of all, we have Brenda Rajagopalan. He's the vice president of products. Sitting next to him is Don Foster, vice president of Storage Solutions. And in the far piece of the panel Mersereau, vice president of Global Channels and Alliances. All three of them with Conn Volt. Gentlemen, thanks all three of you for joining us. Exactly. All right, so first of all, great job on the launch. You know, these days with a virtual event doing, you know, the announcements, the engagement with the press and analyst, you know, having demos, customer discussions. It's a challenge to put all those together. And it has been, you know, engaging in interesting watch today. So we're going to start with you. You've been quite busy today explaining all the pieces, so just at a very high level if you put this really looks like the culmination of the update with Conn Volt portfolio new team new products compared to kind of a year, year and 1/2 ago. So just if you could start us off with kind of the high points, >>thank you still, yeah, absolutely exciting day for us today. You did comrade multiple reasons for that excitement and go through that we announced an exciting new portfolio today knows to not the culmination. It's a continuation off our journey, a bunch of new products that we launched today Hyper scaler X as a new integrated data protection appliance. We've also announced new offerings in data protection, backup and recovery, disaster recovery and complete data protection and lots of exciting updates for Hedwig and a couple of weeks like we introduced updates for metallic. So, yes, it's been a really exciting pain. Also, today happens to be the data, and we got to know that we are the leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for the ninth consecutive. I am so a lot of goodness today for us. >>Excellent. Lots of areas that we definitely want to dig deep in to the pieces done. You know, we just heard a little bit about Hedvig was an acquisition a year ago that everybody's kind of looking at and saying Okay, you know, will this make them compete against some of their traditional partners? How we get integrated in So, baby, just give us one level deeper on the Hedvig piece on what that means to the portfolio? Yeah, sure, So I >>guess I mean, one of the key things that the random mentioned was the fact that had hyper scale that's is built off the head Day files. So that's a huge milestone for us. As we teased out maybe 10 months ago. Remember, Tomball, Go on the Cube and talking about, you know, kind of what our vision and strategy was of unifying data and storage management. Those hyper hyper scale X applying is a definite milestone improving out that direction. But beyond just the hyper scale ECs, we've also been driving on some of the more primary or modern workloads such as containers and the really interesting stuff we've come out with your recently is the kubernetes native integration that ties in all of the advanced component of the head to distribute storage architecture on the platform itself across multi cloud and on premise environments, making it really easy and policy driven. Um, for Dev, ops users and infrastructure users, the tie ins applications from a group, Friction >>Great and Mercer. There's some updates to the partner program and help us understand how all of these product updates they're gonna affect the kind of the partnerships and alliances beasts that you want. >>Absolutely. So in the time since our last meeting that go in the fall, which is actually right after I had just doing combo, we spent a good portion of the following six months really talking with partners, understanding the understand the impact of the partner program that we introduced last summer, looking at the data and really looking at barriers to evolve the program, which fell around three difference specific. Once you bet one was simplicity of the simplicity of the program, simplicity of understanding, rewards, levers and so forth. The second was paying for value was really helping, helping our partners to be profitable around things like deal registration on other benefits and then third was around co investment. So making sure that we get the right members in place to support our partners and investing in practices. Another training, another enablement around combo and we launched in over these things last week is a part of an evolution of that program. Today is a great follow on because in addition to all of the program evolutions that we we launched last week now we have an opportunity with our partners to have many more opportunities or kind of a thin into the wedge to open up new discussions with our customers now around all of these different use cases and capabilities. So back to that simplification angle, really driving more and more opportunities for those partners toe specific conversations around use cases. >>Okay, for this next question, I think it makes sense for you to start. Maybe maybe Don, you can get some commentary in two. But when he's firstly the announcements, there are some new products in the piece that you discuss but trying to understand, you know, when you position it, you know, do you call the portfolio? Is it a platform? You know, if I'm an existing Conn Volt customer, you know, how do I approach this? If I use something like metallic, how does that interplay with some of the new pieces that were discussed today. >>Sure, I can take the business. I'm sure Don and mostly will have more data to it. The simplest way to think about it is as a port for you. But contrary to how you would think about portfolio as independent products, what we have is a set off data management services granular. We're very aligned to the use case, which can all inter operate with each other. So maybe launched backup and recovery and disaster recovery. These can be handled separately, purchased separately and deployed standalone or for customers who want a combination of those capabilities. We also have a complete data protection are fine storage optimization, data governance E discovery in complaints are data management services that build on top off any of these capabilities now a very differentiating factor in our platform owners. All the services that you're talking about are delivered off the same software to make it simpler to manage to the same year. So it's very easy to start with one service and then just turn on the license and go to other services so I can understand the confusion is coming from but it's all the same. The customer simplicity and flexibility in mind, and it's all delivered off the same platform. So it is a portfolio built on a single Don. Would you like to add more to it? >>Yeah, I think the interesting thing due to add on top of that is where we're going with Hedvig Infrastructure, the head of distributed storage platform, uh, to to run this point, how everything is integrated and feed and work off of one another. That's the same idea that we have. We talked about unifying data and storage manager. So the intricate storage architecture components the way data might be maneuvered, whether it's for kubernetes for virtual machines, database environments, secondary storage, you name it, um, we are. We're quickly working to continue driving that level of of unification and integration between the portfolio and heads storage, distribute storage platforms and also deliver. So what you're seeing today going back to, I think wrong his first point. It's definitely not the culmination. It's just another step in the direction as we continue to innovate and integrate this >>product, and I think for our partners what this really does, it allows them to sell around customer use cases because it'll ask now if I have a d. Our use case. I can go after just PR. If I have a backup use case, I can just go after backup, and I don't have to try to sell more than that. Could be on what the customer is looking for in parallel that we can steal these things in line with the customer use case. So the customer has a lot of remote offices. They want to scale Hedvig across those they want to use the art of the cloud. They can scale these things independently, and it really gives us a lot of optionality that we didn't have before when we had a few monolithic products. >>Excellent. Really reminds me more of how I look at products if I was gonna go buy it from some of the public cloud providers living in a hybrid cloud. World, of course, is what your customers are doing. Help us understand a little bit, you know, Mercer talked about metallic and the azure partnership, but for the rest of the products, the portfolio that we're talking about, you know, does this >>kind >>of work seamlessly across my own data center hosting providers Public Cloud, you know, how does this fit into the cloud environment for your customer? >>Yes, it does. And I can start with this one goes to, um it's our strategy is cloud first, right? And you see it in every aspect of our product portfolio. In fact, I don't know if you got to see a keynote today, but Ron from Johns Hopkins University was remarking that comment has the best cloud native architectures. And that's primarily because of the innovation that we drive into the multi cloud reality. We have very deep partnerships with pretty much all the cloud vendors, and we use that for delivering joint innovation, a few things that when you think of it from a hybrid customers perspective, the most important need for them is to continue working on pram while still leveraging the cloud. And we have a lot of optimization is built into that, and then the next step of the journey is of course, making sure that you can recover to the cloud would be it work load. Typically your data quality and there's a lot of automation that we provide to our solutions and finally, Of course, if you're already in the cloud, whether you're running a science parents or cloud native, our software protects across all those use cases, either true sass with metallic auto downloadable software, backup and recovery so we can cover the interest victims of actual presence. You. We do definitely help customers in every stage of their hybrid cloud acceleration journey. >>And if you take a look at the Hedvig protect if you take a look at the head back to, um, the ability to work in a cloud native fast, it is essentially a part of the DNA of that storage of the storage, right? So whether you're running on Prem, whether you're running it about adjacent, set up inside the cloud head, that can work with any compute environment and any storage environment that you went to essentially then feed, we build this distributed storage, and the reason that becomes important. It's pretty much highlighted with our announcement around the kubernetes and container support is that it makes it really easy to start maneuvering data from on Prem to the cloud, um, from cloud to cloud region to region, sort of that high availability that you know as customers make cloud first a reality and their organizations starts to become a critical requirement or ensuring the application of and some of the things that we've done now with kubernetes in making all of our integration for how we deliver storage for the kubernetes and container environments and being that they're completely kubernetes native and that they can support a Google in AWS and Azure. And of course, any on premises community set up just showcases the value that we can provide in giving them that level of data portability. And it basically provides a common foundation layer, or how any sort of the Dev ops teams will be operating in the way that those state full container state workloads. Donna Oh, sorry. Go >>ahead, mark area >>because you mentioned the metallic and azure partnership announcement and I just want to get on that. And one thing that run dimension, which is we are really excited about the announcement of partnership with Microsoft and all the different news cases that opens up that are SAS platform with Azure with office 3 65 and all of the great application stack it's on. If you're at the same time, to run this point. We are a multi cloud company. And whether that is other of the hyper scale clouds Mess GC, P. Ali at Oracle and IBM, etcetera, or Oliver, Great service writer burners. We continue to believe in customer choice, and we'll continue to drive unique event innovations across all of those platforms. >>All right, Don, I was wondering if we could just dig in a little bit more on some other kubernetes pieces you were talking about. Let me look at just the maturation of storage in general. You know, how do we had state back into containers in kubernetes environments? Help us see, You know what you're hearing from your customers. And you know how you how you're ready to meet their needs toe not only deliver storage, but as you say, Really? You know, full data protection in that environment? >>Certainly it So I mean, there's been a number of enhancements that happened in the kubernetes environment General over the last two years. One of the big ones was the creation of what the visit environment calls a persistent volume. And what that allows you to do is to really present storage to a a communities application. Do it be typically through what's called a CSR container storage interface that allows for state full data to be written, storage and be handled and reattached applications as you leverage them about that kubernetes. Um, as you can probably imagine that with the addition of the additional state full applications, some of the overall management now of stateless and state collapse become very talent. And that's primarily because many customers have been using some of the more traditional storage solutions to try to map that into these new state. Full scenario. And as you start to think about Dev ops organization, most Dev ops organizations want to work in the environment of their choice. Whether that's Google, whether that's AWS, Microsoft, uh, something that might be on Prem or a mix of different on Prem environments. What you typically find, at least in the kubernetes world, is there's seldom ever one single, very large kubernetes infrastructure cluster that's set to run, Dev asked. The way and production all at once. You usually have this spread out across a fairly global configuration, and so that's where some of these traditional mechanisms from traditional storage vendors really start to fall down because you can apply the same level of automation and controls in every single one of those environments. When you don't control the storage, let's say and that's really where interfacing Hedvig and allowing that sort of extension distribute storage platform brings about all of this automation policy control and really storage execution definition for the state. Full statehood workloads so that now managing the stateless and the state full becomes pretty easy and pretty easy to maintain when it comes to developing another Dev branch or simply trying to do disaster recovery or a J for production, >>any family actively do. That's a very interesting response, and the reality is customers are beginning to experiment with business. Very often they only have a virtual environment, and now they're also trying to expand into continuous. So Hedwig's ability to service primary storage for virtualization as well as containers actually gives their degree of flexibility and freedom for customers to try out containers and to start their contingent. Thank you familiar constructs. Everything is mellow where you just need to great with continuous >>Alright, bring a flexibility is something that I heard when you talk about the portfolio and the pricing as to how you put these pieces together. You actually talked about in the presentation this morning? Aggressive pricing. If you talk about, you know, kind of backup and recovery, help us understand, You know, convo 2020 how you're looking at your customers and you know how you put together your products, that to meet what they need at that. As you said, aggressive pricing? >>Absolutely. And you use this phrase a little bit earlier is to blow like flexibility. That's exactly what we're trying to get to the reason why we are reconstructing our portfolio so that we have these very granular use case aligned data management services to provide the cloud like flexibility. Customers don't have the same data management needs all the time. Great. So they can pick and choose the exact solution that need because there are delivered on the same platform that can enable out the solution investment, you know, And that's the reality. We know that many of our customers are going to start with one and keep adding more and more services, because that's what we see as ongoing conversations that gives us the ability to really praise the entry products very aggressively when compared to competition, especially when we go against single product windows. This uses a lot of slammed where we can start with a really aggressively priced product and enable more capabilities as we move forward to give you an idea, we launched disaster recovery today. I would say that compared to the so the established vendors India, we would probably come in at about 25 to 40% of the Priceline because it depends on the environment and what not. But you're going to see that that's the power of bringing to the table. You start small and then depending on what your needs are, you have the flexibility to run on either. More data management capabilities are more workloads, depending on what your needs will be. I think it's been a drag from a partner perspective, less with muscle. If you want a little bit more than that, >>yes, I mean, that goes back to the idea of being ableto simply scale across government use functionality. For example, things like the fact that our disaster recovery offering the Newman doesn't require backup really allows us to have those Taylor conversations around use cases, applications >>a >>zealous platforms. You think about one of the the big demands that we've had coming in from customers and partners, which is help me have a D R scenario or a VR set up in my environment that doesn't require people to go put their hands on boxes and cables, which was one of those things that a year ago we were having. This conversation would not necessarily have been as important as it is now, but that ability to target those specific, urgent use cases without having to go across on sort of sell things that aren't necessarily associated with the immediate pain points really makes those just makes us ineffective. Offer. >>Yeah, you bring up some changing priorities. I think almost everybody will agree that the number one priority we're hearing from customers is around security. So whether I'm adopting more cloud, I'm looking at different solutions out there. Security has to be front and center. Could we just kind of go down the line and give us the update as to how security fits and all the pieces we've been discussing? >>I guess I'm talking about change, right, so I'll start. The security for us is built into everything that we do the same view you're probably going to get from each of us because security is burden. It's not a board on, and you would see it across a lot of different images. If you take our backup and recovery and disaster recovery, for instance, a lot of ransomware protection capabilities built into the solution. For instance, we have anomaly detection that is built into the platform. If we see any kind of spurious activity happening all of a sudden, we know that that might be a potential and be reported so that the customer can take a quick look at air Gap isolation, encryption by default. So many features building. And when you come to disaster recovery, encryption on the wire, a lot of security aspects we've been to every part of the portfolio don't. >>Consequently, with Hedvig, it's probably no surprise that when that this platform was developed and as we've continued development, security has always been at the core of what we're doing is stored. So what? It's for something as simple as encryption on different volume, ensuring the communication between applications and the storage platform itself, and the way the distributors towards platform indicates those are all incredibly secured. Lock down almost such for our own our own protocols for ensuring that, um, you know, only we're able to talk within our own, our own system. Beyond that, though, I mean it comes down to ensure that data in rest data in transit. It's always it's always secure. It's also encrypted based upon the level of control that using any is there one. And then beyond just the fact of keeping the data secure. You have things like immutable snapshots. You have declared of data sovereignty to ensure that you can put essentially virtual fence barriers for where data can be transported in this highly distributed platform. Ah, and then, from a user perspective, there's always level security for providing all seeking roll on what groups organization and consume storage or leverage. Different resource is the storage platform and then, of course, from a service provider's perspective as well, providing that multi tenanted access s so that users can have access to what they want when they want it. It's all about self service, >>and the idea there is that obviously, we're all familiar with the reports of increased bad actors in the current environment to increased ransomware attacks and so forth. And be a part of that is addressed by what wrong and done said in terms of our core technology. Part of that also, though, is addressed by being able to work across platforms and environments because, you know, as we see the acceleration of state tier one applications or entire data center, evacuations into service provider or cloud environments has happened. You know, this could have taken 5 10 years in a in a normal cycle. But we've seen this happen overnight has cut this. Companies have needed to move those I T environments off science into managed environments and our ability to protect the applications, whether they're on premises, whether they're in the cloud or in the most difficult near where they live. In both cases, in both places at once, is something that it's really important to our customers to be able to ensure that in the end, security posture >>great Well, final thing I have for all three of you is you correctly noted that this is not the end, but along the journey that you're going along with your customers. So you know, with all three of you would like to get a little bit. Give us directionally. What should we be looking at? A convo. Take what was announced today and a little bit of look forward towards future. >>Directionally we should be looking at a place where we're delivering even greater simplicity to our customers. And that's gonna be achieved through multiple aspects. 1st 1 it's more technologies coming together. Integrating. We announced three important integration story. We announced the Microsoft partnership a couple of weeks back. You're gonna see us more longer direction. The second piece is technology innovation. We believe in it. That's what Differentiators has a very different company and we'll continue building it along the dimensions off data awareness, data, automation and agility. And the last one continued obsession with data. What more can we do with it? How can we drive more insights for our customers We're going to see is introducing more capabilities along those dimensions? No. >>And I think Rhonda tying directly into what you're highlighting there. I'm gonna go back to what we teased out 10 months ago at calm Bolt. Go there in Colorado in this very on this very program and talk about how, in the unification of ah ah, data and storage management, that vision, we're going to make more and more reality. I think the, uh, the announcements we've made here today let some of the things that we've done in between the lead up to this point is just proof of our execution. And ah, I can happily and excitedly tell you, we're just getting warmed up. It's going to be, ah, gonna be some fun future ahead. >>And I think studio in the running that out with the partner angle. Obviously, we're going to continue to produce great products and solutions that we're going to make our partners relevant. In those conversations with customers, I think we're also going to continue to invest in alternative business models, services, things like migration services, audit services, other things that build on top of this core technology to provide value for customers and additional opportunities for our partners >>to >>build out their their offerings around combo technologies. >>All right, well, thank you. All three of you for joining us. It was great to be able to dig in, understand those pieces. I know you've got lots of resources online for people to learn more. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you too. Thank you. Alright, and stay with us. So we've got one more interview left for the Cube's coverage of con vault. Future Ready, students. Mannan. Thanks. As always for watching the Cube. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Commvault Future Ready 2020 brought to you by Commvault. >> Hi and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman and I'm joined by David Vellante here. Of course, we just had the keynote for Commvault Future Ready, Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO. Dave, he's been there a little bit over a year. We've been watching the transformation of Commvault as they are trying to go much deeper in the cloud. Of course, the space, data protection overall, backup and recovery, been a super hot one. Especially, if you talk about everybody accelerating what they're doing with the cloud, Dave, from an end user standpoint, as well as for Commvault. So why don't we start with the company first, as I said, the move to subscription, the move to cloud, a lot of change needed, and that's one of the reasons they brought Sanjay into the company. Of course, he'd been at Puppet before that, he was the CIO of EMC before that. So Dave, tell us your thoughts lately on Commvault. >> Okay, so Commvault, obviously Stu, has been around for a long, long time, and it's kind of a diversified player in the data protection space. I've always felt like they've had a more diversified sort of vision and portfolio. Sanjay took over, what was it February last year, right? So he kind of came in and inherited a company in transition. And transitioning from what has largely been a legacy sort of on-prem, perpetual software licensed business to now one that's transferring into a subscription based model, obviously a large maintenance base. I think about 60% of their revenues comes from services, and most of that is maintenance, okay? So he's inherited that, and then they're going into a subscription model. So that's going to hit the income statement, and then boom COVID hits. So Sanjay is getting it all from all sides, but Commvault is a 670, roughly, million dollar company on a trailing 12 month basis. And the market cap's in the 1.7, 1.8 range, so they trade at about 2.7 times revenue. So that's much better than a hardware company, but it should be better than that as a software company. So the challenge that he has is, okay, how do we get the company growing again? How do we transition to that subscription based model? The good news on Commvault is their balance sheet is tremendous. I mean, they have no debt, no debt. I mean, several hundred million dollars in cash, over 300 million and zero debt, which kind of interesting to me, Stu. Because many companies during this COVID pandemic have tapped the credit markets, Commvault has chosen not to. Maybe they should right now with such low interest rates, and maybe that can help get the growth engine going. But I think they're very conservative in that standpoint and obviously very proud of their balance sheet, but with the likes of Cohesity and Rubrik, and I know we're going to talk about that pouring money into the market, trying to attack them, and we'll talk more about their position relative to those guys, you might like to see 'em raise a little bit of money or take on some debt and really go after some of those opportunities that you referred to upfront, it is a hot market. >> Yeah, well, Dave, you talk about some of the newer entrants raised just insane amounts of money when you talk about that space. Not only Cohesity and Rubrik, but also talked about Veem. Of course, we've watched Veem go from a change in ownership and how much money they have. And from a revenue standpoint, Veem actually might be bigger than Commvault at this point, I believe, right? >> Yeah, I think so. I mean, they're billion dollar bookings, they say. I mean, I believe it, but they're a privately held company. Commvault, we can tell actually what their numbers are. Guaranteed Cohesity and Rubrik are losing money. So their cost of acquiring a customer is huge. Commvault is, let's face it, it's servicing its install base, and it's mining that. And that's why it's, it's cashflow positive. I mean, it's a very healthy company financially. The challenge that, again, Sanjay has is how do you get growth? They're a company, as I said earlier, in transition. Let me share with you, if I may, some data from our friends at ETR. What we're showing here is the fundamental methodology of ETR, which is that net score, Stu. We talk about that all the time, ETR is, as I say, our data partner, Enterprise Technology Research. Every quarter, they go out and they say, "Based for each company and their various segments, "are you adopting new?" That's the lime green, that's the 2%. "Are you increasing spending?" That's the 30%, and this is from the July survey so this is relative to the first half. "Are you flat?" You can see that fat middle 56%, and then you can see decrease is 7% and that's in the pink, and then 5% replacing. So good news here is more people are spending more, more customers spending more, than are spending less. Net score's the red subtracted from the green, so it comes out at roughly 20%, which is that's certainly not terrible. It's a legacy company that's been around a long time. So you would see a company that's a newbie, that's hot. We'd always talked about UI path automation anywhere, Snowflake, they're in the 70% range, but they're much, much smaller companies but they're growing very, very rapidly. So this is respectable and very common for a company that has been around as long as Commvault. >> Yeah, thanks so much for sharing that data, Dave. Of course, as you said, huge customer base, they've been around for awhile. I remember when we first did Commvault GO two years ago, very excited, very engaged user base. There was a good strategy discussion and an understanding for what Commvault needed to do to get to the cloud, but there was an understanding that they couldn't keep doing with the same team what had brought them to the place before. You always say, Dave, what got you to where you were isn't going to get you to where you need to go. Talk a little bit about the keynote. Last year at Commvault there were a couple of big pieces. Number one, is they really had their first SaaS offering with Metallic. And what the momentum has been on Metallic is, first of all, they made a big partnership announcement with Microsoft ahead of this event. Multi-year, Metallic has a few different solutions. One of them, of course, is to work on Office 365, so when we go to SaaS and we go to the cloud, we understand that data protection isn't something that just comes inherently. Some people thought, "Oh hey, I did it "in my own data center, but once I go to the cloud, well, "I'm sure it just takes care of things "like data protection and security." The answer is I still need to think about it, and the ecosystem has helped filling that gap. So Metallic was the first step and what we saw, Dave, really looks like a holistic refresh of the product line. Commvault back in recovery, Commvault disaster recovery, Commvault complete data protection, all aligning themselves to be more to what you were talking about, going to that full ratable model, and the other piece was Hedvig. So Hedvig software company, helping them to be in more cloud-native environments. And they launched a Hedvig X, so it's the full integration of that solution. Less than a year from the acquisition to fully integrating it and making it an offering that's ready for what they're doing. >> Is that they're cloud play? Actually Hedvig is sort of in that space, right? As with cloud you think subscription, but also Commvault is basically putting its stack in the cloud, right? And taking advantage of cloud services, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Metallic, specifically is built for the cloud. >> So let's talk a little bit about cloud, I have some other data here. And the cloud, if you pull up that next slide, the cloud has been eating away at on-prem vendors. We know it's been growing at 2000, 3000 basis points higher than the on-prem business. But what this slide shows is that same net score methodology that we talked about before, but it's filtering, you can see in the left hand side here, it's filtering on AWS, Google and Microsoft. So there's 585, AWS, Google and Microsoft customers in the ETR dataset. There's like about 1200 in the overall survey this quarter. And this shows the over time the net score of Commvault in those accounts, so you can see, as I was saying, go back to 2018, you can see prior to Sanjay taking over this thing was dipping and dipping, losing momentum coming into kind of the April survey and then July survey of 2019, and it's kind of bouncing off the bottom now. So it seems like they're making some progress there, and what we want to see is that momentum continue to grow. Again, net score is a measure of spending velocity. So what you want to see is as that transition occurs more sort of a net score increases over each quarter. >> Yeah, well, Dave as you mentioned earlier, there absolutely are some headwinds potentially there, but it looks like Sanjay, at least, has stopped some of the bleeding on this and, stated goal of course, to return to growth. And so we would want to see that go from just up one or 2% to be able to track with the cloud. Probably a good time for us to talk a little bit about the competition, Dave, because if you talk just in cloud markets, are you tracking along with the cloud? So the hyperscales themselves, of course, growing at very huge percent. A company that's been around as long as Veritas isn't necessarily going to be doing 35 to 70% growth as you would see from AWS or Azure. But what do you see out there for some of the competition in general, who were some of the key players that we need to look at? >> Yeah, so I mean, think about the backup guys. I mean, the traditional space, you've mentioned Veritas. Veritas, by the way, in the ETR survey data is not playing well, they're in the red. They've been losing share, the share donors, as they say, you've got some big players, Dell EMC, obviously, kind of living off the data domain base. Remember Dell EMC fell behind, prior to the Dell acquisition, they weren't investing heavily in the data protection business. They were kind of living milking off that data domain base. Back when you were there, they had the networker and they had Avamar, and so there was a bifurcated thing. Frank Slootman came and he tried to clean some of that up, but then he was onto his next big thing, of course, it was ServiceNow. And so, you know, Dell is a big footprint, obviously, but they're very hardware centric, as you know, so they have a big hardware agenda. IBM with Spectrum Protect, Veem was hurting them. They did the deal with Catalogic to kind of stop the bleeding, he kind of did. Again, big install base, and then you got the sort of newcomers. Veem is not really a newcomer anymore. I think they've been around for 15 years, big acquisition. Decent momentum in the market, especially started the Microsoft base, and they're kind of everywhere, so you see them. And of course you see Cohesity and Rubrik spend a lot of money, as you said. And it's interesting, let me pull up this next data point. In the ETR data set this past quarter you saw Cohesity actually overtake Rubrik. Rubrik was very, very strong earlier on. They're kind of neck and neck in this chart, what this chart shows is not net score, it's now market share. Now market shares, not real market shares, Stu. I have to be cautious here because it's not like IDC tracks market share. What it is is pervasiveness in the dataset. So in other words, within this segment, the number of mentions of the vendor divided by the total mentions in the segment, okay? So it's really pervasiveness or presence in the data set. And what this shows is you can see we've got 65 Commvault customers in the survey, and it shows the impact of Veem, Rubrik and Cohesity in the Commvault base. And you can see up through, let's see, that's the recent surveys is you see the increases up to the increasing red line is Veem, and then you got the Rubrik line and then the Cohesity line, but they're all recently, since the October 19th survey, down, trending down. So that says to me that Commvault is holding serve within its own base and actually doing better as these guys are declining in this base. You can see the comment that ETR made, "Rubrik, Cohesity and Veeam are all seeing "market share declines in shared accounts with Commvault," so that's good news. I think this is very important, Stu, and here's why. Is Commvault has got to hunker down and maintain those customers. It does not want to be a share donor much in the same way that Veritas has been. So that's a quick scan of the competitive marketplace. And again, from my standpoint, I'd like to see Sanjay maybe get a little bit more aggressive. I liked the acquisitions. Hedvig, it's great, deal with actually some more subscription, but I'd like to see them go hard after a cloud native. I have to dig into that, maybe you can comment, but really cloud native and multicloud across clouds being able to have that same experience on-prem as I do in the clouds at very high performance, very low latency. >> Yeah. Well, Dave, first of all, one thing, talk about the competitive win rate. That's something you always look at is how are you doing against the competitors? Not only did Sanjay come in, but you saw changes along how the channel chief, I believe, and the salespeople. So definitely reinvigorating that piece of it, as well as, Dave we saw, in the keynote. So the portfolio is updated, an aggressive engineering investment, some through acquisition, some through changing the code and moving in these environments, leveraging partnerships, great to see the Microsoft one, love to see something along the lines of Google. We understand Amazon, you play in that ecosystem, it is challenging to necessarily partner deeply with AWS, unless you're one of a few strong players in the marketplace, but working closer in cloud. And Dave, one thing I'd point out, last year, one of the things that really impressed me at Commvault GO is they did have some good developer actions. So when you talk about cloud native, of course, enabling developers is one of the key things. Like many companies out there, inside the company you've got developers, so how are you unleashing that? So Hedvig, a good acquisition along those lines, but you know, in the middle of the show floor, they had people that you set up with whiteboards and just go at it. So, you know, reminds me of days past when you used to have these engineering-driven shows where you could go in and really understand that. So helping to developers, enable them, backup and recovery just needs to tie into all my DevOps and IT Ops and all my other environments to make things just more automated because also you talk cloud native, Dave, automation has to be a big piece of it. And to your point, we actually have really good guests coming on the program. Not only will we have Sanjay, relatively fresh off the keynote, I've got a panel with the product people to really dig in and understand that. We'll poke and prod at some of the cloud native pieces and understand where that's going, got their head of strategy also on the program. >> Yes, I think you're making a great point about automation. Just speaking about M&A for a moment, I like M&A, I like growth through M&A, I'm comfortable with that as long as it fits into the portfolio. Your point about automation, I see opportunities there for M&A, things like visibility, observability, obviously hot analytics, automated operations, IT Ops, anything that sort of removes labor and complexity and gives me visibility across clouds. That I think is something that could be interesting, again, as long as it fits into the portfolio. I'll say this, I mean, Sanjay was at EMC and knows M&A because I've no doubt they were bringing all their M&A candidates to Sanjay and saying, "Okay, what do you think of this tech, do you use it?" Probably kick the tires a little bit, so he, I'm sure, was a part of those. I'm sure he saw the good, the bad, and the ugly. You were there, EMC was pretty good at acquisitions, but then it got a little out of control. >> And Dave, talk automation, Sanjay came from Puppet. Puppet was one of the early companies along helping people move along from those manual tasks to how can we automate those? So, absolutely, Sanjay now a little over a year in there, starting to see from the product standpoint, and expect to see some of the trailing results as to how that moves forward. >> And then again, blending that, if it's a tuck in or whatever, maybe there's some big chess move out there. I would just suspect given Commvault's conservative nature you wouldn't see that. Although, they could do it. I mean, at their revenue level, their balance sheet would allow them to raise some debt, if they wanted to do that now would be the time to do it. But it's interesting, everybody's doing it and they're not. So I kind of liked the contrarian play. Given the opportunity in the market, given the TAM expansion through, beyond backup into data management, and it's a cloud and multicloud, I do think there's maybe an opportunity for them to be a little bit more aggressive. >> All right, well, Dave, thanks so much for helping us dig in and kick off our coverage. >> You're welcome, Stu. >> All right, stay with us. We have a bunch of interviews here for Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of Convolt future. Ready? 2020 brought to you by Convolt. >>Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the cubes coverage of Convolt future. Ready to help me wrap up our coverage of the event? Happy to welcome back to the program. Trump Geraldo key is the vice president of strategy and chief of staff with Convolt. Tom. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks to glad to be here. All right. So before we get into the news, Tom, and I love when I get to talk to strategy people, cause you know, you have your 90 day plans, you have your quarterly plans, you have your yearly plans. You're a, you know, year, year and a half into the new regime, of course, Sanjay you're chief of staff for and yourself. So, um, I'm sure coming into 2020, um, a few things probably hit in 2020 that weren't on your initial plan. So, you know, global pandemic and the like tell us a little bit about, you know, how current events, uh, have been impacting, you know, both, both, both of your plans and, and, and, and led to what we saw today. >>Yeah, sure. Great, Stu um, good question. You know, you know, what's interesting is, um, obviously we're in a different world today than where we were last time we spoke at the, at our go conference in the, um, in the fall and, uh, and like everyone else, you know, we're, we're dealing with this new reality. And, um, you know, we're fortunate because we are a software company, which means, you know, from an operational standpoint, um, you know, we're, we're able to, we're able to continue to build products, deliver great software to our customers. And the, like I'd say from a strategy perspective, you know, we're still on course, we, uh, as you saw at the go conference last, last fall, and as you see today, um, we've been building new products, new capabilities, um, you know, under the mantra of intelligent data management, which really is a new direction for the company or a new way that we're framing, uh, the, the, uh, what we're bringing to our customers. >>And while we've had to make some tactical changes inside our business, the fundamental strategy is strong. In fact, I think in a lot of ways it's actually sped up, sped things up. Uh, I think it was a, as we talked about today, um, quite a bit the, uh, digital transformation for organizations is happening, even pastoring them, or people are saying, Hey, you know, where I thought I might've had five, 10 years to, you know, to on this journey, it's actually compressing quite a bit. And we feel like we're in a really good spot. And we feel like we've been building towards, um, the delivering the kinds of capabilities that customers need. So, um, fundamentally things aren't changing for us. And I think, um, I think we're in a good spot today. And hopefully, you know, that is gonna resonate with the marketplace with this series of announcements that we're making, uh, making today. >>Yeah, absolutely. Tom huge forcing function in the marketplace, by what we're seeing today. Um, you, you mentioned, uh, the user conference go from last year. One of the big themes at the show last year was the intelligent data management. So help us understand, you know, connect the dots if you would, uh, between the, the vision and now really it's a whole portfolio refresh, uh, that we're seeing from Convolt today. >>Yeah. So we're, you know, we're building off of 20 years of development in this space, right? We it's so much more than backup. And, uh, you know, I think traditionally Combolt may have gotten a little bit pigeonholed as a backup provider, but really when you look under the covers and you look at our platform, right, it provides true data awareness, automation, agility across your entire estate. And we have almost a thousand patents in this space. So, um, you know, what that platform offers for us is the ability to support lots of different data management services that can be consumed in different ways. And so when we think about intelligent data management, right it's data management services that are delivered in that intelligent way, right through that awareness automation and agility, you know, obviously to the way that we deliver it to customers is, you know, either it's flexible traditional software, right downloadable software, or, um, as an integrated appliance. >>Um, and now even as software, as a service through our metallic offering, because when you look at it, you know, that foundation that metallic is built upon is that same core platform that, you know, our current customers know and enjoy. So, um, you know, when we talk about intelligent data management, that frames the whole story for us. So when we think about, you know, our roadmap going forward as well, it's about what are the new types of data management services that customers are demanding and how can we build that right on that platform, that core platform that we've already been, uh, had developed for so many years, >>You know, Tom, Tom, I'm glad you brought up, uh, some of those different models, uh, the way that people can consume, uh, and purchase, uh, these solutions. Uh, if we look at, uh, you know, the overhaul of the portfolio, they are, uh, one of the pieces I like to understand from you is if you look at pricing, uh, if you look at licensing, um, you know, obviously Convolt has been going along this journey, uh, from, uh, T to be more in the, uh, uh, that subscription model, if you will. So help us understand how the, how the updates fit there. >>Yeah. I, you know, it it's, I'll tell you, it starts with, if you, if you had a chance to see, I'm sure you did see Sanjay's presentation today. You know, a lot of what we're talking about here is simplification and simplifying, not just the user experience, but also the commercial experience, right? So simplifying the usage of the product, but also simplifying the usage. So when we think about it, um, you know, and customers are demanding this more than ever right now, right? Um, obviously this goes back to the new world that we're living in. And, um, if you take that and also consider our expanding portfolio, we need to make sure that we're doing it in a way that makes it easy for customers to consume, um, the different elements of it. So we've taken an approach that makes, um, licensing simple. So first we're, we're aligning licensing to the workload that's being either protected or managed in some other way. >>Right? So for instance, if it's a virtual machine workload, the licensing is by virtual machine. If it's mailbox oriented, it's by user, right. It's aligned to the workload and the procurement methodology that organizations are used to buying for that particular workload. I think in the past things that might've gotten a little bit convoluted, is this terabyte based, is it VM based? Is it user based? Is it instance based? Does it right. And what we've done is we've taken a drastic simplification approach. Uh, I'm looking at that and looking at that, so that as organizations think about their workloads, uh, they don't have to do like math derivatives to figure out what their cost is going to be. The second thing is we wanted to make it more predictable. And so, um, you know, we've had subscription licensing as an option for a few years now, but it's really just been an option, right? >>And now we're going to be more aggressive in terms of how we're offering that. We want to incentivize prescriptions even further. You know, if a customer wants a one year term, we'll provide a one year term, right? If they want a multi year term, we'll provide a multi-year term, it's up to them, but whatever it is, it's going to help them buy what they need rather than be forced to make some sort of massive upfront perpetual license decision. Right? Well, we'll incentivize that sort of predictability. And then lastly, you know, we want to make sure that we're being aggressive and flexible in how we're providing these options to customers. So, you know, if you go back to the intelligent data management comments and being able to deliver different data management services, we want to make sure that we're aggressive when it comes to the solitary use case. >>If I want to back up the thing, I'm going to be very aggressive, right? Combolt's going to have aggressive pricing, uh, for that particular use case. Um, but then what we also want to do is we want to make it attractive to customers to bring their data in environment, even further with, you know, other types of data management capabilities. So we're going to make it easier for customers to do that. And you see that through the portfolio approach that we've announced today. Um, we've really rebuilt our portfolio, I think for, you know, uh, the more modern enterprise and, uh, and we're incentivizing and making it worth customers while to really look at all the different offerings that we have. >>So, Tom, I wonder if you could speak a little bit to the ripple effect of that change that you have to, to the pricing and, and, and the like, um, I thinking about go to market your channel, uh, and you know, compensation for, for along the value chain there, how does that happen? >>So, um, obviously, you know, as we make any kind of change to our portfolio, be it, um, you know, be it adding products or changing the licensing. There's a lot of work that has to go into it behind the scenes. And, you know, this frankly is a big part of what we've changed in the last 18 months. Um, the, uh, and we talked about this a little bit last time. You and I, you and I spoke, you know, it's hard to get an organization to be aligned end to end and even harder when you think about all the downstream effects of that, right. When you've got, you know, distribution layers, and in of course your, your customer base, um, how do you get everybody in sync and aligned with what it is that we're doing? And we've made sure that throughout this process, as we've been leading to today, which is really a combination of a lot of this effort, that, you know, the folks in the organization both internally and externally, that need to be up to speed and need to be aligned to what it is that we're doing are there. >>Right? So it's part of that. Um, part of that process, we've been working on this for months to make sure that we're in a good place. You know, I, I have a saying inside the company, which is sometimes you have to go slow to go fast and it, it relates to, it actually relates to, um, to like motorcycle racing. You know, when you, you know, a motorcycle race, isn't one on the straightaway is when everybody has their throttle wide open it's one, um, before they enter the turns as they're slowing down, because the whole idea is you slow down when you get the bike settled, you get your, you enter the curve, you know, the right trajectory so that you can hit the apex and accelerate out. So when it comes to aligning a big organization and in our, um, distribution and channel infrastructure behind that, going slow means making sure everybody's aligned upfront in the process. And then we can build the plans going forward to make sure that we've got the right information in the right place at the right time, so that the customer can have a great experience at the end of the line. >>Alright, Tom, you, you've now been with Convolt a little over a year, you know, bring us inside a little bit, you know, some of the cultural changes, what surprises you've seen, uh, and, uh, you know, H help us, you know, bring a close to, uh, the Convolt future. Ready? >>Yeah. I'll tell you a stew. It's been, so I've been with, Convolt now a little bit over a year, but a year and a quarter. And, um, it has been a tremendous experience, obviously, we've we have, we've transformed the company. And, you know, if you look at the leadership team, it's, you know, it's a, it's a mixture of new folks and folks that have a lot of experience with the company. Um, and you look throughout the organization between how we operate as I was just talking about, and, um, the kind of innovation that we're delivering to the marketplace, it's founded on a really ideal, you know, we want to, um, we wanted to simplify the business. We wanted to drive innovation and we want to make sure that we're executing and we've been able to rally the company around those three components. And I'll tell you, um, the, the biggest pleasant surprise that I've had inside the organization is the attitude of our people and the openness of the Convolt teams to the kinds of change that we've been making. >>Um, it's been tremendous because without, without their support, there's no way that we would have been able to do this. Um, you know, from employee one to employee, you know, 2,500, you know, we're all like rowing in the same direction to use another analogy. And, um, without that, it would be impossible to make the kinds of changes that we're making now, you know, I I'd also say, you know, it takes it's, um, it takes time and that's one of the things that we've all needed to make sure that we, that we had, you know, getting, getting the whole company aligned, um, and then having the patients to, to make sure that we've got a nice follow-through, um, has been really important. And I think, you know, today is a great example of how far we've taken things at Humboldt and where we think things are headed going forward. And I expect lots more of us, more great things as we move forward through the rest of our, our calendar and fiscal year and into the out years as well. >>All right, Tom, uh, one more final word. Uh, w w what do you want really the customers to have as their takeaway from Convolt future ready? >>Well, I mean, I hope a customer see, you know, the kind of a positive change in momentum that we're making between, you know, what we're trying to, to deliver in terms of value for our customers and how much they can derive out of that. Um, you know, for our PR, you know, when you're, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So for us, you know, it all comes down to the data and data, you know, is so fundamental to any organization, how they derive value from it. And, you know, we play, I think, an important part in that landscape, and it's our hope that we're delivering the types of services to customers that allow them to extract the value of the data to make them successful. And at the end of the day, that's what we're all about. And I hope that this has been a good, um, experience for customers to see this and, um, and that they can, um, you know, see from it that we we've got momentum behind us. And that we're just going to continue to move this forward. >>All right. Well, Tom, thank you so much data, absolutely huge opportunity for customers as well as Convolt for you and, and all of your ecosystem there, Tom Broderick. Thanks so much pleasure catching up with you. >>Thank you, Sue. Really appreciate it. >>All right. And that brings to a close the cubes coverage of Convolt future. Ready? Check out the cube.net for lots more. You can go back and see the Convolt go that Tom and I have referenced and stay tuned for lots more events that we have coming up. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you for watching the cube.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of CONMEBOL. Future Ready 2020. Brought to you by combo. Hi, I'm Stew Minuteman. And this is the Cube's coverage of Con Volt Future ready event Welcoming back to the program. Fresh off the keynote stage. Sanjay Mirchandani. He's the CEO of Con Volt. Sanjay. Nice job on the keynote. And thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks to Good to see you again. >>Nice to see you too. So, Sanjay, about a year and 1/2 into your journey with Conn Volt, you took over. And you know what it looks like? You've almost completely refreshed the portfolio there. Start a little bit, you know, future. Ready. Tell us how you're getting Conn Volt and its customers ready to be prepared for what happened today as well as the >>right. So, you know, we've we've given visit The past 18 months, have flown by in the past four or five. Even faster. Um, the change. You know, the change that we've had all deal with us as organizations has been tremendous. We've been hard at work. When I came on board, I should have talked about how we were setting out to simplify, innovate and execute all three of those pillars and, ah, future ready, which I love as a term completely embodies what I think the work we've been up to and what the world needs today, which is really getting it ready for whatever's next. And, you know, and it's coming together of innovation, simplification and and hopefully you'll agree some good execution to bring it all together. Yeah, so we've been busy. >>Sanjay, you talked a bit about just the moment in time that we're in. Wonder if you could bring us inside. You know your customers. So there's certain things that we saw for a couple of months. People put a pause on. Other things absolutely have been accelerated. We talk to customers about their adoption of cloud, you know, digital transformation. It's one of those things. That boy, I hope I'm through some of those or you know, can be as agile as possible. But, you know, what do you hearing specifically from our customer base and how they're dealing with things? >>You know, Cto, I touched a little bit on that during my keynote. And you know this this this this time that we're in has really caused, I think a couple of shifts. The first structural shift was Oh, hey, this thing is here to stay and let's get our employees Working and productive and keep the business is running and keeping them safe and everything else. That first shift happened right on. Honest about What was it that March, April and businesses small and big had to figure out how to take go from their their their operating model into, ah, remote. With the remote model, you re prioritize and you thought through what was important at the time and what it was was really getting laptops into the hands of your employees, getting them safe into their working environment, making sure your business processes leaning in that direction. You could take care of your customers. And so that was sort of the first structural faith, the second structural failures. Okay, how do we really drive productivity? One of the new priorities. What do we need to do, what you want to invest in? What do you want to pull back from? And from our vantage point from A from a technology and data point of view, what we're hearing is the themes that if I had a paraphrase of conversations I have with CIOs, it's NGOs. It's really around a simplification. This is a This is a great time to really simplify and, you know, and make sure that you're working with the tried and tested. This is not the time to experiment. This is not the time for esoteric. This is really about simplifying and working with the tried and tested. The second is really about focusing on skills, you know, this is you need you need to be able to leverage, and you need to be able to bring productivity from the from the people that you have an I t. And really focus around that that's, you know, that sometimes for gotten, you know that I like to call them. The unsung heroes of technology has just been pushed into their homes. They're now doing their jobs, longer hours, tougher scenarios. They have no access to their data centers. So it's over. So let's think about skills and the third, you know, the third thing, really that has been propelled into this conversation is cloud. So if you were on a journey, you're off the journey you need to get there quickly, okay? And you need to really newly leverage a light touch, low touch, remote sort of capability. A So fast is you can't call a digital transformation. Call it whatever you'd like to say. But it is about truly leveraging the cloud in a way that that was no longer, you know, a one year, two year three applying. You just have to bring it right to those kinds of things we're hearing and dealing with. >>Yeah, it's so important, Sanjay. Especially that simplicity piece. You know, I remember a few years ago there were certain customers that were adopting cloud, and it was the reminder. Oh, hey, your data protection in your security, you need to make sure you take care of that when you go to the cloud. And unfortunately, you know, some of the people that are now accelerating things you have to quickly say Oh, wait. I can't work this in a few months. I need to take care of this upfront, so help us understand a little bit. You know, the announcements that you've made. How are you making sure that you're ready for customers? The simplicity that they need to take advantage of the innovation and opportunity that the cloud on solutions provider >>absolutely and and make a mistake for me to. Simplification is not just the technology is easy to use, even though that is a big part of what we're working on and working and delivering through these announcements. But we've also got to make sure that the partnerships that we that we that we have lend themselves to what customers need, you know, engineered better its source not in the field, you know, and then and then the ecosystem to make the technology available and consumed commercially in the way that customers would like to keep that simple to. But today, if I just focus on the portfolio, you know, we've we've you could say we've completely rebuilt this incredible stack of technology that we've built this company out and, you know, and we weave in a nutshell. What we've done is announced A. We've taken our backup and recovery suite and be saying we've got a new company, backup and recovery product. We've got a brand new con Volt disaster recovery product. You can get them together as a unit Azaz the complete backup and recovery suite, if you would. So that's one big set of offerings. The second and you know the second is is we bought Hedvig sort of next generation software defined storage technology company last year, and we've been feverishly work quietly at work, integrating Hedvig into calm bolt not just as a company, but in the technology and our new hyper scale technology. Hyper scale. ECs is the embodiment of those two things coming together, the best of data protection from Con Volt and the best storage subsystem to drive that from Hedvig, also from console. So the two come together on all of this technology, whether it's the suite that I mentioned or the hyper scaler, all of it you can. You can mix and match any way you want with it with a world class user interface or user interfaces if you want command lines. If you want AP ICE will keep it open, all of it to you. In addition, we've got announcements or under Activate Suite on. Recently, we talked about our partnership with Microsoft with the metallic azure sort of combination for customers. So it's ah, it's a left to right set of announcement with simplification threatened right through it. >>Sanjay, you mentioned partnerships. Ah, a little bit before the show, you had, of course, the extended partnership with Microsoft with metallic. Maybe give us just a little bit more color about you know how, Con Volt make sure their position and working closely with those hyper scale >>hours. Yeah, you know, and we work with all the hyper scaler. So, you know, there we are probably the most prevalent data protection technology, if you would in the public cloud. And most of the way we talk about over an exabyte that we've helped customers, right, that the cloud is just one data point we've we've been, you know, seen is from the outside in as being the transport capability across across hybrid cloud scenarios. The partnership, the partnership with Microsoft and Microsoft Azure in particular, is the coming together of these things because customers, when we talk to customers and Microsoft office of customers be here from them, they want the ability to be, if you know, as they get more prevalent in the cloud as their workloads get more more pervasive in the cloud, they want to make sure that the same industrial strength data protection cloud in that they had well while they were on prayer for primarily on Prem. Our solutions are completely hybrid. And so the partnership really brings together again. You know, technology that's engineered better together, our data protection and their their cloud best in class our channels working, working together and making sure that it's easy for customers to work work with us. And we're available on the azure marketplace and our field forces also aligned around it. So it's again a 3 60 kind of conversation that we have with customers as much as much of today's announcements. >>Yeah, Sanjay, you talked about the hyper scale er's. You mentioned that the integration of the Hedwig Solution work with Dev Ops and really the cloud native type solutions. Of course, one of the things everybody's looking at when you were hired to this job is you've got background in the automation in developer world. So you know, how is that scene in the update? The portfolio really that embracing of cloud native and develop our environments? >>Cloud without automation is not a cloud, right? It's just it's just it's just infrastructure that's put somewhere else. It's deep, deep degrees of it off automation that really bring cloud to life. Right? And I was fortunate that have been in the Dev ops world for a while in a market leading with marketing product. And I was very pleasantly surprised when I when I came to convert and sell the deep degrees of automation and work flows that are core technology had, with Hedvig acquisition being a platform layer being the storage layer that is multi protocol and appeals incredibly to Dev Ops engineers because everything in the product you know is call a bill through an A p I for a set of AP eyes. It's it's Richard's got work flows and and it's multi critical. So whether you're using VMC or you're building the next generation container applications or you're just using object storage, it doesn't matter. We can mix and match it across, you know, private and public cloud environments, and it's all culpable and it's all programmable. It's all automated on as much as you want >>it. All right, So, Sanjay, I know we can't talk too much about Financial Piece is where we are in the quarter. But one of the things Dave Volante and I were discussing and looking at Kahn Volt. You know, there's some good data, you know, especially if you look at win rates against some of the some of the newer players in this space that the data that we have from ET R was showing, you know, increased win rates for Con Volt. Just could you give us a little bit of your competitive landscape view you talked about? Customers don't want to take too much risk, you know? How do you balance between being, you know, a company with a large install base? But you want to be, you know, more modern? >>Oh, yeah. And you know, the use cases we're talking about. The cloud that we're seeing those leaders are today's use cases, not yesterday's use cases, and we're winning in the base is the fact that we respect that customers are coming from Okay, There's a lot of stuff that runs that business that is still good. That isn't in the cloud that they're they're working their plants journey from that to something else as well. That's where we're leading in areas where they have it in the public cloud, and we always like to stay 1 to 2 steps ahead of the hard problems our customers going to encounter. So our portfolio is is absolutely cloud ready. Our portfolio is rich in that in that capability, and we're not slowing down. You know, we're winning because we have the breath of technology that we support. Both, You know, source source data that customers want o protect and target scenarios where maybe the hyper scaler or anything else where customers want to take it. And the flexibility, the second thing. And if you heard the interview I did with Run from from Johns Hopkins, it's the optimization off our technology around each of those cloud scenarios that gives our customer's true, you know, true value around the compute and storage decisions they have to make. And we helped them make through deep through deep degrees of AI and ML built in. So so it's not just about moving bits. It's about optimizing all of that on the entire life cycle of that data, from the point it's created to the point. >>Excellent. Well, Sunday. Want to let you have the final word? Give us what you want customers to have as the take away from today's future. Ready event? >>Sure. So, first of all, I wanted to, you know, I want to thank all our our audience here, our customers for being with us. It's being with us as a customer, being looking at us as a prospect for technology. We are investing like, you know, we've invested over a $1,000,000,000 over over a period of time as a company in data protection, and we're taking that to a whole new level with the innovations that we're bringing to the table. So, you know, we truly believe that the journey with as it pertains to data the journey to the cloud requires you to be able to think through the life cycle from storing, protecting, optimizing and using that data all the way through. And our solutions can be used independently. Best of class across each of them or together better together. And, you know, we I I urge you to take a few minutes and look at some of the some of the great innovations we've brought to table and rest assured that everything we're doing eyes with hybrid cloud in mind and is it is completely cloud optimized. >>All right. Well, Sanjay Mirchandani. Thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations to you and the team on the work on the updates. Definitely. Look forward to hearing more in the future. >>Thanks. Too good to be here. >>Alright, stay tuned. We've got more from Con vault Future ready on student a man. And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover virtual experience brought to you by HP. I'm stew minimum. And this is the Cube's coverage of HP Discover virtual experience rather than all getting together in one place. Life box, Vegas. We're getting people around the globe where they are digging into some of the partner discussions here. Happy to welcome to the program. Ricardo de Blasio. He is the chief revenue officer from Con Vault. Ricardo, Thanks so much for joining us. Great to see you. >>We lost you. Great to be here. >>Excellent. So, you know, obviously HP discover Conn Volt and B when you give us the latest on on the partner. >>Absolutely. Well, first of all, I would like to thank you H p e deal team, not only for this invitation, but for the great partnership that we have. Ah, since actually, many, many years. Well, things are going really, really well with HB. Ah, we're very happy with very proud. I mean, if I'm a chief revenue officer also, my idol said it all. You know, if I look at the performance is off our alliances in the last 18 months, um, as being a double digit row and in some quarter even a triple digit growth. So ah, our relationship engagement into the field are growing up on a weekly basis. And the amount of opportunity that we have in our forecasting in our pipeline with HB are growing more and more and more. And, um, I believe we found still a good thing. And young between ah Cos us being the leader off data protection in the market and in conjunction with one of the largest server infrastructure, um, service vendor, service provider like HP. You know, if you think about one of the the the the highest success that we had experience right now is is humble. True green A as a backup as a service, right? So so many angle our chip. It's working and we just feel we are crashing, really, that the people, the iceberg and the best is yet to come so super excited to be here, super excited for what's what's ahead of us. >>Alright, Ricardo, we'll last year and we've had the Cube at Kahn Volt go on for a couple of years. Ah, lot of discussion about the various consumption models, especially out you know, Cloud is fitting into things, whether it be a public cloud and backing up data or are, you know, SAS models. You know, obviously, Alex was the, you know, star of the show at combo go. Last year you mentioned the Green Lake offerings that you're doing with HP to give back up as a service. So bring us inside. You know what you're hearing from your customers? How they're managing these various cloud offering. >>Totally stupid. Well, um I mean, as you know, I mean the the adoption into cloud native APS or moving waters into, ah, cloud models. It is something that has been around for the last 10 years. Obviously, what the current situation is producing is a triggering event to really moving to a light speed, um, transformation and adoption off any type of cloud motors. And we believe that's up backup and data protection provider. Um, we are in the middle of it, experiencing a lot of benefits. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, if you look at our metallic offering, one of our blockbuster is backing up office 3 65 which is a cloud native app after that we got Salesforce or we've got service now and so on. Right before moving to more traditional and point out of management like that or ah, um, like mobile phone. But even if I look at, you know, from from an angle of our partnership with HP, But I see most off the grow and opportunity is being on the Green Lake platform. Um, a lot of the opportunity that we have in our pipe that have been built in the last six months, but I see a lot of potential to do business together. Um, 80% of them is with Green Lake. This always great legs in the middle. >>Excellent. Yeah. What? What do you hearing so much from customers, You know, with your you're the chief revenue officer. So is it Move from cap ex to op X. You know, bring us inside a little bit. The finance side. What you're hearing from customers is how they get ready. Obviously, with the global pandemic even more of a highlight on the cloud models, if I've done things right, I should be able to either, you know, scale up if needed, or if I need to dial things down for a little while. Hopefully, I haven't locked myself in tow some environment. So I love to hear a little bit more color on that piece of it. >>Absolutely. I believe you nail. It's do I mean ah, there's definitely an operational driver behind which he's Can I scale or down my data center without having the possibility to have people on the ground? And so how can I move into a virtual data center? Uh, what? I have computing storage networking that can follow my beach off. Uh, I o according to my business need and this d'etre angle in the current crisis, um, company often are not run, but CFO becomes more important. And, um, there's a huge ah, attention to us and, uh, and everything that can be moved from a perpetual into a credible and therefore cloud has a better fit for that. And, um, and then last but not least, is also, you know, the better integration that a lot of cloud models provide. You were the cloud native. That's right. I mean, um, and you run salesforce on Prem? Not really. Right. So how can you have Ah, a dashboard of different business application and operational applications that are better integrated with the cloud native. That's so the more you can offer your client I eat relates or metallic proponent Delta Cloud Native Services that he's a, um, naturally integrated with the parent cloud native app. So the more you're going to make their life easier. >>Excellent. Ricardo. You know, Con Volt works with many partners. What makes the HP partnership special? >>So I think you know what I said earlier. Definitely. I would say the first thing. These, um a market segmentation, overs and the price. We are experiencing a lot of success with our enterprise clients. You know, if I look at the joint pipeline that we built together, I would say 90% of the lines are global 2000 customers logo. And so that is everyone. Number number two. You know how much work with it collectively in integrating our product line and platform together. So if you look into the humble complete solution and very soon also mentality, but even that big that has been done a lot of effort on that side, they are natively integrated with open a P I so that our clients really will not feel the difference off having two different salad silos solution and and then last but not least, the same strategic goal and view off pushing our cloud based Motorola radical modeler Green Lake for H p e and metallic and a big for mobile. >>Excellent. So you mentioned you know, some of the shifting models to some some of the newer solutions. You know, obviously, you know, integrations partnership a little bit of time, but give us a little bit. What should we be expecting from, you know, calm bolt in the partnership with HP through the rest of 2020. >>Absolutely. Still. Well, um, definitely an acceleration. You know, we put the decision a combo too. Ah, focus on fewer partners are very relevant to us. We're very happy to say that Hve is one of them. And, um, we want to do more from a product integration perspective. So the next one in line with the metallic and how the metallic play and integration will play into green legs and into a lot of HB product. Um, but also, we want to do more with our field engagement. Right? So now we have weekly or monthly orderly. Ah, weekly engagement with our with our two fields organization. Ah, just in order to better serve our clients and often do business with the same channel partners that we have in our ecosystem. >>Excellent. Well, Ricardo, thank you so much for joining us. We really pleasure. >>Thank you. Thank you, Stew. And thank you, HP, for the great partnership opportunity. >>All right, Lots more coverage from the cube. HP discover virtual experience. I'm Stew Minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, welcome back to the cube at Lisa Martin with Steve men and men and we are coming to you alive from combo go 19 please to welcome to the cube, a gent from Microsoft Azure. We've got Ben call principal program manager. Ben, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on. So Microsoft combo, what's going on with the partnership? >>They wouldn't have have great storage pond is in data management space. We've been working with Convult for 20 years now in Microsoft and and they've been working with us on Azure for that as long as I can remember not being on that the Azure business for about seven years now. So just a long time in cloud terms like dog ears and it's sort of, they've been doing a huge amount there around getting customer data into the cloud, reducing costs, getting more resiliency and then also letting them do more with the data. So they're a pretty good partner to have and they make it much easy for their customers to to go and leverage cloud. >> So Ben, you know, in my career I've had lots of interactions with the Microsoft storage team. Things have changed a little bit when you're now talking about Azure compared to more, it was the interaction with the operating system or the business suite at had. >>So maybe bring us up to date as those people that might not have followed where kind of the storage positioning inside of Microsoft is now that when we talk about Azure and your title. Yeah, we, we sort of can just, just briefly, we worked very heavily with our own premises brethren, they are actually inside the O team is inside of the Azure engineering old male, which is kind of funny, but we do a load of things there. If he started looking at, firstly on that, that hybrid side, we have things like Azure files. It's a highly resilient as a service SMB NFS file Shafter a hundred terabytes, but that interacts directly with windows server to give you Azure file sync. So there is sort of synergies there as well. What I'm doing personally, my team, we work on scale storage. The big thing we have in there is owl is out blood storage technology, which really is the underpinning technology fault. >>Preapproval storage and Azure, which is an including our SAS offerings, which are hosted on Azure too. So disc is on blood storage of files on blood storage. You look at Xbox live, all these kind of stuff is a customer to us. So we build that out and we were doing work there and that's, that's really, really interesting. And how we do it. And that's not looking at going, we're gonna buy some compute, we're going to buy some storage, we're going to build it out, we're going to run windows or hyper V or maybe VM-ware with hoc with windows running on the VMware, whatever else. This is more a story about we're gonna provide you storage as a service. You didn't get a minimum of like 11 nines at your ability. And and be able to have that scale to petabytes of capacity in one logical namespace and give you multiple gigabytes, double digit gigabytes of throughput to that storage. >>And now we're even that about to multiple protocols. So rest API century. Today we've got Azure stack storage, EU API, she can go and use, but we give you that consistency of the actual backend storage and the objects and the data available via more than just one protocol. You can go and access that via HDFS API. We talk about data lakes all the time. For us, our blood storage is a data Lake. We turn on hierarchal namespace and you can go and access that via other protocols like as I mentioned HDFS as well. So that is a big story about what we want to do. We want to make that data available at crazy scale, have no limits in the end to the capacity or throughput or performance and over any protocol. That's kind of our lawn on the Hill about what we want to get to. >>And we've been talking to the Combolt team about some of the solutions that they are putting in the cloud. The new offering metallic that came out. They said if my customer has Azure storage or storage from that other cloud provider, you could just go ahead and use that. Maybe how familiar and how much I know you've been having about run metallic. >> We were working, we work pretty tightly with the product team over Convolt around this and my team as well around how do we design and how do we make it work the best and we're going to continue working to optimize as they get to beyond initial launch to go, wow, we've got data sets we we can analyze. We knew how to, we wanted out of tune it. Now really we love the solution particularly more because you know the default if you don't select the storage type where you want to go, you will run on Azure. >>So really sort of be cued off to the relationship there. They chose us as a first place we'll go to, but they've also done the choice for customers. So some customers may want to take it to another cloud. That's fine. It's reasonable. I mean we totally understand it's going to be a multicloud world and that's a reality for any large company. Our goal is to make sure we're growing faster than the competitors, not to knock out the competitors altogether because that just won't happen. So they've got that ability to go and, yeah, Hey, we'll use Azure as default because they feel we're offering the best support and the best solution there. But then if they have that customer, same customer wants to turn around and use a competitor of ours, fine as well. And I see people talking about that today where they may want to mitigate risks and say, I'm going to do, I'm doing off office three, six five on a, taken off this three 65 backup. It's cool. You use metallic, it'll take it maybe to a different region in Asia and they're backing up. They still going, well, I'm still all in on Microsoft. They may want to take it to another cloud or even take it back to on premise. So that does happen too because just in case of that moment we can get that data back in a different location. Something >>so metallic talking about that is this new venture is right. It's a Convolt venture and saw that the other day and thought that's interesting. So we dug into it a little bit yesterday and it's like a startup operating within a 20 year old company, which is very interesting. Not just from an incumbent customer perspective, but an incumbent partner perspective. How have you seen over the last few years and particularly bad in the last nine months with big leadership and GTM changes for condo? How has the partnership with Microsoft evolved as a result of those changes? >>Um, it's always been interesting. I guess when you start looking at adventure and everything seems to, things change a little bit. Priorities may change just to be fair, but we've had that tight relationship for a long time and a relationship level and an exec leadership level, nothing's really changed. But in the way they're building this platform, we, we sit down out of my team at the Azure engineering group and we'll sit down and do things like ideations. Like here's where we see gaps in the markets, here's what we believe could happen. And look back in July, we had inspire, which is our partner conference in Las Vegas and we sat down with their OT, our OT in a room, we'll talking about these kinds of things. And this is I think about two months after they may have started the initial development metallic from what I understand, but we're talking about exactly what they're doing with metallic offered as a service in Azure as, Hey, how about we do this? So we think it's really cool. It opens up a new market to convert I think too. I mean they're so strong in the enterprise, but they don't do much in the smaller businesses because with the full feature product, it also has inherent complexibility complexity around it. So by doing metallic, is it click, click, next done thing. They really opening I think new markets to them and also to us as a partner. >>I was going to add, you know, kind of click on that because they developed this very quickly. This is something that I think what student were here yesterday, metallic was kind of conceived, designed, built in about six months. So in terms of like acceleration, that's kind of a new area for Combolt. >>Yeah, and I think, I think they're really embracing the fact about let's release our code in production for, for products which are sort of getting the, getting to the, Hey, the product is at the viable stage now, not minimum viable, viable, let's release in production, let's find out how customers are using it and then let's keep optimizing and doing that constant iteration, taking that dev ops approach to let's get it out there, let's get it launched, and then let's do these small batches of changes based on customer need, based on tele telemetry. We can actually get in. We can't get the telemetry without having customers. So that's how it's going to keep working. So I think this initial product we see today, it's just going to keep evolving and improving as they get more data, as they get more information, more feedback, which is exactly what we want to see. >>Well, what will come to the cloud air or something you've been living in for a number of years. Ben, I'd love to hear you've been meeting with customers, they've been asking you questions, gives us some of the, you know, some of the things that, what's top of mind for some of the customers? What kinds of things did they come into Microsoft, Dawn, and how's that all fit together? >>There's many different conferences of interrelate, many different conversations and there'll be, we'll go from talking about, you know, Python machine learning or AI fits in PowerPoint. >>Yeah. >>It's a things like, you know, when are we gonna do incremental snapshots from the manage disks, get into the weeds on very infrastructure centric stuff. We're seeing range of conversations there. The big thing I think I see, keep seeing people call out and make assumptions of is that they're not going to be relevant because cloud, I don't know cloud yet. I don't know this whole coup cube thing, containers, I don't really understand that as well as I think I need to. And an AI, Oh my gosh, what do we even do there? Cause everyone's throwing the words and terms around. But to be honest, I think would still really evident is cloud is still is tiny fraction of enterprise workloads. So let's be honest, it's growing at a huge rate because it is that small fraction. So again, there's plenty of time for people to learn but they shouldn't go and try. >>And so it's not like you go and learn everything in the technology stack from networking to development to database management to, to running a data set of power and cooling. You learn the things that are applicable to what you're trying to do. And the same thing goes to cloud. Any of these technologies go and look at what you need to build for your business. Take it that step and then go and find out the details and levels you want to know. And as someone who's been on Azure for, like I said, almost seven years, which is crazy long. That was, that was literally like being in a startup instead of Microsoft when I joined and I wasn't sure if I wanted to join a licensing company. It's been very evident to me. I will not say I'm an Azure expert and I've been seven years in the platform. >>There are too many things for for me to be an expert in everything on, and I think people sort of just have to realize that anyone's saying that it's bravado. Nothing else. Oh, people. The goal is Microsoft as a platform provider. Hopefully you've got the software and the solution does make a lot of this easier for the customer, so hopefully they shouldn't need to become a Coobernetti's expert because it's baked into your platform. They shouldn't have to worry about some of these offerings because it's SAS. Most customers are there. Some things you need to learn between going from exchange to go into Oh three 65 absolutely. There's some nuances and things like that, but once you get over that initial hurdle, it should be a little easier. I think it's right and I think going back to that, sort of going back to bear principles going, what is the highest level of distraction that's viable for your business or that application or this workload has to always be done with everything. If it's like, well, class, not even viable, running on premises, don't, don't need to apologize for not running in cloud. If I as this, what's happening for you because of security, because of application architecture, run it that way. Don't feel the need and the pressure to have to push it that way. I think too many people get caught up in this shiny stuff up here, which is what you know 1% of people are doing versus the other 99% which is still happening in a lot of the areas we work and have challenges in today. >>That's a great point that you bring up because there is all the buzz words, right? AI, machine learning cloud. You've got to be cloud ready. You've got to be data-driven to customer. To your point going, I just need to make sure that what we have set up for our business is going to allow our business one to remain relevant, but to also be able to harness the power of the data that they have to extract new opportunities, new insights, and not get caught up with, shoot, should we be using automation? Should we be using AI? Everybody's talking about it. I liked that you brought up and I find it very respectfully, he said, Hey, I'm not an Azure expert. You'd been there seven, seven dog years like you said. And I think that's what customers probably gained confidence in is hearing the folks like you that they look to for that guidance and that leadership saying, no, I don't know everything to know. But giving them the confidence that their tribe, they're trusting you with that data and also helping look, trusting you to help them make the right decisions for their business. >>Yeah, and that's, we've got to do that. I mean, I as a tech guy, it's like I've, I've loved seeing the changes. When I joined Microsoft, I, I wasn't lying. I was almost there go enough. I really want to join this company. I was going to go join a startup instead and I got asked to one stage in an interview going, why do you want to join Microsoft? We see you've never applied to, I'd never wanted to. A friend told me to come in and it's just been amazing to see those changes and I'm pretty proud on that. So when we talk about those things we're doing, I mean, I think there is no shame going, I'm just going to lift and shift machines because cloud's about flexibility. If you're doing it just on cost, probably doing it for the wrong reason. It's about that flexibility to go and do something. >>Then change within months and slowly make steps to make things better and better as you find a need as you find the ability, whatever it may be. And some of the big things that we focus on right now with customers is we've got a product called Azure advisor. It'll go until people, when one, you don't build things in a resilient manner. Hey, do you know this has not ha because of this and you can do this. It's like, great. We'll also will tell you about security vulnerabilities that maybe should a gateway here for security. Maybe you should do this or this is not patched. But the big thing of that, it also goes and tells you, Hey, you're overspending. You don't need this much. It provisions, you provision like a Ferrari, you need a, you just need a Prius. Go and run a Prius because it's going to do what you need. >>I need a paler list and that's part of that trusted suit. Getting that understanding, and it's counterintuitive, but we're now like, it's coming out of mozzarella too, which is great. But seeing these guys were dropping contracts and licenses and basically, you know, once every three years I may call the customer, Hey, how about renewal? Now, go from that to now being focused on the customer's actual success. I've focused on their growth in Azure as a platform. Our services growth, like utilization not in sales has been a huge change. It scared some people away, but it's brought a lot more people in and and that sort of counterintuitive spend less money thing actually leads in the longterm to people using more. >>Absolutely. That's definitely not the shrink wrap software company of Microsoft that I remember from the 90s yeah. might be similar to, you know, just as to get Convolt to 2019 is not the same combo that many of us know from 15 years ago. A good >>mutual friend of ours, sort of Simon and myself before I took this job, he and I sat down, we're having a beer and discussing the merits, all not Yvette go to things like that. Same with Convolt there. They're changing such such a great deal with, you know, what they're putting in the cloud, what they're doing with the data, where they're trying to achieve with things like for data management across on premises and cloud with microservices applications and stuff going, Hey, this won't work like this anymore. When you now are doing it on premises and with containers, it's pretty good to see. I'm interested to see how they take that even further to their current audience, which is product predominantly. You know the it pro, the data center admin, storage manager. >>It's funny when you talked about just the choice that customers have and those saying, aye, we shouldn't be following the trends because they're the trends. We actually interviewed a couple of hours ago, one of customers that is all on prime healthcare company and said, he's like, I want to make a sticker that says no cloud and proud and it just what there was, we don't normally hear from them. We always talk about cloud, but for a company to sit down and look at what's best for our business, whether it's, you know, FedRAMP certification challenges or HIPAA or GDPR, other compelling requirements to keep it on prem, it was just refreshing to hear this customer say, >>yeah, I mean it's just appropriate for them. You do what's right for you. I, yeah, it's no shame in any of it. It's, I mean you don't, you definitely don't get fans by it by shaming people about not doing something right. And I mean I've, I'm personally very happy to fee fee, you know, see sort of hype around things like blockchain die down a little bit. So it's a slow database and we should use it for this specific case of that shared ledger. You know, things like that where people don't have to know blockchain. Now I have to know IOT. It's like, yeah, and that hype gets people there, but it also causes a lot of anxiety and it's good to see someone actually not be ashamed of it. And they agree the ones when they do take a step and use cloud citizen may be in the business already, they're probably going to do it appropriately because have a reason, not just because we think this would be cool, right? >>Well not. And how much inherit and complexity does that bring in if somebody is really feeling pressured to follow those trends. And maybe that's when you end up with this hodgepodge of technologies that don't work well together. You're spending way more in as as business it folks are consumers, you know, consumers in their personal lives, they expect things to be accessible, visible, but also cost efficient because they have so much choice. >>Yeah, the choice choice is hard. It's just a, just the conversation I was having recently, for example, just we'll take the storage cause of where we are, right? It's like I'm running something on Azure, I'm a, I'm using Souza, I want an NFS Mount point, which is available to me in Fs. Great, perfect. what do I use as like, well you can use any one of these seven options like that, but what's the right choice? And that's the thing about being a platform can be, we give you a lot of choices, but it's still up to you or up to app hotness. It can really help the customers as well to make the most appropriate choice. And, and I, I pushed back really hard in terms of best practices and things. I hate it because again, it's making the assumption this is the best thing to do. >>It's not. It's always about, you know, what are the patterns that have worked for other people? What are the anti-patterns and what's the appropriate path for me to take? And that's actually how we're building our docs now too. So we, we keep, we keep focusing on our Azure technology and we're bringing out some of the biggest things we've done is how we manage our documentation. It's all open sourced, it's all in markdown on get hub. So you can go in and read a document from someone like myself is doing product management going, this is how to use this product and you're actually, this bit's wrong, this bit needs to be like this and you can go in yourself even now, make a change and we can go, Oh yeah and take that committed in and dual this kind of stuff in that way. So we're constantly taking those documents in that way and getting realtime feedback from customers who are using it, not just ourself in an echo chamber. >>So you get this great insight and visibility that you never had before. Well, Ben, thank you, Georgie stew and me on the queue this afternoon. Excited to hear what's coming up next for Azure. Makes appreciate your time. Thank you for steam and event. I, Lisa Martin, you're watching the cue from Convault go 19.