>>The cube is back at Vemo 2022. I was happy to be live. Dave ante, Dave Nicholson and Dave Russell three Daves. Dave is the vice president of enterprise strategy at Veeam. Great to see you again, my friend. Thanks for coming >>On. Uh, it's always a pleasure. And Dave, I can remember your name. I can't remember >>Your name as well. <laugh> so wow. How many years has it been now? I mean, add on COVID is four years now. >>Yeah, well, three, three solid three. Yeah, Fallon blue. Uh, last year, Miami little secret. We're gonna go there again next year. >>Okay, so you joined Veeam >>Three. Oh, me four. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. Four is four, right? Okay. Wow. >>Um, time flies, man. >>Interesting. What your background, former analyst analyze your time at Veeam and the market and the changes in the customer base. What, what have you seen? What are the big takeaways? Learnings? >>Yeah. You know, what's amazing to me is we've done a lot more research now, ourselves, right? So things that we intuitively thought, things that we experienced by talking to customers, and of course our partners, we can now actually prove. So what I love is that we take the exact same product and we go down market up market. We go across geographies, we go different verticals and we can sell that same exact product to all constituencies because the differences between them are not that great. If it was the three Dave company or the 3m company, what you're looking for is reliable recovery, ease of use those things just transcend. And I think there used to be a time when we thought enterprise means something very different than mid-market than does SMB. And certainly your go to market plans are that way, but not the product plans. >>So the ransomware study, we had Jay buff on earlier, we were talking about it and we just barely scratched the surface. But how were you able to get people to converse with you in such detail? Was it, are you using phone surveys? Are you, are, are you doing web surveys? Are you doing a combination? Deep >>Dives? Yeah. So it was web based and it was anonymous on both ends, meaning no one knew VE was asking the questions. And also we made the promise that none of your data is ever gonna get out, not even to say a large petroleum company, right. Everything is completely anonymized. And we were able to screen people out very effectively, a lot of screener questions to make sure we're dealing with the right person. And then we do some data integrity checking on the back end. But it's amazing if you give people an opportunity, they're actually very willing to tell you about their experience as long as there's no sort of ramification about putting the company or themselves at risk. >>So when I was at IDC, we did a lot of surveys, tons of surveys. I'm sure you did a lot of surveys at Gartner. And we would look at vendor surveys like, eh, well, this kind of the questions are rigged or it's really self-serving. I don't sense that in your surveys, you you've, you've always, you've still got that independent analyst gene. Is that, I mean, it's gotta be, is it by design? Is it just happen that ransomware is a topic that just sort of lends itself to that. Maybe you could talk about your philosophy there. >>Yeah. Well, two part answer really, because it's definitely by design. We, we really want the information. I mean, we're using this to fuel or inform our understanding of the market, what we should build next, what we should message next. So we really want the right data. So we gotta ask the right questions. So Jason, our colleague, Julie, myself, we work really hard on trying to make sure we're not leading the witness down a certain path. We're not trying to prove our own thesis. We're trying to understand what the market really is thinking. And when it comes to ransomware, we wanna know what we don't know, meaning we found a few surprises along the way. A lot of it was confirmational, but that's okay too. As long as you can back that up, cuz then it's not just Avenger's opinion. Of course, a vendor that says that they can help you do something has data that says, they think you uni have a problem with this, but now we can actually point to it and have a more interesting kind of partnership conversation about if you are like 1000 other enterprises globally, this may be what you're seeing. >>And there are no wrong answers there. Meaning even if they say that is absolutely not what we're seeing. Great. Let's have that conversation that's specific to you. But if you're not sure where to start, we've got a whole pool of data to help guide that conversation. >>Yeah. Shout out to Julie Webb does a great job. She's a real pro and yes. And, and really makes sure that, like you say, you want the real, real answers. So what were some of the things that you were excited about or to learn about? Um, in the survey again, we, we touched just barely touched on it in 15 minutes with Jason, but what, what's your take? Well, >>Two that I'd love to point out. I mean, unfortunately Jason probably mentioned this one, you know, only 19% answered when we said, did you pay the ransom? And only 19% said, no, I didn't pay the ransom. And I was a hundred percent successful in my recovery. You know, we're in Vegas, one out of five odds. That's not good. Right? That's a go out of business spot. That's not the kind of 80 20 you want to hear. That's not exactly exactly. Now more concerning to me is 5% said no ransom was asked for. And you know, my phrase on that is that's, that's an arson event. It's not an extortion event. Right. I just came to do harm. That's really troubling. Now there's a huge percentage there that said we paid the ransom about 24% said we paid the ransom and we still couldn't restore the data. So if you add up that 24 in that five, that 29%, that was really scary to me. >>Yeah. So you had the 19%. Okay. That's scary enough. But then you had the wrecking ball, right? Ah, we're just gonna, it's like the mayhem commercial. Yes. Yeah. See ya. Right. Okay. So <laugh>, that's, that's wild. So we've heard a lot about, um, ransomware. The thing that interests me is, and we've had a big dose of ransomware as analysts in these last, you know, 12, 18 months and more. But, but, but it's really escalated. Yeah. Seems like, and by the way, you're sharing this data, which is amazing. Right. So I actually want to dig in and steal some of the, the data. I think that's cool. Right? Definitely. You gave us a URL this morning. Um, so, but you, your philosophy is to share the data. So everybody sees it, your customers, your prospects, your competitors, but your philosophy is to why, why are you sharing that data? Why don't you just keep it to yourself and do it quietly with customers? >>Yeah. You know, I think this is such a significant event. No one vendor's gonna solve it all. Realistically, we may be tied for number one in market share statistically speaking, but we have 12.5%. Right. So we're not gonna be able to do greater good if we're keeping that to ourselves. And it's really a notion of this awareness level, just having the conversation and having that more open, even if it's not us, I think is gonna be beneficial. It speaks to the value of backup and why backup is still relevant this day and age. >>I dunno if you're comfortable answering this, but I'll ask anyway, when you were a Gartner analyst, did you get asked about ransomware a lot? >>No. >>Very rarely or never. >>Almost never. Yeah. And that was four years ago. Literally. Like it >>Was a thing back then, right? I mean it wasn't of course prominent, but it was, it was, I guess it wasn't that >>20 16, 20 17, you know, it's, it's interesting because at a couple of levels you have the, um, the willingness of participants to share their stories, which is a classic example of people coming together to fight a common fo. Yeah, yeah. Right. In the best of times, that's what happens. And now you're sharing that information out. One of the reasons why some would argue we've gotten to this place is because day zero exploits have been stockpiled and they haven't been shared. So you go to, you know, you go, you go through the lineage that gets you to not pet cat as an example. Yes. And where did it come from? Hey, it was something that we knew about. Uh, but we didn't share it. Right. We waited until it happened because maybe we thought we could use it in, in some way. It's, it's an, it's an interesting philosophical question. I, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know where, if that's, uh, the third, it's the one, the third rail you don't want to touch, but basically we're, we are, I guess we're just left to sort through whatever, whatever we have to sort through in that regard. But it is interesting left to industry's own devices. It's sharing an openness. >>Yeah. You know, it's, I almost think it's like open source code. Right? I mean, the promise there is together, we can all do something better. And I think that's true with this ransomware research and the rest of the research we do too. We we've freely put it out there. I mean, you can download the link, no problem. Right. And go see the report. We're fine with that. You know, we think it actually is very beneficial. I remember a long time ago, it was actually Sam Adams that said, uh, you know, Hey, there's a lot of craft brewers out there now, you know, is, are you as a craft brewery now? Successful? Are you worried about that? No. We want every craft brewery to be successful because it creates a better awareness. Well, an availability market, it's still Boston reference. >>What did another Boston reference? Yes. Thank you, >>Boston. And what <laugh>. >>Yeah. So, you know, I, I, I feel like we've seen these milestone, you know, watershed events in, in security. I mean, stucks net sort of yeah. Informed us what's possible with nation states, even though it's highly likely that us and Israel were, were behind that, uh, the, the solar winds hack people are still worried about. Yes. Okay. What's next. Even, even something now. And so everybody's now on high alert even, I don't know how close you guys followed it, but the, the, uh, the Okta, uh, uh, breach, which was a fairly benign incident. And technically it was, was very, very limited and very narrow in scope. But CISOs that I talked to were like, we are really paranoid that there's another shoe to drop. What do we do? So the, the awareness is way, way off the charts. It begs the question. What's next. Can you, can you envision, can you stay ahead? It's so hard to stay ahead of the bad guys, but, but how are you thinking about that? What this isn't the end of it from your standpoint? >>No, it's not. And unfortunately it's because there's money to be made, right? And the barrier to entry is relatively low. It's like hiring a Hitman. You know, you don't actually have to even carry out the bad act yourself and get your own hands dirty. And so it's not gonna end, but it it's really security is everyone's responsibility. Veeam is not really a full time security company, but we play a role in that whole ecosystem. And even if you're not in the data center as an employee of a company, you have a role to play in security. You know, don't click that link, lock the door behind you, that type of thing. So how do you stay ahead of it? I think you just continually keep putting a focus on it. It's like performance. You're never gonna be done. There's always something to tune and to work on, but that can be overwhelming. So the positive I try to tell someone is to your point, Dave, look, a lot of these vulnerabilities were known for quite some time. If you were just current on your patch levels, this could have been prevented, right? You could have closed that window. So the thing that I often say is if you can't do everything and probably none of us can do something and then repeat, do it again, try to get a little bit better every period of time. Whether that's every day, every quarter, what case may be, do what you can. >>Yeah. So ransomware obviously very lucrative. So your job is to increase the denominator. So the ROI is lower, right? And that's a, that's a constant game, right? >>Absolutely. It is a crime of opportunity. It's indiscriminate. And oftentimes non-targeted now there are state sponsored events to your point, but largely it's like the fishermen casting the net out into the ocean. No idea with certainty, what's gonna come back. So I'm just gonna keep trying and trying and trying our goal is to basically you wanna be the house on the neighborhood that looks the least inviting. >>We've talked about this. I mean, any, anyone can be a, a, a ransomware as to go in the dark web, ransomware's a service. Oh, I gotta, I can put a stick into a server and a way I go and I get some Bitcoin right. For it. So, so that's, so, so organizations really have to take this seriously. I think they are. Um, well you tell me, I mean, in your discussions with, with, with customers, >>It's changed. Yeah. You know, I would say 18 months ago, there was a subset of customers out there saying vendors, crying Wolf, you know, you're trying to scare us into making a purchase decision or move off of something that we're working with. Now. I think that's almost inverted. Now what we see is people are saying, look, my boss or my boss's boss's boss, and the security team are knocking on my door asking, what are we gonna do? What's our response? You know, how prepared are we? What kind of things do we have in place? What does our backup practice do to support ransomware? The good news though, going back to the awareness side is I feel like we're evangelizing this a little less as an industry. Meaning the security team is well aware of the role that proper backup and availability can play. That was not true. A handful of years ago. >>Well, that's the other thing too, is that your study showed the closer the practitioner was to the problem. Yes. The more problems there were, that's an awareness thing. Yes. That's not a, that's not, oh, just those guys had visibility. I wanna ask you cuz you've You understand from an application view, right. There's only so much Veeam can do. Um, and then the customer has to have processes in place that go beyond just the, the backup and recovery technology. So, so from an application perspective, what are you advising customers where you leave off and they really have to take over this notion of shared responsibility is really extending beyond cloud security. >>Yeah. Uh, the model that I like is interestingly enough, what we see with Caston in the Kubernetes space. Mm-hmm <affirmative> is there, we're selling into two different constituencies, potentially. It's the infrastructure team that they're worried about disaster recovery. They're worried about backup, but it's the app dev DevOps team. Hey, we're worried about creating the application. So we're spending a lot of focus with the casting group to say, great, go after that shift, left crowd, talk to them about a data availability, disaster recovery, by the way you get data movement or migration for free with that. So migration, maybe what you're first interested in on day one. But by doing that, by having this kind of capability, you're actually protecting yourself from day two issues as well. >>Yeah. So Let's see. Um, what haven't we hit on in this study? There was so much data in there. Uh, is that URL, is that some, a private thing that you guys shared >>Or is it no. Absolutely. >>Can, can you share the >>URL? Yeah, absolutely. It's V E E so V two E period am so V with the period between the E and the a forward slash RW 22. So ransomware 22 is the research project. >>So go there, you download the zip file, you get all the graphics. Um, I I'm gonna dig into it, uh, maybe as early as this, this Friday or this weekend, like to sort of expose that, uh it's you guys obviously want this, I think you're right. It's it's it's awareness needs to go up to solve this problem. You know, I don't know if it's ever solvable, but the only approach is to collaborate. Right. So I, I dunno if you're gonna collaborate with your head-to-head competitors, but you're certainly happy to share the data I've seen Dave, some competitors have pivoted from data protection or even data management to security. Yes. I see. I wonder if I could run a premise by, I see that as an adjacency to your business, but not sort of throwing you into the security bucket. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah. You know, certainly respect everything other competitors are doing, you know, and some are getting very, you know, making some good noise and getting picked up on that. However, we're unapologetically a backup company. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, we're a backup company. First. We're worried about security. We're worried about, you know, data reuse and supporting shift, left types of things, but we're not gonna apologize for being in the backup availability business, not, not at all. However, there's a role that we can play. Having said that that we're a role. We're a component. If you're in the secondary storage market, like backup or archiving. And you're trying to imply that you're going to help prevent or even head off issues on the primary storage side. That might be a little bit of a stretch. Now, hopefully that can happen that we can go get better as an industry on that. >>But fundamentally we're about ensuring that you're recoverable with reliability and speed when you need it. Whether we're no matter what the issue is, because we like to say ransomware is a disaster. Unfortunately there's other kind of disasters that happen as well. Power failures still happen. Natural issues still occur, et cetera. So all these things have to be accounted for. You know, one of our survey, um, data points basically said all the things that take down a server that you didn't plan on. It's basically humans at the top human error, someone accidentally deleted something and then malicious humans, someone actually came after you, but there's a dozen other things that happened too. So you've gotta prepare for all of that. So I guess what I would end up with saying is you remember back in the centralized data centers, especially the mainframe days, people would say, we're worried about the smoking hole or the smoking crater event. Yeah. Yeah. The probability of a plane crashing into your data bunker was relatively low. That was when it got all the discussion though, what was happening every single day is somebody accidentally deleted a file. And so you need to account on both ends of the spectrum. So we don't wanna over rotate. And we also, we don't want to signal to 450,000 beam customers around the world that we're abandoning you that were not about backup. That's still our core >>Effort. No, it's pretty straightforward. You're just telling people to back up in a way that gives them a certain amount of mitigation yes. Or protection in the event that something happens. And no, I don't remember anything about mainframe. He does though though, much older than me >>EF SMS. So I even know what it stands for. Count key data don't even get me started. So, and, and it wasn't thank you for that answer. I didn't mean to sort of a set up question, but it was more of a strategy question and I wish wish I could put on your analyst hat because I, I feel, I'll just say it. I feel as though it's a move to try to get a tailwind. Maybe it's a valuation play. I don't know. But I, I, it resonated with me three years ago when everybody was talking data management and nobody knew what that meant. Data management. I'm like Oracle. >>Right. >>And now it's starting to become a little bit more clear. Um, but Danny Allen stuff and said, it's all about the backup. I think that was one of his keynote messages. So that really resonated with me cuz he said, yeah, it starts with backup and recovery. And that's what, what matters most to these customers. So really was a strategy question. Now maybe it does have valuation impact. Maybe there's a big market there that can be consolidated. You know, uh, we, this morning in the analyst session, we heard about your new CEO's objectives of, you know, grabbing more market share. So, and that's, that's an adjacency. So it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out far too many security vendors. As, as we know, the backup and recovery space is getting more crowded and that is maybe causing people to sort of shift. I don't know, whatever right. Or left, I guess, shift. Right. I'm not sure, but um, it's gonna be really interesting to watch because this has now become a really hot space after, you know, it's been some really interesting momentum in certain pockets, but now it's everywhere it's coming ubiquitous. So I'll give you the last word Dave on, uh, day one, VEON 20, 22. >>Yeah. Well boy, so many things I could say to kind of land the plane on, but we're just glad to be back in person. It's been three years since we've had a live event in those three years, we've gone from 300,000 customers to 450,000 customers. The release cadence, even in the pandemic has been the greatest in the company's history in 2020, 2021, there's only about three dozen software only companies that have hit a billion dollars and we're one of them. And that, you know, that mission is why hasn't changed and that's why we wanna stay consistent. One of the things Danny always likes to say is, you know, we keep telling the same story because we're not wanting to deviate off of that story and there's more work to be done. And to honors point, you know, Hey, if you have ambitious goals, you're gonna have to look at spreading your wings out a little bit wider, but we're never gonna abandon being a backup. Well, >>It's, it's clear to me, Dave on was not brought in to keep you steady at a billion. I think he's got a site set on five and then who knows what's next? Dave Russell, thanks so much for coming back in the cube. Great to >>See always a pleasure. Thank you. >>All right. That's a wrap for Dave one. Dave ante and Dave Nicholson will be backed tomorrow with a full day of coverage. Check out Silicon angle.com for all the news, uh, youtube.com/silicon angle. You can get these videos. They're all, you know, flying up Wiki bond.com for some of the research in this space. We'll see you tomorrow.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Welcome to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. The digital version I'm Lisa Martin and I have a couple of Cuba alumni joining me from Wien. We've got Danny Allen. It's C T O and S VP of product strategy And Dave Russell, VP of Enterprise Strategy, is here as well. Danny and a Welcome back to the Cube. >>Hi, Lisa. Great to be here. >>Hey, Lisa. Great to be here. Love talking with this audience >>It and thankfully, because of technologies like this in the zoom, were still able to engage with that audience, even though we would all be gearing up to be Go spending five days in Vegas with what 47,000 of our closest friends across, you know, and walking a lot. But I wanted Thio. Danny, start with you and you guys had them on virtually this summer. That's an event known for its energy. Talk to me about some of the things that you guys announced there. And how are your customers doing with this rapid change toe? work from home and this massive amount of uncertainty. >>Well, certainly no one would have predicted this the beginning of the year. There has been such transformation. There was a statement made earlier this year that we've gone through two years of transformation in just two months, and I would say that is definitely true. If you look both internally and bean our workforce, we have 4400 employees all of a sudden, 3000 of them that had been going into the office or working from home. And that is true of our customer base as well. There's a lot of remote, uh, remote employ, mental remote working, and so that has. You would think it would have impact on the digital systems. But what it's done is it's accelerated the transformation that organizations were going through, and that's been good in a number of different aspects. One certainly cloud adoption of clouds picked up things like Microsoft teams and collaboration software is certainly picked up, so it's certainly been a challenging year on many fronts. But on the on the other hand, it's also been very beneficial for us as well. >>Yeah, I've talked to so many folks in the last few months. There's silver linings everywhere. There's opportunity everywhere. But give our audience standing an overview of who them is, what you do and how you help customers secure their data. >>Sure, so VM has been in the backup businesses. What I'll say We started right around when virtualization was taking off a little before AWS and you see two left computing services on DWI would do back up a virtual environments. You know, over the last decade, we have grown into a $1 billion company doing backup solutions that enable cloud data management. What do you mean by that? Is we do backup of all kinds of different infrastructures, from virtual to cloud based Assad's based to physical systems, You name it. And then when we ingest that data, what we do is we begin to manage it. So an example of this is we have 400,000 customers, they're going back up on premises. And one of the things that we've seen this year is this massive push of that backup data into S three into the public cloud and s. So this is something that we help our customers with as they go through this transformation. >>And so you've got a team for a ws Cloud native solution. Talk to me a little bit about that. And how does that allow business is to get that centralized view of virtual physical SAS applications? >>Yeah, I think it all starts with architecture er and fundamentally beams, architectures. ER is based upon having a portable data format that self describing. So what >>does >>that mean? That means it reduces the friction from moving data that might have been born on premises to later being Stan Shih ated in, say, the AWS cloud. Or you can also imagine now new workloads being born in the cloud, especially towards the middle and end of this year. A lot of us we couldn't get into our data center. We had to do everything remotely. So we had to try to keep those lights on operationally. But we also had to begin to lift and shift and accelerate your point about silver linings. You know, if there is a silver lining, the very prepared really benefited. And I think those that were maybe a little more laggards they caught up pretty quickly. >>Well, that's good to hear stick big sticking with you. I'd love to get your perspectives on I t challenges in the last nine months in particular, what things have changed, what remains the same. And where is back up as a priority for the the I T folks and really the business folks, too? >>Yeah, I almost want to start with that last piece. Where? Where's backup? So back up? Obviously well understood as a concept, it's well funded. I mean, almost everybody in their right mind has a backup product, especially for critical data. But yet that all sounds very much the same. What's very, very different, though? Where are those workloads? Where do they need to be going forward? What are the service level agreements? Meaning that access times required for those workloads? And while we're arguably transitioning from certain types of applications to new applications, the vast majority of us are dead in the middle of that. So we've got to be able to embrace the new while also anchoring back to the past. >>Yeah, I'm not so easily sudden, done professionally or personally, Danny, I'd love to get your perspective on how your customer conversations have changed. You know, we're executives like you, both of you are so used to getting on planes and flying around and being able Thio, engage with your customers, especially events like Vermont, and reinvent What's the change been like? And from a business perspective, are you having more conversations at that business? Little as the end of the day. If you can't recover the data, that's the whole point, right? >>Yeah, it is. I would say the conversations really have four sentiments to them. The first is always starts with the pandemic and the impact of the pandemic on the business. The second from there is it talks about resource. We talked about resource management. That's resource management, both from a cost perspective. Customers trying to shift the costs from Capex models typically on premises into Op X cloud consumption models and also resource management as well. There's the shift from customers who are used to doing business one way, and they're trying to shift the resources to make it effective in a new and better way. I'd say the third conversation actually pivots from there to things like security and governance. One of the interesting things this year we've seen a lot of is ransomware and malware and attacks, especially because the attack surface has increased with people working from home. There is more opportunity for organizations to be challenged, and then, lastly, always pivots where it ends up his digital transformation. How do I get from where I used to be to where I want to be? >>Yeah, the ransomware increase has been quite substantial. I've seen a number of big. Of course you never want to be. The brand garment was head Carnival Cruise Line. I think canon cameras as well and you're talking about you know you're right, Danny. The attacks are toe surfaces, expanding. Um, you know, with unprotected cloud databases. I think that was the Facebook Tic Tac Instagram pack. And so it's and also is getting more personal, which we have more people from home, more distractions. And that's a big challenge that organizations need to be prepared for, because, really, it's not a matter of are we going to get a hit? But it's It's when, and we need to make sure that we have that resiliency. They've talked to us about how them enables customers toe have that resiliency. >>Yeah, you know, it's a multilayered approach like you know, any good defensive mechanism. It's not one thing it's trying to do all of the right things in advance, meaning passwords and perimeter security and, ideally, virtual private networks. But to your point, some of those things can fail, especially as we're all working remotely, and there's more dependence on now. Suddenly, perhaps not so. I t sophisticated people, too. Now do the right things on a daily basis and your point about how personal is getting. If we're all getting emails about, click on this for helpful information on the pandemic, you know there's the likelihood of this goes up. So in addition to try and do good things ahead of time, we've got some early warning detection capabilities. We can alert that something looks suspicious or a novelist, and bare bears out better investigation to confirm that. But ultimately, the couple of things that we do, they're very interesting and unique to beam are we can lock down copy of the backup data so that even internal employees, even somewhat at Amazon, can't go. If it's marked immutable and destroy it, remove it, alter it in any way before it's due to be modified or deleted, erased in any way. But one of the ones I'm most excited about is we can actually recover from an old backup and now introduce updated virus signatures to ensure we don't reintroduced Day zero threats into production environment. >>Is it across all workloads, physical virtual things like, you know, Microsoft or 65 slack talked about those collaboration tools that immune ability, >>so immune ability. We're expanding out into multiple platforms today. We've got it on on premises object storage through a variety of different partners. Actually, a couple dozen different partners now, and we have something very unique with AWS s three object lock that we you can really lock down that data and ensure that can't be compromised. >>That's excellent, Danny, over to you in terms of cloud adoption, you both talked about this acceleration of digital business transformation that we've all seen. I think everyone has whiplash from that and that this adoption of cloud has increased. We've seen a lot of that is being a facilitator like, are you working with clients who are sort of, you know, maybe Dave at that point you talked about in the beginning, like kind of on that on that. Bring in the beginning and we've got to transform. We've got to go to the cloud. How do you kind of help? Maybe facilitate their adoption of public health services like AWS with the technologies that the off first? >>Yeah, I'd say it's really two things everyone wants to say, Hey, we're disrupting the market. We're changing everything about the world around us. You should come with us. Being actually is a very different approach to this one is we provide stability through the disruption around you. So as your business is changing and evolving and you're going through digital transformation, we can give you the stability through that and not only the stability through that change, but we can help in that change. And what I mean by that is if you have a customer who's been on premises and running the workloads on premises for a long while, and maybe they've been sending their backups and deaths three and flagging that impute ability. But maybe now they want to actually migrate the workloads into E. C to weaken. Do that. It's a It's a three step three clicks and workflow to hit a button and say send it up into Easy to. And then once it's in AWS, we can protect the workload when it's there. So we don't just give the stability in this changing environment around us. But we actually help customers go through that transformation and help them move the workloads to the most appropriate business location for them. >>And how does that Danny contending with you from a cost optimization perspective? Of course, we always talk about cost as a factor. Um, I'm going to the cloud. How does that a facilitator of, like, being able to move some of those workloads like attitude that you talked about? Is that a facilitator of cost optimization? Lower tco? I would imagine at some point Yes, >>Yes, it is. So I have this saying the cloud is not a charity right there later in margin, and often people don't understand necessarily what it's going to cost them. So one of the fundamental things that we've had in being back up for a W s since the very beginning since version one is we give cost forecasting and it's not just a rudimentary cost forecasting. We look at the storage we looked compute. We looked at the networking. We look at what all of the different factors that go into a policy, and we will tell them in advance what it's going to cost. That way you don't end up in a position where you're paying a lot more than you expected to pay. And so giving that transparency, giving the the visibility into what the costs of the cloud migration and adoption are going to be is a critical motivator for customers actually to use our software. >>Awesome. And Dave, I'm curious if we look at some of the things trends wise that have gone on, what are you seeing? I t folks in terms of work from home, the remote workers, but I am imagine they're getting their hands on this. But do you expect that a good amount of certain types of folks from industries won't go back into the office because I ts realizing, like more cost optimization? Zor Hey, we don't need to be on site because we can leverage cloud capabilities. >>Yeah, I think it works, actually, in both directions least, I think we'll see employees continue to work remotely, so the notion of skyscrapers being filled with tens of thousands of people, you know, knowledge workers, as they were once called back in the day. That may not come to pass at least any time soon. But conversely to your point everybody getting back into the data center, you know, from a business perspective, the vast majorities of CEO so they don't wanna be in the real estate business. They don't wanna be in the brick and mortar and the power cooling the facilities business. So >>that was >>a trend that was already directionally happening. And just as an accelerant, I think 2000 and 20 and probably 2021 at least the first half just continues that trend. >>Yeah, Silicon Valley is a bit lonely. The freeways there certainly emptier, which is one thing. But it is. It's one of those things that you think you could be now granted folks that worked from home regardless of the functions they were in before. It's not the same. I think we all know that it's not the same working from home during a pandemic when there's just so much more going on. But at the same time, I think businesses are realizing where they can actually get more cost optimization. Since you point not wanting to manage real estate, big data centers, things like that, that may be a ah, positive spin on what this situation has demonstrated. Daddy Last question to you. I always loved it to hear about successful customers. Talk to me about one of your favorite reference customers that really just articulates beams value, especially in this time of helping customers with so many pivots. >>Well, the whole concept of digital transformation is clearly coming to the forefront with the pandemic. And so one of my favorite customers, for example, ducks unlimited up in Canada. They have i ot sensors where they're collecting data about about climate information. They put it into a repository and they keep it for 60 years. Why 60 years? Because who knows? Over the next 60 years, when these sensors in the data they're collecting may be able to solve problems like climate change. But if you >>look at it >>a broader sense, take that same concept of collection of data. I think we're in a fantastic period right now where things like Callum medicine. Um, in the past, >>it was >>kind of in a slow roll remote education and training was on kind of a slow roll. Climate change. Slow roll. Um, but now the pandemics accelerating. Ah, lot of that. Another customer, Royal Dutch Shell, for example. Traditionally in the oil and petrochemical industry, their now taking the data that they have, they're going through this transformation faster than ever before and saying, How do I move to sustainable energy? And so a lot of people look at 2020 and say, I want how does this year? Or, you know, this is not the transformation I want. I actually take the reverse of that. The customers that we have right now are taking the data sets that they have, and they're actually optimizing for a more sustainable future, a better future for us and for our Children. And I think that's a fantastic thing, and being obviously helps in that transformation. >>That's excellent. And I agree with you, Danny, you know, the necessity is the mother of invention. And sometimes when all of these challenges air exposed, it's hard right away to see what are the what are the positives right? What are the opportunities? But from a business perspective is you guys were talking about the beginning of our segment, you know, in the beginning was keeping the lights on. Well, now we've got to get from keeping the lights on, too. Surviving to pivoting well to thriving. So that hopefully 2021 this is good as everybody hopes it's going to be. Right, Dave? >>Yeah, absolutely. It's all data driven and you're right. We have to move from keep the lights up on going the operational aspect to growing the business in new ways and ideally transforming the business in new ways. And you can see we hit on digital transformation a number of times. Why? Because its data driven, Why do we intercept that with being well? Because if it's important to you, it's probably backed up and held for long term safekeeping. So we want to be able to better leverage the data like Danny mentioned with Ducks Unlimited. >>And of course, as we know, data volumes are only growing. So next time you're on day, you have to play us out with one of your guitars. Deal >>definitely, definitely will. >>Excellent for Dave Russell and Danny Allen. I'm Lisa Martin. Guys, thank you so much for joining. You're watching the Cube

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM on 2020. Brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back. I'm Stew Minimum. And and this is the Cube's coverage of VM on 2020 online this year. We've done the event for many years and being able to reach the team executives, some of their partners and the like where they are around the globe really excited to be able to dig in. And we're gonna talk some numbers, the analysis and to help me do that. I've got to VM Cube alumni. We've had them on the Cube before. They were being always excited to get the talk of them and dig into the numbers with them now that they are at VM. Dave Russell is the vice president of enterprise strategy, and Jason Buffington is the vice president of solution strategy. Both with beam. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>All right. First, I guess you know, let me ask how you guys doing? You know, we're having a little bit of ah, discussion before we came on here. As Do you know, everyone is now inundated with data and numbers and the like with this global pandemic. You know, Dave, how things doing in your neck of the woods, and, uh, and then we'll go to Jason. >>Yeah, well, you know, literally cannot complain. Personally, VM itself is doing incredibly well as an organization will double click on that here. But, you know, in terms of data, particularly as it relates to this space that we're in backup and recovery availability Cloud data management. The recent data for first half 2020 is actually fascinating. We're gonna double click on that a little bit more, right, Jason, >>we are now as far as how we're doing. You know, I've been at every team on that. We've had the 1st 3 is an analyst. Last two is a VP. I've never gotten to do one in my pajama bottoms, though, so that's kind of a nice changes to kind of mix it up a little bit. Um, but yeah, the other thing, which has been kind of fun is is that because we haven't been traveling, it really gave Dave and I had a chance to kind of get back to our roots a little bit and really dig into research. And how do you apply research to product direction and go to market? And so it's been a fun project that were culminating with was the motto >>Yeah, Jason, please don't be given out secrets. I'm not saying if you look up Dave Volante, Twitter, handle that. You'll find the suit on the top shorts on the bottom. Look, what I refer to is cube casual for some of these remote events. But, you know, you do have a breakout that you're doing really looking at digital transformation and I t. Modernization, you know, digital transformation. I'm sure you know you, both of you, from the analyst standpoint. For a while, it was a bit of a buzz word. You know, today, when you just with the backdrop of the global pandemic, it's like, Well, if you have had the the chance to go through the digital transformation, hopefully, you know, you get things put to the test, you're relying on data, you should be more agile, and those are all things that I think the remote workforce and what they're doing. But if you hadn't finish that or either started or in the middle of that journey, you know, big question is, you know, what are you doing? Will this accelerate it? Will it slow it down? So excited to dig into your CEO research? Why don't you give us a little bit of the background? How long is this going on? Who you're talking to is as part of this. This research. >>Sure. Well, as far as the research itself goes. So the team went to an outside panel and said, Hey, don't tell anybody who is from when you interview these kinds of personas in these kinds of folks. We did 1550 enterprises and by that definition, meaning 1000 users or not across 18 different countries around the world. And then we even ask some questions around. Not only what country are you in, but in what countries do you influence? Data protection, strategy and architecture? Everyone from I T architects all the way through csos were part of that survey. And we've got some great data back not only from an executive perspective of what are the expectations of i t, but also from the i t implementer anti architect's perspective on what are their real world challenges today and That's some of things that we were at being really keen to understand more, to make sure that we're building the right things and saying the right things for our customers and our prospects. >>Excellent. And maybe give us a little bit of a backdrop. You know, when I think about enterprise is, you know, we always talk about these mega waves. You know, The things that I talked about is you know, when I talk to the CSO suite, it's not that they have Well, you know, I've got a multi cloud strategy, you know, I'm figuring out how cloud changes what I'm doing. Digital transformation is one of those things that brings together, you know, the business and the I t. And hopefully you know something I know we've all been talking about for quite a long time. I t just can't be a separate thing. Or so you know, a cost center but needs to really respond to the business. What's that Backdrop of digital transformation and, you know, bring us inside a little bit what your learnings >>were. Yeah, to me. I think I like the notion of digital transformation because it's very specific to every business, maybe even every business unit, meaning it's not a case of a vendor saying, Here's what your project should be. Rather, it's more of a notion of whatever initiative you have to try to increase customer intimacy, to be able to contain costs, expand your reach. That's really what digital transformations here to support. >>Excellent. And Jason give us a little bit of color as you know, some of the finding. >>Yeah, so I mean, I think the big ones that we looked at were, you know, what were the major I t challenges you had overall, and maybe not so much of a surprise, but staffing and legacy infrastructure. We're still some of the biggest things that we're holding back i t organizations, which I think is especially interesting in the landscape, the world right now, right, Because your staff can't be in the places where they used to be and from a legacy perspectives to I know you love data as much as we do. Um, the you know, if if organizations are spending between 68 82% of their money and their dollars on the status quo, that doesn't leave a whole lot left for the things that you'd like to do, like improving customer experience like accelerating the employees of your business. So things like digital transformation tend to get hindered by the same stuff that tenders I t. Modernization and just hear the buzz words just trying to do better in I t. For the sake of the business. But really, those have been kind of big gaps. >>Yeah, I think Jason hit a key point. There's two of you know the issue right now is a lot of us are just trying to run the business like, literally keep the lights on. You and Jason mentioned the stats of high sixties low seventies just trying to keep status quo. The digital transformation, in my mind is about obviously trying to run the business while you're seeking to grow the business and aspirational, hoping to transform your business to really improve customer intimacy and success of end customers as well as partners. So if done right, pursuing digital transformation can help you with tactical needs as well. A strategic outcome? >>Yeah, you know, it's it's it's a little sad, I think, from an industry standpoint, you talk about how much money in time is spent on keeping the lights on. I feel like 10. 15 years ago, it was, you know, the 80 85%. If you're saying, you know, we've whittled away a little bit now in the low seventies, some really good companies, it's getting, but we haven't things yet. Um, I'm curious. You know, you have this position, they don't know that it was sponsored by VM. So how do cloud as a general technology and then, you know, data protection and availability specifically, you know, fit into the overall priorities for that that I t modernization. >>So there were There were two questions that we really focused on that they're my two favorite slides in the in the whole deck. The 1st 1 that I thought was really interesting is when we asked organizations, What does modern data protection look like? Or innovative? And I think we use a few different buzzwords along the way, and we asked them, check all of these capabilities that might apply, and then which one is the most definitive? And we actually got two different sets of answers depending on how you pivot that data. If you ask, uh, most common responses, Modern data protection looks cloudy, and what I mean by that is the top choices scored were the ability to do D. R as a service. The ability to integrate on premise and cloud based is part of your data protection architecture. And then the ability to move data from one cloud to another would certainly reinforces the fact that we are not only in a hybrid world but in a multi hybrid world as well. So if you're looking for most common answers, modern data protection looks cloudy. But if you flip it over and you say what is the most definitive feature, you actually get something very different. You find out that the ability to leverage orchestration and workflow, the ability to manage via AP eyes and systems management the ability to be part of a cyber security strategy. So what you see is that modern data protection in general has to be cloudy. But more importantly, backup should not sit on an island of its own. It should be a cohesive part of a broader I T experience that's managed by something broader that's part of provisioning a systems framework. So those two answers kind of Tell us what should we not only making sure that we continue to build on, but also making sure that we're communicating as far as you know, does being meet the bar for what organizations are looking for in a modern or innovative data protection strategy? >>Yeah, that's really interesting. You know, I guess one of the big things I've seen over the last 12 to 18 months is maturation of things like, you know, a really hybrid strategy. So if I look at the team, you know the most critical partnerships, of course, our VM ware from a historical standpoint and things like Microsoft going Ford in both of them have made big strides over the last couple of years as you not just, you know, on premises versus Public Cloud. But how do all these things work together? The discussions that we've been having about cloud is not necessarily a destination, but it's more of an operating model. And as people build out their architectures, the all the things you mentioned there, it's not a place or a destination, But it's more of that architect view and can live across lots of different environment. Does that make sense. Yeah, >>yeah, it's across. It's a horizontal play, really, It's not moving from Point A to point B. It's really embracing expanded choices. So you know what we found when we did? This survey is directionally where organizations are at the day with on Prem physical virtual going towards cloud and then how they responded their intention two years later. There weren't major surprises there, meaning the shift was increasingly more towards cloud. But it also wasn't a case that on Prem physical goes to zero. So any more than it's a case of an organization goes 100% all in on one hyper scaler, all the cloud provider. So it's really about supporting a mixed, and it's about offering choice because every business or maybe more specifically, every workload within a business might have their own natural migration associated with what they need to do what's appropriate, given their business realities and their desires. So if we double click on what's really important from backup, the number one thing that came back from our global survey which a little incriminating on the state of the industry was the number one thing that would make us want to change our backup provider so that application would back up. That is an amazing, the shocking statement. That's like saying so. If you change cars, automobiles, what would you look for? First and foremost, and your response is an automobile that started. >>It was really scary right in 2020. So Dave and I have each been in backup almost exclusively for 30 years each, right and still you using label spell backup for almost the same length of time. And we've been doing this for a really long time. And in 2020 when I T pros were asked what would get them to change, it's they'd like it to work the way they thought it would when they bought it. I mean, that's just a really damning statement. And then beyond that, when the next drivers certainly economics came into play. So the number two answers were reducing hardware and software costs and improving. TCO nor I were two and three and then capabilities around, improving our P o rto SL A's and then ease of use. That kind of rounds out the top five with cloud coming in right behind that. So not a whole lot of surprise there, but what a terrible statement for the industry that we just like it to work. >>All right, how about some good news? What? What recommendations or guidance? Is there anything that you got out of it that you know, best practices or leaders in the space or what peers would recommend team to each other. >>So I think the two things that I took away that I thought was really interesting from a best practices and moving forward data reuse scored really, really high. So the interest in leveraging and the survey actually asked several different scenarios for what folks were either doing or aspiring to do around data use. And you can call it copy data management. You can call it secondary storage use cases. You whatever marketing buzz where you want. But the bottom line is, don't just put your data in the backup repository and wait for bad things happen. Do something with that data. Dev Ops Acceleration patch testing risk mitigation, quarantine for forensics for cyber. But there was a lot of of yes, we're starting to do. And also yes, we're aspiring. Over the next 12 months, I think data reuse was a really big thing that I was so glad that folks were getting along the way and then also the recognition that with the intolerance of downtime and the intolerance of data loss that was measured in the survey, it was really obvious that a lot more organizations understand they have to be combining not only backups but also snapshots and replication in a consistent way. Because you can't meet the SL is that most organizations have today. If the only thing you're doing is just nightly backup now the team, we would say, Great, you got to do snapshots you out of the replication. You ought to do backup. Please don't use three different tools times each one of those times, each workload. It's not economically or operationally viable. So certainly in that's good news for us, because we manage all three. But those were kind of two big drivers I was most excited about. >>And if I take what we got from the data protection report and then couple that with recent industry analysis reports from like I, D. C. And Gartner, I merge that together, I think one of the reasons why IBM has been very successful you know, literally knock on wood, but VM is up as a company 10% year over year, October 2 October arm Sorry, April. April and that's been true for all 12 years. That being has been shipping back of product, so in a tough time, actually doing extremely well. Still, hiring still expanding Gartner has beam for calendar year 2019 moving from number four in market globally. Toe number three i. D. C. Maintains beam is number one and market in Europe, one of the top five vendors. Three of the five, where negative year over year VM was the highest sequentially positive year over year positive. And I think the reasons why not going back to the survey in my mind was due to the software defined nature of the solution and what I mean by that in particular, why that has customer value, especially now in a current pandemic. Situation is you can leverage the existing infrastructure that you've got. We we've been around and remember the macroeconomic issue of 2000 and eight organizations held on to their assets much, much longer. Refresh cycles slowed down, so the ability to leverage the infrastructure that you have to scale out horizontally to be able to ingest more data to have a horizontal management playing. To be able to have a service repository that could include cloud and object storage just allows you to better leverage the investments you've made but deflects appropriately for workloads and to be able to expand into things like public cloud and object storage as you see fit. >>Well, David Jason, thank you so much for the update. Real pleasure to catch up with you Always. Always great big data with both. >>Thank you. So you could just be >>alright. Stay tuned for more coverage from VM on 2020 Online on stew minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2019 brought to you by Veeam! >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. We're here at the Fontainebleau Hotel. VeeamON day one of two-day coverage of the Veeam conference, very swaggy hotel. Dave Russell is here. He's the Vice President of NFI Strategy at Veeam. David, good to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> Thanks so much for coming onto theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks for having me again. >> You're very welcome. So let's see, you're well over, let's see, a year out, just about a year out of Gartner. Right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> And so okay you've been injected with the Kool-Aid fully, I presume, right? >> There you go, in the green, yes. >> But we're still going to talk a little bit about the magic water, but before we get into that, talk about your first year here. >> Yeah. >> Your impressions. Do they meet, exceed your expectations? >> It exceeded my expectations, but I can honestly say I'm not doing what I thought I was going to be doing here, but it actually turned out to be better. The other thing I will honestly tell you is I'm now on Pacific Coast time at the moment. Arizona, we're too unsophisticated for Daylights Saving, right so I'm either Mountain or Pacific but I'm Pacific now. But by 10 a.m. my time, I pretty much what I thought I was going to do that day is out the window and I'm doing something else and it's fun though. I mean now especially with the investment that we had earlier in the year and the cash reserves we ended last year with, looking at a lot of partnership capabilities, looking at ecosystem activities, certainly involved with customer activity. We're redoing our marketing and how we're focusing our go-to-market so it's a whole variety of things that sort of change hourly. >> So on the, I think we just talked about the M&A side. You've always been a dot connector in your, right? Because you talk to all the vendors, you talk to all the customers and you could see the picture. You have a huge observation space so part of your job on strategy is to try to what? Figure out where the gaps are. >> Yeah. >> And then drive strategy around do we build, do we buy? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah and it really does net down to what you said. It's a build/buy decision. It's an acceleration to market kind of decision and then the hard part is what are you willing to trade off and of course the real answer is as little as humanly possible. But you have to decide, just because you can do it, just 'cause you have the money doesn't necessarily mean you should pull the trigger. So if anything, it's curious because people like myself and a couple of my colleagues, we almost are more discerning. So we look at, okay, the technology, is it really viable? Do our due diligence, right? But then we also look at well, does this fit culturally? Is the integration point really there? Is the customer value really going to be significantly improved and if you cannot answer that very favorably, then keep the money. >> So you worked at IBM for a number of years, you worked at Gartner for a number of years. Now you're back working for a vendor. >> Yeah. >> Compare and contrast those roles. I mean Gartner, you do a lot of writing, you do a lot of traveling, you talk to a zillion people. I'm sure you talk to a lot of people here too, but you're coming at it from a very biased perspective whereas Gartner of course you're unbiased. You're serving the end customer. So talk about the difference in those two roles. >> So I approach it a little uniquely in that I'm biased. I mean I'm paid by a vendor, right? And so there's a certain inherent bias in there, but I go into a customer conversation and say "Maybe you shouldn't be using Veeam for certain things." So I'll give you an example. We have Unix capabilities with Solaris AIX. There are other vendors that do that even better than we do. They have rich application integration. If someone says that's my number one problem, honestly we're not your best choice. Now the reality is most of the world is moving towards more physical and virtual Windows and Linux. So I'll come in, say, a large enterprise and I'll say, "Okay, if you're like most shops," and I'll always undersell it. "Like probably 85% of your workload "is physical virtual Windows Linux." and they always interrupt me and go, "No, no, no, it's 92%." Like, "Okay, well we can help with that 92%." >> Yeah, yeah. >> The other 7%, I'm honestly going to tell you, we're not best of breed. >> Yeah that's a safe balance view that the AIX Solaris piece. >> Series. (Dave laughs) There's certain things. >> Yeah. >> We want to stick to our swim lane. We think it's a pretty wide lane, but there's no reason to come out of it. >> So your role as strategy, talk a little bit about how you're turning that strategy into action and specifics at Veeam. >> Yeah a big part of it has to do with cloud. >> I know that's the word that we've been talking about for a long, long time. So there's the aspirational aspect of Cloud and the operational. The aspirational is I want to be able to move in and out. I want mobility, I want the ability to exit. The operational is I want to be able to do this efficiently, meaning I want to be able to either send data to the cloud, my on-prem backup or I want to be able to protect SAAS-based workloads or infrastructure as a service workload so cloud-native workloads and then over time, I might want to be able to leverage that for something other than availability. So how can you rapidly make the data and only the portion of data that I need available to me when I need it? >> I was taking some notes during the key notes and I was just doing like a little, not really a tag cloud, but I was trying to identify as I heard them and grabbed them, the attributes of cloud data protection. I want to throw some out to you. You tell me. We'll play kind of word association, I guess. So I have fast recovery, API-based, open, simple, transparent, data-oriented, automated, cloud pricing, federated to accomodate the edge. Are these some of the attributes that we should associate with cloud data protection, maybe some of the things that I'm missing. How do you look at the attributes of a company and its products providing cloud data protection? >> Yeah so a big part of it, I actually like the phrase hybrid cloud even better than people say multi-cloud. The reason I like that is because hybrid presumes that you can have on premises as well. So like if it was the Dave and Dave company tomorrow, we'd probably be born in the cloud. Everything would be software as a service. We'd get some public cloud space. Now if we'd been in business for 20 years, we've got investments that we've made and we don't want to get rid of that any sooner than we have to. So hybrid cloud I like, but I think you nailed it in that what do every one of those attributes have in common? It's trying to get your most precious resource to you in a way that you want to consume it with as least amount of friction as possible. We want to reduce the aggravation associated with being able to access that rapidly. >> When you think about the customer conversations that you've had at Veeam and even going back to your Gartner days, I've always felt this notion of not hybrid, I see hybrid and multi-cloud as different. I've always looked at multi-cloud as multi-vendor. >> Yeah. >> Yeah I've got line of business, I've got shadow IT, I've got different IT projects and I've got multiple clouds and it's just, to me it was always less of a strategy than sort of this is where we are and now people need to put together a hybrid strategy. So IT's been asked to come clean up this mess as it always is. What's your take on the hybrid landscape and how we got here but more specifically, customer strategies when you consult with your customers? >> Yeah you're right that there's a lot of departmental buying, there's a lot of, in some cases, it's best of breed so I'm very willing to go look at multiple providers because I didn't sign up to go deploy the third best solution. Everyone wants what they think will be the most appropriate tool for them and rightfully so. So I think that's how we got, to your point, we didn't have a strategy that said I want 10 vendors. We arrived at an implementation choice that resulted in 10 vendors being deployed and then to your point further, then we had to layer on something on top of that. That's really where we come in and simple as it sounds, we really want to promote choice, choice of infrastructure, choice of cloud, choice of hypervisor, choice of operating system. >> So great discussion vector is the best of breed versus sort of integration. >> Yeah. >> And my question is that's been a decades-long. >> Yeah. >> Sort of trade-off that people have made. You see it in the software business, the hardware business and all through the industry. Is the API economy changing that. Can you be both, I mean Veeam, let's agree. Veeam is a best-of-breed provider. While your portfolio's growing, you're a billion-dollar company, you take a company like Dell who's got this ridiculously large portfolio. They can come into a customer and say well even with services or at IBM, we can wrap the big blue blanket around you and integrate everything. With the API economy, does that change the game on that argument of best of breed versus integration and convenience? >> It's a nuanced answer. The answer is a little yes and a little no. >> It depends, right? >> Let me decompose that because that's a cop-out, but the "it depends" aspect is really, APIs are wonderful to create an ecosystem and other integration points. If that's about offering your expandability to do something, that's a positive. If that really means that well because I can't deliver what you need, you got to go and write it yourself, that is a negative. So if the API is leveraging something for even greater value but beyond what the tools are originally designed to do, I think that's net positive, but if you have to exploit the API to just to get the product to work, why did I buy your product when I have to go hire someone to write code to work on your product? That's, you don't want that business. >> Okay so the last Gartner Magic Quadrant that came out was one that you sort of spearheaded back in 2017. It was like this perfect storm of backup analysts leaving Gartner and so there's been a little bit of delay in terms of the new one coming out which is coming our shortly as I understand it, but one of the observations that you can make if you look at the 2016-2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant is that Veeam moved from lower right to upper right which is rare. Can you explain that a little bit? You were saying that it usually goes in a different pattern. Elucidate, please. >> Yeah. Yeah so the magic in the Magic Quadrant is if you could actually jump from one quadrant to straight to leaders and that would be a very atypical progression. Usually it's a backwards Z. You come into the lower left, probably get over to the lower right, fall back, but go up to the upper left and then maybe you get to leaders in the upper right. The magic part in Veeam, the thing that they were able to do is go from visionary lower right to leader upper right. >> Okay and why do you think they were able to do that? I mean there are numerous attributes, but presumably 350,000 I think is the number of customers helped and so you've got a lot of references and proof points, the technology itself, but it's rare. Why do you think Veeam has been able to succeed in that regard? >> I think it's because Veeam has been good about getting answers to the most pressing problems. Again Veeam doesn't do everything. It doesn't support every single operating system, but the vast majority of the concentration of where customer issues are and where customer environments are getting deployed at, we can address very well and actually this weekend, I got here Friday night. So all day Saturday, all day Sunday and yesterday 'til 5 p.m. I took our SE training and so I've deployed Veeam, worked with active directories, all kinds of things for 72 hours basically and it was really that easy to use. In fact, my most difficult thing is I stayed in class until 6:30 at night because I'd never done active directory. I've never been an exchange admin before so I had to kind of come up to speed on those tools a little bit, but once I got that, the product was incredibly powerful, but also very intuitive. So you still have a little bit of that independent analyst DNA in you so I'm going to ask you to try to put that independent hat on. When you think about Veeam's traditional base of SMB, they're very successful there, obviously superglued itself to the virtualization trend. The last couple of years, Veeam has tried to move up-market, develop some relationships with some large players and has had some success there. Is the product well-suited for that larger enterprise and where do you see that going in terms of the up-market progression? >> Yeah so in theory, that's what I'm here to drive, the enterprise word is in my title, but in reality I focus more broadly than that. But if I just think about enterprise, I ran the numbers last week and company inception to date, we've actually derived over $2 billion of software-only revenue from the enterprise market and that's been accelerating. Now in 2017-18 and the first quarter of this year, almost $1 billion. So we're moving and we're moving fast. We had our sales kick off like most companies do. January, go to sales kick off and Ratmir says, "Hey don't chase just the big deals, the $2 million deals. "We've never sold a $2 million "without having a $200,000 deal first." The very next week, we got a $2 million deal on the first paper so he shot low. He should've said five million, but the interesting thing about Veeam and to answer your question, I think we resonate with the kind of challenges a large enterprise has. We allow them to move at their own scale if they want to move in a very large fashion, they can with Veeam. I would honestly tell them move as appropriate for you. As assets age, as you're willing to take on the change in an environment, do so, but I think Veeam is interesting. It's the same piece of software that I installed on my laptop this weekend that can also go to a Fortune 100 company. The same piece of software that manages 50,000 agents, we have at one shop, 50,000 Windows agents. We can do that with same code base and the only thing that's different is we just horizontally scale out how we deploy the capacity and then how we deploy the mover agents. >> I tweeted out this morning, Ratmir was standing in front of a chart with all these features and over the time and that's been part of the hallmark of Veeam is not checkbox features but real substantive features and you've had a consistent progression. Even Ratmir said, we don't have a big long-term roadmap that we share with our customers even internally. Yeah we have a direction and a vision, but very focused, almost like a bit of an Agile development methodology but the point is that, and you see that some companies are really good at this, some companies, not so good at this, but just consistently delivering features that are in-demand, that customers want, listening to their customers and just nailing it and that seems to be the hallmark of Veeam and as they say, some companies just don't have that in their DNA. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah I think what it really comes down to is at the end of the day, every developer thinks like a customer and they do that because they spend a lot of time on our Veeam forums and I'll be honest, when I was a mainframe backup developer, I didn't talk to that many customers. I was just writing code and I didn't know how people were actually putting the product to use in production. I didn't always know what feature might be most helpful for them. >> You were guessing. >> I was trying to think of the art of the possible, hopefully an educated guess, but I was really just trying to say what might be good, what might be of resonance versus actually having someone goes on a forum and says Veeam, what I would like you to do is X. That's one of the reasons why we do have, to your point, we don't have a 10-year roadmap where we say this feature is coming in 12 months, this feature is coming in 24 months. It's fluid and in some cases, we actually moved up delivering our physical agent management by a year because we started selling more and more of those and people said I need that feature functionality faster. We're willing to trade-off some of our other feature functionality. So if we can be, as long as we can continue to respond to the market, I think we're well-positioned. >> How does a capability like that surface itself? Obviously by talking to customers, but how does it get into the development pipeline so quickly? >> Yeah well in some cases, we've got a huge amount of not just, our part of R&D. It's the research, it's experimentation, it's incubation of new things. So when we find that sweet intersection point, then we can quickly operationalize that. In other cases, we just have to be nimble. We have to react fast. >> Is it a command and control culture though where somebody says okay this is what we're doing or is it more sort of the team gets together and says oh this really makes sense based on what the customers are telling us, let's go. How does that decision get made? >> Yeah well ultimately it is a command and control in the sense that our co-founder, one of our co-founders runs sales and marketing. Our other co-founders runs R&D and they ultimately get sign-off on their respective areas, but it is collaborative in the sense of we do bring forward, here's what we see in market, here's what see in our customer forums. Here's what our ecosystem of partners are telling us, here's our view of the top five things we ought to go do. >> I was struck by the other slide that Ratmir had. It was the $15 billion slide and it was probably, backup and recover was maybe I don't know seven out of the 15 if I remember, but there were all these other segments. It was sort of analytics and disaster recovery and data management, all new pockets of opportunity. $15 billion today, obviously growing with especially the cloud. How do you see that landscape and how does that affect the way you look at strategy? >> Yeah so I actually put that bubble chart together. >> Oh, I like it. >> The rationale between the bubbles, we have core, we put backup in the middle because that's what we do but also that's how we ingest data and now we can do other things around it. So the reason for those bubbles and they were of varying sizes and the bubbles were sort of in and out of to varying degrees the main backup bubble according to how much intersection we thought as a company we could have with that. Where we thought we could add value, where we thought there was an ecosystem potential. So for example, analytics. We're not going to become the next best analytics company tomorrow, not even years from now. We could partner and we can provide data and we get better access to data to be able to do that. So we'd want to facilitate that. In other cases, maybe we really do want to go own and acquire. >> Well and so to your earlier comments there, I didn't use the term, the phrase land and expand, but that's clearly what you guys are doing starting with the $200,000 sale and growing it to a $2 million sale. So those bubbles are potentially cohort sales. >> Yes. >> That you can sell sort of like bananas in bunches I like to say, right? >> Yeah. And part of that is who do you sell that to. And so if you're able to go and address some of those ancillary bubbles or markets, now you've got a different entree point into the organization. If you're already involved with an organization, now you can offer more value because you can get more out of your data that you've already protected. So it opens up new conversations for us to have. It opens up entirely new buying centers for us too. >> Well how is the role of whom you sell to changing? I mean it was backup admin historically, right or maybe a Veeamware admin. Veeam admin. How is that changing? >> So greatest example I would tell you are events. So we acquired a company last January or a year ago January called N2W Software. So they're predominantly at Amazon re:Invent conferences. You go to Amazon re:Invent and no one's heard of Veeam and if anyone's heard of either of the two companies, it's definitely N2WS and someone's seen it in the marketplace. That demographic tends to be totally different from the demographic if you go to the on-premises data center type of conference where they have heard of Veeam and it's a very different sort of mindset. To your point, they grew up in a very different landscape. Now instead of someone who's well-steeped in server storage and networking and maybe majored in one, possibly two of those things, now you've got a generalist where he or she is probably in their 20s, has a very different point of view of what it should take to get something working and has a very different view of how they want to be sold to, how you can go and reach them. >> So at the cloud show, there might be a development persona. >> Yes. >> That you're selling to. Obviously VMWare, VMWorld, we know what that is. It's IT guys, right, is the predominant and how do you see cloud changing that? Is it cloud architects or sort of cloud leaders? CTOs increasingly? Data Protection becomes more and more important to digital business. So how are you seeing that role change due to cloud? >> So right now we have to basically have more touchpoints. Our typical legacy fan of our customer, our customer base, our product's sweet spot still remains and it's in some cases will pull us into the cloud. In other cases, we have to go talk to someone that's entirely different. But again, that's more of an administrative view. But to your point, going up the stack now, if you go to the not even Vice President of Infrastructure, you go to the CIO, he or she says, "I am tired of thinking about boxes. "I am tired of thinking about where this resides. "I want to think business outcome." So for us that's actually a great conversation because it all comes back to data. That's what we're in the business of doing. We capture, protect and move data. >> So that brings it back to strategy. We got to run, but summarize in your words, just sort of the strategy of Veeam and where you see this whole thing going. >> Yeah I will simplistically say it's more of the same. We want to continue to offer what we think is a best of breed solution for on-prem and increasingly cloud availability, but also we want to offer real customer value in terms of now being able to leverage that data, get more value out of that whether that's DevOps, running analytics against that, security test patch, whatever it may be, we want to be able to give you just the data you need, so have granularity, and offer speed and ease of use to do that. >> So as data becomes more and more important, you're seeing companies go beyond backup, trying to get more out of there, their backup, moving to data protection, data management, not just an insurance policy anymore. Dave Russell, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with Peter Burris as my cohost. We're at VeeamON Live from Miami. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering IBM thing twenty nineteen brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back. We're here in Moscow, named North for IBM. Think twenty nineteen. I'm stupid. I'm unhappy. Toe. Welcome back to the program. A cube alone. Dave Russell, who is the vice president of enterprise strategy with Team and IBM partner Dave. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Hey, thank you for having against two. >> All right, S o. You know, big thing we're talking about here of the show. It's hybrid cloud. It's multi cloud and IBM, you know, spent, you know, big money to make acquisitions in the space to be there. Multi club. Something I've been hearing from theme for a number of years. Talk to us about kind of the relevant. Why beams here at this show? And we'll get into it from there. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, So I've been traveling the world. Really? You mentioned Barcelona just a moment ago. Been? You know, Barcelona, Vegas, a number of other cities really pitching beams, multi cloud capabilities and story. And the short version of it is we believe that all organizations are really multi cloud today. Whether they realize it or not, they're going to be more multi cloud in the future. And what I mean by that is if you think about availability, backup in recovery and replication, you know it's a Zurich zur stack. It's a ws. It's private cloud. It's obviously what you have on premise, and it's the stuff you haven't even thought about tomorrow. And you. If you want to make a little adjacent stretch, you can put software is a service. I think in there, too, So it's about really offering protection, but also portability. >> Yeah, absolutely. When you have that multi cloud world world, of course, data is one of the most important things and how to lie for you. No protect and secure my data and leverage that data is critically important. IBM has a lot of different pieces. Where's the intersection between vehement IBM? >> Yeah, it's actually pretty exhaustive. So I'm a former I B M for fifteen plus years still live in Tucson, where IBM storage has a big presence and, you know, so it's everything from tape. We still believe Tape has a role to play, by the way, actually just released some new tape capabilities. It's, of course, the servers that they offer, and as well as the GTS Global Services and IBM cloud, of course, were interact with but their storage raise their virtual ization solutions. All of that. We have hooks and integration into today. >> Yeah, IBM have a pretty broad and deep portfolio, so lots of places for for being too play Dave. If he had an announcement recently updated, you were just alluding to some of the function of what? Why do you walk us through what the latest is? >> Yeah, it's actually the largest in company's history, which is now eleven years shipping product as of today, which is three weeks ago today we released the product, but as of today, there's sixty four thousand downloads that's against the base of three hundred thirty thousand ish customers might be three hundred thirty two thousand, but sixty four thousand dollars in exactly three weeks. Couple of capabilities from a cloud perspective alone. We've got this kind of probability that we spoke about take any workload on premises or physical virtual that's running in your shop and to be able to move it somewhere else. Really, to click restores to be able to get Teo Zura zur Stak E. W s. From an IBM perspective, we can definitely support IBM cloud in that we've got beam availability suite for a W s, where we can take instances running in a Ws like Mongo to be Cassandra and bring that back. You may want to bring that back for safekeeping or even transformation on prime two of'em instance, we've got all kinds of interesting things to not least of which is called cloud Tear. It sounds like an archive solution. It's it's really not. We underneath the covers take what's on running on premises for you. Let's say you're a beam shop today, and we can take out those unused blocks, unbeknownst to you and stage als off objects storage. And we can optimize how we do that. Right? So we can make sure you avoid egress charges. We essentially short version of that is in active source side D duplication of optimizing the blocks in the cloud. And then we leave uninterrupted access to it on prime. You don't ever have to know what's in the cloud. Change your behaviour. Changed the application to update it. Those are just a couple of the many things that we introduced. >> Well, yeah, quite a few things there, Dave. You know, in a multi cloud world. Can you bring us inside the customers? You know, Who is it that teams working with there? You know, cloud architect. Seems like it would be different than kind of the traditional, you know, storage or system administrator there. You know, one of the things we worry about in a multi cloud worlds is I've got different skill sets I need for all of these and how their organizations manage that. And, you know, how is the organization shaping up? >> Well, today You're right. It can be dispersed people, you know, disparity, folks. You know, it could be the software as a service person. It could be someone that's used to thinking, say, a ws. And I know when we go as a company to ignite their conference when we go there because, Ah, company Ricard called and two ws that specializes in that the people that come up to that desk don't even know who I mean. So >> reinvent your saying for all it was on >> my bed yet. So, you know, they don't even know the on premise, right? They only know what their specific focuses. And so, you know, we interact with a multitude of different roles where they tend to unite is vice president of infrastructure. But it could be many different touch points. I think is an organization. If you're especially a C i. O, you're probably a little bit worried about how many different things are going on there. Can we have a common management plain? >> Yeah. One of the areas that's really interesting. We talk about the public clouds. IBM has a long tradition with kind of C. S, P. S and M s bees, the service providers ahs. You will where does seem interacted at that layer of the ecosystem. Yeah, >> well, we have really twenty one thousand different being cloud service providers today, some of which manage over one million different machine instances just themselves. So we did a number of actually updates for them as well. And that's actually one of the tape integration points we now offer tenant to tape ifyou're a cloud service provider to offer an additional capability. But we offered, you know, the engine, if you will, that people can build it back up as a service disaster, recovery as a service, a solution around. >> Okay. Excellent. And thiss new release. What was it called? Yeah. >> It's a long name. Its aversion nine dot five update for >> that That screams major release. Yeah, >> well, it's the importance of it belies the, you know, the Newman clincher. But, you know, the reality is it's the biggest in our history. >> Yeah. So, Dave, give us a little insight. You know, you're doing the presentation here at IBM. Think give us some of the the team present where we're going to be seeing the bright green throughout the show. >> Yeah. Yeah. So there's been a couple of different things taking place already. I'm really going to hit multi cloud. Very, very hard. Really? From a how you should think about. So I really intended to be so much a beam commercial we'll talk about, you know, unabashedly, what being capabilities are but really set up a thought process. You know, a framework I get to kind of play a little bit of my analyst role, but, well, how much you want, You know, approach this. >> Yeah. David, I'm glad you brought it up. I love when you get here. We put your analyst hat roll on. We can. You know, talk is analysts here when I look at multi cloud networking. Management and security have just been this challenge we've been looking at. We've made progress as a whole, but there's still a lot of concerns. And, you know, multi cod sure isn't simple for the enterprise today. Ah, where we doing well is an industry. I know there's some areas that Beam has specific expertise to help on DH solutions, but I won't give a critical eyes, too. You know, what we need to do is an industry as a whole to make things better for customers, You >> know, the number one thing I would say is have a design, have a plan, don't fall into this haphazard. And one of the reasons I assert that just about every organization is multi cloud is because no matter what size you are, somebody somewhere has deployed something in a cloud or two or more. And again, if you throw software is a service into that. Now, this's just geometrically expanded. But it hasn't been like a conscious design strategy. >> Yeah, in many ways that we used to talk about shadow it Teo and many thie old. It was we used to call it either silos or cylinders of excellent, depending on the organization that you lived into. The concern I have is we're kind of rebuilding these in the cloud. So how we've learned from the past, our customers, you know, the CEOs, the organization's getting a better handle around their environment today. Or are we failed to do what was done in the past? >> I think we're getting incrementally better. Obviously, some organizations are, you know, accelerating faster than others. I think initially, when people thought, well, I can lift and shift and life will be better. You know, I can just like I introduce server virtual ization. Now, everything's cheaper, and I'm going to spend a lot of money to do that, you know? Well, I'm going to go to the cloud. It's going to be cheaper. And I just doing the same exact capabilities, instances and deployment that I was doing before never really worked out. So I think if you're approaching us something fresh and new and trying to actually take advantage of those capabilities here in a better position. >> Yeah. So I had a really interesting discussion earlier today. Had had the heads of V M wears cloud a group in an IBM cloud on. Of course, one of them comes up is you know, are we just lifting and shifting or re transforming and how to developers fit into it? So I'd love to hear from a beam standpoint as that, you know, application, maturity and modernization happens. You know What? What does that mean to the VM portfolio? >> Well, I would be really exciting if we do see more of a development base because I think really then you can add on extensions to what? Today the team is a data capture retention engine. It's best known for backup in recovery, disaster, recovery. But it could be so much more than that. So just a quick commercial button integration. Answer your question of we can now stand up ad hoc, isolated instances of machines and you can run things on that like GDP are scrubbing. You know, you can also do what we call a secure restore you, Khun. Understand? Well or not, it has a virus associated with it before populated back into the environment. But as a application community, you may want to say tomorrow morning at ten AM I want thes ten servers stood up with fresh data so my team could go in there and now generate faster applications for the business. It's really a business transformation St That's why I think we need more developers. >> Yeah, I remember one of the demons I attended, the CTO of Microsoft came, and you handed out his book, which I read recently, and it was kind of that they called it. It's not like science fact. But, you know, you talked about about cyber security and the challenge we faced in, you know? Okay. The global terrorists are going to come, you know, wipe out, you know, the entire infrastructure, and it's a little bit close to home, you know, because you kind of understand the security threat. Where does seem fit into the security picture when it when it comes to multi cloud things like Ransomware and the like, >> Yeah, unfortunately, things are going to happen. And we know this because things are already happen to number of organizations. It doesn't, you know, really take too long to find somebody that's been affected by this already. And so when that happens, you need some first level step of remediation. You need to get back as fast as you can to known. Good copy of your data. You know, Certainly that's where beam comes in, but being ableto also have portability. What if we could go and take your Azzurri instance data? Do the bios conversion for you automatically and send that to Amazon or vice versa. So you can have another offline, baldheaded copy. Or, you know, in that ransom where notion I presented to you. You know what? If you have to go backto backups, put ransomware typically lies dormant before it actually deploys the payload. So you don't know exactly how far back you need to go. So with this capability, you could go back on ly so far as you need to me Because you could verify exactly when vulnerability was introduced. But do that in a way that's sandbox isolated off the network and not putting you at risk. All >> right, Dave gives little look forward. What would be it would be expecting to see from beam through twenty. Nineteen? >> Yeah, we're focused a lot on increasing scale way. Believe that were very easy to use. Solution. People say no. Simple, you know, flexible, reliable. We wantto keep enhancing that, but we're looking at additional work loads to protect all the time cloud capabilities to expand upon a new ways, though, to take what it has always been a data protection company and make it a data management company. Things we were just speaking about from a developer angle. You're going to see us go a lot harder on that. We have a significant amount of investment way Got the largest We believe storage software investment history of five hundred million ended last year with a rich cash reserves. So now, instead of busy trying to do stuff, we're also looking at busy. What else do we need to acquire? Potentially. All right, >> well, Dave, the Cube is really excited to be back here in the redone Mosconi. A little bit more glass, a little bit more light, a little bit more space. The theme is having its annual user conference at facility. We really like to the front of blue in Miami for people that are going or thinking about going to tell him what they should be expected if they attended. >> Yeah, well, you'll get to see live demonstrations of everything I've been speaking about and Mohr, you know, seeing is believing, right? It's one thing to have power point. It's another thing to actually see someone demo it. And some of our folks, they actually demo this live on stage mean they're not canned demos. They're actually going into real servers and doing things like having a virus infiltrate and then remediating from that. So you'll get to see that you get to Seymour of road map. You'll get to see more customers, success stories and our partner ecosystem. We have a huge number of partners, of course, IBM being one of them. But we'll have a whole legal system of people there as well that have built his business around. Wien. >> Alright, Dave, want to give you the final word takeaways as to the importance of what's happening here at IBM, think the partnership and beyond, Well, >> IBM like you mentioned. I mean, they're probably the last major portfolio vendor on the planet, right? And they do just about everything you can imagine. And so from a partnership perspective, there's there's no geography, There's no vertical. There's practically no cos. Size, and there's almost no technology that's untouched. So the opportunity to interact and partner is huge. We believe we can offer some advantages in terms of simplicity in terms of cloud mobility and exploitation of IBM infrastructure. And we're just happy to be here and view them as a very strong partner. >> All right, well, Dave Russell. Always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right. And we'll be back with more coverage here from IBM. Think twenty nineteen. Of course, the Cube will also be a giveem on May twentieth through twenty second at The Phantom. Blew in Miami, Florida on stew minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube.

>> Narrator: Live from Chicaco, Illinois. It's theCUBE Covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back in Chicago at VeeamOn 2018 #VeamOn, my name is Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, our exclusive live coverage of VeeamOn. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Cube alum Dave Russell is here. He's the newly minted VP of enterprise strategy at Veeam. Dave, it's great to see you again, thanks for coming back on. >> Thanks for having me, guys, what a difference the year makes. >> Yeah, so newly minted. Last year we had you on as Gartner Analyst, we've followed your work for years. I've personally followed you for, actually many decades. Going back to your IBM days. So, let's start. How'd you end up at Veeam? >> Unexpectedly, very similar to IBM to Gartner transition. Wasn't looking to make a change. Opportunity came literally out of the blue. So, this transition was also equally out of the blue. Some emails, phone calls started taking place over one weekend. Actually on a Sunday, so towards the end of the weekend. And, after a little bit of discussion of a couple of opportunities, and kind of looking at where I might be the best fit, and realizing that I really didn't think I was in a position to relocate. You know, me move the family, even though no one else said that I had to do that, I just felt like to do another position justice, you really have to be there. And in the situation with Veeam, I didn't think that was the case. I also thought I could jump in there, and they've got lots of other great people, I mean, Danny Allen is one of many examples. So I ultimately, from Sunday morning to, I guess, the following Saturday evening, some things were sort of in flight, and they landed where they did. >> So, California, of course as you know, doesn't have non-competes. People leave companies all the time. You were in a position at Gartner. You saw everything, from everybody. You did the Magic Quadrants for years, and years, and years, you had visibility on companies' plans. And now you're here, many of the folks that were customers, or people that you were advising are now competitors. How do you, as an analyst, and now a professional at Veeam, draw that line between what you can and cannot share? >> I don't want to make it sound too simple, but it's actually not that hard. And what I mean by that is, it's not hard, I think, for anyone that does an analyst job role, to understand how to compartmentalize. Right, you can't go and talk to a three-letter company, and then talk to a two-letter company, and mix the two conversations. And the same with transitioning jobs. When I came from IBM for 15 plus years, to Gartner, there were a lot of things I knew, of course, lot of things that I knew about even the backup space that I was focused on. I was the technical strategist for that product, development manager for that product. Even in Adjacent areas like storage, meaning storage arrays, my colleagues, new colleagues at Gartner would say, "I wonder what the road map is for that." And I would say, well I know what the road map is for that, >> Keep wondering. >> But you know, I'm not going to say anything. And no one asked me to, it was never that kind of situation. The same, I think is true right now. No one's asked me, "So what do you know?" In fact, I probably over-rotated, in that I literally shredded everything that I had, and took pictures of me shredding documents that I had. I literally took every drive that I have and overwrote it, not just deleted it, but overwrote it with multiple patterns and took pictures of that. Semi-ironically, I guess I'll just give this example, but kind of leave it at a high level. For a couple of days it looked like I was going to the West Coast. And so I shredded everything but their Magic Quadrant response, and then when I realized that wasn't the case I shredded that Magic Quadrant response. So, I had to reach out to Veeam and said, hey you know the thing I just shredded? Your marketing plan that you gave me in person two weeks ago, the Magic Quadrant response that I had already printed off and highlighted and done notes on. Can you resend that to me again, I need to re-read that. (laughing) >> Okay, so now, you've clearly had a choice of places to go, you're sought after, you've had an impact on the road map and strategy of many, many of these companies. Why Veeam? >> Well. I don't know if Veeam is going to love me saying this, but I thought there were two great opportunities, and I'm not kidding, I only looked at two, there were a couple more, but I looked only seriously at two, and for very different reasons. The reason that I really liked Veeam, was that their problems set, or what I thought I could offer was really different. It wasn't, hey we need someone to really focus on strategy and to navigate through, going through a financial transaction or an IPO situation, and what happens after that. It was more operational. It was more, we already are in the enterprise, but we need to go big in the enterprise. We already have some strategy people, but we need enterprise strategy. So it was more of an augmentation play. And I thought that was really interesting. I thought where Veeam is in its life cycle was interesting, not that a younger startup isn't also equally as compelling, but when I looked at where I thought I could be of value, and ultimately what was right for the family, it was, I thought, the best decision. >> Dave, you've been covering backup for a long time, but would it be safe to say that it's one of the hottest times in this space that you've seen, and why is that? >> I'm a Homer, so I'm going to say, I think I've been saying for 28 years there's never been a time like this in backup. But I actually think there's evidence to support that that's true. So let me give you a couple cases, or examples. Case in points. Every year I ask the question, are you more or less willing to switch backup vendors, is essentially the gist of it, and that was through my Gartner days. And there's kind of a scale, are you somewhat more willing to augment the solution, are you far more willing to augment the solution, all the way to, are you somewhat more willing to completely replace it, or far more willing to completely replace it. Long story short, the heat index, or I'm far more willing to completely replace the solution, is on the rise. And that kind of flies in the face of the myth that people don't switch backup solutions. The other thing that was interesting is, also drawing from my Gartner heritage, last December at a conference, did onstage polling, you could ask people questions, and one of them was: one year from now who do you think will be your strategic backup vendor? The top response is: we won't have a strategic backup vendor. That was 23% of the audience. 22% said it would be Veeam. And then you went down the list for organizations or vendors that have far more market share than Veeam. So, the fact that the majority of people say, basically out with everybody, and then the second highest response is: we're going to choose number four in market, based on market share. That's pretty, I don't want to say, can we say damning? Is that okay to say on here? Okay that's a pretty damning indictment of the state of the industry. >> So, I know you don't see the stuff, or maybe you do, some of it, but the stuff that the Wikibon research guys do. And they've just done some work, and I want to run it by you, and just sort of stink test it, if you will. Clearly we've been talking all day that data protection is moving up in the minds of CXOs. I mean, that's kind of well-known. But, they discovered a dichotomy between the business and IT with respect to the degrees of automation. In other words the business expects that there's far more automation than actually exists. And that's leading, in their conclusion, to what you were saying before is, a lot of opportunities for customer churn. It seems to be very churn-ripe environment. And the other piece that I'd love your comment on is, the Global 2000 generally, specifically, really, the Fortune 1000, is leaving billions of dollars on the table over, let's say, a three or four year period in either inadequate data protection or poorly architected data protection. So do some of those findings jive with your experience and your knowledge of the marketplace? >> Yeah they really do, because the last three years at Gartner, one of the fun things I got to do, it was a little more horizontal, was participate in CIO level research. And there was like 4:15 a.m. phone calls for me, but it was still fun to do, because there was, I think 3700 CIOs participated from around the world. So if you look at the big takeaways from there, the short story is, CIOs think that they are much further along on their journey than they actually are. I don't think it's because these men and women are blind, it's just they're thinking that we've been talking about this for so long, haven't we automated more? Aren't we more virtualized? Aren't we more into the cloud? And haven't we done more of our objectives that we set out to do? The sad reality is, the case is often no. And if you look at backup and recovery in particular, I totally agree with you, I mean for the amount of money that's being spent in this industry, our rate of return is not so great. It's not a spending problem, to your point, you're spending billions and billions of dollars, on software and then you're spending even more billions on hardware, and you're obviously spending human capital to go and manage this stuff, and professional services, what have you. So how come we can't restore the file? >> Right. And essentially many parts of that business are failing. So we can do better, is your point. >> I wanted to ask you about the value of data. One of your former colleagues at Gartner, Doug Laney, wrote a great book. I got an advance copy, Doug's been on theCUBE many times. Infonomics is the name of the book, really talking about a methodology to understand the value of data. Do you feel like organizations, especially in this digital world, have a good understanding of the value of their data, and if not, how does that affect their data protection decisions? >> I'll give you the short, not so great answer, which is no I don't think that they do. But to elaborate on that, I think someone or some people do. I don't think that's distributed around the whole enterprise so for example, if I'm the backup person, I think I know what I need to go and protect. You might be the Cassandra administrator, and you say, no this is the future of our business that I'm actually instantiating this new application right here. Meanwhile I'm not doing anything to protect that whatsoever. So if I'm operating under an independent view, that doesn't align with the business, then we're in trouble, and I, unfortunately, think that's too typically the case. That all parts of the business aren't interlocked. >> Yeah, back to your point about some of the transitions happening in the market. There's a number of players that are putting forth primarily appliances, even though they are software based, and Veeam is 100% pure software, how do you see that dynamic playing the market right now? >> Well I don't think there are any wrong answers, I know that sounds like a weasel cop-out, so let me double click on that, >> Stu: You're no longer an analyst you can't say, "It depends." >> There you go, yeah, there are 16 shades of gray actually. So the part that I think is very positive, on an appliance delivery model is that solves initial deployment challenges, that solves proof of concept challenges, that's a wonderful thing to be able to say, "Dave I want you to go take this box and just try it." And then you say, "You know what, I do like that." Great, you can actually keep the car you just test-drove. We can cut a PO for you right now. So there's actually a value in my mind for that hardware delivery model. Then you get other customers, that are on the other end of the spectrum, right? I don't want to spend more money on your server, that you're going to charge me for when I actually have more buying power, if I'm a large size organization, I can go to name your server company and buy it for cheaper than you can. And what I've found is, what I used to do, at Gartner, ask questions of, what is your purchasing intention around backup and recovery? It literally became kind of right down the middle. Some people were moving away from appliances towards software base, some people were doing the opposite. Others were kind of of open mind somewhere in the middle. So at net net, I think anyone, whether you're a startup like, so let's just name names, Rubrik and Cohesity, they're today primarily sales motion of a hardware appliance, but obviously they offer a virtual appliance as well. You take the other end of the spectrum, someone like Veeam, where Ratmir's made it very clear, we are not in the hardware business. And you look around and you see, there are a lot of hardware partners. So at the end of the day, whether you own it or enable it, I'm not convinced is 100% the point. I think it's just really offering the choice. But more importantly, what's the experience of that choice? People don't want to be integrators, so that favors appliances, you would think, but maybe people don't want to be integrators, and if they have a tightly coupled solution. Where they don't feel like they're assembling it, but they also don't have to just buy whatever Veeam says is going to be the controller this year, then maybe that's positive too. >> What's your point of view, and it may not be Veeam's sweet spot, but I wanted to get your thoughts on this, when you look at an Oracle environment, and you see how Oracle approaches data protection. Obviously there's RMAN in there, but it seems like the database and the application take more responsibility for recovery in particular, and it seems to work quite well, but it's expensive. And it's probably overkill for most applications. Do you see that as a trend, or is that a sort of an isolated tip of the pyramid? >> I would've said years ago that I thought it was a trend. Because the notion of either a hypervisor, or an application being more aware of recoverability, or availability, would make a lot of sense to me. Because they understand more about what's going on in that particular system. The reality is, and Oracle does a number of great things, RMAN is wonderful, ASM is wonderful, they have a couple of different appliances, but I'll just leave it at the fact that that's not the predominant Oracle protection mechanism today even for Fortune 500, means that there's some sort of feeling that maybe that's not answering all of the issues. >> Is that you feel like that's an opportunity for Veeam then? I infer from your response. >> I do, and honestly, to be fair, I think it's an opportunity for others besides Veeam, But absolutely I think it's an opportunity for Veeam, because Veeam is trying to go in and further penetrate that space. Oracle is forever going to be vitally important. I don't think we're ever going to see a day where SAP running on Oracle on on-prem server goes to zero. >> Right. >> Dave on the keynote stage this morning you said you want to be a builder again, what do we expect to see from you in the next coming year? >> Well I think the big thing is, I have had the luxury of being able to listen to and advise people, and that's a, I was going to say blessing, that sounds corny, but it's a privilege. But I miss the direct connect, it'd be great to be able to really go to product groups and say here's what I think we need to do in the next rev of the solution. Or here's my rationale from talking to, either Veeam customers or Veeam prospects, about why they're not choosing us for some workloads, maybe it's high end work, Oracle. And be able to effect change. I really was serious on stage when I said, I view this as my last stop. This is my third switch or second switch and third company so hopefully I'm here for 10 or 12 years, otherwise that's a little premature of a switch. >> Well, Dave, congratulations on the move, and the new role at Veeam. Your reputation is impeccable, and I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Always good to see you guys, thanks for having me. >> Alright, you're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from VeeamOn 2018 in Chicago. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> We just started reselling Veeam We now have a combination of a very strong technology portfolio, deep integration, and a commitment to good market partnership. The combination, we think, will be very exciting for HP, Nimble, and Veeam customers in the years to come. (relaxed electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans it's theCUBE covering Veeam On 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Dave Russell is here. He's a vice-president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. David, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey, good to see you guys. Nice to see you again. >> So, we were talking off camera. I mean, you are probably the number one known backup, data protection analyst in the business and have been for quite some time. You've seen it all. Give us the state of backup, recovery, data protection, availability, whatever you want to call it. But where are we today? >> You know, in some regards, I don't know if we're any different than we were 28 years ago when I got into the business. The interesting thing is, my wife actually got into this before I did. We were both mainframe developers of backup at IBM and I didn't really want to get a real job. Maybe you could argue I still don't have a real job but what I wanted to do is to stay in grad school forever and I started doing backup there in grad school for undergraduate computing lab. And about six years ago, I showed my wife some of the polls that we do at Gartner events. We can do realtime feedback, what's your greatest challenge, what are your issues with backup? And then she said that was kind of interesting. Two years ago, she came to an event we did in Las Vegas and afterwards she came up and I was hoping she was going to say, "Hey, you did a good job." She said, "What in the heck have you been doing? "These are the same problems when I left the industry 20 years ago to be a mom." Everybody still has too much data, too little backup window, the cost is too high, the complexity is too great. So a lot of infrastructure changes but not a lot of the same pain points have shifted dramatically. What has shifted, though, is cost is even more important than it ever was. Obviously, we could talk about volume of data but now we maybe want to have multiple copies of even our backup data. We want faster access to that backup data. 'Cause we want, now, backup to be a high-availability replication solution not just the tape in the vault somewhere. So there's now speed requirements on our backup. So, I could keep going forever but I'll just let it out to say that as an industry, we still have many of the same challenges that we've always had, arguably for decades and decades. Now, the challenge is the cat's out of the bag, meaning the rest of the business sometimes is aware of just how costly this is. Just how difficult this is from an op-ecs perspective. We can't go hire five, 10 smart people to do this. >> And the backup window, is it correct to say it's essentially disappeared? >> Yeah, there's some organizations that really feel like we don't have a backup window 'cause if we just take a step back, what is really backup, nevermind how you could use it for other use cases like DevOps. Backup, if you state it in the most unappealing terms, it's how much data are you willing to lose, how much time are you willing to take to go get that aged copy of data. And, of course, the rhetorical answer would be well, I don't want any of those bad things to happen, right. But at the end of the day, that's really our frustration. >> David: And I want it back instantly. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so that's obviously putting great pressure on the businesses. So when you look at Veeam's ascendancy, I've been saying it all day and I'd like to test this with you, it sort of coincided, obviously, with VMware and when people had to sort of rethink their VMware backups. You just did a webinar entitled "Backup: Fix it or Ditch it." I feel like a lot of people went through that, answering that question in early VMware days. So, give us, what was the conclusion of that webinar? >> Yeah, well, the number one thing is frustration. And we've done a lot of drill down on what are you frustrated on. Number one is cost, number two is complexity and we could even break this up by large enterprise, mid-size, and smaller enterprise but there's a lot of similarities. So now, where do you come out on fix it or ditch it? The answer for many organizations, is a little bit of both. And what I mean by that, this is kind of mind-boggling, I think, is that backup space used to be sweep the floor. If you were in an incumbent vendor, you wanted to kick out any other solution, if you were an organization, you wanted to collapse from three, five backup products to one backup product, and if you were an emerging vendor, what do you want to do? Go kick out the incumbent vendor. But now, an organization says, "You know, maybe we'd like "to completely change, but we can't. "So we're going to try and fix what we've got." And that's usually what I recommend, at least try and get the value out of what you've already bought and deployed But we're going to implement something else, too. So, there's probably 15 years or more of trying to collapse the number of solutions. Now an organization says, not 'cause I want five solutions but because through pain, basically, not getting my needs met, I'm going to continue running two solutions or expand to two solutions. And you could argue Veeam invented that. They came in on the virtual end, exactly to your point, and then it was a land and expand. We see this happening, though, in the industry overall. >> Dave, I have to think that just the current state of cloud is compounding what you're talking about. Customers have their own data centers, they have virtualized environments. I think Veeam said this morning the average customer they have is only 75% virtualized so they've got 25 physical. Everybody's got SASS, everybody's using some public cloud, at least for some test data. Veeam says that they can now go everywhere but most customers are probably doing piecemeal deployments. Everything in IT is additive. What do you see, how does cloud impact that space in general? >> Well, my biggest fear on the cloud aspect, whether it's software as a service or public cloud, someone's going to rent you infrastructure, is that we're going to learn some lessons the hard way. Again, meaning that most organizations typically think well, if we went to software as a service, they'll take care of it. We have no responsibility anymore or didn't we "get rid of that problem" meaning backup or DR. And the answer is no. You're still the owner of the data. And where it gets shades of gray is that SASS provider's going to give you some level of protection, some level of backup. Chances are they're not going to give you everything you had when you had that email system on premise. So my fear is that organizations are going to suffer an outage and realize there is still a need for additional protection. Right now, many organizations, they're running a bit exposed or don't even realize that they're running a bit exposed. >> Yeah, what is the state of those SASS providers and public cloud providers? Is Veeam still best of breed to go in those environments or are we starting to see them all offer their own native pieces? >> Well, I think we're in a transition period because there's a number of third party solutions that can be good at handling this and you'd have to believe that ... So, take Microsoft for example. They're in the unique position of having had on premise applications and now having public cloud and so eventually, someone's going to say well, here's all the things we did for exchange on premise. Why can't we get all that availability beyond 60, 90 day retention if we go to SharePoint Online or exchange in Azure. There's a tension that's taking place right now. Right now, at this point in time, though, I think if an organization really wants to protect their data like they have and they're used to having been doing on prem, they're going to need a third party solution, whether it's Veeam or someone else. >> David, I want to ask you about your magic corner on data center backup and recovery software. It struck me that ... I don't want to overdo it. I know you guys are very sensitive about each quadrant and how customers should interpret that but we all do the same thing. We go right to the leader. People fight to be in the upper right. And it struck me that Veeam was the only relatively smaller company that sort of knows their way in there. And they're known for SMB but in the magic quadrant you were saying this is really the upper end of M and larger organizations. So what is it that sort of sets leadership apart and how is it that Veeam was able to get in there with those established, much larger players? >> Yeah, that's a great question because exactly what you said, the competitive response would have been isn't Veeam just deployed in small environments? And collectively, we take about two and a half thousand end user inquiry calls a year in backup. So we started seeing a number of trends a couple of years earlier that hey, Fortune 500 companies are deploying Veeam and it's not in the plant in Mexico City or in a small, little area. It's in the Detroit Motor City in the data center and we're seeing a bid for six figures or higher, in some cases. So that's when we started realizing, hey wait a minute. The point of being cast an enterprise supplier is to actually be in the enterprise. They're already in the enterprise. So that's what we started to notice and finally we said another issue we have with putting some of the leaders in quadrants, are they really leading the market or pushing the market? And we really felt that Veeam had kind of crossed over the point last year when we issued the quadrant in June that they were causing the market to shift, whether it was having better virtualization capability, changing to socket-level pricing, addressing ease of use. They were doing things and give sort of "extra credit" for a provider that can not only sense what the market is looking for but kind of push the market. >> Can you explain the socket-based pricing a little bit and how that affected the market? 'Cause I know a number of vendors have made some pricing changes. IBM in particular sort of said everybody can buy anything and use credits there and that was, I felt, a move to keep the install base where it is. Veeama interpreting was different with the socket-based pricing. What was that, did it have an effect on the market in any other way? >> Yeah, the short answer is it absolutely effected the market because you look at the number of heterogeneous backup vendors that have come out and now offer socket-based pricing. So they're doing this in response to Veeam. And what we see now is the organization, depending on who the buyer is, they have no idea what terabytes are. I know what server deployment we have, meaning how much socket we've got so it was just speaking to that constituency in a buying motion that they understood. >> Stu: Something they could quantify. >> Exactly. >> Veeam made a number of announcements this morning and some prior to the show. Anything jump out at you? CDP's one of the ones we've been talking the most. Maybe you could give us your quick competitive analysis of how that looks. >> Well, CDP was near and dear to my heart. In 2005, it was September 2005, almost the same day Microsoft came out with their data protection manager for CDP, Backup Exec came out with CDP. >> Stu: I was trying to remember when Kosha came out because I was at the company that acquired Kosha. >> Yeah, sure. So Kosha, Topio, you know, it can go on. And CDP, around 2005 and 6 was really a lot of buzz, going to change everything. The problem was it was difficult to do because thee infrastructure didn't facilitate it. So, back then you had to split the volume manager and have multiple rights. Now, today's announcement on CDP where you don't have to have a lot of extra infrastructure but it's the hypervisor that's splintering this off for you. IL filtering that's making this easier, making this actually achievable. I think that's going to be really compelling. Most people here I've been talking to say this is going to be great for critical applications. There were some shops I spoke with in the mid-2000s, you know, five, six, seven years, that said we use CDP even on general file systems and why? It's because if I keep making a delete and I call up the help desk and it's like, oh, Dave hit confirm to delete again. He called up to say can you get me my file back and it's the fifth time I've called this week. Well, data protection would allow us to go let him self-service perhaps, but definitely use less data. >> So, for Veeam to get that CDP granularity, if I could talk about that for a second. It's got to obviously rely on VMware APIs. Are you, I'm sure you're tracking this, but are you concerned about Dell EMC gaming the system? Historically, what have you seen there? Difficulty getting hands on SDKs? Trying to put the incumbent in an advantage. What are your thoughts on that? >> Well, you're right. Historically, especially at the storage rate perspective, proprietary APIs or sort of supporting SMIS but having quote "extensions" which are basically proprietary off to the side, were an issue. Here is a case where I think it's in the hypervisor's best interest, and soon it'll be in Microsoft's best interest with Hyper-V and you could go on and on about the other platforms to offer the capability as well. So there is a danger but I don't see how the sort of storage oligarchs are going to be able to fence that off in this case. >> Yeah, I call them the cartel. Is Veeam now, because of its ascendancy, part of that oligarchy? >> Well, I think you have to say approaching half a billion dollars in revenue, it's sort of like the enterprise question. How many enterprises do you have to get in before you enterprise? Well, how many hundreds of millions of dollars do you have to make before you're one of the big ones? >> What do you make of this messaging of Veeam, companies like Veeam, don't want to talk about backup anymore. Backups kind of past ... You see some start-ups like Datos the other day said no, no, we're not a backup company. Okay, and then there's shifting to this notion of availability. Does that resonate with customers? Is that the way customers are thinking about this or is it just sort of good marketing? >> It resonates with some customers. Now, personally, I like it 'cause to me availability is an umbrella. We can put backup and we can put disaster recovery and high availability under there. And maybe you can sort of find a way that DevOps and copy data kind of plays under availability. It doesn't actually work in all geographies. So, I was in Tokyo at a Gartner data center conference three weeks ago, I guess, almost. And they don't really, availability doesn't sound good and disaster recovery sounds worse because that meant you had disaster. So how much disaster recovery do you want to buy? Well, none because I don't want any disasters. So availability is a little regionalized. There are definitely some shops that just say look, I have a backup budget and that's what I need to go and do better. I have a backup pain point, etc. I think, though, whether it's replication and instant VM mounting and the notion of DevOps, we're seeing more and more organizations get their head around ... Whether they want to call it availability or something else but it's beyond backup. >> Well, what's come through loud and clear, however, is your point about cost. I mean, it seems like customers are still insanely focused on cost and that's because backup generally is insurance. So cost and complexity have to be minimized and a lot of the backup platforms that are out there are expensive and they're anything but simple. >> Yeah, and you look at the economics. We've seen negative pricing pressure on dollars per terabyte of backup software now for three years running. Now, list price and obviously, no one really pays list, but list price starting with just a small number of terabytes, some vendors were 10,000 dollars, some vendors were 14 and a half thousand dollars a terabyte and you and I go down to whatever shop and we go buy a terabyte drive, if you can find a one terabyte drive, for a couple hundred dollars. >> David: Four terabytes now. >> And obviously, the data written on it is where the real value is but you see the mismatch of I'm spending list price 14,000 dollars terabytes to protect 140 dollars worth of equipment. There's a problem here. So, whether you're the VP of infrastructure, the purchasing department, or just the backup admin that says I have a problem because I can't go buy now the agent for the database that I'm trying to buy 'cause we've already spent all this money on just the base backup platform. >> Yeah, there's really this 10 year pressure on all infrastructure pricing. Cloud, open source, is really putting pressure on that. So, David, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate your insights and keep up the great work. >> It was great to see you guys. Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. It's theCUBE, we're live from New Orleans, Veeam On 2017. (relaxed electronic music)

>>We're seeing green here at Vemo in 2022, you're watching the cube, Dave ante and David Nicholson wrapping up our second day of coverage. Dave, good show. Good to be, you know, again, good to be back. This is our third show in a row. We're a Cuban as well. So the cube is, is out there, but same every, every show we go to so far has been most of the people here haven't been out in two plus years. Yeah. Right. And, and, and they're like, Hey, let's go. Let's hug. Let's shake. I got my red band on cuz we've been on a lot of shows or just being careful <laugh> um, you know, Hey, but it's great to see people back, uh, >>Absolutely >>Such a different vibe than virtual virtual sucks. Everybody hates it now, but now it's going hybrid. People are trying to figure that out. Yeah. Uh, but it's, it's in your view, what's different. What's the same >>In terms of, uh, in person versus hybrid kind of what's happened since what's >>Different being here now versus say 2019, not that you were here in 2019, but a show in 2019. >>I, I think there's right now, there's a certain sense of, uh, of appreciation for the ability to come and do this. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, >>As opposed to on we or oh, another show, right? >>Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, and, uh, a personal opinion is that, um, I think that the hybrid model moving forward is going to end up being additive. I don't know that I don't, you know, people say we'll never go back to having in person the way we did before. Um, I'm holding out hope that that's not the case because I, I think so there's so much value to the kinds of conversations that we have, not only here on the set with folks in person, but just the hallway conversations, uh, the dinner conversations, um, those are so critical, uh, not only with between vendors and customers, but between different business units. Um, you know, I, I, I came into this thinking, you know, I know Veeam very well. I've known them since the beginning. Um, but you think I'm going to a conference to talk about backup software and it wasn't like that at all. I mean, this is, this is an overarching, very, very interesting subject to cover. So how is it different? I think people are appreciative. I wouldn't say we're backed full throttle a hundred percent, um, uh, back in the game yet. But, uh, but we we're getting there. Some >>Of the highlights Veeam now, number one, statistical tie for first place in revenue. There aren't a lot of segments, especially in storage where Dell is not number one, I guess technically Dell is like, I don't know, half a percentage point ahead, but Veeam's gonna blow by that. Unless Dell gets its data, >>Protect me as the luxury of focus, they can focus >>Like a laser on it focus. Right? That, that we, we saw this in the P PC where focused, we saw Dell's ascendancy cuz they were focused on PCs, right? Yeah. We saw Seagate on dis drives Intel and microprocesors Oracle on databases and, and, and Veeam applied that model to what they call modern data protection. Um, and, and the, so the reason why we think they're gonna go past is they growing at 20 plus percent each year. And, and I can almost guarantee Dell's data protection business isn't although it's been in a, I, I sense a downward slope lately, they don't divulge that data. Um, but if they were growing nicely, they would be talking about it. So I think they've been kind of hiding that ball, but Dell, you know, you can't count those guys out they're baby. >>No, you can't. And there's always >>A, they don't like to lose. They get that EMC DNA still in >>There. Yeah. You take, you can, you might take your eye off the ball for a little while to focus on other things. But uh, I think it'll be healthy for the industry at large, as Veeam continues to take market share. There's definitely gonna be pushback from, from others in the field, but >>The pure software play. Um, and you know that no hardware agenda thing and all that I think is, is clearly in Veeam's favor. Uh, but we'll see. I mean, Dell's got other, other strengths as do others. I mean, this is, this is, let's not forget this, this, this market is crowded and getting kind. I mean, you got, you got other players, new, new entrants, like cohesive in Rubrik Rubic, by the way is the one I was kind of referring to. That seems to be, you go to their LinkedIn, they seem to be pivoting to security. I was shocked when I saw that. I'm like, wow, is that just like a desperation move? Is that a way to get your valuation up? Is that, is there something I'm missing? I, I don't know. I haven't talked to those guys in a little bit, need to get, get there, but cause he and Rubrik couldn't get to IPO prior to, uh, you know, the, the, the, the, the tech sell off the tech lash. >>If you will Veeam, didn't need toves. We have 30% EBITDA and, and has had it for a while. So they've been, they caught lightning in a bottle years ago, and then now they got the inside capital behind them. Um, you got new entrance, like, like Kuo, you got com. Vault is out there. You still got, you know, Veritas is still out there competing and you know, a number of other, you get you got is wherever HP software landed in, in the MicroStrategy, uh, micro strategy. <laugh> um, no not micro strategy anyway, in that portfolio of companies that HP sold its software business to, you know, they're still out there. So, you know, a lot of ways to, to buy backup and recovery software, but these guys being the leader is no surprise. >>Yeah. You know, it's, I, I, I have to say it to me. It's a classic story of discipline >>Microfocus, sorry, >>Microfocus. Yeah, that's right. That's right. You know, it's funny. I, I, I could see that logo on a, I know I've got a notebook at home. Um, but, but theme is a classic example of well disciplined growth where you're not playing the latest buzzword game and trying to create adjacent businesses that are really, that might sound sexy, but have nothing to do with your core. They've been very, very disciplined about their approach, starting with, you know, looking at VMFS and saying, this is what we're gonna do, and then branching out from there in a logical way. So, so they're not out ahead of the tips of their skis in a way that some others have have gotten. And those, you know, sometimes swinging for the fence is great, but you can strike out that way also. And they've been hitting, you know, you could say they've been hitting singles and doubles just over and over and over again for years now. Well, that's been a great strategy. >>You've seen this a lot. I mean, I, I think you watched this at EMC when you were there as you, it was acquisitions to try to keep the growth up. It was, it was great marketing. I mean, unbelievable marketing cloud meets big data. Oh yeah. And you'd hear on CNBC. AMC is the cloud company. You're like, eh, fucking have a cloud. So, so you, you you've seen companies do that to your point about getting ahead of your skis. VMs never done that EMS like, eh, this is the product that works great. Yeah. Customers love it. They buy it, you know, we got the distribution channel set up and so that's always been, been, been part of their DNA. Um, and I think the other piece is putting meat on the bone of the tagline of modern data protection. When I first heard that I'm like, mm, okay. >>But then when you peel the onion on that, the core is back up in recovery, a lot of focus on recovery. And then the way they, I remember it was there in the audience when they announced, you know, support for bare metal, people went crazy. I'm like, wow, okay. They cuz they used to say, oh, never virtualization forever. Okay. So they beat that drum and you never say never in this business, do you, and then moving on to cloud and hybrid and containers and we're hearing about super cloud now, and maybe there'll be an edge use case there it's still unclear what that pattern is. You've talked about that with Zs, but it's not clear to me where you put your muscle yet in, um, in edge, but really being able to manage all that data that is people talk about data management that starts to be data management. And they've got a footprint that enables 'em to do that. >>Yeah. And, and I'd like to see that same discipline approach. That's gotten them here to continue no need to get on board a hype cycle. Um, what I really love from a business execution perspective from Veeam is the fact that they know their place in terms of the, their strategic advisory role for end user customers and their places largely in partnership with folks in the channel partners, large and small, um, in a couple of the conversations we had over the last few days, we talked about this idea that there are fewer and fewer seats at the table. Uh, working with customers, customers can't have 25 strategic vendor partners and a lot of smaller niche players that focus on something even as important as backup will pretend that they are, that they hold the same sort of strategic weight as a hyperscale cloud provider. Does they pretend that they're gonna be there in the CX O meetings? Um, when they're not Veeam knows exactly how to best leverage what they do with customers and that's through partners in the channel. >>The other thing is, um, new CEO, a non Eron, uh, the fifth CEO, I think I'm correct. Is that right at, at VE yes. Um, so two founders, uh, and then when Peter McKay came on, he was co CEO. Um, and then, um, yep. And let's see, I think yep. You the fifth. Okay. So each of the CEOs kind of had their own mark. Right. Um, and we asked an on in the analyst thing, what do you want your legacy to be? And I, I loved his answer. He's like, this is a fragmented business with a lot of adjacencies and we are the leader in revenue, but we only have 12% revenue share. I want to take that to 25%, 40%. That's like EMC at 30 plus percent of the storage market, Cisco of 60% of the networking market. Wow. If anybody could ever get there, but so 25 to 30% of a market that's that's big. Yeah. I liked his demeanor thought he had a really good style philosophy. Well-spoken well spoken. So new leadership, obviously insight brought him in to take them to the next level. Um, and, and really drive. I gotta believe get ready for IPO. We kind of admitted that. >>Yeah. And I, and IPO for them, one thing he mentioned is that, um, in this case, this is not an IPO let's high five and go to Vegas and get table service because now we finally have money. Uh, they're not doing, you know, obviously an injection in capital from an IPO is always a good thing or should be a good thing if handled properly, but that's not their primary driver. So it'll be very interesting to see if they can hit the timing. Right. Um, how that, how that works out >>Well and, and bill large is his was predecessor. Uh, he, he, he took over, uh, once the company, excuse me, went private. Um, >>Yeah, that phone backed up. >>I still good in the mic once the company went private, uh, well, no, they were always private. Once they got acquired for five plus billion dollars from inside capital, um, they, they put bill in charge, perfect choice for the transition. And it was like, okay, bill. It's like, when you, my brother's a sailor. He says, Hey, take, take the wheel, see that lighthouse or see that tree go for it, keep it on track. And that's what bill did. Perfect. And he knew the company knew where all the skeletons were buried and, and was perfect. Perfect transition for that. Now they're bringing in somebody who they feel can take it to the next level. They're at a billion. He said he could see 5 billion and, and beyond. So that's kind of cool. Um, the other thing was ecosystem as companies got a really robust ecosystem, all the storage array vendors came on. >>The, the, the backup appliance companies, you know, came on to the cube and had a presence here. Why? Because this is where all the customers are. This is the leader in backup in recovery. Yeah. They all want to partner with that leader. Now they're at out the other shows as well, uh, for the Veeam competitors, but frankly, Veeam, Veeam competitors. They don't have, like you said, they're pure play. Many of them don't have a show like this, or it's a smaller event. Um, and so they gotta be here. Uh, and I think the, the, the other thing was the ransomware study. What I really liked about Veeam is they not only just talked about it, they not only talked about their solution. They sh they did deep dive surveys and shared a ton of data with guys that knew data. Um, Dave Russell and Jason Buffington, both former analysts, Russell was a Gartner very well respected top Gartner analyst for years. Jason buff, Buffington at ESG who those guys did always did some really good, still do deep research. So you had them representing that data, but sharing it with the community, of course, it's, it's gonna be somewhat self-serving, but it wasn't as blatant. It that wasn't nearly as blatant as I often see with these surveys, gender surveys, I'll look at 'em. I can tell within like, seconds, whether it's just a bunch of marketing, you know, what, or there's real substance. Yeah. And this one had real substance to >>It. Yeah. And it's okay. When substance supports your business model. >>Yeah. Cool. >>It's great. Good >>Marketing. But yeah, as an best marketing, I'm not gonna use it. The whole industry can use this and build on it. Yeah. I think there were a lot of unanswered questions. I, what I love about Vema is they're going back and they, they did it in February. They, they updated it just recently. Now they're going back and doing more cuz they want to get it by country. So they're making investments. And then they're sharing that with the industry. I love that. >>It'll be interesting to see if they continue it over time, how things change if things change. Um, one of the things that we really didn't talk a lot about is, uh, and you know, it's, I know it's talked about behind closed doors, um, this idea of, uh, stockpiling day zero exploits, and the fact that a lot of these, these >>Things, >>A lot of these problems arguably could have been headed off, had our taxpayer funded organizations, shared information with private industry in a more timely fashion. Um, um, we had, um, uh, uh, was it, uh, Gina from AWS who gave the example of, uh, the not Petia, uh, experience in the hospital environment. And that came directly out of frankly a day zero exploit that the NSA had identified years earlier within Microsoft's operating system. And, uh, somehow others got ahold of that and used it for nefarious means. So the intent to stockpile and hang onto these things is always, um, noble, but sometimes the result is, uh, less than desirable. So that's, it'll be an interesting conversation. >>We'd be remiss if we didn't mention the, the casting acquisition, the, the, the container data protection, small piece of the business today. Uh, but strategic in the sense that, yeah, absolutely. If you want to appeal to developers, if, if, if, if, if you want to be in the cloud, you know, you better be able to talk containers generally in Kubernetes specifically. So they gotta play there as well. >>Well, they, they, they hit virtualization cloud containers. Maybe I'm missing something in between, but they seem to be >>Ransomware >>Catching waves effectively. Yeah. Ransomware, uh, catching waves effectively, uh, again, not in an artificial buzzword driven way, but in a legitimate disciplined business growth approach that, uh, that's impressive. >>And I, and I think Danny mentioned this, we, he said we've been a PLG product led growth company. Um, and I think they're evolving now. We talked about platforms versus product. We still got still a product company. Uh, but they're bill wants to build out a Supercloud. So we're watching that very closely. I, I think it is a thing. You got a lot of grief for the term, super cloud. Some people wince at it, but it's, there's something brewing. There's something different. That's not just cloud public cloud, not hybrid cloud, not private cloud it's across cloud it's super cloud. All right, Dave, Hey, it was a pleasure working with you this week. Always kind of funny. I mean, we're, the crew was out in, uh, in Valencia, Spain. Yeah. Uh, they'll in fact, they'll be broadcasting, I believe all the way through Friday. Uh, that's an early morning thing for the, uh, for the west coast and, but east coast should be able to catch that easily. >>Of course you can all check out all the replays on the cube.net, also YouTube, youtube.com/silicon angle go to wikibon.com. There's some, you know, research there I publish every week and, and others do, uh, as well, maybe not as frequently, but, uh, we have a great relationship with ETR. I'm gonna poke into some data protection stuff in their survey. See if I can find some interesting, uh, data there. And don't forget to go to Silicon an angle.com, which is all the news. This is the cube, our flagship production we're out at VEON 2022. Thanks for watching.

>>Hi, this is Dave Volonte. We're winding down Day two of the Cubes coverage of Vim on 2022. We're here at the area in Las Vegas. Myself and Dave Nicholson had been going for two days. Everybody's excited about the VM on party tonight. It's It's always epic, and, uh, it's a great show in terms of its energy. Danny Allen is here. He's cto of in his back. He gave the keynote this morning. I say, Danny, you know, you look pretty good up there with two hours of sleep. I >>had three. >>Look, don't look that good, but your energy was very high. And I got to tell you the story you told was amazing. It was one of the best keynotes I've ever seen. Even even the technology pieces were outstanding. But you weaving in that story was incredible. I'm hoping that people will go back and and watch it. We probably don't have time to go into it, but wow. Um, can you give us the the one minute version of that >>long story? >>Sure. Yeah. I read a book back in 2013 about a ship that sank off Portsmouth, Maine, and I >>thought, I'm gonna go find that >>ship. And so it's a long, >>complicated process. Five >>years in the making. But we used data, and the data that found the ship was actually from 15 years earlier. >>And in 20 >>18, we found the bow of the ship. We found the stern of the ship, but what we were really trying to answer was torpedoed. Or did the boilers explode? Because >>the navy said the boilers exploded >>and two survivors said, No, it was torpedoed or there was a German U boat there. >>And so >>our goal was fine. The ship find the boiler. >>So in 20 >>19, Sorry, Uh, it was 2018. We found the bow and the stern. And then in 2019, we found both boilers perfectly intact. And in fact, the rear end of that torpedo wasn't much left >>of it, of course, but >>data found that wreck. And so it, um, it exonerated essentially any implication that somebody screwed >>up in >>the boiler system and the survivors or the Children of the survivors obviously appreciated >>that. I'm sure. Yes, Several >>outcomes to it. So the >>chief engineer was one >>of the 13 survivors, >>and he lived with the weight of this for 75 years. 49 sailors dead because of myself. But I had the opportunity of meeting some of the Children of the victims and also attending ceremonies. The families of those victims received purple hearts because they were killed due to enemy action. And then you actually knew how to do this. I wasn't aware you had experience finding Rex. You've >>discovered several of >>them prior to this one. But >>the interesting connection >>the reason why this keynote was so powerful as we're a >>team, it's a data conference. >>You connected that to data because you you went out and bought a How do you say this? Magnanimous magnetometer. Magnetometer, Magnetometer. I don't know what that >>is. And a side >>scan Sonar, Right? I got that right. That was >>easy. But >>then you know what this stuff is. And then you >>built the model >>tensorflow. You took all the data and you found anomalies. And then you went right to that spot. Found the >>wreck with 12 >>£1000 of dynamite, >>which made your heart >>beat. But >>then you found >>the boilers. That's incredible. And >>but the point was, >>this is data >>uh, let's see, >>a lot of years after, >>right? >>Yeah. Two sets of data were used. One was the original set of side scan sonar >>data by the historian >>who discovered there was a U boat in the area that was 15 years old. >>And then we used, of >>course, the wind and weather and wave pattern data that was 75 years old to figure out where the boiler should be because they knew that the ship had continued to float for eight minutes. And so you had to go back and determine the models of where should the boilers >>be if it exploded and the boilers >>dropped out and it floated along >>for eight minutes and then sank? Where was >>that data? >>It was was a scanned was an electronic was a paper. How did you get that data? So the original side scan sonar data was just hard >>drive >>data by the historian. >>I wish I could say he used them to >>back it up. But I don't know that I can say that. But he still had >>the data. 15 years later, the >>weather and >>wind and wave data, That was all public information, and we actually used that extensively. We find other wrecks. A lot of wrecks off Boston Sunken World War Two. So we were We were used to that model of tracking what happened. Wow. So, yes, imagine if that data weren't available >>and it >>probably shouldn't have been right by all rights. So now fast forward to 2022. We've got Let's talk about just a cloud >>data. I think you said a >>couple of 100 >>petabytes in the >>cloud 2019. 500 in, Uh, >>no. Yeah. In >>20 2200 and 42. Petabytes in 20 2500 Petabytes last year. And we've already done the same as 2020. So >>240 petabytes >>in Q one. I expect >>this year to move an exhibit of >>data into the public cloud. >>Okay, so you got all that data. Who knows what's in there, right? And if it's not protected, who's going to know in 50 60 7100 years? Right. So that was your tie in? Yes. To the to the importance of data protection, which was just really, really well done. Congratulations. Honestly, one of the best keynotes I've ever seen keynotes often really boring, But you did a great job again on two hours. Sleep. So much to unpack here. The other thing that really is. I mean, we can talk about the demos. We can talk about the announcements. Um, so? Well, yeah, Let's see. Salesforce. Uh, data protection is now public. I almost spilled the beans yesterday in the cube. Caught myself the version 12. Obviously, you guys gave a great demo showing the island >>cloud with I think it >>was just four minutes. It was super fast. Recovery in four minutes of data loss was so glad you didn't say zero minutes because that would have been a live demos which, Okay, which I appreciate and also think is crazy. So some really cool demos, Um, and some really cool features. So I have so much impact, but the the insights that you can provide through them it's VM one, uh, was actually something that I hadn't heard you talk about extensively in the past. That maybe I just missed it. But I wonder if you could talk about that layer and why it's critical differentiator for Wien. It's >>the hidden gem >>within the Wien portfolio because it knows about absolutely >>everything. >>And what determines the actions >>that we take is the >>context in which >>data is surviving. So in the context of security, which we are showing, we look for CPU utilisation, memory utilisation, data change rate. If you encrypt all of the data in a file server, it's going to blow up overnight. And so we're leveraging heuristics in their reporting. But even more than that, one of the things in Wien one people don't realise we have this concept of the intelligent diagnostics. It's machine learning, which we drive on our end and we push out as packages intervene one. There's up to 200 signatures, but it helps our customers find issues before they become issues. Okay, so I want to get into because I often time times, don't geek out with you. And don't take advantage of your your technical knowledge. And you've you've triggered a couple of things, >>especially when the >>analysts call you said it again today that >>modern >>data protection has meaning to you. We talked a little bit about this yesterday, but back in >>the days of >>virtualisation, you shunned agents >>and took a different >>approach because you were going for what was then >>modern. Then you >>went to bare metal cloud hybrid >>cloud containers. Super Cloud. Using the analyst meeting. You didn't use the table. Come on, say Super Cloud and then we'll talk about the edge. So I would like to know specifically if we can go back to Virtualised >>because I didn't know >>this exactly how you guys >>defined modern >>back then >>and then. Let's take that to modern today. >>So what do you >>do back then? And then we'll get into cloud and sure, So if you go back to and being started, everyone who's using agents, you'd instal something in the operating system. It would take 10% 15% of your CPU because it was collecting all the data and sending it outside of the machine when we went through a virtual environment. If you put an agent inside that machine, what happens is you would have 100 operating systems all on the same >>server, consuming >>resources from that hyper visor. And so he said, there's a better way of capturing the data instead of capturing the data inside the operating system. And by the way, managing thousands of agents is no fun. So What we did is we captured a snapshot of the image at the hyper visor level. And then over time, we just leverage changed block >>tracking from the hyper >>visor to determine what >>had changed. And so that was modern. Because no more >>managing agents >>there was no impact >>on the operating system, >>and it was a far more >>efficient way to store >>data. You leverage CBT through the A P. Is that correct? Yeah. We used the VCR API >>for data protection. >>Okay, so I said this to Michael earlier. Fast forward to today. Your your your data protection competitors aren't as fat, dumb and happy as they used to be, so they can do things in containers, containers. And we talked about that. So now let's talk about Cloud. What's different about cloud data protection? What defines modern data protection? And where are the innovations that you're providing? >>Let me do one step in >>between those because one of the things that happened between hypervisors and Cloud was >>offline. The capture of the data >>to the storage system because >>even better than doing it >>at the hyper visor clusters >>do it on the storage >>array because that can capture the >>data instantly. Right? So as we go to the cloud, we want to do the same thing. Except we don't have access to either the hyper visor or the storage system. But what they do provide is an API. So we can use the API to capture all of the blocks, all of the data, all of the changes on that particular operating system. Now, here's where we've kind of gone full circle on a hyper >>visor. You can use the V >>sphere agent to reach into the operating system to do >>things like application consistency. What we've done modern data protection is create specific cloud agents that say Forget >>about the block changes. Make sure that I have application consistency inside that cloud operating >>system. Even though you don't have access to the hyper visor of the storage, >>you're still getting the >>operating system consistency >>while getting the really >>fast capture of data. So that gets into you talking on stage about how synapse don't equal data protection. I think you just explained it, but explain why, but let me highlight something that VM does that is important. We manage both snapshots and back up because if you can recover from your storage array >>snapshot. That is the best >>possible thing to recover from right, But we don't. So we manage both the snapshots and we converted >>into the VM portable >>data format. And here's where the super cloud comes into play because if I can convert it into the VM portable data format, I can move >>that OS >>anywhere. I can move it from >>physical to virtual to cloud >>to another cloud back to virtual. I can put it back on physical if I want to. It actually abstracts >>the cloud >>layer. There are things >>that we do when we go >>between clouds. Some use bio, >>some use, um, fee. >>But we have the data in backup format, not snapshot format. That's theirs. But we have been in backup format that we can move >>around and abstract >>workloads across. All of the infrastructure in your >>catalogue is control >>of that. Is that Is >>that right? That is about >>that 100%. And you know what's interesting about our catalogue? Dave. The catalogue is inside the backup, and so historically, one of the problems with backup is that you had a separate catalogue and if it ever got corrupted. All of your >>data is meaningless >>because the catalogue is inside >>the backup >>for that unique VM or that unique instance, you can move it anywhere and power it on. That's why people said were >>so reliable. As long >>as you have the backup file, you can delete our >>software. You can >>still get the data back, so I love this fast paced so that >>enables >>what I call Super Cloud we now call Super Cloud >>because now >>take that to the edge. >>If I want to go to the edge, I presume you can extend that. And I also presume the containers play a role there. Yes, so here's what's interesting about the edge to things on the edge. You don't want to have any state if you can help it, >>and so >>containers help with that. You can have stateless environment, some >>persistent data storage, >>but we not only >>provide the portability >>in operating systems. We also do this for containers, >>and that's >>true if you go to the cloud and you're using SE CKs >>with relational >>database service is already >>asked for the persistent data. >>Later, we can pick that up and move it to G K E or move it to open shift >>on premises. And >>so that's why I call this the super cloud. We have all of this data. Actually, I think you termed the term super thank you for I'm looking for confirmation from a technologist that it's technically feasible. It >>is technically feasible, >>and you can do it today and that's a I think it's a winning strategy. Personally, Will there be >>such a thing as edge Native? You know, there's cloud native. Will there be edge native new architectures, new ways of doing things, new workloads use cases? We talk about hardware, new hardware, architectures, arm based stuff that are going to change everything to edge Native Yes and no. There's going to be small tweaks that make it better for the edge. You're gonna see a lot of iron at the edge, obviously for power consumption purposes, and you're also going to see different constructs for networking. We're not going to use the traditional networking, probably a lot more software to find stuff. Same thing on the storage. They're going to try and >>minimise the persistent >>storage to the smallest footprint possible. But ultimately I think we're gonna see containers >>will lead >>the edge. We're seeing this now. We have a I probably can't name them, but we have a large retail organisation that is running containers in every single store with a small, persistent footprint of the point of sale and local data, but that what >>is running the actual >>system is containers, and it's completely ephemeral. So we were >>at Red Hat, I was saying >>earlier last week, and I'd say half 40 50% of the conversation was edge open shift, obviously >>playing a big role there. I >>know doing work with Rancher and Town Zoo. And so there's a lot of options there. >>But obviously, open shift has >>strong momentum in the >>marketplace. >>I've been dominating. You want to chime in? No, I'm just No, >>I yeah, I know. Sometimes >>I'll sit here like a sponge, which isn't my job absorbing stuff. I'm just fascinated by the whole concept of of a >>of a portable format for data that encapsulates virtual machines and or instances that can live in the containerised world. And once you once you create that common denominator, that's really that's >>That's the secret sauce >>for what you're talking about is a super club and what's been fascinating to watch because I've been paying attention since the beginning. You go from simply V. M. F s and here it is. And by the way, the pitch to E. M. C. About buying VM ware. It was all about reducing servers to files that can be stored on storage arrays. All of a sudden, the light bulbs went off. We can store those things, and it just began. It became it became a marriage afterwards. But to watch that progression that you guys have gone from from that fundamental to all of the other areas where now you've created this common denominator layer has has been amazing. So my question is, What's the singer? What doesn't work? Where the holes. You don't want to look at it from a from a glass half empty perspective. What's the next opportunity? We've talked about edge, but what are the things that you need to fill in to make this truly ubiquitous? Well, there's a lot of services out there that we're not protecting. To be fair, right, we do. Microsoft 3 65. We announced sales for us, but there's a dozen other paths services that >>people are moving data >>into. And until >>we had data protection >>for the assassin path services, you know >>you have to figure out how >>to protect them. Now here's the kicker about >>those services. >>Most of them have the >>ability to dump date >>out. The trick is, do they have the A >>P? I is needed to put data >>back into it right, >>which is which is a >>gap. As an industry, we need to address this. I actually think we need a common >>framework for >>how to manage the >>export of data, but also the import of data not at a at a system level, but at an atomic level of the elements within those applications. >>So there are gaps >>there at the industry, but we'll fill them >>if you look on the >>infrastructure side. We've done a lot with containers and kubernetes. I think there's a next wave around server list. There's still servers and these micro services, but we're making things smaller and smaller and smaller, and there's going to be an essential need to protect those services as well. So modern data protection is something that's going to we're gonna need modern data protection five years from now, the modern will just be different. Do you ever see the day, Danny, where governance becomes an >>adjacency opportunity for >>you guys? It's clearly an opportunity even now if you look, we spent a lot of time talking about security and what you find is when organisations go, for example, of ransomware insurance or for compliance, they need to be able to prove that they have certifications or they have security or they have governance. We just saw transatlantic privacy >>packed only >>to be able to prove what type of data they're collecting. Where are they storing it? Where are they allowed to recovered? And yes, those are very much adjacency is for our customers. They're trying to manage that data. >>So given that I mean, >>am I correct that architecturally you are, are you location agnostic? Right. We are a location agnostic, and you can actually tag data to allowable location. So the big trend that I think is happening is going to happen in in this >>this this decade. >>I think we're >>scratching the surface. Is this idea >>that, you know, leave data where it is, >>whether it's an S three >>bucket, it could be in an Oracle >>database. It could be in a snowflake database. It can be a data lake that's, you know, data, >>bricks or whatever, >>and it stays where >>it is. And it's just a note on the on the call of the data >>mesh. Not my term. Jim >>Octagon coined that term. The >>problem with that, and it puts data in the hands of closer to the domain experts. The problem with that >>scenario >>is you need self service infrastructure, which really doesn't exist today anyway. But it's coming, and the big problem is Federated >>computational >>governance. How do I automate that governance so that the people who should have access to that it can have access to that data? That, to me, seems to be an adjacency. It doesn't exist except in >>a proprietary >>platform. Today. There needs to be a horizontal >>layer >>that is more open than anybody >>can use. And I >>would think that's a perfect opportunity for you guys. Just strategically it is. There's no question, and I would argue, Dave, that it's actually >>valuable to take snapshots and to keep the data out at the edge wherever it happens to be collected. But then Federated centrally. It's why I get so excited by an exhibit of data this year going into the cloud, because then you're centralising the aggregation, and that's where you're really going to drive the insights. You're not gonna be writing tensorflow and machine learning and things on premises unless you have a lot of money and a lot of GPS and a lot of capacity. That's the type of thing that is actually better suited for the cloud. And, I would argue, better suited for not your organisation. You're gonna want to delegate that to a third party who has expertise in privacy, data analysis or security forensics or whatever it is that you're trying to do with the data. But you're gonna today when you think about AI. We talked about A. I haven't had a tonne of talk about AI some >>appropriate >>amount. Most of the >>AI today correct me if you think >>this is not true is modelling that's done in the cloud. It's dominant. >>Don't >>you think that's gonna flip when edge >>really starts to take >>off where it's it's more real time >>influencing >>at the edge in new use cases at the edge now how much of that data >>is going to be >>persisted is a >>point of discussion. But what >>are your thoughts on that? I completely agree. So my expectation of the way >>that this will work is that >>the true machine learning will happen in the centralised location, and what it will do is similar to someone will push out to the edge the signatures that drive the inferences. So my example of this is always the Tesla driving down the road. >>There's no way that that >>car should be figuring it sending up to the cloud. Is that a stop sign? Is it not? It can't. It has to be able to figure out what the stop sign is before it gets to it, so we'll do the influencing at the edge. But when it doesn't know what to do with the data, then it should send it to the court to determine, to learn about it and send signatures back out, not just to that edge location, but all the edge locations within the within the ecosystem. So I get what you're saying. They might >>send data back >>when there's an anomaly, >>or I always use the example of a deer running in front of the car. David Floyd gave me that one. That's when I want to. I do want to send the data back to the cloud because Tesla doesn't persist. A tonne of data, I presume, right, right less than 5% of it. You know, I want to. Usually I'm here to dive into the weeds. I want kind of uplevel this >>to sort of the >>larger picture. From an I T perspective. >>There's been a lot of consolidation going on if you divide the >>world into vendors >>and customers. On the customer side, there are only if there's a finite number of seats at the table for truly strategic partners. Those get gobbled up often by hyper >>scale cloud >>providers. The challenge there, and I'm part of a CEO accreditation programme. So this >>is aimed at my students who >>are CEOs and CIOs. The challenge is that a lot of CEOs and CIOs on the customer side don't exhaustively drag out of their vendor partners like a theme everything that Saveem >>can do for >>them. Maybe they're leveraging a point >>solution, >>but I guarantee you they don't all know that you've got cast in in the portfolio. Not every one of them does yet, let alone this idea of a super >>cloud and and and >>how much of a strategic role you can play. So I don't know if it's a blanket admonition to folks out there, but you have got to leverage the people who are building the solutions that are going to help you solve problems in the business. And I guess, as in the form of >>a question, >>uh, do you Do you see that as a challenge? Now those the limited number of seats at >>the Table for >>Strategic Partners >>Challenge and >>Opportunity. If you look at the types of partners that we've partnered with storage partners because they own the storage of the data, at the end of the day, we actually just manage it. We don't actually store it the cloud partners. So I see that as the opportunity and my belief is I thought that the storage doesn't matter, >>but I think the >>organisation that can centralise and manage that data is the one that can rule the world, and so >>clearly I'm a team. I think we can do amazing things, but we do have key >>strategic partners hp >>E Amazon. You heard >>them on stage yesterday. >>18 different >>integrations with AWS. So we have very strategic partners. Azure. I go out there all the time. >>So there >>you don't need to be >>in the room at the table because your partners are >>and they have a relationship with the customer as well. Fair enough. But the key to this it's not just technology. It is these relationships and what is possible between our organisations. So I'm sorry to be >>so dense on this, but when you talk about >>centralising that data you're talking about physically centralising it or can actually live across clouds, >>for instance. But you've got >>visibility and your catalogues >>have visibility on >>all that. Is that what you mean by centralised obliterated? We have understanding of all the places that lives, and we can do things with >>it. We can move it from one >>cloud to another. We can take, you know, everyone talks about data warehouses. >>They're actually pretty expensive. >>You got to take data and stream it into this thing, and there's a massive computing power. On the other hand, we're >>not like that. You've storage on there. We can ephemeral e. Spin up a database when you need it for five minutes and then destroy it. We can spin up an image when you need it and then destroy it. And so on your perspective of locations. So irrespective of >>location, it doesn't >>have to be in a central place, and that's been a challenge. You extract, >>transform and load, >>and moving the data to the central >>location has been a problem. We >>have awareness of >>all the data everywhere, >>and then we can make >>decisions as to what you >>do based >>on where it is and >>what it is. And that's a metadata >>innovation. I guess that >>comes back to the catalogue, >>right? Is that correct? >>You have data >>about the data that informs you as to where it is and how to get to it. And yes, so metadata within the data that allows you to recover it and then data across the federation of all that to determine where it is. And machine intelligence plays a role in all that, not yet not yet in that space. Now. I do think there's opportunity in the future to be able to distribute storage across many different locations and that's a whole conversation in itself. But but our machine learning is more just on helping our customers address the problems in their infrastructures rather than determining right now where that data should be. >>These guys they want me to break, But I'm >>refusing. So your >>Hadoop back >>in their rooms via, um that's >>well, >>that scale. A lot of customers. I talked to Renee Dupuis. Hey, we we got there >>was heavy lift. You >>know, we're looking at new >>ways. New >>approaches, uh, going. And of course, it's all in the cloud >>anyway. But what's >>that look like? That future look like we haven't reached bottle and X ray yet on our on our Hadoop clusters, and we do continuously examine >>them for anomalies that might happen. >>Not saying we won't run into a >>bottle like we always do at some >>point, But we haven't yet >>awesome. We've covered a lot of We've certainly covered extensively the research that you did on cyber >>security and ransomware. Um, you're kind of your vision for modern >>data protection. I think we hit on that pretty well casting, you know, we talked to Michael about that, and then, you know, the future product releases the Salesforce data protection. You guys, I think you're the first there. I think you were threatened at first from Microsoft. 3 65. No, there are other vendors in the in the salesforce space. But what I tell people we weren't the first to do data capture at the hyper >>visor level. There's two other >>vendors I won't tell you they were No one remembers them. Microsoft 3 65. We weren't the first one to for that, but we're now >>the largest. So >>there are other vendors in the salesforce space. But we're looking at We're going to be aggressive. Danielle, Thanks >>so much for coming to Cuba and letting us pick your brain like that Really great job today. And congratulations on >>being back >>in semi normal. Thank you for having me. I love being on all right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. More coverage. Day volonte for Dave >>Nicholson, By >>the way, check out silicon angle dot com for all the written coverage. All the news >>The cube dot >>net is where all these videos We'll we'll live. Check out wiki bond dot com I published every week. I think I'm gonna dig into the cybersecurity >>research that you guys did this week. If I can >>get a hands my hands on those charts which Dave Russell promised >>me, we'll be right back >>right after this short break. Mm.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VEEMON 2022. We're here at the Aria in Las Vegas. Dave Vellante with David Nicholson, my co-host for the week, two days at wall to wall coverage. Jason Buffington is here, JBuff, who does some amazing work for VEEAM, former Analyst from the Enterprise Strategy Group. So he's got a real appreciation for independence data, and we're going to dig into some data. You guys, I got to say, Jason, first of all, welcome back to theCUBE. It's great to see you again. >> Yeah, two and a half years, thanks for having me back. >> Yeah, that's right. (Jason laughs) Seems like a blur. >> No doubt. >> But so here's the thing as analysts, you can appreciate this, the trend is your friend, right? and everybody just inundates you with now, ransomware. It's the trend. So you get everybody's talking about the ransomware, cyber resiliency, immutability, air gaps, et cetera. Okay, great. Technology's there, it's kind of like the NFL, everybody kind of does the same thing. >> There's a lot of wonderful buzzwords in that sentence. >> Absolutely, but what you guys have done that's different is you brought in some big time thought leadership, with data and survey work which of course as an analyst we love, but you drive strategies off of this. So you got to, I'll set it up. You got a new study out that's pivoted off of February study of 3,600 organizations, and then you follow that up with a thousand organizations that actually got hit with ransomware. So tell us more about the study and the work that you've done there. >> Yeah, I got to say I have the best job ever. So I spent seven years as an analyst. And when I decided I didn't want to be an analyst anymore, I called VEEAM and said, I'd like to get in the fight and they let me in. But they let me do independent research on their behalf. So it's kind of like being an in-house counsel. I'm an in-house analyst. And for the beginning of this year, in February, we published a report called the Data Protection Trends Report. And it was over 3000 responses, right? 28 countries around the world looking at digital transformation, the effects of COVID, where are they are on BAS and DRS. But one of the new areas we wanted to look at was how pervasive is ransomware? How does that align with BCDR overall? So some of those just big thought questions that everyone's trying to solve for. And out of that, we said, "Wow, this is really worth double clicking." And so today, actually about an hour ago we published the Ransomware Trends Report and it's a thousand organizations all of which have all been survived. They all had a ransomware attack. One of the things I think I'm most proud of for VEEAM in this particular project, we use an independent research firm. So no one knows it's VEEAM that's asking the questions. We don't have any access to the respondents along the way. I wish we did, right? >> Yeah, I bet >> Go sell 'em back up software. But of the thousands 200 were CISOs, 400 were security professionals which we don't normally interact with, 200 backup admins, 200 IT ops, and the idea was, "Okay, you've all been through a really bad day. Tell us from your four different views, how did that go? What did you solve for? What did you learn? What are you moving forward with?" And so, yeah, some great learnings all around helping us understand how do we deliver solutions that meet their needs? >> I mean, there's just not enough time here to cover all this data. And I think I like about it is, like you said, it's a blind survey. You used an independent third party whom I know they're really good. And you guys are really honest about it. It's like, it was funny that the analyst called today for the analyst meeting when Danny was saying if 54% and Dave Russell was like, it's 52%, actually ended up being 53%. (Jason laughs) So, whereas many companies would say 75%. So anyway, what were some of the more striking findings of that study? Let's get into it a little bit. >> So a couple of the ones that were really startling for me, on average about one in four organizations say they have not been hit. But since we know that ransomware has a gestation for around 200 days from first intrusions, so when you have that attack, 25% may be wrong. That's 25% in best case. Another 16% said they only got hit once in the last year. And that means 60%, right on the money got hit more than once per year. And so when you think about it's like that school bully Once they take your lunch money once and they want lunch money, again, they just come right back again. Did you fix this hole? Did you fix that hole? Cool, payday. And so that was really, really scary. Once they get in, on average organizations said 47% of their production data was encrypted. Think about that. So, and we tested for, hey, was it in the, maybe it's just in the ROBO. So on the edge where the tech isn't as good, or maybe it's in the cloud because it's in a broad attack surface. Whatever it is, turns out, doesn't matter. >> So this isn't just nibbling around the edges. >> No. >> This is going straight to the heart of the enterprise. >> 47% of production data, regardless of where it's stored, data center ROBO or cloud, on average was encrypted. But what I thought was really interesting was when you look at the four personas, the security professional and the backup admin. The person responsible for prevention or mediation, they saw a much higher rate of infection than the CSOs and the IT pros, which I think the meta point there is the closer you are to the problem. the worst this is. 47% is bad. it's worse than that. As you get closer to it. >> The other thing that struck me is that a large proportion of, I think it was a third of the companies that paid ransom. >> Oh yeah. >> Weren't able to recover it. Maybe got the keys and it didn't work or maybe they never got the keys. >> That's crazy too. And I think one thing that a lot of folks, you watch the movies and stuff and you think, "Oh, I'm going to pay the Bitcoin. I'm going to get this magic incantation key and all of a sudden it's like it never happened. That is not how this works. And so yeah. So the question actually was did you pay and did it work right? And so 52%, just at half of organization said, yes. I paid and I was able to recover it. A third of folks, 27%. So a third of those that paid, they paid they cut the check, they did the ransom, whatever, and they still couldn't get back. Almost even money by the way. So 24% paid, but could not get back. 19% did not pay, but recovered from backup. VEEAM's whole job for all of 2022 and 23 needs to be invert that number and help the other 81% say, "No, I didn't pay I just recovered." >> Well, in just a huge number of cases they attacked the backup Corpus. >> Yes. >> I mean, that's was... >> 94% >> 94%? >> 94% of the time, one of the first intrusions is to attempt to get rid of the backup repository. And in two thirds of all cases the back repository is impacted. And so when I describe this, I talk about it this way. The ransomware thief, they're selling a product. They're selling your survivability as a product. And how do you increase the likelihood that you will buy what they're selling? Get rid of the life preserver. Get rid of their only other option 'cause then they got nothing left. So yeah, two thirds, the backup password goes away. That's why VEEAM is so important around cloud and disk and tape, immutable at every level. How we do what we do. >> So what's the answer here. We hear things like immutability. We hear terms like air gap. We heard, which we don't hear often, is orchestrated recovery and automated recovery. I wonder if you could get, I want to come back to... So, okay. So you're differentiating with some thought leadership, that's nice. >> Yep. >> Okay, good. Thank you. The industry thanks you for that free service. But how about product and practices? How does VEEAM differentiate in that regard? >> Sure. Now full disclosure. So when you download that report, for every five or six pages of research, the marketing department is allowed to put in one paragraph. It says, this is our answer. They call the VEEAM perspective. That's their rebuttal. To five pages of research, they get one paragraph, 250 word count and you're done. And so there is actually a commercial... >> We're here to buy here in. (chuckles) >> To the back of that. It's how we pay for the research. >> Everybody sells an onset. (laughs) >> All right. So let's talk about the tech that actually matters though, because there actually are some good insights there. Certainly the first one is immutability. So if you don't have a survivable repository you have no options. And so we provide air gaping, whether you are cloud based. So your favorite hyper-scale or one of the tens of thousands of cloud service providers that offer VEEAM products. So you can have, immutability at the cloud layer. You can certainly have immutability at the object layer on-prem or disk. We're happy to use all your favorite DDoS and then tape. It is hard to get more air-gaped and take the tape out drive, stick it on a shelf or stick it in a white van and have it shipped down the street. So, and the fact that we aren't dependent on any architecture, means choose your favorite cloud, choose your favorite disc, choose your favorite tape and we'll make all of 'em usable and defendable. So that's super key Number one. Super key number two there's three. >> So Platform agnostic essentially. >> Yeah. >> Cloud platform agenda, >> Any cloud, any physical, we work happily with everybody. Just here for your data. So, now you know you have at least a repository, which is not affectable. The next thing is you need to know, do you actually have recoverable data? And that's two different questions. >> How do you know? Right, I mean... >> You don't. So one of my colleagues, Chris Hoff, talks about how you can have this Nalgene bottle that makes sure that no water spills. Do you know that that's water? Is it vodka? Is it poison? You don't know. You just know that nothing's spilling out of it. That's an immutable repository. Then you got to know, can you actually restore the data? And so automating test restores every night, not just did the backup log work. Only 16% actually test their backups. That breaks my heart. That means 84% got it wrong. >> And that's because it just don't have the resource or sometimes testing is dangerous. >> It can be dangerous. It can also just be hard. I mean, how do you spend something up without breaking what's already live. So several years ago, VEEAM created the sandbox is what we call a data lab. And so we create a whole framework for you with a proxy that goes in you can stand up whatever you want. You can, if file exists, you can ping it, you can ODBC SQL, you can map the exchange. I mean, you can, did it actually come up. >> You can actually run water through the recovery pipes. >> Yes. >> And tweak it so that it actually works. >> Exactly. So that's the second thing. And only 16% of organizations do. >> Wow. >> And then the third thing is orchestration. So there's a lot of complexity that happens when you recover one workload. There is a stupid amount of complexity happens when you try cover a whole site or old system, or I don't know, 47% of your infrastructure. And so what can you do to orchestrate that to remediate that time? Those are the three things we found. >> So, and that orchestration piece, a number of customers that were in the survey were trying to recover manually. Which is a formula for failure. A number of, I think the largest percentage were scripts which I want you to explain why scripts are problematic. And then there was a portion that was actually doing it right. Maybe it was bigger, maybe it was a quarter that was doing orchestrated recovery. But talk about why scripts are not the right approach. >> So there were two numbers in there. So there was 16% test the ability to recover, 25% use orchestration as part of the recovery process. And so the problem where it is, is that okay, if I'm doing it manually, think about, okay, I've stood back up these databases. Now I have to reconnect the apps. Now I have to re IP. I mean, there's lots of stuff to stand up any given application. Scripts says, "Hey, I'm going to write those steps down." But we all know that, that IT and infrastructure is a living breathing thing. And so those scripts are good for about the day after you put the application in, and after that they start to gather dust pretty quick. The thing about orchestration is, if you only have a script, it's as frequently as you run the script that's all you know. But if you do a workflow, have it run the workflow every night, every week, every month. Test it the same way. That's why that's such a key to success. And for us that's VEEAM disaster recovery orchestra tour. That's a product that orchestrates all the stuff that VEEAM users know and love about our backend recovery engine. >> So imagine you're, you are an Excel user, you're using macros. And I got to go in here, click on that, doing this, sort of watching you and it repeats that, but then something changes. New data or new compliance issue, whatever... >> That got renamed directly. >> So you're going to have to go in and manually change that. How do you, what's the technology behind automated orchestration? What's the magic there? >> The magic is a product that we call orchestrator. And so it actually takes all of those steps and you actually define each step along the way. You define the IP addresses. You define the paths. You define where it's going to go. And then it runs the job in test mode every night, every week, whatever. And so if there's a problem with any step along the way, it gives you the report. Fix those things before you need it. That's the power of orchestrator. >> So what are you guys doing with this study? What can we expect? >> So the report came out today. In a couple weeks, we'll release regional versions of the same data. The reason that we survey at scale is because we want to know what's different in a PJ versus the Americas versus Europe and all those different personas. So we'll be releasing regional versions of the data along the way. And then we'll enable road shows and events and all the other stuff that happens and our partners get it so they can use it for consulting, et cetera. >> So you saw differences in persona. In terms of their perception, the closer you were to the problem, the more obvious it was, did you have enough end to discern its pearly? I know that's why you're due the drill downs but did you sense any preliminary data you can share on regions as West getting hit harder or? >> So attack rate's actually pretty consistent. Especially because so many criminals now use ransomware as a service. I mean, you're standing it up and you're spreading wide and you're seeing what hits. Where we actually saw pretty distinct geographic problems is the cloud is not of as available in all segments. Expertise around preventative measures and remediation is not available in all segments, in all regions. And so really geographic split and segment split and the lack of expertise in some of the more advanced technologies you want to use, that's really where things break down. Common attack plane, uncommon disadvantage in recovery. >> Great stuff. I want to dig in more. I probably have a few more questions if you don't mind, I can email you or give you a call. It's Jason Buffington. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, keep it right there. You're watching theCUBE's live coverage of VEEAMON 2022. We're here in person in Las Vegas, huge hybrid audience. Keep it right there, be right back. (upbeat music)

>>President. >>Hello everyone and welcome to wien on 2021. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of the event. You know, VM is a company that made its mark riding the virtualization wave, but quite amazingly has continued to extend its product portfolio and catch the other major waves of the industry. Of course, we're talking about cloud backup. SaS data protection was one of the early players there making moves and containers. And this is the VM on power panel with me or Danny Allen, who is the Ceo and Senior vice president of product strategy at VM. Dave Russell is the vice President of enterprise Strategy, of course, said Vin and Rick Vanover, senior director of product strategy at VM. It's great to see you again. Welcome back to the cube. >>Good to be here. >>Well, it had to be here. >>Yeah, let's do it. >>Let's do this. So Danny, you know, we heard you kind of your keynotes and we saw the general sessions and uh sort of diving into the breakouts. But the thing that jumps out to me is this growth rate that you're on. Uh you know, many companies and we've seen this throughout the industry have really struggled, you know, moving from the traditional on prem model to an an A. R. R. Model. Uh they've had challenges doing so the, I mean, you're not a public company, but you're quite transparent and a lot of your numbers 25% a our our growth year of a year in the last quarter, You know, 400,000 plus customers. You're talking about huge numbers of downloads of backup and replication Danny. So what are your big takeaways from the last, You know, 6-12 months? I know it was a strange year obviously, but you guys just keep cranking. >>Yeah, so we're obviously hugely excited by this and it really is a confluence of various things. It's our, it's our partners, it's the channel. Um, it's our customers frankly that that guide us and give us direction on what to do. But I always focus in on the product because I, you know, we run product strategy here, this group and we're very focused on building good products and I would say there's three product areas that are on maximum thrust right now. One is in the data center. So we built a billion dollar business on being the very best in the data center for V sphere, hyper V, um, for Nutanix, HV and as we announced also with red hat virtualization. So data center obviously a huge thrust for us going forward. The second assess Office 3 65 is exploding. We already announced we're protecting 5.8 million users right now with being back up for Office 3 65 and there's a lot of room to grow there. There's 145 million daily users of Microsoft teams. So a lot of room to grow. And then the third areas cloud, we moved over 100 petabytes of data into the public cloud in Q one and there's a lot of opportunity there as well. So those three things are driving the growth, the data center SaAS and cloud >>Davis. I want to get your kind of former analyst perspective on this. Uh you know, I know, you know, it's kind of become cliche but you still got that D. N. A. And I'm gonna tap it. So when you think about and you were following beam, of course very closely during its ascendancy with virtualization. And back then you wouldn't just take your existing, you know, approaches to back up in your processes and just slap them on to virtualization. That that wouldn't have worked. You had to rethink your backup. And it seems like I want to ask you about cloud because people talk about lift and shift and what I hear from customers is, you know, if I just lift and shift to cloud, it's okay, but if I don't have a plan to change my operating model, you know, I don't get the real benefit out of it. And so I would think back up data protection, data management etcetera is a key part of that. So how are you thinking about cloud and the opportunity there? >>Yeah, that's a good point, David. You know, I think the key area right there is it's important to protect the workload of the environment. The way that that environment is naturally is best suited to be protected and also to interact in a way that the administrator doesn't have to rethink, doesn't have to change their process so early on. Um I think it was very successful because the interface is the work experience looked like what an active directory administrator was used to, seeing if they went to go and protect something with me where to go recover an item. Same is true in the cloud, You don't want to just take what's working well in one area and just force it, you know, around round peg into a square hole. This doesn't work well. So you've got to think about the environment and you've got to think about what's gonna be the real use case for getting access to this data. So you want to really tune things and there's obviously commonality involved, but from a workflow perspective, from an application perspective and then a delivery model perspective, Now, when it comes to hybrid cloud multi cloud, it's important to look like that you belong there, not a fish out of water. >>Well, so of course, Danny you were talking to talking about you guys have product first, Right? And so rick your your key product guy here. What's interesting to me is when you look at the history of the technology industry and disruption, it's it's so often that the the incumbent, which you knew now an incumbent, you know, you're not the startup anymore, but the incumbent has challenges riding these these new waves because you've got to serve the existing customer base, but you gotta ride the new momentum as well. So how rick do you approach that from a product standpoint? Because based on the numbers that we see it doesn't you seem to be winning in both the traditional business and the new business. So how do you adapt from a product standpoint? >>Well, Dave, that's a good question. And Danny set it up? Well, it's really the birth of the Wien platform and its relevance in the market. In my 11th year here at Wien, I've had all kinds of conversations. Right. You know, the perception was that, you know, this smb toy for one hyper Advisor those days are long gone. We can check the boxes across the data center and cloud and even cloud native apps. You know, one of the things that my team has done is invest heavily in both people and staff on kubernetes, which aligns to our casting acquisition, which was featured heavily here at V Mon. So I think that being able to have that complete platform conversation Dave has really given us incredible momentum but also credibility with the customers because more than ever, this fundamental promise of having data backed up and being able to drive a recovery for whatever may happen to data nowadays. You know, that's a real emotional, important thing for people and to be able to bring that kind of outcome across the data center, across the cloud, across changes in what they do kubernetes that's really aligned well to our success and you know, I love talking to customers now. It's a heck of a lot easier when you can say yes to so many things and get the technical win. So that kind of drives a lot of the momentum Dave, but it's really the platform. >>So let's talk about the future of it and I want all you guys to chime in here and Danny, you start up, How do you see it? I mean, I always say the last 10 years, the next 10 years ain't gonna be like the last 10 years whether it's in cloud or hybrid et cetera. But so how Danny do you see I. T. In the future of I. T. Where do you see VM fitting in, how does that inform your roadmap, your product strategy? Maybe you could kick that segment off? >>Yeah. I think of the kind of the two past decades that we've gone through starting back in 2000 we had a lot of digital services built for end users and it was built on physical infrastructure and that was fantastic. Obviously we could buy things online, we could order close we could order food, we we could do things interact with end users. The second era about a decade later was based on virtualization. Now that wasn't a benefit so much to the end user is a benefit to the business. The Y because you could put 10 servers on a single physical server and you could be a lot more flexible in terms of delivery. I really think this next era that we're going into is actually based on containers. That's why the cost of acquisition is so strategic to us. Because the unique thing about containers is they're designed for to be consumption friendly. You spin them up, you spin them down, you provision them, you d provisions and they're completely portable. You can move it >>from on >>premises if you're running open shift to e k s a k s G k E. And so I think the next big era that we're going to go through is this movement towards containerized infrastructure. Now, if you ask me who's running that, I still think there's going to be a data center operations team, platform ups is the way that I think about them who run that because who's going to take the call in the middle of the night. But it is interesting that we're going through this transformation and I think we're in the very early stages of this radical transformation to a more consumption based model. Dave. I don't know what you think about that. >>Yeah, I would say something pretty similar Danny. It sounds cliche day valenti, but I take everything back to digital transformation. And the reason I say that is to me, digital transformation is about improving customer intimacy and so that you can deliver goods and services that better resonate and you can deliver them in better time frame. So exactly what Danny said, you know, I think that the siloed approaches of the past where we built very hard in environments and we were willing to take a long time to stand those up and then we have very tight change control. I feel like 2020 sort of a metaphor for where the data center is going to throw all that out the window we're compiling today. We're shipping today and we're going to get experience today and we're going to refine it and do it again tomorrow. But that's the environment we live in. And to Danny's point why containers are so important. That notion of shift left meaning experience things earlier in the cycle. That is going to be the reality of the data center regardless of whether the data center is on prem hybrid cloud, multi cloud or for some of us potentially completely in the cloud. >>So rick when you think about some of your peeps like the backup admit right and how that role is changing in a big discussion in the economy now about the sort of skills gap we got all these jobs and and yet there's still all this unemployment now, you know the debate about the reasons why, but there's a there's a transition enrolls in terms of how people are using products and obviously containers brings that, what what are you seeing when you talk to like a guy called him your peeps? Yeah, it's >>an evolving conversation. Dave the audience, right. It has to be relevant. Uh you know, we were afforded good luxury in that data center wheelhouse that Danny mentioned. So virtualization platform storage, physical servers, that's a pretty good start. But in the software as a service wheelhouse, it's a different persona now, they used to talk to those types of people, there's a little bit of connection, but as we go farther to the cloud, native apps, kubernetes and some of the other SAAS platforms, it is absolutely an audience journey. So I've actually worked really hard on that in my team, right? Everything from what I would say, parachuting into a community, right? And you have to speak their language. Number one reason is just number one outcomes just be present. And if you're in these communities you can find these individuals, you can talk their language, you can resonate with their needs, right? So that's something uh you know, everything from Levin marketing strategy to the community strategy to even just seating products in the market, That's a recipe that beam does really well. So yeah, it's a moving target for sure. >>Dave you were talking about the cliche of digital transformation and I'll say this may be pre Covid, I really felt like it was a cliche, there was a lot of, you know, complacency, I'll call it, but then the force marks the digital change that uh and now we kind of understand if you're not a digital business, you're in trouble. Uh And so my question is how it relates to some of the trends that we've been talking about in terms of cloud containers, We've seen the SAs ification for the better part of a decade now, but specifically as it relates to migration, it's hard for customers to just migrate their application portfolio to the cloud. Uh It's hard to fund it. It takes a long time. It's complex. Um how do you see that cloud migration evolving? Maybe that's where hybrid comes in And again, I'm interested in how you guys think about it and how it affects your strategy. >>Yeah. Well it's a complex answer as you might imagine because 400,000 customers, we take the exact same code. The exact same ice so that I run on my laptop is the exact same being backup and replication image that a major bank protects almost 20,000 machines and a petabytes of data. And so what that means is that you have to look at things on a case by case basis for some of us continuing to operate proprietary systems on prem might be the best choice for a certain workload. But for many of us the Genie is kind of out of the bottle with 2020 we have to move faster. It's less about safety and a lot more about speed and favorable outcome. We'll fix it if it's broken but let's get going. So for organizations struggling with how to move to the cloud, believe it or not, backup and recovery is an excellent way to start to venture into that because you can start to move data backup ISm data movement engine. So we can start to see data there where it makes sense. But rick would be quick to point out we want to offer a safe return. We have instances of where people want to repatriate data back and having a portable data format is key to that Rick. >>Uh yeah, I had a conversation recently with an organization managing cloud sprawl. They decided to consolidate, we're going to use this cloud, so it was removing a presence from one cloud that starts with an A and migrating it to the other cloud that starts with an A. You know, So yeah, we've seen that need for portability repatriation on prem classic example going from on prem apps to software as a service models for critical apps. So data mobility is at the heart of VM and with all the different platforms, kubernetes comes into play as well. It's definitely aligning to the needs that we're seeing in the market for sure. >>So repatriation, I want to stay on that for a second because you're, you're an arms dealer, you don't care if they're in the cloud or on prem and I don't know, maybe you make more money in one or the other, but you're gonna ride whatever waves the market gives you so repatriation to me implies. Or maybe I'm just inferring that somebody's moved to the cloud and they feel like, wow, we've made a mistake, it was too fast, too expensive. It didn't work for us. So now we're gonna bring it back on prem. Is that what you're saying? Are you saying they actually want their data in both both places. As another layer of data protection Danny. I wonder if you could address that. What are you seeing? >>Well, one of the interesting things that we saw recently, Dave Russell actually did the survey on this is that customers will actually build their work laid loads in the cloud with the intent to bring it back on premises. And so that repatriation is real customers actually don't just accidentally fall into it, but they intend to do it. And the thing about being everyone says, hey, we're disrupting the market, we're helping you go through this transformation, we're helping you go forward. Actually take a slightly different view of this. The team gives them the confidence that they can move forward if they want to, but if they don't like it, then they can move back and so we give them the stability through this incredible pace, change of innovation. We're moving forward so so quickly, but we give them the ability to move forward if they want then to recover to repatriate if that's what they need to do in a very effective way. And Dave maybe you can touch on that study because I know that you talked to a lot of customers who do repatriate workloads after moving them to the cloud. >>Yeah, it's kind of funny Dave not in the analyst business right now, but thanks to Danny and our chief marketing Officer, we've got now half a dozen different research surveys that have either just completed or in flight, including the largest in the data protection industry's history. And so the survey that Danny alluded to, what we're finding is people are learning as they're going and in some cases what they thought would happen when they went to the cloud they did not experience. So the net kind of funny slide that we discovered when we asked people, what did you like most about going to the cloud and then what did you like least about going to the cloud? The two lists look very similar. So in some cases people said, oh, it was more stable. In other cases people said no, it was actually unstable. So rick I would suggest that that really depends on the practice that you bring to it. It's like moving from a smaller house to a larger house and hoping that it won't be messy again. Well if you don't change your habits, it's eventually going to end up in the same situation. >>Well, there's still door number three and that's data reuse and analytics. And I found a lot of organizations love the idea of at least manipulating data, running test f scenarios on yesterday's production, cloud workload completely removed from the cloud or even just analytics. I need this file. You know, those types of scenarios are very easy to do today with them. And you know, sometimes those repatriations, those portable recoveries, Sometimes people do that intentionally, but sometimes they have to do it. You know, whether it's fire, flood and blood and you know, oh, I was looks like today we're moving to the cloud because I've lost my data center. Right. Those are scenarios that, that portable data format really allows organizations to do that pretty easily with being >>it's a good discussion because to me it's not repatriation, it has this negative connotation, the zero sum game and it's not Danny what you describe and rick as well. It was kind of an experimentation, a purposeful. We're going to do it in the cloud because we can and it's cheap and low risk to spin it up and then we're gonna move it because we've always thought we're going to have it on prem. So, so you know, there is some zero sum game between the cloud and on prem. Clearly no question about it. But there's also this rising tide lifts all ship. I want to, I want to change the subject to something that's super important and and top of mind it's in the press and it ain't going away and that is cyber and specifically ransomware. I mean, since the solar winds hack and it seems to me that was a new milestone in the capabilities and aggressiveness of the adversary who is very well funded and quite capable. And what we're seeing is this idea of tucking into the supply chain of islands, so called island hopping. You're seeing malware that's self forming and takes different signatures very stealthy. And the big trend that we've seen in the last six months or so is that the bad guys will will lurk and they'll steal all kinds of sensitive data. And then when you have an incident response, they will punish you for responding. And they will say, okay, fine, you want to do that. We're going to hold you ransom. We're gonna encrypt your data. And oh, by the way, we stole this list of positive covid test results with names from your website and we're gonna release it if you don't pay their. I mean, it's like, so you have to be stealthy in your incident response. And this is a huge problem. We're talking about trillions of dollars lost each year in, in in cybercrime. And so, uh, you know, it's again, it's this uh the bad news is good news for companies like you. But how do you help customers deal with this problem? What are you seeing Danny? Maybe you can chime in and others who have thoughts? >>Well we're certainly seeing the rise of cyber like crazy right now and we've had a focus on this for a while because if you think about the last line of defense for customers, especially with ransomware, it is having secure backups. So whether it be, you know, hardened Linux repositories, but making sure that you can store the data, have it offline, have it, have it encrypted immutable. Those are things that we've been focused on for a long while. It's more than that. Um it's detection and monitoring of the environment, which is um certainly that we do with our monitoring tools and then also the secure recovery. The last thing that you want to do of course is bring your backups or bring your data back online only to be hit again. And so we've had a number of capabilities across our portfolio to help in all of these. But I think what's interesting is where it's going, if you think about unleashing a world where we're continuously delivering, I look at things like containers where you have continues delivery and I think every time you run that helm commander, every time you run that terra form command, wouldn't that be a great time to do a backup to capture your data so that you don't have an issue once it goes into production. So I think we're going towards a world where security and the protection against these cyber threats is built into the supply chain rather than doing it on just a time based uh, schedule. And I know rick you're pretty involved on the cyber side as well. Would you agree with that? I >>would. And you know, for organizations that are concerned about ransomware, you know, this is something that is taken very seriously and what Danny explained for those who are familiar with security, he kind of jumped around this, this universally acceptable framework in this cybersecurity framework there, our five functions that are a really good recipe on how you can go about this. And and my advice to IT professionals and decision makers across the board is to really align everything you do to that framework. Backup is a part of it. The security monitoring and user training. All those other things are are areas that that need to really follow that wheel of functions. And my little tip here and this is where I think we can introduce some differentiation is around detection and response. A lot of people think of backup product would shine in both protection and recovery, which it does being does, but especially on response and detection, you know, we have a lot of capabilities that become impact opportunities for organizations to be able to really provide successful outcomes through the other functions. So it's something we've worked on a lot. In fact we've covered here at the event. I'm pretty sure it will be on replay the updated white paper. All those other resources for different levels can definitely guide them through. >>So we follow up to the detection is what analytics that help you identify whatever lateral movement or people go in places they shouldn't go. I mean the hard part is is you know, the bad guys are living off the land, meaning they're using your own tooling to to hack you. So they're not it's not like they're introducing something new that shouldn't be there. They're they're just using making judo moves against you. So so specifically talk a little bit more about your your detection because that's critical. >>Sure. So I'll give you one example imagine we capture some data in the form of a backup. Now we have an existing advice that says, you know what Don't put your backup infrastructure with internet connectivity. Use explicit minimal permissions. And those three things right there and keep it up to date. Those four things right there will really hedge off a lot of the different threat vectors to the back of data, couple that with some of the mutability offline or air gapped capabilities that Danny mentioned and you have an additional level of resiliency that can really ensure that you can drive recovery from an analytic standpoint. We have an api that allows organizations to look into the backup data. Do more aggressive scanning without any exclusions with different tools on a flat file system. You know, the threats can't jump around in memory couple that with secure restore. When you reintroduce things into the environment From a recovery standpoint, you don't want to reintroduce threats. So there's protections, there's there's confidence building steps along the way with them and these are all generally available technologies. So again, I got this white paper, I think we're up to 50 pages now, but it's a very thorough that goes through a couple of those scenarios. But you know, it gets the uh, it gets quickly into things that you wouldn't expect from a backup product. >>Please send me a copy if you, if you don't mind. I this is a huge problem and you guys are global company. I admittedly have a bit of a US bias, but I was interviewing robert Gates one time the former defense secretary and we're talking about cyber war and I said, don't we have the best cyber, can't we let go on the offense? He goes, yeah, we can, but we got the most to lose. So this is really a huge problem for organizations. All right, guys, last question I gotta ask you. So what's life like under, under inside capital of the private equity? What's changed? What's, what's the same? Uh, do you hear from our good friend ratner at all? Give us the update there. >>Yes. Oh, absolutely fantastic. You know, it's interesting. So obviously acquired by insight partners in February of 2020, right, when the pandemic was hitting, but they essentially said light the fuse, keep the engine's going. And we've certainly been doing that. They haven't held us back. We've been hiring like crazy. We're up to, I don't know what the count is now, I think 4600 employees, but um, you know, people think of private equity and they think of cost optimizations and, and optimizing the business, That's not the case here. This is a growth opportunity and it's a growth opportunity simply because of the technology opportunity in front of us to keep, keep the engine's going. So we hear from right near, you know, on and off. But the new executive team at VM is very passionate about driving the success in the industry, keeping abreast of all the technology changes. It's been fantastic. Nothing but good things to say. >>Yes, insight inside partners, their players, we watched them watch their moves and so it's, you know, I heard Bill McDermott, the ceo of service now the other day talking about he called himself the rule of 60 where, you know, I always thought it was even plus growth, you know, add that up. And that's what he was talking about free cash flow. He's sort of changing the definition a little bit but but so what are you guys optimizing for you optimizing for growth? Are you optimising for Alberta? You optimizing for free cash flow? I mean you can't do All three. Right. What how do you think about that? >>Well, we're definitely optimizing for growth. No question. And one of the things that we've actually done in the past 12 months, 18 months is beginning to focus on annual recurring revenue. You see this in our statements, I know we're not public but we talk about the growth in A. R. R. So we're certainly focused on that growth in the annual recovering revenue and that that's really what we tracked too. And it aligns well with the cloud. If you look at the areas where we're investing in cloud native and the cloud and SAAS applications, it's very clear that that recurring revenue model is beneficial. Now We've been lucky, I think we're 13 straight quarters of double-digit growth. And and obviously they don't want to see that dip. They want to see that that growth continue. But we are optimizing on the growth trajectory. >>Okay. And you see you clearly have a 25% growth last quarter in A. R. R. Uh If I recall correctly, the number was evaluation was $5 billion last january. So obviously then, given that strategy, Dave Russell, that says that your tam is a lot bigger than just the traditional backup world. So how do you think about tam? I'll we'll close there >>and uh yeah, I think you look at a couple of different ways. So just in the backup recovery space or backup in replication to paying which one you want to use? You've got a large market there in excess of $8 billion $1 billion dollar ongoing enterprise. Now, if you look at recent i. D. C. Numbers, we grew and I got my handy HP calculator. I like to make sure I got this right. We grew 44.88 times faster than the market average year over year. So let's call that 45 times faster and backup. There's billions more to be made in traditional backup and recovery. However, go back to what we've been talking around digital transformation Danny talking about containers in the environment, deployment models, changing at the heart of backup and recovery where a data capture data management, data movement engine. We envision being able to do that not only for availability but to be able to drive the business board to be able to drive economies of scale faster for our organizations that we serve. I think the trick is continuing to do more of the same Danny mentioned, he knows the view's got lit. We haven't stopped doing anything. In fact, Danny, I think we're doing like 10 times more of everything that we used to be doing prior to the pandemic. >>All right, Danny will give you the last word, bring it home. >>So our goal has always been to be the most trusted provider of backup solutions that deliver modern data protection. And I think folks have seen at demon this year that we're very focused on that modern data protection. Yes, we want to be the best in the data center but we also want to be the best in the next generation, the next generation of I. T. So whether it be sas whether it be cloud VM is very committed to making sure that our customers have the confidence that they need to move forward through this digital transformation era. >>Guys, I miss flying. I mean, I don't miss flying, but I miss hanging with you all. We'll see you. Uh, for sure. Vim on 2022 will be belly to belly, but thanks so much for coming on the the virtual edition and thanks for having us. >>Thank you. >>All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This keeps continuous coverage of the mon 21. The virtual edition. Keep it right there for more great coverage. >>Mm

>> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's the CUBE, covering Veeamon 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome to the Windy City, everybody, you're watching the CUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host, Stuart Miniman. Stu, this is our second year of covering Veeamon. Although we have covered Veeam as a company since the early days of its ascendancy into the virtualization space, really focused on as a VMware specialist, virtualization only, now expanding dramatically into the enterprise. This is a company that has grown from very small to quite large, it's going to be probably close to a billion dollars in bookings this year, growing at 30 plus percent each year. A company that is moving beyond just the small business into the core of the enterprise with new executives, new messaging, renewed partnerships that seems to be really gaining traction. Veeam is a backup and data protection specialist that's now trying to rebrand itself as an always on, for the digital world, hyperavailability, intelligent data management, multi-cloud environment, throw in a few more buzzwords, Stu. And they're punching above their weight, as they always have, and it's a playbook that Veeam has used very, very successfully. Combine that with the branding, green everywhere. They've taken over Chicago. Veeam is famous for its parties, parties at VMworld, and other big events, like HPE Discover. And this is, I don't know, the fifth, sixth Veeamon that they've had, and we've got how many people here, Stu? >> 2,200. >> 2,200. So, what's your take? You saw the keynotes this morning, you were in the private analyst sessions today. Give us your analysis of Veeam. >> Yeah, Dave, you know, first of all, they did what most of the big companies do. They started off with a partner day. Veeam's all about their partners. Last year, you and I documented what they talked about is they were transitioning from the 10 years of virtualization to the next big wave, which is cloud. Doesn't mean that virtualization goes away, there's lots that they're doing in the multi-hypervisor world, but multi-hypervisor, multi-cloud, it's any data, any app, any cloud is the message. And Peter McKay started out, Dave, you know, big hero numbers for the company. As you said, they've had over double-digit growth, for now, it's 39 quarters, hugely impressive. 827 million in 2017 booking. The goal absolutely is to be over one billion dollars this year. For me, the number that jumped out, really, is they have 300,000 customers. You and I were talking to Ratmir a little bit and said, okay, you know, VMware has 500 thousand, he's like, well, 550 thousand customers and Veeam's in about 270 thousand of those, so about half of all VMware customers are in there, that Veeam is in there, but they have lots of headroom for growth in those VMware environments. As you've heard Veeam today over and over, the growth opportunity for them is the enterprise. So while they're in a lot of the Fortune 100 and Fortune 1000 accounts, they haven't penetrated them nearly as deeply as, say, a VMware has. But when you look at 300,000 customers, Dave, they're adding 133 customers a day. That's about 10,000 a quarter. 133 a day, 10,000 a quarter. Say, compare and contrast against another Veeam partner, Nutanix. Nutanix is adding about 1,000 customers a quarter, which is great for Nutanix, for their market, but as a software company in the cloud world, Veeam can stack themselves up against, again, some of the largest software companies in the world. And they put out the plan in place, is how they're going to get not only over a billion, but get to, like, that five billion dollar mark, which is some really rarefied air. >> So, let's stay on that for a second. Two themes I want to cover. First, the customers. 300,000 customers, 90% are in a virtualized and using VMware, that was the roots of this company. But there's 500,000, 550,000, I think now, VMware customers, so there's some opportunity there. We're going to talk to Ratmir Timashev, the founder. He was sharing with us before that their mantra earlier on was no physical, just virtual, just virtual. Well, last year, they announced physical. They're expanding, that's a TAM expansion move. Their TAM is much, much bigger than just a couple of billion dollars in pure backup. It's in the 20, 30 billion dollar range now. So that leads me to the second point, which is Veeam is an enterprise software, Veeam's a pure software company, first of all. So they are beginning to reach that rarefied air of a billion dollar plus companies. Obviously, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, you know, are there. But others have recently cracked the billion: ServiceNow, Workday, companies like that. RedHat, obviously, is another one that's blown through that billion dollar figure, doing very, very well. Some would argue that Nutanix is a software company, could even argue, sort of stretching it now, Pure is a software company, a lot of software innovation. But Veeam, there's no argument, they are a pure software company. The number of billion-dollar software companies is few and far between, Veeam is about to crack that magic number, which is not trivial. >> Yeah, and Dave, we've talked about going beyond virtualization and cloud. Last year, one of the big discussion points was they bought N2WS, which is really how they get backup into AWS. And they've got large growth, 153 growth year over year. Other one, Microsoft, big partner of theirs, both for virtualization, something that kind of sent a ripple through the whole virtualization industry, when Veeam got off of only VMware and added hyper-v support. Well, Azure, they've got over 2,500 downloads of their Azure solution, so showing growth there. Also, supporting IBM Cloud, working with a lot of service providers. The breadth of what they're offering, in expanding beyond just the virtualization, admin, and some simple tools, where Veeam had really cut their teeth. Because, Dave, that core business, there's a lot of competitors there now, and Veeam's trying to make sure that they fight off the competition and stay ahead in this multi-cloud world. >> So much to talk about, I want to talk about the competition, but before we get there, one of the critical factors for a company like Veeam, trying to attract enterprise customers, Veeam's a company who's known for their SMB heritage. And so, partnerships, crucial. Just some of the partnerships that they've signed and emphasized over the last year and a half, two years: HPE, my sources tell me, we heard Bill Philbin up on stage this morning, he had a keynote, my sources tell me that it's many, many tens of millions of dollars, so this is on its way to 100 million dollar partnership. IBM, you mentioned IBM Cloud, Microsoft, the Azure stuff, Pure Storage, Nutanix, VMware, obviously, has always been a partner. NetApp, Cisco, we heard up on stage today. So expanding the partner ecosystem. Stu, explain why that's so important. >> Yeah, so first of all, Dave, so many places, how does Veeam go to market? One of the more interesting things, if you talk about the sales motion, is HP and Cisco now have Veeam in their price book. So Veeam, great channel, customers that love them, over 300,000, but when you take the Cisco sales force and the HPE sales force, and say you guys can make money on this, that really hypercharges what they're doing. It was always nice that they partnered with VMware, but how do you get deeper into those environments? I know you want to touch on the competition, we'll make sure we cover, there's some critical hires that they've also had in recent times, but what's your take on the competition? >> Yeah, that's just what I'm talking about. Before we get to competition, I do want to talk about, >> Oh, partners. >> Talent, but I just want to mention HPE, the reason why HPE, to me, is so interesting is because when they sold their software business to Micro Focus, they jettisoned the old HP Data Protect, or HP Protect software business. That opened up a huge opportunity and vacuum for Veeam to slide in. They were very aggressive with regard to partnering with HPE, smart move by Veeam, and I think, smart move by HPE, even though it's more of a reseller slash partnership agreement. Talent. This company's been able to attract talent. It started with Peter McKay, who was brought in to top-level the messaging and the executive team. He's brought in a number of folks, in sales and marketing, the new CMO is on as well. They've attracted a few, one in particular, analysts. So one of the kerfuffles before this show was Gartner announced that two of its analysts were leaving to go to Rubrik. Well, over the weekend, when this announcement came out, Veeam executives saw that. One of them was Dave Russell, who we've had in the CUBE before, very sharp guy, very well known, respected. Veeam jumped on him on that weekend and said, no, you know us better than you know Rubrik, you got to come work for us, and so they stole Dave Russell away. We saw Dave Russell on stage today. He left Rubrik at the altar, which, you know, I'd rather see that than him going to work for Rubrik, for four or five months. But what do you make of that? >> Yeah, so Dave, we've seen a lot of jumps recently, from the analyst side. It's interesting, Jason Buffington, who we'd have on the CUBE many times, is also here at Veeam, so hot space. I know last year at VMworld, we said this whole backup, secondary storage market is one of the hottest areas. There's a lot of money, there's a lot of growth. And what's the analyst's job? It's to really understand some of these trends here. So, some of 'em, it's something that they're passion on, they called Dave Russell the Godfather of backups. So, he said he wanted to be a builder, he wanted to get in, heck, even a good friend of mine just announced he's joining Veeam, Mark Toomey, who was from the EMC side, worked on the backup stuff, real strong technologist, was one of the early bloggers, really knows his stuff, and based in Ireland. Veeam's doing a real good job of attracting talent. Peter McKay's learning from his patriots, as to how to bring in good talent. >> And we'll have him on to talk to you about that. As a lead-in to the competitive discussion, I want to give some analysis that we got from Peter Burris and David Floyer from the Wikibon team. They gave me a few points leading up to this conference that I want to share with our audience. Number one is data protection and orchestration are moving up the list on the level of CXO concerns. So we're seeing that very clearly in our research. The second point, this company talks a lot about the future, and automation as being part of that. There's a dichotomy between the business and IT, in terms of the expectations to the degrees of automation that exist. The business assumes there's a lot more automation than there actually is, so when you see executives up on stage, talking about this automated world, the expectations in the business are everything's going to be automated. It's not that simple yet today. That causes some friction, potentially, in the customer base. Means there's lots of room for churn, that's good news for a company like Veeam, who's both an incumbent but a disruptor moving upmarket. The global 2000, according to David Floyer, is leaving billions of dollars on the table, in terms of lost revenue, because they have inadequate data protection. If you look over a three or four year period, companies are losing money because of inadequate, bolted-on data protection strategies. The last point is all these vendors are vying for position. It's unclear who's going to win this game. You've got no dominant player. You've got the backup and recovery vendors, the storage companies like Dell and EMC, you got security companies that are in there, you got startups, like Rubrik and Cohesity, you got Veeam, who's an established, they're like a hybrid, both established and startup. So you've got this competitive dynamic, which is really, really interesting. I want to flip it over to you. Last year at VMworld, backup and recovery, data protection was one of the hottest areas of topics of conversation, and on the floor, one of the most trafficked by customers. What's your take on that? >> Well, Dave, you know, core to our research, we've been talking about for, I can't even tell you now how long, data is at the center of it all. How do I not, it's not storing data, it's getting value from my data, it's unlocking data. It's not about big data, it's not about some cool new tooling that we have there, and what we've really found is if I've got good replicas, if I've got strong backup, I can actually leverage my data more, get more value out of it, that's critical to what we're talking about here, Dave. Which is why Veeam and others like them can get this, is simplicity, is something we hear over and over, the early days of VMware, that was why customer loved VMware. And Veeam followed that trend a lot. It's really tough to be simple. That was that whole hyperconverge wave, was supposed to be simple. Cloud is not simple today. It's multi-cloud, there's a lot of challenges there. So Veeam, their customers love 'em, the proof is in the numbers that they're putting in. >> I think that's great analysis. Let's close on that. The challenge, I think, for Veeam, like some of the incumbents that you saw, Veritas, IBM, when VMware's ascendancy occurred, Veeam stepped in and really disrupted and won that battle. Now, the others hung on. They hung on to their install base, but they're hanging on for dear life. You've seeing IBM now retooling its portfolio, Dell EMC retooling its backup portfolio, Veritas retooling its backup portfolio, so it's jump ball in that respect. Veeam's got to demonstrate that it can move from that virtualization specialist, small business specialist, up into the enterprise, resonate with the CXOs, and compete for its fair share. So we'll be watching that, we'll be covering that all week. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. You're watching the CUBE, live from Chicago, Veeamon 2018.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C. It's the Cube. Covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to .NEXT in D.C. everybody. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host Stewart Miniman. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract a signal from the know as we hear it. .NEXT, Nutanix's customer event. Two days of wall to wall coverage. Julia Palmer is here. She's a research director at Gartner. My new best friend. (laughs) Great to see you again. We had a great dinner last night. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Oh, my pleasure. >> So, it's a good little event here. Lot of excitement. But what's your take? You are a former practitioner, now an analyist. You were in the heart of technology at GoDaddy. You really know the market, the products. What do you make of what's going on here at .NEXT? >> You know when hyper convergence first emerged it was all about saving money. It was all about going from infrastructure that was maybe too complex and too expensive to something that maybe, based on commodity will bring lower acquisition costs. But this not the story today at all. That's what, I think my IT leaders are telling me. They're not going after acquisition costs. They're not looking at things and just comparing by the capex. They're looking at the bigger picture and how will this technology will help them to enable business. So that's I think a the biggest difference now. Going from something as simple as, is it going to to be more expensive? Less expensive? To how will it move the needle to my enterprise, to my organization? >> Dave: So that's certainly the messaging that you're hearing from, from Nutanix. As a practitioner, do you buy that? Do you believe that they're more than just an infrastructure company? That they are a transformative force in the industry. >> Julia: Yeah, I hear a lot, you know. I moderated a panel today with three customers and one of them said, you know, I'm in the health care business. I'm here to save lives. I'm not here to reinvent my own hyper converge infrastructures. So, he wants to focus on what's important for his end users. And he wants to stop manage (mumbles). That's just not a focus. And I hear it over and over again from different types of customers. >> Dave: Hmm, now you were not a Nutanix customer previously, correct? >> No. But you did see a lot of different infrastructure products? >> Julia: Absolutely. >> As a practitioner what bothered you about what the vendor community did. What were your likes and dislikes? >> Julia: Everything. Everything bothered me. >> Everything bothered you. I was part of pretty large organization and when you have a big footprint you have big problems. And one of them, for example, was that we would have an outage and we reach out to the vendor and they would tell us, you know, you hit a bug and we have a fix and we will give you the fix and you will be good to go tomorrow. Nevermind the outage that you had and impacted end users. So now a lot of vendors are using predictive analytics. Cloud based analytics, >> Right. to see if there's anything in your existing environment that's susceptible to existing bugs and proactively reach out to you to provide a fix. So I was just thinking, looking back, how many outages I could have prevented if this technology was available when I was running it. >> Stewart: Yeah, Julia, I mean we know that companies for so long, you know, infrastructure, they spent so much of their time, you know, running around, patching it, fixing it, worrying about that. Hyper converge now is trying to talk about, you know, where it fits into the whole cloud picture, which is mostly about an operational model. Where do you see along those trends. Do you believe that hyper converge really fits into a cloud strategy or is it cloud washing from a bunch of infrastructure people? You know? >> I think it has a potential. I don't think it's there today. But I think it has a great potential because when I talked to Gartner end users about, like, why hyper converge? And I actually did some total cost of ownership research, what they all told me that looking back they realized how much OpEx it saved them. And they say it was very difficult. You kind of had to take our chance on it because upfront you can't predict the outcome. Is it really going to be more simple? What does simple mean? What's key performance indicator and simple you can put. So, but looking back, the guys that implemented, they all told me that 60 percent of OpEx they saved. Meaning they didn't last with infrastructure (mumbles). How do they do this? They stop manage components. They start managing VM's. So next step is stop manage VM's, start managing applications and that's what cloud management is all about. Getting out of infrastructure management all together and deliver a business what they want. And usually, they want support for their applications. >> Dave: So, my understanding is that Gartner has analysts that service the vendor community, the executive community, and the practitioner community. You are a direct practitioner, >> Yes. Advisor. >> I deal with IT leaders. Okay, your peeps. (laughs) I think you mentioned to me last night that you've had hundreds of conversations and you've only been at Gartner, what, six months? >> Two years. >> Oh, two years, sorry. I apologize for that. Okay, so in the two years, hundreds of conversations. Is that fair? What kinds of conversations are you having with clients around infrastructure? What are the challenges that they're having? And what are you advising them? I know there are many, many, but maybe you can summarize the top ones. >> That's a very good question. I actually want to write research about it. Top five questions about hyper converse people asking so I've been thinking about it for a while. So, different types of customers, new customers are asking questions about, is it ready? Should I go for it? Why would I go for it? Why can't I keep my (mumbles) infrastructure design? What should I look for as a new key performance indicators? It's not the same way, how would you judge it here. Then existing hyper converge customer are looking for what's next step in hyper convergence. Is it ready for prime time? Is it ready for mission critical applications? Because they're looking at the boxes and they look at the commodity hardware and they still feel uncertain. Can it really run something that they're a proprietary hardware used to run. So we explore the advantages of software defined, software defined storage. Value is in the software. You know, being backed up by software defined storage, my favorite subject, is a, is a, you know abstracting and distributing data that you don't worry about us anymore. So scale out storage replacing proprietary architecture can provide you same level of uptime and performance especially with new, you know, flash options. So that's a popular question. Number three is just the, you know, we leave it to in the age of a compressed differentiation I believe my colleague Dave Russell calls it, and there's a small differences between the vendors and end users are not aware of this. And they can be critical for particular use case. So they always ask strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats on each and every one them. Because we have a lot of solutions on hyper converge now. A lot of vendors, prominent vendors now join the market. So end users are a little bit confused. How do I navigate through this ocean of different hyper converge solutions. >> Stewart: Yeah, so Julia, Nutanix helped really drive a lot of this awareness for the hyper converge market. Now, every company, you know, all the big players have at least one, if not multiple solutions out there. How do you see Nutanix? Are they differentiating themselves? Are they, I know they're trying move beyond kind of the hyper converge label, ya know. What are the doing good? What would you like to see them do more? >> Julia: Yeah, Nutanix is a, you know, was one of the leaders from the very beginning. And, you know, remains the leader. They obviously succeed in at least in a lot a features. And a very fast release cycle of new features. It's easy when you have one focus, you know. Other companies have so many different areas they need to focus or protect and Nutanix doesn't have this problem. And also being able to mix different hardware, I think it's an advantage, you know. Being able, the customer needs to make a choice, you know. I think the structure of the future is going to be all about choice. It's less about, ya know, this is a lock in. I want to pick my hyper visor. I want to pick my hardware and move on. >> Stewart: So one of the things I think Nutanix does best when they're not positioning themselves as a storage solution, however, cause the storage market is tremendously competitive and there's always the, you know, there's the next technology, the next wave. There's so many competitors out there. I mean, do you think things like NVMe over Fabric are going to just, you know, have the potential to disrupt everything that Nutanix is doing? You know, what are some of the big threats to, ya know, their current position? >> Actually, I just wrote a research about how NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics is going to disrupt and improve integrated and hyper converge systems. I think those technologies and it's like NVMe without NVMe over Fabric. It's like, I call it, it's like barbecue without barbecue sauce, right? So the NVMe and NVMe over Fabric has potential to boost performance of hyper converge systems on par with what a solid state, erase today do. So I think a, and it's commodity hardware, right? We're not talking about anything proprietary. So when a we going to move towards this territory when NVMe and NVME over Fabrics become mainstream maybe two years from now, three maybe years from now. I think everybody can enjoy shared distributed storage performance. And, but honestly, your question about storage, like do you need to position yourself as a storage company or not, the major difference about different hyper converge products, in my opinion, is how they do storage. Other than this, it's the same flavors of hyper visor, it's the same commodity hardware. So what do we have different? The ways you did data services. The ways you position your storage. You, you deliver the storage services. >> Stewart: So, you know what, I'm curious. When I read Wall Street stuff about Nutanix they seem to overreact to every bit of news so, you know, the Dell relationship, ya know, is challenging there for that to head win. Oh wait, the Google announcement seems to be a great tailwind, ya know, the big bump in the stock today. Do you see those partnerships as critically important or is it the vision and execution of Nutanix and what they're doing with their customers? >> I think so. I think we live in the age when a ecosystem support is everything, ya know. People not necessarily today go to the public cloud to save money. They go for ecosystem support. To expand their services and their capabilities. That's why, ya know, embracing the cloud and not trying to position yourself against is the right way to go. I think we all need to embrace cloud and find the way that will benefit the end users. >> Dave: Um hmm, so you were sharing with, you spend a fair amount of time, all Gartner analysts who do these things do on magic quadrants. They, we put a lot of effort into them. A lot of people criticize magic quadrants. I think they're unfairly criticized. I know how much work goes into them. >> Thank you. And they are fact based opinions if I could categorize them like that, right? Is that fair? So, do you do one on hyper converged infrastructure or converged? Do you separate converged from hyper converged? How do you look at the market? >> Julia: So last year magic quadrant was integrated systems, which is converged and hyper converged. But what Gartner does is actually, every year we look at the market and we adjust our inclusion criteria. We adjust market definition. So, I don't think it's a big secret that hyper conversion is leading this market right now. And, honestly, in conversion infrastructure, if you look at conversion infrastructure, it's very similar. The only difference in conversion infrastructure is how you do storage. Which storage area you are using. So it becomes less strategic to even analyze conversion infrastructure. So you will see this year, I cannot break all of the news here, but much more emphasis on software driven, hyper converged infrastructure. Not services. Not the appliances, but more software. >> Stewart: I love to hear that cause at Wikimon when we called the category "server sand" so like VM ware, major player both as a partner in Nutanix. A competitor in Nutanix. Ya know, I know there like, they don't show up on the Gartner magic quadrant because they don't fit into that environment. Also the lines between converge, hyper converge, and software defined storage seem to be blurring a lot. I mean, in some ways they're just different ways of packaging. Some of the others, they, hyper converged is a, ya know, delivery option for what they're doing, so. >> Julia: Exactly. >> Where do you see it going, ya know, it's, ya know, obviously beyond the appliance but, ya know. Say there's the Google announcement today. Where do you see, ya know, a company like Nutanix fitting into this hybrid or multi-cloud world? >> Differentiating on software, this is the name of the game, right? So, if you can have a portable software you can run on any hardware, you obviously can continue and run on any cloud as well. And this is an idea. You said it absolutely right. Like software defines storage. It's not a technology. It's a delivery option. So customer needs to be in charge of their options. Do I want to deploy on premises? Do I want to go on cloud? Do I want to have an appliance? Do I want to buy a software, bring your own hardware? All of those choices need to be given to the end user. They need to decide which way they want to go. >> Dave: So, we're going to have Chad Saccage on tomorrow and it's obviously interesting, we see Nutanix selling through Dell. We were there two years ago when that announcement was made. Great, ya know, business. Terrific. But as you were saying, converged and hyper converged and software defined, they're all coming together now. What do you expect is going to happen with EMC and Nutanix? Do you have any... I don't want to use the prediction, but any scenarios that you can see developing there? >> I think, you know I hate to speculate, but I think both of those companies are extremely user oriented. So, if there will be demand for Nutanix that will continue to support Nutanix because they will do it right by the customers. And same with Nutanix, ya know, they never want to turn someone down saying it's not their problem. Both support them in parallel as long as demand is there. >> Dave: So let me ask the question differently, cause I agree with you. EMC, customer centric. Michael Dell, there's nobody more customer centric on the planet. Clearly Nutanix is customer focused. Having said that, if the three of us were advising Dell, EMC on what to do, we would say keep doing what the customers want. Great, check. But from a product roadmap standpoint, I don't know about you Stew, but I know I would push them to look at doing more of a hyper converge, software defined, like roadmap, as opposed to kind of bolted on V-blocks. Which got it all started. Would you agree with that? Or, do you think that's a waste of R&D? Just outsource it or OEM it? >> Software defined storage is hard to do. It's hard to do it from the ground up, ya know. Products need to mature, ya know, VMware, VSEN. It's a mature product. It's a good foundation for software defined storage and for hyper converged. Building something from the ground up, just to separated from VMware, it will be very difficult. >> Dave: Okay, well okay, right. Well then double down on VMware maybe is the advice there. Or maybe they're not really inquisitive right now because they have the debt service but over time maybe bring in startups to innovate there. Or maybe not because when you look at the Dell EMC deal from previous generations, there's a very successful deal. One of the most, probably the most successful storage deal in the history >> Stewart: Talking about the partnership? >> of storage. The partnership. >> Sure. Before Dell bought Compellent, then remember, Dell buys Compellent. I would look back on that and say Dell probably would have been better off just staying with EMC. Reselling EMC. I mean you were there during those days. I don't know. Was Compellent and EqualLogic, >> EqualLogic were those successful acquisitions in your view? In retrospect. >> Stewart: In retrospect they did pretty well but you're right Dave, the EMC partnership was way more money. I think by the time Dell bought EMC the internal Dell storage, ya know, revenue had grown to almost, or a, ya know, order of magnitude, the same size of EMC and they had to put a lot more emphasis into it. So, you know, better margins, ya know, just if they continue to partner. >> Dave: So maybe it's better for Dell to continue to partner is kind of your point. >> Stewart: Yeah. >> Julia: Absolutely. >> Uh huh, okay. Very diplomatic. (laughs) >> Julia: Would you expect anything else? (laughs) >> Julia, thanks so much for coming on the Cube >> Oh, thank you guys it was a pleasure having you. >> it was my pleasure >> Julia: Thank you for having me. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back to wrap right after this short break. This is the Cube. We're live from D.C. at Nutanix .NEXT. Be right back. (electronic music) >> Narrator: Robert Hershev.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Voiceover: Live from New Orleans. It's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back, Mario Angers is here. He's the senior manager of systems at the University of British Columbia. Welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you, thank you. >> So how's VeeamON going? >> So far, so good. It's fabulous, actually. I love the event, cause it's not so big that you can't talk to a lot of people, and it's small enough that you get to know a lot of different folks. >> Yeah, it feels bigger, they're saying the number's 3,000. It feels bigger than that to me, but at the same time it is kind of intimate. >> Yeah no, I went to their first event, so certainly this is very different than what it was like. I think their first event was 2014? So, yeah, that's very good. >> So, tell us what's going on up at British Columbia. What's hot these days? >> Well, I spoke to this a little bit yesterday during the partner session, right? So, British Columbia's in a bit of unique position, because we have laws that prevent us from storing data outside Canada, right? So up until recently, we didn't have any of the large service providers, so we had to basically, to some degree, reinvent the wheel. So if wanted to provide or consume cloud, we had to basically build it, which is what the University of British Columbia did a few years ago. And, because we're the largest in BC, we were doing it at scale already, so we were approached by an organization inside British Columbia called BCNET, which basically services all the other higher ed, and they asked us if we wanted to provide cloud services to the community, and we've been doing this for almost three years now. >> Dave: As a partner to BCED? >> Yeah, to BCNET, yeah. >> Dave: BCNET, yeah. >> So we're basically the service operator, they're the service provider, right, but we do everything, we take care of the marketing, the communication. >> And Mark, could you walk us through, what's that stack look like? I did an interview with the OpenStack Summit with a Massachusetts higher ed cloud that they built that used OpenStack as the underlying piece. What's yours built on? >> So we went with, we're a VMware shop. So we went with the cloud directory as the front end basically, but the back end is a combination of Cisco servers, HP servers, net op storage, HP storage, data domain for our backup. Of course we use Veeam for our backup software, and then it's VMware stack end-to-end. >> Okay, it was funny, the gentlemen that I interviewed, actually, was the one who created VCD, when he was at VMware, so I'm just curious to see your viewpoint. One of the things we use to say is, cloud is not virtualization plus, but if you build a stack, if you can have kind of the orchestration and management pieces... So you feel you have a cloud, what differentiates what you have today, versus what you could have built five years ago? >> Well, I think five years ago, it would have been really challenging to provide the services in a self service capability to our end users. So today we can do that. The only involvement we have is we provision a virtual data center for our end user, and then it's self service from there, for them. We also use NSX, which is also a VMware product, so it's self service end-to-end. >> And how has your availability become better with what you have today versus what you had before? >> Veeam is a significant partner of ours, so we've been a Veeam customer for probably five or six years now, on the backup and restore side, probably about four years, and I would say it's made our jobs a lot easier. So historically our legacy backup system was just a bear and a monster to manage. So it required a huge amount of time to not just manage, but understand how it was done. With Veeam, they've really simplified that process, and we have a very large environment, and we basically have one guy managing backup. >> So it used to be, well that's pretty good productivity. So it used to be the conversation around, "Well, we're meeting our backup within the window." That was sort of the challenge. >> Mario: Yep. >> And now increasingly, it's, we want to get as close as RPO zero as possible for certain apps, not everything, as it's too expensive, and we want a much faster recovery time objective. So can you talk to us, first of all, do you converse in those terms with your line of business, and have you been able to affect those metrics? >> So, we're not quite there yet, from a sophistication, or a maturity perspective, We still have a bit of a ways to go to get there. However, can we now guarantee to our folks that we'll be able to bring workloads back within the service level that we have with our customers? Absolutely. So we can provide peace of mind now, knowing that if we lose something we can bring it back very quickly, as it's actually being restored to the production environment. >> So where do you want to go from here? It sounds like you've got the productivity thing nailed. You got one person managing all this, and you're able to meet those SLAs. What's next? >> I would say next for us is, so today we provide what I'll call a managed service around backup. So basically, the team that I manage is looking after backup for all the clients within the service, so our next step is really to provide them the ability to manage that themselves. So we're looking to do that over the summer. Once we do that, then we want to start partnering with Veeam as well and start looking at their Cloud Connect product. We've been in discussions for some time now about how we're going to do that, and that's the evolution of that. And then building on that, we're being also asked to add to the portfolio of services that we provide, and one of those services is disaster recovery as a service. So that's becoming very, very critical to the province. Vancouver is basically like San Francisco or Los Angeles. We live in one of the biggest fault zones in the world, so at one point it will happen. So now we've basically provisioned a data center in the middle of the province where it's outside your quake zone, so now we can start providing those services to our community. >> Could you speak to the relationship with Veeam with the storage arrays that you have? What's the interaction there? >> So when we went to Veeam it was really important that the full integration is there with the storage vendors that we have. So originally we were primarily in that app shop. So in that, integration was in place. So when we started looking at moving off of tape and moving onto disk for backup, we basically narrowed the list down to vendors that also fully integrated with Veeam. So we chose Data Domain, an EMC product. We've been very happy. And just recently we went to RFPing, we basically selected a new vendor for virtualization storage. And the same rules apply. Full integration needs to be in place. We need to be able to know that we're going to be able to read the data off of the storage arrays, and then move it to the backup. Without that integration, there's no guarantees that we can do that successfully. >> So a data demand customer, happy with that as the backup appliance, fast, great data reduction... Didn't EMC get you in a headlock and say, "You got to buy Networker and Avamar," and really push hard? >> Mario: Oh they tried. >> Of course, they did try. >> Okay, so what led to your decision to go with Veeam? >> The complexity of those solutions. So we're not going to reinvent how we're structured or how we're architected just to put a backup solution in place. And if you look at a lot of the other really big vendors in the marketplace today, that's basically the expectation, is okay well, you're built out like this, now you're going to have to do this in order to consume our solution. That just wasn't an option for us. >> And some people would say, "Well I get one thrown to choke and that simplifies things," but you don't buy that. >> Mario: No, not at all. I think it keeps vendors honest if you have more than one. It gives you some leverage to be able to negotiate. And to be quite honest with you, I've yet to find another vendor that provides the level of quality and support that Veeam does. And they're growing as a company, and I expect that things will change to some degree, because that's part of growing. However, so far, the experience that we've had is the same we had four years ago when they were a relatively small company. >> Can you give an example of what resonates with you as customer in terms of that service experience? >> I think as a bunch of IT guys, we think we know everything, right? So when we originally acquired Veeam, we thought, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we get what you're telling us, but we know better than you do." So we went ahead and implemented based on what we felt was right. It wasn't right. So they didn't come over and say, "Told you so," or "We're not going to help you now, cause you decided to go this way." No, they provided us with all the support we needed in order to actually change what we had done, and there was never any finger pointing or any... It was basically, "You're a partner, we're going to help you be successful." And that's very rare, I think, in the industry today. >> Yeah, really, respecting sort of that you wanted to do it a certain way, and now I learned. >> Yeah, they did try to talk us out of it, but we decided to move in that direction anyway. To me it's like, yeah, it's a fantastic relationship. >> Anything that you've seen here today, or this week, the announcements, that was really interesting and exciting to you? >> Yeah, I think a lot of the things that are coming in Version 10 are going to allow us to expand on the things that we provide to our customers. For example, all the stuff they talk about around availability, primarily disaster recovery stuff, which is such a big thing for us. So I think this is going to add significant value. >> Mario, anything either Veeam or your vendor ecosystem that you're looking for that would make your life easier? You seem to have a pretty opinionated view of what you need. >> So to me is, we're it the business of solving problems. So as a vendor, you're not going to help me solve my problem unless you understand what my problem is. In my experience, I'm not going to say with all vendors, but with a lot of vendors in the past couple of years, is basically the caliber of the sales people I feel have changed. So it used to be that the sales folks used to be pretty knowledgeable about what they sold. Now it feels like all they're trying to do is make their quarter. And as a customer it's becoming frustrating, because I don't want to be sold to. I want someone that's going to help me solve problems, and deliver solutions to my customers. >> You must get a lot of different storage infrastructures, but NetApp is a primary supplier, of course. >> Mario: Yep, it's still very big in our environment. >> We just had NetApp on with Veeam, and they were talking about their relationship. As a customer, how do you find the relationship between Veeam and NetApp? Is there tangible value that you see in that working relationship? How do you interact with those two different companies? >> Oh of course there's tangible value. So we're an enterprise customer, right? And as we scaled within our environment, we came into a bottleneck between Veeam and NetApp. And all we had to do was expose it to both companies, and they worked together to resolve the issue. And I believe it was Version Nine that they released a fix for it. But that's been the experience, is the work that happens behind the scenes, we're not exposed to that, it always creates a positive experience for us in the end. >> We had Dave Russell on earlier from Gartner, and he was talking about pricing, and licensing, and specifically socket-based pricing, and said that that had a big impact on the marketplace. From a customer standpoint, what can you share with us about licensing, pricing, strategies that you employ, and maybe advice for other customers? >> So I think a lot of vendors are starting to try to simplify their licensing. Because if you look, I'm not going to pick on anyone specific, but they had, "Okay well we're going to sell you a number of VMs and then the storage on top of that." And it's like, okay that doesn't make sense. I don't want a PhD in math to be able to calculate how much I'm going to spend for licensing. So give me a model that is easy to manage, and I'm going to know exactly what my cost is, and have a very predictable cost going forward. And I understand Veeam has a couple different model, but they're still very simple. So you're either subscription or you're socket. So to me, just keep it simple. >> Dave: What's your preference? >> Right now it's socket. However, I'm not opposed to looking at something different. If it makes sense for my clients, I'm perfect fine with it. >> When you go subscription, does that have an effect? Does your CFO like that? Switching to a radical model? >> Well, we're just basically turning our capital into operational. And as long as my base cost doesn't change, I think it's perfectly fine. >> Dave: So from a capital budget standpoint, it's got to be neutral and go from there. >> Excellent, alright Mario, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great insights. >> Thank you for having me. >> Dave: You're very welcome. Keep it right there, everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. (upbeat electronic music)