>> Narrator: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering veeAMON 2019. Brought to you by veeAM. >> Welcome back to veeAMON 2019, in Miami. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Justin Warren as my co-host. Simon Robinson here is the Senior Vice President, 451 Research, Simon it's great to see you, thanks for coming to the cube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So is this your, is this right, your first veeAMON. >> It is, it is, first veeAMON, the first time in Miami, first time on theCUBE. So kind of bucket list check. >> Hey, got to give you a sticker here then, so here you go, thank you for coming on. And of course you've got the veeAM party tonight, which you may have been to some other veeAM parties at other shows, but-- >> Simon: I know them by reputation. >> Yeah, they're good. So looking forward to that. Two days, what have you learned here in the last couple of days, what are your impressions? >> Yeah, my impressions are that this is a conference that reflects the type of company that I think veeAM is, and veeAM's a little atypical for a technology company in this space, they didn't go down the traditional route, they had a very kind of different model right from the get-go, but what I see is real grass roots innovation, and veeAM has always been short on rhetoric, short on hype, and long on actually delivering the products and the capabilities that customers want, and it's been great to see examples of how that's playing out at the show, and we heard Ratmir talking about innovation, and 451 Research, we're an analyst firm focused on understanding the impacts of innovation, we provide data and insight around the technology innovation lifecycle, and it's always been, we've covered veeAM from pretty much day one, and it's always been clear to us that veeAM is a pretty special company, not just you have to be in the right place at the right time with the right product, but you also have to do it in a way that, they're kind of table stakes, you've got to do it in a way that actually engages and empathizes with what a customer is looking to achieve, and I think they've got that at the grassroots level, the veeAM admin level, a decade or more ago, and really have doubled down on that, so it's been awesome to see some of the examples of that at the conference this last couple of days, to have a general session with the eight demos. (laughing) >> And they all worked. >> They all worked. >> All of the eight!. >> I was terrified when they wheeled out the tub of water and it was like, they were dropping a laptop in there. Hey, you know, it was awesome and I think Ratmir is talking around, this being Act Two of veeAM's journey and veeAM's story. But firstly, lets kind of pay tribute to what they did in Act One. I think for any company to build a billion dollar revenue business software is a phenomenal achievement. But to do it in the data protection space? It's even more so. >> It's on backup, possibly the most boring thing ever, and they've kind of made it exciting. >> They used to say that backup was, well they used to say two things about backup. Firstly it's an insurance policy. And secondly, it was the one part of the IT environment that even storage people found boring. (laughing) But I mean, just see the kind of energy, enthusiasm, passion, of the folks here. That really isn't the case. >> That's true. It's been one of those boring but important factors. And then, veeAM's ascendancy, I've said this many times, has coincided with the birth of virtualization. We were consolidating physical servers because they were under-utilized, but then the backup had to be completely rethought because you didn't have enough band-width in the servers, and the capacity to run a backup job, and here comes veeAM, and it's just perfect fit, boom. Takes off. Now you've got Act Two, which is cloud. And I feel like it's jump balled, to use a U.S. basketball analogy, for you-- >> Simon: No idea what that means. >> --folks who don't follow basketball. (laughing) But it's "start over," right? And so, everybody's going after cloud, multi-cloud hybrid. And so, do you feel as though veeAM can replicate a success in what Ratmir's calling "Act Two" and draft from "Act One"? And one of the key factors, what's the tail wind for them, and what are some of the head winds. Certainly competition, we're going to' talk about that, but what are some of the other things that you guys see in your research? >> Yeah, so I think, I mean, first off, I think the hybrid cloud is a reality. Our research tells us that 60% of organizations are looking to, or characterize their strategy as being hybrid cloud strategy. But they're really struggling with actually enacting that and doing that in a processed, organized, deliberate way. We got a lot going on in the multi-cloud world, but multi-cloud is often an accident rather than something deliberate. It just turns out that they've got all these assets across all these different-- >> Dave: Multi-vendor, "Oh, I've got all these clouds!" >> That's right, that's right. Again, go back a decade, and how relatively straight forward the data and application environment seemed, right? I mean you had your application, it was probably on-prem, it really on a server that was connected to this bit of tin, and-- >> Little did we know at the time, right? >> Yeah, and fast forward to today, and data is just everywhere. So I think the tailwind for a company like veeAM is that, obviously, there's always going to be a need for backup, but I think that the conversation is evolving from one around data backup into one of data management, because you can only manage the data in your environment if you understand where it is, what its value is, what the potential exposures are, and I think that's why we see a big opportunity in managing data across this much more diverse and broader environment. >> So given that, do you think customers are better able to manage their data environment now than they used to be, or is it actually getting worse because now it's a much more dynamic and disparate environment. People weren't that great at it beforehand, have they gotten better, or not? >> It's hard to generalize. I think, in the main, customers acknowledge that they do a pretty bad job of managing it on a holistic basis. And I think we are seeing many organizations do it on a piece by piece basis. I think things like GDPR have been a wake-up call that, "Hey, your data is your responsibility!" And whether that data is on your facilities or it's in somebody else's, that doesn't matter. It's still your responsibility. So that was kind of a little bit of a wake-up call for organizations, certainly in Europe, and I think we're going to' see that replicated across the region also. >> We had the rise of Ransomware as well, which was actually the best advertisement for backup that you could ever have had. >> No doubt. >> Absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> These, we talk about the shared responsibility model, I mean, to your point, Simon, I mean, it's like security, right? I mean, somebody misconfigures an Amazon EC2-- >> Simon: That's right. >> -okay, it's not Amazon, it's the shared responsibility, and the same thing with the GDPR, malware. >> It really is, but I think, when we think about what the major challenges that just about every business faces, it's how do they scale their operations in a way that's going to' allow them to really take advantage of this thing we're calling "Digital Transformation," I know it's an over-used term, but-- >> Dave: But it's real. >> It is real, it is real. And I'll research, we asked a question in a survey recently, which is, "What is your organization's single biggest barrier?" And it's, "We don't respond quickly enough to the business." It's the biggest objective, but it's also the most difficult barrier to overcome. And I think we're only going to start to address this if we can fundamentally have a different look at how we scale operations, and that's across the application estate, across the infrastructure, it's also across data, right? And it's modernized, and it's transforming the way we think about managing data, and it's, we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past and end up with a zillion silos that all have a person that needs managing that silo, that environment. We've done that. We don't want to, as we move to multi-cloud, and we acknowledge that data and applications are going to' be in a greater diversity of locations, we have to have a model that scales to managing across those environments. And it's that kind of consistency of approach that I think the industry is lacking, but there's definitely an awareness that we need to address though. >> Yeah, so given that there's that awareness and there's a need there for the market, there has been a refresh in data protection in that part of the industry. Nothing much was happening for probably a good 10 years. David LaMein was kind of the last big disrupter that we had in that marketplace. And then it feels like overnight, everything changed. And suddenly there were a whole bunch of competitors all trying to go after this data-protection market, and veeAM being one of them. So with that challenge for customers happening, and this dynamic market, how do you see the market dynamics evolving as we go through what veeAM calls its "Act Two," and people start moving to this hybrid cloud. What does that look like from your research? >> I think from a customer's perspective, it is often actually just perplexing. I mean, where do you start? How do you think about this on a strategic basis? And again, some of our research has pointed out, highlighted that, again, it's kind of obvious, but, how do we get better alignment between IT and the business? And when we asked about that in the context of digital transformation, it was the businesses, it was the respondents that said, "Yes, our IT strategy is being developed in lock-step with the business," right? Those are the companies that feel like they can, that they have a good handle on this digital transformation. Data transformation. And we do see a bit of a, almost kind of a schism opening up. There is a kind of digital leaders, and there are definitely digital laggards that are really, really struggling with this. And I think that, to me, means opportunity. I mean, there's opportunity for vendors to come here, to come in here and address it. I think with data protection specifically, if you'd have said 10 years ago that there was almost kind of a Cambrian explosion of start-ups and new companies in backup recovery, and data protection, DR. That sounded like madness a decade ago. You know, we've seen absolute explosion, huge number of companies coming together, coming to market with real innovation, which ultimately, I think, is going to' be good for customers. I think there's probably too many for the market to sustain at this point, 'cause all these new entrants, none of the incumbents are going away. But I think it's going to' be very much a partner-centric kind of success. There's a realization I think from, certainly from the hyperscale cloud providers that they're not going to be able to do this on their own, right? They're going to' have to work with "legacy" incumbents. These guys definitely have a role to play. I mean, I was just in a session earlier today talking about VTL in the cloud. >> Dave: Yeah. >> I mean (laughing) VTL?! In the cloud?! (laughing) >> Legacy processes, they're hard to kill. >> But the more this evolves, the more it seems like the public cloud is starting to resemble kind of the on-prem world in some ways. >> Well that's interesting. You know I was in London a couple of weeks ago for the AWS summit and Matt Garman, who's the AWS exec, I think he's the guy who first launched EC2, he was the product manager at the time. Now he's the senior executive. He said, "We believe the vast majority of customers will eventually migrate all workloads into the cloud." And then it was, "But," and this is the "but" that they wouldn't have acknowledged two years ago, we realize that its a hybrid world-- >> We can't do this ourselves. >> And then they talked about snowball, and outpost, and all these other things that they're doing. And Microsoft has always had a different posture. Of course it has a huge on-premise state. But let's talk a little bit about the horses on the track. So you were mentioning some of the legacy backup guys, all the start-ups coming in. There's been over a billion and a half raised for data protection. So you've got Veritas, Dell EMC, IBM with its Tivoli business, it's done some stuff with Catalogic. And then you've got Cohesity and Rubrik trying to get escape velocity, so they got tons of cash, having big parties, trying to replicate that marketing momentum. And you've got veeAM, has, to your point, Simon, built a billion dollar software business, okay. And is now saying, "Okay, we're going into the next wave." >> And profitable! I was speaking with Ratmir this morning, and they were actually cash-flow positive and on gap-basis as well, they're making money! >> There's nothing more atypical than-- >> I know! >> --a start-up type company that's making money. >> And you've got specialists. You've got Drover in there and Zerto-- >> Simon: Yeah, you've got Zerto, you got, >> --you know, a lot of guys, Amantis just got taken out by Cohesity, so. How do you guys see that competitive market shaking out, Dave Russel did the bubble chart, Ratmir showed it yesterday, 15 billion. Is the tam big enough to support all these guys? What do they have to do to get return for their investors? We're talking IPO's in the future before the window closes. It's getting hairy. >> It is, and you know, certainly some of those incumbents are not without having their challenges. I think it's incumbent on them to listen to what customers are asking for. Customers are moving to the cloud, right? They're going to' do that with or without the legacy guys. So they have to get on-board with that and help manage that process for customers. I think what I like about some of the newer guys, the Rubrik's, the Cohesity's, is they are talking about this bigger picture, this issue that, we said at the start, that many organizations acknowledges is a real challenge, and that's having an overall view into their data estate, their data assets. But for many different reasons, it's always been very, very difficult to crack that on a holistic basis. These guys are putting together some compelling stories, some compelling products to do that, and customers are definitely buying it. Now it's not on the scale that they're buying Veeam on a very tactical basis, so I think the challenge for Veeam is to evolve their own proposition from being pretty tactical, important, absolutely, but to kind of move up the value chain from there. And I think we are starting to see many examples of how that is coming into play with some of the announcements we've had at the show today. >> Yeah, I mean, to your point. A billion dollars profitable, 350,000 customers, and a modern sort of approach. >> Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. We've heard simplicity so many times over the last couple of days, but to me when we talk about if the challenge is operational scale, you can't do that without simplicity. And I think the fact that they acknowledge that from a very early date, we speak to a lot of, you know, customers overall, but lots of veeAM customers. Every single one says, "I love the simplicity." It works, it just works. You know, it's these kinds of things that they really do matter, because, not just because it just sounds great, but actually it lets, it either lets the administrator do other things, it's freeing up their time, or it allows a different part, maybe a less experienced or different type of professional to come in and manage the environment and not have to have a PhD in storage and backup and all those things that made this such a human capital-intensive process in the past. >> Easy and simple, they're easy, things to claim, and many companies actually try to claim that they're either easy or simple. It's really difficult to actually deliver on. >> That's right. >> But when you have customers coming back to you and telling you, "You are simple and easy to use," That's when you know that you've got it right. >> What I like about veeAM's messaging is, I've heard it a lot this week, is it's, start with backup. It actually is all about the backup, and you don't hear that from a lot of the upstarts, they're like, "No, no, no, backup. It's all about the data management." It's this sort of vision, these guys used the term "aspirational," almost as a pejorative. >> Right. >> So it's kind of interesting to see that competitive battle and then you've got the legacy guys trying to hang onto their install base, maybe making some announcements, I mean, Dell EMC just made a bunch of announcements, and kind of came out and admitted, "Hey, we took our eye off the ball." Obviously Veritas has a huge install base that everybody's trying to attack. IBM with Tivoli. >> There's a new CEO at Commvault. >> Yeah, and Commvault. We, I don't want to leave them out of the equation, right? They're doing their enterprise piece. And they've always had a little different angle on this space, so, there's a lot of action going on here. 15 billion, half of that is probably backup. >> The challenge is that this isn't a homogenous market, right? >> Dave: Right, very fragmented. >> There are just so many different things that we need to protect. There are so many different ways we can protect them, that soon just started getting into the details, that's when it starts, the market starts to stratify. >> And with cloud and new programming-- >> And people keep creating new ones, you know, object storage comes up, and then we've got no sequel databases that are now happening. >> Microservices, kubernetes, protection-- >> The whole container thing which we haven't really heard an awful lot about this week, I think. I mean, I'm looking forward to seein' how veeAM's story evolves there, but if we do accept that containers, kubernetes is going to be the new middleware that connects a new breed of infrastructure to a new application paradigm, if you like, then that's going to' need protecting. So I think we talk about it, backup, as being tactical, but actually it is a start of a journey, and also, I think one thing that's come out from this last couple of days is the importance of DR, and that's absolutely reflected in our research when we ask about, "What are big challenges in the storage and data arena, DR is a top two challenge every single time. It's too expensive. It's too difficult to run, to build, to test. I've been hearing that for 15, 20 years, right? And we're still not there. >> You can't automate the testing, it's too dangerous to fail over and fail back, so we don't do it, and we don't test it, so we clearly haven't cracked this one as an industry, and there is massive latent demand, I think, and I think, as we think, I mean who can tolerate any sort of down time for any sort of application, right? It just becomes a prerequisite to have applications always on-line. You know, that prerequisite for effective DR is going to' continue. >> Okay, guys, we got to' go. Thanks very much, Simon, for coming on theCUBE. >> Simon: Hey, great! Great to be here! >> Great to have you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest, you're watching theCUBE, live, from veeAMON, 2019, Miami. We'll be right back. (theme music)

(techno music) >> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois, its theCUBE. Covering LeMon 2018. Brought to you by VeeAM. >> Welcome back to the windy city everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events. We track the signal, extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with co-host Stu Miniman. This is our second year here at VeeAMON. Hashtag Veeamon, simple enough. Kate Hutchison is here, she's the CMO of VeeAm. >> Yes, thank you very much for having me. Its a pleasure to be here. >> You're very welcome, thanks so much for taking time out of your busy schedule, great show. You've painted the town in green. >> We certainly have. (laughs) >> So VeeAM obviously didn't need your expert help in creating awareness in places like this. >> Kate: Yes. >> And having a persona around around the green team. Awesome. Your background, Riverbed, Polycom, VMware, Citrix, BEA, some rockstar companies. You've got a lot of experience there. Why did you come to Veeam, and why now? >> Yes, so I was attracted to VeeAM for many reasons. We have some, as you know, some stellar attributes as a company. We've been talking about our net promoter score of 73, which is three and half times the industry average. And of course the executive team themselves, and meeting them and really wanting to be a part of that team. So that was a huge reason for me joining, but as it relates to my career and my background and what I thought I could bring to VeeAM. Very much about enterprise marketing. So I've spent about the last 20 years in the industry, as you mentioned the company names. Really helping those companies build the powerhouse brand, and so I just love being a company who is known for one thing, but is very successful that being known for something that's even broader and more strategic. And that's why I wanted to join the company. >> You mentioned the phrase powerhouse brand. What is a powerhouse brand, and how do you go about building it? >> Well everybody probably has a different definition of a powerhouse brand, but having spent a good 15 years in the Bay area, Silicon Valley, when you're walking around Silicon Valley and you say who you work for and everyone recognizes it, you're working for a powerhouse brand. That hasn't been the case with VeeAM. Now we're very strong, we do our research. We come out pretty strong it Europe, but in terms of our brand awareness in North America we have a ways to go there. Again, and I think because when it comes to building a brand and a powerhouse brand, enterprises really rely on customers to do that. To really leverage the voice of customers, to get the word out and to get the customers to go on record to talk about the power and value of VeeAM. Because when customers go on to talk about it, there really is no better marketing that you can do. >> Ya Kate, one of the things I saw. VeeAM started out with the geeks, and I say that in the most loving terms. People that did virtualization. >> Kate: Yes. >> VeeAM solved a problem, simple, huge adoption in that market, but as we've been talking about all day here, data protection is going up the stack. >> Kate: It is. >> It's hitting the seed sweep more, so. >> Kate: Yes. >> Maybe you could explain to a lot of our audience are the techies and they're like I don't understand this brand in marketing things. >> Kate: Sure. >> We just want the next little containers and things there. >> Kate: Absolutely. >> So why the brand elevation? >> So, first and foremost, we're known for one thing in the industry, as it relates to our product. It just works, and we're not leaving that behind, and certainly the enterprise cares a lot about the product, but as we go into the enterprise space, there's some things that an enterprise customer is going to look for, that an SMB may not. Enterprise is one of the assured company that they're doing business with, has long term viability. They want to make sure that there's plenty of addressable market and headroom for them to go far and above, beyond their sights of, a billion in our case. The other thing is, enterprise customers have a different way of engaging with that company, as it relates to the selling motion. So whether it's our partners, our alliance partners, our resellers, our sales teams directly, they want to be able to work with them as trusted advisors, and they want our folks to be able to anticipate their needs, well ahead of when they actually encounter them. So, we're talking a lot about a journey for our customers. We've been talking about intelligent data management, and the five stages of getting to that. So its really, its building on our core. Which has been SMB and commercial, but also now, up leveling the story, and by the way, the technologists at all companies of all sizes, want to be doing more to influence the outcomes, the business outcomes. So we're telling a story that we think will resonate with them and there's always plenty of click downs into the technology if you want it. (laughs) >> So you guys are putting a lot of emphasis on the up leveling. As Stu mentioned, CXO is becoming more aware of the data protection problem. >> Kate: Yes. >> Its becoming a board level topic. >> Kate: Yes. >> So I think I get the why now. >> Kate: Yes. >> My question is, why VeeAM? And what is the brand promise that you're going to bring to that enterprise? >> So I think, traditionally, VeeAM has been thought of as more of an S&B and commercial play. So the why now is that we have a much broader portfolio then we had a few years ago, and yet we're thought of as just back up and replication. Now, we're building on what our reputation is and back up and replication, but we want to take customers to where we know the puck is going. So for example, as enterprise customers want to take advantage of public clouds, of manage clouds, of SAS applications, they need to be able to get control of all their data. That's the one thing we hear over and over. I don't know where all my data is. Right? So they need to have a platform that can give them that visibility and that aggregated view, that single paint of glass. Then they're going to eventually want to take advantage of being able to move workloads into places where it makes more sense to have them. In cases where there needs to be tighter protection, or in the case of archive data, that they don't need to spend a lot of money on primary storage. It just depends on what our customers want to do. And, ultimately, to be able to move to more of a behavior based way of managing that data. For example, if we see malware crossing that network we can immediately respond and make sure that those workloads are secure. It could also happen as it relates to weather systems and being able to have the data be smart enough to sense and respond where it needs to move to. >> We saw some slides this morning that Peter McKay was showing, like off the platform slide, and I tweeted out that we learned years ago, working with Eric Brinyawlson and Andy McAfee that platforms beat products. >> Kate: Yes. >> So, talk about the importance of platforms through the enterprise. >> Yes, so first of all you cannot be a platform provider without an ecosystem that's embracing and extending the value, and we're working with our ecosystem through the API's, the application programming interfaces, that we make available to them so that they can integrate with our products, and actually allow our platform to be able to be the most complete platform for intelligent data management. That is not all coming from VeeAm, we are very heavily dependent on our ecosystem. >> Dave: Right. >> So that's really the crux of how important a platform is because customers have a lot of technology already in their environments. They want to make sure that if I'm buying something from you, that it'll integrate into my existing environment so I don't have to do a complete rip and replace. That's a very expensive proposition. So, we have been investing and we have thousands of technology partners that are embracing our API's and again, extending the value of our platform. >> I don't want to jump in but, I was going to ask you how you add value to those partners, and it's not just the product and the features, and doing what you say you're going to do from a product standpoint, it's having that platform that makes it easy to integrate, >> Kate: That's right. >> And creating that scale effect, that flyaway effect. >> Absolutely, and a solution that is better together. So, customers really like buying solutions that are already packaged and integrated as it might relate to Cysco and VeeAM or HPE and VeeAM or NetApp and VeeAM. That's what we've been doing with those partners in particular and really going to market together, and that is a preferred way for many customers to buy. >> Or IBM and VeeAM, or Microsoft and VeeAM, >> Yes >> Botanics and VeeAM. VMware and Veeam, we don't want to leave anybody out. >> Kate: We don't want to leave anyone out. Those three that I mentioned, we're on their price list and we are reselling. >> So that's the difference. >> Yes. That's the difference >> Okay, that's really the point. >> Yes. >> Okay. >> So my question is, as you go up the stack a bit, talk about platforms and things like orchestration, >> Kate: yes >> the swim lanes get a little bit muddy, because if you talk about those same partners, the VMware, Microsoft, the Newtanics of the world. >> Kate: Yes. >> They want to own a lot of those pieces in the multi cloud world. >> Kate: Yes. >> Maybe you can help explain that. >> I think we're all probably saying some of the same words, but defining them a little differently. So when we talk about orchestration, it's very much about allowing workloads to move seamlessly across multi-clouds. To do that while the data is secure and protected, and eventually introduce, we have partnerships today that allow us to leverage artificial intelligence. So that those workloads can move seamlessly without any disruption to the business as they're moving to the right location. So yes, I think you hear a lot of the terms, but as you drill down into it and you double click on what does that mean for, in your environment, it's a little different. >> So when VeeAM decided to expand deeper into the enterprise, it's putting its money where its mouth is. I mean Robby brought in Peter McKay, he brought in a number of folks on the sale side with enterprise, now yourself. >> Kate: Yes. >> We saw Dave Russel up on stage today. >> Kate: Yes. >> He's got some enterprise jobs. >> I'm looking forward to working with him. >> You're not just talking to talk, you're walking to walk. Which is great to see, and thinking about the total available market, its a TAM expansion move, can you address that at all? >> Kate: Yes. >> I know you guys are very research oriented, as a company. >> Kate: Yes. >> You have relationships with all the big research houses. What do you see from a taman standpoint. >> Yes, so, remember that our proposition is to have the most complete platform for intelligent data management. By virtue of saying that, it really means we have to look at adjacent markets for additional capabilities to put into our platform, to ensure that we remain ahead of the competition as it relates to intelligent data management. We're looking at various adjacent markets. Whether that be through a build buyer partner strategy. So one of the largest market opportunities in an adjacency is the cloud infrastructure as a service market. It's huge. Its about 90 billion. It's got a very fast clip in terms of its compounded annual growth rate, and we've already made some pretty great progress there, both organically, as well as through the acquisition of N2WS. When we move into fast growing market segments like that, and we have many others that are adjacent as well, it's creating an addressable market of about 30 billion for us as we look out into 2022. So we're pretty excited about that, and again, that gets back to making those investments so that an enterprise customer feels confident betting their business on us. We have that scale ability. We have that addressable market, and we are increasingly helping our folks on the front lines become trusted advisors to our customers. >> In your estimation, I know some of this is hard when you're doing the analysis >> Kate: Yes. >> I used to do that for a living so I know. In your estimation is that sort of an approximation of spend, or does it include what we look at, as the money that's left on the table by the global 2000 because they have inadequate data protection. Presume it does not include that. >> Kate: Yeah. >> Because if it did, it would probably be a trillion. >> Kate: Right >> But I wonder if you can add some color to it. >> Well I think as we get into an era of compliance, we have GDPR coming down this month, I think companies are taking a new look at what does it really mean to ensure that I know where all my data is, that I ensure it's protected, that I'm sure that it's secure, and that it's in compliance. I think you're seeing more attention, more money. You mentioned earlier that this is becoming more of a sea level issue, and I think in an era of compliance and regulations that are coming down, you're going to see that only increase. >> One of the interesting things that we saw about VeeAM when we were looking at the show here, you're almost, how do I say it, a tweener. You're still kind of a startup, but you're one of the bigger companies in the space. There's a lot of buzz and energy, and customer interest >> Yes. >> In this all market thing. How do you look at yourself compared to some of the legacy giants, >> Yeah. >> And some of the new startups? >> So we are a very fast growing company. We posted 40 percent growth in Q4. We were at 36% year over year. I mean off the very big numbers. I haven't seen these numbers since I was at VMware. So that is a rapid growth company that grows up quickly when it's growing at that clip, so I think there's a part of us that's extremely paranoid about the competition and looking at some of the new entrance to make sure that we are really staying ahead and innovating, continuing to innovate. Then we look at some being legacy companies that have been in this space, and we see in some cases, a downward trend in their revenue and in their investments in this era, in this area. Again, I think it's a healthy balance of innovative and paranoid, and recognizing that customers want the solution that VeeAM offers, and they do want to be able to migrate off of the legacy systems that are out there. We are seeing that time and again. We just showed, this morning in the general session, we showed a Royal Caribbean video and that was a case where they abandoned their legacy system to go with VeeAM. >> Well that's quite a story. Nearly a billion dollars, growing at 35 plus percent a year. You got to look to companies like Service Now, Work Day. >> Kate: Yes. >> You're in that rare-ified air. Well Kate thanks so much for coming. >> Absolutely. >> Congratulations on the new role. >> Thank you. >> Really excited to see you sort of take VeeAM up into that new stratosphere. >> I'm very excited to be here. >> It's great to be part of VeeAMON 2018. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll be right back with our next guess, right after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's theCube. Covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back at VeeamON, Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Marc Crespi is here, he's the vice president of SEs at Exagrid Systems, big partner of Veeam's, big presence on the show floor here. Mark, thanks for coming on theCube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So what's doing with Exagrid, we were talking off camera, kind of know you guys a little bit, you guys are right around the corner from us in Massachusetts, but give us the update in the company and what's new? >> Yeah, be happy to. So, first I'd like to thank Veeam for putting on a terrific show, and it's great to be in the beautiful city of New Orleans with you guys. So, if you look at the Exagrid business, Exagrid is a leader in disbase backup with data deduplication business. And we've been a Veeam partner for a decade now, and right from the early days when we started talking and working with Veeam, we realized that our two architectures had a natural fit. So when we talked to joint Veeam customers, whether they're new customers or existing customers, they're experiencing an exponential benefit over just using Veeam with some other disk player as result. If you look at how our business has evolved over the last decade or so, we were originally in the tape replacement business, you know, the dinosaur tape libraries that were still roaming the earth back then, and what we find now is, a lot of customers have moved on from tape, tape is a minority of the backup storage media that we see in the market today. And most of our business in fact is replacing other disk based implementations, either with or without native data deduplication, about 80% of our business now. And it's all the names you hear in the disk based backup with data deduplication market that we're replacing. We've also grown from a company that initially focused on midsized enterprise to now an enterprise class built product and company. So if you look at our average sale, our average customer size, it has grown exponentially over the past several years. And our sales force has grown over 500% just in the last two to three years itself, so we're in a high growth mode, we're experiencing a lot of success and much of our business is, a significant portion of our business is working with either existing or new Veeam customers. >> And a lot of the growth is coming from replacing existing, what's generally referred to as purpose built backup appliances, is that correct? >> That is correct, and the reason that we're seeing that phenomenon is when we sat down and created our architecture, we looked at the legacy of tape and what was wrong with tape. Well tape wasn't very mechanical, it was unreliable, but it also suffered from a vicious cycle of grow, break, replace. So, all our customer data is growing 20, 30% a year, which means your data's doubling every 2.5 to three years. And whatever you're backing up to, you're going to outgrow it. And you're going to ultimately have to replace it in its entirety. And you've got those precious IT budget dollars that you'd like to spend on other initiatives, and you're rebuying your backup storage just to tread water before you even get around to spending on the expansion. So we said that problem needs to be eliminated entirely, and the only way you can eliminate that problem, is by having a highly scalable architecture that never requires forklift upgrade. So if you look at our technology and why we're able to replace incumbent vendors, we're typically finding a frustrated customer who's been through two or three forced refreshes, either 'cause they outgrew technology or the vendor forced them to to outgrow technology by end of lifing et cetera, which we don't do, we don't end of life any of our products, and therefore they lift their head to say, well before I just spend all these dollars again, plus expansion, why don't I go back into the market and see if anyones figured out a better way to do this, and that's where we come in. We come in and show them that you can start with the footprint you need and then you can expand infinitely and we're never going to force you to buy what you already own, so, it marries up much more closely with the lifespan customer customers want for backup storage than the lifespan vendors want for back up storage. >> Marc, can you unpack that a little bit for us, I think about VM where it was an example of how we avoided having to do certain upgrades. I think of operating systems, or servers that were end of life, stick it into VM, I could grow and expand, but when I think about Gear, there's all sorts of reasons why just the exponential growth of, you know, different media types, different sizes that we need to take, that how come you can do this, while others, you know, force those upgrades. >> That's a great question, so I'd compare and contrast a little bit with virtualization, what virtualization brought to the table was, it allowed you to take a set of computing resources and make sure it was fully utilized, right, so if you had a server, you were running one application on it, maybe it was only 30% utilized, you had spare storage, you had spare compute, so what virtualization allowed you to do was add applications that were segmented, and therefore they could run without conflict and you could get that hardware fully utilized. This is a little bit different in that, if you think about what backup really is, on a nightly or weekly basis, even with some of the modern backup techniques that have come out, customers are moving large amounts of data, and it has to be within a certain window of time, because they don't want backups running during productions hours, because that can impact network performance, server performance, et cetera. The other side of the equation is when they want something back they want it back fast. So in order to achieve that, we made two architectural differences, on a scalability side, we said that the legacy storage architectures that typically, utilize a fixed amount of compute, and then expand by simply adding storage, missed the point that when you add workload to a system, but you don't add power to that system, performance at the same time, everything that system does is going to take longer. So, if I have a certain amount of data, and I have a certain amount of compute, and then I double my data, but I don't double my compute, my memory and my networking, naturally everything that system's doing going to take twice as long. So we recognized that you needed a grid based architecture, or a cluster based architecture, that said, when my data doubles, I'll double the storage, but I'm also going to double the compute, the network, the memory, et cetera, at the same time. So if I have a very short backup window day one, with an Exagrid implementation, and my data doubles, I have that very same backup window, I have the very same recovery time. I have the very same replication time, all the things that a disk based backup appliance do, grow linearly with Exagrid. >> And you're saying other architectures had to wait for intel? >> That's a great point, yes, they rely very much on the compute. Now there's implementations where Flash is being added to try and speed up processes, et cetera, which sounds like a great idea, 'cause Flash is obviously a very useful technology in the storage industry, but when you look at the pricing of backup infrastructure, Flash breaks the model for that, for backup infrastructure. It makes the products more expensive and its unnecessary if you implement things correctly. >> Because FAT Disk is still cheaper than cheap Flash, is that right? >> Spinning disk is still about a sixth to an eighth the cost of Flash. >> Now, I wonder if can go back, I want to pick your technical brain for a minute. So you mentioned tape replacement, and then, as I recall the ascendancy of we can call them purpose built backup appliances, I think it's an IDC term or whatever, but we'll use that. A big part of the value proposition was plugging directly, looking like tape, so you didn't have to rip and replace your processes, and I remember Avomar was trying to convince the market that no, you have to change your processes, and people were like, conceptually that sounds good, but its too disruptive for me, so where were you guys on that curve? Do you look like tape, are you easy to pop in or? >> Proud to say we look nothing like tape. >> Okay, so that was a head wind for you early on, right? But it's really benefited you down the road, is that fair to say? >> If it was a head wind, it was a breeze, okay, and what I mean by that is, the technology we're referring to is VTL, Virtual Type Library, and in the very early days of the market, there were some legacy environments typically Fibersand type environments, where you had to make your disk look like tape so that the customer could transition, especially larger customers where, you know, change is harder, radical change is harder to make quickly. So VTL provided a sort of bridge, or transition technology over a period of time. We're through that phase of the market. >> Dave: But it was a band aide? >> It was very much a band aide. >> But you say it was a breeze, but Data Domaine got two thirds of the market, so, I mean... >> Yeah, but it wasn't because of their VTL. >> Dave: It wasn't. >> No, that was a result of there were still some Fiber environments out there, and they decided to cover that part of the market. We looked at the percentage of the market that we thought would need that, both in the early days but more, even more forward looking, you know, everything about our architecture is quite a bit more forward looking than the people we're competing against. And we realized that the investment it would take to do that, would eventually be wasted because it would go away, and heres why, if you look at what Veeam's software does with instant VM recovery and synthetic fulls and, sureback, and virtual lab, et cetera, when you make a disk look like tape, you lock yourself into the Fred Flinstone era of backup. In other words, you can't take advantage of any of the advanced features in that software, because tape couldn't support those features. And as far as the software knows, it thinks it's talking to a tape library, so it's doing silly things like saying fast forward, rewind, eject with disk. If you think about it, you can almost do a stand up set. >> Dave: Hey, your sequential... >> You know, picking on this, right. So what we said is, that's going to go away, it's very clear with what the software folks are doing, especially Veeam, that that's going to go away. Now, I realize Veeam recently added tape capability, but the reason for that is, not because its a primary backup media, it's because for customers that have, you know, infinite retention, or seven, eight, 10 year retention... >> Dave: They need an offsite tape option. >> They need an economic option. It's not that they like it, because we actually have a lot of conversations with customers, even with that longer term retention where they at least want to explore the economics of disk, but in some instances, even though they hate it, and they grin and bare it, they go with tape just purely economically. >> Right, so early days was, hey don't change anything about your software, keep the Fred Flinstone software and all your processes associated with that, and then, of course VM Ware changed everything. >> Marc: Right, and then graduate to the modern... >> Okay, and then the other big, sort of intern scenario, they used to argue about Dedupe rates, and I presume it's the work load and the nature of the data that determines that, not necessarily the technology, but maybe not, maybe there's some nuance on. >> It's a little bit of both. So a responsible deduplication vendor's going to ask the customer a number of questions about the make up and the nature of their data, okay, however, there's also a lot of aspects to which algorithm you use that are going to drive that. So, if you don't implement a very strong aggressive deduplication algorithm, your result is going to be lower, and we find in many of the software based implementations, and some of the appliance vendors, that they took shortcuts on the algorithms itself. Either because they were compute bound or you might be running it on a standard Windows server which is not optimized to run a really strong algorithm, and therefore where, we may say at 12 weeks of retention, you can get about 20 to one, they're getting six or seven to one, and in some cases they're recommending just put straight disk behind the software, well you end up with disk sprawl, because you're keeping all of this retention but you're not reducing the data enough, so you've got disk everywhere. >> Okay, so the quality of the data reduction algorithms matter, okay, and then the other arguments used to be inline or post process, Frank Luptin used "Oh that crappy post process..." >> Marc: I don't remember when he said that. >> Yeah, and weigh in on that. >> So, we kind of agree. Not that inline is better but that parallelization is better so we actually invented a third way called Adaptive Deduplication. Which basically, what that does is, it allows the chunks of data to land into our box first, and then we begin deduplicating, and replicating and parallel, right. So, we're doing it at the same time, but we're not doing it inline. And we monitor utilization of the system and we favor the backup window, so if think our deduplication is going to slow the back window down, we throttle back a bit. If we have plenty of resources, we crank away at the deduplication and replication. So we eliminated the potential drawbacks of post process, we eliminated the potential drawbacks of inline, and the biggest drawback of inline is that, when you go to recover a system and you think about Veeam's instant VM recovery, if you boot a virtual machine, we have that virtual machine in its entirety in a high speed cache, so it's up in seconds. So I was talking to a customer of ours at our booth who recovered an exchange server recently by booting it off of a Exagrid in about five minutes, right. If you tried to do that out of a dedupe, a device that only has inline deduplicative data, you're looking at hours to maybe even a day. Now you're CEO's not going to be too happy when they can't do email for a day, so I would recommend a high speed cache. >> Marc, Exagrid's been a partner with Veeam for a lot of this journey that Veeam's been on for the last 10 years. Here at the show, they've been talking about where the next 10 years are going, everything cloud, and expanding what they're doing, as you look forward, any announcements this week or as you look forward as a partnership, where do you see things growing? >> We don't have any specific announcements this week, I would refer folks to our website, we just recently announced our 5.0 release, it includes some pretty important things. One of the things it includes is, integration with Veeam's scale out backup repository, which dramatically simplifies the use of multiple Veeam repository's with Veeam's software. We also announced an offering for AWS we think that's appropriate for some customers, not all necessarily, where we can put a virtual appliance on Amazon, and in the cloud realm, there's no question that customers are going to continue to explore the cloud model for both efficiency, operational, expense versus capital, but there's going to be multiple cloud models, for example we partnered with a company, who's here, who you may have spoken to Offsite Data Sync. So if the customer doesn't want to do Amazon for some reason, then Offsite Data Sync will offer them the very same service with Exagrid technology and an operational expense model. And they've been a very good partner of ours as well. >> And the virtual appliance in AWS how does that work? You pop it in a COLO facility or? >> No, you literally, you load it into Amazon like you would any other Amazon machine instance, and it behaves just like a second data center. So you replicate to it, and it can store all of your offsite data, and then when you need it back, you can recover it provided bandwidth is adequate. >> So, I access the instance from the AWS marketplace, or? >> No, we actually provide it directly. >> Oh, okay. >> Through reseller network. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I appreciate you by the way taking me down memory lane and sort of educating us on... >> Marc: Love talking about this stuff. >> Now, so, a lot of things we talked about are old news, to sort of set the context. Where are we today, what is the state of the market and the competitive differentiators that customers really care about? >> I think that we're at the state of the market where people are frustrated with a lot of legacy approaches, whether it's on the backup software side or the backup storage side. The licensing models are expensive, the vendors are gouging them, because they're trying to keep revenue, and they're worried about, you know, the players that are becoming the replacement players like Veeam, like Exagrid. So we're at point now where I see more activity of customers looking for alternatives to what they're running today than maybe in history of backup. You know, people always used to say, backup apps are very sticky, they're very hard to replace, well, look at what Veeam's been able to accomplish. Backup storage is very hard to replace, once it's installed. Well if you force a customer every three years to respend the money they already spent, plus more, you're creating a vent where that customers going to get frustrated and they're going to go out and look at alternatives. So I think we're at a point now where more so than ever, customers are looking for alternatives that stop the madness of backup spending, and stop the madness of backup performance degradation. >> Yeah, we had Dave Russel on yesterday and in his last magic quadrant, you probably read it, I think one of his strategic planning assumptions was 50% of the customers out there are going to replace or sunset their existing backup architecture in the next two years. I mean, that's a massive number, so, and obviously a huge opportunity for you and for Veeam. >> Yeah, I'm honored to be talking to Dave later today. >> Well Marc, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCube, it was really a pleasure. >> Thank you guys, it's been fun. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest after this short break. (techno music)