>>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.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, welcome back to the cubes coverage of combo go 19. Stu Miniman is here with me, Lisa Martin and we are wrapping up two days of really exciting wall to wall coverage of the new vault and we're very pleased to welcome a couple of special guests onto the program. To help us wrap up our two days, we have Miranda foster, the vice president of worldwide communications for comm vault and Al Bunty is here, the co founder, former COO and board member. Welcome Miranda and Al. Great to have you on the program. Thanks Lisa. So a lot of energy at this event and I don't think it has anything to do with our rarefied air here in the mile high city. Al, let's start with you. >>Well, there's other things in Colorado. >>There are, yeah, they don't talk about it. They talked about that on stage yesterday. So owl, you have been with convo ball as I mentioned, co-founder. What an evolution over the last 20 years. Can you take us back? >>Surely. So, um, yeah and it's been, it's, it's really kind of cool to see it coming together at this point. But if you go back 20 years when we started this, the whole idea was around data. And remember we walked into a company that was focused on optical storage. Um, we decided it would be a good company to invest in. Um, for two reasons. One, we thought they were really great people here, very creative and innovative and two, it was a great space. So if we believed we believe data would grow and that was a pretty decent thesis to go with. Yeah. And then, then it started moving from there. So I tell people I wasn't burdened with facts so I didn't understand why all these copies were being made of the same set of data. So we developed a platform and an architecture focused on indexing it so you just index at once and then could use it for many different purposes. >>And that just kept moving through the years with this very data centric approach to storage, management, backup protection, etc. It was all about the data. I happened to be lucky and said, you know, I think there's something to this thing called NAS and sand and storage networks and all those things. And I also said we have to plan for fur on scale on our solution of a million X. Now it was only off a magnitude of about a thousand on that, but it was the right idea. You know, you had to build something to scale and, and we came in and we wanted to build a company. We didn't want to just flip a company but we thought there is a longterm vision in it and if you take it all the way to the present here it's, it's really, um, it's, it feels really good to see where the company came from. It's a great foundation and now it will propel off this foundation, um, with a similar vision with great modern execution and management. >>Yeah. Al, when we had the chance to talk with you last year at the show in Nashville, it was setting up for that change. So I want to get your view there. There are some things that the company was working on and are being continued, but there's some things that, you know, Bob hammer would not have happened under his regime. So want to get your viewpoint as to the new Convolt, you know, what, what is, what are some of those new things that are moving forward with the company that might not have in the previous days? >>Yeah, that's a good questions. Do I think Mo, a lot of the innovation that you've seen here, um, would have happened maybe not as quickly. Um, we, the company obviously acquired Hedvig. Uh, we were on a very similar path but to do it ourselves. So you had kind of been a modern, we need to get to market quicker with some real pros. I think, um, the, the evolution of redoing sales management essentially was probably the biggest shift that needed to be under a new regime, if you will. Yeah. >>So Miranda, making these transitions can be really tricky from a marketing standpoint. Talk, talk us through a bit, some of the, how do you make sure trusted yet innovative and new that you've accomplished at this show? >>Well, trust it is obviously the most important because the Bob, the brand that Bob and Al built really embodies reliability for what we provide to our customers. I mean that's what gives them the peace of mind to sleep at night. But I'll tell you, Sanjay has been with us for just eight months now, February of 2019 and it's been busy. We've done a lot of things from a points on J transition with Bob and now to his point we've, we've acquired Hedvig, we've introduced this new SAS portfolio and you're exactly right. What we need to do is make sure that the reliability that customers have come to rely on Convolt for translates into what we're doing with the new Convolt and I think we've done a really good job. We've put a lot of muscle behind making sure, particularly with metallic that it was tried, it was trusted, it was beta tested, we got input from customers, partners, industry influencers. We really built it around the customer. So I think the brand that comm brings will translate well into the things that we've done with these, with these new shifts and movements within the company >>on, on that questions too as well. Um, I think Miranda is a good example of somebody that was with the company before a tremendous talent. She's got new opportunities here and she's run with it. So it's kinda that balance of some, uh, understood the fundamentals and the way we're trying to run the business. And she's grasped the new world as well. So, >>and Rob as well, right? Robin in his new, >>yeah, that's another good point. So that was all part of the transitioning here and Sanjay and the team had been very careful on trying to keep that balance. >>Change is really difficult anywhere, right? Dissect to any element of life. And you look at a business that's been very successful, has built a very strong, reliable brand for 20 years. Big leadership changes, not just with Sanjay, but all of the leadership changes. You know, analysts said, all right, you've got to upgrade your Salesforce. We're seeing a lot of movement in the area. You got to enhance your marketing. We're seeing metallic has the new routes to market, new partner focus, so PSI focuses. We're also seeing this expansion in the market, so what folks were saying, you know a year ago come on is answering in a big way and to your point in a fast way that's not easy to do. You've been here nine years since the beginning. Can you give us a little bit of a perspective, Miranda, about some of the things that were announced at the show? >>How excited everybody is, customers, partners, combo folks. How do you now extend the message and the communications from go globally after the show ends? That's an awesome question. I'm really passionate about this. So you know, Monday we announced metallic, we announced a new head of channels and alliances and Mercer Rowe, we had crazy technology innovation announcements with activate, with the acceleration of the integration with Hedvig with the momentum release that we put out today. We're also doing cool stuff with our corporate social responsibility in terms of sponsoring the new business Avengers coalition. That's something that Chris Powell is really championing here at, at the show and also within combo. So we're very excited about that. And then when you add people like yourselves, you know the tech field day folks, because not everybody can be here, right? Not everybody can be at go. So being able to extend the opportunity for, for folks to participate in combo, go through things like the cube through things like tech field day and using our social media tools and just getting all of the good vibes that are here. Because as Al says, this really is an intimate show, but we try to extend that to anybody who wants to follow us, to anybody who wants to be a part of it. And that's something that we've really focused on the last couple of years to make sure that folks who aren't here can, can get an embrace the environment here at Commonweal go. >>It's such an important piece that you're here helping with the transition I talked about. It's important that some of the existing >>get new roles and do responsibility going forward. What's your role going to be and what should we expect to see from you personally? Somebody has got to mow the lawn. >>Yeah. >>But yes, do I, I'll stay on the board. Um, we're talking through that. I think I'll be a very active board, not just the legal side of the equation. Um, try and stay involved with customers and, and strategies and, and even, uh, potential acquisitions, those kinds of things. Um, I'm also wandering off into the university environment. Uh, my Alma mater is a university of Iowa. I'm on the board there and uh, I'm involved in setting up innovation centers and entrepreneurial programs and that kind of thing. Um, I'll keep doing my farming thing and uh, actually have some ideas on that. There's a lot of technology as you guys know, attacking Nat space. So, and like I said, I'll try to keep a lot of things linked back into a combo. >>What Al can have confidence in is that I will keep him busy. So there's that. And then I will also put on the table, we agree to disagree with our college athletic loyalties. So I'm a big kid just because we don't compete really. Right. So I mean, but if I won Kansas wherever to play, then we would just politely disagree. Yeah. Well that's good that you have this agreement in place. I would love to get some anecdotal feedback from you of some of the things that you've heard over the last three days with all this news, all these changes. What are you hearing from customers and partners who you've had relationships with for a very long time? >>I think they're, I think they're all really excited, but, and maybe I'm biased, but they liked the idea that we're trying to not throw out all the old focus on customers, focus on technologies, continue the innovation. I'm pleased that we, Miranda and the team started taking this theme of what we do to a personal level, you know, recovery and those kinds of things. It isn't just the money in the business outages. It's a really a effect on a personal lives. And that resonates. I hear that a lot. Um, I asked our bigger customers and they've loved us for our support, how we take care of them. The, the intimacy of the partnership, you know, and I think they feel pleased that that's staying yet there's lot of modern Emity if that's a good word. I think fokai was what you, I think it's the blend of things and I think that really excites people. >>We've heard that a lot. You guys did a great job with having customers on stage and as a marketer who does customer marketing programs, I think there's nothing more validating than the voice of a customer. But suddenly today that I thought was a pivot on that convo, did well as Sonic healthcare was on main stage. And then he came onto the program and I really liked how he talked about some of the failures that they've been through. You know, we had the NASA talking yesterday, NASA, 60 years young, very infamous, probably for failure is not an option, but it is a very real possibility whether you're talking about space flight or you're talking about data protection and cyber attacks and the rise of that. And it was really, I'd say, refreshing to hear the voice of a customer say, these are the areas in which we failed. This is how come they've helped us recover and how much better and stronger are they? Not just as a company as Sonic healthcare, but even as an individual person responsible for that. That was a really great message that you guys were able to extend to the audience today and we wanted to get that out. >>I loved that as well. I think that was good. I have also back on driving innovation, I always felt one of my biggest jobs was to not punish people that failed. Yeah. I, you know, with the whole engineering team, the bright people in marketing, I, I would be very down on them if they didn't try, but I never wanted them to feel bad about trying and never punish them. >>And one of the things Matthew said on main stage, first of all, I love him. He's great. He's been a longtime CommonWell supporter. I love his sense of humor. He said, you know, combo came to me and said, can you identify, you know, your biggest disaster recovery moment? And he was like, no, because there's so many. Yes. Right? Like there's so many when you're responsible for this. It's just the unpredictability of it is crazy. And so he couldn't identify one, but he had a series of anecdotes that I think really helped the audience identify with and understand this is, these are big time challenges that we're up against today. And hearing his use case and how con ball is helping him solve his heart problems, I think was really cool. You're right. I loved that too. He said, I couldn't name one. There are so many. That's reality, right? As data proliferates, which every industry is experiencing, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. There's also great risk as technology advances for good. The bad actors also have access to that sort of technology. So his honesty, I thought was, was refreshing, but spot on. And what a great example for other customers to listen to the RA. To your point, I, if I punish people for failure, we're not going to learn from it. >>Yeah, you'll never move forward. >>Miranda. So much that we learn this week at the shows. Some, a lot of branding, a lot of customers, I know some people might be taking a couple of days off, but what should we expect to be seeing from con vault post go this year, >>continue to innovation. We're not letting our foot off the gas at all. Just continuing innovation as as as we integrate with Hedvig continued acceleration with metallic. I mean those guys are aggressive. They were built as a startup within an enterprise company built on Comvalt enterprise foundation. Those guys are often running, they are motivated, they're highly talented, highly skilled and they're going to market with a solution that is targeted at a specific market and those guys are really, really ready to go. So continued innovation with Hedvig integrate, sorry, integration with Hedvig with metallic. I think you're just going to be seeing a lot more from Combalt in the future on the heels of what we consider humbled, proud leadership with the Gartner magic quadrant. You know the one two punch with the Forrester wave. I think that you're just going to be seeing a lot more from Combalt and in terms of how we're really getting out there and aggressive. And that's not to mention Al, you know what we do with our core solutions. I mean today we just announced a bunch of enhancements to the core technology, which is, which is the bread and butter of, of what we do. So we're not letting the foot off the gas to be sure >>the team stay in really, really aggressive too. And the other thing I'd add as a major investor that I'm expecting is sales. Now I'd love to just your, your final thoughts that the culture of Convolt because while there's some acceleration and there's some change, I think some of the fundamentals stay the same. Yeah, it's, it's right to, and again, that's why I feel we're at a good point on this transition process. You alluded to it earlier, but I feel really good about the leadership that's in, they've treated me terrifically. I'm almost almost part of the team. I love that they're, they're trying to leverage off all the assets that were created in his company. Technology, obviously platform architecture, support base, our support capabilities. I, I told Sandy today I wish she really would have nailed the part about, and by the way, support and our capabilities with customers as a huge differentiator and it was part of our original, Stu knows he's heard me forever. Our original DNA, we wanted to focus on two things. Great technology, keep the great technology lead and customer support and satisfaction. So those elements, now you blend that stew with really terrific Salesforce. As Ricardo says, have you guys talk with Ricardo soon? But anyway, the head of sales is hiring great athletes, particularly for the enterprise space. Then you take it with a real terrific marketing organization that's focused, Oh, had modern techniques and analytics on all those things. You know, it's, it's in my opinion, as an investor especially, I'm expecting really good things >>bar's been set well. I can't think of a better way for Sue and me to our coverage owl veranda. Thank you. This has been fantastic. You've got to go. You get a lawn to mow, you've got a vacation to get onto and you need some wordsmithing would focus your rights. You have a flight ticket. They do five hours. Hi guys. Thank you. This has been awesome. Hashtag new comm vault for our guests and I, Lisa Martin, you've been watching the cubes coverage of Convault go and 19 we will see you next time.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. Hey, >>I'll come back to the cube date to have our coverage of Combalt go. 19 Lisa Martin with Stu. Met a man. We are in Colorado. Please welcome to the cube Sandy Hamilton, the VP of customer success. Been a convo four and a half months. So welcome to the Q book and the call. Sandy, thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to sit here with you this morning and share a little bit about what's going on at Commonwealth and it's been great. You guys are here. It's been fantastic. We had a great day yesterday. We got to speak with Sanjay, with Rob, Don foster, Mercer, a whole bunch of your customers. Well exactly the vibe, the positivity from the channel to the customer to the course. Even the OJI calm ball guys that I worked a couple of 10 years ago that are still here, it does really feel like a new combo and you're part of that on. >>Sanjay probably brought you in and the spring of 2019 and we've seen a lot of progress and a lot of momentum from comm vault in terms of leadership changes, sills structured new programs for channel. Exciting stuff. You kicked off this morning's keynote and you had the opportunity to introduce Jimmy Chen who if you haven't seen free solo, I haven't seen it. I'm watching it as soon as they get home from us. Amazing. But what a great way to introduce failure and why it's important to be prepared because it is going to happen. I just thought that was a great tone. Especially talking with you. Who leads customer success. >> Absolutely. Thank you Lisa very much and good morning Sue. Appreciate it. You know it's interesting cause when I think about customer success here at Comvalt, there's so many different facets to it. There really is all about engaging with our customers across everything that they do and we want to make sure our customers are prepared for something that will likely happen to them someday. >>Right. We have one of our customers talking about a cyber attack down there on their environment and how we were actually able to help them recover. So it's also that preparedness that Jimmy talked about, right? And making sure that you are training as much as you can, being prepared for what may come and knowing how to recover from that as he, as he talked about. I also think one of the things that we do really well is we listened to our customers when they give us feedback. So it's about how did those customers use what we did differently or how did they try it? And it wasn't exactly what they thought. And so how do we continue to innovate with the feedback from our customers? >>Sandy, one of the things we're hearing loud and clear from your customers is they're not alone. They're ready. I love, we have, Matthew is coming on a little bit later talking about, he's like, I'm here and my other person that does disaster, he's here too. So you know, I'm doing my own free solo. We've been talking about in tech, it's the technology and the people working together. You talked a little bit in your keynote about automated workflows, machine learning, talk about some of those pieces as to how the innovation that Combolt's bringing out is going to enable and simplify the lives of, >>yeah, I mean I think it, I think it does come down to how are we really taking care of the backend, if you will, from a technology perspective and what can we make more automated, you know, more secure. You know, you think about things like, I was even talking about new automated workflows around scheduling, even your backup windows, right? And if you think about, you know, the complexity that goes into scheduling all of that across all of your environments, we have the ability to actually have you just set what your windows should be and we'll manage all the complexities in the background, which allows you to go do things like this for customers to come to do things like this. >>So Sandy, I tell you, some of us, there's that little bit of nervousness around automation and even customers talking about, Oh well I can just do it over text. And I'm just thinking back to the how many times have I responded to the wrong text thread and Oh my gosh, what if that was my, you know, data that I did the wrong thing with. >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the things that I love about this company, and again I've been here for a short period of time, but our worldwide customer support organization is just, you know, one of the hallmarks I think of this company, right? And how we're actually there for those customers at any point in time whenever they need any type of um, you know, help and support. And it isn't just the, you know, when you actually need that, when something goes wrong, it's also proactively we have professional services people, you know, we have all kinds of folks in between. Our partners play a huge role in making sure that our customers are successful with what they have going on. Let's dig into and dissect the customer life cycle. Help us understand what that's like for one and existing combo customer. Cause we talked to a couple of yesterday who've been combo customers for you know, a decade. >>So walk us through a customer life cycle for an incumbent customer as well as a new customer who is like Sanjay said yesterday, one of the things that surprised him is that a lot of customers don't know Combolt so what's the life cycle like for the existing customers and those new ones? >> Yeah, so you know, our fantastic install base of customers that we have today, one of the things that we are striving to continue to do is to make sure we're engaged with them from the beginning to the end. And the end isn't when they end, it's when you know, we're then fully deployed helping them do what they need to go in their environment. I think one of the great things about where we are with Comvalt right now is we actually have new products, new technologies, right? Have you guys had been exposed to, how are we making sure that the customers that we've had for a while are truly understanding what those new capabilities are? >>So if you think about it for us, it's how are we helping them to actually do more with their existing Convolt investment and potentially leverage us in other ways across their environment. Um, so we have, you know, our team of, you know, great, uh, you know, sales reps as well as our fantastic, you know, sales engineers, um, all the way through. Again, you know, PS and support, those people are always in contact with our customers, helping them to understand what we can really do across that life cycle and if they need to make changes along the way, we're here to help them, you know, do that as well. For a newer customer. One of the things that we're really focused on right now is that initial sort of onboarding for them and what set experience like for those customers. So having more of a, of a programmatic touch with those customers to make sure that we're more consistent in what we're doing. So they are actually receiving a lot of the same information at the same time and we're able to actually help them actually frankly in a more accelerated fashion, which is I think really important for them to get up and running as well. >>And when we talked about metallic yesterday with Rob and some other folks and I think a gentleman from Sirius, one of your launch partners, yes, Michael Gump. And you know the fact that that technology has the ability for partners to evaluate exactly what is going on with their customers so that they can potentially be even predictive to customers in terms of whether they're backing up end points or O three 65 I thought that was a really interesting capability that Colombo now has. It's giving that insights and the intelligence even to the partners to be able to help those customers make better decisions before they even know what to do makes exactly. >>They and their son, our partners are such a key part here to everything that we're really trying to do. And especially with the metallic, it's all through partners, right? And so we're really trying to drive that behavior and that means we've really have to ensure that we are bringing all of those partners into the same fold. They should have the same, you know, capabilities that we do. It's one of the, one of the also things that I'm trying to work on right now is how are we making sure our partners are better enabled around the things that we have in the capability. So we're working on, as part of those partner programs that you mentioned is do they have the right tools, if you will, and knowledge to go do what they need to go do to help our customers as well because it really is a partnership. >>Yeah. So Sandy, we've been looking at various different aspects of the change required to deliver metallic, which is now a SAS offering from a services and from a support standpoint, I think of a different experience from SAS as opposed to enterprise software. So bring, bring us, bring us your perspective. Yeah. This >>comes back a little bit to the onboarding experience, right? Where it's got to be much more digital touch. It's gotta be much more hands off cause that's the way the are thinking about buying metallic in the first place. Right? They don't have to have a sales rep, they can go by metallic, you know, frankly on their website right now, metallic.io, you know, you can go there, you can get everything you need to get started. Um, and so we want to make sure that the customers have different ways of engaging. And so some of that could very much be digital. Some of that can be, you know, different avenues of how they're working. They're wanting to work with us. But when you also then think about that type of a model, you start to think about consumption matters, right? And how much they're using and are they using everything that they purchased. >>And so we actually have a small team of customer success managers right now in the organization that are working with all of the new customers that we have in the SAS world to say, how are you doing? How's that going? You know, how's your touch? Is there anything that's presenting a challenge for you? Making sure they really do fully understand the capabilities end to end of that technology so that we can really get them onboarded super quick. As you probably know from talking to those guys, we're not having any services really around metallic cause it's not designed to need those services, which is huge. You know, I think in not only the SAS space but for Convolt as well. I think it's a new era and it also provides, frankly an opportunity for our partners to continue to engage with those customers going forward as well. >>One of the first things that I reacted to when I saw metallic, a Combalt venture was venture. I wanted to understand that. And so as we were talking yesterday with some of the gentlemen I mentioned, it's a startup within Combalt. Yeah. So coming from puppet but shoot dead in which Sonjay Mirchandani ran very successfully. Got puppet global. Your take on going from a startup like puppet to an incumbent like convo and now having this venture within it. Yeah. You know, I think it's one of the brilliant things that Sanjay and the team did very early on to recognize what Rob Calu, Ian and the rest of the folks were doing around this idea of what is now metallic. And they had been noodling it and Sanjay's like, that's got a really good opportunity. However we got to go capitalize on that now and bring that to market for our customers now. >>And if we had continued on in the way that we were, which is where it was night jobs and we didn't necessarily have all the dedicated people to go do it, you know, we may not have metallic right now. And so it was, it was really a great thing within the company to really go pull those resources out of what they were doing and say, you guys are a little startup, you know, here you go do it. And we actually had a little celebratory toast the other night with that team because of what, just a fantastic job that they've done. And one of the common threads in something everybody said was the collaboration that it really brought, not only within that team but across Combalt because there's a singular goal in bringing this to market for our customers. So it's been a great experience. I think we're going to leverage it and do more. So Sandy, >>before we let you go, need to talk a little bit about the. >>Fabulous. If I had one here I would, but I don't. So, um, a couple of months ago at VMworld, I don't know if you guys were there, you guys were probably there. Um, we actually started this thing called the D data therapy dog park. And there we had a number of puppies and they were outside. Folks came by, you know, visited. They stopped, they distressed, they got to pet a puppy. I mean, the social media was just out of this world, right? And we had San Francisco policemen there. It was, it was, it was great. Even competitors, I will say even competitors were there. It was, it was pretty funny. But, um, by the end of it, over 50% of the dogs that were there actually got adopted out, um, you know, into homes where they otherwise wouldn't have. Um, since then there've been a couple of people that have actually copied this little idea and you know, P places are springing up. >>So we have a, what we call it, data therapy dog park here where you can go in and get your puppy fix, you know, sit with the dogs and relax for a bit. But you know, we're super excited about it as well because, you know, it's sort of a fun play on what we do, but, but it's also, I think, you know, a great thing for the community and something that is near and dear to my heart. I have four dogs. Um, and so I'm not planning on taking another one home, but I'm doing my best to get some of these adopted. So if anybody out there is interested, just let me know. >>Oh, that was adoptable. All of them cheese. I'm picking up a new puppy and about eight days. So other ones of friends. I've got to have dogs enough for you. Do you need a third? We'll have a friend that has two puppies at the same time and said it's not that much more. I have had one before. You're good to go. We can, we can hook you up. Oh no. But one of the great things is it also, first of all, imitation is the highest form of flattery or for other competitors that are doing something similar, but you also just speak to the fact that we're all people, right? We are. We're traveling, especially for people that go to a lot of conferences and it's just one of those nice human elements that similar with the stories that customers share about, Hey, this is a failure that we had and this is how it helped us to recover from that. It's the same thing with, you can't be in a bad mood with, I think puppies, cupcakes and balloons. So if there were, I know that I could finish a show today >>that's like I took one of the little puppies when I was rehearsing yesterday on main stage. I took one of them with me out there and I was just holding it the whole time, you know? It was really, >>this was great. I'm afraid to venture back into the data therapy document. You're proud taking another one home OU was. Andy. It's been a pleasure to have very much. I appreciate it. Appreciate the time. Thank you and hope you have a great rest of the event. If you need anything, let us know. I'm sure we will and I can't wait to talk to you next year when you've been a comm vault for a whole like 16 months and hearing some great stories we do as well. All right. Take care. First two men, a man, Sandy Hamilton, the puppies, and I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cue from Convault go and 19 thanks for watching.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Welcome to the cube Lisa Martin, the stupid a man live on day one of Combalt go 19 we're in Colorado this year and we're excited to welcome to the Cape for the first time we have Matt Shai, VP of strategic pricing at Combalt. Matt, welcome. Thanks for having me here. So lots of news coming out yesterday and today. You know in the last student, I've had a number of conversations today already about just how much evolution has happened with Convault in this calendar year alone and list came in, you know when Sanjay took over con ball, you've got to upgrade your sales force. We've seen the sales leadership changes, I said enhance your marketing. We've seen new routes to market partner focus expansion into, you know, really expanding the Tamworth Hedvig acquisition. Talk to us a little bit about from a pricing perspective, a strategic perspective. What are you guys doing? What's new this year that you guys are really saying, Hey, we're listening to our customers, we're listening to our partners. >>So there's two parts to it. The first is really just making things simpler and easier for everybody. So we started that journey last year. Sanjay came in and said keep it going, so we need to continue to go to market simplification, make it easier for people. So we've tried to do that as much as possible. We're going to continue to do that. Whether it's packaging related pricing related, make it quicker for customers and partners to get access to the software. The second part to that is when we release new products like activate, we've talked a lot about activate over the last couple of days. We have new packaging for that, which is exciting, but we need to make sure that's accessible. So making that easy for our partners to get to it, cross selling and upselling, that kind of thing for everybody to have access to. So that's really the direction that we've gotten from Sanjay and as we get into the future, it's continuing that with things like vague and metallic and and all that. >>Anything particular about activate a, you know, what differentiates, how that pricing package versus how come might've done to that stuff in the back. It's the granularity of it is what it is. So come fall. One of the great things that we can do here is we can be flexible and Sanjay talked a lot about that in his main stage presentation this morning. And we can give a customer the ability to do what they want, when they want and how they want. So they've purchased from comm vault in the past. Likely they have different routes that they bought from and activate gives them the ability to buy in that same manner. So it's granular, it gives them the ability to get software when they need it, the type of software they need, but in the manner they want to buy it as well. So that's the exciting parts of it. >>So we had a chat with Rob earlier talking about metallic and your how, how that sass product was put together. Well customers have a lot of experience now with, with sass. So tell us from a pricing and packaging standpoint, your involvement and what customers they're going to see when it comes to metallic. Yes, we're directly involved with the pricing. We wanted to make sure that it aligns with everything we stand for as a pricing organization at con vault. And I'm excited about it because we've never really had a straight SAS product that's like go to the website, get the price, download it, good to go. Right. It's exciting. I'm, I'm, I can't wait to have it out there. I can't wait for customers to go get it and download it. The booth has been really, really slammed today from what I've heard. So I'm excited about the pricing. >>All right. And there's a couple of different pricing models depending on how they're doing. Maybe you could walk us through that. Yeah, sure. So you have three different options that you can buy. Each one gives you a different use case. So you have backup endpoint, mailbox, all that O three 65 different things you can buy. They all start at one particular price point and they're tiered. So the bigger you get, the more of a discount you get. The other cool thing that we can do here, because we do different use cases, which is sometimes different than competitors, is that you get a family discount with Convault. So if you buy one and you get to a high enough level, you can go into another one and into another one and get that same discount. So we're really trying to get customers to use as much as they can, get them accessible and we hope they like it. >>Where were customers in terms of when this was being conceived? You know, just not just metallic from a product and a technology perspective, but from a consumption subscription perspective where they actively, I would imagine certain customers like maybe part of an advisory board helping you guys determine this is kind of a new direction for calm ball, where they talked to us about the influence that some of these key customers had and really enabling this pricing to be so transparent. >>We had, it was, it wasn't even just customers. There was a lot of people who had influence into that. So industry, influencers, financial and flood, a lot of people had a lot of influence and a lot of input into how we do it because obviously everybody has a way that they like to buy. Customers had a big input cause as we started this, one of the first things we came through was how do we make sure that the packaging looks good. And that was one of the first core deliverables cause everything sort of runs off that. Make sure that it looks right, make sure it's accessible to customers and easy. So that was one of the first things we did was go out surveys, customer surveys, input data points, all that really started the process. And Matt metallic is 100% through the channels. So tell us a little bit about how that works for a SAS offering. >>Yeah. So through the channel for us is going to be fantastic because we want to make sure that our partners can sell it to folks. That was one of the biggest things our customers came back with was we like to buy through our, our partner. Like, we don't have to go do all bunch of different things, so great, you should go out and buy from your partner. They have access to it. It's easy to understand. It's easy to price, easy to package, and there really shouldn't be a whole lot of worrying about it from a customer standpoint. Quicken, painless. Yeah. And the other thing I understand if it's core, it's by capacity. If it's the O three 65 for endpoint on, it's based on your number of users. There's that piece in there that if I have my own cloud storage, I can leverage that. >>So is that just a different pricing, cause I didn't see that piece on the website. How does that impact thing? Yeah, so it really is about flexibility. Like if you want to use ours, you can and that's fine. If you have your own and you want to go use that, that's fine too. Like we're not really, we don't want to lock anybody into something that they may not need or want. So if you already have a contract with one of the cloud providers, you're free to go and use that. And we're not gonna worry about it. If you want to go do it through us and that's great, we'll, we'll work with you on that. So metallic focused on the mid market, but combo has a really good percentage of revenue that comes from a large global enterprise accounts. You guys had made some leadership changes there, new initiatives on these large global enterprises and some that are going to be fulfilled and delivered exclusively through I think global systems integrators. >>We do have a GSI program that from a, from a strategic perspective, knowing so much business comes through the channel for those really large enterprise accounts. What's that strategic pricing conversation concept all about? Yes, so that one's a little bit different. That's, we have so many different things that we do. We have metallic, we have Hedvig obviously that we just acquired. We have Comvalt complete and all the different things we do. So from an enterprise standpoint, it's how do we get the right go to market for them, which is potentially a systems integrator if they, if they go that route. Larger partners, potentially. Some of our Alliance partners are key to that as well. And then there's the, how do we make it easy for them to buy all that technology in one so that they don't have to have five different things that they're buying from comm vault. >>So that is the roadmap discussion. So how do we get from here to there and make sure that they have easy access to that. So that's part of the conversation we're having now. But it's the first thing that's on my mind every morning and my team works on it every day. So as we, as we integrate Hedvig, as Metalla comes into market, obviously we have appliances and different routes there. Those all have to be easy. So if you're a customer and you want to buy five of them, it's like quick and painless for you to buy all five. And it's a, it's an easy model for an enterprise. So that's how we like that to go. How does it work with, say, let's look at the Hedvig acquisition as an example. They come and bring in customers. They announced the acquisition in September, it's closed. You're already working on integrations touches a little bit about from a strategic perspective when, when there's an acquisition, there's customers that are on certain, you know they've got certain contracts. >>How do you take all of that past experience from the incoming company and start kind of massaging those pricing, pricing, the structure to now fit and be delivered through a combo? Yeah, it's a great question. That's one of the things that we're starting to work on now, which is how do we take all those different price points and packaging and work them in? We've done a little bit of it, so we've integrated what had vague guys into our portfolio in terms of it's there through con vaults, so there they're the same BS, the same support. They'll say maintenance the same everything in that respect, which is great. They're going to align to combat and that way, but really the next step is going to be exactly what you said, which is how do we put those two together so we don't want to keep them apart. >>We don't want to. You can buy Hedvig and then you can buy combo all. We want them to be the same and so the longterm vision for that will be to do that. We haven't gotten there yet. That's the next plan with Hedvig integration is to take those customers and say, how did you buy it? What did you like, what didn't you like? And then we can take that feedback and really use it to package up a solution. I'm curious how the changes in the public cloud have been impacting your line of work. You know, for example, we watched the AWS marketplace and they have more and more customers buying through them. Last year they came out with the, I forget what they call it, just like the private buying so that you can, even if you have a special arrangement, you can still buy it through the AWS marketplace. >>Is that, are you seeing that as a trend or customer's interest in that is Combalt looking down that path? Yeah, they're interested in it and certainly will enable people to go do it. It hasn't been a huge focus yet in terms of price. Right? Because a lot of the things that we have that are priced are already aligned to how they should be in the cloud. So when we sell something like a VM for example, it's kind of aligned to how they buy it anyway. So we haven't seen a huge change in how people would do that. It's more as we get more into the cloud and multi-cloud with Sanjay's vision, we'll start to see some more go to market perspectives that are like that. And the routes to market will change a little bit, but we're set up for it already from a pricing standpoint. So it's not going to be a big change. >>So as we look at the momentum that Combalt carries into their fourth annual go with how much leadership change, we talked about that the routes to market and things, what are some of you think the bar has been set? Like, all right, we've got to figure this out. For example, the, the, the simplification of the Hedvig combat structure. Is there kind of an expectation that as fast as there no iterating and delivering on technology, you've gotta be able to do the same from a pricing standpoint. Yep. >>Everything you won't need to do on technology. I need to be just as fast on pricing. Yeah, there's definitely that expectation and that's a great expectation. I mean, we can't have the technology lag, we can't have the pricing like it has to be, it has to go at the same time. And that's, so we're, we're tight with all the folks who were doing that had big integration, making sure that we're aligned to it. There's absolutely that expectation. But I loved that expectation because what we have to get it out at the same time and that's great. >>It does. Will it? Well, it, it makes things interesting and exciting. The customers are demanding this transparency because if we think about it in our consumer lives, we have transparency. I mean, think about buying a car these days as the consumer, you're so empowered with whatever you want to buy. And there's this expectation, right as as an it buyer that they have the same type of transparency and the same type of simplified pricing structure. So you've got to be able to deliver to meet that too, right? >>We do. And there's no black box anymore. Like when I first started doing this a long time ago, it was like here's a product, here's a black box, here's, you'll buy it from your partner that's gone. Like they need to know exactly what goes into that. So transparency, we talk a lot about it from a pricing standpoint. It used to be like, don't talk about pricing, right? Cause that nobody knew. We should really know what happens in there. Everybody knows what happens in there now and they should, I mean it's their money. So we need to make sure that they understand how they're spending it, why they should be spending it with one vendor versus another, and then what's going to be good for them in the longterm. So we talk a lot about that from a strategy standpoint. >>Well that's actually something that could be a competitive differentiator for cobalt. Right? Compare if there are others who are saying, you know, secret sauce, talk to sales. That can be with how quickly things change. A new these days, that transparency can be a real game changer in the customer's experience. >>It can be. And one of the, so I came from a background of competitive intelligence when I did, I worked at a firm for a long time and CII and so I was told by my boss at the time, he said, don't be the department of Rob, Rob. He's a department of facts, right? And so as a pricing person, it's the department of facts. I'll tell you as a customer, this is good, this is coming, this is where we are now. All that stuff. And it's up to you to make a decision. Like it's, you know, it's there, the facts are there. The pricing we think is structured in a way that helps you and support you, but you're free to make a decision. I don't want to force anything on you. And so that's for me and my group, that's where our transparency kind of lives. As we know customers have to buy. We know they have options. They're not always going to choose Convolt. We'd like them to, but they're not going to, and we just try to make that as easy as possible and make it a painless problem. Make it a painless solution. >>Right. Easy and painless. I'll take it now. Thank you for joining Stu and me and talking to us about what you're doing and how quickly things are iterating all the way from the technologies to the pricing structure. We appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. All right. Firstly, men and men, I N Lisa Martin, and you're watching the cube vault go in 19.

(bright, peppy music) >> Announcer: From Chicago, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Hello everyone, welcome to Chicago. We're here covering the Veritas Solution Day. Veritas, last year, had the Veritas Vision Conference and they brought together all their customers. This year they decided to go around the world, I think they have six or seven of these across the globe. And we just were in New York a few weeks ago at Tavern on the Green. We're here at the Palmer House in Chicago. Iconic hotel. About 60 to 70 customers here. Of course Chicago's a big opportunity for companies like Veritas because there's such a good customer base here. But what I want to do now is set up what's going on in the data protection business. According to a number of sources, Gartner, IDC Data, other survey data, certainly anecdotally when we talk to customers, about half of the customers that we talk to are going to replace their data protection platform within the next five years. Why is that? Well, there are a number of factors that are affecting that and I want to talk about the reasons why, the implications to the market, and what that means for customers. So if you look back 10 years ago, there was a similar dynamic going on catalyzed by the ascendancy of virtualization. What was happening is that you had all these servers that were underutilized and so the brilliance of virtualization was we're going to consolidate those servers, virtualize the compute power, dramatically increase the utilization and reduce the physical capacity that's on the floor. So you can get rid of stuff. Get rid of servers, spend less, and get more value out of that asset. Because you had all these underutilized hardware assets. Data protection backup in particular was the one workload that actually could use all that compute power. Why, because at the end of the day, you're backing up this huge stream of data. And so as a result, when you had to do a full backup, you didn't have the physical resources. So people had to rethink how they architected backup because of virtualization. So you now have a similar dynamic, but for different reasons. Some of the big trends that are going on here. The first one is of course digital. So digital means data and it's all about how you get value out of your data because data is increasingly an important asset. People are realizing that protecting that data is more and more important. As a result, people are rethinking just the definition of recovery. Recovery has to be faster, you've got to be always on in this digital world. So digital transformation is critical. You can't just bolt on backup as you have for the last 20, 30, 40 years really. Backup has been a bolt on. You've also got cloud. Everybody wants cloud-like. So you're seeing a shift from improving or dealing with resource utilization and allocation, as I explained in the virtualization world, now to automation. Why automation? Because people want a cloud-like experience. They realize they can't just shove all their data into the public cloud. There's data all over the place, and I'll talk about that in a moment in terms of distributed data, but specifically people want a cloud-like experience. What does that mean? That means they want pay-as-you-go, they want simple deployment, they want fast seamless recovery, and they want a lot of automation. While the price of technology comes down year after year, the price of people doesn't. And you can't just keep throwing people at the infrastructure problem, because it's so complex, you have to automate. And you want to shift resources toward higher value activities. Digital transformation, dev opps, application development. So this distributed data world, this multi-cloud world, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment when I discuss the Edge, it's becoming a forcing function. Multi-cloud is a forcing function to rethink your backup. Because you've got different infrastructures, a service providers, you've got SAS providers, you've got all kinds of clouds that are popping up all over the lines of business and within your own data centers. As a result, you need to think about how do I catalog all that data, how do I protect that data, how do I govern that data, how do I deal with things like GDPR and make sure that I'm in compliance. So it becomes a much more complicated equation, and the variables are distinct. For example, I don't really understand what point in time means anymore. If you have distributed data, what does it mean to have a point in time copy? Point in what time? Who's the master? So you need some kind of controls in that multi-cloud world. That's a forcing function to rethink your backup. The other thing is platform. Platform beats products. I'll talk about that in a moment. People for years have looked at backup as purely insurance. Everybody hates buying insurance, we all know that, so you're seeing people trying to get more out of their backup and recovery platforms. For instance, integrating disaster recovery. So that's becoming an integral part of people's strategies. You're also seeing analytics becoming more and more important. People are trying to, because all the data sits in the corpus of the backup, people are saying why don't we analyze that data and get more out of it. Why don't we take snapshots of that data and make it available to dev opps. And what about ransomware, which again I'll talk about in a moment. Could I maybe look at anomalies in that data to determine if there are some problems. Many, many use cases emerging. Data classification, governance, I mentioned GDPR before, so you're seeing backup shift from pure insurance to a higher value business opportunity. And then of course, there's security, there's compliance, there's governance, ransomware is critical. Organizations are creating air gaps, meaning disconnecting from the internet, so that if they get hit with a ransomware attack they can isolate their data, but just even that is not enough. People can get through air gaps by physically putting in, whatever. Sticks or malware et cetera. So you still have to be able to use analytics to look at that corpus of backup data and identify anomalies. But again, because of those security risks and because of the importance of digital transformation and data people are rethinking how they do data protection. And finally, there's the Edge. We are living in a distributed world, it's a multi-cloud world, as I said before it's a forcing function, and the Edge is one of those clouds, if you will, which changes the way in which you think about backup. How does it change. Locality of the recovery data. If you've got Edge data, if you've got multi-cloud, you've, as I said before, got to have a global catalog and recover that data locally. Another thing to think about is SLAs. In a cloud world, you, the customer, are responsible for the recovery. Well, the cloud vendor can get the light back on on the disc system, or the computer, or the compute system, you are responsible for the people and the process to recover your business. That is not the cloud vendor's responsibility so you need to think about that. And think about recovery as recovery at the business level, not just recovery of the data, but recovery, getting your business back online. There's also the three laws of the cloud. We learned this from Pat Gelsinger this August at VMworld. The laws of physics, the laws of economics, and the law of the land. Those will dictate where you put data and how you back up that data. So all of this has created a new landscape in the data protection business. Let's run down that landscape. Who are the leaders. You've got Dell EMC, you've got Veritas, you've got Convault, and you've got IBM. Those guys comprise probably 2/3 or more of the marketplace. And you have startups like Cohesity and Rubrik who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars going after them and challenging them. You've got a whole new set of players that are taking new approaches. Actifio, for example, got the whole copy data management thing going. Datrium is creating end to end, both primary storage and data protection backup in the same platform with a software-based cloud-like, SAS-like offering. You've got companies like Zerto and Imanis Data that are specialists. You've got companies like WANdisco, again, taking new approaches. And then you have Oracle, with the Oracle recovery appliance, which is totally changing the way in which backup worked for Oracle databases exclusively. Taking a database-led approach to backup. And then of course you've got the storage players that are part of the ecosystem even though they're not directly competing with backup software vendors. Guys like Pure, NetApp, InfiniteApp. They're partnering with backup vendors. And then of course, there's the cloud guys. AWS, Azure, Google. The thing to think about as customers, really three things. Platform versus product. What's the platform look like? Is it an API-based platform? Because you want to program to that platform infrastructurer's code, you want to support your dev opps infrastructure. The second is cloud-like pricing, and cloud-like deployment. You want a cloud-based operating model to simplify your operations and lower your IT labor costs and shift those costs to more strategic efforts and initiatives such as digital transformation and application development. And the third is ecosystem alignment. Make sure that your backup software vendor and you backup solution vendors are all, their ecosystem is aligned with your ecosystem. Because you're going to get more facile integration and problem-solving and flexibility if those systems align. So take a look at that as well. Couple of things I want to mention and emphasize. New application development models. Cloud Native, Kubernetes. Function, you know people call it server-less, but function-based programming. Really to support dev opps and infrastructure as a code. That is going to have implications on how you protect data. And finally AI. How can you talk about anything today without talking about AI. Anticipatory staging of data for recovery, as in the example. Predicting where problems are going to occur. Machine intelligence will increasingly play a role in this whole landscape. So, as you can see, there's a lot going on. This is why data protection is such a hot space. That's why the VCs are getting in. It's why the incumbents like Veritas, Dell EMC, IBM, Convault, those that I mentioned are trying to re-platform and hang on to their large install bases and ultimately grow them. And it's why companies in the startup and the niche spaces, are tucking in and identifying new opportunities to participate. So that's a quick overview of what's going on here at the Veritas Vision Solution Day from Chicago. We'll be here all day talking to customers, talking to practitioners, technologists, and executives. So keep it right there, you're watching theCUBE. I'm Dave Vellante. Be right back. (bright music)