(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and we're going to talk about data protection in the age of ransomware. It's a top of mind topic. And with me are two great guests and CUBE alumnus, David Noy, Vice Presidents of Product Management at Dell Technologies and Rob Emsley, Director of Data Protection Product Marketing at Dell. Guys, welcome back to the CUBE, it's good to see you both. >> Oh, thanks so much, I appreciate it. Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, thanks a lot Dave. >> Hey David, let me start with you. Maybe we could look at the macro, the big picture at Dell for cyber security. What are you seeing out there? >> You know, I'm seeing an enormous amount of interest in cybersecurity obviously driven by a string of recent events and the presidential executive order around cybersecurity. Look, we're in unprecedented times where, you know, disaster readiness is not just about being prepared for a wildfire or a sprinkler going off in your data center. It's around a new class of malicious attacks that people just have to be ready for. And it's not even a question of if it's going to happen, it's a question of when it's going to happen. We know it's going to happen, you're going to get hit by them. And so we go beyond just thinking about, hey, how do you build in technical capabilities into the product to make it difficult for attackers? We actually want to get predictive. We want to use advanced technologies and capabilities like artificial intelligence and machine learning to go out and scan users environments and look at their data which is really the lifeblood of a business and say, hey, we can see that there is potentially an attack looming. We can start to look for dormant attack vectors. And as soon as something bad is happening because we know something bad is going to happen, we can help you quickly recover the restore or figure out which restore point to recover from so you can get your business back and operational as soon as possible. >> Great, thank you for that, David. Hey Rob, good to see you. You know, we've seen a lot of changes recently kind of as David was referencing, it used to be okay, cybersecurity, that's the domain of the SecOps team and, you know, the rest of the company said, okay, it's their problem. You know, data protection or backup, that was the backup admin. Those two worlds are kind of colliding together. We use terms like cyber resiliency now. It's a sort of super set of, if you will, of the traditional cybersecurity. So how can organizations get ahead of these cyber threats when you engage with customers? Do you have any sort of specific angles or tooling that you use to help? >> Yeah, Dave, there's a couple of things to unpack there. You know, I think one of the things that you call out is cyber resiliency. You know, I think there's a balancing act that customers are all working through between cybersecurity and cyber resiliency. On the left-hand side of the balancing act, it's, you know, how can I keep bad things out of my network? And the reality is that it's very difficult, you know, to do that. You know, there's many applications that customers have deployed to protect the perimeter. But as you know, many cyber threats, you know, are manifested from inside of the perimeter. So what we're seeing is customers starting to invest more in making themselves cyber resilient organizations, you know, and as David mentioned, it's not the if, it's the when. The question is, how do you respond to when a cyber attack hits you? So one of the things that we introduced pointing back six months ago is a globally available cyber resiliency assessment. And we worked in collaboration with the Enterprise Strategy Group and we put out a free online assessment tool to allow customers to really answer questions around, you know, a big part of the NIST framework, around detection, protection and recovery. And we give customers the opportunity to get themselves evaluated on, are they prepared? Are they vulnerable? Or are they just, you know, black and white exposed? You know, what we found over the last six months is that over 70% of the people that have taken this cyber resiliency assessment fall into that category of they're vulnerable or they're exposed. >> Right, thank you for that. Yeah, the guys at ESG do a good job in that they have deep expertise in that space. And David, Rob just talked about sort of the threats from inside the perimeter and, you know, any person, you don't even need a high school diploma to be a ransomwarist, you can go on the dark web. You can acquire ransomware as a service. If you have access to a server and are willing to put a stick in there and do some bad things or give credentials out, hopefully you'll end up in handcuffs. You know, but more often than not, people are getting away with really, you know, insidious crime. So how is Dell, David helping customers respond to the threat of ransomware? >> So, you know, as I mentioned earlier, the product approach is pretty sophisticated. You know, you're right, somebody can come and just put a USB stick into a machine or if they have administrative access, they can figure out a code that they've either been given because, you know, the trust has been placed in the wrong place or they've somehow socially engineered out of someone. Look, it's not enough to just say, I'm going to go lock down my system. Someone who's gained access can potentially gain access to other systems by hopping through them. We take a more of a vault based approach which means that when you create a cyber vault, it's essentially locked down from the rest of your environment. Your cyber criminal is not able to get to that solution because it's been air gapped. It's kept somewhere else completely separate from other network but it also has keys and to the keys to the kingdom or that it opens up only at a certain time of day so it's not vulnerable to coming in at any time. It goes and requests data, it pulls the data and then it keeps that immutable copy in the vault itself. So the vault is essentially like a gated off, modded off environment that an attacker cannot get into. If you find that there was an attack or if an attack has occurred in which an attack will occur sooner or later, you then can basically prevent that attacker from getting access into that vaulted environment before that next opening event occurs. We also have to go back and look at time because sometimes these attackers don't instantiate all at once, I'm going to basically go and encrypt all your data. They take a more of a graduated approach. And so you have to go and look at patterns, access patterns of how data has actually changed and not just look at the metadata, say, okay, well, it looks like the data changed at a certain time. You have to look at the data contents. You have to look at the, if there's a file type. Often times, you can actually analyze that as well and say, hey, this given file whether it's a PowerPoint file or an Excel file or one of the a hundred or a thousand different file types should look like this, it doesn't look like that inside. What are many of the solutions that look for these attackers do is they're just looking at metadata access and then potentially just entropies or how fast things are changing. Well, it's changing faster than it normally would. That's not enough. And the attackers are just going to get smarter about how they go and change things. They're going to change it so that they don't change file suffixes or they don't change them with a very high entropy rate. And without using some kind of a system that's actually constantly tuning itself to say, hey, this is how these attack vectors are evolving over time, you're going to miss out on these opportunities to go and protect yourself. So we have also a constantly evolving and learning capability to go in and say, okay, as we see how these attack vectors are evolving to adapt to the way that we defend against them, we're going to also (audio glitches) other practices to make sure that we account for the new models. So it's a very adaptable kind of, it really is artificial intelligence form of protecting yourself. >> Can I ask you a question, David, just a follow-up on the immutable copy? Where does that live? Is it kind of live on prem? Is it in the cloud, either? >> Both, so we have the ability to put that on prem. We have the ability to put that in a second data center. We have the ability to keep that actually in a colo site so basically, completely out of your data center. And we've got the ability to keep that in the cloud as well. >> The reason I ask is because I just, you know, putting my paranoid SecOps hat on and I'm no expert here but I've talked to organizations that say, oh yeah, it's in the cloud, it's a service. Say, okay, but it's immutable? Yeah, it's write once, read many. You can't erase it. I go, okay, can I turn it off? Well, no, not really. Well, what if I stopped paying for the service? Well, we'd send a notice out. I said, okay, wait a minute. So am I just being too paranoid here? How do you handle that objection? >> Of turning it off? >> Yeah, can I turn it off or can you make it so that nobody can turn it off? >> Oh yeah, that's a good question. So actually what we're building into the product roadmap is the ability to that product actually self inspect and to look at. Whether or not even the underlying, so for example, if the service is running in a virtual machine. Well, the attacker could say, let me just go attack the virtual machine and it infect it and basically turn itself off even in an on-prem, nevermind in the cloud. And so we're looking at building or we're building into the roadmap, a lot more self inspection capabilities to make sure that somebody isn't going to just shut down the service. And so that kind of self resiliency is critical even to a vaulted solution which is air gapped, right? To your point. You don't want someone going, well, I can just get around your solution. I'm just going to go shut it down. That's something that we're getting at. >> So this talks, I think for the audience, this talks it's like an ongoing game of escalation and you want to have a partner who has the resources to keep up with the bad guys cause it's just the constantly, you know, upping the ante, Rob, you guys do a survey every year, the Global Data Protection Index. Tell us about that. What are the latest results? You survey a lot of people. I'm interested in, you know, the context of things like remote work and hybrid work, it's escalated the threat. What are you seeing there? >> Yeah, so as you mentioned, the Global Data Protection Index, we survey over a thousand IT executives, you know, around the globe. And in the most recent study, we absolutely started to ask questions specifically around, you know, customer's concerns with regards to cybersecurity. And we found that over 60% of the customer surveyed, you know, really are concerned that they don't feel that they are adequately prepared to respond to cyber threats that they see, unfortunately on a day-to-day basis. You know, certainly, you know, as you mentioned, the work from anywhere, learn from anywhere reality that many customers are dealing with, you know, one of the concerns that they have is the increased attack surface that they now have to deal with. I mean, the perimeter of the network is now, you know, much broader than it ever has been in the past. You know, so I think all of this leads, Dave, to cybersecurity discussions and cyber resiliency discussions being top of mind for really any CIO, their CSO in any industry. You know, in the days of old, you know, we used to focus at the financial services industry, you know, as, you know, a bunch of customers that we, you know, could have very relevant conversations with but now, you know, that is now cross industry-wide. There isn't a vertical that isn't concerned about the threats of cyber security and cyber attacks. So, you know, when we think about our business especially around data vaulting with our PowerProtect portfolio but also with our PowerScale portfolio, with our unstructured data storage solutions. You know, when we're really having constant conversations of brand, how do you make your environment more cyber resilient? And, you know, we've been seeing, you know, rapid growth in both of those solution areas, both implementing extensions of customers, backup and recovery solutions, you know, but also, you know, in the environments where, you know, we're deploying, you know, large scale unstructured storage infrastructure, you know, the ability to have real-time monitoring of those environments and also to extend that to delivering a vaulted solution for your unstructured storage are all things that are leading us to, you know, work with customers to actually help them become more cyber resilient. >> Great, thanks. The last question and maybe for both of you. Maybe Rob you start and David you can chime in. I'm interested in what's exciting you guys, what's new in the portfolio, are there new features that you're delivering that map to the current market conditions? I mean, your unique value proposition and your capabilities have shifted. You have to respond to the market changes over the left last 18 to 24 months whether it's cyber, ransomware, the digital transformation, what's new in the portfolio and what's exciting you guys. >> So Dave, yes, so quite recently we, you know, as well as, you know, running an event specifically to talk about protection and the age of ransomware and to discuss many of the things that we've covered on this call. You know, data protection is still a foundational technology to help customers become, you know, more secure and, you know, reduce their risk profiles. So innovation that we delivered very recently, you know, it's really in three specific areas, you know, VMware Data Protection, NAS Data Protection and then, you know, also, you know, we introduced a tech preview of a direction that we're taking to expand the scalability and manageability of our PowerProtect appliances. So transparent snapshots delivers capabilities to help customers better protect their VMware environment without the concern of disrupting their production applications when they're doing backup and recovery of virtual machines. Dynamic NAS protection moves away from the age old mechanism of NDMP and provides a much more performance and scalable solution for protecting all of that unstructured data running on NAS infrastructure. And then last but not least to say the tech preview of Smart Scale which is our new solution and architecture to allow customers to pull together multiple power of attack appliances within their data sensors and give them a much easier way of managing the PowerProtect appliances that they have and scaling them environment by implementing a federated namespace to align on them to get support in that environment. >> Nice, some great innovations there. All right, David bring us home. What's exciting you? You shared a little bit with the roadmap of... >> Yeah, look, I think all of this is about operations today. Every enterprise is 24/7. It doesn't matter what vertical you're in, right? Downtime is unacceptable. And whether that means whether it's downtime because you got hit by a malicious attacker, it means downtime because you were caused by disruption of virtual machine instances to Rob's point during the backup process. And we can't interrupt those processes, we can't impact their performance. It means, you know, making sure that your largest unstructured repositories in NAS deployments can be backed up in a time that makes sense so that you can meet your own SLAs. And it means that with a smart scale product there are ability to go and say, okay, as you're expanding your backup target environment, we can do that in a seamless fashion without disrupting your backup operations and your day-to-day operations. All of this is around making sure that we minimize the amount of disruption that our end users experience either because of malicious attacks or because of day-to-day operations and making, you know, making sure that those businesses really can operate 24/7. And that is the crux of a really true enterprise solution for data protection >> Guys, very important topic, really appreciate you coming on the CUBE. Great conversation and keep up the good work of protecting our data. >> Well, Dave, thanks. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, and thanks everybody for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>>mhm mhm >>Hey guys, welcome back to Los Angeles lisa martin. Coming to you live from cuba con and cloud native Con north America 2021. Very excited to be here. This is our third day of back to back coverage on the cube and we've got a couple of guests cube alumni joining me remotely. Please welcome parse our karate senior consultant, product marketing, Dell Technologies and David Noi VP product management at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen welcome back to the program. >>Thanks johnny >>so far so let's go ahead and start with you. Let's talk about what Dell EMC is offering to developers today in terms of unstructured data. >>Absolutely, it's great to be here. So let me start with the container storage interface. This is Q khan and a couple of years ago the container storage interface was still in beta and the storage vendors, we're very enthusiastically kind of building the plug in city of the different storage portfolio to offer enterprise grade features to developers are building applications of the Cuban this platform. And today if you look at the deli in storage portfolio, big block volumes. Nash shares s three object A P I S beyond their virtual volumes. However you're consuming storage, you have the plug ins that are required to run your applications with these enterprise Great feature speech right about snap sharks data replication, all available in the Cuban this layer and just this week at coupon we announced the container storage modules which is kind of the next step of productivity for developers beat you know uh in terms of observe ability of the storage metrics using tools like Prometheus visualizing it ravana authorization capabilities so that you know too bad moments can have better resource management of the storage that is being consumed um that so there are these multiple models were released. And if you look at unstructured data, this term may be a bit new for our kind of not very family for developers but basically the storage. Well there is a distinction that is being made you know, between primary storage and unstructured storage or unstructured data solutions And by unstructured we mean file and object storage. If you look at the cube contact nickel sessions, I was very glad to see that there is an entire stream for um machine learning and data so that speaks to how popular communities deployment models are getting when it comes to machine learning and artificial intelligence. Um even applications like genomics and media and entertainment and with the container storage interface uh and the container storage modules with the object storage portfolio that bill has, we offer the comprehensive unstructured data solutions for developers beat object or file. And the advantage the developers are getting is these you know, if you look at platforms like power scale and these areas, these are like the industry workhorses with the highest performance. And if you think of scale, you know, think of 250 nasnotes, you know with a single name space with NVIDIA gpu direct capabilities. All these capabilities developers can use um for you know, applications like machine learning or any competition intensive for data intensive applications that requires these nass uh scale of mass platforms. So so um that's that's what is new in terms of uh what we are offering, you have the storage heaters >>got a parcel. Thank you. David, let's bring you into the conversation now you've launched objects scale at VM World. Talk to us about that, what some of the key features and capabilities are and some of those big business benefits that customers are going to be able to achieve. >>Sure thing. So I really want to focus on three of the biggest benefits. This would be the fact that the product is actually based on kubernetes country, the scale of the product and then its ability to do global replication. So let me just touch on those in order. Mhm You said that the product is based on kubernetes and here we are cube concept. The perfect time to be talking about that. This product really caters to those who are looking for a flexible way to deploy object storage in containerized fashion, appeals to the devops folks and folks who like to automate things and call the communities a P I. S to make uh the actual deployment of the product. Very simple in turnkey and that's really what people turn to kubernetes for is the ability to spin things up when they need them and spend them down as they don't and make that all on commodity hardware and commodity, you know, the quantity pricing and the idea there is that I'm making it as simple and easy as possible. You're not going to get as much shadow I. T. You won't have people going off and putting things off into a public cloud. And so where security of an organization or control of the data that flows with an organization is important. Having something that's easy for developers to use in the same paradigm that they're used to is critical. Now I talked about scale and you know, if you have come to me two years ago I would have told you, you know, kubernetes, yeah, containers people are kicking it around and they're doing some interesting science experiments, I would say in the last year I started to see a lot of requests from customers um in the dozens, even 200 petabyte range as it relates to capacity for committees and specifically looking for C. S. I and cozy with this. This this is the the object storage implementation of the container storage interfaces. Uh So skin was definitely there and the idea of this product is to provide easy scalability from the terabytes range into the multi petabyte range and again it's that ease of use, ease of deployment because it is kubernetes basically because it's a KPI driven that makes that possible. So we're talking about going from a three night minimum to thousands of nodes. and this allows people to deploy the product either at the edge or in the data center um in the edge because you can get very small deployments in the data center to massive scale. So we want to provide something that covers the gamut. The last thing I talked about was replication. So let me just touch upon what I mean by that uh when people go and build these deployments, if you're building a deployment at the edge of an object scale product, you're probably taking in sensor data or some kind of information that you want to then send back to a data center for processing. So you make it simple to do bucket based replication. An object, sorry object storage based replication to move things to another location. And uh that can be used either for bringing data back for analytics from the edge, it can be used for availability. So making sure that you have data available across multiple data centers in the case that you have an outage. It could be even used for sharing data between developers in one site and another site. So we provide that level of flexibility overall. Um this is the next generation object store leveraging. Dell technologies number one position in object storage. So I'm pretty excited about >>and how David is object scale integrated with VM ware software. Stop give us that slice and dice. >>Yeah, and that's a good question. And so, you know, we're talking about this being a Kubernetes based product, you can deploy it on open shift or we integrate directly with VM ware cloud foundation and with Tansy, which is VM ware's container orchestration and management platform. I've seen the demo of the product myself from my team and they've showed it to be did all of the management of the product was actually done within the V sphere Ui, which is great. So easy to go and just enter the V sphere. You I installed the product very simply have it up and running and then go and do all of your management through that user interface or to automate it using the same api is that you used to through VM ware and the 10 Zoo uh platform. >>Thank you, paris are back to you. Security is a big theme here in kubernetes. It's also been a big theme here. We've been talking about it the last three days here at cop con. How does Dell EMC's unstructured portfolio offer that necessary cyber protection that developers need to have and bake that into what they're doing. So >>surely, you know, they talk about cybersecurity, you know, there are different layers of security right from, you know, smarter firewalls to you know how to manage privileged account access and so on. And what we are trying to do is to provide a layer of cyber defense, right at the asset that you're trying to protect, which is the data and this is where the ransom their defender solution is basically detecting any patterns of the compromise that might have happened and alerting the I. T. Um administration about this um possible um intrusions into their into the data by looking at the data access parents in real time. So that's a pretty big deal. Then we're actually putting all this, you know, observance on the primary data and that's what the power scale platform cybersecurity protection features offers. Now we've also extended this kind of detection mechanism for the object data framework on pcs platforms as well. So this is like an additional layer of security at the um layer of uh you know where the data is actually being read and written. Do that's the area, you know, in case of object here we're looking at the S. Three traffic and trying to find his parents in case of a file data atmosphere, looking at the file's access parents and so on. So and in relation to this we're also providing uh data isolation mechanism that is very critical in many cyber recovery processes with the smart absolution as well. So this is something that the developers are getting for like without having to worry about it because that is something implemented at the infrastructure layer itself. So they don't have to worry about you know trying to court it or develop their application to integrate these kinds of things because it's an it's embedded in the infrastructure at the one of the FBI level at the E C. S A P I level. So that's pretty um pretty differentiating in the industry in the country storage solutions. I'll get. >>Uh huh. Yeah. I mean look if you look at what a lot of the object storage players are doing as it relates to cyber security. They're they're playing off the fact that they've implemented object lock and basically using that to lockdown data. And that's that's good. I mean I'm glad that they're doing that and if the case that you were able to lock something down and someone wasn't able to bypass that in some way, that's fantastic. Or if they didn't already encrypted before I got locked down what parts are is referring to is a little bit more than that. It's actually the ability to look at user behavior and determined that something bad is happening. So this is about actually being able to do, you know, predictive analytics being able to go and figure out that you're under attack. There's anomalous behavior um and we're able to go and actually infer from that that something bad is happening and where we think it's happening and lock it down even even more securely than for example just saying hey we provide object like capabilities which is one of the responses that I've seen out there from object storage vendors >>can you share with us. Parts are a customer example like walk us through how this is actually being used and deployed and what some of those business outcomes are. >>Yes lisa. So in terms of container realization itself, they have a media and entertainment kind of customer story here. Um Swiss TXT um they have a platform as a service where they serve their customer base with a range of uh you know, media production and broadcasting solutions and they have containers this platform and part of this computerization is part of their services is they offer infrastructure as a service to you know, media producers who need a high performance storage, high performance computing and power skill And Iceland have been their local solutions to offer this And now that they have containerized their core platform. Well you see a sign interface for power skills, they are able to continue to deliver the infrastructure, high performance infrastructure and storage services to their customers through the A. P I. And it's great to see how fast they could, you know, re factor their application but yet continue to offer the high performance and degrees enterprise grade uh features of the power scale platform. So Swiss Txt and would love to share more. Keep it on the story. Yeah. Hyperlink. >>And where can folks go to learn more about objects scale and what you guys are announcing? Yes, particular. You are a website that you want to direct folks too. >>I would say that technologies dot com. And uh that's the best place to start. >>Yeah, I would go to the Delta product pages around objects should be publicly built. >>Excellent guys, thank you for joining me on the program today. Walking through what how Dell EMC is helping developers with respect to unstructured data, Talking to us about objects skill that you launched VM world, some of those big customer benefits and of course showing us the validation, the proof in the pudding with that customer story. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you. Thank you lisa >>For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Los Angeles. We're coming to you from our coverage of coupon and cloud native on North America 21. Coming back. Stick around. Rather I should say we'll be back after a short break with our next guest.

>>live from Orlando, Florida It's the cue covering Microsoft Ignite Brought to you by Cohee City. >>Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of Microsoft ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host Stew Minimum. We are joined by David Noi. He is the VP of cloud at cohesively, which is where we are. We're in the Coe City boots. So I should say thank you for welcoming us. >>My pleasure they found over here. >>So you are pretty brand new to the company. Ah, long time Tech veteran but new newish to Cohee City. Talk a little bit about what made you want to make the leap to this company. >>Well, you know, as I was, it was it was time for me to move from. My prior company will go to the reasons they're but a CZ. I looked around and kind of see who were the real innovators, right? You were the ones who were disrupting because my successes in the past have all been around disruption. And when I really looked at what these guys were doing, you know, first, it's kinda hard to figure out that I was like, Oh my gosh, this is really something different, Like it's bringing kind of the cloud into the enterprise and using that model of simplification and then adding data service is and it is really groundbreaking. So I just like, and the other thing was, I'll just throw this point out there. I read a lot of the white papers of the technology, and I looked at it and having been, you know, Tech veteran for a while, it looked to me like a lot of people who have done this stuff before we got together and said, If I had to do it again and do it right, what were things I wouldn't d'oh! And one of the things I would do, right? Right, so that was just fascinating. >>So, David, I was reading a Q and A recently with Mohit, founder of Cohee City, and it really is about that data you mentioned. Data service is, Yeah, bring us inside a little bit way in the storage and I t industry get so bogged down in the speeds and feeds and how fast you can do things in the terabytes and petabytes and like here. But we're talking about some real business issues that the product is helping to solve. >>I totally agree. Look, I've been in the in the storage industry for a while now, and you know, multi petabytes of data. And the problem that you run into when you go and talk to people who use this stuff is like old cheese. I start to lose track of it. I don't know what to do with it. So the first thing is, how do you search it? Index it? That's, you know, so I can actually find out what I have. Then there's a question of being able to go in and crack the date open and provide all kinds of data. Service is from, you know, classifications. Thio. Uh oh. Is this Ah, threat or business? Have vulnerabilities in it. It's really a data management solution. Now, of course, we started with backup, right? But then we're very quickly moving into other. Service is back on target file an object. You'll see some more things coming out around testing dead. For example, if you have the world's data is one thing to just keep it and hold it. But then what do you do with it. How do you extract value out of it? Is you really gotta add data management Service is and people try to do it. But this hyper converge technology and this more of a cloud approach is really unique in the way that it actually goes about it. >>I speak a little bit of that. That that cloud approach? >>Yeah, So I mean, you know, But he comes from a cloud background, right? He wrote was big author of the Google foul system. The idea, basically is to say, Let's take a look at a global view of how data is kept. Let's basically be ableto actually abstract that with the management layer on top of that and then let's provide service is on top of that. Oh, by the way, people now have to make a decision between am I gonna keep in on premise or keep it in the cloud? And so the data service is how to extend not just to the on Prem, but actor actually spend Thio. Pod service is as well, which is kind of why I'm here. I think you know what we do with Azure is pretty fascinating in that data management space, too. So we'll be doing more data management. Is the service in the cloud as well? >>So let's get into that a little bit. And I'm sure a lot of announcements this week with your arc and another products and service is. But let's dig into how you're partnering and the kinds of innovative things that go he see a Microsoft are doing together >>what we do. A lot of things. First of all, we weave a very rapid cadence of engineering, engineering conversations. We do everything from archiving data and sending long term retention data into the cloud. But that's kind of like where people start right, which is just ship it all up there. You know, Harvard, it's held right. But then think about doing migrations. How do you take a workload and actually migrated from on Prem to the cloud hold? We could do wholesale migrations of peoples environments. You want to go completely cloud native, weaken, fail over and fill back if we want to as well so we can use the cloud is actually a D. R site. Now you startle it. Think about disaster. Recovery is a service. That's another service that you start to think about what? About backing up cloud native workloads? Well, you don't just want to back up your work Clothes that are in the on Prem data certainly want to back him up also in the cloud. And that includes even office 3 65 So you just look at all of what you know. That means that the ability then could practice that data open and then provide all these additional when I say service is I'm talking about classifications, threat analysis, being able to go in and identify vulnerabilities and things of that nature. That's just a huge, tremendous value on top of just a basic infrastructure capabilities. >>David, you've been in the industry. You've seen a lot of what goes on out there, help us understand really what differentiates Cohee City. Because a lot of traditional vendors out there that are all saying many of the same word I hear you're Clough defying enters even newer vendors. Then go he sitio out there >>totally get it. Look, I mean, here's here's kind of what I find really interesting and attractive about the product. I've been in the storage history for a long time, so many times, people ask me, Can I move my applications to the storage? Because moving the data to the application that's hard. But moving the application to the data Wow, that makes things a lot easier, right? And so that's one of the big things that actually we do that's different. It's the hyper converged platform. It's a scale out platform. It's one that really looks a lot more like some of the skill of platforms that we've done in the past. But it goes way beyond that. And then the ability. Then say, OK, let's abstract that a ways to make it as simple as possible so people don't have to worry about managing lots of different pools and lots of different products for, you know, a service one versus service to versus service three, then bringing applications to that data. That's what makes it really different. And I think if you look around here and you talk to other vendors, I mean don't provide a P eyes. That's one thing that's great and that's important. But it actually bring the applications to the data. That's you know, that's what all of the cloud guys dont look a Google Gmail on top. They put search on top. They put Google translate on top. Is all of these things are actually built on top of the data that they store >>such? Adela This morning in the Kino talked about that there's going to be 500 million knew at business applications built by 2023. How is cohesive? E position to, you know, both partner with Microsoft and everyone out there to be ready for that cloud native >>future. That's a great question. Look, we're not gonna put 500 million applications on the product, right? But we're gonna pick some key applications that are important in the top verticals, whether it's health care, financial service is public sector and so long life sciences, oil and gas. But in the same time, we will offer the AP eyes extensions to say anything about going into azure if we can export things is as your blobs, For example, Now we can start to tie a lot of the azure service's into our storage and make it look like it's actually native as your storage. Now we can put it on as your cold storage shed, a hot storage. We can decide how we want to tear things from a performance perspective, but we can really make it look like it's native. Then we can take advantage of not just our own service is, but the service is that the cloud provides is well on. That makes us extraordinarily powerful >>in terms of the differentiator of Cohee City from a service of standpoint. But what about from a cultural standpoint we had sought Nadella on? The main stage is turning. Talking a lot about trust and I'm curious is particularly as a newer entrants into this technology industry. How how do you develop that culture and then also that reputation. So >>here's one of the interesting things when when I joined the company and I've been around for a while and I've been in a couple of very large brand names, I started walking down the holes and I'm like, Oh, here, here. Oh, you're here. Wait, you're here. It's like an old star cast, and when you go into, you know, some of the customer base and it's like, Hey, we know each other for a long time. That relationship is just there. On top of that, I mean the product works, it's solid. People love it. It's easy to use, and it actually solves riel problems for them. On Dhe, you know, we innovate extraordinarily fast. So when customers find a problem, we're on such a fast release cadence. We can fix it for them in extraordinarily, uh, in times that I've never seen before. In fact, is a little bit scary how fast the engineering group works. It's probably faster than anything I've ever seen in the past. And I think that helps that build the customers trust because they see that if we recognize there's a problem, we're gonna be there to soldier for >>them. There's trust of the company when we talk about our data. There's also the security aspect. Yes, cohesive. He fit into the A story with Microsoft and beyond. >>The security part is extraordinarily important. So look, we've already, as I said, built kind of our app marketplace and we're bringing a lot of applications to do things like Ransomware detection, um, vulnerability detection day declassification. But Microsoft is also developing similar AP eyes, and you heard this morning that they're building capabilities for us to be able to go and interact with them and share information. So we find vulnerabilities because share it with Ambika. Share with us so we could shut them down. So way have the native capabilities built in. They have capabilities that they're building of their own. Imagine the power of it being able to tie those two together. I just think that that's extraordinarily powerful. >>What about Gross? This is a company that is growing like gangbusters. Can you give us a road map? What you can expect from Coach? >>Look, I've never seen growth like this. I mean, I joined specifically to look at a lot of the cloud, and the file on Object service is and, you know, obviously have a background in backup data protection as well. I haven't seen growth like this since my old days when I was a nice guy. Started in, like, Isil on back in the, you know, way, way old days, this is This is you know, I can't give you exact numbers, but I'll tell you, it's way in the triple digits. And I mean and it's extraordinarily fast to see from an an azure perspective. We're seeing, you know, close to triple digit growth as Well, so I love it. I mean, I'm just extraordinarily excited. All right, >>on the product side, Give us a little bit of a look forward as to what we should be expecting from cohesive. >>Absolutely so from a look forward perspective. As I said, we protect a lot of on premise workloads, and now and we protect, obviously, as your work clothes as well. So we protect observe e ems. But as we think about some of the azure native service is like sequel in other service is that air kind of built native within a azure. We'll extend our application to be able to actually do that as well will extend kind of the ease of use and the deployment models to make it easier for customers to go on, deploy and manage. It really seems like a seamless single pane of glass, right? So when you're looking at Cory City, you should think of it as even if it's in the cloud or if it's on premise. It looks the same to you, which is great. If I want to do search and index, I can do it across the cloud, and I can do it across the on Prem so that integration is really what ties it together makes it extraordinarily interesting. >>Finally, this is this is not your first ignite. I'm interested to hear your impressions of this conference, what you're hearing from customers. What your conversations that you're having. >>You know, it's a lot of fun. I've been walking around the partner booths over here to see, like, you know, who could we partner with? That's more of those data management service is because we don't think of ourselves again. You know, we started kind of in the backup space. We have an extraordinarily scalable storage infrastructure. I was blown away by the capabilities of the file. An object. I mean, I was as a foul guy for a long time. It was unbelievable. But when you start to add those data management capabilities on top of that so that people could either, you know, again, either your point, make sure that they can detect threats and vulnerabilities are you find what they're looking for or be able to run analytics, for example, right on the box. I mean, I've been asked to do that for so long, and it's finally happening. It's like It's a dream >>come true, Jerry. Now >>everything you ever wanted software defined bringing the applications to the data. It's just like, if I could ever say like, Hey, if I could take all of the things that I always wanted a previous companies that put him together it's cohesive. I'm looking around here and I'm seeing a lot of great technology that we can go and integrate with >>Great. Well, David, No, I Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. >>Thank you very much. I appreciate it. >>I'm Rebecca Knight, First Amendment. You are watching the Cube.

>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We are joined by David Neu. He is the VP of cloud at Cohesity, which is where we are. We're in the Cohesity booths, so I should say thank you for welcoming us. Pleasure. They found me here. So you are pretty brand new to the company, a, a longtime tech veteran, but, but new newish to Cohesity. Talk a little bit about what made you want to make the leap to this company? >>Well, you know, as I was, I mean it was, it was time for me to move from my prior company. Um, and then we'll go into the reasons there. But, um, as I looked around and to kind of see who were the real innovators, right, who were the ones who were disrupting, cause my successes in the past have all been around disruption. And when I really looked at what these guys were doing, you know, first it's kind of hard to figure out. Then it was like, Oh my gosh, this is really something different. Like, um, it's bringing kind of the cloud into the enterprise and using that model of simplification and then adding data services and it's really groundbreaking. So I just like a, and the other thing was, Oh, I'll just throw this point out there. I read a lot of the white papers and the technology and I looked at it and having been a lot, you know, tech veteran for awhile, it looked to me like a lot of people who have done this stuff before it got together and said if I had to do it again and do it right, like what were the things I wouldn't do and what are the things I would do? >>Right, right. So that was just fascinating. So David, yeah, I was reading a Q and a recently with, with Mohit, founder of Cohesity, and it really is about that data. You mentioned data services. Yeah. Bring us insight a little bit. You know, we in the, you know, storage in it industry, you know, get so bogged down in the speeds and feeds and how fast you can do things in the terabytes and petabytes and like here, but we're talking about some real business issues that the product is helping to, to solve. >> I totally agree. Look, I've been in the, in the storage industry for a while now and you know, multi petabytes of data and the problem that you run into when you go and talk to people who use this stuff is like, well geez, I start to lose track of it. I don't know what to do with it. >>So the first thing is how do you search it, index it. That's, you know, so I can actually find out what I have. Then there's a question of being able to go in and crack the data open and provide all kinds of data services from, you know, classification to uh, Oh, is this a threat or business have vulnerabilities in it. It's really a data management solution. Now of course we started with backup, right? But then we're very quickly moving into other services back on target, file an object. You'll see some more things coming out, uh, around test and dev. For example, if you have the world's data, it's one thing to just keep it and hold it, but then what do you do with it? How do you extract value out of it is you really got to add data management services and people try to do it, but this hyper converged technology in this more of a cloud approach is, is really unique in the way that it actually goes about it. >>Could you speak a little bit of that, that that cloud approach? Yeah, so I mean, you know, Monet comes from a cloud background, right? He wrote the, he was the author of the Google file system. The idea basically is the same. Let's take a look at a global view of how data is capped. Let's basically be able to actually abstract that with a management layer on top of that and then let's provide services on top of that. Oh by the way, people now have to make a decision between am I going to keep it on premise or keep it in the cloud? And so the data services, how to extend not just to the on-prem but the act to actually extend to Conde services as well, which is kind of why I'm here. I think, uh, you know, what we do with Azure is pretty fascinating in that data management space too. So we'll be doing more data management as a service in the cloud as well. >>So let's get into that a little bit and I'm sure a lot of announcements this week with Azure arc and another products and services, but let's dig into how you're partnering in the kinds of innovative things that go Cohesity and Microsoft are doing together. >>Well, we're doing a lot of things. First of all, we, we've a very rapid cadence of engineering to engineering conversations. We do everything from archiving data and sending longterm retention data into the cloud. But that's kind of like where people start, right? Which is just ship it all up there. You know, in Harvard it's held, right? But then think about doing migrations. How do you take a workload and actually migrated from on prem to the cloud in a hold? We can do wholesale migrations that people's environments who want to go completely cloud native, we can fail over and fail back if we want to as well. So we can use the cloud is actually a dr site. Now you start to think about disaster recovery as a service. That's another service that you start to think about, Oh, what about backing up cloud native workloads? >>Well, you don't just want to back up your own workloads that are in the on prem data center. You want to back them up also in the cloud and that includes even office three 65 so you just look at all of what that means and then the ability then crack that, open that data open and then provide all these additional, when I say services, I'm talking about classification, threat analysis, um, being able to go in and identify vulnerabilities and things of that nature. That's just a, a huge, tremendous value on top of just the basic infrastructure capabilities. David, you've been in the industry, you've seen a lot of what goes on out there. Hopeless, understand really what differentiates Cohesity. Because a lot of traditional vendors out there that are all saying many of the same words to hear here, cloudifying hinders even newer vendors than Cohesity's eh, out there. >>Totally get it. Look, I mean, here's, here's kind of what I find really interesting and, and, and, and just attractive about the product. I've been in the storage industry for a long time. So many times people have asked me, can I move my applications to the storage because moving the data to the application, that's hard, but moving the application to the data, wow, that makes things a lot easier. Right? And so that's one of the big things that actually we do that's different. It's the hyperconverge platform. It's a scale out platform. It's one that, um, really looks a lot more like some of the scale out platforms that we've done in the past, but goes way beyond that. And then the ability to then say, okay, let some strike that. A ways to make it as simple as possible so people don't have to worry about managing lots of different pools and lots of different products for, you know, a service one versus service two versus service three and then bringing applications to that data. >>That's what makes it really different. And I think if you look around here and you talk to other vendors, I mean, they'll provide API APIs. That's one thing and that's great and that's important, but to actually bring the applications to the data, that's, you know, that's what all of the cloud guys do. I mean, look at Google, they put Gmail on top, they put a search on top, they put Google translate on top is all of these things are actually built on top of the data that they store such as Adela. This morning in the keynote talked about that there's going to be 500 million new at business applications built by 2023 how is Cohesity position to both partner with Microsoft and everyone out there to be ready for that cloud native future? That's a great question. Look, we're not going to put 500 million applications on the product, right? >>But we are going to pick some key applications that are important in the top verticals, whether it's healthcare, financial services, public sector, and so long I've sciences, oil and gas, but I'm in the same time we all will offer the API APIs extensions too. So if you think about going into Azure, if we can explore things as Azure blobs for example, now we can start to tie a lot of the Azure services into our storage and make it look like it's actually native Azure storage. Now we can put it on Azure cold storage, you know, hot storage, we can decide how we want to tier things from a performance perspective, but we can really make it look like it's native. Then we can take advantage of not just our own services but the services that the cloud provides as well. And that makes us extraordinarily powerful >>in terms of the differentiator of Cohesity from a services standpoint. But what about from a cultural standpoint? We had Satya Nadella on the main stage this morning talking a lot about trust. And I'm curious as particularly as a newer entrant into this technology industry, pow, how do you, uh, develop that culture and then also that reputation too? >>Here's one of the interesting things we did when I joined the company and I've been around for awhile and I've been in a couple very large brand names. I started walking down the halls and I'm like, Oh, you're here. Oh, you're here. Wait, you're here. And it's like an all star cast and a, when you go into, you know, some of the customer base and it's like, Hey, we know each other for a long time. That relationship is just there on top of that. I mean, the product works, it's solid. People love it. It's easy to use and it actually solves real problems for them. Um, and you know, we innovate extraordinarily fast. So when customers find a problem, we are in, uh, on such a fast release cadence, we can fix it for them in extraordinarily, uh, uh, in times I've never seen before. >>In fact, is a little bit scary how fast the engineering group works. It's, uh, probably faster than anything I've ever seen in the past. And I think that helps. They build the customer's trust cause they see that if we recognize there's a problem, we're going to be there to solve it for them. There's trust of the company. Uh, when we talk about our data, there's also the security aspect. Yes. How does Cohesity fit into the, there's a story with Microsoft and beyond. The security part is extraordinarily important. So look, we've already, as I said, built kind of an AR app marketplace and we're bringing a lot of applications to do things like ransomware detection, uh, um, vulnerability detection, data classification. But, uh, Microsoft is also developing similar API APIs. And you heard this morning that they're building capabilities for us to be able to go and interact with them and share information. >>So if we find vulnerabilities, we can share it with them, they can share with us and we could shut them down. So we have the native capabilities built in, they have capabilities that they're building of their own. Imagine the power of being able to tie those two together. I just think that that's extraordinarily powerful. What about growth for a company that is growing like gangbusters? Can you give us a roadmap you can expect from coaching? I've never seen growth like this. I mean, I joined, um, specifically to look at a lot of the cloud and, uh, the file and object services and you know, obviously I have a background in, in backup and data protection as well. Um, I haven't seen growth like this since my old days when I was in Iceland, when I started in Isilon back in the, you know, way, way old days. >>This is X. This is, you know, I can't give you exact numbers, but I'll tell you it's way in the triple digits, you know what I mean? And, and it's extraordinarily fast to see from an Azure perspective, we're seeing, you know, close to triple digit growth as well. So I, I love it. I mean, I'm just extraordinarily excited. All right. Uh, on the product side, give us a little bit of a look forward as to what we should be expecting from Cohesity. Absolutely. So from a look forward perspective, as I said, we protect a lot of on-premise workloads and um, you know, now and we protect obviously Azure workloads as well. We protect Azure VMs. But as we think about some of the Azure native services like sequel, um, and other services that are kind of built native within Azure, uh, we'll extend our application and to be able to actually do that as well, we'll extend kind of the ease of use and the deployment models to make it easier for customers to go and deploy and manage. It really seems like a seamless single pane of glass, right? So when you're looking at, uh, Cohesity, you should think of it as, even if it's in the cloud or if it's on premise, it looks the same to you, which is great. If I want to do search and index, I can do it across the cloud and I can do it across the on prem. So that integration is, is really what ties it together and makes it extraordinarily interesting. >>Finally, this is, this is not your first ignite. I'm interested to hear your impressions of this conference. What you're hearing from customers, what your, what the conversations that you're having. >>You know, it's a lot of fun. I've been walking around the partner booths over here to see like, you know, who can we partner with to add some more of those data management services because we don't think ourselves, again, you know, we started kind of in the backup space. We have an extraordinarily scalable storage infrastructure. I was blown away by the capabilities of the fallen object. I mean it was just as a fall guy for a long time. It was unbelievable. But when you start to add those data management capabilities on top of that so that people can either, you know, again, either to your point, uh, make sure that they can detect threats and vulnerabilities or uh, you know, find what they're looking for or you know, be able to run analytics for example, right on the box. I mean, I've been asked to do that for so long and then just, it's finally happening. It's like, it's a dream come true for me. It's like everything you ever wanted software defined, bringing the applications to the, to the data. It's just like if I could ever say like, Hey, if I could take all of the things that I always wanted at previous companies and put them together, it's Cohesity and I'm looking around here and I'm seeing a lot of great technology that we can go and integrate with. >>Great. Well, David and I, thank you so much for coming on the cube. >>Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I'm Rebecca knife. First to Miniman. You are watching the cube.

from Tavern on the Green in Central Park New York it's the to covering Veritas vision solution day brought to you by Veritas welcome back to New York City everybody we're in the heart of Central Park at the Tavern on the Green beautiful location here a lot of customers coming in to see and hear veritas solution days we talked to Scott general earlier about sort of why these solution days very intimate customer events around the world David Moyes is here he's the vice president of software to find storage and appliances at Veritas David thanks for coming on oh thanks for having me you're very welcome so wait appliances you guys were software company what what's going on we are we are a software company and we have been a software company for a very long time and we will continue to be a software company for a very long time but what we find is that you know customers oftentimes they want to deploy software but then they find that there's a lot of additional challenges that come with that there's the maintenance of the actual server infrastructure there's patching of the operating system there's vulnerabilities that show up those additional operational costs sometimes outweigh the benefits of just buying a purpose-built appliance and those purpose-built appliances can sometimes you know how workflows built-in to them that just make them so easy to use that you know one person could potentially operate petabytes of an appliance versus a whole army of people trying to maintain hundreds or thousands of individual servers so you put out a stat this morning which I wasn't aware of you guys have more than half the market I think it was an IDC stat maybe was Gartner more than half the market for integrated the purpose-built backup appliances is that right that's right so for backup appliances purpose-built back of appliances that actually hosts the backup software we have more than 50% market share people have that much trust in the appliances that we build and find that simplicity so compelling that they want to buy it and that form factor from us you know about a decade ago I wrote a piece in the early days of wiki bond talking about services oriented storage and and when we think about software-defined storage what you described today was actually sets of granular services that I can invoke when I need them or not if I don't need them very cloud like I mean I could replace the s in Software Defined with s and services and that's your kind of philosophy and approach isn't it it is in fact what we find is that people want data services on top of that data when you're reporting enterprise data and you protecting exabyte so that apprise data the way the Veritas does having it just sit there and do nothing is is kind of wasteful to a large extent unless you're just waiting for a disaster to occur or data corruption or something like that if we can support to think about what are the governance capabilities lineage audit all of the different things that we could potentially build as services that are then can be downloaded onto that purpose-built backup appliance those all become added value to the customer but you you did what you described was not just another you're not just dropping in another stovepipe appliance you talked about having visibility across the entire portfolio you really stress that a lot you said several times you can't get this from any other backup vendor or any other vendor really talk about that a little bit well what's interesting is that look from the moment that data is actually born from a primary application and then it's protected its protected into a backup solution and then it's probably put into some sort of a storage solution either maybe at a duplication storage solution then it's moved to an even cheaper tier and eventually off to the cloud or somewhere else each of those are disparate if we can actually build a connector framework that can actually extract that information and bring it all together so that we can start to make assertions about hey how did this data flow how did it originate what kind of information do I have do I even need it anymore after seven years should I purge it or should I delete it is it even a risk to my organization to keep it you can only do that when you can make those associations across the lifecycle of that data and so we tracked the data through its entire lifecycle and that's only through the integration of all that product portfolio and that's something that you're not going to see with the small point solutions that are being built by startups and it's even very rare to see in some of the larger companies that build these solutions you know dude I'm glad you mentioned that about getting rid of data because so often today in the in the news media and you here in vendor presentations people talk about keeping data forever yeah that's that's dangerous in a lot of case a lot of general councils out there don't want to keep data forever there's data that you want to delete if in fact you can because of the compliance risks that it brings to your company you don't want to keep working process or some rogue email that floats around the organization get rid of that keep what you have to and get rid of the rest right and then the problem is if you don't know what you have and also you don't know how many places that that data is propagated how can you possibly delete it all we've helped customers in some cases that I'm not going to mention who they are but we've helped them delete up to 50 percent of their data after it's aged out and I've talked to banks before and I've asked them like hey after seven years what do you do with your data they say well we just keep it because we don't know what it was originated for we don't even know what's in it and therefore it's too risky for us to go and delete but at the same time to your point it may be even too risky to keep in some cases especially a liability to keep that deal and what's the what's the technology enable are there is that your catalog you're sort of copy data management self so it's a combination of things the catalog is what helps us understand what we have and where it is and how it's actually moved through that lifecycle and then we have a component called the Veritas information classifier and that component allows us to crack open the data and actually determine what's inside whether it's personally identifiable information social security numbers there's a number of different patterns we can look for actually document types and we can actually tag that data and say hey this data has information that's pertains to a specific individuals so for example if I'm following gdpr rules I can now find out all the data where it's propagated specific to an individual who said now I want all my stuff deleted and that's a very powerful technique so such as the data it's the metadata associated with that taste well that's a that I think it's a unique capability in terms of being integrated into a solution and so that's that's cool I also want to talk about Acme financial services yeah is artificial company or a real company but but an anonymized company that you talked about moving to your system your appliance based system they were able to reduce TCO by 40% shave two thirds of their hardware infrastructure away come back to that is I have sort of a tongue-in-cheek there get rid of tape at least we're possible no new tape I think is what you that's right and then save 20 million dollars a year in reduced downside downtime costs so my tongue and cheek is who everybody remembers the the no hardware agenda of signs you know bhai live in Massachusetts that we used to see those right next to the EMC facilities and you're only a hardware agenda it seems with your appliance is to get rid of hardware is exactly right look we we are actually putting out technology that allows you to take ten heads or ten servers and consolidate it down to two or three to make the total cost of ownership for your product less because at the end of day it's in our benefit right we're a software vendor we want to maintain ourselves as a software vendor we want to take Hardware out of the equation to the extent that's possible but we don't want to do it at the expense of simplicity and so striking that balance is what's most important yeah and and you also have talked about a little you showed a little leg if you will on a road map that's right I'm one of the things that struck me and it's sort of there today but but even more in the future is the ability to scale compute and storage independently and more granular chunks explain what that is and why that's important to customers well you know if you think about it the way that these integrated backup appliances work even back up people just dismiss backup appliances they just grow and grow and grow to a certain capacity they scale up and scale up and at some point the performance just starts to tank and taper off so what if you could actually grow them almost in a node-based architecture think about its compute and storage that you grow together and as you add more compute you add more storage and so that means that I can do more micro services or I can provide better deduplication but my deduplication doesn't slow down when I go from two petabyte to four petabyte because my compute has actually grown in lockstep with my storage you made a big deal about eliminating tape where possible and you also and I want to push it this a little bit talked about the economics of solution relative to tape I was somewhat surprised because the conventional wisdom would say tape is you know pennies on the dollar come here to to disc based solutions how is it that you're able to make that claim well there's a couple of different things that come to play number one is that again through the cloud catalyst capability of net backup we can actually keep data deduplicated before we send it to our disk based solution which means that it stays in some cases 50 to one deduplicated and you're not necessarily gonna get that capability on tape you'd have to rehydrate don't have to rehydrate so if you talk about about pennies well multiply that by 50 because if your data duplicates that much that's the kind of thing you're talking about the second part is the operational cost of actually maintaining tape now if I'm keeping data for seven years thirty years the lifetime of a patient that tape infrastructure age is out and I'm doing tape migrations all the time those are not cheap and sometimes though tape infrastructures not even available anymore the other compatibility is not there that's right the other thing is well the other thing is is the network costs right if you're going to be pushing stuff over the network absolutely your network and your and you pushing bigger things over the network you have more network infrastructure just for the purposes of moving data from one here tier to another tier it's wasteful David talked about the Flex appliance what I took away from that is it sort of allows for services oriented deployment fast migration it allows you to sort of test out new services to see whether or not you like it what what is that what does the customer have to do to exploit that capability today the customer would buy our high-end backup appliance which is the 53:40 they would buy the Flex software which is a software package that allows them to basically augment that's appliance so that it can actually maintain that catalog and then quickly deploy them those services as I showed in the demo in three minutes or less we can deploy a service on from the service catalog in the future you should expect that we should we will begin to build that into all of our appliances that's just the way of doing things it becomes a service-oriented architecture and that catalog is just going to be a natural way of us operating ok I want to also ask you about another capability that you discussed which was your ability to look across the portfolio and identify predictive failures yeah everybody talks about machine intelligence being used you know in that use case IOT you hear about that along what are you guys doing what's unique well you know in some cases what we're doing is not completely unique I mean there are some companies that have done this pretty well they've done it for their own point solutions I think where it gets interesting is when you say look we're not just building a point solution we have a number of different products again for the entire lifecycle of data from the moment it's born and if I can integrate all of the telemetry that I get from those different products I can now start to get predictive about things that might have happened not just at one stage within one product but might happen down the road when I go to move it into my long-term retention as my long-term retention ready for it is it going to impact the performance of my long-term retention solution and so therefore should I think about scaling on my long-term retention solution independent of you know so or ahead of the actual growth of my purpose-built Beco appliance right so it's that portfolio view that makes it so powerful right it's okay two things actually the portfolio view and also the full lifecycle view as well that's right something you've been hitting on not just a point product all right David I know you Jam it a lot of a lot of customer conversations here in New York so I gotta let you go but thanks so much for stopping by the cube appreciate my pleasure I really appreciate your time thank you welcome all right keep it right there everybody you're watching the cube live from Veritas solution days in New York City right in the heart of Central Park we'll be right at right back after this short break [Music]

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's The Cube covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We are here covering Veritas Vision 2017, the hashtag is VtasVision. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman my cohost David Noy is here, he's the vice president of product management at Vertias. David, thanks for coming to The Cube. >> Thanks for having me, pretty excited. >> Yes, we enjoyed your keynote today taking us through the new product announcements. Let's unpack it, you're at the center of it all. Actually, let's start with the way you started your keynote is you recently left EMC, came here, why, why was that? >> I talk to lots and lots of customers, hundreds, thousands of customers. They're enterprise customers, they're all trying to solve the same kind of problems, reducing infrastructure costs, moving to commodity based architectures, moving to the cloud, in fact they did move to the cloud in Angara. If you look at the NAS market in 2016 it had been on a nice two percent incline until about the second half of 2016 it basically dove 12% and a big part of that was enterprises who were kicking the tires finally saying we're going to move to cloud and actually doing it as opposed to just talking about it. At EMC and a lot of the other big iron vendors they have a strategy that they discuss around helping customers move to cloud, helping them adopt commodity, but the reality is they make their money, their big margin points, on selling branded boxes, right? And as much as it's lip service, it's really hard to fulfill that promise when that's where you're making your revenue, you have revenue margin targets. Veritas on the other hand, it's a software company. We're here to sell software, we're able to make your data more manageable to understand that it's a truth in information, I don't need to own every bit, and I thought that the company that can basically A, provide the real promise of what software define offers is going to be a software company. Number two is that you can't buck the trend of the cloud it's going to happen, and either you're in the critical path and trying to provide friction, in which case you're going to become irrelevant pretty soon or you enable it and figure out how to partner with the cloud vendors in a nonthreatening way. I found that Veritas, because of its heterogeneity background, hey you want AIX, you want Linux, you want Solaris, great, we'll help you with all those. We can do the same thing with the cloud, and the cloud vendors will partner up with us because they love us for that reason. >> Before we get into the products, let's unpack that a little bit. Why is it that as Veritas you can participate in profit from that cloud migration? We know why you can't as a hardware vendor because ultimately the cloud vendor is going to be providing the box. >> Well, the answer is that, a couple things. One is, we believe and even the cloud vendors believe that you're going to be in a hybrid environment. If you project out for the next ten years, it's likely that a lot of data and applications and workloads will move to cloud, but not all of them will. And you probably end up in about a 50/50 shift. The vendor who can provide the management and intelligence and compliance capabilities, and the data protection capabilities across both your on-prem, and your off-premise state as a single unified product set is going to win, in my opinion, that's number one. Number two is that the cloud vendors are all great, but they specialize in different things. Some are specialized in machine learning, some are really good with visual image recognition, some are really good with mobile applications, and people are, in my opinion, going to go to two, three, four different clouds, just like I would go to contracting agencies, some might be good at giving me engineers, I might go to dice.com for engineers, I might go to something completely different for finance people, and you're going to use the best of breed clouds for specific applications. Being able to actually aggregate what you have in your universe of multicloud, and your hybrid environment and allowing you, as an administrator to be aware of all my assets, is something that as a non-branded box pusher, as a software vendor I can go do with credibility. >> You're a recovering box pusher. >> I'm a recovering box pusher, I'm one month into recovery, so thank you very much. >> And David, one of the things we're trying to understand a little bit, you've got products that live in lots of these environments, why do you have visibility into the data? Is it because they're backup customers, is it other pieces? Help us understand in that multicloud world, what I need to be to get that full. >> That's a great question and I'll bridge into some of the new products too. Number one is that Veritas has a huge amount of data that's basically trapped in repositories because we do provide backup, we're the largest backup vendor. So we have all this data that's essentially sitting inactive you know, Mike talks about it, Mike Palmer our CPO, talks about it as kind of like the Uber, you know, what do you do with your car when it's not being used, or Air BnB if you will, what do you do with your home when it's not being used, is you potentially rent it out. You make it available for other purposes. With all this trapped data, there's tons of information that we can glean that enterprises have been grabbing for years and years and years. So that's number one, we're in a great position 'cause we hold a lot of that data. Now, we have products that have the capabilities through classification engines, through engines that are extending machine learning capabilities, to open that data up and actually figure out what's inside. Now we can do it with the backup products, but let's face it, data is stored in a number of different other modaliites, right? So there's blocked data that is sitting at the bottom of containerized private clouds, there are tons and tons of unstructured data sitting in NAS repositories, and growing off-prem, but actually on prem this object storage technology for the set it and forget it long term retention. All of that data has hidden information, all of it can be extracted for more value with our same classification engines that we can run against the net backup estate, we can basically take that and extend that into these new modalities, and actually have compelling products that are not just offering infrastructure, but that are actually offering infrastructure with the promise of making that data more valuable. Make sense? >> It does, I mean it's the holy grail of backup. For years it's been insurance, and insurance is a good business, don't get me wrong, but even when you think about information governance, through sarbanes-oxley and FRCP et cetera, it was always that desire to turn that corpus of data into something more valuable than just insurance, it feels like, like you're saying with automated classification and the machine learning AI, we're sort of at the cusp of that, but we've been disappointed so many times what gives you confidence that this time it'll stick? >> Look, there's some very straightforward things that are happening that you just cannot ignore. GDPR is one, there's a specific timeline, specific rules, specific regulatory requirements that have to be met. That one's a no brainer, and that will drive people to understand that, hey when they apply our policies against the data that they have they'll be able to extract value. That'll be one of many, but that's an extreme proof-point because there's no getting around it, there's no interpretation of that, and the date is a hard date. What we'll do is we'll look quickly at other verticals, we'll look at vertical specific data, whether its in data surveillance, or germain sequencing or what have you, and we'll look at what we can extract there, and we'll partner with ISVs, is a strategy that I learned in my past life, in order to actually bring to market systems or solutions that can categorize specific, vertical industry data to provide value back to the end users. If we just try to provide a blanket, hey, I'm just going to provide data categorization, it's a swiss army knife solution. If we get hyper-focused around specific use cases, workloads and industries now we can be very targeted to what the end users care about. >> If I heard right, it's not just for backup, it's primary and secondary data that you're helping to solve and leverage and put intelligence into these products. >> That's right, initially we have an enormous trapped pool of secondary data, so that's great, we want to turn that trapped pool from just basically a stagnant pool into something that you can actually get value out of. >> That Walking Dead analogy you used. >> The Walking Dead, yeah. We also say that there's a lot of data that sits in primary storage, in fact there's a huge category of archive, which we call active archive, it's not really archive, still wanted on spinning disk or flash. You still want to use it for some purpose but what happens when that data goes out into the environment? I talked to customers in automotive, for example, automotive design manufacturers, they do simulations, and they're consuming storage and capacity all the time, they've got all of these runs, and they're overrunning their budget for storage and they have no idea which of those runs they can actually delete, so they create policies like "well, if it hasn't been touched "in 90 days, I'll delete it," Well, just because it hasn't been touched in 90 days doesn't mean there wasn't good information to be gleaned out of that particular simulation run, right? >> Alright, so I want to get back to the object, but before we go deeper there, block and file, there's market leaders out there that seems that, it's a bit entrenched, if you will, what between the hyperscale product and Veritas access, what's the opportunity that you see that Veritas has there, what differentiates you? >> Sure, well, let's start with block. The one big differentiator we'll have in block storage is that it's not just about providing storage to containerized applications. We want to be able to provide machine learning capabilities to where we can actually optimize the IO path for quality of service. Then, we also want to be able to through machine learning determine whether, if it's how you decide to run your business, you want a burst workloads actually out into the cloud. So we're partnered with the cloud vendors, who are happy to partner with us for the reasons that I described earlier, is that we're very vendor agnostic, we're very heterogeneous. To actually move workloads on-prem and off-prem that's a very differentiated capability. You see with a few of the vendors that are out there, I think Nutanix for example, can do that, but it's not something that everyone's going after, because they want to keep their workloads in their environments, they want to check controls. >> And if I can, that high speed data mover is your IP? >> That's right, that's our IP. Now, on the file system side... >> Just one thing, cloud bursting's one of those things, moving real-time is difficult, physics is still a challenge for us. Any specifics you can give, kind of a customer use case where they're doing that? A lot of times I want this piece of the application here, I want to store the data there, but real time, doing things, I can't move massive amounts of data just 'cause, speed of light. >> If you break it down, I don't think that we're going to solve the use case of, "I'm going to snap my finger "and move the workload immediately offline." Essentially what we'll do is we'll sync the data in the background, once it has been synced we'll actually be able to move the application offline and that'll all come down to one of two things: Either user cases that exceed the capabilities of the current infrastructure and I want to be able to continue to grow without building them into my data center, or I have an end of the month processing. A great case is I have a media entertainment company that I used to work with that was working on a film, and it came close to the release date of that film, and they were asked to go back and recut and reedit that film for specific reasons, a pretty interesting reason actually, it had to do with government pressure. And when they went to go back and edit that film they essentially had a point where like, oh my gosh, all of the servers that were dedicated to render for this film have been moved off to another project. What do we do now, right? The answer is, you got to burst. And if you had cloud burst capabilities you could actually use whatever application and then containerize whether you're running on-prem or off-prem, it doesn't matter, it's containeraized, if we can get the data out there into the cloud through fast pipes then basically you can now finish that job without having to take all those servers back, or repurchase that much infrastructure. So that's a pretty cool use case, that's things that people have been talking about doing but nobody's every successfully done. We're staring to prove that out with some vendors and some partners that potentially even want to embed this in their own solutions, larger technology partners. Now, you wanted to talk about file as well, right, and what makes file different. I spent five years with one of the most successful scale-up file systems, you probably know who they are. But the thing about them was that extracting that file system out of the box and making it available as a software solution that you could layer on any hardware is really hard, because you become so addicted to the way that the behavior of the underlying infrastructure, the behavior of the drives, down to the smart errors that come off the drives, you're so tied into that, which is great because you build a very high performance available product when you do that, but the moment you try to go to any sort of commodity hardware, suddenly things start to fall apart. We can do that, and in fact with our file system we're not saying "hey, you've got to go it on "commodity servers and with DAS drives in them." You could layer it on top of your existing net app, your Isolon, your whatever, you name it, your BNX, encapsulate it, and create policies to move data back and forth between those systems, or potentially even provision them out say, "okay, you know what, this is my gold tier, "my silver tier, my bronze tier." We can even encapsulate, for example, a directory on one file service, like a one file system array, and we can actually migrate that data into an object service, whether its on-prem or off-prem, and then provide the same NFS or SMB connectivity back into that data, for example a home directory migration use case, moving off of a NAS filer onto an object storer, on premise or off premise and to the end user, they don't know that things have actually moved. We think that kind of capability is really critical, because we love to sell boxes, if that's what the customer wants to buy from us, and appliance form factor, but we're not pushing the box as the ultimate end point. The ultimate end point is that software layer on top, and that's where the Veritas DNA really shines. >> That's interesting, the traditional use cases for block certainly, and maybe to a lesser extent file, historically fairly well known an understood. So to your point, you could tune an array specifically for those use cases, but in this day and age the processes, and the new business models that are emerging in the digital economy, very unpredictable in terms of the infrastructure requirements. So your argument is a true software defined capability is going to allow you to adapt much more freely and quickly. >> We've also built and we've demoed at Vision this week machine learning capabilities to actually go in and look at your workloads that are running against those underlying infrastructure and tell you are they correctly positioned or not. Oh, guess what, we really don't think this workload should belong on this particular tier that you've chosen, maybe you ought to consider moving it over here. That's something that historically has been the responsibility of the admin, to go in and figure out where those policies are, and try to make some intelligent decisions. But usually those decisions are not super intelligent, they're just like, is it old, is it not old, do I think it's going to be fast? But I don't really know until runtime, based on actual access patterns whether it's going to be high performance or not. Whether it's going to require moving or aging or not. By using machine learning type of algorithms we can actually look at the data, the access patterns over time, and help the administrators make that decision. >> Okay, we're out of time, but just to summarize, hyperscales, the block, access is the scale out, NAS piece, cloud object... >> Veritas cloud storage we call it. Veritas cloud storage, very similar to the access product is for object storage, but again it's not trying to own the entire object bits, if you will, we'll happily be the broker and the asset manager for those objects, classify them and maintain the metadata catalog, because we think it's the metadata around the data that's critical, whether it lives off-prem, on-prem, or in our own appliance. >> You had a nice X/Y graph, dollars on the vertical axis, high frequency of access to the left part of the horizontal axis, lower SLAs to the right, and you had sort of block, file, object as the way to look at the world. Then you talked about the intelligence you bring to the object world. Last question, and then let's end there. Thoughts on object, Stu and I were talking off camera, it's taken a long time, obviously S3 and the cloud guys have been there, you've seen some take outs of object storage companies. But it really hasn't exploded, but it feels like we're on the cusp. What's your observation about object? >> I think object is absolutely on the cusp. Look, people have put it on the cloud, because traditionally object has been used for keeping deep, and because performance doesn't matter, and the deeper you get, the less expensive it gets. So a cloud provider's great, because they're going to aggrigate capacity across 1,000 or 20,000 or a million customers. They can get as deep as possible, and they can slice it off to you. As a single enterprise, I can never get as deep as a cloud service provider. >> The volume, right? >> But what ends up happening is that more and more workloads are not expecting to hold a connection open to their data source. They're actually looking at packetize, get-put type semantics that you can see in genomic sequencing, you see it in a number of different workloads where that kind of semantic, even in hydoop analytic workloads, where that kind of get-put semantic makes sense, not holding that connection open, and object's perfect for that, but it hasn't traditionally had the performance to be able to do that really well. We think that by providing a high performance object system that also has the intelligence to do that data classification, ties into our data protection products, provides the actionable information and metadata, and also makes it possible to use on-prem infrastructure as well as push to cloud or multicloud, and maintain that single pane of glass for that asset management for the objects is really critical, and again, it's the software that matters, the intelligence we build into it that matters. And I think that the primary workloads in a number of different industries in verticals or in adopting object more and more, and that's going to drive more on premise growth of object. By the way, if you look at the NAS market and the object market, you see the NAS market kind of doing this, and you see the object market kind of doing this, it's left pocket right pocket. >> And that get-put framework is a simplifying factor for organizations so, excellent. David, thank you very much for coming on The Cube. We appreciate it. >> Appreciate it, thanks for having me. >> You're welcome, alright, bringing you the truth from Veritas Visions, this is The Cube. We'll be right back, right after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube! Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, everybody. We are covering Veritas Vision 2017, and this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, with Stu Miniman and Mike Palmer is here, he's the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Veritas. Mike, thanks for coming to The Cube. >> Thank you for having me here. >> Great keynote, yesterday. We see hundreds, if not thousands of these discussions, and talking head presentations, and yours was hilarious. Let's set up for the people who didn't see it, yesterday. Mike gets up there, and he's talking about the, there's a video that's playing about the end of the world. And the basic theme is that you didn't take care of your data, and now the world's coming to an end. Las Vegas was in shambles, and there were waterfalls running through the hotels, drones attacking people, and then you picked it up from there and then took it into, just a really funny soliloquy. But, where'd you come up with that idea? And, how do you think, I thought it went great, but how did you feel afterwards? >> Well, I can take only partial credit. I have an amazing creative team, and when you work at a company that's been doing, you know, large-scale enterprise data-center stuff, we know that part of our obligation for our audience is kind of making it more palpable for them, making it feel a little bit more, bringing the emotion to it. So we want to have a little bit of excitement in there. But at the same time, we have a real message, you know, and hopefully that came across, too. >> It did, and then, you know, but again, a lot of good humor, the megabytes, gigabytes, you know, up to zetabytes, yadabytes, Mike Tyson-bytes, on and on and on. (laughing) Very clever, so congratulations on that... >> Mike: Oh, thanks! >> We really enjoyed it. Mixed things up a little bit. So, and again, very transparent. We talked about the UX, not the best. You're not happy with it. >> Mike: Right. >> And again, very transparent about that, I think that's a theme of many successful companies, today. But, so, let's start with, sort of, what does it take as the Chief Product Officer, to transform a company from somebody who's been around since 1983, into a modern, you know, cloud-like, hyper-scale, you know, set of service and software offerings. >> That's a big question, but I can tell you the first thing that it takes, the most important thing that it takes, is the best engineering team in the world. You can do a lot of things around the outside, we need to fix our UX, we know that, often considered that to be the kitchens and bathrooms of our house remodel. But if your foundation's broken, if your framing isn't there, you really don't have much of an asset to put on the market. We have a great engineering team, we are releasing products at a velocity that is incomparable in the enterprise ISV space, and we're super proud of that. So I think that's the number one thing. I think number two is the other thing, that we're the envy of the industry, for, and that is, an amazing install-base of customers. Very hard to name a fortune 2000 company that isn't a significant customer of Veritas, so we have a great basis to collaborate and innovate. You know, the rest, we know we have some work to do as we bring it into the modern age. You know, we talked a lot about the fact that workloads are changing in data centers, architectures are changing, we're establishing new partnerships with some of the sponsors that you see here today, like Microsoft, like Google, like IBM, and Oracle, and others. And, you know, it takes a village and they're helping us move into the next 10 years. >> Stu: You know, Mike, talk a little bit about the transition from, you know, software that lived on servers, to now, well, cloud is just isn't somebody else's servers, I think, is the word for that. >> Mike: Right. >> You know, it definitely, we've talked many times this week, you know, Veritas was software-defined before there was such a thing, used to be the FUD from the traditional players, that it was like, oh, you can't trust stuff like that, and now, of course, they're all software-defined and, you know, talking about that, too, so, what does that mean, going to kind of, being completely agnostic, for where things lived, and some of the intricacies of trying to work with, you know, some of the big and small cloud-players? >> A lot of questions in there, and I think David Noy, who I know you guys are going to talk to later, is going to talk a bit more specifically about this, but one of the first things you have to keep in mind, is if you're building software to be software-defined, then you have to build it without considering the hardware platform that you may deliver it on. And I think that's where some of our competitors get it wrong, they can say that they're software-defined, but the litmus test is, can I really pick up this software without modification, and go run it in one of those hyper-scalers? Or put it on one of the white boxes that I went into the market and procured and integrated myself? Veritas has been doing that for a long time. In fact, if you really look at Veritas's core, we're an integrator. We've been an integrator of applications, through the protection space, in our file-system and our info-scale technologies, we are integrators of operating systems, when you look at hyper-scalers, they're just the next operating system. Someone else's hardware, as you said. So we look to protect our customers in terms of their choices, make flexibility a real part of the multi-cloud architecture they're putting together, still doing the things we do well with protection, and ultimately layer on that last little bit when we're talking software-defined and that is not just focus on the infrastructure, but really aspire to this, how do I better manage data and get value from data? >> You know, Mike, I want to dig one level deeper on that. So, the cloud providers, it's all well and good to say, yeah, I'm agnostic, but each of them have their own little nuances. It's, at least today, it's not like, oh, I choose today to wake up and this one has cheaper prices, and it's not a commodity, it's not a utility, and each one of them have services that they want you to integrate with, have to have deeper, how do you balance that, you know, integration, how much work's done, where the customers are pulling you, how does that product portfolio get put together? >> That's an excellent question and I will be fully honest, that a year ago we thought about the answer to that question very differently than we do today. You know, a year ago, I think we were somewhat naive, and thought, hey, we're going to throw a thin layer of capability on top of the clouds, and in effect commoditize them ourselves, and hope our customers just move around as if there were no underlying services. And obviously if you're a cloud-provider, that is not an approach that you're a big fan of. (laughing) And frankly, it's a disservice to the customers, because they are building some really valuable services, and they are differentiating themselves. Our approach has changed, our approach today is a very deep-level integration with each cloud provider, and the specialization they're bringing to the market, without sacrificing the portability, without sacrificing the built-in protections that the cloud providers aren't putting on their platforms and don't want to put on their platforms. And again going back to this idea of data, ultimately, if it's someone else's hardware, in effect, in some cases, someone else's application, it's always your data, and how we are servicing that data is really the key. >> So, that's really hard work. In a lot of cases, you have to interface with very low-level, primitive APIs from the cloud service providers. How do you, sort of, balance your resources, or a portion of your resources, between doing that, because you guys, I call it the compatibility matrix, all kinds of data stores, all kinds of clouds, every one of those is engineering resources. And it seems that's a key part of your strategy, but you got to be sacrificing something, which is maybe, you know, the next widget on your existing products. How do you think about proportioning those? >> You know, at Veritas, in a way, the emergence of the cloud ecosystem actually improves that situation for us. We're carrying 30 years of operating systems that have come and gone, that have incremented versions, and our customers often strand or isolate single examples of those boxes, from 20 years ago that they expect us to test all of our software against, on their behalf. (laughing) For example, right, and so when you look at where we are today, there are five or 10 cloud providers, versus hundreds of operating system versions, and application, we have no problem supporting the proliferation in cloud, we actually welcome the ability to support those... >> Stu: You're much happier with the one version of AJUR, as opposed to the old Patch Monday. >> Exactly right, and you know, they upgrade the whole thing at once... >> Yeah. >> They issue a couple new services, and we adapt 'em, no problem. >> Am I thinking about it the wrong way? Because, while that's true, and I understand that, but within an individual cloud, you could have 15 data services. I think about AWS data services, their data pipeline is increasingly complex, so. Doesn't that complexity scale in a different direction? >> Mike: It scales differently for sure, but I would give a lot of credit to the cloud providers, because they're taking a lot of the regression testing that we used to have to do, for example, with application providers and operating system providers who didn't think about us when they were building their products. The cloud providers take accountability for regression testing all of the things that they release to their customers. So when we adopt an API, we're fully confident that that API works in the context of that cloud environment. So that's off our plate. It really isolates the need for us to simply test that API against our environment. >> Dave: OK, so much more stable and predictable environment for you. I want to ask you, I've heard the term modern data protection a lot, what is modern data protection? Everyone wants to be next-gen, how do you define modern data protection? >> Mike: And this is something we're super passionate about, because our industry has been around for quite a long time, and you get terms thrown out there, like legacy or modern, and everyone's fighting for brand recognition, and kind of, end of the growth spaces in the market. For us, it actually is very simple. We recognize that there are a lot of different techniques to protect data, we think of these protection schemes like lots of different insurance policies, and lots of different tools in your toolbox. Where Veritas is going to win, and continues to win, is that we can offer our customers all of those techniques. We're not trying to convince them that one technique is so much more special than another one, that they need to diversify and create complexity in their environment, so we talk about modern data protection as the ability to choose snapshots, or back-ups, or copy data management, or workload migration, in the future there will be other ways to do this: continuous data protection, or scale-out platforms for cloud providers. These are just techniques inside of a Veritas portfolio, as opposed to stand-alone companies that create complexity for our customers. So, modernization is choice. >> Dave: OK, so you have this awesome install-base. Bill Coleman said to us yesterday, in response to a similar but related question, that it's ours to lose. And the question that we have is, as you look at that install base, you got to get them onto this modern data platform. How do you do that? Do you write some abstraction layer? You talked about that thin layer in the cloud, you must have thought about doing that. Is that what you're doing? How is that going? What does that journey look like? >> Mike: You know, that is one of the most fundamental strategy questions for Veritas. And one of the things we recognized early on, is that while we do have an amazing install base of customers, and those customers are hyper-scaled themselves, you're talking about customers with tens of thousands of servers running our software, both on the storage and the protection site, so the thing that we cannot ask them to do is continuously upgrade their environment to take advantage of new features. We will put out one-to-two major releases of our software, particularly on a protection side, annually. But we're innovating at a far greater pace than that, so we've made some conscious choices to create new architectures for our customer that are workload-specific, so Cloud Point, being a great example, coming out in July, our Object Store announcements, underpinning our next generation protection solutions. So they have modern storage capabilities, our second example. But pulling them together is where only Veritas can offer a customer a complete catalog of that data. So, combining your net back-up catalog with Cloud Point, for example, with your storage, with what you've put into cloud, provides a customer, for the first time, kind of a complete view of the secondary estate. And so, as long as we get that right, we don't have to upgrade, we don't have to seed, what we have to do is enable our customers, through simple adoption of new tools, provide that visibility over the top, and I think that they'll be good to go. >> So that's kind of like a, I think of a term, backward compatibility, is essentially what you're providing for your install base, is that right? >> Mike: That's exactly right. Providing, and this is where API-based infrastructure and service-driven architectures help us a lot. We don't have to fully instantiate a code-base every time that we want to offer a service to a customer. >> Dave: There aren't many independent, in fact there aren't any independent, is one, two-and-a-half billion dollar software companies in your space, but there are many emerging guys, who are getting a lot of attention, well-funded, some, you know, hitting that kind of, 100 million dollar revenue mark, at least it appears that way. How do you look at those guys? What do you learn from them? You know, Branson said today, you know, you learn by listening and watching, in this case. You're watching the market, obviously, what are you seeing there, it's the hottest space in the infrastructure market right now, is your space and security. Are the two, you know, smoking hot spaces. What are you observing, and what are you learning? >> And I think the direct answer to your question is probably the user. You know, and I think that's the lesson of the industry even over the last 15 years, is that when a new workload arises, it's creating a new user inside the enterprise IT department. And that user often gets to determine all of the services that they need to make themselves successful. If that is a cloud workload, and they need availability services, or they need protection services, they want that to integrate in the same place that they buy in provision their cloud workload. If it's a container workload it's the same. We saw the rise of some of our competitors that got to multi-hundred million dollar revenue streams, by focusing on a single user, and a single type of transaction, with a single type of interface. And Veritas kind of lost its way, I think, a little bit, back in that time. So what we are watching today, is who are our users? What workloads are emerging? What sort of interfaces do we need to develop for those users? Which is why we made our UX statements as strongly as we did. We're committed to those. That is going to be the future of Veritas, it's serving the broadening user-base inside of enterprise. >> Dave: You're seeing a lot of discussion in the industry around design thinking, I know we're out of time, here, but, you know, you see companies, like, for instance, Charles Phillips's company, Infor, bought a company called Hook and Loop, and they're all about design, and, how is design thinking fitting into your, sort of, UX/UI plans? >> I mean, the parlance that we use internally is jobs to be done. Right, we clearly want to create a very consistent user experience, and look and feel, we want our customers to be proud to be Veritas customers. But we have to be super cognizant of, what is the job they're trying to get accomplished? And allow the system to be designed around accommodating that. If that is, I want three workflows in three steps or less, can I do that? It could be, I have a very complicated job and I want the ability to control very granular things, do I have an interface to do that? So, if we know the user and the job to be done, we can create a consistent look and feel, I think that we are, we're going to not only ride the wave, of change inside of our particular industry, but I think we're going to wind up in a consolidation space where we're a big winner. >> All right, last question, the bumper sticker on Vision 2017, as the trucks are pulling away from the area, what's the bumper sticker? >> Mike: Secondary data is your most under-utilized asset, and a platform provider is what you need to take advantage of it. >> Dave: All right, Mike, thanks very much for coming to The Cube. Congratulations, and good luck. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, you're welcome, keep right there, buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. The Cube, live we're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (peppy digital music) >> Veritas Vision 2017 everybody. We're here at The Aria Hotel. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Vtas, #VtasVision, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman who is my cohost for the week. Stu, we heard Richard Branson this morning. The world-renowned entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson came up from the British Virgin Islands where he lives. He lives in the Caribbean. And evidently he was holed out during the hurricane in his wine cellar, but he was able to make it up here for the keynote. We saw on Twitter, so, great keynote, we'll talk about that a little bit. We saw on Twitter that he actually stopped by the Hitachi event, Hitachi NEXT for women in tech, a little mini event that they had over there. So, pretty cool guy. Some of the takeaways: he talked a lot about- well, first of all, welcome to day two. >> Thanks, Dave. Yeah, and people are pretty excited that sometimes they bring in those marquee guests, someone that's going to get everybody to say, "Okay, wait, it's day two. "I want to get up early, get in the groove." Some really interesting topics, I mean talking about, thinking about the community at large, one of the things I loved he talked about. I've got all of these, I've got hotels, I've got different things. We draw a circle around it. Think about the community, think about the schools that are there, think about if there's people that don't have homes. All these things to, giving back to the community, he says we can all do our piece there, and talking about sustainable business. >> As far as, I mean we do a lot of these, as you know, and as far as the keynote speakers go, I thought he was one of the better ones. Certainly one of the bigger names. Some of the ones that we've seen in the past that I think are comparable, Bill Clinton at Dell World 2012 was pretty happening. >> There's a reason that Bill Clinton is known as the orator that he is. >> Yeah, so he was quite good. And then Robert Gates, both at ServiceNow and Nutanics, Condi Rice at Nutanics, both very impressive. Malcolm Gladwell, who's been on theCUBE and Nate Silver, who's also been on theCUBE, again, very impressive. Thomas Friedman we've seen at the IBM shows. The author, the guy who wrote the Jobs book was very very strong, come on, help me. >> Oh, yeah, Walter Isaacson. >> Walter Isaacson was at Tableau, so you've seen some- >> Yeah, I've seen Elon Musk also at the Dell show. >> Oh, I didn't see Elon, okay. >> Yeah, I think that was the year you didn't come. >> So I say Branson, from the ones I've seen, I don't know how he compared to Musk, was probably the best I think I've ever seen. Very inspirational, talking about the disaster. They had really well-thought-out and well-produced videos that he sort of laid in. The first one was sort of a commercial for Richard Branson and who he was and how he's, his passion for changing the world, which is so genuine. And then a lot of stuff on the disaster in the British Virgin Islands, the total devastation. And then he sort of went into his passion for entrepreneurs, and what he sees as an entrepreneur is he sort of defined it as somebody who wants to make the world a better place, innovations, disruptive innovations to make the world a better place. And then had a sort of interesting Q&A session with Lynn Lucas. >> Yeah, and one of the lines he said, people, you don't go out with the idea that, "I'm going to be a businessman." It's, "I want to go out, I want to build something, "I want to create something." I love one of the early anecdotes that he said when he was in school, and he had, what was it, a newsletter or something he was writing against the Vietnam War, and the school said, "Well, you can either stay in school, "or you can keep doing your thing." He said, "Well, that choice is easy, buh-bye." And when he was leaving, they said, "Well, you're either going to be, end up in jail or be a millionaire, we're not sure." And he said, "Well, what do ya know, I ended up doing both." (both laughing) >> So he is quite a character, and just very understated, but he's got this aura that allows him to be understated and still appear as this sort of mega-personality. He talked about, actually some of the interesting things he said about rebuilding after Irma, obviously you got to build stronger homes, and he really sort of pounded the reducing the reliance on fossil fuels, and can't be the same old, same old, basically calling for a Marshall Plan for the Caribbean. One of the things that struck me, and it's a tech audience, generally a more liberal audience, he got some fond applause for that, but he said, "You guys are about data, you don't just ignore data." And one of the data points that he threw out was that the Atlantic Ocean at some points during Irma was 86 degrees, which is quite astounding. So, he's basically saying, "Time to make a commitment "to not retreat from the Paris Agreement." And then he also talked about, from an entrepreneurial standpoint and building a company that taking note of the little things, he said, makes a big difference. And talking about open cultures, letting people work from home, letting people take unpaid sabbaticals, he did say unpaid. And then he touted his new book, Finding My Virginity, which is the sequel to Losing My Virginity. So it was all very good. Some of the things to be successful: you need to learn to learn, you need to listen, sort of an age-old bromide, but somehow it seemed to have more impact coming from Branson. And then, actually then Lucas asked one of the questions that I put forth, was what's his relationship with Musk and Bezos? And he said he actually is very quite friendly with Elon, and of course they are sort of birds of a feather, all three of them, with the rocket ships. And he said, "We don't talk much about that, "we just sort of-" specifically in reference to Bezos. But overall, I thought it was very strong. >> Yeah Dave, what was the line I think he said? "You want to be friends with your competitors "but fight hard against them all day, "go drinking with them at night." >> Right, fight like crazy during the day, right. So, that was sort of the setup, and again, I thought Lynn Lucas did a very good job. He's, I guess in one respect he's an easy interview 'cause he's such a- we interview these dynamic figures, they just sort of talk and they're good. But she kept the conversation going and asked some good questions and wasn't intimidated, which you can be sometimes by those big personalities. So I thought that was all good. And then we turned into- which I was also surprised and appreciative that they put Branson on first. A lot of companies would've held him to the end. >> Stu: Right. >> Said, "Alright, let's get everybody in the room "and we'll force them to listen to our product stuff, "and then we can get the highlight, the headliner." Veritas chose to do it differently. Now, maybe it was a scheduling thing, I don't know. But that was kind of cool. Go right to where the action is. You're not coming here to watch 60 Minutes, you want to see the headline show right away, and that's what they did, so from a content standpoint I was appreciative of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, they brought on David Noy, who we're going to have on in a little while, and went through, really, the updates. So really it's the expansion, Dave, of their software-defined storage, the family of products called InfoScale. Yesterday we talked a bit about the Veritas HyperScale, so that is, they've got the HyperScale for OpenStack, they've got the HyperScale for containers, and then filling out the product line is the Veritas Access, which is really their scale-out NAS solution, including, they did one of the classic unveils of Veritas Software Company. It was a little odd for me to be like, "Here's an appliance "for Veritas Bezel." >> Here's a box! >> Partnership with Seagate. So they said very clearly, "Look, if you really want it simple, "and you want it to come just from us, "and that's what you'd like, great. "Here's an appliance, trusted supplier, "we've put the whole thing together, "but that's not going to be our primary business, "that's not the main way we want to do things. "We want to offer the software, "and you can choose your hardware piece." Once again, knocking on some of those integrated hardware suppliers with the 70 point margin. And then the last one, one of the bigger announcements of the show, is the Veritas Cloud Storage, which they're calling is object storage with brains. And one thing we want to dig into: those brains, what is that functionality, 'cause object storage from day one always had a little bit more intelligence than the traditional storage. Metadata is usually built in, so where is the artificial intelligence, machine learning, what is that knowledge that's kind of built into it, because I find, Dave, on the consumer side, I'm amazed these days as how much extra metadata and knowledge gets built into things. So, on my phone, I'll start searching for things, and it'll just have things appear. I know you're not fond of the automated assistants, but I've got a couple of them in my house, so I can ask them questions, and they are getting smarter and smarter over time, and they already know everything we're doing anyway. >> You know, I like the automated assistants. We have, well, my kid has an Echo, but what concerns me, Stu, is when I am speaking to those automated assistants about, "Hey, maybe we should take a trip "to this place or that place," and then all of a sudden the next day on my laptop I start to see ads for trips to that place. I start to think about, wow, this is strange. I worry about the privacy of those systems. They're going to, they already know more about me than I know about me. But I want to come back to those three announcements we're going to have David Noy on: HyperScale, Access, and Cloud Object. So some of the things we want to ask that we don't really know is the HyperScale: is it Block, is it File, it's OpenStack specific, but it's general. >> Right, but the two flavors: one's for OpenStack, and of course OpenStack has a number of projects, so I would think you could be able to do Block and File but would definitely love that clarification. And then they have a different one for containers. >> Okay, so I kind of don't understand that, right? 'Cause is it OpenStack containers, or is it Linux containers, or is it- >> Well, containers are always going to be on Linux, and containers can fit with OpenStack, but we've got their Chief Product Officer, and we've got David Noy. >> Dave: So we'll attack some of that. >> So we'll dig into all of those. >> And then, the Access piece, you know, after the apocalypse, there are going to be three things left in this world: cockroaches, mainframes, and Dot Hill RAID arrays. When Seagate was up on stage, Seagate bought this company called Dot Hill, which has been around longer than I have, and so, like you said, that was kind of strange seeing an appliance unveil from the software company. But hey, they need boxes to run on this stuff. It was interesting, too, the engineer Abhijit came out, and they talked about software-defined, and we've been doing software-defined, is what he said, way before the term ever came out. It's true, Veritas was, if not the first, one of the first software-defined storage companies. >> Stu: Oh yeah. >> And the problem back then was there were always scaling issues, there were performance issues, and now, with the advancements in microprocessor, in DRAM, and flash technologies, software-defined has plenty of horsepower underneath it. >> Oh yeah, well, Dave, 15 years ago, the FUD from every storage company was, "You can't trust storage functionality "just on some generic server." Reminds me back, I go back 20 years, it was like, "Oh, you wouldn't run some "mission-critical thing on Windows." It's always, "That's not ready for prime time, "it's not enterprise-grade." And now, of course, everybody's on the software-defined bandwagon. >> Well, and of course when you talk to the hardware companies, and you call them hardware companies, specifically HPE and Dell EMC as examples, and Lenovo, etc. Lenovo not so much, the Chinese sort of embraced hardware. >> And even Hitachi's trying to rebrand themselves; they're very much a hardware company, but they've got software assets. >> So when you worked at EMC, and you know when you sat down and talked to the guys like Brian Gallagher, he would stress, "Oh, all my guys, all my engineers "are software engineers. We're not a hardware company." So there's a nuance there, it's sort of more the delivery and the culture and the ethos, which I think defines the software culture, and of course the gross margins. And then of course the Cloud Object piece; we want to understand what's different from, you know, object storage embeds metadata in the data and obviously is a lower cost sort of option. Think of S3 as the sort of poster child for cloud object storage. So Veritas is an arms dealer that's putting their hat in the ring kind of late, right? There's a lot of object going on out there, but it's not really taking off, other than with the cloud guys. So you got a few object guys around there. Cleversafe got bought out by IBM, Scality's still around doing some stuff with HPE. So really, it hasn't even taken off yet, so maybe the timing's not so bad. >> Absolutely, and love to hear some of the use cases, what their customers are doing. Yeah, Dave, if we have but one critique, saw a lot of partners up on stage but not as many customers. Usually expect a few more customers to be out there. Part of it is they're launching some new products, not talking about very much the products they've had in there. I know in the breakouts there are a lot of customers here, but would have liked to see a few more early customers front and center. >> Well, I think that's the key issue for this company, Stu, is that, we talked about this at the close yesterday, is how do they transition that legacy install base to the new platform. Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." And I think that's right, and so the answer for a company like that in the playbook is clear: go private so you don't have to get exposed to the 90 day shock lock, invest, build out a modern platform. He talked about microservices and modern development platform. And create products that people want, and migrate people over. You're in a position to do that. But you're right, when you talk to the customers here, they're NetBackup customers, that's really what they're doing, and they're here to sort of learn, learn about best practice and see where they're going. NetBackup, I think, 8.1 was announced this week, so people are glomming onto that, but the vast majority of the revenue of this company is from their existing legacy enterprise business. That's a transition that has to take place. Luckily it doesn't have to take place in the public eye from a financial standpoint. So they can have some patient capital and work through it. Alright Stu, lineup today: a lot of product stuff. We got Jason Buffington coming on for getting the analyst perspective. So we'll be here all day. Last word? >> Yeah, and end of the day with Foreigner, it feels like the first time we're here. Veritas feels hot-blooded. We'll keep rolling. >> Alright, luckily we're not seeing double vision. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Vertias Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (peppy digital music)