>> From The Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from The Cube in ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante >> The pandemic not only accelerated the shift to digital but it also highlighted a rush of cyber criminal sophistication, collaboration, and chaotic responses by virtually every major company in the planet. The SolarWinds hack exposed supply chain weaknesses and so-called island hopping techniques that are exceedingly difficult to detect. Moreover, the will and aggressiveness of well-organized cybercriminals has elevated to the point where incident responses are now met with counter attacks, designed to both punish and extract money from victims via ransomware and other criminal activities. The only upshot is the cybersecurity market remains one of the most enduring and attractive investment sectors for those that can figure out where the market is headed and which firms are best positioned to capitalize. Hello, everyone. And welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" we'll provide our quarterly update of the security industry, and share new survey data from ETR and the Cube community that will help you navigate through the maze of corporate cyber warfare. We'll also share our thoughts on the game of 3D chess that Okta CEO, Todd McKinnon, is playing against the market. Now, we all know this market is complicated, fragmented and fast moving. And this next chart says it all. It's an interactive graphic from Optiv, a Denver, Colorado-based SI that's focused on cybersecurity. They've done some really excellent research and put together this awesome taxonomy, and it mapped vendor names therein. And this helps users navigate the complex security landscape. And there are over a dozen major sectors, high-level sectors within the security taxonomy and nearly 60 subsectors. From monitoring, vulnerability assessment, identity, asset management, firewalls, automation, cloud, data center, sim, threat detection and intelligent endpoint network, and so on and so on and so on. But this is a terrific resource, and going to help you understand where players fit and help you connect the dots in the space. Now let's talk about what's going on in the market. The dynamics in this crazy mess of a landscape are really confusing sometimes. Now, since the beginning of cyber time, we've talked about the increasing sophistication of the adversary, and the back and forth escalation between good and evil. And unfortunately, this trend is unlikely to stop. Here's some data from Carbon Black's annual modern bank heist report. This is the fourth, and of course now, VMware's brand, highlights the Carbon Black study since the acquisition, and to catalyze the creation of VMware's cloud security division. Destructive malware attacks, according to the recent study are up 118% from last year. Now, one major takeaway from the report is that hackers aren't just conducting wire fraud, they are. 57% of the banks surveyed, saw an increase in wire fraud, but the cybercriminals are also targeting non-public information such as future trading strategies. This allows the bad guys to front-run large block trades and profit. It's become a very lucrative practice. Now the prevalence of so-called island hopping is up 38% from already elevated levels. This is where a virus enters a company supply chain via a partner, and then often connects with other stealthy malware downstream. These techniques are more common where the malware will actually self-form with other infected parts of the supply chain and create actions with different signatures, designed to identify and exfiltrate valuable information. It's a really complex problem. Of major concern is that 63% of banking respondents in the study reported that responses to incidents were then met with retaliation designed to intimidate, or initiate ransomware tax to extract a final pound of flesh from the victim. Notably, the study found that 75% of CISOs reported to the CIO, which many feel is not the right regime. The study called for a rethinking of the right cyber regime where the CISO has increased responsibility and a direct reporting line to the CEO, or perhaps the COO, with greater exposure to boards of directors. So, many thanks to VMware and Tom Kellerman specifically for sharing this information with us this past week. Great work by your team. Now, some of the themes that we've been talking about for several quarters are shown in the lower half of the chart. Cloud, of course is the big driver thanks to work-from-home and to the pandemic. And the interesting corollary of course, is we see a rapid rethinking of end point and identity access management, and the concept of zero trust. In a recent ESG survey, two thirds of respondents said that their use of cloud computing necessitated a change in how they approach identity access management. Now, as shown in the chart from Optiv, the market remains highly fragmented, and M&A is of course, way up. Now, based on our research, it looks like transaction volume has increased more than 40% just in the last five months. So let's dig into the M&A, the merger and acquisition trends for just a moment. We took a five-month snapshot and we were able to count about 80 deals that were completed in that timeframe. Those transactions represented more than $20 billion in value. Some of the larger ones are highlighted here. The biggest of course, being the Thoma Bravo, taking Proofpoint private for a $12 plus billion price tag. The stock went from the low 130s and is trading in the low 170s based on the $176 per share offer. So there's your arbitrage, folks. Go for it. Perhaps the more interesting acquisition was Auth0 by Optiv for 6.5 billion, which we're going to talk about more in a moment. There was more private equity action we saw as Insight bought Armis, an IOT security play, and Cisco shelled out $730 million for IMImobile, which is more of an adjacency to cyber, but it's going to go under Cisco security and applications business run by Jeetu Patel. But these are just the tip of the iceberg. Some of the themes that we see connecting the dots of these acquisitions are first, SIs like Accenture, Atos and Wipro are making moves in cyber to go local. They're buying SecOps expertise, as I say, locally in places like France, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, and Australia, that last mile, that belly to belly intimate service. Israeli-based startups chocked up five acquired companies in the space over the last five months. Also financial services firms are getting into the act with Goldman and MasterCard making moves to own its own part of the stack themselves to combat things like fraud and identity theft. And then finally, numerous moves to expand markets. Okta with Auth0, CrowdStrike buying a log management company, Palo Alto, picking up dev ops expertise, Rapid7 shoring up it's Coobernetti's chops, Tenable expanding beyond Insights and going after identity, interesting. Fortinet filling gaps in a multi-cloud offering. SailPoint extending to governance risk and compliance, GRC. Zscaler picked up an Israeli firm to fill gaps in access control. And then VMware buying Mesh7 to secure modern app development and distribution service. So tons and tons of activity here. Okay, so let's look at some of the ETR data to put the cyber market in context. ETR uses the concept of market share, it's one of the key metrics which is a measure of pervasiveness in the dataset. So for each sector, it calculates the number of respondents for that sector divided by the total to get a sense for how prominent the sector is within the CIO and IT buyer communities. Okay, this chart shows the full ETR sector taxonomy with security highlighted across three survey periods; April last year, January this year, and April this year. Now you wouldn't expect big moves in market share over time. So it's relatively stable by sector, but the big takeaway comes from observing which sectors are most prominent. So you see that red line, that dotted line imposed at the 60% level? You can see there are only six sectors above that line and cyber security is one of them. Okay, so we know that security is important in a large market. But this puts it in the context of the other sectors. However, we know from previous breaking analysis episodes that despite the importance of cyber, and the urgency catalyzed by the pandemic, budgets unfortunately are not unlimited, and spending is bounded. It's not an open checkbook for CSOs as shown in this chart. This is a two-dimensional graphic showing market share in the horizontal axis, or pervasiveness in net score in the vertical axis. Net score is ETR's measurement of spending velocity. And we've superimposed a red line at 40% because anything over 40%, we consider extremely elevated. We've filtered and limited the number of sectors to simplify the graphic. And you can see, in the sectors that we've highlighted, only the big four are above that 40% line; AI, containers, RPA, and cloud. They exceed that sort of 40% magic waterline. Information security, you can see that as highlighted and it's respectable, but it competes for budget with other important sectors. So this is of course creates challenges for organization, because not only are they strapped for talent as we've reported, they like everyone else in IT face ongoing budget pressures. Research firm, Cybersecurity Ventures estimates that in 2021, $6 trillion worldwide will be lost on cyber crime. Conversely, research firm, Cannolis peg security spending somewhere around $60 billion annually. IDC has at higher, around $100 billion. So either way, we're talking about spending between 1 to 1.6% annually of how much the bad guys are taking out. That's peanuts really when you consider the consequences. So let's double-click into the cyber landscape a bit and further look at some of the companies. Here's that same X/Y graphic with the companies ETR captures from respondents in the cybersecurity sector. That's what's shown on the chart here. Now, the usefulness of the red lines is 20% on the horizontal indicates the largest presence in the survey, and the magic 40% line that we talked about earlier shows those firms with the most elevated momentum. Only Microsoft and Palo Alto exceed both high watermarks. Of course, Splunk and Cisco are prominent horizontally. And there are numerous companies to the left of the 20% line and many above that 40% high watermark on the vertical axis. Now in the bottom left quadrant, that includes many of the legacy names that have been around for a long time. And there are dozens of companies that show spending momentum on their platforms, i.e above single digits. So that picture is like the first one we showed you, very, very crowded space. But so let's filter it a bit and only include companies in the ETR survey that had at least 100 responses. So an N of 100 or greater. So it was a little easier to read but still it's kind of crowded when you think about it. Okay, so same graphic, and we've superimposed the data that determined the plot position over in the bottom right there. So there's net score and shared in, including only companies with more than 100 N. So what does this data tell us about the market? Well, Microsoft is dominant as always, it seems in all dimensions but let's focus on that red line for a moment. Some of the names that we've highlighted over the past two years show very well here. First, I want to talk about Palo Alto Networks. Pre-COVID as you might recall, we highlighted the valuation divergence between Palo Alto and Fortinet. And we said Fortinet was executing better on its cloud strategy, and Palo Alto was at the time struggling with the transition especially with its go-to-market and its Salesforce compensation, and really refreshing its portfolio. But we told you that we were bullish on Palo Alto Networks at the time because of its track record, and the fact that CIOs consistently told us that they saw Palo Alto as a thought leader in the space that they wanted to work with. They said that Palo Alto was the gold standard, the best, especially larger company CISOs. So that gave us confidence that Palo Alto, a very well-run company was going to get its act together and perform better. And Palo Alto has just done just that. As we expected, they've done very well and rapidly moving customers to the next generation of platforms. And we're very impressed by the company's execution. And the stock has generally reflected that. Now, some other names that hit our radar in the ETR data a couple of years ago, continue to perform well. CrowdStrike, Zscaler, SailPoint, and CloudFlare. Now, CloudFlare just reported and beat earnings but was off, the stock fell on headwinds for tech overall, the big rotation. But the company is doing very well and they're growing rapidly and they have momentum as you can see from the ETR data. Now, we put that double star around Proofpoint to highlight that it was worthy of fetching $12.5 billion from private equity firm. So nice exit there, supporting the continued consolidation trend that we've predicted in cybersecurity. Now let's turn our attention to Okta and Auth0. This is where it gets interesting, and is a clever play for Okta we think, and we want to drill into it a bit. Okta is acquiring Auth0 for big money. Why? Well, we think Todd McKinnon, Okta CEO, wants to run the table on identity and then continue to expand as TAM has to do that, to justify his lofty valuation. So Okta's ascendancy around identity and single sign-on is notable. The fragmented pictures that we've shown you, they scream out for simplification and trust, and that's what Okta brings. But it competes with some major players, most notably Microsoft with active directory. So look, of course, Microsoft is going to dominate in its massive customer base, but the rest of the market, that's like (indistinct) wide open. And we think McKinnon saw the opportunity to go dominate that sector. Now Okta comes at this from an enterprise perspective bringing top-down trust to the equation, and throwing a big blanket over all the discreet SaaS platforms and unifying employee access. Okta's timing was perfect. It was founded in 2009, just as the massive SaaSifiation trend was happening around CRM and HR, and service management and cloud, et cetera. But the one thing that Okta didn't have that Auth0 does is serious developer chops. While Okta was crushing it with its enterprise sales strategy, Auth0 was laser-focused on developers and building a bottoms up approach to identity. By acquiring Auth0, Okta can dominate both sides of the barbell and then capture the fat middle. So yes, it's a pricey acquisition, but in our view, it's a great move by McKinnon. Now, I don't know McKinnon personally, but last week I spoke to Arun Shrestha, who's the CEO of security specialist, BeyondID, they're a platinum services partner of Okta. And they're a zero trust expert. He worked for Okta for a number of years and shared with me a bit about McKinnon's style, and think big approach. Arun said something that caught my attention. He said, firewalls used to be the perimeter, now people are. And while that's self-serving to Okta and probably BeyondID, it's true. People, apps and data are the new perimeter, and they're not in one location. And that's the point. Now, unfortunately, I had lined up an interview with Diya Jolly, who was the chief product officer at Okta and a Cube alum for this past week, knowing that we were running this segment in this episode but she unfortunately fell ill the day of our interview and had to cancel. But I want to follow up with her, and understand how she's thinking about connecting the dots with Auth0 with devs and enterprises and really test our thesis there. This is a really interesting chess match that's going on. Let's look a little deeper into that identity space. This chart here shows some of the major identity players. It has some of the leaders in the identity market, and is a breakdown at ETR's net score. Now net score comprises five elements. The lime green is, we're adding the platform new. The forest green is we're spending 6% or more relative to last year. The gray is flat send plus or minus flat spend, plus or minus 5%. The pinkish is spending less. And the bright red is we're exiting the platform, retiring. Now you subtract the red from the green, and that gets you the result for net score which you can see super-imposed on the right hand chart at the bottom, that first column there. The far column is shared in which informs and indicates the number of responses and is a proxy for presence in the market. Oh, look at the top two players in terms of spending momentum. Now SailPoint is right there, but Auth0 combined with Okta's distribution channel will extend Okta's lead significantly in our view. And then there's Microsoft. Now just a caveat, this includes all of Microsoft's security offerings, not just identity, but it's there for context. And CyberArk as well includes this acquisition of adaptive, but also other parts of CyberArk's portfolio. So you can see some of the other names that are there, many of which you'll find in the Gartner magic quadrant for identity. And as we said, we really like this move by Okta. It combines positive market forces with lead offerings from very well-run companies that have winning DNA and passionate people. Now, to further emphasize what's happening here, take a look at this. This chart shows ETR data for Okta within SailPoint and CyberArk accounts. Out of the 230 CyberArk and SailPoint customers in the dataset, there are 81 Okta accounts. That's a 35% overlap. And the good news for Okta is that within that base of SailPoint and CyberArk accounts, Okta is shown by the net score line, that green line has a very elevated spending in momentum. And the kicker is, if you read the fine print in the right hand column, ETR correctly points out that while SailPoint and CyberArk have long been partners with Okta, at the recent Octane21 event, Okta's big customer event, The company announced that it was expanding into privileged access management, PAM, and identity governance. Hello, and welcome to co-opetition in the 2020s. Now, our current thinking is that this bodes very well for Okta and CyberArk and SailPoint. Well, they're going to have to make some counter moves to fend off the onslaught that is coming. Now, let's wrap up with what has become a tradition in our quarterly security updates. Looking at those two dimensions of net score and market share, we're going to see which companies crack the top 10 for both measures within the ETR dataset. We do this every quarter. So here in the left, we have the top 20, sorted by net score spending momentum and on the right, we sort by shared N. So it's again, top 20, which informs, shared N informs the market share metric or presence in the dataset. That red horizontal lines, those two lines on each separate the top 10 from the remaining 10 within those top 20. And our method, what we do is we assign four stars to those companies that crack the top 10 for both metrics. So again, you see Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Okta, CrowdStrike, and Fortinet. Fortinet by the way, didn't make it last quarter. They've kind of been in and out and on the bubble, but company is very strong, and doing quite well. Only the other four did last quarter. They were the same for last quarter. And we give two stars to those companies that make it in both categories within the top 20 but didn't make the top 10. So Cisco, Splunk, which has been steadily decelerating from a spending momentum standpoint, and Zscaler, which is just on the cusp. We really like Zscaler and the company has great momentum, but that's the methodology. That is what it is. Now you can see, we kept Carbon Black on the right most chart, it's like kind of cut off, it's number 21. Only because they're just outside looking in on net score. You see them there, they're just below on net score, number 11. And VMware's presence in the market we think, that Carbon Black is right really worth paying attention to. Okay, so we're going to close with some summary and final thoughts. Last quarter, we did a deeper dive on the SolarWinds hack, and we think the ramifications are significant. It has set the stage for a new era of escalation and adversary sophistication. Now, major change we see is a heightened awareness that when you find intruders, you'd better think very carefully about your next moves. When someone breaks into your house, if the dog barks, or if you come down with a baseball bat or other weapon, you might think the intruder is going to flee. But if the criminal badly wants what you have in your house and it's valuable enough, you might find yourself in a bloody knife fight or worse. Well, what's happening is intruders come to your company via island hopping or insider subterfuge or whatever method. And they'll live off the land stealthily using your own tools against you so that you can't find them so easily. So instead of injecting new tools in that send off an alert, they just use what you already have there. That's what's called living off the land. They'll steal sensitive data, for example, positive COVID test results when that was really, really sensitive, obviously still is, or other medical data. And when you retaliate, they will double-extort you. They'll encrypt your data and hold it for ransom, and at the same time threaten to release the sensitive information, crushing your brand in the process. So your response must be as stealthy as their intrusion, as you marshal your resources and devise an attack plan. And you face serious headwinds. Not only is this a complicated situation, there's your ongoing and acute talent shortage that you tell us about all the time. Many companies are mired in technical debt, that's an additional challenge. And then you've got to balance the running of the business while actually effecting a digital transformation. That's very, very difficult, and it's risky because the more digital you become, the more exposed you are. So this idea of zero trust, people used to call it a buzzword, it's now a mandate along with automation. Because you just can't throw labor at the problem. This is all good news for investors as cyber remains a market that's ripe for valuation increases and M&A activity, especially if you know where to look. Hopefully we've helped you squint through the maze a little bit. Okay, that's it for now. Thanks to the community for your comments and insights. Remember I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. These episodes, they're all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search breaking analysis podcasts, put in the headphones, listen when you're in your car, or out for your walk or run, and you can always connect on Twitter @DVellante, or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. I appreciate the comments on LinkedIn and in Clubhouse, please follow me, so you're notified when we start a room and riff on these topics and others. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (light instrumental music)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, welcome back to the cube at Lisa Martin with Steve men and men and we are coming to you alive from combo go 19 please to welcome to the cube, a gent from Microsoft Azure. We've got Ben call principal program manager. Ben, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on. So Microsoft combo, what's going on with the partnership? >>They wouldn't have have great storage pond is in data management space. We've been working with Convult for 20 years now in Microsoft and and they've been working with us on Azure for that as long as I can remember not being on that the Azure business for about seven years now. So just a long time in cloud terms like dog ears and it's sort of, they've been doing a huge amount there around getting customer data into the cloud, reducing costs, getting more resiliency and then also letting them do more with the data. So they're a pretty good partner to have and they make it much easy for their customers to to go and leverage cloud. >> So Ben, you know, in my career I've had lots of interactions with the Microsoft storage team. Things have changed a little bit when you're now talking about Azure compared to more, it was the interaction with the operating system or the business suite at had. >>So maybe bring us up to date as those people that might not have followed where kind of the storage positioning inside of Microsoft is now that when we talk about Azure and your title. Yeah, we, we sort of can just, just briefly, we worked very heavily with our own premises brethren, they are actually inside the O team is inside of the Azure engineering old male, which is kind of funny, but we do a load of things there. If he started looking at, firstly on that, that hybrid side, we have things like Azure files. It's a highly resilient as a service SMB NFS file Shafter a hundred terabytes, but that interacts directly with windows server to give you Azure file sync. So there is sort of synergies there as well. What I'm doing personally, my team, we work on scale storage. The big thing we have in there is owl is out blood storage technology, which really is the underpinning technology fault. >>Preapproval storage and Azure, which is an including our SAS offerings, which are hosted on Azure too. So disc is on blood storage of files on blood storage. You look at Xbox live, all these kind of stuff is a customer to us. So we build that out and we were doing work there and that's, that's really, really interesting. And how we do it. And that's not looking at going, we're gonna buy some compute, we're going to buy some storage, we're going to build it out, we're going to run windows or hyper V or maybe VM-ware with hoc with windows running on the VMware, whatever else. This is more a story about we're gonna provide you storage as a service. You didn't get a minimum of like 11 nines at your ability. And and be able to have that scale to petabytes of capacity in one logical namespace and give you multiple gigabytes, double digit gigabytes of throughput to that storage. >>And now we're even that about to multiple protocols. So rest API century. Today we've got Azure stack storage, EU API, she can go and use, but we give you that consistency of the actual backend storage and the objects and the data available via more than just one protocol. You can go and access that via HDFS API. We talk about data lakes all the time. For us, our blood storage is a data Lake. We turn on hierarchal namespace and you can go and access that via other protocols like as I mentioned HDFS as well. So that is a big story about what we want to do. We want to make that data available at crazy scale, have no limits in the end to the capacity or throughput or performance and over any protocol. That's kind of our lawn on the Hill about what we want to get to. >>And we've been talking to the Combolt team about some of the solutions that they are putting in the cloud. The new offering metallic that came out. They said if my customer has Azure storage or storage from that other cloud provider, you could just go ahead and use that. Maybe how familiar and how much I know you've been having about run metallic. >> We were working, we work pretty tightly with the product team over Convolt around this and my team as well around how do we design and how do we make it work the best and we're going to continue working to optimize as they get to beyond initial launch to go, wow, we've got data sets we we can analyze. We knew how to, we wanted out of tune it. Now really we love the solution particularly more because you know the default if you don't select the storage type where you want to go, you will run on Azure. >>So really sort of be cued off to the relationship there. They chose us as a first place we'll go to, but they've also done the choice for customers. So some customers may want to take it to another cloud. That's fine. It's reasonable. I mean we totally understand it's going to be a multicloud world and that's a reality for any large company. Our goal is to make sure we're growing faster than the competitors, not to knock out the competitors altogether because that just won't happen. So they've got that ability to go and, yeah, Hey, we'll use Azure as default because they feel we're offering the best support and the best solution there. But then if they have that customer, same customer wants to turn around and use a competitor of ours, fine as well. And I see people talking about that today where they may want to mitigate risks and say, I'm going to do, I'm doing off office three, six five on a, taken off this three 65 backup. It's cool. You use metallic, it'll take it maybe to a different region in Asia and they're backing up. They still going, well, I'm still all in on Microsoft. They may want to take it to another cloud or even take it back to on premise. So that does happen too because just in case of that moment we can get that data back in a different location. Something >>so metallic talking about that is this new venture is right. It's a Convolt venture and saw that the other day and thought that's interesting. So we dug into it a little bit yesterday and it's like a startup operating within a 20 year old company, which is very interesting. Not just from an incumbent customer perspective, but an incumbent partner perspective. How have you seen over the last few years and particularly bad in the last nine months with big leadership and GTM changes for condo? How has the partnership with Microsoft evolved as a result of those changes? >>Um, it's always been interesting. I guess when you start looking at adventure and everything seems to, things change a little bit. Priorities may change just to be fair, but we've had that tight relationship for a long time and a relationship level and an exec leadership level, nothing's really changed. But in the way they're building this platform, we, we sit down out of my team at the Azure engineering group and we'll sit down and do things like ideations. Like here's where we see gaps in the markets, here's what we believe could happen. And look back in July, we had inspire, which is our partner conference in Las Vegas and we sat down with their OT, our OT in a room, we'll talking about these kinds of things. And this is I think about two months after they may have started the initial development metallic from what I understand, but we're talking about exactly what they're doing with metallic offered as a service in Azure as, Hey, how about we do this? So we think it's really cool. It opens up a new market to convert I think too. I mean they're so strong in the enterprise, but they don't do much in the smaller businesses because with the full feature product, it also has inherent complexibility complexity around it. So by doing metallic, is it click, click, next done thing. They really opening I think new markets to them and also to us as a partner. >>I was going to add, you know, kind of click on that because they developed this very quickly. This is something that I think what student were here yesterday, metallic was kind of conceived, designed, built in about six months. So in terms of like acceleration, that's kind of a new area for Combolt. >>Yeah, and I think, I think they're really embracing the fact about let's release our code in production for, for products which are sort of getting the, getting to the, Hey, the product is at the viable stage now, not minimum viable, viable, let's release in production, let's find out how customers are using it and then let's keep optimizing and doing that constant iteration, taking that dev ops approach to let's get it out there, let's get it launched, and then let's do these small batches of changes based on customer need, based on tele telemetry. We can actually get in. We can't get the telemetry without having customers. So that's how it's going to keep working. So I think this initial product we see today, it's just going to keep evolving and improving as they get more data, as they get more information, more feedback, which is exactly what we want to see. >>Well, what will come to the cloud air or something you've been living in for a number of years. Ben, I'd love to hear you've been meeting with customers, they've been asking you questions, gives us some of the, you know, some of the things that, what's top of mind for some of the customers? What kinds of things did they come into Microsoft, Dawn, and how's that all fit together? >>There's many different conferences of interrelate, many different conversations and there'll be, we'll go from talking about, you know, Python machine learning or AI fits in PowerPoint. >>Yeah. >>It's a things like, you know, when are we gonna do incremental snapshots from the manage disks, get into the weeds on very infrastructure centric stuff. We're seeing range of conversations there. The big thing I think I see, keep seeing people call out and make assumptions of is that they're not going to be relevant because cloud, I don't know cloud yet. I don't know this whole coup cube thing, containers, I don't really understand that as well as I think I need to. And an AI, Oh my gosh, what do we even do there? Cause everyone's throwing the words and terms around. But to be honest, I think would still really evident is cloud is still is tiny fraction of enterprise workloads. So let's be honest, it's growing at a huge rate because it is that small fraction. So again, there's plenty of time for people to learn but they shouldn't go and try. >>And so it's not like you go and learn everything in the technology stack from networking to development to database management to, to running a data set of power and cooling. You learn the things that are applicable to what you're trying to do. And the same thing goes to cloud. Any of these technologies go and look at what you need to build for your business. Take it that step and then go and find out the details and levels you want to know. And as someone who's been on Azure for, like I said, almost seven years, which is crazy long. That was, that was literally like being in a startup instead of Microsoft when I joined and I wasn't sure if I wanted to join a licensing company. It's been very evident to me. I will not say I'm an Azure expert and I've been seven years in the platform. >>There are too many things for for me to be an expert in everything on, and I think people sort of just have to realize that anyone's saying that it's bravado. Nothing else. Oh, people. The goal is Microsoft as a platform provider. Hopefully you've got the software and the solution does make a lot of this easier for the customer, so hopefully they shouldn't need to become a Coobernetti's expert because it's baked into your platform. They shouldn't have to worry about some of these offerings because it's SAS. Most customers are there. Some things you need to learn between going from exchange to go into Oh three 65 absolutely. There's some nuances and things like that, but once you get over that initial hurdle, it should be a little easier. I think it's right and I think going back to that, sort of going back to bear principles going, what is the highest level of distraction that's viable for your business or that application or this workload has to always be done with everything. If it's like, well, class, not even viable, running on premises, don't, don't need to apologize for not running in cloud. If I as this, what's happening for you because of security, because of application architecture, run it that way. Don't feel the need and the pressure to have to push it that way. I think too many people get caught up in this shiny stuff up here, which is what you know 1% of people are doing versus the other 99% which is still happening in a lot of the areas we work and have challenges in today. >>That's a great point that you bring up because there is all the buzz words, right? AI, machine learning cloud. You've got to be cloud ready. You've got to be data-driven to customer. To your point going, I just need to make sure that what we have set up for our business is going to allow our business one to remain relevant, but to also be able to harness the power of the data that they have to extract new opportunities, new insights, and not get caught up with, shoot, should we be using automation? Should we be using AI? Everybody's talking about it. I liked that you brought up and I find it very respectfully, he said, Hey, I'm not an Azure expert. You'd been there seven, seven dog years like you said. And I think that's what customers probably gained confidence in is hearing the folks like you that they look to for that guidance and that leadership saying, no, I don't know everything to know. But giving them the confidence that their tribe, they're trusting you with that data and also helping look, trusting you to help them make the right decisions for their business. >>Yeah, and that's, we've got to do that. I mean, I as a tech guy, it's like I've, I've loved seeing the changes. When I joined Microsoft, I, I wasn't lying. I was almost there go enough. I really want to join this company. I was going to go join a startup instead and I got asked to one stage in an interview going, why do you want to join Microsoft? We see you've never applied to, I'd never wanted to. A friend told me to come in and it's just been amazing to see those changes and I'm pretty proud on that. So when we talk about those things we're doing, I mean, I think there is no shame going, I'm just going to lift and shift machines because cloud's about flexibility. If you're doing it just on cost, probably doing it for the wrong reason. It's about that flexibility to go and do something. >>Then change within months and slowly make steps to make things better and better as you find a need as you find the ability, whatever it may be. And some of the big things that we focus on right now with customers is we've got a product called Azure advisor. It'll go until people, when one, you don't build things in a resilient manner. Hey, do you know this has not ha because of this and you can do this. It's like, great. We'll also will tell you about security vulnerabilities that maybe should a gateway here for security. Maybe you should do this or this is not patched. But the big thing of that, it also goes and tells you, Hey, you're overspending. You don't need this much. It provisions, you provision like a Ferrari, you need a, you just need a Prius. Go and run a Prius because it's going to do what you need. >>I need a paler list and that's part of that trusted suit. Getting that understanding, and it's counterintuitive, but we're now like, it's coming out of mozzarella too, which is great. But seeing these guys were dropping contracts and licenses and basically, you know, once every three years I may call the customer, Hey, how about renewal? Now, go from that to now being focused on the customer's actual success. I've focused on their growth in Azure as a platform. Our services growth, like utilization not in sales has been a huge change. It scared some people away, but it's brought a lot more people in and and that sort of counterintuitive spend less money thing actually leads in the longterm to people using more. >>Absolutely. That's definitely not the shrink wrap software company of Microsoft that I remember from the 90s yeah. might be similar to, you know, just as to get Convolt to 2019 is not the same combo that many of us know from 15 years ago. A good >>mutual friend of ours, sort of Simon and myself before I took this job, he and I sat down, we're having a beer and discussing the merits, all not Yvette go to things like that. Same with Convolt there. They're changing such such a great deal with, you know, what they're putting in the cloud, what they're doing with the data, where they're trying to achieve with things like for data management across on premises and cloud with microservices applications and stuff going, Hey, this won't work like this anymore. When you now are doing it on premises and with containers, it's pretty good to see. I'm interested to see how they take that even further to their current audience, which is product predominantly. You know the it pro, the data center admin, storage manager. >>It's funny when you talked about just the choice that customers have and those saying, aye, we shouldn't be following the trends because they're the trends. We actually interviewed a couple of hours ago, one of customers that is all on prime healthcare company and said, he's like, I want to make a sticker that says no cloud and proud and it just what there was, we don't normally hear from them. We always talk about cloud, but for a company to sit down and look at what's best for our business, whether it's, you know, FedRAMP certification challenges or HIPAA or GDPR, other compelling requirements to keep it on prem, it was just refreshing to hear this customer say, >>yeah, I mean it's just appropriate for them. You do what's right for you. I, yeah, it's no shame in any of it. It's, I mean you don't, you definitely don't get fans by it by shaming people about not doing something right. And I mean I've, I'm personally very happy to fee fee, you know, see sort of hype around things like blockchain die down a little bit. So it's a slow database and we should use it for this specific case of that shared ledger. You know, things like that where people don't have to know blockchain. Now I have to know IOT. It's like, yeah, and that hype gets people there, but it also causes a lot of anxiety and it's good to see someone actually not be ashamed of it. And they agree the ones when they do take a step and use cloud citizen may be in the business already, they're probably going to do it appropriately because have a reason, not just because we think this would be cool, right? >>Well not. And how much inherit and complexity does that bring in if somebody is really feeling pressured to follow those trends. And maybe that's when you end up with this hodgepodge of technologies that don't work well together. You're spending way more in as as business it folks are consumers, you know, consumers in their personal lives, they expect things to be accessible, visible, but also cost efficient because they have so much choice. >>Yeah, the choice choice is hard. It's just a, just the conversation I was having recently, for example, just we'll take the storage cause of where we are, right? It's like I'm running something on Azure, I'm a, I'm using Souza, I want an NFS Mount point, which is available to me in Fs. Great, perfect. what do I use as like, well you can use any one of these seven options like that, but what's the right choice? And that's the thing about being a platform can be, we give you a lot of choices, but it's still up to you or up to app hotness. It can really help the customers as well to make the most appropriate choice. And, and I, I pushed back really hard in terms of best practices and things. I hate it because again, it's making the assumption this is the best thing to do. >>It's not. It's always about, you know, what are the patterns that have worked for other people? What are the anti-patterns and what's the appropriate path for me to take? And that's actually how we're building our docs now too. So we, we keep, we keep focusing on our Azure technology and we're bringing out some of the biggest things we've done is how we manage our documentation. It's all open sourced, it's all in markdown on get hub. So you can go in and read a document from someone like myself is doing product management going, this is how to use this product and you're actually, this bit's wrong, this bit needs to be like this and you can go in yourself even now, make a change and we can go, Oh yeah and take that committed in and dual this kind of stuff in that way. So we're constantly taking those documents in that way and getting realtime feedback from customers who are using it, not just ourself in an echo chamber. >>So you get this great insight and visibility that you never had before. Well, Ben, thank you, Georgie stew and me on the queue this afternoon. Excited to hear what's coming up next for Azure. Makes appreciate your time. Thank you for steam and event. I, Lisa Martin, you're watching the cue from Convault go 19.

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

>> Narrator: Live from Denver, Colorado it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, we're wrapping up close-- Wrapping up our coverage of two days at Commvault Go in Colorado and we're excited to welcome a new gust to theCUBE. We have Tim Carben, Principle Systems Engineer for Storage and Data Protection at Mitchell, a Commvault customer. Tim, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me. >> Lisa: First question. >> Yes. >> Are you ready for the interview? (Tim shows off his shirt) >> I came ready. >> Lisa: You were born ready! >> Yes. (Lisa laughs) >> So for those of you who weren't here, the get ready, be ready is a big theme of the event. So, Tim, first of all, before we get into what Mitchell is doing with Commvault, tell our audience who Mitchell is, what types of products and services do you deliver? >> Well, Mitchell is a little known name, but we are a technology company that provides smart solutions, or smart insurance solutions. (Tim sighs) I'm sorry, we provide smart technology solutions for insurance companies in the area of property and casualty. >> Okay. That's a big, that's a-- >> That's a mouth full. >> It is a mouth full, but you did really well. So based here in the US? >> Tim: Yes in San Diego. >> Oh, that's right, Sunny San Diego. We were just talking about the scooter problem. How could I forget? So, you came onboard there, you said around five or so years ago? >> Tim: Yes, about five and a half years. >> If I think of like, insurance. (Lisa cringes) The data volume growing, right, must be, you're wincing, exponential. Talk to us about the data strategy and the importance of data to Mitchell and what you're doing with Commvault to protect it, get that visibility and use it to deliver stellar services. >> Well that's exactly it. It's, we see growth and, year over year and making sure that we keep that data protected is the most important thing. We have to be able to provide that back to our customers, in an instant and keep it available. That's number one is keeping everything available. So, of course I'm going to choose Commvault. I always look into everything that's in the market and I talk with everyone. I mean, I've had conversations with everyone from Rupert to Veritas and I agree with Forrester in saying that Commvault's the best product for the data protection. >> Lisa: Why? >> Mainly, because we're seeing them move forward faster than anyone else. They're able to-- Or I'm able to, I guess I should say, utilizing Commvault, microtune my environment to be able to provide the fastest level of backup and recovery. Rather than buying blocks and putting these blocks together. And even when it comes to the hyperscale product, it's a Red Hat server cluster. So it's not a black box you can't see inside of, you understand what's going on underneath it and it is a tried and true methodology for doing what you're trying to do and it's... I guess for lack of better words, just really resilient, I love it. >> Great, so Tim, you said you've looked at a lot of solutions, you've been on Commvault for quite a while. Talk to us a little bit about that usability of the product, you know? Some of the questions we have is, you know how simple it actually is to use, you know how much your team needs to study up and get on it and just, kind of, the cadence of change that you're seeing coming from Commvault. >> Now, my team's really good. You know we've been-- They've been with Commvault since version six they know how to use the Java console. So, it's not so much as, they are learning something new, but what's happening and what I've noticed with Commvault, from within the Java console to the command center, is they're making everything else a lot easier. So, they're not changing the way I'm doing my mature backups of, say Oracle, or, you know file system, things like that, but they are making it a lot easier for me to start and recover and I guess, change configuration of the VMware backups. They're making it easier of me to manage my storage and with the command center or with the web console, I should say, they're making it so much easier to report. Anyone that's utilized the CommNet from back in the day, the old reporting tool, versus the new centralized metrics reporting tool, knows that there's no comparison whatsoever. And I can point all of my CommCells to one reporting system and provide reports that go over everything from storage utilization to, you know, just resource utilization all the way down to chargeback, based upon any given criteria I want. >> You have full visibility? >> Full visibility. >> You mentioned that you've been a Commvault customer for a while, not just at Mitchell, but your previous company, you also said before we started that you've done a lot of speaking on behalf of Commvault, your use case, other challenges that you had, the business outcomes. I would love to get your perspective on being one of those customer champions, what are some of the things that you're hearing from prospective Commvault customers? Are they asking you for your advice, like hey, we had this kind of compelling event, Tim, what would you recommendation be? >> A lot of it is specifics and I think that's, you know, they'll be asking questions based upon who they're talking to and I'm the guy that you talk to when you want to talk the details. So they'll come to me and say hey, what about this hyperscale configuration and I'll say, well rather than go with the larger environment, go with the smaller nodes and spread it wider, that way you can transfer more data in. But... It's a lot of just how is it working for you? And even into the newer environments where we're looking at the, you know, 0365 being backed up by SaaS is, how easy is it to configure? And that is quite possibly the easiest thing to configure that I've ever run across. >> Wow. Ever? >> Ever. Well, like I said, they keep making things better and in the past I've used, you know, Veritas backup Exec, as everyone has back in the day. I mean, we've done data transfer on tapes, I've used TSM for seven years, so everything's going to be easier than that and even a lot of testing of different backup applications and when you look at what we're doing with cloud configuration and Commvault SaaS model, Commvault really takes a lot of the configuration out that you would need to do and they have their own CommCell administrator that takes care of it. I was talking with Justin not too long back, he's here I was so happy to get to meet him and he manages all that for us. We enter in the specifics as far as configuration and it's done. >> So you guys-- Oh, go ahead, Stu. >> So, Tim, you know, what I'm curious about is the feedback loop that you have with Commvault. Obviously you're quite happy with the product, you've seen the maturation over time. Are there things you're asking for, or things that you're seeing on their roadmap or maybe things that were announced this week, that are exciting you or things that you would love to help be doing things even better than what you're doing today? >> I don't know, this may be the thing that the sales people don't like about me. Is I don't hold back when I see something that I want to see different and I've done this with different storage manufacturers that I've worked with, as well as, of course with Commvault and the one things that I always come back to and this is one thing I joked with my previous sales person on is, if you're going to call it Commvault Complete, why doesn't it include orchestrate and activate? You could just call it Commvault and then give us another Commvault Complete that actually contains everything in it, because, I wish I could run the activate in-house. The problem is, is I've priced it out, I've provided that data to my upper management and they just will not buy off on it. >> And what was Commvault's response to that feedback? 'Cause they're very pro-listening to their customers, we've heard that resoundingly. >> They are and there really wasn't anything. They said they're hand things up the channel and what's interesting about it is in talking to the activate people today, or, yes, either way. During the show, I found out that they added another plan that would allow you to buy activate by the terabyte and not by the user. So that may be something that could help drop the price if we isolate specific environments to what we would use the activate for and that would be (Tim nods) workable, I guess I should say. >> So, speaking of activate, data governance, insights, the California Consumer Privacy Act, CCPA is around the corner. >> Yes. >> You're based in San Diego. Where is Mitchell in terms of its readiness for that and how is Commvault, ar they part of that solution to get ready? >> As far as-- I can speak to the data protection side of it, because that's where I'm at. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> And I have everything in place for us to be ready by the time everything comes through. And it is utilizing Commvault. I mean, that's the backbone of being able to keep us protected. At that level and all levels, I should say. >> Tim, as we mentioned before, you've been speaking, you've been quite busy at the show, give us, you know, some of the highlights that you've had and, you know, what brings you to Go and how many of them have you been to? >> Well, I went to the first two Florida and DC. I skipped out on the last one, I wanted to send my coworkers there. So my coworkers that I work with, I made it a point I said I'm staying at the office, I'll take care of everything, go and-- No pun intended. >> Lisa: I was going to say that was good. >> Yes. (Lisa and Tim laughing) And then I came back to this one. The big thing is learning. This is an opportunity for me to talk to industry experts, to talk to customers who have done things that I'm planning on doing in the future, to help out customers who haven't done things that I've already done and let 'em know hey look out for this or look out for that. But, with this one a big part of it is looking at the workflows, looking at the automation. Utilizing or being able to utilize all the other features that I have available to me that I'm not using right now. >> Last question in the last few seconds of the time we have left, lots of announcements from Commvault in the last nine months a lot of change, a lot of leadership change, reps to market change, new ventures. Some of your perspective of what you're seeing with this new Commvault? >> Well, it's exciting when you look at it. At first I wondered about the Hedvig acquisition. I mean, it's a step into the primary storage market and some people say that a lot of the companies that are partners with Commvault could see that as overstepping boundaries, but when I learn what they're doing and what they're planning on doing and utilizing it as more of a data protection multicloud strategy, this really could push them a little bit further along than anyone else than the data protection market is. So, the changes look to be, for lack of better words, really good for the company and in turn really good for us, the consumer. And making sure that we can do everything that we need to do and we're ready to move forward. >> 'Course you are, you have the shirt. >> Tim: That's right, we're ready >> Well Tim, Tim thank you for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon. Sharing with us what's going on at Mitchell and you perspectives on knowing Commvault as long as you have. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you for having me. >> Our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE from Commvault Go '19. (upbeat tune)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault GO 2019, brought to you by Commvault. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault GO 19, from Colorado. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. Stu and I are pleased to welcome somebody new to theCUBE and to Commvault. We've got Tom Broderick, VP of Strategy and Chief of Staff to the CEO of Commvault. Tom, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, I like you're on brand, the new Commvault venture, >> Yeah, I got to sport the colors, right? >> Metallic, very nice. >> That's right, I had the big jacket on yesterday, so. >> Oh wow, all right. So lots of change at Commvault. You're new as well, you've worked with Sanjay, now this is your third different company working with Sanjay Mirchandani, the CEO. Talk to us a little bit about your short time here at Commvault. There's been so much change that he's driving, cultural change, Metallic was something that was conceived, designed, built in a very short time period, a lot of acceleration. Your first few months here, what's it's been like? >> It's been, obviously, a ton of activity. And, one of the things that we know, and I think it's obvious, Commvault as a company has been in this state of transition. You bring a new CEO on, and we've got a new leadership team, that is merging well with the core leadership team of people that have a lot experience at the company and it's working really well. From the beginning we knew that we needed to focus on three areas, inside the company and outside. It's really around, as we talk to folks, around simplifying our business. And when we say that, normally in an event like this it goes towards how do we simplify working with our partners, how do we simplify working with our customers, how do we simplify our products, that kind of thing. But, from my perspective, one of the things that I focus on, is also, how we focus on simplifying ourselves on the inside, because this is an area where we can be much more efficient in how we bring our technology to the marketplace. So I'm focused on breaking down silos, I'm focused on driving effective communication in the business, so that we can deliver that technology to our partners and our customers. So, simplifying the business. Innovation is the next big key. So, obviously, our technology, and this is one of the things before coming on, I did a lot of research on Commvault technology, I've been out of this part of the market for quite some time, and the core technology is super solid. But we needed to innovate further, and shoulder out into different areas, and that's where you see things like Metallic come into play, the acquisition of Hedvig, where we're using our balance sheet, in a way that's very different for the company. This is our first acquisition as a company. And then of course all the new features and functions that we put into SP17, which was just released in the core product. And then lastly, it's around execution. So, simplify, innovate, execute. And when we talk about execution, a lot of that falls on the go-to-market side so this feeds right into some of those leadership changes that we announced this week, and that we announced earlier, bringing folks like Riccardo Di Blasio on, and that's how we think about things. So that's been a structure that's allowed us to do so much change in such a little amount of time. >> So Tom, I'd love to dig into that a little bit, so we've talked of Commvault traditionally has done a decent job of trying to move a little faster, so if you talk about the core product, it's on a 90 day release cycle, it's not the nine to 18 months train that many of us that have been in the industry a long time was like, okay, we got to get on the train, jam everything into it, hope we go and when we get to the end that we actually release something that we're happy with and it's supported and it works. Your last stop with Sanjay was at Puppet. Very different mindset, I'm curious what you learned there, and how that is really permeating the whole industry and what changes need to happen in Commvault to live in this new sass role like Metallic's going to offer, you know, if you're not delivering code, what are you doing. >> Yeah, it's a great question Stu, and the thing is, obviously we're living a different world than what we were 20 years ago, agile methodologies have sped everything up, and people are used to faster release cycles, how do we get new features out to customers in a much more expeditious way. The challenge though, and I'll bet if folks are watching this, the challenge internally is how you do that effectively. So one of the things that we did at Puppet was we had to get better at bringing the technology to the market, end to end across the business, so inside the business. It's not enough for the developers to say, "Okay, code's ready", and just throw it out there. Is the field enabled, is the pricing right, is the packaging right, is the documentation right, is marketing activated, all those elements of it. So again, this is a little bit inside baseball, from a Commvault perspective we're institutionalizing this as one of the core processes that helps us operate the business. I talk a lot about inside, I talk about how sometimes you have to go slow to go fast, and what I mean by that is the cross-functional elements of the business need to get together sooner in the process to make sure that everybody's on the same page, aligned, they know the key dependencies and they know when they can make their deliverables, so that when we're ready to go to market with the new technology, or new product, or a new service pack release, that everybody is ready to go with that because it does nobody any good if the code's ready, you throw it over the wall and then it just kind of falls down because people outside weren't ready. >> But operational simplification, as you describe it, that's really challenging to do, number one. Number two, doing it at a company that's been in business for 20 years, where you have different functions, you probably have some incumbent folks in there. Lot of change, how have you been able to accomplish that in such a short time period, it seems like, one of the things that Stu and I've been hearing is that there was a lot of receptiveness, within the incumbency internally at Commvault, but operational simplification it's no simple feat. >> No, it's really easy when you write it down on a piece of paper, it's hard once you get the humans involved. But the thing is, and this is one of the things that I've noticed at Commvault, it's been tremendously refreshing to me, is that, you know we have about 2,500 people in the organization and if I was going to give a massive generalization, we have 2,500 people that want to do the right thing, and they truly want to do the right thing for our customers. The issue in the past is that they haven't been aligned in all the same direction, or set of directions. So we were a little bit haphazard in certain ways. But people want to do the right thing, and once I started talking about these concepts and once we started implementing them, and now that we're actually seeing results, it's amazing, I have so many people coming up to me saying, "Wow, I didn't really get it at first, but now that we're actually implementing these kind of processes inside the company, it's amazing, the transformation that we're seeing, and we're so glad that we're doing it." >> Can you talk to us about the decisions for the Commvault ventures, that's one of the things that struck me when I saw some of the press releases earlier in the week, Metallic, a Commvault venture. The Hedvig acquisition, a Commvault venture. Some of the conversations that Stu and I have had this week, it's like a startup mentality within Commvault. Talk to us about the strategic decision to go that venture inside Commvault route. >> Yeah sure, absolutely. So obviously, Hedvig is indeed a venture, I mean, via acquiring a company that were a startup. But as we looked at bringing them into the Commvault folds, internally, inside the company, we had some guiding principles that we created straight away. And the number one guiding principle was don't break the business. Meaning, we're not going to come in and overwhelm them with Commvault. Because they created a successful entity amongst themselves, and a great technology that we think fits really well into our portfolio. But we do want to create some degree of separation because, we might be talking to different customers, this I why, I think I saw David Wigglesworth on a little bit earlier, and he's setting up the emerging technologies sales unit because they're going to be taking this to market a little bit different way. The development team is not being merged right into our core development team, they're remaining a unit amongst themselves reporting to Sanjay, right directly to Sanjay. On the Metallic side we did take the startup approach from the beginning, and we said look, it's easy for organizations to say, hey, we want to build this new thing to serve this new part of the market, and we're going to invest resources into it, let's put the plans together and go get it done. But especially for public companies too, it's easy on your 90 day cycles, to all of a sudden say, you know what, we have to rebound, or take those funds that we were going to put there, and move them elsewhere. And we said, no, we can't do this, this is super strategic to us, we have to ring fence it, and we have to let them build this product in a different way. So, I was talking about business readiness before, in terms of the process that we institute, they were actually the first group to implement it within their small team, and it created a great proof point for the rest of the organization to see how it works. >> So Tom, we've had some great conversations with a lot of the new leadership this week, you mentioned we had the conversation with Wiggs, he's starting to hire some of those sales people. We know there's always change going on in an environment, but is Commvault mostly through with the strategic leadership hires and now it's down to the next layer as to things like the overlays in some of the new initiatives, or is there still more work to be done on the structural piece of things? >> Good question Stu. You know, our work is never done. I think it's the same with any organization. I think most of the major parts and pieces are put in place, like where we want them. One of the things that you mentioned earlier, that this is my third tour of duty with Sanjay, and I say one of the really powerful things that he brings to an organization is the ability to build a strong, well-functioning leadership team. And I say well-functioning. And he did it at EMC, he did it at Puppet, and he's doing it here. And now we've got that senior leadership team in place, that is going to be continuing down this path of positive momentum that we've got. >> One of the challenges making through this big move, we said that the team definitely was receptive, we know that they're ready, but clear communication, just without getting into too many proprietary things that you've done, what tips can you have to make sure that an organization of this experience and this size isn't just going to get like, "Oh my God, whiplash, "they're changing management, I don't know where I fit." Or anything like that, how do we make sure that you get everybody pointing towards the true north, and, ready is I think the word we've heard over and over, so making sure that everybody in Commvault is ready to move forward? >> It's hard and it takes a lot of discipline. I do think you need to be as transparent as you can be, with the workforce and with your employees. They need to understand where we're going with this because if it's just a bunch of change for change's sake, that's difficult environment to live in. And we're certainly not that, we have objectives and goals, and we know what we want to get to. Obviously there are strategic elements of it that we can't necessarily discuss all the time, but at least directionally we have to be able to explain the moves that we're making in such a way that makes sense to people. If we believe it, and we've done our diligence, then it should be transferrable and we should be able to make it so that it's clear to everybody on the Commvault team. And we are focused on making that happen. Internally we do a lot of communication. Sanjay writes a lot of blogs internally. Sandy Hamilton writes a lot of blogs, Riccardo is constantly talking to the teams, and that just permeates down. We need to continue to get better at it, it's hard, organizational communications are hard. But we need to lead from the top as well, make sure that as we demonstrate what it means to communicate that all throughout the organization, we're creating that sort of culture. >> In the last few seconds here Tom, I would love to get your perspectives. What's the biggest thing that you're going to take away of the last three days of your first Commvault GO? >> Tom: Wow. >> Too many to count? >> (laughs) It's exciting, I'll say that, very specifically, walking through the Metallic booth and the Hedvig booth is inspiring to me, the amount of traffic going through those two booths, that's exactly-- >> That's probably what that applause is for right now, in fact it is, I see it. >> That is, they invited me over at 4 o'clock, I said I couldn't make it. It's been truly inspiring, and I think people are excited. And for me it's, obviously you want your customers excited, you want your partners to be excited, but for me too, it's just as important to have our employees excited, and that's a major takeaway that I'm bringing from this conference. >> I think we would echo that we've heard a lot of excited folks. Well Tom, thank you for joining Stu and me on the program, we look forward to Commvault GO 2020 already. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> Excellent. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from Commvault GO 19. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault GO, 2019. Brought to you Commvault. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault GO '19 from Colorado. Lisa Martin here, with Stu Miniman. Stu and I are pleased to welcome, somebody who knows a lot about Commvault from a couple of different angles, we have Andrew Cochrane, Solutions Architect at Softcat. Andrew, welcome to the program. >> Hi Lisa and Stu, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. >> So you have familiarity, more than familiarity, with Commvault for a long time. You are at Softcat now, you've been there since the beginning part of this year. But you've been working with Commvault on the customer's side for a long time. Let's start there which just giving us your history of what your guys do, what you were doing with Commvault on the customer's side, before we get into the partnership with SoftCat. >> Yes, I started working with Commvault about five years ago. I was working for a large global company, headquarters in the UK, around research and development. We had a lot of different siloed backup technologies. We had big problems with data growth. So I ran a project there, to find a solution that will help us with that in the day that we were doing it, but then also as we grew. As we had big plans to grow, our data we were growing about six or seven average year on year. So we had a major challenge with that data boom. So I started working with Commvault, we selected that as a tool set. And we implemented it and so, were able to reduce our backup down to a much more controlled environment, much more automated, and increase our backup success, and our restore success dramatically from sort of, our SLA was, we didn't have one actually, but it was probably more around 50% up to sort of then 99% success rate. And then, we started that journey and it was definitely a partnership with Commvault then from a customer angle. Because we saw backup as day one, and then it was really how can we progress that, and move from data redaction to data management. So we started looking at what we now refer to as Orchestrate and Activate. So Orchestrate really looking at how can we move workloads, initially it was between sites or it might be for recovery scenarios, and then obviously now the cloud. And then, we started looking at Activate, because we realize we had a challenge of our data's growing more and more. We can protect, which is great. We can move it, but we didn't really know what it was. We knew we had stuff, we know we had a lot of it. But, when you start drilling down beyond the file types, or the sizes of, is it sensitive, is it person identifiable, is there a risk with this data, do we need it, can we delete it, we didn't know. So that's where we started looking at Activate. So that's kind of where my journey start to end as a customer, when we started to get involved with Activate. I sort of left that when we were sort of end of the POC phase, so we knew it could do what we wanted it to do. It's then a matter of scaling that. And then yeah, I joined Softcat beginning of this year to take on a new challenge as a partner. >> All right, so it's great learning you had as the user now you can relate with your customers even more. Just give us a thumbnail sketch of Softcat, and how the Commvault partnership you have, fits into the overall business. >> Yeah, so Softcat, our UK partner, we were around infrastructure services. We're one of the leading UK partners. We cover a broad ranges across hybrid cloud, network, security, digital working space, so we cover a wide gander of different technologies. And Commvault are one of our key vendors that we work with and really one that we work a lot with around the data management piece, and discuss with customers the challenge I had as a customer. And we share that with them and discuss Commvault and how that can help them in their challenges. >> The role that you now have with Softcat what part of your experience with Commvault on the customer side attracted you to shift over to Softcat and partner, and be a partner with Commvault? >> Yeah, yes, I mean my whole career up to this point about 20 years has always been from a customer side, in different organizations, different sectors. And I kind of, I got to the point where I've done a lot different roles, I'd been different infrastructure roles, different end-user compute roles, and I've been on service desks, into the architecture world, and I've kind of had a good round of experience, but I thought I've never experienced the channel of a vendor. So I wanted a new challenge, and Softcat has this Solution Architect role, which is ideal, and I thought actually sitting in the channel, I suppose, still being close to the customer, and being able to understand their challenges and what they're trying to do, because that's been my whole career to that point. But then also, sign to form, relationships with the vendors that were different. So having that closer relationship, that being able to, I suppose amplify almost my voice, 'cause I can having one voice as single customer, but now I see even in 10 months, I think, I'm into triple digits of customers, so I can start to amplify that voice of saying it's not just one, it's all of the customers that I represent and almost starting to be that go-between between the customer and the vendor. And I thought that was really interesting challenges, it's something that I'd be good at hopefully. And it really attracts me to start to sort of sit in that space and start to meet more customers, see their environments, their challenges to see was my experience unique or is everybody having the same sort of challenges and aspirations and start to work together to try and help solution design around those. >> Great so Andrew, I'd love you to bring us inside some of those conversations you're having. >> Yeah. >> We've been having conversations this whole week about the new Commvault, they've got some new products, like Metallic, very much partner driven activity. Which of the product in the Commvault portfolio are resonating most with your customers and what you have heard this week that you want to make sure that you're bringing back to your users? >> Yeah, as far as before this week, the two that really resonated were Complete and Activate. Complete obviously for that almost the stuff that we have to do. We need to protect that data, we need to recover it. So it's always going to been, I think a conversation in any organization. The Activate one is a really interesting discussion point actually, and something which, from my experience before as a customer, I bring into a lot of the conversations I have with my customers. And it's really trying to understand, yes, you might protect it, but do you understand the, like I said the challenge I had as a customer, and quite a lot organizations don't, they don't have the understanding or that ability to automate things, or they might be early on that journey, so it's really, I try and take a slightly difference attack of trying to understand the business. Work with not only, our infrastructure contacts, but also trying to say actually, can we speak to Legal, to Compliance, to Governance, to HR, because data securing are considering things like GDPR and other regulatory bodies. It's not an IT problem, this is the whole organization. Actually we find that Activate is a good way to start to have that discussion with customers. I suppose that was up to this point, and then obviously, now, last couple of days, I think, the one that I'm looking forward to will be Metallic. It's not yet, outside of the US, but I'm waiting for that time because we definitely see a space with SMBs where they want the power of something like Commvault but they also want the simplicity to deploy it and to operate it. And I think Metallic has a really great play there. I've seen it over the last couple of days a few times and I think it's looking real powerful. >> Andrew, I'm curious, you've talked about the products that are resonating with your customers. How many of them are really on the defensive when it comes to data? You know, I'm worry about protecting, I'm worry about government, versus those that are saying okay, I want to be data driven, I'm going through digital transformation, and therefore, understanding and leveraging my data is a key part of that? >> Yeah, I think it's a mix. I've seen so far and it really sort of comes down to the sector they're in. I've find out the sectors that are more governed tend to be more around that security and that protection side. Also like, sort of government, healthcare, any things sort of federal anything like that they seemed to be much more protection oriented. Anything more in the private sector is definitely that transformation, and that's where we have a lot of discussions whether it be digital transmission, a hybrid cloud, it's definitely more data driven. It's interesting seeing those two different perspectives. But I think, at some point, they all start to merge so I think it's just where those sectors are at the moment. >> Where would you say, customers, you said you were working with triple digits. >> Yeah. >> So 30 plus or no, hundred of customers. >> Yeah, hundreds yeah. >> Actually wait. >> It's been a busy time 10 months. (laughs) >> Lisa: That's a lot, that's a lot businesses. Where would you guesstimate they are with respect to readiness for GDPR? I heard some stats recently 70% of organizations are still, aren't ready ready or really fully able to address that. Your take from the UK's stand point. >> Yeah, I think, I'm not sure of the stats from what I've seen, you're right, it's probably high percentage on complying or ready for it. I think the main thing is to address that, and I suppose be aware that you're not ready, and to start on that journey. Because a lot of the regulatory things is about being on that journey, and starting it, and knowing that you got a roadmap to get to, to be, there is no real Nirvana of being compliant it's a constant rolling. And it's a matter of start that journey, identifying the processes, building a virtual team, of like I said, all those different people within the organization, finding out what data you have, but almost that comes after you've almost identified the problem. And the technology will come afterwards to try and help you to go through that. And yeah, I found a lot of the organizations that I've met so far, they're not really ready for that. I think there's still a little bit of a way to go. With all the difference, cause you got GDPR, you've got CCPA, that's going to come-- >> Yeah, yes, yup. >> any day now. >> Which, yeah I don't think a lot of organizations are ready for it. But it's a matter of starting that journey. >> Is that part of the advisory services that Softcat delivers, is to help them understand, there's no recipe for how to get ready, but obviously, you mentioned CCPA, that's probably the tip of the iceberg of more privacy. Laws that are >> Yeah. >> going to be enacted. So looking at the fines that are there, how do you advise customers, I'm sure depends right on how ready or not they are, but what's Softcat's sort of prescription for helping customers, like hey you've got to get, here's the place to start, because GDPR has been around for a while, other things are coming and if you're not compliant and a complying event happens, there's a tremendous risks to the business. >> There is yeah. I mean there's a financial risk, but it's also that impact actually of if you get audited and not compliant, that can have a really detrimental effect especially on a brand. So I mean yeah really we go in and try and first of all identify where an organization is, and that's across the board, we try and identify the problem, where are you, what do we need to do, what are, are there any sort of business challenges that it might have, any objectives, anything that we're trying to do as well as just getting compliant. And then, really it's trying to help formulate a plan. The first place that we start is building a team, of different people, of identifying, even if we do not where it is, by identifying the types of data you'll have, where it might be stored, what we think are the risky points. And starting to work from there really we're trying to formulate a plan of where you need to start actioning things, because some organizations, even if they can't put their finger on it they'll have an idea where it might be. So it's starting to help formulate that plan, formulate the teams that can bring different perspectives, because IT can bring in the technology side, but they might not be, as okay with the legal aspects. So therefore, you need legal, you might need HR, because they'll understand the employee side, you might have customers, so you might need customer relations, to understand who are the customers, what data do keep with them, so you need all these different aspects trying to get them round the table to start to understand almost, what the problem is, within each organization. There's somethings which are common, but organization has this like unique part, they might be more sort of experience in one area, less in others so it's about balancing out that risk of where they need to then focus on. >> So Andrew, I heard at the partner keynote on Monday, they talked about some new initiatives, some new incentives, especially going after new logos, you've only been on the partner side a relatively short time, but curious you're reaction, in your organization, thinking about some of the changes that are happening in the go-to-market from the Commvault standpoint. >> Yeah, yeah, the partner exchange day was a great day. I think a lot of good announcements for the partner world. I mean really there's ways to engage with Commvault better, I think the marketing that's been talked about, is a really a big thing. I think making Commvault stand out from everything else on the market. Showing those brands that we can go talk to other customers about. Sanjay's mentioned it, I think, a couple of times as well is about debunking some myths, about Commvault being complex. That's one that I have to address many times when I go into organizations. So it's great from a partner aspect to see that Commvault gained those things head on really. Because that will help Commvault, but also the partners and also it's customers, because more costumers can enjoy their great technology. So yeah, I think they're doing a lot of great work for the partner on the channel. >> I'm sure your perspective as a long time Commvault customer and now partner are going to be invaluable to the relationship. So we thank you Andrew for coming by theCUBE, and talking with Stu and me about Commvault and Softcat. Lots of exiting things are on the horizon I'm sure. >> Yeah, thank you for having me, it's been great to be at GO, it's been a great event. >> Lisa: It's a great event, isn't it? >> Yeah. >> Excellent, thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Commvault GO '19.

>> Narrator: Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019. Brought to you by Commvault. (upbeat electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are covering Commvault Go '19 from Colorado and Stu and I are pleased to welcome a couple of guys back to theCUBE. We've got David Wigglesworth, a VP, now VP of Global Sales and Emerging Technologies at Commvault for what, a couple weeks now David? >> About a month and five days. >> About a month, and look who's back, it's Don Foster, VP of Storage Solutions, >> Great to be back. from the Keynote stage, welcome back Don. >> Thank you very much. >> Don, and we appreciate you bringing your own personal makeup artist, Sanjay Merchandandi, >> Yeah. >> A man of many skills. >> Indeed. (laughing) >> He really is. So if this whole, like, CEO thing doesn't work, he's clearly got a career in, you know, touch-up makeup. >> In makeup. >> Yeah, all right, so Wigs we'll start with you, you've got a cool nickname, so I got to use it. You've been here for about a month or so. This is a new Commvault. We've heard a lot in the last two days. A lot of news, a lot of leadership changes, obviously, go-to-market changes, new partner offerings, lots of stuff. Tell us first, before we dig in, what attracted you to Commvault? >> That's a pretty easy question to answer, it's the leadership. So, obviously I'm very familiar with Commvault. I've competed with them in my past career. Always been a very formidable competitor. When you walked into an account in my previous life and they said they had Commvault, you usually kind-of wiped your brow, and thought 'Oh okay, I've got to find something else here to talk about' but in all seriousness, for me it was, you know, when I first noticed in the News that Sanjay had come onboard. That peaked my interest, because obviously I knew Sanjay in my previous life at EMC and at VMware. And then when I watched Ricardo join the company, I was like, okay, this is something I really need to dig into. And so when I had the opportunity to meet with them and understand the direction of where they want to take the company, which was also already just a phenomenal IT organization, just a pillar in the IT community, with what the founders were able to do in relatively short amount of time. I was really excited to be able to come over and be a part of it. >> Wigs, you've got a emerging tech under your purview, tell us a little bit about what that's going to mean in your role. >> Right now it means I'm head big, right? So, by now, everyone's heard of the acquisition that was made. That was the other thing also that really interested me, was that technology because I really think that's where the market is going and I just felt like it was a great addition to the Commvault family of products. But it's a different technology. It's calling on a different set of folks with inside of an account and it's primarily an enterprise play. It can be a go-down-market a little bit, and enterprise's is kind of where I spent the last several years of my career, the last 20 or so (laughs) and so what we've decided to do is, because it's so different, we've decided for the time being, that we were going to create a special aid organization globally to go sell that solution so that our existing core sellers can focus on our existing set of products, right? That we can be a specialist organization that can help them with their customers, selling all of the additional emerging tech, right? And so, here at the show, we've obviously spent time talking about Hedvig. Metallic is another new technology for us. Now Metallic is going to handled differently, but as we continue to grow our emerging technologies from the traditional core Commvault family of products, that's what I'm going to be focused on. So it'll begin with Hedvig. >> So for the role that you're in now, you said about a month or so, are you bringing in a brand-new sales overlay team? Are you guys hiring like crazy or are some of the Commvault OG sales-guys-or-girls shifting up, we'll say? >> For the most part, we're bringing in new talent. We're looking for people that have a broad spectrum of the experience, right. Obviously someone with strong storage background, but also people that know virtualization code, people that understand containers. Those skillsets are really important to us. And so we're busy building out both an America sales team and also building out a Nemea sales team. And then my partner, I call him my partner-in-crime, Ediz. Ediz is building out our SE organization for the same two theaters. We'll start in those two theaters and then once we get the product fully integrated, which is part of what this guy is doing, once we get the product fully integrated, then I think you'll see us start to move into some other theaters. But right now we're going to focus on those. So yes, we're hiring. Right now my LinkedIn says, "David Wigglesworth, we're hiring." >> I think I saw that actually (laughing). >> So Don, we got to dig into some of the technology with you and Avinash yesterday. >> Absolutely. >> So we're now getting most of the way through the conference, bring us inside some of the conversations you're having. I know it was one of the biggest question, we had coming in was: 'All right The Hedvig that we knew, what's going to change, how does that fit?' Blurring the lines between primary and secondary and all those discussions we had with Sanjay. So take us to how people, are they kind of getting it at this point? And we know it's a journey for the integration and where it will ultimately end. >> Here's the real interesting thing, is probably in the first, I don't know, maybe 24 hours of having conversations with people from partner exchange all the way through to basically day one of actual Commvault Go, I probably had about four, maybe five if you count one of the service providers from Customers' Partners, come up and say, "Okay look, we looked at this tech about 18, 12 months ago and it was top of our list for what we wanted to do for building out this initiative, but there was a little bit too much risk." Going okay, do we really want to invest that much on a company that is maybe not the largest, most, I wouldn't want to say, reputable, but substantial in the marketplace. Will they be there in the future? And they're like, "Now that we know you've legitimized that business "and you want to keep that technology going forward, "this is fantastic. "We totally want to go and take a re-look back at this "and see how we can apply "that back into our infrastructure." So that's a great feedback to hear, and only serves as validation that when we look at the tech and say "This is good stuff," that we know it's good stuff and then of course the next piece is always, "All right, so now when can I start using this for Commvault and?" >> Right. >> That's when we start getting into the conversations of all right, we've got some integration work to do, the partners are asking when they can start to get access to sell it and again, we've got some work to do just to industrialize what we're doing and make the experience similar and then we'll start to roll it out in a considered fashion. >> I'm curious about the education piece. One of the customers that was onstage this morning, Sonic Healthcare, one of the things he said, on main stage and when he stopped by theCUBE a couple of hours ago, was, he said: "I wouldn't be in my job," and he runs disaster recovery and business continuity for Sonic Healthcare, "I wouldn't be in my job without Commvault's support." And I really appreciated and respected how he talked about some of the failures that they had. I always think failure is a good F-word if you leverage it in that way, (agreement) failure can mean success, if you learn from it. But the support organization and the training he talked about have been instrumental. Talk to us, guys, about how you're going to be partnering together to not just enable the big partners for those large enterprise accounts but maybe even the new sales-guys-and-girls that are coming, David, to your team to help everybody really understand how best to delivery a really stellar customer experience with something as exciting now as Hedvig is. >> You want to start, since you've been working on the integration. >> Yes, absolutely. First and foremost, I've been working with Avinash and his brother, Srinivas, and a lot of their engineering team. You really start to lock in things that are repeatable and scalable in nature, right? So that if we are going to open this up to more people, we do need to have repeatable nature of the building blocks for different use cases. So there's some core work we're doing on outlining, positioning, criteria, success, what the outcome needs to be, how that ties back in to hardware. Making sure as well that we understand how the messaging really does resonate and make sure that we're following and being focused on what our core targets are. Because a solution like what Hedvig offers, you can quickly start talking about a lot of different things that could be all things to many people, and we know that that's probably the worst decision to make, because you go super wide and don't go very deep at all and you end up losing the value prop. So identifying what the real core use cases are, getting deep in how it works, one with what the structure of it looks like, making it repeatable, that's the first and foremost thing, I think, for how we can help both Ediz and Wigs' sales team, and on the support side, doing very similar things but also doing some of the programmatic work of the integration and the experience. I talk about experience, like the sending of logs, the things that Matthew Magby from Sonic Healthcare was talking about how we really helped him. We want that same level of experience tied into where the software storage platform works as well. So there's some work to be done there. But as we get it done, the enablement on the support side, as you know, we deal with storage everyday anyway, so it's not like it's a big leap, but we do have to bring them into the mix of how the actual technology works, where it breaks, why it breaks, and those are all the things that we're really focused on in the next 90 days. >> Yeah, I think the real key for me as we talk to customers and also employees is I want them all to have the same experience with the new Hedvig solution that they experience with Commvault, right? And that goes from training our employees, really getting our SEs up to speed, so they can have a meaningful conversation to be able to get a customer to say, "Yeah, I think I'd like to speak with the Special Aid team. "Please have them give me a call." And also on the enablement for the clients, and having the customer understand that you can dial to 1-800 number for support, you can talk to somebody that can lead you down a path and give you the same quality of support you've been used to whether you're calling about a Hedvig solution or whether you're calling about a Commvault solution. >> Yeah, we talked about it a little yesterday, but the scale of the offering is a little bit different. >> It is. >> And therefore, that has some challenges on the support. And something that I'm sure Commvault is going to work on making that, it's not identical for every customer but a little bit more repeatable to be able to scale out that offering. >> I would agree, I would agree. The hardest thing to do is when you have a product that has so much functionality as Hedvig is to not lose focus and try to talk way too broad. What you've really got to do is, you've got to drill down with the client try to understand where their pinpoints are and because, quite frankly, the Hedvig product can do a lot of things. >> Don: Yeah, it can. >> Who's the ideal target customers, we talked about the theaters in which you're going to be launching first. Enterprise, we talked about that. Commvault has a significant presence in the Fortune 500, I think I read about three quarters of Commvault's revenue today comes from the Fortune 500, and Stu was saying yesterday about 80% of the revenue comes from the channel. So we look at Hedvig and the enterprise for a second, customers that are new to Commvault, those existing enterprise customers, GTM both? >> Yeah, I would say, the primary focus is going to be calling on the existent customer set. It's much easier to have a conversation with someone who knows who you are, even though you may be selling a new solution, at least they know who you are and they have a positive experience with us. So that, number one, we're going to focus on our probably our top 300 global accounts to start, as well as our top enterprise accounts. So there's probably, I would say, in the two theaters I mentioned earlier, there's probably about 35 hundred accounts that we're really going to focus on, and really try to make sure that we get in front of as many as we can and tell the story. I think that's where we have to start. Now, will there be greenfield opportunities? Yeah, I think quite frankly, that the Hedvig offering is different enough that it will enable us to go call on some of accounts that aren't doing business with Commvault today, maybe doing business with some of our competitors. So hopefully we can use that to actually win more traditional Commvault business. That's the plan. >> And the reason the enterprise really makes sense, the global accounts, is most larger companies have figured out how try solve the CapEx problem, right? >> David: Yeah. >> They've figured out just the economies of scale and how they grow and move, they can kind of handle that. What really still becomes a challenging piece is the operational efficiency. So, can I get the right solution at the right cost, but do it in a way that I'm actually making things more simplified? I'm not actually exploding more complexity into my environment. That's really where the Commvault data management platform and the Hedvig solution together really make a really solid story. >> All right, so Wigs, Don's team's really got their work cut out for them with all the integration work and know they've got a cadence and a roadmap. For you, obviously, new logos, there's got to be revenue goals. What are some of the key KPIs to measure how this becomes a successful acquisition? >> Well if my CEO is standing close by, he may be in earshot of this, right now it's trying to drive as much revenue as we can. But we also have to realize that we also have to build a pipeline, right? So right now my main focus here is I got to get a team in place that can go articulate the value of this solution to a client, right, number one, both technically and then working with Ediz to get the SE team in place, so that's number one. Number two, while we're doing that, we need to build a pipeline, right? When you make an investment, as you guys know, you're expected to start getting a return on that pretty quickly. And, it's nice, we inherited some nice pipeline with the acquisition. But with opportunity comes responsibility and so we've got to build that pipeline up and really get out in front of customers and find some opportunities that we can not only try to finish for this second half so we can hit all of our financial metrics, but really build pipeline for FY21, for us which starts in April. >> So the voice of the customer is, really can be really powerful. We've heard from a number of Commvault customers on our program yesterday, today on main stage. Is there a plan, Wigs, from your perspective, to get customers into some sort of data so that you have proof in the pudding to show those large enterprises and those theaters to help build that pipeline. Look at someone who's been an existing Commvault customer for five, 10 years or so, here's the, I don't want to say migration path, but maybe upgrade path to expand footprint in there. Here's how we did it, here's why this was ideal for this customer. Plans to get those early adopters to help you dial up the pipeline? >> So have you been reading my 'Go to market strategy' (laughing) 'cause you kind of you basically just read it. So yes, listen we are inheriting some nice accounts with Hedvig. They have some nice logos out there which is really good. And it's a good foundation for us to build upon. But we're very fortunate in that our core sellers have some really good relationships with some pretty large customers really in all different industries. And so, what we're doing right now is we're trying to identify probably about 10 accounts that make sense. That are really strong partners. They don't have to necessarily be really big customers, but just really strong partners that want to work together with us. And exactly what you just said, let's get in front of them, let's give them an opportunity to play with the technology and have them help us figure out, we think we have a pretty good idea what the go-to-marketing messaging should be for our existing customer base but certainly don't assume that we know everything. So have them help us build that strategy. So that is absolutely the plan. >> We've been hearing a lot about the last couple of days, of just, the openness of Commvault. Whether it's, I really thought it was cool with Metallic that the telemetry that partners can get to help customers, maybe even before a customer knows of an issue or an opportunity, but this telemetry, this 'let's learn from our customers,' couldn't agree as a marketer with you more about, we might think we have a great tagline, great messaging, but it's the users who need to validate that. What I'm hearing a lot over the last day and a half is how receptive Commvault is. We're listening to our customers, whether it's existing and comeback customers that Sanjay's team are dealing with, or even through partners. That message is loud and clear, and that's pretty important. >> Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I'll be honest with you, what's it's also been able to give us an opportunity to do is where we've had some relationships, quite frankly, that maybe we need to work a little harder on. Hedvig has given us that opportunity to kind of start those conversations as well. I think there's a lot of value, both on the existing opportunities as well as growing the business overall. >> Guys, nothing short of a lot of work ahead. But, pretty exciting stuff. We thank you both. Wigs, welcome again to Commvault. >> Thank you. >> Can't wait for next year. Going to bring some cool customers on the program. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Looking forward. The buzz is so amazing this year. So many customers have said, "I know you weren't here last year, but wow," and that's what they've said. I can't wait to see what this is going to be like next year. Thank you for having us on here. >> You've got to come back. >> Absolutely we will. >> Yeah? >> Yeah. >> All right, guys, thank you for joining Stu and I. >> Thank you both very much. >> Thank you. >> For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE from Commvault Go '19. (upbeat electronic music)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, welcome back to the Q but Lisa Martin with men and men and we are coming to you alive from Conn logo 19 please to welcome to the cube, a gent from Microsoft Azure. We've got Ben Nichol, principal program manager. Ben, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on. So Microsoft combo, what's going on with the partnership? >>They wouldn't have have great storage pond is in data management space. We've been working with Convolt for 20 years now in Microsoft and and they've been working with us on Azure for about as long as I can remember not being on that the Azure business RET seven years now. So just a long time in cloud terms like doggies and it sort of, they'd been doing a huge amount of their around getting customer data into the cloud, reducing costs, getting more resiliency and then also letting them do more with the data. So they were a pretty good partner to have and they make it much easy for their customers to to go and leverage cloud. So Ben, you know, in my career I've had lots of interactions with the Microsoft storage team. Things have changed a little bit when you're now talking about Azure compared to, you know, more. >>It was the interaction with the operating system or the business suite had. So maybe bring us up to date as those people that might not have followed. You know, we're kind of the storage positioning inside of Microsoft is now that when we talk about Azure and your title. Yeah, we, we sort of look and just just briefly, we worked very heavily with our on premises brethren. They actually inside the O S team is inside of the Azure engineering old male, which is kind of funny, but we do a lot of things there. If he started looking at, firstly on that hybrid side, we have things like Azure files. It's a highly resilient as a service SMB NFS file share up to a hundred terabytes but that interacts directly with windows server to give you Azure file sync. So there is sort of synergies there as well. When I'm doing personally my team, we work on scale storage. >>The big thing we have in there is Al is out blood storage technology, which really is the underpinning technology, full Priya tool storage and Azure which is including our SAS offerings which are hosted on Azure too. So disc is on blood storage, our files on blood storage, you look at Xbox live, all these kinds of stuff is a customer to us. So we build that out and we, we are doing work there and that's really, really interesting and how we do it and that's not looking at going we're going to buy some compute, we're going to buy some storage, we're going to build it out, we're going to run windows or hyper V or maybe VMware with windows running on the VMware, whatever else. This is more a story about wigging to provide you storage as a service. You didn't get a minimum of like 11 nines at your ability and and be able to have that scale to petabytes of capacity in one logical namespace and give you multiple gigabytes, double digit gigabytes of throughput to that storage. >>And now we're even moving about to model multiple protocols. So rest API century today we've got Azure stack storage, you pay API, she can go and use, but we give me that consistency of the actual back end storage and the objects and the data available via more than just one protocol. You can go and access that via HDFS API. As we talk about data lakes all the time. For us, our blood storage is a data Lake. We turn on hierarchal namespace and you can go and access that via our other protocols like as I mentioned HDFS as well. So that is a big story about what we want to do. We want to make that data available at crazy scale, have no limits in the end to the capacity or throughput or performance and over any protocol. That's kind of our line in the Hill about what we want to get to. >>And we've been talking to vault team about some of the solutions that they are putting in the cloud. The new offering metallic that came out. They said if my customer has Azure storage or storage from that other cloud provider, you could just go ahead and use that. Maybe how familiar and how much, I know you've been having a run metallic. We were working, we were pretty tightly with the product team over Convolt around this and my team as well around how do we design and how do we make it work the best and we're going to continue working to optimize as they get beyond initial launch to go, wow, we've got data sets we can analyze, we know how to, we wanted out of tune it. Now really we love the solution particularly more because the default, if you don't select the storage type where you want to go, you will run on Azure. >>So really sort of be kudos to the relationship there. They chose us as a first place we'll go to, but they've also done the choice for customers. Say some customers may want to take it to another cloud. That's fine. It's reasonable. I mean, we totally understand it's going to be a multi-cloud world and that's a reality for any large company. Our goal is to make sure we're growing faster than the competitors, not to knock out the competitors all together because that just won't happen. So they've got that ability to go and yet, Hey, we'll use Azure as default because they feel that way, offering the best support and the best solution there. But then if they have that customer, same customer wants to turn around and use a competitor, Val's fine as well. And I see people talking about that today where they may want to mitigate risks and say, I'm going to do, I'm doing all of office three, six, five on a taken office, three, six, five backup. It's cool. Use metallic, it'll take it maybe to a different region in Asia and they're backing up and they still going, well I'm still all in on Microsoft. They may want to take it to another cloud or even take it back to on premises. So that does happen too because just in case of that moment we can get that data back in a different location. Something happens. >>So metallic talking about that is this new venture is right. It's a Combolt venture and saw that the other day and thought that's interesting. So we dug into it a little bit yesterday and it's like a startup operating within a 20 year old company, which is very interesting. Not just from an incumbent customer perspective, but an incumbent partner perspective. How have you seen over the last few years and particularly bad in the last nine months with big leadership and GTM changes for combo? How has the partnership with Microsoft evolved as a result of those changes? >>Um, it's always been interesting. I guess when you start looking at adventure and everything, since things change a little bit, priorities may change just to be fair, but we've had that tight relationship for a long time. At a relationship level and an exec leadership level, nothing's really changed. But in the way they're building this platform, we sit down out of my team, out of the Azure engineering group and we'll sit down and do things like ideations, like here's where we see gaps in the markets, here's what we believe could happen. And look back in July, we had inspire, which is our partner conference in Las Vegas. When we sat down with their OT, our OT in a room, we'll talking about these kinds of things and this is I think about two months after they may have started the initial development metallic from what I understand, but we will talking about exactly what they're doing with metallic offered as a service in Azure is, Hey, how bout we do this? So we think it's really cool. It opens up a new market to Convolt I think too. I mean they're so strong in the enterprise, but they don't do much in smaller businesses because with a full feature product, it also has inherent complexibility complexity around it. So by doing metallic, is it click, click, next done thing. They're really opening, I think, new markets to them and also to us as a partner. >>I was going to ask, you know, kind of click on that because they developed this very quickly. This is something that I think what student were here yesterday, metallic was kind of conceived design built in about six months. So in terms of like acceleration, that's kind of a new area for Combalt. >>Yeah, and I think, I think they're really embracing the fact about um, let's release our code in production for products, which are sort of getting, getting to the, Hey that product is at the viable stage now, not minimum viable, viable, let's release in production, let's find out how customers are using Atlin, let's keep optimizing and doing that constant iteration, taking that dev ops approach to let's get it out there, let's get it launched. And then let's do these small batches of changes based on customer need, based on tele telemetry. We can actually get in. We can't get the telemetry without having customers. So that's how it's going to keep working. So I think this initial product we see today, it's just going to keep evolving and improving as they get more data, as they get more information, more feedback. Which is exactly what we want to see. >>Well, what will come to the cloud air or something you've been living in for a number of years. Ben, I'd love to hear you've been meeting with customers. They've been asking you questions, gives us some of the, you know, some of the things that, what's top of mind for some of the customers? What kinds of things did they come into Microsoft, Dawn, and how's that all fit together? >>There's many different conferences of interrelate, many different conversations and they'll, we will go from talking about, you know, Python machine learning or AI PowerPoint. >>Yeah. >>It's a things like, you know, when are we going to do incremental snapshots from a manage disks? Get into the weeds on very infrastructure century staff. We're seeing range of conversations there. The big thing I think I see, keep seeing people call out and make assumptions of is that they're not going to be relevant because cloud, I don't know cloud yet. I don't know this whole coup cube thing. Containers. I don't, I don't really understand that as well as I think I need to. And an AI, Oh my gosh, what do I even do there? Because everyone's throwing the words and terms around. But to be honest, I think what's still really evident is cloud is still is tiny fraction of enterprise workloads. Let's be honest, it's growing at a huge rate because it is that small fraction. So again, there's plenty of time for people to learn, but they shouldn't go and try and slip. >>It's not like you're going to learn everything in a technology stack, from networking to development to database management to, to running a data set of power and cooling. You learn the things that are applicable to what you're trying to do. And the same thing goes to cloud. Any of these technologies, go and look at what you need to build for your business. Take it to that step and then go and find out the details and levels you want to know. And as someone who's been on Azure for like a cinema seven years, which is crazy long. That was a, that was literally like being in a startup instead of Microsoft when I joined and I wasn't sure if I wanted to join a licensing company. It's been very evident to me. I will not say I'm an Azure expert and I've been seven years in the platform. >>There are too many things throughout my for me to be an expert in everything on and I think people sort of just have to realize that anyone saying that it's bravado, nothing else. The goal is Microsoft as a platform provider. Hopefully you've got the software and the solution to make a lot of this easier for the customer, so hopefully they shouldn't need to become a Kubernetes expert because it's baked into your platform. They shouldn't have to worry about some of these offerings because it's SAS. Most customers are there some things you need to learn between going from, you know, exchange to go into oath bricks, these five. Absolutely. There are some nuances and things like that, but once you get over that initial hurdle, it should be a little easier. I think it's right and I think going back to that, sort of going back to bare principles going, what is the highest level of distraction that's viable for your business or that application or this workload has to always be done with everything. >>If it's like, well, class, not even viable, run it on premises. Don't, don't need to apologize for not running in cloud. If I as is what's happening for you because of security, because of application architecture, run it that way. Don't feel the need and the pressure to have to push it that way. I think too many people get caught up in the shiny stuff up here, which is what you know 1% of people are doing versus the other 99% which is still happening in a lot of the areas we work and have challenges in today. >>That's a great point that you bring up because there is all the buzz words, right? AI, machine learning cloud. You've got to be cloud ready. You've gotta be data-driven to customer, to your point going, I just need to make sure that what we have set up for our business is going to allow our business one to remain relevant, but to also be able to harness the power of the data that they have to extract new opportunities, new insights, and not get caught up with, shoot, should we be using automation? Should we be using AI? Everybody's talking about it. I liked that you brought up and I find it very respectfully, he said, Hey, I'm not an Azure expert. You'd been there seven, seven dog years like you said. And I think that's what customers probably gained confidence in is hearing the folks like you that they look to for that guidance and that leadership saying, no, I don't know everything. To know that giving them the confidence that they're true, they're trusting you with that data and also helping trusting you to help them make the right decisions for their business. >>Yeah. And that that's, we've got to do that. I mean, I, as a tech guy, it's like I've, I've loved seeing the changes. When I joined Microsoft, I, I wasn't lying. I was almost there go inf I really want to join this company. I was going to go join a startup instead. And I got asked to one stage in an interview going, why do you want to join Microsoft? We see you've never applied to that. I never wanted to, a friend told me to come in and it's just been amazing to see those changes and I'm pretty proud on that. Um, so when we talk about, you know, those, the things we're doing, I mean I think there is no shame going, I'm just going to lift and shift machines because cloud is about flexibility. If you're doing it just on cost, probably doing it for the wrong reason, it's about that flexibility to go and do something. >>Then change within months of slowly make steps to make things better and better as you find a need as you find the ability, whatever it may be. And some of the big things that we focus on right now with customers is we've got a product called Azure advisor. It'll go until people want one. You know, you don't build things in a resilient manner. Hey, do you know this is not ha because of this and you can do this. It's like great. Also will tell you about security vulnerabilities that maybe she had a gateway here for security. Maybe you should do this or this is not patched. But the big thing is that it also goes and tells you, Hey, you're overspending. You don't need this much. It provisions, you provision like a Ferrari, you need a, you just need a Prius, go and run a Prius because it's going to do what you need and need to pay a lot less. >>And that's part of that trust. Getting that understanding. And it's counterintuitive that we're now like it's coming out of my team a lot too, which is great. But seeing these guys were dropping contracts and licenses and basically, you know, once every three years I may call the customer, Hey, how bout a renewal now go from that to now being focused on the customer's actual success and focused on their growth in Azure as a platform of our vast services growth like utilization not in sales has been a huge change. It scared some people away but it's brought a lot more people in and and that sort of counterintuitive spin less money thing actually leads in the longterm to people using more. >>Absolutely. That's definitely not the shrink wrap software company of Microsoft that I remember from the 90s yeah, very might be similar to you know, just as volt to 2019 is not the same combo, but many of us know from with 15 >>years and a good mutual friend of ours, sort of Simon and myself before I took this job, he and I sat down, we're having a beer and discussing the merits, all the not evacuate and things like that. Same with. They are changing such, such a great deal with, you know, what they're putting in the cloud, what they're doing with the data, where they're trying to achieve with things like Hedvig for data management across on premises and cloud with microservices applications and stuff going, Hey, this won't work like this anymore. When you now are doing an on premises and we containers, it's pretty good to see. I'm interested to see how they take that even further to their current audience, which is product predominantly, you know, the it pro, the data center admin, storage manager. >>It's funny when you talked about, um, just the choice that customers have and those saying I, we shouldn't be following the trends because they're the trends. We actually interviewed a couple of hours ago, one of Combolt's customers that is all on prime healthcare company and said, he's like, I want to make a secret that says no cloud and proud and it just, what that was, we don't normally hear from them. We always talk about cloud, but for a company to sit down and look at what's best for our business, whether it's, you know, FedRAMP certification challenges or HIPAA or GDPR or other compelling requirements to keep it on prem, it was just refreshing to hear this customer say, >>yeah, I mean it's, it's appropriate for the do what's right for you. I, yeah, it's no shame in any of them. It's, I mean, you don't, you definitely don't get fans by, by shaming people and not doing something right. And I mean, I, I'm personally very happy with the feet, you know, see sort of hype around things like blockchain died down a little bit. So it's a slow database unless you're using for the specific case of that shared ledger, you know, things like that where people don't have to know blockchain. Now I have to know IOT. It's like, yeah. And that hype gets people there, but it also causes a lot of anxiety and it's good to see someone actually not be ashamed of and like, and they grade the ones when they do take a step and use cloud citizen may be in the business already. They're probably going to do it appropriately because have a reason, not just because we think this would be cool. >>Well not and how much inherent and complexity does that bring in if somebody is really feeling pressured to follow those trends and maybe that's when you end up with this hodgepodge of technologies that don't work well together, you're spending way more in as as business it folks are consumers, you know, consumers in their personal lives, they expect things to be accessible, visible, but also cost efficient because they have so much choice. >>Yeah, the choice choice is hard. It's just a, just the conversation is having recently, for example, just we'll take the storage cause of where we are, right? It's like I'm running something on Azure. I'm a, I'm using Souza. I want an office Mount point, which is available to me in Fs. Great. Perfect. what do I use? It's like, well you use any one of these seven options, like what's the right choice? And that's the thing about being a platform company. We give you a lot of choices but it's still up to you or up to harness. It can really help the customers as well to make the most appropriate choice. And I pushed back really hard on terms like best practices and things. I hate it because again, it's making the assumption this is the best thing to do. It's not. It's always about, you know, what are the patterns that have worked for other people, what are the anti-patterns and the appropriate path for me to take. >>And that's actually how we're building our docs now too. So we keep, we keep focusing at our Azure technology and we're bringing out some of the biggest things we've done is how we manage our documentation. It's all open sourced. It's all in markdown on get hub. So you can go and read a document from someone like myself is doing product management going, this is how to use this product and you're actually this bits wrong. This bit needs to be like this, and you can go in yourself, even now, make a change and we can go, Oh yeah, and take that committed in and do all this kind of stuff in that way. So we're constantly taking those documents in that way, in getting real time feedback from customers who are using it, not just ourself and an echo chamber. >>So you get this great insight and visibility that you never had before. Well, Ben, thank you, Georgie stew and me on the Q this afternoon. Excited to hear what's coming up next for Azure. May appreciate your time. Thank you for streaming event. I, Lisa Martin, you're watching the cue from convo. Go 19.

>> Narrator: Live, from Denver, Colorado. It's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO 2019. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, we are at Commvault GO '19 in Colorado. Stu and I are pleased to welcome a couple of guests joining us this next segment we have Kevin Haro, Infrastructure from Quad, and Matt Tyrer, Senior Manager, Solutions Marketing from Commvault. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Oh, it's great to finally be here! >> Yeah, exciting stuff in the last couple days. So Kevin, let's start with you. Give our audience an understanding of Quad, what kind of business you're in, what services and products you deliver. >> Quad is first and foremost a printer so we do large-scale, long-run printing. We've got locations across the country and Latin America and Europe. So from a data perspective we have our own internal apps and stuff, obviously, but for the most part our large chunks of data come straight from our customers, so. >> Lisa: And what kind of customers are we talking about? >> Customers, magazines, books, anything of that nature. Anybody who needs long-run signs, we do it all, packaging. >> Okay, so talk to us about kind of your role and from a data perspective how it's exploding. (Kevin & Matt laugh) >> It seems to be growing every day, that's true. So the data that comes in from our customers we treat it, we improve it, we add to it and then we have to get it back to them, make sure everything's okay, and then it goes to the printers and then it needs to be saved. So you can imagine that piles up pretty quickly. >> Now is it just that the actual images themselves are getting bigger? Like the content that's coming towards? Or is it also that your customer base is growing and expanding too? So it's the individual customers are getting bigger but also you're getting bigger as well from a Quad perspective. >> Yes, both, all three actually. So you can imagine just the amount of images that go into a catalog and how every single one of those came in. Even though it might be an inch or two big on your page it came in full-res, so it adds up quick. >> All right, Kevin why don't you walk us through what led you down the path to Commvault. If you can give us a little bit of the before, and the process that led to choosing Commvault. >> The initial reason we came into Commvault was actually partially backup related, but we were actually in the middle of a site lifecycle so we were looking to upgrade the hardware at 12 different sites and we wanted to switch the hypervisors at those sites and Commvault provided us the means to do that quickly and easily without us having to rebuild all of those systems. So that was our first introduction to it. That went very well for us. We're doing another round coming up here very soon. And so we've done all that, and now actually we're taking a step back and actually going with a Commvault backup solution itself. >> And what was the hypervisor before and now? >> Those were VMware to HyperView. >> Okay, yeah, Matt, maybe walk us through is that a typical use case that you see out there? Migrations are often one of the most challenging things for infrastructure people. We used to say it was the four-letter word when you're told to migrate something. (Matt laughs) But yeah, take us inside. >> Well I mean, you see, it doesn't have to be just a hypervisor to hypervisor migration. You see it just every day with people shifting workloads into the cloud. And in this case here, it's not a same-for-same movement necessarily. So it could be VMware on one site like what you guys were doing, changing into HyperV. Or it could be simply moving from VMware maybe on-premises to native AMIs in AWS. So you're seeing a lot of people kind of decoupling from that hypervisor layer or at least abstracting it, because it's more about the data itself, and less where the data happens to reside. So I think that's going to continue to be something that we see more and more of, as people continue to move into that multiple cloud environment. Did you guys also move in to the cloud too, as part of this? Or this is just in on-prem? >> Kevin: We have not made a huge on-cloud investment at this point in time. But the story that we've been hearing on the cloud the multicloud and the avoiding the lock-in holds true for us, just at the hypervisor level. We don't want to be kept to decisions that were made five, 10 years ago just because it's hard to get off of a specific hypervisor or piece of software. >> Matt: Yeah. >> So it gives us the flexibility to do what we're looking to do. >> So we talked a little bit about the proliferation of data, both from the actual images and the files getting larger and larger and larger, then growth in the Quad customer base. Talk to us about what you were doing to backup data before because you were using somebody else before you decided to make the move over to Commvault. >> We have been using somebody else. We've actually been using four somebody elses. >> Lisa: Can you tell us who those four somebody elses are? >> Our primary one's were EMC, but aside from that, in smaller offices we had other solutions as well. So we've heard the complexity of Commvault is an issue and we were afraid of it as well but that complexity really doesn't stand up to teaching someone how to restore off of four potentially different systems and four different architectures in general. So getting everything under that one pane of glass is an end goal for sure. >> Was it really the compelling event? or was there maybe an issue like we were hearing on stage this morning with one of the Commvault customers saying "Hey, we had a big failure"? Was there a compelling event or was it, we've got four different solutions in here. We need that single pane of glass 'cause the data has so much value but if we can't see it. >> Kevin: It's really the single pane of glass. I mean, in order to maintain that interconnected web of backups we actually had to home grow our own system just to be able to look up where the backup was to begin with. And while that works, it's effective, it's an extra step that has to be taken in the middle of a recovery process. >> Well, Matt, you started your time at Commvault in the field so bring us a little bit, some of the competitive landscape that you see out there. Consolidating onto a single vendor, obviously, is something we see all the time when there's M&A activity or you've got branch offices and the like. >> Yeah, I mean, it's certainly not uncommon to come across customers in Quad's situation where they've got one product over here one product over there. And I think a lot of it stems from IT was in such a reactive mode for so long that it's almost trying to play catch up. It's like, well we have to address protecting the virtual machines. Okay, we'll draw up a solution in for that. We have to protect the data at the remote site. Well, I can't get my enterprise solution there so I'll drop another band-aid solution in out there. And we're finally getting to that maturity where people are able to go back and re-examine some of those infrastructure decisions made five, 10 years ago and starting to rectify it by being able to bring that data together and consolidate. And so that's kind of what I've always liked about from a Commvault perspective, is that comprehensive coverage Pretty much whatever it is, wherever it is you can get that single pane of glass. And there's a lot of stuff that we can do and data environments are certainly not getting less complex (laughs). >> Well, talk to us about the complexity, Kevin, 'cause at all the shows that we go to complexity is always a topic that we hear for every technology and every customer is looking to reduce complexity, increase agility, all the buzz words right, flexibility, simplicity. You said, very candidly, that when you were looking at the hypervisor switch and when it came time to evaluate the backup solutions, you were concerned about Commvault's complexity. We've heard a lot in the last day and a half about simplicity, reduced complexity. How have you found this implementation in terms of the previous complexity concerns and do you have that single pane of glass that you were looking for? >> Kevin: The complexity, the problem didn't really occur to us. I mean, we were walked through by our vendor very nicely. They got us through, they got us our SOP's built. We've been able to roll it out successfully. We started with some of our hardest sites after that migration product. We started with the ones that were behind double nets and are actually at customer locations behind fire walls we don't own. The ones that have been a problem for us for years to secure those backups and those were where we started and that's where we've actually had some pretty decent success. I mean there is obviously a lot of settings and stuff to be worked through and to have a guide sit there and walk us through and make sure we're getting the backup and the retention that we need. At the end of the day, we've got the backups going and they're working well. >> And that's kind of what we were striving to do when we introduced the Commvault command center was for the customers that don't need to go to that level of detail provide a much more streamlined interface with a lot of the heavy automation elements in it. So customers that don't need those deep controls and customizations can work within that command center. But the ones that do, and actually what's entertaining is a lot of our long-term customers prefer working in that deeper complexity. Because it's like "Oh, I like how I can tune it like this "or I can flip it like that." So it's nice that our customers have the option of working where they feel most comfortable. >> And Matt, I'd love to get your perspective you've been with Commvault for 12 years. >> Matt: Almost, yeah. >> We feel like the last day and a half and we'll say Sanjay really kicked this off yesterday by saying #newCommvault. (Matt laughs) And it does feel like that with the changes to the leadership, the changes to the partner organization and partner programs, the focus on mid market with Metallic, with the Hedvig acquisition. Your perspective on being at Commvault for quite a long time, how do you see the company now? >> It's refreshing when you've been with a company for a long time just to see how we're able to shift how we're talking about ourselves, and it's almost like a brand new level of confidence. You see the smash of color everywhere and just the way that we talk about the solutions, the way we talk about the company as well. It's been a lot of change going on, but it's been exciting to kind of see that next evolution of the company in terms of taking that company to the next step and see what the future holds. So I've been really excited to see all of these changes over the past year and continue to see. (laughs) >> So Kevin you've walked us through from the migration that you did initially to the solutions that you're using today. Where are you looking forward for what you might use with Commvault? And any of the new things that were announced this week catch your eye that you might want to be looking into further when you get back to the office? >> Obviously Kubernetes has been floating around for a while so there's solutions here that we've been looking at, but we really want to get our fundamental backup and retention system to the point where it is no longer consuming whole days of FTEs. So where there's a report that comes out, we can check it, we know that it's good. We don't have to babysit that product, and we can get on to some other larger projects, things of that nature. We can get on to worrying about some of the bigger issues making sure that we're ready for a cyber event, things of that nature. >> All right, you did mention Kubernetes. Where are you as a company with that? Data protection, obviously you need to-- >> Matt: I knew you were going to go there (laughs) >> Worry about, even multicloud. I'll be at KubeCon, maybe see you there. (laughs) >> The first ones have just been rolled out recently they're in, they're up, that's about where that is. >> Matt: Just starting, baby steps. >> Baby steps, yes. But we'd like to do the baby steps correctly so technologies that make sense. >> That's great that you're kind of shifting or it looks like anyway to getting a lot more automated in terms of what you're doing within the Commvault. I met with or I was manning a customer panel yesterday with just a bunch of customers sharing what they were doing from moving towards that self-driving backup or at least backup or managing by exception where the less hands-on you can be, the more time that you've got back into your day to focus on other projects, so yeah. >> Exactly. So yeah, I mean, we're at a point right now where we are obviously switching, so we want to look ahead and make sure that we're set and ready to go for the future. >> So Kevin, last question for you, in the last nine months there's been some pretty big changes at Commvault the new leadership, new focus on routes to market, how do you internalize that, in terms of this direction, this Commvault 2.0, this new Commvault as an existing customer? >> Well, we're a new customer to them so to see the energy that's coming at us is refreshing. To see them placed in the upper quadrants obviously helps sell the product to us for management to back our decisions up, so in general the whole range seems to be getting met and we're not having to say this does everything except X, Y, and Z. >> Excellent, well, Kevin, Matt, thank you for joining Stu and me on the program this afternoon at GO we appreciate your time. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for having us. >> Lisa: Our pleasure >> Take care >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Commvault GO '19 (upbeat music)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by. >>Hey, welcome back to the cube Lisa Martin with Steven and Amanda. We are covering combo go 19 in Colorado day two of our coverage and we're excited to welcome a successful comm vault customer to the cube. We have from the main stage this morning, Matthew mag meet data center, director of Sonic healthcare. Matthew, welcome. Thank you for having me. This is so exciting. Oh good. We're excited to have you. So you got to, you are, you're, as your pen says, a combo customer champion. >>I am a customer champion a, I've kind of prided myself on that for the last few years. Uh, I like to get involved in the community and kind of help the other newcomers to come volt as well. As better my understanding and try to give the guys on the other end of the support line and break. >>So before we dig into Sonic and what you guys are doing and how you're working with combo, give our audience an overview of Sonic healthcare, what you guys do, where you're based, all that good background stuff. Okay. >>So I worked for a Sonic healthcare USA, so that's obviously in the United States. Uh, we are an anatomical and clinical pathology laboratory company. Um, we are based, uh, West coast central and East coast of the United States and we work with hospitals, doctor's office to provide, you know, quick and reliable laboratory results. >>So this is patient data. Yes. We think of, we think of data as I'm sure you do as well. It's the lifeblood. It's the new oil. It's all the things, right? That you hear the new bacon. It's the new bacon is that was like your quote? I saw that combo last year. >>Yeah, they had, they had teachers last year with that data. Yeah. Data is the new bacon. >>Well it's, it's critical, you know, regardless of if you're for Kim comparing it to bacon, I do like that. But it's also, there's the proliferation of it is hard to manage. Tell us a little bit about the it environment at Sonic. You guys have been using combo for about four years, but give us an overview of what you were working with before and how, what may be some of the compelling events were. >>So coming on board with Sonic, uh, the combo rollout was relatively new. We didn't, I didn't really come into a preexisting environment. It was like, okay, this is, this is what we're going to use. I need you to learn it and run with it, make sure that it works. Right. And um, you know, coming from other companies that had different software applications, I was always in charge of the disaster recovery. That's always been kind of like a, a beating heart for me. >>You're the Dr. Guy. It is apparently, >>it's really hard to find someone who's excited about backups. So I've put, it's like, yes, please take it. So I'm coming in and being able to mold this application to kind of how I wanted it was a little like touch and go at first because we had people out of our, um, overseas office that were, uh, handling already and is, they kind of set the stage of how they wanted it to go. But, you know, things change. We've got to kind of move things as we go, but I kind of owe a lot to them to kind of really introducing me to combo. >> So Matthew, one of the things that we've really enjoyed talking about at this show is everybody's ready. They're born ready, they know what they're doing, what it's preparing for when things do fail. So you talked a little bit on stage about some of those times when things fail and how today you're able to be here and you're, the other person in the D R group is here and you don't have to worry about walking away from the office and you know, having, you know, I guess not a Pedro anymore, but getting that call. >>Yeah, they need to be there. So my cell phone. But yeah, so bring us through some of those, you know, failure scenarios. We are always trying different things. You know, combo does offer a wide array of different solutions they have for plans and one of them is their active directory plan. And I'm leaning towards this cause this is my most recent failure is, you know, we were just, I've always had issues with active directory testing. The fail over and my first attempt at it was a failure. But I learned so much off the bat that I'm actually comfortable now that there might be a few tweaks that we have to do. By worst case scenario, we'd definitely be able to get it back online without any issue. But if we would've gone into it without testing, without that failure, who knows what could have happened. It could've been just a resume generating event, you know? >>Well, so you, you Stu alluded to it and what you mentioned in the keynote was, Hey, my other only other Dr. Guy is here in the audience. So I actually, I have >>team a data center team and we're all in charge. It's eight, eight people and we're, we're in charge of the disaster recovery. But, uh, the old gentleman who's with me is the only other one who's, uh, uh, done a lot of the combo training. He comes to Kai, he's been to all three combos, goes with me and uh, he's, he's probably the, if I'm not around, he's the next in line to take that. So if there's a major issue it would be one of us that they would contact by. We're both here >> and you're both here. Well that actually speaks volumes. It does. And we're comfortable and you know, we've been checking email for things but you know, everything's smooth sailing so far. >>I think I saw a quote from you, I think it was in a video where you said before it was like having a newborn. >>Absolutely, absolutely. I used to check like sign in. It's like 10 o'clock every single night for the first year that I worked for sign cause I was petrified cause you know, I knew that I was backing stuff up but I don't know, was it still running with it still being backed up? Did it pause? Was it causing performance issues on the other end? There were so many what ifs and I just, I was, I was a mess. I was a nervous wreck constantly, you know, working till one or two in the morning and then go to bed and then eagerly get up and start checking stuff even before I left the house, you know? And I'm like, Oh, okay, that's finished. But now it's like, yeah, I know I finished not worried about Matthew. I think back to early in my career it was the dreaded backup window is, you know, when am I going to be able to get that in there? >>Can I finish the backup in the window that I have? And we've mostly gotten beyond that. But you know, there's so many new now we were just talking with Sandy Hamilton who was on stage before you about some of that automation. Really great automation sounds good, but there's gotta be a little bit of fear. It's like shit, you know, talking about like texting, I said like we've all texted the wrong thing or the wrong person or you had the wrong person. So tell us your thoughts about how automation is impacting your world and how calm voltage. >> I actually have very little automation workflow running through comm vault right now. A lot of the stuff that we do automation wise lies on the VMware side. Um, so that's, that's been good. I haven't really implemented a lot just because I personally am not comfortable with it yet. >>I'm not against it. It's just something that I haven't really trained myself enough to say I'm going to leave and let this run by itself. I'm still like, Oh no, this could be better. This could be better. This can be better. So until I'm 100% comfortable with that, I think we'll just leave it at a semiautomated task of just, sorry, you said something down the road that you're absolutely even even sitting in keynote yesterday and listening about the Alexa automation and SMS tax, I like writing in a piece of paper to test that because it's something that I've always wanted and ever since combo go last year when they were using Alexa to check SLA and RPO and RTO, I'm like, I want to be able to do that. So that's definitely down the road, but it's on the back burner right now. >>So give us a landscape view distributed organization. You talked about your base in the U S but all of the different clinics and organizations that you work with, are you living in this multi-cloud world? >>So, uh, we are pretty much zero cloud initiative company. Yeah. I'm actually trying to work on a slogan, Oh no, cloud zero cloud and proud or something like that. But I'm not 100% sure. It's definitely not out of the question. But with FedRAMP co compliancy and HIPAA, there's just a lot of regulation between the data that we have for the U S that transmits back and forth, let's say Australia or Ireland or something like that. There's certain regulations that we have to deal with and uh, in the cloud there's, there's very few options of where you can actually have those servers. So it's right now, you know, on prem is kind of, it's kind of our jam. >>So as a lot of organizations are going through FedRAMP certification, I was just at one of Dell's events the other week. They're going through it. I know some other like e-signature companies are doing, a lot of companies are, are you paying attention to that? Is that something that you think in the future might provide more confidence? >>Completely transparent. It's something I should be paying more attention to that I'm, I've just, I really haven't really done as much research as I should have and you know, I take full responsibility for that. But at the same time, you know, there's, there's a lot of other things going on in the U S that until we implement something of that nature, I don't really think that I'm really too concerned about it. So Matthew, you've been to a few of these events. Last one, last year there was a lot of talk about the coming change in this year. Lot of new faces, new Hedvig metallic. Yeah. So what we'll want to get your impression on the executive changes, some of the, you know, are you seeing any indications of organizational changes and the products? What I'm seeing is I'm seeing new life to a product that I've always been told is a dinosaur, which I kind of laugh cause I'm like, well if this dinosaur is doing things that, you know, the greatest and latest and greatest things aren't or aren't really doing. So to see this new life, the new rebranding of the logo, the new leadership, the new acquisitions and everything is just like feeding fuel to the fire. That is combo. And, and I'm, I'm pretty excited. I will say that I'm a little bit more excited about the new additions to like orchestrate and activate since stuff like metallic. I won't really be implementing just because of our business practices. But yeah. >>Let's talk about in our last few minutes here, cause they actually talked about some of the new technologies with orchestrate activate yesterday and today, but in terms of support we just had as to mention, we just interviewed Sandy Hamilton and she's come on board in the last, I think she said four and a half months. Owning professional services systems, engineering support, customer success throughout the entire life cycle. Tell us a little bit in, in our closing minute or so about the support and training that you've gotten from combat that give you the confidence for you and one of your other guys to be here and not tied to your phone. >>I don't think I'd still be with combo if it wasn't for their support. I, I owe so much to their support. They've brought me through some pretty dark times with deployment, with troubleshooting, with failures where I thought that I had things right and it just didn't work. I've called in at one in the morning, got great support, I've caught any 10 in the morning and got great support, phenomenal follow up. Um, their, their community impact, like their forums and their customer champion. So much. Just additional information that helps you not have to call in and not make you feel like that, Oh, that failure. So I owe a lot to their support and their training because without a, like I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be on stage. I'm, I'm wonder if you could put a point on that, the, the forums in your participation as a customer champion, you're spending your own time, you're working with your PBM. >>Why is that so important and how is this the vibrancy of this community, you know, it belongs to the worlds, you know, naming the things that you learn. Somebody taught me, so why shouldn't I teach somebody else? And if that makes someone else be able to go out and ride mountain bikes or cook with their daughter or do anything like that, then I'm all for it because it got me, it got me through all that. So I mean I have 10 15 minutes on the customer forum to answer you. Oh yeah, I know that. I've seen that. I had a gentleman the first morning at breakfast, like I've had a ticket open for two weeks and they can't figure it out. And we worked together and actually got his problem solved, you know? And it was like the only reason is because I've seen that and I worked with combat and they showed me how to fix it and I retain that knowledge. >>That's awesome. DOE takes paying it forward to a whole new level. And it also volumes about how you followed Jimmy chin this morning and nailed it. I tried. It was very difficult, you know, I'm sure that you know why he was filming that solo climber. He was sweaty palms. I was definitely sweaty phone calls. It was, well, Matthew, what a pleasure to have you on the program. So much fun. Thank you. Congratulations on your success and we look forward to hearing it. Many more great things out of Sonic. Thank you. All right. First to a minimum I and Lisa Martin, you're watching the cube from combo go 19.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, good morning. Welcome to the cubes coverage of combo go 19 I'm Lisa Martin and it was stupid man. Hey Sue. Hey Lisa. Are you ready? I was going to ask you. Yes. Are you ready? >>I believe the statement this morning was, we're born ready. >>We are born ready? Yes. That was a big theme this morning. It's the theme of the event here at con Volvo 19 in Colorado and great parody this morning of all these old video clips of all these actors including the Lego movie stars from saying I'm ready. Even SpongeBob. That one got me, so we had a great day. Yesterday's to love some news came out Monday and Tuesdays a lots of great stuff to talk about. We had there a lot of their C level execs and let a new changes a call yesterday. Really got the vibe of, Hey, this is a new Combalt. >>It's interesting Lisa, because one of the things we've been talking about is the 20 years of pedigree that the company has. This Andre Mirchandani said yet they're doing some new items. I was talking to some of the partners in there like how come metallics like a separate brand, don't you worry about brand spread? We knew a thing about having too many brands on the program so it is the history, the experience, the lessons learned, the war chest as they said of all of the things that have gone wrong over the years and I sure know that from my time living on the vendor side is there's no compression algorithm for all the experience you've had and like, Oh we fixed something in that stays in the code as opposed to there's something brand new might need to work through things over time but metallic a separate brand but leveraging the partnerships and the go to market and the experience of Convolt overall. >>So if you want, my quick take is, you know metallic. I definitely, I think coming out of here is the thing we will be talking the most about their SAS plus model. I want to see how that plays in the marketplace. As I probed Rob, when we interviewed him, customers, when you think about SAS, it should just be, I worry about my data and I get up and running and they said they have a very fast up and running less than 15 minutes. That's great. But some of that optionality that they built in, Oh well I can bring this along or I can add this and do this. It's always worried that a wait, do I have to remember my thing? And as it changes down the road, do I have everything set up right? Those are things that we're trying to get away from when we go to a SAS or cloud model. >>And to your point, another theme of the show has been about operational simplification, not just what Combolt is doing internally to simplify their operations, but what they need to deliver to customers. Customers want simplicity rates. Do we, we talk about that at every show regardless of industry, but there is this, this line, and maybe it's blurring, >>like we talked a lot about blurred lines yesterday of too much choice versus simplification. Where's the line there? >> Yeah and a great point Lisa, so one of the items Sandra Mirchandani said yesterday in his keynote was that blurring the line between primary and secondary storage and I probed him on our interview is Convolt going into the primary storage market with Hedvig. Hedvig has got a, you know, a nice offering, strong IP, good engineering team. I think they want to make sure that customers that have bought head vigor want to keep buying Hedvig we'll do it, but it really, I think two years from now when you look back at is that core IP, how does that get baked into the solution? That's why they bought it. That's where it's going to be there. I don't think we're going to be looking two years from now and saying, Oh wow know Convolt they're going up against all the storage star Walton competing a bit gets HCI and everything. >>They have a strong partnership, so I think I got clarity on that for the most part, even though the messaging will will move over time on that, it will move over time on that. >> That's a good point that the song blurred lines kept popping into my head yesterday as we were talking about that. But one of the things that was clear was when we spoke with Rob Kalusi and about metallic, we spoke with Avinash Lakshman about Hedvig Sanjay as well as Don foster. They're already working on the technical integration of of this solutions and we even spoke with their VP of pricing. So from a customer, from a current Hedvig customer perspective, there is focus on that from Combolt's perspective. It's not just about integrating the technologies and obviously that has to be done really well, but it's also about giving customers that consistency and really for combo kind of a new era of transparency with respect to pricing. >>And another thing we talked about some of that transformation of the channel and Mercer row came on board only a couple of days officially on the job. He's helped a number of companies get ready for multicloud and absolutely we've seen that change in the channel over the last five to 10 years. Know back in his days when he was at VM world at VMware there the channel was, Oh my gosh, you know, when Amazon wins we all lose and today we understand it as much more nuance there. The channel that is successful partners with the hyperscale cloud environments, they have practices built around it. The office three 65 and Microsoft practices are an area that Convolt in their partners should be able to do well with and the metallic will tie into as well as of course AWS. The 800 pound gorilla in this space will be there. Combolt plays into that and you know, setting the channel up for that next generation with the SAS, with the software and living in a broader multicloud environment is definitely something to watch you a lot of news about the channel, not just from a leadership standpoint but also so metallic for the mid market >>really delivered exclusively through the channel but also the new initiative that they have. And we talked a little bit about this yesterday about going after and really a big focus with global systems integrators on the largest global enterprises. And when we spoke with their GTM chief of staff yesterday along with Mercer with Carmen, what they're doing, cause I said, you know, channel partners, all the channel partners that they work with work with their competitors. So you have to really deliver differentiation and it can't just be about pricing or marketing messaging goes all the way into getting those feet on the street. And that's another area in which we heard yesterday Combolt making strategic improvements on more feet on the street co-selling with partners, really pulling them deeper into enablement and trainings and to them that's one of the key differentiators that they are delivering to their partners. Yeah >>and Lisa, he, we got to speak to a number, a couple of customers we have more coming on today. It's a little bit telling that you know the average customer you talk to, they have five 10 years of experience there. They are excited about some of the new offerings, but as we've said many times metallic, the new Hedvig we want to talk to the new logos that they're going to get on board. That is something that for the partners has been an incentive. There were new incentives put in place to help capture those new logos because as we know, revenue was actually down in the last fiscal year a bit and Convolt feels that they have turned the corner, they're all ready to go. And one other note I'd like to make, the analogy I used last year is we knew a CEO was canoe CEO search was happening, a lot of things were in motion and it's almost as if you were getting the body ready for an organ transplant and you make sure that the antibodies aren't going to reject it. And in conversation with Sanjay, he was very cognizant of that. His background is dev offs and he was a CIO. We went for it, he was the CEO of puppet. So he's going to make things move even faster. And the pace of change of the last nine months is just the beginning of the change. And for the most part I'm not hearing grumbling underneath the customer seem fully on board. The employees are energized and definitely there was good energy last year, but a raise of the enthusiasm this year. >>Well Stu, first of all, you have just been on fire the last two days comparing their CEO transition to getting a body ready for a transplant. It's probably one of the best things I've heard in a long time. That was awesome. But you're right, we've heard a lot of positivity. Cultural change is incredibly difficult. You talked a minute ago about this as a 20 year old company and as we all have all experience and the industries in which we're in, you know, one of the things that's important is, is messaging that experience and talking about the things that that worked well, but also the things that didn't work well, that they've learned from that message was carried through the keynote this morning. That three customers on stage that we saw before we had to come to the side. And I, I had, my favorite was from Sonic healthcare. Matthew McCabe's coming on in shortly with us and I always appreciate, you know, I think the voice of the customer is the best brand validation that you can get. However, what's even better is a customer talking about when the technologies that they're using fail because it does happen. How are they positioned with the support and the training and the education that is giving them to make those repairs quickly to ensure business continuity and ensure disaster recovery. I think that to me that speaks volumes about the legacy, the 20 years of experience that combo has. >>Yeah, no, Lisa, you're absolutely right. There's certain products out there that we talk about uptime in 100% in this space. You, I believe the stat was about 94% success rate and we had NASA in the keynote yesterday talking about success versus partial success versus failures and Convolt really embraces that and has customers that we'll talk about that because there are times that things will happen and there are things that you need to be able to recover from ransomware. Often it is not a question of if, when it is going to be happened, at least. The other thing I want to get your comment on Jimmy chin who is the director and one of the, the cameraman of the free solo Oscar-winning free solo documentary definitely gave me a little bit of, Oh my gosh, look at some of the Heights and I was nervous just looking at some of this stuff they're doing. I like a little bit of lightweight hiking. I'm not a mountain climber, nothing like that. But he talked about when the camera goes on, there's that added pressure that goes on and it's sitting there. It's like, yeah, you know, we sit here live all day doing that. There's that, that energy to perform. But you know, we all appreciate the everybody watching and understanding that we're all human here and every time, every once in awhile a word or a mistake gets in there, but we keep going summit. Yeah, >>that's life. But also Jimmy chin, phenomenal. I think at 2018 they just won the Oscar just earlier this year for free. Solo. I have to watch that this weekend. But a couple of things that he talked about is that failure is a huge part of preparation. Couldn't agree more. What a simplified statement for somebody that not only has has skied Everest, the climbed Meru, I think they call it the shark fin of India, but what you talked about with what he documented with free solo and all of the thousands of sequences and he talked about that, Alex, I'm forgetting his last name, the guy who closed, who free soloed, El Capitan, all of these different failure scenarios that he rehearsed over and over again in case he encountered any of them, he would immediately be to remedy that situation and get himself back on track. I thought that message to me, failure is a good F-word if you use it properly. You know NASA, you mentioned yesterday and NASA was famous for coining in the 60s failure is not an option and I always say onto that cause I used to work for NASA, but it's a distinct possibility. And so what Jimmy chin shared this morning was electrified, but it also was a great understatement of what Combolt is helping their customers. We have to help you prepare for this. We can't help you prepare for all of it. As you mentioned, ransomware, it's not if but when. >>Well, right and both NASA and when the climbing is understanding where something could go wrong and therefore what the failures scenarios are. So you know rockets today you can't have a failure and by failure they mean look, if the rocket isn't going to work or something goes wrong, we need to make sure we don't have loss of life. That is something that if you look at blue origin and SpaceX that is pre eminent in there is we can't have another challenger disaster. We can't have some of these environments where we have the loss of human life. So that is number one. Some of the other ones, sometimes we know that the unknown happens or things don't go quite right. So being prepared to understand if something goes wrong, how do we recover from that? And that brings us back to the whole data protection and recovery of the environment because the best laid architecture, eventually something will happen and therefore we need to make sure that that data, the lifeblood of the company is able to be recovered and used and that the business can go forward even if some piece of infrastructure or some attack got through. >>There are, and there's inherent risk in every industry, whether you're talking about healthcare data, we talked with AstraZeneca yesterday, you know, genetics, clinical data, or you're talking about a retailer, doesn't matter. There's an inherent risks with every business and one of the most important things that I got out of the NASA talk yesterday, Jimmy Chin's talked today, some of the customers, is that preparation is key. You can't be over prepared. You really can't act fact. He said that you can't be overprepared in his line of work, but I think it applies to the inherent risks that any business has. Managing data. As we talk about Sue all the time, it's the lifeblood. It's the new oil. It is. It has to be available, accessible 24 by seven if it isn't and can't be. Businesses are massive risk in this day and age. Competitive competitors who have maybe better risk fault tolerance scenario in play. >>So that risk that they have to mitigate comes a preparation. We're going to be talking with Sandra Hamilton in just a few minutes about who leads customer success for combo. Really want to dig into the training, the support. We've heard that articulated from customers on stage that I don't wake up in the middle of the night anymore because I have this support from my trusted vendor combo and that is critical to any business staying up. Absolutely. We're going to hear from number of customers. I'm sure they're ready and we are ready for day two. We are ready. See, let's have a great day. Yeah, thanks. All right, so Sue and I will be right back with our first guest on day two of our coverage of comm Volkow for Stu. I'm Lisa Martin. We'll be right back.

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

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of day one of convo go and 19 from Colorado. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu minimum and we have a cube alumni back with us. Arch, not van Venkatraman. You are the research manager for storage and data center for IDC. Welcome back. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Likewise, so here we are. Day one of con BOGO, lots of stuff. Nutrition's I stopped coming out in the last day and a half or so, but also lots of momentum that really kind of the dust kicked up when Sanjay Mirchandani took over the home from Bob hammer just about nine months ago. You've been covering combo for about three years. Just love to get your perspective on the last three years and what you've seen particularly in the last nine months. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I've been tracking them for three years and they've been slowly making that pivot to the cloud world to changing how they're pricing to, you know, to really break free from that perception that they're very traditional, they're very cumbersome, they're expensive, they're trying to break through that and hiring Sanjay was kind of validation that Hey we are committed to the future and Sanjay comes from this very agile DevOps seed, open sores, containerized property worlds. >>So he, he is new culture and Sandra came in and he started, I think he started making a lot more changes. We saw that their journey to the cloud was a lot more accelerated and they're starting to talk this new language that is attracting developers. So they talk about cloud native technologies. They're talking about database and data as the bottleneck in development life cycle, which is all new music to develop us ears. And then that means you're going to bring in data management, which is a huge issue right to the developer strategy, right to the boardroom strategy. That's where it needs to be because data is actually at the heart of what companies are doing. And we keep talking about speed of fins, speed of development and speed of applications. I think it's time we start talking about speed of intelligence and speed of insights because that's what's going to give companies a competitive difference. >>And that's what Sanjay brought in in the last nine months. And I was tracking the Hedwig acquisition as well and a lot of companies, a lot of people who I spoke to here were extremely excited about what Hedwig brings into the table and there was a lot of interest in what they bring in. So I think Sanjay brought in a new culture to come ball and he cemented that new culture with Hedwig because with Hedwig they acquired that new startup culture as well. So it's really coming together of a lot of new culture and that's going to overpower the old culture and going to bring a lot transformation within. >>So as arch and I, but I'd love to get your insights into how that that changed and you said, right. Do you know Sandra came from puppet? We talked to them earlier today about moving faster and CIC D and all this wonderful things. But how that aligned with customers. We talked to customers that are seven or 10 years working with convolve inside the organization. You know the person that owned the backup and recovery process, you know, how familiar are they with their developer team and how that's coming together in an organization. So is Convolt meeting the customers where they are? Are they skating to the puck? How does that alignment? >>Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's, it's imperative that come moved and a lot of traditional data protection vendors move because customers are moving as well and they are forced to move because they are seeing lot of onslaught of data. Data's corporate data is growing 50 to 60% every year. That's just business data. So they're grappling with data growth and they're expected to do more with less and data is fragmented everywhere. So they are forced to make that change as well. So they are employing data protection officers, but at the same time they're also employing data scientists and newer data model architects to do new things with data because they are under pressure to deliver that better customer experiences. So companies are going through that change and we, in August we did a research and asked organizations, are you happy with your existing data protection tools and are you going to change it? >>And interestingly, 60% of those who are operating in multicloud environments want to change their data protection environment. And that shows because until now there was this huge power of incumbency, right? I will, I'm okay with this, I'll probably buy the next version of this and try and do iterative improvements. But now companies realize that this data growth and fragmentation and multicloud environment represents a new frontier and they need to move from this thinking that they've had and they're willing to change and work with the newer kind of companies that provide them what they want around unification and simplification. >>Yeah, I think you brought up some great points there. We've found when we talked to customers, they seem to be more open than ever to try something new. I kind of wonder if that's why metallic almost has a separate brand, a separate web website. It is a Convult venture because you know Combalt has incumbency and it has a pedigree. But if I'm trying something new, Convolt might not be the first one that I think of. >>Yeah. So today was the first time I heard about metallic and there is some, I love the branding and there's so much of gloss and shines, I need to get behind the gloss and shine. But I've seen that was one of the busiest places that we have seen today in the exhibition. And that shows commitment to the, it's, it's, it's, it's, they're entering the SAS world and they're talking that cloud likes scalability and it's also more than applications. They're talking about the pricing is a like consumption base, that cloud language and it's going to propel them along the way. And your perspective as customers that you talk to in any industry have so much choice. You're saying, Hey, the customers are recognizing in this multicloud world in which they find themselves operating. We've gotta be able to change our data protection strategy. I imagine things like the rise in cyber attacks or GDPR or the new law in California. >>That's coming are some compelling events. But when customers look at the landscape, and as was saying, they're so much more open to maybe trying new vendors, for example, how does Combalt part, you know, significant part and combat maybe new part with Hedvig and with metallic as a sort of this startup within combo. How did they elevate and differentiate themselves in your opinion, in a competitive landscape? Interesting. Yep. So when you look at startups, they have a lot of agility, but they're not able to bring that enterprise grade skill. Excuse me. And if you look at a lot of traditional vendors, they have that scale and enterprise grade guarantees, but they don't have that agility. But with this initiative, they've done some clever things and brought agility and skill together. That's their differentiator to see no, grab some water, we'll talk for a second. You probably even taught all day. >>That's the hazard, right, of going to these events is your voice, especially with the altitude. But, but as, as we've seen other large incumbents do the same thing. Absolutely. Everyone's pivoting to the same. It is. But also integration of technologies is not easy. Right. And that's sort of the table stakes is how are they, for example, going to integrate Hedvig such that one had bigs installed. ACE has a smooth, seamless transition and this opens up more opportunity for them and vice versa that that Combolt's install base now has more opportunity. Talk to us about what you've seen. They talked a little bit yesterday about some of the integration connections that they've made so far, but that's really key because a lot of companies don't do integrations. Well yeah, there've been some big acquisitions and they do integrations for years and years, right? It's been just 13 days since the acquisition closed. >>So it's still early days, but they need to keep that momentum up and I see a lot of synergy. So bringing storage and data management together is a good idea. But at the same time, I heard Sanjay alluded to it on the stage as well, where they're talking about application and data and moving away from that infrastructure. Right. And that that view is very important because companies need to move from protecting data centers to protecting centers of data. That's what they need to think about. So they need to abstract from infrastructure, but which is why when you look at it all though it's software defined storage. The language that they use is very clever. They're talking about APIs, they're talking about newer workflows, they're talking about changing business processes, they're talking about enabling data, they're talking about controlling data and using it data, using data for insights. >>So they're putting in a lot of newer perspective to this infrastructure view and taking a software defined container defined API defined view, and that's kind of very, very modern. I think that's going to bring a huge amount of difference. So thinking about some of the customers that you've spoken to will say in the last year that are either using Combolt or evaluating combo, some of the positioning that you just talked about to kind of very interesting, but I presume quite strategic with how they're talking about protect, use, manage control data. Are you hear from Comvalt are you hearing and seeing this is what I've been hearing from customers, is there an alignment? Are you hearing from custom what you heard from customers? I'll start over like in the last year, what combat is now delivering and the messaging that they're articulating. Are you now, are you seeing alignment like they're going in the direction that I'm hearing with what customers are wanting. >>He has, the customers are grappling with multicloud data services, so it's not just data protection but they need to get visibility of data across their, all the data sets across the board that they're challenged not just with structured data but growth in unstructured and semi-structured data as well. So they need to look at newer kinds of storage like object storage and all that. So they are grappling with newer kinds of challenges and that's why this new language is going to be hugely useful. And that's why this coming together of storage and data management can actually make a big difference because together they can paint a picture for the organization and tell them these are the challenges you're grappling. You don't need to buying different solutions from different places and buy it and bring it all together. We have deeper level of integration and we can solve it and convert. >>We'll be able to get to the customer at the storage level before they hit the customer, hits the data management problem and then starts hunting for a newer solution. So they're getting in early before the problem actually becomes an operational issue and that the Hey red, they are ready with the solution when the customer gets there. You might, you mentioned data visibility a minute ago and that's critical, right? For organizations that are, whether it's a smaller organization or one that's heavily matrix, if you don't have, and a lot of them don't have visibility into all of the data. Something that you talked about in the very beginning of the interview, that speed of intelligence and speed of insights, it can't take advantage of that. Yeah, yeah. Yes. So companies are investing into a lot of data scientists. But then so, so I was talking to actually three, I was doing a CIO executive dinner on this whole topic about data driven. >>And then so some of organizations, some of the CIS put their hands up and said, Hey, we have actually employed new data scientists. These data engineers and data scientists don't come cheap, right? They're very heavily skilled, talented, talented professionals. So you employ them. And now we're working backwards. Now we are trying to do what we can do with the data models and there's so much problem we are facing. We don't know what data is good data to be analyzed, what data we can delete, what data is cold data that we can send to archives and what do we need to, what are the use cases that we need big data analytics for? So they're working backwards and they're not able to leverage and capitalize on all the resources that they've spent on hiring these kinds of data scientists and data engineers. So I think they need to start that. Organizations need to get a hygiene about their data first and then take the next step around analytics and hiring these kind of data scientists is the first step. Sorry >>are tryna just, I was curious if you could comment on a statement that Sanjay Mirchandani made this morning. He says we need to rethink the kind of the lines and into definitions between primary and secondary storage. What do you think of that statement and where do you think vault ultimately will fit in the broader marketplace? >>You's quite aligned with what I see when I talk to customers as well. So, so companies, data is growing and it's fragmented, but at the same time the lines between primary storage and secondary storage are blurring as well. So the data that's cold today may be hot data tomorrow. So they need to understand, get visibility into data. Just 10% of data is hard data today. So that data needs to sit in the most expensive storage environments. They can leverage it and the rest needs to be, needs to go into tiered, into other colder storage, cheaper alternatives. But at the same time, when you want to access that data, it should not be difficult because now when you push it to a cloud archive your, that's your archive and be damned, right? You're not going to get that data back on in the format you want at the time you want, at the cost you want. So you need to make sure that you invest in storage technologies and you make that data tiering in such a way that when that called data is suddenly becoming warm data or hot data, you need to have access to it instantly in the format you like. Archna thank you for sharing your insights and recommendations and just your view on the industry and combat. We appreciate your time. No problem at all. Thank you very much. First, zoom and a man. I am Lisa Martin and you're watching the cube from combat go 19.

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

>> Announcer: Live from Denver, Colorado, it's The Cube. Covering Commault Go 2019. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Commvault Go 19! I'm Lisa Martin, with Stu Miniman. And Stew and I are pleased to welcome to The Cube for the first time, we have Chris Powers, VP and General Manager at HPE. Chris, welcome! >> Thank you very much, thank you. I was telling Stu earlier, you know, long time watcher. First time participant. >> All right, well, awesome, we love that. So here we are in your native area of Colorado. We were just talking about the weather which is probably a topic if you live or visit Colorado that is always an interesting conversation because it changes >> Chris: Rapidly. >> So rapidly, exactly. You guys had snow last week, we have beautiful weather. Well, at least so far this week. But I only got in last night. >> Well stick around till this weekend cause we'll have some more snow. >> All right, I brought some boots. So Chris, talk to us, you've been a long time HPE guy, let's have just kind of a status of the HPE, Commvault relationship, the partnership. What's going on there? >> Absolutely, so Commvault is key important partner to HP. We actually have an arrangement via a capability we call HPE Complete by which we actually skew up Commvault products, we go through the background working with Commvault making sure we have application integration so that customers have a lot of confidence in them. And then a customer or a partner can buy a complete solution on a single P.O. from both companies. So it really provides that ease of transaction, ease of evaluation. And then confidence in the delivered solution that they purchased from HPE. >> So confidence and simplification are great from doing a transaction. Talk to us about how Commvault and HP are working together to really have customers in this multi-cloud world that a lot of them are living in have confidence that they're able to access secure data in a way that is as simple as it can be. >> Well there's a couple things we have. We have integration with Commvault products with a number of our, across a number of our platforms. Commvault is the backbone for our HPE GreenLake backup as a service product, right? And what that gives is the confidence and the capabilities of having a cloud-like experience for your backup environment. But it's managed and controlled on premises. So it brings the benefits of both with the Commvault and Telesnap technology we've got that integrated in with our HPE Primera 3Par and Nimble platforms and that makes snapshot management much more seamless and much more of core portion of their data protection strategies. So there's a number of connection points that we have and we will continue over time to just continue to broaden and exploit that, you know, where the opportunities exist. >> Yeah, I just had a conversation with Craig Rutledge, last week about GreenLake. Bring us inside your customers and you know, how is it some of their buying patterns are changed? GreenLake's actually been around for about nine years, I hadn't been aware that it had been around that long. But you know, cloud and as a service, Commvault's talking about there's a new SaaS offering that they have. You know storage used to be just something you thought about with a box. Now, you know, software is one of the key delivery mechanisms for how I manage and deal with my data. >> That's correct. Well, you know, a lot of the consumption models changed. You know quite a bit over time. And there are more and more, we're seeing more and more of our customers really being more interested in not purchasing the box. Really, I mean the box delivers something. Really, this is shifting more towards purchasing what is being delivered, right. And so that's why these SaaS service models are really that significant. They're a market changer in a couple of aspects. First of all it changes the economics. You know from a consumption standpoint about what are you purchasing? Second thing it does, is it pushes back under the vendor more of the responsibility of the day-to-day maintenance and the activities. Right, it offloads. And so you could be using these IT, you know, compute storage services. Really focusing on them to bring your business outcome as opposed to spending a lot of your time and energy managing the infrastructure itself. >> Chris, of course we've heard a lot about data this week. One area I'm surprised I haven't heard about it much, maybe I just haven't been in the right conversations, is AI. And I know, I've talked to your peer Patrick Osborne, quite a few times about how AI is impacting your portfolio. Maybe help us understand how it fits into this whole discussion. >> Certainly, you know, it's really in two forms. One is AI to support your infrastructure management itself. Right? So a key component of our strategy is something we call the global intelligence engine. And that brings with it a combination of really monitoring what's happening within the environment. Creating from that a set of, think of fingerprints. Associated with workloads such that we can begin to trace and understand, based upon those fingerprints, if there's something changing in the environment, applying rules based AI to understand what an immediate type of response is. So that's how we're using it to simplify infrastructure management, because it is amazingly complex to what it used to be years ago. The second way though is actually bringing to market capabilities that support AI type workloads. And that's a step that Patrick's really focused on with our Mapar, blue data, integration. And it's really, so it's bringing both of those sets to marketplace. Wanting to help customers better manage their environment and then more on effectively being able to utilize those tools to then manage their businesses. >> And this is part of your, the intelligent data platform strategy that HPE is talking about. Can you kind of walk us through that IDP pitch? >> Absolutely. So, first and foremost it starts with workloads. Right? And it's workload optimized systems. That being either from your primary, from you file based from your object in secondary all the way to managing your cloud capabilities. And it's providing that workload mobility, data mobility across those platforms. We layer on top of that this notion of the global intelligence engine. Right? That I've already spoken to. And then what we have is effectively then able to make sure that we have SaaS type plugins for infrastructure management, right? Plugins and (mumbles), chef puppet and so forth. And then also optimizing from an application standpoint what is necessary from a workload standpoint from a data protection standpoint. In all of this then focused at consumers. Be it the data administrators. Be it the line of business owners being the IT infrastructure ops people. It's really this layered sort of capabilities but it starts and ends with workloads. Right? We don't talk about platforms, it's really how do you optimize the capabilities for a specific set of workloads, recognizing that the data associated with those workloads needs to transition over time. >> Chris, wondering if you have any customer examples that might be able to illustrate the power of HPE plus Commvault. >> Certainly, just reflecting back to the backups as a service, via HPE GreenLake. We have number of large customers that utilize GreenLake for the core of their operational activities. Just recently we took down a number of large deals in Europe utilizing HPE with Commvault to provide that in a backup environment managed by HPE GreenLake. >> And from the value of doing that is that you know obviously there's simplicity. You know, does that have an organizational change to how they think about their data protection once their, they leverage GreenLake. >> Well definitely, upon you know leveraging GreenLake, because no longer do you have this arm of backup administrators, you know sitting with you, within your company, right? You are procuring a service, right? You're no longer having to take care of it and manage that infrastructure, be responsible for it. And we take it upon ourselves then to also make sure that that infrastructure is being continuously updated, refreshed. Basically taking that headache of IT management away and focusing on the business outcome. >> Yeah, I'm wondering too, you could probably give a good kind of longterm view of this. How do you see that as different from the previous trend of outsourcing that we've gone through? >> So, I think that trend of outsourcing a lot of times that turned into, once you played it out over a couple of years, turned into more of a game of asset sweating. Right? And so you know, this notion of continually keeping up from a serviceability standpoint, optimizing the capabilities, I think it was more of a focus from an asset utilization play as opposed to delivering a service. I think the real change now, is delivering a service and what does that involve as opposed to like I said, arbitrating and taking advantage of an asset play. >> So when you were talking, you mention the term business outcomes a second ago and my ears perked up, so whether you're talking about whether it's a large retailer or it's a bank for example, talk to us about some of the business outcomes that you guys together with Commvault are helping customers achieve. You talked about kind of a consumer focus, but in terms of kind of like distilling that down to how an organization is maybe delivering new products and services because not only is the data protected and it's available, it's recoverable they've got the AI to be able to gain insights from it. Favorite story maybe that shows like business transformation by leveraging HPE and Commvault together. >> So I think, you know, that the best stories there are really in regards to given that we've freed up resources from that day to day operational type of activities and coupled together with last year, as you mention, that AI type understanding the insights. What it's really doing is it's allowing companies to really accelerate from a flexibility standpoint it's that notion of flexibility and speed to be able to react quickly. And we're seeing that across a large number of customers and that's really what's differentiating customers in this new, what we call the intelligence era, it's that speed and agility to adopt those new quick, adopt new business models, adopt new opportunities quickly change on a dime to recognize when things are changing and then chase after it and take the opportunity. >> So as we're here at day one of Commvault Go 19 this is their fourth event but a lot has changed for them since Sanjay Mirchandani came onboard just about what nine months or so ago, I'm just curious, you've been a partner a long time. Your perspectives on maybe this new Commvault or this Commvault 2.0 that you're seeing that HPE is partnering with? >> So I think it's refreshing, right? It builds into it a new energy, right? A new sense of focus and it's really I think as all of this within the IT industry are recognizing it's this whole notion about service and customer, really it's customer experience and the service enablement that we provide from infrastructure capabilities. I mean we are providing the tools to allow these companies to accelerate and so I think it's really great. It's really great, you know? Companies need to go through transformation, new leaders come in, breathe some different viewpoints and so forth and I think it's very healthy. >> Cultural change is always challenging to do but in some cases it's like you said, it's refreshing, they've also done a lot even with the launch of metallic yesterday just in terms of how quickly we are seeing them go from ideas to you know, to conceiving technologies and delivering them quite quickly to not just their kind of sweet spot of the enterprise, the large global enterprises, but you know down into the mid-market. So in terms of that speed and agility I think there articulating that and showing that pretty well. As to your point, customers have to have the ability whatever size they are, whatever type of industry they're in to be able to react quickly to take advantage of the next wave or be on the front of that next wave and having an infrastructure that is smart, that is optimized, cost-efficient, is as table-stakes to that. >> Absolutely, absolutely. Right, and I think what they've been able to demonstrate this week, you know, as part of their announcement said, is that flexibility, that awareness that there's continuous opportunities to be chased. >> Excellent. Well Chris, we thank you for joining Stu and Me on the The Cube today, telling us what's new with HPE and Commvault. We appreciate your time. >> Appreciate it, thank you very much! >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube, from Commvault Go 19! (upbeat music)