>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, its theCUBE, covering VeeamOn 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back in New Orleans. Peter McKay is back, co-CEO, and newly-minted co-CEO, and Sanjay Poonen is here, the CEO of VMware, longtime CUBE alum and friend of theCUBE. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks, it's good to be here on your show. >> So, Sanjay, you were up in the keynote talking about the partnership with Veeam, your relationship with Peter. So let's start there. You guys have known each other for a long time. You acquired Peter's company into VMware. You guys had a great run up. Start there. Give us a little background on your relationship. >> Well, Dave, relationships make the world go round. I was very fortunate, almost I think on my first week at VMware to meet Peter in the context of a possible acquisition of Desktone. It was the first deal I did at VMworld a few months later. He was just a delight to work with. And, you know, we just give him more and more responsibility. At some point we ran out of things he could do. And he is now here. So we are very proud of him and all he's doing at Veeam. And Veeam's been a great partner of ours. I mean the level of integration have gone into our products. I was just so proud to see all of VMware products and Veeam products making our customers happy. And that's really, really a great story. >> I want to spend a second on that. I mean, obviously we're here to talk about Veeam and VeeamOn and we will, but that business was a struggling business. I mean admittedly when you came on and prior to the acquisition and did some really hard work. I mean, Citrix dominated that business and it really didn't take long for you guys to get a groove swing going. How did that happen? >> And it's a great story. Sanjay did all the heavy lifting there. It was just fun to really watch that transformation happen at VMware. It was, I mean, Desktone was a piece and I kid Sanjay that it all changed when they bought Desktone, but that really was the, it all changed when Sanjay came on board and really transformed that business that was, like you said, struggling and gave it direction and enthusiasm and built the momentum of that business to really look at that market and say these are the things we can do. With a great vision and a great strategy pulled together and a strong team, I was just fortunate to be part of that as I kind of moved through VMware. And it was a great experience and I learned a lot from Sanjay as we went through that process. >> I mean you have always been very humble, and said it's the team, it's not me, and I'm sure there's a lot of truth to that, but what is it, the piece parts, the right technology? I mean obviously, you know, VMware has always had great vision. But just all came together. >> Yeah, I think that sort of starts where Peter left out. And it starts with team. I'm a big Warriors fan. This week I'm a Celtics fan, too. We'd love to see the Celtics play the Warriors. But it's strength in numbers, and you know Peter was a key part of that team, Sumita Won, Noah, the list goes on. People on his team that he brought, like Dave Grant, and many of them take on bigger and bigger jobs. As I moved into my new role, I groomed Sumita, he's now taking that. So it really always starts with a team. We believe that strength in numbers. We've hired what I think, and groomed, the best team in end user computing bar none. Secondly, we really had a point of view and a vision of certain things that were going to remove the two Cs that I think have plagued the space: cost and complexity. And one part of cost and complexity, the cloud, things like Desktone, later on moving to things like AirWatch in the cloud. And as we did that, we really, really start to embrace these vectors of innovation. And the third is embracing the ecosystem. To us the ecosystem is hugely important and you know, you think about companies like Apple and Google, they were irrelevant to VMware, but now in the context of end user computing, Apple and Google are embracing us. Further into the cloud, AWS last year, yesterday we announced that Horizon Cloud will run on Azure. So the ecosystem is the third pillar of what we've done. I think all three of those are key reasons we've been successful. >> Well and VMware has had an epic ecosystem. So what, Peter, can you learn from that and how do you apply it at Veeam? >> I've learned a lot. I was there for three and a half years and it was a great learning experience for me as I look to kind of how VMware really addressed a lot of the customer challenges, but also had a great vision for where they wanted to go. And so when I came over to Veeam, it was very much, and to be honest, Veeam really piggybacked on a lot of the things that VMware did over the years. Same approach to the sales model, a lot of the same partners, and our customers are pretty much overlapping. And so what we've done is just, I've learned a lot from the things that really went well at VMware and I brought a lot of that best practices over to Veeam in the 10, 11 months that I've been here. I think there's a lot of things that we can do. And a lot of it, that Sanjay said, the ecosystem, that's a big part of what I've been doing since I came here, is broadening our ecosystem partner community to make it easier for our customers, especially in the enterprise where they want us to work better together, not just technology, which we've done a really good job, but expanding past technology into how do we work better in the field together and how do our partners interact together. And that's really worked out very well for us. >> Sanjay, in your keynote you talked about a lot of the joint customers VMware and Veeam, we talked in the intro about the ascendancy of Veeam kind of riding the VMware wave. One of the questions I had from a lot of the community coming in is, if you look at things like VMware on AWS, talked about the Azure piece there, how does the relationship with Veeam fit there? Veeam obviously has its multi cloud strategy, but in the cloud, how do customers know that VMware is going to, you know, stay partnering with companies like Veeam? >> Yeah, Stu, I think it's a really good question. For us, as we kind of looked at our hybrid cloud strategy, we had to actually make some changes. Eighteen months ago, if you asked VMware about our hybrid cloud strategy, you probably heard vCloud Air as the first thing we talked about. We've since then divested that asset. We've changed a lot of the way in which we've done. We worked to embrace the public cloud. Our partnership with AWS, a preferred primary cloud partner, that has been enormously helpful in giving people a vision of where the data center is headed. But as we've begun to do that, and you'll hear more about kind of the GA of that offering as we approach the summer round of VMworld, but what we're doing with AWS, a couple of things started to play out where customers were asking us for some add on services for VMware Cloud Foundation running on AWS. And the two I began to hear most often with customers were around security and around data, issues like backup. So we began to create a list of ISVs that we really want to kind of work closely with. Companies like Palo Alto, for example in security. Companies like Veeam in the backup area. And it's not to say others aren't important, other topics, but these are the ones that are very important. And VMware always, you come to VMworld, hundreds and thousands of companies have made themselves successful on our platform. We want to continue that. And then what we seek to do it just like you saw on stage today and have the product managers and the technical product marketing folks really integrate products to see vRealize and Log Insight and vSAN. Of course vSphere is so deeply integrated with Veeam, and them taking advantages. You know, it benefits their 200,000 plus customers, which is a big subset of our 500,00 customers. >> Peter, I heard in Sanjay's keynote, talked about things like containers, some of these newer technologies, openStack. How do those play into the partnership? >> Well I think as we started our partnership all around vSphere and it kind of expanded as Sanjay said, we continue to look for ways that we can work better together development-wise, but also go to market. So we've integrated even further with vSphere, as he said, vSAN and vRealize. And a lot of that is opening up the platform for containers and other cloud services that we continue to integrate with. And so I think we're very, our development organizations are working very closely. As VMware is expanding its reach and its platform, we are doing it as well. And so that's a lot of why I think you see the success we've had between the two companies. >> Question for you guys on cloud. You know, you do the SWOT analysis. And sometimes you get confused, is that an opportunity or is that a threat, right, okay. So cloud is one of those. Obviously building your own public cloud is not an option, no longer an option, not really ever been an option for Veeam. How do you make cloud an opportunity, each of you? >> Sanjay: I'll let you start, Peter, and then I'll. >> So for Veeam, way back in, three years ago, four years ago, they made it a major investment into a managed service, companies who are building a cloud. And we've built that up to, as I said, 15, 16,000 of these partner and managed service providers and cloud providers. And this is the world that I lived in from my Desktone days. We always believe that as part of, this on premise, this public cloud, and we continue to, Amazon, Azure, and Google, but we always believe that there is companies that have this special value add, that a lot of companies were going to go to, and we thought that was the managed service provider community and the systems integrators or the strategic outsourcers. And so three years ago we started to invest very heavily in building that and helping them build that business around Veeam. And that part has turned out to be a fantastic part of our business. Now about almost 30% of our business is coming from those providers that are selling cloud services, managed service providers, as well as now the new public cloud is becoming a bigger part of our business. So, for us, yeah, you could look at it early on, as maybe that's a negative, but it is by far the focus for our business going forward. >> I would just add, you know briefly building on that, we had a very similar approach. I think when I was last time on theCUBE I described our approach in this analogy. Imagine 500,000 customers, you know 40, 50 million workloads sitting on this island called VMware, a continent called VMware. And around it started to appear island. Four thousand of them have embraced VMware, the same service providers, the ones he talked to. But the biggest four we were wrestling how would we become relevant to them. And you have to look at this no longer as a threat, but an opportunity. I fundamentally believe when you face a crisis, you can either go down the path of a disaster or an opportunity. We began to say, we want to be the infrastructure software bridge into every public or private cloud. So which means, you know, if it's going to be AWS, we want to build that software bridge that allows workloads to move there, come back if they choose to, and then specialized kinds of workloads that might sit on the cloud. So we started out with IBM Cloud and AWS Cloud, but then our customers said we'd like to have the VDI service that you're running on IBM also run on Azure because it's a Windows workload. Okay, we can do that. And that's what we announced yesterday. So we're going to be very focused in getting this thing successful for our customers. And where they are seeing the public clouds as part of the infrastructure service, we're going to go right there with them. >> And to the extent, Peter, that you can cut costs and complexity better than anybody else, then you become a more attractive partner to VMware and then you get that virtuous cycle. Gents, great to see you both. Thanks very much for coming back to theCUBE. >> Always a pleasure. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much for having us here. >> Thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from VeeamOn in New Orleans. Be right back. (techno music) (musical computer tones)