(upbeat music) >> We're back at VeeamON 2022. We're here at the Aria in Las Vegas Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Bill Andrews is here. He's the president and CEO of ExaGrid, mass boy. Bill, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I hear a lot about obviously data protection, cyber resiliency, what's the big picture trends that you're seeing when you talk to customers? >> Well, I think clearly we were talking just a few minutes ago, data's growing like crazy, right This morning, I think they said it was 28% growth a year, right? So data's doubling almost just a little less than every three years. And then you get the attacks on the data which was the keynote speech this morning as well, right. All about the ransomware attacks. So we've got more and more data, and that data is more and more under attack. So I think those are the two big themes. >> So ExaGrid as a company been around for a long time. You've kind of been the steady kind of Eddy, if you will. Tell us about ExaGrid, maybe share with us some of the differentiators that you share with customers. >> Sure, so specifically, let's say in the Veeam world you're backing up your data, and you really only have two choices. You can back that up to disc. So some primary storage disc from a Dell, or a Hewlett Packard, or an NetApp or somebody, or you're going to back it up to what's called an inline deduplication appliance maybe a Dell Data Domain or an HPE StoreOnce, right? So what ExaGrid does is we've taken the best of both those but not the challenges of both those and put 'em together. So with disc, you're going to get fast backups and fast restores, but because in backup you keep weekly's, monthly's, yearly retention, the cost of this becomes exorbitant. If you go to a deduplication appliance, and let's say the Dell or the HPs, the data comes in, has to be deduplicated, compare one backup to the next to reduce that storage, which lowers the cost. So fixes that problem, but the fact that they do it inline slows the backups down dramatically. All the data is deduplicated so the restores are slow, and then the backup window keeps growing as the data grows 'cause they're all scale up technologies. >> And the restores are slow 'cause you got to rehydrate. >> You got to rehydrate every time. So what we did is we said, you got to have both. So our appliances have a front end disc cache landing zone. So you're right directed to the disc., Nothing else happens to it, whatever speed the backup app could write at that's the speed we take it in at. And then we keep the most recent backups in that landing zone ready to go. So you want to boot a VM, it's not an hour like a deduplication appliance it's a minute or two. Secondly, we then deduplicate the data into a second tier which is a repository tier, but we have all the deduplicated data for the long term retention, which gets the cost down. And on top of that, we're scale out. Every appliance has networking processor memory end disc. So if you double, triple, quadruple the data you double, triple, quadruple everything. And if the backup window is six hours at 100 terabyte it's six hours at 200 terabyte, 500 terabyte, a petabyte it doesn't matter. >> 'Cause you scale out. >> Right, and then lastly, our repository tier is non-network facing. We're the only ones in the industry with this. So that under a ransomware attack, if you get hold of a rogue server or you hack the media server, get to the backup storage whether it's disc or deduplication appliance, you can wipe out all the backup data. So you have nothing to recover from. In our case, you wipe it out, our landing zone will be wiped out. We're no different than anything else that's network facing. However, the only thing that talks to our repository tier is our object code. And we've set up security policies as to how long before you want us to delete data, let's say 10 days. So if you have an attack on Monday that data doesn't get deleted till like a week from Thursday, let's say. So you can freeze the system at any time and do restores. And then we have immutable data objects and all the other stuff. But the culmination of a non-network facing tier and the fact that we do the delayed deletes makes us the only one in the industry that can actually truly recover. And that's accelerating our growth, of course. >> Wow, great description. So that disc cache layer is a memory, it's a flash? >> It's disc, it's spinning disc. >> Spinning disc, okay. >> Yeah, no different than any other disc. >> And then the tiered is what, less expensive spinning disc? >> No, it's still the same. It's all SaaS disc 'cause you want the quality, right? So it's all SaaS, and so we use Western Digital or Seagate drives just like everybody else. The difference is that we're not doing any deduplication coming in or out of that landing zone to have fast backups and fast restores. So think of it like this, you've got disc and you say, boy it's too expensive. What I really want to do then is put maybe a deduplication appliance behind it to lower the cost or reverse it. I've got a deduplication appliance, ugh, it's too slow for backups and restores. I really want to throw this in front of it to have fast backups first. Basically, that's what we did. >> So where does the cost savings, Bill come in though, on the tier? >> The cost savings comes in the fact that we got deduplication in that repository. So only the most recent backup >> Ah okay, so I get it. >> are the duplicated data. But let's say you had 40 copies of retention. You know, 10 weekly's, 36 monthly's, a few yearly. All of that's deduplicated >> Okay, so you're deduping the stuff that's not as current. >> Right. >> Okay. >> And only a handful of us deduplicate at the layer we do. In other words, deduplication could be anywhere from two to one, up to 50 to one. I mean it's all over the place depending on the algorithm. Now it's what everybody's algorithms do. Some backup apps do two to one, some do five to one, we do 20 to one as well as much as 50 to one depending on the data types. >> Yeah, so the workload is going to largely determine the combination >> The content type, right. with the algos, right? >> Yeah, the content type. >> So the part of the environment that's behind the illogical air gap, if you will, is deduped data. >> Yes. >> So in this case, is it fair to say that you're trading a positive economic value for a little bit longer restore from that environment? >> No, because if you think about backup 95% of the customers restores are from the most recent data. >> From the disc cache. >> 95% of the time 'cause you think about why do you need fast restores? Somebody deleted a file, somebody overwrote a file. They can't go work, they can't open a file. It's encrypted, it's corrupted. That's what IT people are trying to keep users productive. When do you go for longer-term retention data? It's an SEC audit. It's a HIPAA audit. It's a legal discovery, you don't need that data right away. You have days and weeks to get that ready for that legal discovery or that audit. So we found that boundary where you keep users productive by keeping the most recent data in the disc cache landing zone, but anything that's long term. And by the way, everyone else is long term, at that point. >> Yeah, so the economics are comparable to the dedupe upfront. Are they better, obviously get the performance advance? >> So we would be a lot looped. The thing we replaced the most believe it or not is disc, we're a lot less expensive than the disc. I was meeting with some Veeam folks this morning and we were up against Cisco 3260 disc at a children's hospital. And on our quote was $500,000. The disc was 1.4 million. Just to give you an example of the savings. On a Data Domain we're typically about half the price of a Data Domain. >> Really now? >> The reason why is their front end control are so expensive. They need the fastest trip on the planet 'cause they're trying to do inline deduplication. >> Yeah, so they're chasing >> They need the fastest memory >> on the planet. >> this chips all the time. They need SSD on data to move in and out of the hash table. In order to keep up with inline, they've got to throw so much compute at it that it drives their cost up. >> But now in the case of ransomware attack, are you saying that the landing zone is still available for recovery in some circumstances? Or are you expecting that that disc landing zone would be encrypted by the attacker? >> Those are two different things. One is deletion, one is encryption. So let's do the first scenario. >> I'm talking about malicious encryption. >> Yeah, absolutely. So the first scenario is the threat actor encrypts all your primary data. What's does he go for next? The backup data. 'Cause he knows that's your belt and suspend is to not pay the ransom. If it's disc he's going to go in and put delete commands at the disc, wipe out the disc. If it's a data domain or HPE StoreOnce, it's all going to be gone 'cause it's one tier. He's going to go after our landing zone, it's going to be gone too. It's going to wipe out our landing zone. Except behind that we have the most recent backup deduplicate in the repository as well as all the other backups. So what'll happen is they'll freeze the system 'cause we weren't going to delete anything in the repository for X days 'cause you set up a policy, and then you restore the most recent backup into the landing zone or we can restore it directly to your primary storage area, right? >> Because that tier is not network facing. >> That's right. >> It's fenced off essentially. >> People call us every day of the week saying, you saved me, you saved me again. People are coming up to me here, you saved me, you saved me. >> Tell us a story about that, I mean don't give me the names but how so. >> I'll actually do a funnier story, 'cause these are the ones that our vendors like to tell. 'Cause I'm self-serving as the CEO that's good of course, a little humor. >> It's your 15 minutes of job. >> That is my 15 minutes of fame. So we had one international company who had one ExaGrid at one location, 19 Data Domains at the other locations. Ransomware attack guess what? 19 Data Domains wiped out. The one ExaGrid, the only place they could restore. So now all 20 locations of course are ExaGrids, China, Russia, Mexico, Germany, US, et cetera. They rolled us out worldwide. So it's very common for that to occur. And think about why that is, everyone who's network facing you can get to the storage. You can say all the media servers are buttoned up, but I can find a rogue server and snake my way over the storage, I can. Now, we also of course support the Veeam Data Mover. So let's talk about that since we're at a Veeam conference. We were the first company to ever integrate the Veeam Data Mover. So we were the first actually ever integration with Veeam. And so that Veeam Data Mover is a protocol that goes from Veeam to the ExaGrid, and we run it on both ends. So that's a more secure protocol 'cause it's not an open format protocol like SaaS. So with running the Veeam Data Mover we get about 30% more performance, but you do have a more secure protocol layer. So if you don't get through Veeam but you get through the protocol, boom, we've got a stronger protocol. If you make it through that somehow, or you get to it from a rogue server somewhere else we still have the repository. So we have all these layers so that you can't get at it. >> So you guys have been at this for a while, I mean decade and a half plus. And you've raised a fair amount of money but in today's terms, not really. So you've just had really strong growth, sequential growth. I understand it, and double digit growth year on year. >> Yeah, about 25% a year right now >> 25%, what's your global strategy? >> So we have sales offices in about 30 countries already. So we have three sales teams in Brazil, and three in Germany, and three in the UK, and two in France, and a lot of individual countries, Chile, Argentina, Columbia, Mexico, South Africa, Saudi, Czech Republic, Poland, Dubai, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, et cetera. We've just added two sales territories in Japan. We're adding two in India. And we're installed in over 50 countries. So we've been international all along the way. The goal of the company is we're growing nicely. We have not raised money in almost 10 years. >> So you're self-funding. You're cash positive. >> We are cash positive and self-funded and people say, how have you done that for 10 years? >> You know what's interesting is I remember, Dave Scott, Dave Scott was the CEO of 3PAR, and he told me when he came into that job, he told the VCs, they wanted to give him 30 million. He said, I need 80 million. I think he might have raised closer to a hundred which is right around what you guys have raised. But like you said, you haven't raised it in a long time. And in today's terms, that's nothing, right? >> 100 is 500 in today's terms. >> Yeah, right, exactly. And so the thing that really hurt 3PAR, they were public companies so you could see all this stuff is they couldn't expand internationally. It was just too damn expensive to set up the channels, and somehow you guys have figured that out. >> 40% of our business comes out of international. We're growing faster internationally than we are domestically. >> What was the formula there, Bill, was that just slow and steady or? >> It's a great question. >> No, so what we did, we said let's build ExaGrid like a McDonald's franchise, nobody's ever done that before in high tech. So what does that mean? That means you have to have the same product worldwide. You have to have the same spares model worldwide. You have to have the same support model worldwide. So we early on built the installation. So we do 100% of our installs remotely. 100% of our support remotely, yet we're in large enterprises. Customers racks and stacks the appliances we get on with them. We do the entire install on 30 minutes to about three hours. And we've been developing that into the product since day one. So we can remotely install anywhere in the world. We keep spares depots all over the world. We can bring 'em up really quick. Our support model is we have in theater support people. So they're in Europe, they're in APAC, they're in the US, et cetera. And we assign customers to the support people. So they deal with the same support person all the time. So everything is scalable. So right now we're going to open up India. It's the same way we've opened up every other country. Once you've got the McDonald's formula we just stamp it all over the world. >> That's amazing. >> Same pricing, same product same model, same everything. >> So what was the inspiration for that? I mean, you've done this since day one, which is what like 15, 16 years ago. Or just you do engineering or? >> No, so our whole thought was, first of all you can't survive anymore in this world without being an international company. 'Cause if you're going to go after large companies they have offices all over the world. We have companies now that have 17, 18, 20, 30 locations. And there were in every country in the world, you can't go into this business without being able to ship anywhere in the world and support it for a single customer. You're not going into Singapore because of that. You're going to Singapore because some company in Germany has offices in the U.S, Mexico Singapore and Australia. You have to be international. It's a must now. So that was the initial thing is that, our goal is to become a billion dollar company. And we're on path to do that, right. >> You can see a billion. >> Well, I can absolutely see a billion. And we're bigger than everybody thinks. Everybody guesses our revenue always guesses low. So we're bigger than you think. The reason why we don't talk about it is we don't need to. >> That's the headline for our writers, ExaGrid is a billion dollar company and nobody's know about it. >> Million dollar company. >> On its way to a billion. >> That's right. >> You're not disclosing. (Bill laughing) But that's awesome. I mean, that's a great story. I mean, you kind of are a well kept secret, aren't you? >> Well, I dunno if it's a well kept secret. You know, smaller companies never have their awareness of big companies, right? The Dells of the world are a hundred billion. IBM is 70 billion, Cisco is 60 billion. Easy to have awareness, right? If you're under a billion, I got to give a funny story then I think we got to close out here. >> Oh go ahead please. >> So there's one funny story. So I was talking to the CIO of a super large Fortune 500 company. And I said to him, "Just so who do you use?" "I use IBM Db2, and I use, Cisco routers, and I use EMC primary storage, et cetera. And I use all these big." And I said, "Would you ever switch from Db2?" "Oh no, the switching costs would kill me. I could never go to Oracle." So I said to him, "Look would you ever use like a Pure Storage, right. A couple billion dollar company." He says, "Who?" >> Huh, interesting. >> I said to him, all right so skip that. I said, "VMware, would you ever think about going with Nutanix?" "Who?" Those are billion dollar plus companies. And he was saying who? >> Public companies. >> And he was saying who? That's not uncommon when I talk to CIOs. They see the big 30 and that's it. >> Oh, that's interesting. What about your partnership with Veeam? Tell us more about that. >> Yeah, so I would actually, and I'm going to be bold when I say this 'cause I think you can ask anybody here at the conference. We're probably closer first of all, to the Veeam sales force than any company there is. You talk to any Veeam sales rep, they work closer with ExaGrid than any other. Yeah, we are very tight in the field and have been for a long time. We're integrated with the Veeam Data Boomer. We're integrated with SOBR. We're integrated with all the integrations or with the product as well. We have a lot of joint customers. We actually do a lot of selling together, where we go in as Veeam ExaGrid 'cause it's a great end to end story. Especially when we're replacing, let's say a Dell Avamar to Dell Data Domain or a Dell Network with a Dell Data Domain, very commonly Veeam ExaGrid go in together on those types of sales. So we do a lot of co-selling together. We constantly train their systems engineers around the world, every given week we're training either inside sales teams, and we've trained their customer support teams in Columbus and Prague. So we're very tight with 'em we've been tight for over a decade. >> Is your head count public? Can you share that with us? >> So we're just over 300 employees. >> Really, wow. >> We have 70 open positions, so. >> Yeah, what are you looking for? Yeah, everything, right? >> We are looking for engineers. We are looking for customer support people. We're looking for marketing people. We're looking for inside sales people, field people. And we've been hiring, as of late, major account reps that just focus on the Fortune 500. So we've separated that out now. >> When you hire engineers, I mean I think I saw you were long time ago, DG, right? Is that true? >> Yeah, way back in the '80s. >> But systems guy. >> That's how old I am. >> Right, systems guy. I mean, I remember them well Eddie Castro and company. >> Tom West. >> EMV series. >> Tom West was the hero of course. >> The EMV 4000, the EMV 20,000, right? >> When were kids, "The Soul of a New Machine" was the inspirational book but anyway, >> Yeah Tracy Kidder, it was great. >> Are you looking for systems people, what kind of talent are you looking for in engineering? >> So it's a lot of Linux programming type stuff in the product 'cause we run on a Linux space. So it's a lot of Linux programs so its people in those storage. >> Yeah, cool, Bill, hey, thanks for coming on to theCUBE. Well learned a lot, great story. >> It's a pleasure. >> That was fun. >> Congratulations. >> Thanks. >> And good luck. >> All right, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2022, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back right after this short break, stay with us. (soft beat music)

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, It's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris. We're here at day one at VeeamON 2019. This is CUBE's 3rd year of doing VeeamON. We started in New Orleans, it was a great show. Last year was Chicago, and here, Miami at the Fontainbleau hotel. Marc Crespi is here, he's the vice president of sales engineering for the Americas at ExaGrid Systems Cube. Hello Marc, good to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> Thanks for coming on. So, give us the update. What's happening with ExaGrid? You guys got new headquarters in Marlborough. Marlborough's happening these days, right? We got the new shopping spa, and the mayor's going crazy, so give us the update on ExaGrid. >> Yes, so we just moved into a beautiful new headquarters in Marlborough and share it with some great other companies. The company continues to grow rapidly, double digit growth year over year, one of the few companies in this category that's growing that quickly. So everything's great. >> What's driving the growth? >> Well, customers are looking to fix the economics of backup. They've been spending too much money on it for a lot of years, so they look at products now, they want them to be simple, easy to use, and very cost-effective and we drive that trend very hard. >> Yeah I mean that doesn't really describe- what you just described, simple, easy to use, and cost-effective really doesn't describe backup for the past 20 years. So what are you doing specifically to make it simple, cost-effective, and easy to use? >> Well, first of all, by working with companies like Veeam. Veeam is a very easy-to-use product, it's very intuitive and then our product integrates very well with it so the products work together very well and makes just a very simple solution. >> What do you see as other big trends in backup? showed a slide today, 15 billion dollars. A big chunk of that, maybe close to half of it was backup and recovery, there's all kind of other stuff: data management, analytics, etc, etc, etc. What do you see, obviously cloud, you talked about the big superpowers, what are the big trends that are driving your business and more importantly, your customers transformation? >> Well, customers are looking to reduce the amount of data that they actually have to move. So, incremental technology's a really big- themes of pioneer in that, obviously doing incremental backups and that saves time and effort, saves space, along with data deduplication, it really makes for cost-effective storage solution. >> Talk a little bit more about why you're growing, how you sort of uniquely compete in the marketplace with some of the big whales. >> Sure, so our most unique feature is our architecture, and it has both technical aspects and economic aspects. Because we're a scale-out architecture, meaning that with every capacity increase of your data, we're not just adding storage, we're adding CompuPower network memory, etc. so that we keep the backup times very, very, very low. That also makes for a very cost-effective architecture because what we've done is you can scale out pretty much infinitely and we've also eliminated the concept of the end of a life of products. So we never force our customers into mandatory refreshes so their economics are very predictable over a long period of time. >> What do you see as the biggest use cases today that are driving your business? I mean, obviously, backup and recovery, I talked earlier about some of these emerging data management, cloud obviously, is this big, Edge, you seeing much going on there. What are some of those workloads and use cases that you see? >> I think probably one of the biggest use cases these days is what I would call instant recoveries, meaning that rather than doing a traditional restore, which could take a long number of minutes to hours. Customers will actually run production workloads off of the backup target as a way to get users back productive more quickly than would've been done in the past. >> Yeah, and that's key because you see in RPO and RTO's sort of companies putting more and more pressure on the IT groups to shrink those times, presuming you're seeing that in conjunction with digital, digital business, digital transformation. You talked about architecture before. What about your architecture and maybe with your partnership with Veeam allows customers to shrink those RPO and RTO times? >> I think the other aspect of our architecture that's very unique is what we called adaptive deduplication. One of the things we looked at when we architected the product was deduplication is obviously a very effective technology, but what are potential cons. Things that would make it less effective in backup. And one of the things we realized was if you put deduplication in the middle of the backup window and due to deduplication while the backups are running, then you could interfere with the speed of disk. So we do something called adaptive deduplication which means that we allow the object from the backup software to land and then we deduplicate and replicate them in parallel, but we make sure that we're not throttling the backups. So, we provide disk speeds even though we use deduplication. >> Okay. So, that's an example of one of the things you're doing to sort of improve it. How about Veeam integration? Is there anything specific there that you're doing that we should know about? >> Well, part of it is because of adaptive deduplication and because we maintain complete copies of backups. We uniquely support instant Veeam recovery like no other vendor can. Furthermore, we run what's called the Veeam data remover which is actually Veeam technology runs inside of our appliance and sets up a optimized communication protocol with the Veeam software that allows us to do a number of great things. >> Wait, double click on on that. So, is it an efficient protocol or is there other sort of accelerators that you've got in there? >> The protocol is optimized, and then we do some other acceleration around how you do synthetic folds and things of that sort that are unique to the data mover. >> And you have news with Veeam this week, do you not? >> Yes, we do. We're announcing something called ExaGrid backup with Veemam and what it is in a nutshell is the ability for a customer to purchase both technologies from their preferred reseller by just ordering one part number. So it dramatically simplifies the acquisition of the two technologies and allows customers to simplify the buying process. >> So Veeam, I know, is all channel sales. How about you guys? How do you go to market? >> We also are, yes. >> So, talk more about your go-to market. What do you have? Like, an overlay sales force that it helps facilitate? You got partners? Maybe you can talk more about your ecosystem. >> Well, we have a worldwide sales force and our sales people, the people that do the selling, work directly with our partners, so we don't have a specialized channel workforce, but we have a specialized channel strategy, and our entire sales team is very well trained on the channel, how to work with the channel, and make them happy and successful. >> So, backup for a long time time was kind of an afterthought. It was non-differentiated. You just did what you needed to make sure the devices could be recovered. >> Yeah, you bolted it on. >> You bolted it on. >> Right. >> Increasingly, it's becoming recognized as a central capability to any digital business, because if your data goes away or your data's no longer available, your digital business is gone. >> Right. >> That suggests we're going to get a greater degree of differentiation in the types of devices, in the types of systems, etc, that are going to become part of a backup solution. First of all, do you agree with that? And then secondly, go back to the use cases, where do you guys see yourselves fitting into that increasingly federated backup capability? >> Well, I certainly do agree with it. I mean, it's always been a necessity, but now even with things like Ransomware and the cryptoviruses, and things of that sort, it's even more important than it's ever been. It's no longer just data loss, etc. So, we fit into that trend and we'll continue to fit into that trend by continuing to drive the economics through the floor. Customers want that level of protection, it's a little bit like insurance. You need the protection, but you don't want to pay a dollar more than you have to, right? So you want to put it on an economic diet, and the way our technology evolves, we come out with denser, faster systems at a lower cost per terabyte just about every year. And we'll continue to do that. >> So do you anticipate then that there's going to be specialized use cases or are you just going after taking costs out of the equation? >> It's not so specialized because it's very horizontal. Everybody does it and everybody backs up all their data. So, we don't specialize in any one area of the data center like database or anything of that sort. We go wherever the customer needs us to go inside their data center. >> It's in the data center, sorry David, it's in the data center. >> In the data center, we also have a cloud offering, we have partners that will offer disaster recovery as a service, so they'll have data centers that manage on behalf of the customers, and we also have an offering that goes into Amazon web services. And, shortly, we'll be coming out with one for Azure. >> And that is what? A software based offering that uses the cloud as a target? >> Correct, it's a virtual appliance that you can replicate into the cloud. >> All right. We don't have much time left tonight, we have a really important topic to cover, which is, we talked about last year, but I want to bring it up again, which is sports. >> Yup. Why don't we talk Boston sports, we could talk about Warriors. I got a question for you, but- >> I'll watch >> I asked you last year, and I think it was May, we were in Chicago, I said "Would you have traded Tom Brady?" At a time when the sentiment was, he was done. And you said "No way, absolutely not." You, Peter McKay, and Patrick Osmond all said emphatically no, you made the right call. So good job. >> Thank you. >> Your thoughts? >> Would never trade him. He can play until he's 100 for all I care. As long as he keeps performing at such a high level, why would you lose him? >> And then, of course, the Red Sox, 108 wins, that was an amazing gift that they gave us. So, I don't know if you're a baseball fan. >> I am. >> All right, I got to ask you, Peter. Are the Warriors the greatest basketball team in the history of basketball? >> Well, let's see... >> Brendan says yes. >> They are the best basketball team at a time of the most competitive NBA. Some of the rules have changed, but the athletes are better, they're more conditioned, they are more knowledgeable by how to play this game, and they are the best team in basketball without Kevin Durant and without Boogie Cousins. >> Yeah. >> So ... hard to argue. >> They're sweeping Portland without Durant which is pretty amazing. So Brendan, for years, has been trying to tell me that. You know, Brendan is our local basketball genius so, I don't know. >> Now, would the Warriors have beaten say a Bill Russell Celtics team with the Celtics- Bill Russell Celtics team rules? Maybe not. >> Yeah, I don't know. I would say I'm starting to come around to Brendan's way of thinking. But, Marc, we'll give you the last word here. VeeamON 2019, great venue here in Miami, very hip, hip company, hip venue, ExaGrid growing, double digit growth rate, so congratulations on that. Your final thoughts? >> Just great to be here, I always like coming to Veeam events, they're always very well attended, I get to meet a lot of customers and really enjoy it. >> Marc Crespi, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It's great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. Peter and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is VeeamON 2019 and you're watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you by VeeamOn. >> We're back. VeeamOn 2018. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, where we go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. Dave Vellante, with my co-host Stu Miniman and Marc Crespi is here. He's the Vice President of Sales Engineering at ExaGrid, another Mass boy. Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you again, Marc. >> Thanks, great to be with you guys again. Great to be on another fantastic VeeamOn in the world-class city of Chicago. >> Yeah, it's a great city. What's happening at VeeamOn for ExaGrid this year? >> Quite a few executive meetings, a lot of customer contact, existing customers, prospective customers, meeting with the joint sales teams and so on. We coordinate a lot with VeeamOn in the field and on an engineering level, so great to get off the phone and see each other face to face and really deepen the relationship. >> So, talk a little bit about what the conversation is like with customers, particularly as it relates to data protection. We're hearing a lot on cloud, multi-cloud, intelligent data management. What does that all mean to your customers? >> Sure. So, obviously VeeamOn provides a wealth of different functionality in all of those areas, whether it be the intelligent data management, which includes cloud components, et cetera. We at ExaGrid play a role, mostly on the on-premise side, to be honest, of the equation. And because we typically deal with a quite large customers, the use of the cloud is really, typically relegated for older, more archive oriented data, or long-term retention backup data than it is for primary data, or even primary copy for disaster recovery simply because of the logistics of managing that much data when you may need it. However, the cloud plays a very important role in those types of customers, as many of them have regulatory requirements, compliance requirements to keep data long-term that they may never need to access, or never need to touch. In which case tiering that out to the cloud is a potentially good strategy. >> Marc, one of the things we're watching at this show is how VeeamOn's trying to get deeper and broader into the enterprise. If you can, give us a little color as to how you're seeing, where is VeeamOn being successful, what are customers liking for that kind of solution? >> Sure. We're seeing a significant amount of traction with VeeamOn and enterprise customers. In fact, we met with a large travel agency out here at the show who's looking at both VeeamOn and ExaGrid as a combined solution. So we're working very closely. VeeamOn has a dedicated enterprise team in the field, and they're breaking down doors to a number of the different enterprises. And our solution, the way it scales and its performance profile is very well-suited to the enterprise. We are an enterprise-class company as well, so we're doing cross-introductions for each other and to each other's enterprise customer base as we go. >> Talk a little bit more about your solution, where the sweet spot is. We always talk about horses for courses on theCUBE. >> Marc: Sure. Yeah. >> What's your favorite course? >> So, we define a target customer, the first demographic that we use is typically the amount of data they have under management. Put another way, the amount of primary data they have, or the utilization on their primary storage. And where we typically live, these days is 50 terabyte is kind of the low end, all the way up to multiple petabytes of data being backed up. And we can store many, many weeks, or months, or years of that data because of the data deduplication impact. But that's our sweet spot. And typically that's the most key demographic for us to look at, is how much data they're managing. >> And you're an infrastructure provider, obviously. You have software, but you don't do backup software. That's not your specialty, right? >> That's correct. That's one of the reasons we have such a close relationship with VeeamOn. And, quite honestly, we partner with a number of folks, but VeeamOn is clearly one of our key, if not our key partner because they provide the data protection functionality, the management, et cetera, and we provide the intelligent hyperconverged secondary storage that can store all of that data, deduplicate it, replicate it, and also provide, uniquely, I might add; support for some of VeeamOn's really critical features, like Instant VM Recovery and Virtual Lab and SureBackup. Because of the way our product is architected those features work extremely well with us, where in some cases, in some solutions they don't quite work as well. >> I think back to a number of years ago deduplication was all the talk in the storage industry. How are the latest trends in everything from Flash's adoption, NVMe, and NVMe over fabric coming soon, how's that going to impact what customers are doing in your space? >> Sure, so first I'll tackle the deduplication part of it. There's no question that it's now become an accepted norm. It's rare these days that you're explaining what it is, or what it does. But there still is one left over misconception that I think it's really important for all of us who have deduplication to educate customers. And that is that not every type of deduplication is created equal. Sometimes people conflate it with compression. You know, all compression's kind of the same to a certain extent. The way deduplication is implemented, there are certain characteristics that will either increase the amount of data reduction you get or lessen the amount of data reduction you get. For customers it's really important to know what type of algorithm you're dealing with 'cause that's going to translate to cost over the long term. So that's the first thing. The other trends, the adoption of Flash and so on, really has been more on the primary storage side, where that level of performance is required for high transaction, high performance requiring applications and so on. Because Flash remains quite a bit more expensive than spinning disc is, it's inroads into backup or secondary storage have been somewhat more on a limited basis. >> So, if I understand you correctly, a large part of the data reduction is a function of the algorithm... I don't want to say not so much the workload, but I was always under the impression that the workload determined the sort of data reduction efficacy. >> Marc: Sure. >> Which I'm sure is true, but you're saying the algorithm also has a huge impact. >> It's a combination. So, there's no question that certain data types deduplicate extremely well, other types not as well, and some not at all. You know, pre-compressed, pre-encrypted data tends not to deduplicate well at all. Where the algorithm comes in is there's a couple of elements, not to get to get too much in the weeds, but something called block size, which is basically the size of the objects that you examine when you deduplicate, and then whether or not you do what's called variable-length analysis, which is adjusting to the fact that the data is expanding and shrinking as it's changing. Algorithm's that implement very large block sizes and avoid variable-length technology are going to get much lower deduplication ratios than algorithms that implement both of those elements, smaller object sizes, and variable-length technology. And we're in the latter category of the more aggressive form of deduplication. >> So, you've got greater granularity and the greater ability to drive data reduction ratios, assuming the workload is favorable to that. >> Exactly right. If you were to compare the same workload across the two algorithms, the less aggressive and the more aggressive, the more aggressive is going to do better on that workload than the less aggressive. >> And again, I know it depends on the workload, but are we talking about on a percentage basis 10% better, 20%, 50%, a 100%? >> Marc: Multiples better. Some cases five to 10 times better. >> Even an order of magnitude in some cases. >> Marc: An order of magnitude better, yes, in some cases. >> What about encryption? What's the state of encryption these days? What are you advising customers with regard to encryption? >> Well, for years we've been under the impression that everything's going to have to be encrypted at some point. It's been a slow journey. You know, there's PCI compliance, HIPPA compliance. Obviously, there's been some pretty infamous hacks that have happened and so on. So the way we look at encryption, we have encryption solutions, self-encrypting appliances, and we recommend to customers, even if you don't need encryption today, if there is a slight chance that you'll need it in the future, then go with our encrypting line of appliances. The cost difference is nominal. It's in single-digit, low single-digit percentages, and it's there when you need it. So you don't have to potentially swap after that. We also do encryption any time we move data over the LAN. So we're fully ready for all of these compliances. It's certified encryption, you know, federal level certification, et cetera, so-- >> Yeah, Marc, let us know what companies aren't aware of the need for encryption and I'm going to short those stocks. (laughing) >> Okay, you got it. Yeah, you might want to change your bank. >> All right. Got to ask you. Brady, if you were Robert Kraft, would you have traded Tom Brady? >> Absolutely not. >> That's unanimous, there. Three for three on that. >> Absolutely, no. >> Okay, why not? What would the rationale be? >> I think he's got a lot more to give yet. I think it would have been on par with the Babe Ruth trade. It would have been a historical disaster. You know, he got us to the Super Bowl last year. Granted, Philly inched us out, but I still think he's the GOAT and he's going to stay the GOAT. >> Giselle said Tom Brady can't catch the ball. I would say also, he can't play defense, so-- >> I would agree with that as well. >> All right, what about Garoppolo? Do you think it was the right move to hold onto him, essentially as an insurance policy in case Brady went down before the trade deadline, or should they have been more proactive and gotten more for him? >> I think it probably would have been the right move for the Patriots to hang on to Garoppolo, however, for Garoppolo himself, and for the fact that they needed to get at least something for him, I think it was the right move at the right time. He needs to play. He's a great quarterback. He's already turning that San Francisco franchise around. >> Right. >> So I'm happy to see him play. I actually now start watching 49ers games 'cause I want to root for him. >> Me, too. I'm a fan of Garoppolo. >> Marc: He's a son of the Patriots. >> I agree. I think it was the smart move, Stu to keep him as an insurance policy, just in case. You don't know. I mean, Brady, you know, 40 plus years old. I mean, look what happened last year. >> It's the economics, Dave, though. They weren't going to pay him what he needed to be able to be a backup, and I agree with Marc. He was ready to play, obviously and it is fun to watch him on the 49ers. >> No, we agree. One of 'em had to go, right? Okay, and now we're three for three. So Peter McKay, Patrick Osborne, and now Marc Crespi all say Brady should stay. Right move. We'll see. Hey, they're the favorite to win the Super Bowl next year. Hopefully, they can get there. >> Sounds like I'm in good company. >> Marc, thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's always a pleasure to see you guys. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE, from VeeamOn 2018. (upbeat music)

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

>> Live from Miami Beach Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody, we're here at the Fontainebleau hotel. You're watching theCUBE, the leader of live tech coverage. This is day one of our coverage of VeeamON, the third year that we've covered Veeam, they've selected this great location here in Miami. I'm Dave Vellante, with my co-host Peter Burris. Ratmir Timashev is here, he is the co-founder and executive vice president, world-wide sales of Veeam, business guru, sales and marketing maven, a very successful entrepreneur, welcome to the theCUBE and thanks so much for having us. >> Thank you Dave, thank you Peter, thanks for having us. Thanks for doing this at our event. >> You're very welcome, so first of all congratulations, you hit that billion dollar milestone. You predicted it back in 2013, you missed it by about six months Ratmir, you know, (laughs) but really, great. Trailing 12 months, a billion dollars in revenue that includes of course your Ratable revenue, the subscription revenue, which who could have predicted that back in 2013, so amazing milestone, congratulations. And great venue here, you must be really pleased with the turnout, couple thousand people, your thoughts? >> Yeah absolutely, I personally love Miami, this is the best city. Always sunny, always ocean, always blue sky, awesome. And always sand, like that's the best place. So I've always had the dream to have VeeamON in Miami, so the dream comes true, we have over 2,000 people here and many more are watching livestream online. Very excited, very excited. >> Well, Veeam's always been a hip company, always a lot of fun, this is obviously a hip place, good fun part of the country. Let's talk about act one and act two. Act one was, you guys really rode the virtualization wave and you talked today about act two really being cloud and hybrid cloud data management. What are the similarities and the differences between act one and act two? >> So like we discussed during the keynote session, every 10 years or so there is a major industry transformation shift from one platform to another platform, so Veeamware 10 years ago created this technology visualization that dramatically fundamentally changed the way modern data centers are built and managed. And Veeam was very lucky to be at the earlier stage of that virtualization revolution that changed the whole data center. that changed the whole data center. So we were at the right time at the right place. We created the new market, Veeamware backup, and then we extended it to hyperV and HV. So we dominated that mode of data LAE share. But in the last few years we expanded our platform. So beyond just the virtualization, we added the physical support, the Unix support, the cloud support. So now Veeam represents broad, what we call Veeam Availability Platform that supports LAE clouds, virtual, physical clouds. That was act one, we dominated it. We grew from zero to 1 billion within 10, 12 years. We added 350,000 customers over that timeframe. And now it's act two, what is act two? Act two is the, again, the new major industry transformation to a hybrid cloud. What are the similarities? Again, Veeam is in a great position because we're at the right time at the right place with a brilliant product. We have the broad LAE system of our channel partners. We have a broad customer base, 350,000. And we have great technology partnerships with HP, Cisco, NetUP, Nutanix, Pure, and others, so as well as AWS, and Microsoft, and Google, and IBM cloud. So we are in extremely great position to dominate this second wave, what we call second act, which will be the next decade of hybrid cloud. >> Yeah, so optionality was a key, being able to support multiple use cases and supporting different environments. You're well positioned, you're saying, in act two. Act one you really didn't have a lot of competition, you kind of schooled the competition, I think Dell took out some of your early competition then you ran circles around everybody else. A lot more money pouring into this space now, you showed the slide, 15 billion, you've got a 15th of it. Tell us again why you feel like you can, you just used the word, dominate, with all this competition. You got the big guys now sort of learning from you and trying to copy some of your moves and maybe pre announcing some stuff to try and freeze the market. What gives you great confidence that you will dominate act two. >> Again, we have a history of innovation, so we know that there are new requirements for the hybrid cloud. People not only want to protect the data, they want to make sure that when they move to a hybrid cloud, when they put the workloads in a public cloud, that that data is protected, is secured and protected. So that's one capability that customers are looking for. Another capability, they want to be able to move the data back on-prem, or between the clouds, what we call cloud mobility, so they want to have this flexibility and freedom, be cloud agnostic or avoid that cloud lock-in. So they want to also make sure that from compliance standpoint, they are able to move the data if needed. In other use cases they want to leverage the cloud for different data protection capabilities. They want to leverage the cloud for backup, for disaster recovery as well as for long term retention, what we call cloud tier, so they want to, instead of tape, they want to replace tape with the public cloud low storage. So they want to use the cost and the skill ability of the public cloud for long term retentions. So all these use cases, extension of our platform. So we already have the, we own the one component of the hybrid cloud which is on-prem, modern data center, what some people call private cloud. We already own one component and we have 350,000 customers. Most of these customers are going to deploy hybrid cloud. In fact, according to our survey, 73% of our customers are deploying or planning to deploy a hybrid cloud. So most of them I think, in how to leverage the performance, the skill ability, and the elasticity, of the public cloud. So we own this component, we have the capabilities and we're developing product capabilities for the public cloud and with our orchestration on top of it and monitoring and analytics capabilities. So it's a complete solution. >> So Ratmir, I want to build upon this notion of act one and act two because good for you guys over ten years but the industry also is going through an act one to act two when you come right down to it. Where data, for the first four years of this industry, was about recording events that have happened. And now data going forward is becoming a strategic asset that's actually shaping the events that are happening or will happen. And it requires a new approach. It requires that data be regarded as a strategic asset and capabilities have to be established to support that data. I'm especially itched in with the introduction that you made because it suggests that you guys are going to look to an ecosystem to bring that degree of specialization and uniqueness and invention, on top of your platform, to serve a rapidly expanding range of strategic capability requirements when we think about data protection, data assurance. Do you see it the same way? >> Absolutely yeah, I 100% agree. I talked about that briefly during my keynote. We see that there are this four technology superpowers what Pat Galson from Veeamware calls technology superpowers. And those are the cloud, the mobile, artificial intelligence and age in internal things. So all this four technology superpowers. The biggest producers and consumers of the data. So it has to be both in the cloud and on the age so the new product and services are built on that data. Either we are talking about self driving cars, or we are talking about breakthrough in DNA research or cancer research. It's all built both in the cloud and on the age. And Veeam has this technology called data lapse. So when we've actually provide the access to the data, to a field party, either security or compliance or analytical tenders. So they can build more solutions on top of our data lapse. >> So talk a little bit about how you planned to deploy capital going forward, particularly as you try to leverage the opportunities in cloud two. You're seeing all kinds of new emerging technologies. We talk about coup berneties and containers all the time. You've made some acquisitions in the cloud area. Should we think about your emanate strategies as just sort of advancing your ability to either form ecosystems or actually bring in more cloud like capabilities, beyond act one into act two? >> Yeah I mean, first of all, we have a very powerful product and RNZ group. Partially we have this mentality not invented here so in other words we want to invent more in house. However, there are some cases where we need to extend our platform and we might not have the bandwidths or time through market so we're looking at some adjacent in the cloud management space, in the cloud optimization, course optimization, analytics. Those areas are very interesting for us to expand our platform to. >> I'm guessing that NIH mentality, acquisitions you make have to fit into that platform, that architecture. How do you evaluate? You say okay, can we do this ourselves? You say do we have the bandwidth? Is that technology here now? >> Does with Veeam help? >> Yeah with Veeam that's a great problem that we announced today as well. Yeah so the way we evaluate is that, is this adjacent market to what we're doing? For example, AWS or Asur, how close the buyer is. Or Office 365 backup we evolved in house. Or Office 365 backup we evolved in house. Azureware developed in house. Some technologies we are looking to acquire. The question is, is that the same buyer? If the buyer is the same, we prefer to develop in house. If the buyer, for now, is different, we would like to acquire the company and let it grow, and then merge into Veeam later. >> So your co founder runs RND correct? >> Correct >> And you run sales and marketing? So you guys fight over how you're going to allocate the dollars. But as a specialist in data protection, you're allocating all of your RND funding toward data protection. Presumably that helps you compete against the guys who are doing primary storage, secondary storage, all kinds of other software. So when you think about that road map, you told the story about how you got inspiration. You went to Silicon Valley and you were flying back and your partner said, well you know the best product just doesn't always win but you said, whoa so what, do we not invent the best products? You want to have the best products. Talk a little about that sort of organic development. How you guys think about that approach. Where the ideas come from. Is it obviously the customer input? Your knowledge of the space? Where do you see that going? >> So Veeam we believe is very different from other companies. First, we don't build long term road map because the technology is changing so fast that we want to keep that flexibility and agility to change our roadmap. We only disclose our release that we're imminent. Within the next six, nine months we already know. Beyond that, we don't provide the roadmap. We have the vision but we don't have the roadmap with the exact specific dates. >> But it's not a waterfall thinking. It's more agile applied to our-- >> Exactly, agile and flexibility that's what's, agility and flexibility that's what's most important. For example, a year ago or even two years ago when we announced version 10. We didn't know that object storage will become such a needed hot thing that all our customers are asking for. Including the on-prem object storage and the cloud object storage. So we changed our plans and we put lots of resources into object storage. And we finally released the best capability to use the object storage. We believe that object storage is the next cool thing in cloud data management because it will provide 10 times more capacity at the 10th of the course and 10 times faster performance. So it's like it's the next cool technology. That's just one example. Another thing is that, what differentiates Veeam in terms of RNZ and product strategy is that, if we release the feature, we don't do it as a marketing check box, we do cloud storage or we do object storage or we do this or we support Azure. When we design the feature, we think about is it going to be really really valuable? So that our customers, when they get it, they say wow, that's exactly what I needed. So we don't do as a marketing check box, we do provide and our customers really value that. They expect from Veeam that when Veeam releases something, it's going to be useful. >> And easy to use. >> Easy to use and very useful. >> That's important because when you're on offence, you don't have to do check box marketing. We know that a lot of times companies will do check box marketing 'cause they'll hear it in the field. The innovater has it, oh we have it too. And when you really peel the onion you see the differences and start to move forward. Okay so let's talk a little about customers. You had United Health on today. What are you hearing from customers? What are the customers saying that are inspiring you and your team? >> Today's conversations with the customers they start with the modernizing the, continue modernizing their data. A lot of customers still use the legacy backup solutions. They want to modernize. But the conversation quickly shifts to the hybrid cloud. How Veeam is going to help me not only modernize the backup data management on-prem, but how Veeam is going to help me to move to the cloud, manage the data, orchestrate the data movement in the cloud and maybe if needed, bring the data back for compliance reasons. So that conversation always occurs with any size companies. In fact, according to our survey, 73% of our customers say that they have a hybrid cloud strategy. Only 10% say no, we will always stay 100% on-prem. And about 15% say I will move everything to a public cloud. The huge majority is in the middle. 73% have the hybrid strategy. >> Yeah that sort of answers my next question but I'm going to ask it anyway. So an observer might well aren't the cloud guys just going to do their own backup and recovery. Why wouldn't that supplant Veeam? You sort of addressed it with the hybrid approach but I want to hear your answer. All the cloud guys have some form of replication or snapshotting, granted it's not as robust, you and I know that. But for the audience, explain to them why the cloud doesn't put you out of business. >> In fact cloud represents the biggest opportunity for the next 5-7-10 years. It's just historically, the platform vendors they don't provide the good tools, security tools or backup tools. We've been in this business over 25 years. Our first company was specialized in Windows Enterprise Management so we developed lots of tools around Microsoft platforms for managing active directory exchange server, share points, equal server. We always were afraid maybe Microsoft will come up with the similar solutions but they never did. The same is for today's world. Customers want to have the independence from the platform and the vendor, like AWS or Microsoft, they will never provide the capability to move the data outside of AWS. But for the true compliance security, a vendor like Veeam you need the capability not just backup AWS to AWS but you want to be able to backup AWS to on-prem and on-prem to AWS. Or AWS to Azure. So only Veeam can platform vendors, they are not looking to do that. So they want to move the data to the cloud. They're not necessarily providing more capabilities. Move the data outside of their cloud and that's where Veeam comes in, with the cloud mobility capabilities. >> One of the things that our researchers strongly pointed out, is that there are few places within a technology set of capabilities that they must control. And data protection is one of them. So they have to have an approach for managing data protection within their business that's their approach. And there are a few companies in a position to actually provide that. >> Yeah, I absolutely agree. Some customers they think that if I put the data into AWS or Azure or Office 365, Microsoft is going to protect it or AWS. No, it's your data, microsoft protects the infrastructure. So it's a off time service. That's where Microsoft or AWS are responsible. The data is yours. You are responsible for protecting the data recovery. If you delete an email, it's not Microsoft's fault. If you need to do an e-discovery on your email system, that's not Microsoft's problem. >> If you're out of compliance, Microsoft executives aren't going to jail. >> Exactly. That's your responsibility. Your data, Your responsibility. In fact we have a white paper that talks about the shared responsibility model. So there is a shared responsibility. AWS, public cloud providers, they're responsible to keep the service up and running. So therefore resilient infrastructure. Not the data, the data is yours. That sits on top of that resilient infrastructure. >> Yeah you've gone after Office 365 as the starting point for SaaS. Maybe there's other opportunities down the road. Right now it's probably a small market but I think it could emerge over time. But the overall time, you showed $15 billion. Today you have 1/15th of it. Lot more competition today. You see some of your competitors risk $250 million you have to one up them with a $500 million risk. You told me years ago Ratmir, we're probably not going to do an IPO. Give us an update there, same stance on that? >> No we've actually very open to the idea about IPO and we're exploring different opportunities. But we believe that we can continue growing organically because the company is very profitable. So we're reinvesting money into RNZ and we have good foundation for the next act two. But speaking about Office 365 by the way, it's the fastest growing product in the history of Veeam. >> Really? >> Of backup for Office 365 is the fastest growing because we have 350,000 customers, most of them are using Office 365 and they need to protect that data. So and they love Veeam, they are buying. But also we'll actually need new customers just buying Office 365. 23% of our customers for Office 365 are new customers. Also a little bit surprising for us. >> So O365 OneDrive is another opportunity that you guys have gone after. >> It's all part of the same product, yes. >> Salesforce maybe not quite there yet but you could potentially see that emerging as an opportunity? Do you see that? >> Yes we are looking at Salesforce. We are looking at G's width. We are looking at other SaaS applications that are popular among the business customers. >> One point really quickly Dave, is that 1/15th of that $15 billion TAM is just Veeam. Your ecosystem is increasingly going to use the Veeam services to expand the Veeam share of that, the virtual Veeam share of that, even as you grow. I think that's what's particularly interesting is how will that ecosystem add additional services on top of that, to grab more of that overall share. >> And I think, and please comment on that, that's unique to Veeam and the data protection space. You have your own events. You have premier partners that come in. Some of your competitors don't, they're not quite there yet. Some of the other larger competitors it's a small little piece of their whole business so the focus really is accentuated. >> Veeam has always had a channel part in ariant stretch. From day one we were 100% channel, 100%. We don't take the deal directly. Also, we build the broad service provider system network. So we have over 20,000 what we call Veeam cloud and service providers that provide the services to our customers based on Veeam platform backup in the cloud, disaster recovery, manage backup. Finally today we announce with Veeam that's another new initiative that we are expanding our ecosystem with Veeam APS where we want our partners, together with us, build this secondary storage systems that provide a single solution because some customers they want to buy in the form of the hardware appliance, our solution. So it's going to be pre installed, similar experience, out of the box functionality, easy to deploy, easy to manage with a single interphase. All provided and with a single support wise. So those systems will be created together with our partners. Like we announced one with Nutanix as well as with ExaGrid. We are working, Nutanix is one of the most innovative companies in our industry and we were very happy to partner with them because we believe that we will develop the right solution and we will be able to take this APS and offer our other partners to Build a secondary storage system, together with us. >> Well we've seen this little company, years ago, called Veeam, what a great name, superglue itself to the virtualization trend and really ride that wave now going onto act two, which is a cloud rapid timid shift. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Thank you Dave. >> Keep right there everybody. This is theCUBE, we're here at VeeamOn2019 in Miami. We'll be right back after this short break.