>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of CONMEBOL. Future ready 2020. Brought to you by combo. >>Hi and welcome back. I'm Stew Minuteman, and we're at the Cube's coverage of Con Volt Future Ready. You've got the power panel to really dig in on the product announcements that happened at the event today. Joining me? We have three guests. First of all, we have Brenda Rajagopalan. He's the vice president of products. Sitting next to him is Don Foster, vice president of Storage Solutions. And in the far piece of the panel Mersereau, vice president of Global Channels and Alliances. All three of them with Conn Volt. Gentlemen, thanks all three of you for joining us. Exactly. All right, so first of all, great job on the launch. You know, these days with a virtual event doing, you know, the announcements, the engagement with the press and analyst, you know, having demos, customer discussions. It's a challenge to put all those together. And it has been, you know, engaging in interesting watch today. So we're going to start with you. You've been quite busy today explaining all the pieces, so just at a very high level if you put this really looks like the culmination of the update with Conn Volt portfolio new team new products compared to kind of a year, year and 1/2 ago. So just if you could start us off with kind of the high points, >>thank you still, yeah, absolutely exciting day for us today. You did comrade multiple reasons for that excitement and go through that we announced an exciting new portfolio today knows to not the culmination. It's a continuation off our journey, a bunch of new products that we launched today Hyper scaler X as a new integrated data protection appliance. We've also announced new offerings in data protection, backup and recovery, disaster recovery and complete data protection and lots of exciting updates for Hedwig and a couple of weeks like we introduced updates for metallic. So, yes, it's been a really exciting pain. Also, today happens to be the data, and we got to know that we are the leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for the ninth consecutive. I am so a lot of goodness today for us. >>Excellent. Lots of areas that we definitely want to dig deep in to the pieces done. You know, we just heard a little bit about Hedvig was an acquisition a year ago that everybody's kind of looking at and saying Okay, you know, will this make them compete against some of their traditional partners? How we get integrated in So, baby, just give us one level deeper on the Hedvig piece on what that means to the portfolio? Yeah, sure, So I >>guess I mean, one of the key things that the random mentioned was the fact that had hyper scale that's is built off the head Day files. So that's a huge milestone for us. As we teased out maybe 10 months ago. Remember, Tomball, Go on the Cube and talking about, you know, kind of what our vision and strategy was of unifying data and storage management. Those hyper hyper scale X applying is a definite milestone improving out that direction. But beyond just the hyper scale ECs, we've also been driving on some of the more primary or modern workloads such as containers and the really interesting stuff we've come out with your recently is the kubernetes native integration that ties in all of the advanced component of the head to distribute storage architecture on the platform itself across multi cloud and on premise environments, making it really easy and policy driven. Um, for Dev, ops users and infrastructure users, the tie ins applications from a group, Friction >>Great and Mercer. There's some updates to the partner program and help us understand how all of these product updates they're gonna affect the kind of the partnerships and alliances beasts that you want. >>Absolutely. So in the time since our last meeting that go in the fall, which is actually right after I had just doing combo, we spent a good portion of the following six months really talking with partners, understanding the understand the impact of the partner program that we introduced last summer, looking at the data and really looking at barriers to evolve the program, which fell around three difference specific. Once you bet one was simplicity of the simplicity of the program, simplicity of understanding, rewards, levers and so forth. The second was paying for value was really helping, helping our partners to be profitable around things like deal registration on other benefits and then third was around co investment. So making sure that we get the right members in place to support our partners and investing in practices. Another training, another enablement around combo and we launched in over these things last week is a part of an evolution of that program. Today is a great follow on because in addition to all of the program evolutions that we we launched last week now we have an opportunity with our partners to have many more opportunities or kind of a thin into the wedge to open up new discussions with our customers now around all of these different use cases and capabilities. So back to that simplification angle, really driving more and more opportunities for those partners toe specific conversations around use cases. >>Okay, for this next question, I think it makes sense for you to start. Maybe maybe Don, you can get some commentary in two. But when he's firstly the announcements, there are some new products in the piece that you discuss but trying to understand, you know, when you position it, you know, do you call the portfolio? Is it a platform? You know, if I'm an existing Conn Volt customer, you know, how do I approach this? If I use something like metallic, how does that interplay with some of the new pieces that were discussed today. >>Sure, I can take the business. I'm sure Don and mostly will have more data to it. The simplest way to think about it is as a port for you. But contrary to how you would think about portfolio as independent products, what we have is a set off data management services granular. We're very aligned to the use case, which can all inter operate with each other. So maybe launched backup and recovery and disaster recovery. These can be handled separately, purchased separately and deployed standalone or for customers who want a combination of those capabilities. We also have a complete data protection are fine storage optimization, data governance E discovery in complaints are data management services that build on top off any of these capabilities now a very differentiating factor in our platform owners. All the services that you're talking about are delivered off the same software to make it simpler to manage to the same year. So it's very easy to start with one service and then just turn on the license and go to other services so I can understand the confusion is coming from but it's all the same. The customer simplicity and flexibility in mind, and it's all delivered off the same platform. So it is a portfolio built on a single Don. Would you like to add more to it? >>Yeah, I think the interesting thing due to add on top of that is where we're going with Hedvig Infrastructure, the head of distributed storage platform, uh, to to run this point, how everything is integrated and feed and work off of one another. That's the same idea that we have. We talked about unifying data and storage manager. So the intricate storage architecture components the way data might be maneuvered, whether it's for kubernetes for virtual machines, database environments, secondary storage, you name it, um, we are. We're quickly working to continue driving that level of of unification and integration between the portfolio and heads storage, distribute storage platforms and also deliver. So what you're seeing today going back to, I think wrong his first point. It's definitely not the culmination. It's just another step in the direction as we continue to innovate and integrate this >>product, and I think for our partners what this really does, it allows them to sell around customer use cases because it'll ask now if I have a d. Our use case. I can go after just PR. If I have a backup use case, I can just go after backup, and I don't have to try to sell more than that. Could be on what the customer is looking for in parallel that we can steal these things in line with the customer use case. So the customer has a lot of remote offices. They want to scale Hedvig across those they want to use the art of the cloud. They can scale these things independently, and it really gives us a lot of optionality that we didn't have before when we had a few monolithic products. >>Excellent. Really reminds me more of how I look at products if I was gonna go buy it from some of the public cloud providers living in a hybrid cloud. World, of course, is what your customers are doing. Help us understand a little bit, you know, Mercer talked about metallic and the azure partnership, but for the rest of the products, the portfolio that we're talking about, you know, does this >>kind >>of work seamlessly across my own data center hosting providers Public Cloud, you know, how does this fit into the cloud environment for your customer? >>Yes, it does. And I can start with this one goes to, um it's our strategy is cloud first, right? And you see it in every aspect of our product portfolio. In fact, I don't know if you got to see a keynote today, but Ron from Johns Hopkins University was remarking that comment has the best cloud native architectures. And that's primarily because of the innovation that we drive into the multi cloud reality. We have very deep partnerships with pretty much all the cloud vendors, and we use that for delivering joint innovation, a few things that when you think of it from a hybrid customers perspective, the most important need for them is to continue working on pram while still leveraging the cloud. And we have a lot of optimization is built into that, and then the next step of the journey is of course, making sure that you can recover to the cloud would be it work load. Typically your data quality and there's a lot of automation that we provide to our solutions and finally, Of course, if you're already in the cloud, whether you're running a science parents or cloud native, our software protects across all those use cases, either true sass with metallic auto downloadable software, backup and recovery so we can cover the interest victims of actual presence. You. We do definitely help customers in every stage of their hybrid cloud acceleration journey. >>And if you take a look at the Hedvig protect if you take a look at the head back to, um, the ability to work in a cloud native fast, it is essentially a part of the DNA of that storage of the storage, right? So whether you're running on Prem, whether you're running it about adjacent, set up inside the cloud head, that can work with any compute environment and any storage environment that you went to essentially then feed, we build this distributed storage, and the reason that becomes important. It's pretty much highlighted with our announcement around the kubernetes and container support is that it makes it really easy to start maneuvering data from on Prem to the cloud, um, from cloud to cloud region to region, sort of that high availability that you know as customers make cloud first a reality and their organizations starts to become a critical requirement or ensuring the application of and some of the things that we've done now with kubernetes in making all of our integration for how we deliver storage for the kubernetes and container environments and being that they're completely kubernetes native and that they can support a Google in AWS and Azure. And of course, any on premises community set up just showcases the value that we can provide in giving them that level of data portability. And it basically provides a common foundation layer, or how any sort of the Dev ops teams will be operating in the way that those state full container state workloads. Donna Oh, sorry. Go >>ahead, mark area >>because you mentioned the metallic and azure partnership announcement and I just want to get on that. And one thing that run dimension, which is we are really excited about the announcement of partnership with Microsoft and all the different news cases that opens up that are SAS platform with Azure with office 3 65 and all of the great application stack it's on. If you're at the same time, to run this point. We are a multi cloud company. And whether that is other of the hyper scale clouds Mess GC, P. Ali at Oracle and IBM, etcetera, or Oliver, Great service writer burners. We continue to believe in customer choice, and we'll continue to drive unique event innovations across all of those platforms. >>All right, Don, I was wondering if we could just dig in a little bit more on some other kubernetes pieces you were talking about. Let me look at just the maturation of storage in general. You know, how do we had state back into containers in kubernetes environments? Help us see, You know what you're hearing from your customers. And you know how you how you're ready to meet their needs toe not only deliver storage, but as you say, Really? You know, full data protection in that environment? >>Certainly it So I mean, there's been a number of enhancements that happened in the kubernetes environment General over the last two years. One of the big ones was the creation of what the visit environment calls a persistent volume. And what that allows you to do is to really present storage to a a communities application. Do it be typically through what's called a CSR container storage interface that allows for state full data to be written, storage and be handled and reattached applications as you leverage them about that kubernetes. Um, as you can probably imagine that with the addition of the additional state full applications, some of the overall management now of stateless and state collapse become very talent. And that's primarily because many customers have been using some of the more traditional storage solutions to try to map that into these new state. Full scenario. And as you start to think about Dev ops organization, most Dev ops organizations want to work in the environment of their choice. Whether that's Google, whether that's AWS, Microsoft, uh, something that might be on Prem or a mix of different on Prem environments. What you typically find, at least in the kubernetes world, is there's seldom ever one single, very large kubernetes infrastructure cluster that's set to run, Dev asked. The way and production all at once. You usually have this spread out across a fairly global configuration, and so that's where some of these traditional mechanisms from traditional storage vendors really start to fall down because you can apply the same level of automation and controls in every single one of those environments. When you don't control the storage, let's say and that's really where interfacing Hedvig and allowing that sort of extension distribute storage platform brings about all of this automation policy control and really storage execution definition for the state. Full statehood workloads so that now managing the stateless and the state full becomes pretty easy and pretty easy to maintain when it comes to developing another Dev branch or simply trying to do disaster recovery or a J for production, >>any family actively do. That's a very interesting response, and the reality is customers are beginning to experiment with business. Very often they only have a virtual environment, and now they're also trying to expand into continuous. So Hedwig's ability to service primary storage for virtualization as well as containers actually gives their degree of flexibility and freedom for customers to try out containers and to start their contingent. Thank you familiar constructs. Everything is mellow where you just need to great with continuous >>Alright, bring a flexibility is something that I heard when you talk about the portfolio and the pricing as to how you put these pieces together. You actually talked about in the presentation this morning? Aggressive pricing. If you talk about, you know, kind of backup and recovery, help us understand, You know, convo 2020 how you're looking at your customers and you know how you put together your products, that to meet what they need at that. As you said, aggressive pricing? >>Absolutely. And you use this phrase a little bit earlier is to blow like flexibility. That's exactly what we're trying to get to the reason why we are reconstructing our portfolio so that we have these very granular use case aligned data management services to provide the cloud like flexibility. Customers don't have the same data management needs all the time. Great. So they can pick and choose the exact solution that need because there are delivered on the same platform that can enable out the solution investment, you know, And that's the reality. We know that many of our customers are going to start with one and keep adding more and more services, because that's what we see as ongoing conversations that gives us the ability to really praise the entry products very aggressively when compared to competition, especially when we go against single product windows. This uses a lot of slammed where we can start with a really aggressively priced product and enable more capabilities as we move forward to give you an idea, we launched disaster recovery today. I would say that compared to the so the established vendors India, we would probably come in at about 25 to 40% of the Priceline because it depends on the environment and what not. But you're going to see that that's the power of bringing to the table. You start small and then depending on what your needs are, you have the flexibility to run on either. More data management capabilities are more workloads, depending on what your needs will be. I think it's been a drag from a partner perspective, less with muscle. If you want a little bit more than that, >>yes, I mean, that goes back to the idea of being ableto simply scale across government use functionality. For example, things like the fact that our disaster recovery offering the Newman doesn't require backup really allows us to have those Taylor conversations around use cases, applications >>a >>zealous platforms. You think about one of the the big demands that we've had coming in from customers and partners, which is help me have a D R scenario or a VR set up in my environment that doesn't require people to go put their hands on boxes and cables, which was one of those things that a year ago we were having. This conversation would not necessarily have been as important as it is now, but that ability to target those specific, urgent use cases without having to go across on sort of sell things that aren't necessarily associated with the immediate pain points really makes those just makes us ineffective. Offer. >>Yeah, you bring up some changing priorities. I think almost everybody will agree that the number one priority we're hearing from customers is around security. So whether I'm adopting more cloud, I'm looking at different solutions out there. Security has to be front and center. Could we just kind of go down the line and give us the update as to how security fits and all the pieces we've been discussing? >>I guess I'm talking about change, right, so I'll start. The security for us is built into everything that we do the same view you're probably going to get from each of us because security is burden. It's not a board on, and you would see it across a lot of different images. If you take our backup and recovery and disaster recovery, for instance, a lot of ransomware protection capabilities built into the solution. For instance, we have anomaly detection that is built into the platform. If we see any kind of spurious activity happening all of a sudden, we know that that might be a potential and be reported so that the customer can take a quick look at air Gap isolation, encryption by default. So many features building. And when you come to disaster recovery, encryption on the wire, a lot of security aspects we've been to every part of the portfolio don't. >>Consequently, with Hedvig, it's probably no surprise that when that this platform was developed and as we've continued development, security has always been at the core of what we're doing is stored. So what? It's for something as simple as encryption on different volume, ensuring the communication between applications and the storage platform itself, and the way the distributors towards platform indicates those are all incredibly secured. Lock down almost such for our own our own protocols for ensuring that, um, you know, only we're able to talk within our own, our own system. Beyond that, though, I mean it comes down to ensure that data in rest data in transit. It's always it's always secure. It's also encrypted based upon the level of control that using any is there one. And then beyond just the fact of keeping the data secure. You have things like immutable snapshots. You have declared of data sovereignty to ensure that you can put essentially virtual fence barriers for where data can be transported in this highly distributed platform. Ah, and then, from a user perspective, there's always level security for providing all seeking roll on what groups organization and consume storage or leverage. Different resource is the storage platform and then, of course, from a service provider's perspective as well, providing that multi tenanted access s so that users can have access to what they want when they want it. It's all about self service, >>and the idea there is that obviously, we're all familiar with the reports of increased bad actors in the current environment to increased ransomware attacks and so forth. And be a part of that is addressed by what wrong and done said in terms of our core technology. Part of that also, though, is addressed by being able to work across platforms and environments because, you know, as we see the acceleration of state tier one applications or entire data center, evacuations into service provider or cloud environments has happened. You know, this could have taken 5 10 years in a in a normal cycle. But we've seen this happen overnight has cut this. Companies have needed to move those I T environments off science into managed environments and our ability to protect the applications, whether they're on premises, whether they're in the cloud or in the most difficult near where they live. In both cases, in both places at once, is something that it's really important to our customers to be able to ensure that in the end, security posture >>great Well, final thing I have for all three of you is you correctly noted that this is not the end, but along the journey that you're going along with your customers. So you know, with all three of you would like to get a little bit. Give us directionally. What should we be looking at? A convo. Take what was announced today and a little bit of look forward towards future. >>Directionally we should be looking at a place where we're delivering even greater simplicity to our customers. And that's gonna be achieved through multiple aspects. 1st 1 it's more technologies coming together. Integrating. We announced three important integration story. We announced the Microsoft partnership a couple of weeks back. You're gonna see us more longer direction. The second piece is technology innovation. We believe in it. That's what Differentiators has a very different company and we'll continue building it along the dimensions off data awareness, data, automation and agility. And the last one continued obsession with data. What more can we do with it? How can we drive more insights for our customers We're going to see is introducing more capabilities along those dimensions? No. >>And I think Rhonda tying directly into what you're highlighting there. I'm gonna go back to what we teased out 10 months ago at calm Bolt. Go there in Colorado in this very on this very program and talk about how, in the unification of ah ah, data and storage management, that vision, we're going to make more and more reality. I think the, uh, the announcements we've made here today let some of the things that we've done in between the lead up to this point is just proof of our execution. And ah, I can happily and excitedly tell you, we're just getting warmed up. It's going to be, ah, gonna be some fun future ahead. >>And I think studio in the running that out with the partner angle. Obviously, we're going to continue to produce great products and solutions that we're going to make our partners relevant. In those conversations with customers, I think we're also going to continue to invest in alternative business models, services, things like migration services, audit services, other things that build on top of this core technology to provide value for customers and additional opportunities for our partners >>to >>build out their their offerings around combo technologies. >>All right, well, thank you. All three of you for joining us. It was great to be able to dig in, understand those pieces. I know you've got lots of resources online for people to learn more. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you too. Thank you. Alright, and stay with us. So we've got one more interview left for the Cube's coverage of con vault. Future Ready, students. Mannan. Thanks. As always for watching the Cube. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> 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 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.

why from nashville tennessee it's the hue covering CommVault go 2018 brought to you by CommVault welcome back we're a few miles down the road from the Jack Daniel's distillery I believe there's some whiskey flowing on the show floor here but we're gonna finish a couple more interviews you're watching the cube I'm Stu minimun this is Keith Townsend happy to welcome back to the program Don Foster is the senior director of solutions marketing with Conn volt Don great to see you hey great thanks for the invite all right so been really good energy at the show these second time at the program it's my first you've got 2000 of the loyal supporters here lots of breakouts you know the pavilions been hopping labs and everything yeah how's the show been for you so far I think it's been incredible I mean first hats off to our partners and customers for coming the buzz is great this year we try to do something maybe a little bit different than in years past and really make it all about the partner ecosystem and about how solutions are more than just combo software it's CommVault together with our partners really get the outcomes what the customers want so we've really integrated everything in as best we possibly can from the content and the theaters and who's doing presentations and even how we do some of the collaboration yeah one of the themes we've been poking at a bit is like okay what's the same and what's different about CommVault you've got obviously you know trusted brand got a lot of existing customers but you know this is not the CommVault of five years ago it was a really broad set of announcements this week yeah I want want you to say what what's been anything surprise you as to kind of what is resonating which things people are getting most excited about I'm sure yesterday when you showed off that bezel and a bunch of people were booing and I you're like really the bezels it's a bunch of geeks here yeah so you know sometimes the flashy lights still you know get us going for sure well like there's always a few things that kind of surprise you and some things that really don't I mean you say what's same what's different you know there's a few terms that we use one of them being powerful simplicity the fact that the power that comma offers for customers from technology perspective you know that's always a mainstay and I think our customers know that our partners absolutely know that and the fact that we can deliver these these solutions for our customers that are really interesting an integrated way is always powerful the simplicity side I don't know even listening to Al not too long ago talking about hey we need to make things more simplified that's really resonating well and it's not just a dashboard or an interface but it's all the automation that's coming behind the scenes that's really starting to change people's idea in my and their minds and I mean we know we know the customers are expecting more me a Bob and I'll talk to battle Don look on that on the keynote stage our partners are expecting more so we need to deliver more as well so I mean those are some really interesting things on the bezel you know it's interesting appliances you never think it's like people don't want to see the equipment I mean that people see servers and their server racks every day but you bring a piece of equipment you stick in our podium and everyone wants to touch it take a selfie with it it's the new appliance look I applaud your team for not you know smoke and you know music and everything and you know here's the unveiling yeah your software company and therefore one of the deployment models might be we make it nice and easy here it is that's great and everything yeah you have little design people do their thing but at the end of the day I don't want to think about it it's most of the stuff sticking in racks in my data center or in the cloud aren't things that I need to worry about right right I mean it appliance is cool but guess what what we're doing with partners like HP and Cisco on building even larger scale and appliance that's just as school if not maybe cooler so I mean it's just it's great kind of showcase that sort of a spectrum of what we can do for our customers so let's talk about the part of the ecosystem for the size so you guys have a really big show floor great announcements with Cisco HPE but 500 partners doing a partner portion of the show what are some of the under-the-radar announcements or even trends that you've seen that customers are excited about yeah sure so actually I just before I came out here I was a TBC with one of our large worldwide partners and one of the things we were talking about they're super excited about the CommVault activate a product and then did the portfolio of applications that were launching and they basically look you guys absolutely nailed it it's kind of the duh moment you know in fact the partner said three years ago we were trying to tell our customers it's it's the data stupid like the data it's that's what's most important deer is cool but it's the data and when they heard this came out it's a whole nother route for them to talk to customers about how they can do things smarter around their data without trying to sell them on necessarily swapping out back and recovery first so let's really understand what your environment looks like and I'm hearing a lot of buzz from our partner community just on how cool what this might be able to do for them and how they're building their business but more importantly the customers are starting to realize hey GDP are just isn't in an EU thing the California just brought their own regulations we're gonna see that probably come to a state near year before you know it so you're gonna have to have a need to act and really maintain and control that data that's really what activate does right going beyond just metadata and giving giving companies a chance to really understand what they have and how they might need to act against it either to meet their compliance requirements or maybe just be smarter with data yeah I love that be smarter with data I think I was saying you know half the customers that they're starting with compliance because that's something we have to do but then there's the opportunities as to what can I do with the data a great example in the keynote it was like oh well I can actually use intelligence too how do I call the data yes you want to save a lot of data but I don't necessarily need to save all the data and that could save me millions of dollars when I do that so yeah I mean the power of data I think we are still in the early days of you know how does CommVault help customers through that that's so I mean it's it's really kind of in the breath of how we crawl information and what we sort of unlock as we do that right so you probably saw we talked about the four dimensional index the 40 index and it's real it's to call it 4d just to try to make it sound super technical but there really are multiple dimensions that we pull together from information and the meta information and where it comes from and whatnot that's all super important from a starting point but once you start working through a review process you've been vent oriented you want to be able to start adding in some tags maybe some entity detail on where and how that fits the organization and then from that you can get deeper into context and content so the content indexing adding and those are tributes being able to really start to align different different sets of data against one another and then the next piece which we do a little bit ourselves and we also work with partners like lucid works like folks like brain space we can start driving context from that information so before we've even talked about moving or storing data we're crawling this information and really giving customers the chance to solve what really is probably a top-three issue for CIOs and that's what they do do I have where is it and is there value in it or is there risk in it or what is is what I don't know about my data bigger than I realize and that's what this helps to unlock and solve for so I think now we're at the beginning of just the beginning of where infrastructure traditional infrastructure companies like con vault are bleeding into data management specifically with 4d indexing where we're providing data outside of the traditional or what's the file size the data was created centered on recover backing up recovering today that actually providing business context and value that application is v's can pick up are you starting to see any movement in is v-space to leveraging the data that's provided by index 40 so we're definitely seeing interest you know so when people think about data they tend to go down this idea of a data Lake and I've talked I'm sure you guys have heard this oh yeah we just throw the data Lake we throw the data lake well what are you throwing in the data Lake now that's a good question we don't know what's in the data Lake anymore and it becomes a data swamp you probably heard those level of stories right well if you don't know what's in there if the integrity of the information then it becomes a major challenge well a lot of the partners the is V is the folks that want to build and work on solutions outside of you know on top of the data they need to know that they have a good source of truth from what they're working from so being able to showcase that we have sort of that virtual data layer the fact that we can crawl data it's not even under our own management and then be able to offer that information back up to another another partner that really starts to you know sparks and some ideas or maybe what could be next so action we're still working through that we still have some things to do around software development kits and make it easier for our partners to build and get that ecosystem going but it's absolutely right down the alley what we were we want to take this all right so Don I hear your data Lake and the data swamp and when we go to the world of multi cloud and edge components really what we get into is the data ocean because there are currents and weather patterns and you know challenges unforeseen the edge of the map you know don't go there things like that it's one of the things you know I've been looking at the last couple of years when I look at companies like comm vault is you know how do you play in the multi cloud world we had a good chat with AWS I stopped by the Microsoft Azure booth here and as things like multi cloud and edge computing fit in you know weirdoes comm bolt fit so on the cloud space I mean it really starts with how you're actually leveraging or moving data or using data in the cloud right and it seems seems minor but if you're not really using the cloud natively if you're not storing data in a way that an s3 blob expects it and you don't have the index behind it if you're just passing it out into containers so you're not really putting that rigor to what that information is then you start to lose a lot of the downstream capability and so taking advantage of all these different services that are inside of the cloud so I mean this is back in 2008 you know 2007 when AWS was starting to really hit cloud computing you started hearing about Microsoft and Microsoft as you're starting up we realized that we wanted to work with these blob based storage devices and from there we realized all right if we're gonna let customers go to the cloud we want to make sure that once their data goes there there's never a reason for them necessarily to have to pull it back let's be able to help them orchestrate the resource utilization and in order for us to do that that data has to be natively accessible really easy right there in that cloud so that's kind of been our vision so as we've supported AWS and there are many services as we supported Microsoft Azure there many services as we're working through in supporting Google cloud platform Oracle cloud we're tying into those back-end services to make sure that that native access is always available and the red thread there is really the way CommVault indexes it very similar what the 40 index is from an activate perspective that red thread is how we can help manage and information across those clouds so it gives customers an ability to know all right it can be in cold storage but I still know where it is what it's meant for and at any point in time I can use it to drive more insight or pull it up into a production compute resource in the cloud all right don't want to give you the final word as we're coming towards the end of our broadcast here CommVault go what what main takeaway you want customers to have when they think about CommVault and think about this event great so I want them to walk away and realize okay the CommVault maybe they thought we were you know five years ago or the cow bought that maybe they're hearing from other people that isn't from us give us a chance and really take a look the things we're doing around AI the way we're working in a delivery of cloud environments the fact that we have that reliability that dependability and all the modern technologies that you're looking for I bet they will be surprised if they just give us a chance they'll see that the power in our software has become something that's really simple and will actually help them get faster to achieve their outcomes than if they looked at buying point solutions and trying to piece it together on their own so that's really well that's really what we're looking for is start to learn and understand at the new con volt is I bet will surprise them all right Don Foster really appreciate you giving us the update we appreciate the opportunity to be able to dig in with your customers in this broad ecosystem for Keith Townsend Tom's to minimas we'll be doing a wrap-up here in a second and thanks so much for watching 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