>> Narrator: From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >> Everyone welcome back to theCUBE coverage here in Miami Beach at the Fontainebleau Hotel, for Acronis' Global Cyber Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier. Two days of coverage, we're on day two, learning a lot about the global security, cyber security, and protection. Market place and Solutions. Our next guest is Alex Miroshnichenko. Also know as Alex Miro. Great to have you on. And great chatting with you prior to coming on camera. Thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> So Vice President of Cyber Infrastructure for Acronis, essentially looking at your platform. That's essentially the hyperconverged stack underneath the platform software you're enabling, kind of the critical infrastructure for-- >> That's, yeah that's one-- >> the platform. >> one way to describe it. It is infrastructure we provide the complete stack. All the way whatever you're ran on top of. The standard comminuting hardware, including the virtualization layer. Capability to run the still standard container workloads. And essentially optimized for whole cyber platform. It's good enough. >> You know you're interesting background. We were talking before we came on camera about your background. Certainly you've seen waves of innovation, you've been a high performance, storage enterprise, infrastructure, engineer and developer, and executive. A lot has change in past couple of years, and certainly the past decade. You're on the vSAN wave, you saw that storage wave, and now we're in a cloud wave. Now we're on premise with hybrid. >> All right. >> So hybrid, certainly now a big part of the operating model. >> Correct. >> So the operating system is not just storage anymore, it's a system view. What's your personal opinion on where storage is now? I've heard software defined data center from VMware for years. We've even joked about software defined storage, software defined compute. >> Everything. >> I mean everything software defined, but software is the game. Scale's a game, high performance is a requirement. What's changed in storage right now? >> Well in everything and in nothing at the same time. As I said, like, remember going back to thirty years ago. It's like, "Oh gosh, the storage is exploding!" You know, soon we're going to have like two gigabytes. (laughter) You know a company server, my God! And, or, where's it going to be coming from. Like imagining when people started recording music, like they seeing this MP3 things is coming up so. >> Yeah. It's the same game, different year. More game, more storage. >> It's just like, It's this exponential curve. It's like the shape of the curve stays the same. And to be honest, I, part of me never believes that. Like come on, how much bigger can it get, and now everybody's like we get IUT line, we got like those cameras. Streaming things 24/7 and every possible thing you can think of. And of course we're going to store everything, but we obviously don't know what to do with it, but. So from that point of view, the demand keeps growing and you need, you have technologies to handle that appropriately. >> Yeah. >> And again, it's just not a matter of kind of throwing the bits somewhere and forgetting about them. It's just keeping them in the predefined order, and actually being able to process them. And Acronis in the business of a cyber protection. Some people say: "Oh you guys are just "like a back up company." I mean yeah, that's the fundamental part of that, but as you pointed in our pregame chat, as you call it. (laughter) Is, the traditional data protection guys, be that backup, you know you can think about as the various, like a raid as a way to protect your data. They are all about defending against like physical disruption as you call it, right. My disk died, my data center died. You know, my power went out. >> Yeah >> So what do I do? I was the data. But it does not protect you, what I call a logical destruction. I mean back in the classical. >> Logical disruption, what does, >> Disruption >> Okay yeah logical disruption >> Did I say this destruction?. Okay. >> Disruption. It's almost the same thing. >> Right >> I mean, ransomware is pretty much destructive. I mean it's hostage at that point. Logical meaning nonphysical, not like an event like a hurricane or outage or something like that. >> I mean you remove the wrong file, the right file and you didn't notice that. And then you went through several back up cycles and then you realize, " Oh, I want my files back" but then you, the back up that had that file is gone. I mean what are you going to do right? Nothing got disrupted, destructed or destroyed. (laughter) But your files gone. >> So logical disruptions or destructions that's happening, certainly your security points that out. >> But the security is the big thing. That's what the people didn't think about it back, definitely not like me, back twenty years ago. It's like, they. So what happens if you see some got hacked or like people, like a ransomware, right. It's specifically the product designed to muck with your storage. Encrypted, deleted, whatever they want to do there. And again, next thing you know, you're backing up junk that will keep a virus somewhere. And then you go to your back ups and then it's like oh my God, where's everything? Because it's all dead. >> So you're saying people have really strong back up and recovery, but they're recovering malware that they stored. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. >> It's like. (laughter) >> So that seem like an obvious problem, but nobody but Acronis as actually provides an integrated solution to deal with that. I mean there are different, I mean people know what the problem is and there companies out there, like we'll scan your backup archives, and will find malware backup. Fine, great. But then anybody could try to really deal with their restore, in a critical situation, knows that even without the malware concerns, it's stressful shall we say. >> Yeah and it's not always predictable. And it's post haste too. After the fact. >> Right. But if the malware is involved that's, you know, it becomes and extremely expensive and sometimes impossible operation. Acronis takes care of that. Because you know we can actually monitor your back ups. We can find out where was the last time you were clean. It's a post-hoc. We're purposely practical sort through, kind of real time scanning for viruses. So it's a multilevel cyber protection. Which is fairly, I think, >> New >> I think it's unique in the industry. >> Well I think it's interesting how you guys have brought data protection concepts and paradigm, and practice by the way into cyber with much more holistic view. >> Right. >> And I think that's like an operating system kind of thinking. And thinking holistically is about systems. And systems has consequences. If something goes wrong over here it's affecting it, all over the place. >> Right. You've got to the right software for that. >> And I have a very strong system background or DNA as they sometimes like to say that. And in fact the first virtualization solution and containers for that matter, were built by the Acronis engineering team. More than fifteen years ago, way before anybody in the Linux world new how to spell container or what they mean. So our storage layer, software defined storage, >> Yeah. it's fully blown HCI product. Complete around, understand who built that. That gives us a unique advantage among the security companies. >> You know I got to ask you a question. I'm fascinated, I'm a student of history and also of competitive advantage when it comes to technology platforms, and the one thing I always say and see is entrepreneurs whether they're young or old, is that there's two types of entrepreneurs: there's a systems thinker and a coder, right. And I think with platforms you can't short cut a platform because there's trajectory benefits, economies of scale for putting the work in. You can't just put a platform out there over night. You got to have a, you got to build it and it takes time. So there's some people trying to exhilarate platforms. Some have done the work, you guys have done it for a long time. What's your view on that whole: "Well I'm going to throw a whole platform out there." What are some of the things that get exposed when I try to push a platform too fast? >> Well, the platform presumes that you have an ecosystem, people actually using it and building stuff on top of that. Like every, you talked about the coders, every programmers, software developer, or most of them at least. They dream of two things: To write and create a new programming language. Finally the one. >> Yeah, yeah. (laughter) Or the other kind of guy is like, I'm going to write a new operating system. I went through that phase mostly an operating system. Log time ago. And it's a process. I mean whatever you build has to actually serve the purpose. >> Yup. >> There are a lots of platforms in all areas of technology that people's like: "Oh, we're going to create a set of API's "and anybody can plug into us." It's like unless you solved the real problem and really simplify life for people, they're not going to do that. They're not going to do, use a platform for the sake of using the platform. Our cyber platform is different because we're essentially exposed our API's to our technology that's out there and people has been using. I mean, I don't know you saw the keynote yesterday, there was a demo the way how to write, let's go to plug in for the sake of better term. For the person who's interviewed. When people can add their own policies to cyber protect workflow. Which could be specific to what they're doing. You know they notarize things like that. That plan the platform makes sense because it's already out there and it responds to customer demands. We love what you guys do but we have this special, a specific set of requirements. If it's general enough, incorporate it into the product but there's also a lot of things which could be specific to a vertical or even to a specific company. >> Yeah. >> We just want to enable them to do stuff. >> Well that's what platforms are they're enabling >> Right. >> They have to enable some capabilities that provides value to >> Right. >> that use case. And that can be custom or domain specific. >> I'm sorry what? >> That could be domain specific. >> Yes, I'm sorry. >> A platform enables capabilities for someone to do something. (mumbles) >> Yes, but again the key point to the platform is, it has to kind of solve a real problem, not be there for the sake of elegance, or solution, or API's or thing of that nature. >> Final question for you Alex. I'm a CIO or CSO or I'm there decision making, man you know what, I got to rethink my enterprise architecture, I got to think about, I got IoT coming, I got industrial IoT and just regular IoT, I want to have a comprehensive platform. Why Acronis, what's the pitch? And what's different than the traditional SAN's and storage and other solutions out there? What's that pitch to that enterprise decision maker about Acronis? >> Well. You kind of, like you said, you have a tremendous growth in your data flows, the number of data sources are exploding. That's actually going back to your previous question. I think that's what one of the difference is. That it's not just the volume of data, it's the breadth of the data sources you're getting that. So you kind of have to manage that cat zoo some how or it's not even a cat, I don't know. I don't know what the right world analogy for that. So how you guys going to manage that if you have to protect it? At least you have to know what your exposure is, and what the things there. And just throwing out a bunch of you know, like standard cyber, >> Point products. >> technology point products is not going to solve it. I mean yes you can hire lots of people, you can build your own thing, you would be effectively reinventing lot of wheels in the process while we already have that solution for you. >> I like the platform idea because it makes data more addressable horizontally scalable. It's not a side load. >> Right. >> (mumbles) product that you can actually work and enable the data. Data's moving around and you got to be acting on. >> Yes. >> You need software to do that. >> Yes, exactly. So that's another thing. It's not, it's like a structure data, resting on structured data. There's discussions been going on for many years. You know the reality is you will always have both types and you always have the need to process them in both ways. And that's the flexibility. >> I have one more question final question since I just popped in my head. So final, final question. What's in the infrastructure platform that you're involved in that people should know about, that they might not know about that's important to investigate? Is there a killer feature, is there a killer thing in there that is notable that they should know about? What's under the hood on the infrastructures side for Acronis? >> Well lots of things. >> What's your favorite features? >> What are you talking about? >> What's your favorite feature? What's the one thing? >> Gosh you know it's like I have lot of data and I love them all. It's kind of hard >> Yeah you can't take sides. >> It's not sides. Let's say I've been writing storage most of my career. So I like storage. But that doesn't mean it's more important or less important than other things. >> Yeah. >> Unless you have a comprehensive compute layer on top of that. The storage is just, then it becomes a storage vendor, niche vendor, so that's not who we are. I'm really fascinated by actually the integration with the like cyber feature in the security because that's on one hand it's not something that I've been doing in my previous career for most of the time, but I do have a lot of kind of understanding of the workflow issues and integration points. >> Yeah. >> And that excites me. That's one the reasons. >> Yeah. Integrated platform is one the key things. Thanks for coming on Alex. Thanks for sharing your insight. Appreciate it, first in the morning here, and well afternoon now. Thanks for coming on. >> You never know, it's like everybody is so busy. >> The Acronis inaugural Global Cyber Summit 2019. About cyber protection, not data protection. Cyber protection, they both work hand and hand. >> Right. >> This is theCUBE Coverage here in Miami Beach, I'm John Furrier, we'll be back with more after this short break (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage. Two days here in Miami Beach at the Fontainebleau Hotel for Acronis' Global Cyber Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are breaking it all down, our next guest, Ryan Walsh, co-founder and chief channel officer at Pax8. Just talking, riffing about the change in the channels. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you so much, John, happy to be here. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, that's great. >> We have multiple ways of innovation now more than ever. Cloud computing, and digital products. The game is still the same but the equation changes. I've got to get a product in the hands of the customer through a channel of distribution, aka system intergraters, ISVs, VABS, VARS, resellers. Whatever the hell the word is, it's a channel. >> Ryan: That's right. >> And they want to have their customers pay them for services and have turnkey products. Okay, that old world has shifted, so now software. >> Ryan: That's right. >> You got hardware that you could buy from Acronis and others. Edge devices that can be deployed, managed over the cloud. So the cloud has kind of changed the game. >> Yes. >> You guys that started a company that's essentially born in the cloud distributor, which is interesting. So I want you to take a minute to explain Pax8, born in the cloud distributor, what does it mean? How did you get there? >> Yeah, why do we do it? >> What's the story? >> Yeah, that makes sense, the traditional distribution game was on-premise technology. Hardware, printers, software to install, ship it, right? Pick, pack, and ship. Now fast forward to a cloud game, and you'd say, well, do you need distribution? There was a thought at a time that said, well, the channel's going to get disintermediated 'cause all we're going to do is we're just going to go online and we're just going to download it. Customer's going to buy it. I don't need a channel, I don't a distributor. I'm just going to go get what I need. What we learned is that's not the case, because there are some products that you can certainly go and download an app on your phone and know how to do that. But when you're talking about small and medium-sized businesses that might not have in-house IT, it's not so easy as downloading a product. And this was a problem that we wanted to solve as Pax8. Reason we got in the game we actually, many of us came from a born-in-the-cloud software company. And we learned how powerful the channel was. In fact, we started selling direct and realized we just can't scale fast enough, so we committed to the channel. Once we did, we started selling to those partners and you might have thought, yeah, we didn't need distribution. Some of our partners said, yeah, go onto the traditional distributors line card. And when we did that we said, well, they're great at pick, pack, and ship, but as it pertains to a cloud world, it's broken. And so after we sold that company, the CEO of our company, John Street, and another co-founder, we said, well, hey let's go fix a problem, what's out there? And we said, well, distribution is broken for the cloud and that's how Pax8 came to be. >> It's interesting as a student of competitive strategy business, being an entrepreneur myself and having some experience in the channel like you guys have. It's interesting that the same mean comes around the trope, or whatever you want to call it is, oh, the middleman are going to be desegregated and it's direct-to-consumer. Now, I would argue that's true in a lot of cases, it's a bit more efficient to go direct to the consumer. Technology enables that, so downloading basic apps, media's now going direct. Yeah, middleman gets cut out, but that's undifferentiated value. And I think when you look at middlemen, people get confused between a middleman role and a supply chain. So I think what you guys are doing is cracking the code on this value and the supply chain of distribution of software to an edge or channel partner that has a relationship with customers. They don't just change over night. >> This is why we actually, I've been in meetings where we had a born-in-the cloud SaaS company show up at a channel event and at this particular event, we thought this guy was going to come in here and say, "Tell me about how great you are and why I need you." He sat in the chair and said, "Why do I need you?" I wasn't even thinking about this, right, as a channel. A year later he came back and he says, "I understand why I need you. "One, I need partners to help deliver that last mile," because the trust was already there. But more importantly, customers want solutions. And now with, you see what's happening with cloud products, Acronis being one of them, they can pull together multiple things to create a solution. And you really need to have somebody guide that tool. It is not as simple as just downloading an app and making sure that it all work for a business. It just isn't. >> High volume, low margin businesses tend to get disintermediated quickly. >> Right. >> But when there's value creation, you talk about relationship to customers, great channel players have that. And they have costs around servicing that customer. The challenge is when the cost becomes so high (laughs) to provision and serve the customer, gross margin gets hit. >> Ryan: Well this is where-- >> And if so they can eliminate that risk, why wouldn't I look at new supply chain partner or a new partner? >> This is where Pax8 comes into play, which is most partners don't have the in-house technology to build a platform, to shift if they didn't support a recurring subscription revenue model. That's not easy, because when you've shipped a box, you created a bill at that time, but now if you're selling cloud products, you've got to turn it on quickly, you've got to allow somebody to order one, two, three more seats, or gigabytes of something and you've got to make sure that the bill is accurate. That becomes very complex. Just to know what to price things at. >> We've been doing a lot of coverage and reporting on modernization of the Enterprise, cloud computing, of course, Cloud 1.0, Amazon model, Cloud 2.0 is Enterprise, and these nuances that are operationally challenging. But for CureMint, whether it's government, public sector, man, it's 1994! For CureMint, there's no modernization, you're kind of teasing out what I think is like a really big wave coming, which is the modernization of products, marketplaces, and delivery value. >> Yeah, you're right. >> Do you see it the same way? >> 100%. And what's interesting about what you're talking about, even when we started and what we're doing right now, the nuance around what you're saying has, we built things in our platform that we didn't envision in the beginning because the market said this is a problem and we need to fix this. How do you make it easy? And one example of that is, whether you're an Enterprise customer, or you're a partner, a man and service provider, providing multiple cloud solutions to a customer. What they want is, pull it all together, turn it on quickly, and make sure that I can support this technology stack. Look at what Acronis is doing, they've put together data protection and security. This is a very unique combination. Well, a lot of these customers are not just buying that, they are also buying Microsoft products. And so as they grow their stack of technology, they still want to get it as fast as they can, they don't want to pay for things that they don't use. This is the new nuance that we had to solve for this problem with our marketplace is, nobody wants inventory in a virtual world. Pay for what you use, nothing more, nothing less. And you really needed advance automation and integration to make that happen, and that's where Pax8 came in. >> Well, I think that Pax8, Acronis story is interesting because if you think about the demands of the dealer, owner, manager, or the guy who's an entrepreneur or owner of the channel or whatever that partner it is, they have to hire people. The a human resource side of the equation is super efficient, but it's also a razor edge too, right? You overdrive on human labor that has to be a trained out security, right? Why not bring in Acronis in there and Pax8, and I'm up and running with a full-blown security suite cyber protection, new category, I can bring that to market through my channel. >> That's right. >> Trust relationship is there, everything's kind of end-to-end. >> Well, what you think about, what you're saying, it's a part of our model, which is what's sexy that you talk about at first is you've got a cloud marketplace, our partners can use this thing to order multiple cloud products. That's pretty cool because they typically, they wouldn't have the capability to do that themselves. But a part of our model is Pax8 provides Tier 1 support to these partners. To your point, you have to bring on a technician, you may not know whether you're going to sell something new right in the beginning, so the fact that Pax8 can provide sales support and Tier 1 support on that product, allows a partner to figure out whether they're going to sell it, how they're going to sell it, without incurring that cost, because you have a partner like us. >> So what's your positioning relative to the competition? What do you guys offer that's different? How are you guys positioned to the channel versus some other big player? >> What we talk about, and a lot of people say, well, why would you come into this game when you have such big names, big brand recognition? They've got more money, they've got more engineers, they have some tech. But what they didn't have was cloud in your DNA. That's what we represented, so we were untethered by legacy processes, we didn't go through a pick, pack, and ship world. We were built from the ground up to be in the cloud. >> John: DevOps. >> Yeah, DevOps and high automation, this blend. The message we've taken to the street and our focus is, we're blowing up traditional distribution because you needed to think and operate differently to take advantage of the cloud. And so this is our message, our differentiation is solely around this focus on enabling a partner. And if you look at what we are, we're very selective on the cloud products, we a have cloud marketplace, but a lot of people do. The big difference is really we create a partner experience, where we're there by their side. We're not telling them what to do, we're there to make sure that they can grow their cloud footprint. >> You act as fulfillment. >> That's right, we are not-- >> John: You're a full service. >> Yeah, and there's a big difference between saying, I know you want this, can I, I'm going to place the order to, how do you introduce a new technology like Acronis to a partner who's never heard of it? They typically aren't coming in saying, well, I want Acronis and I want to buy it. It's how do you teach them? How do you show they how it works and then how do you support it? >> Channels are very efficient, as well. If you're good, you're gone, you're golden. You'll double down on it. If you suck, you're out, right? They don't tolerate dogma, so I've got to ask you, when you go into the channel, one of the things that they have, and just my observation is, they have a bar about value creation. They want partners that are going to create value. >> Ryan: That's right. >> What's your pitch to them when you're saying, what value do I bring for you, channel partner? >> So is this to Pax8? To the channel partner? >> Pax8 to the channel partner, what value are you bringing? Value creation, bring me value, I'm buying all day long. >> Yeah, Pax8 value, it's two-fold. What we're trying to do is, there's a revenue side of that value and there's a cost-efficiency side to that value. I'll start with the cost efficiency. Partners don't embrace cloud because there's friction in the cloud-buying process. It's difficult to get. The bills are difficult to consolidate, it's difficult to aggregate all of that in one place, and then ultimately make sure that that flows through their business systems. So, the value that Pax8's creating on the simplification of buying cloud, we have a technology that allows them to quickly provision, aggregate the bill, but we don't stop there. Marketplaces that stop there aren't doing enough because we hear about the buyer's journey with customers, and this is where that journey for a partner doesn't start and stop with our marketplace, they actually have tools, like professional service automation tools, where they want what we do with our marketplace to integrate into those tools. So we simplify that whole buying process. That's one huge value add that we have. On the revenue side, most of the partners that we deal with don't have time to go check out cloud products. We do all that vetting and then half our company is sales. So our internal reps help our partners get introduced, and sell-- >> You're driving revenue. >> Yeah, we're driving revenue. I'll give you an example of this value add. It's not a matter of saying, and this is what a lot of marketplaces do, they put up a bunch of tiles and say, well, go pick what you want. You're still faced with the same challenge, well, I don't know about that, I don't recognize the Acronis logo, or maybe I do but I don't know what's in that product." It's really about sales enabling, how do you do that? Well, the one way that we do this is, we go talk to partners about how to grow a cloud practice. We actually go into the field and introduce these cloud products and have partners talk to other partners about how they grew their stack of technology. And then again, we'll demonstrate it, we'll show them, we'll run through the whole thing to sell on their behalf. This is what we find is value add, so a partner doesn't have to do that. It can build a cloud practice, and they can do cost effectively. >> As a disrupter coming into the marketplace, with the cloud mindset, DevOps, you've got a lot of advantages, you can automate, you're driving revenue. Come on, it's a winning formula, you pulled that off, you're going to do well. So I wanted to get your perspective. Looking at this industry, what's the modern channel look like? I've heard all the, oh, the channel's dead, it's changing. Certainly changing. What's the new picture of the channel in your mind? >> Oh, man, I tell you, this is a great question. And one that I'm really excited about because we deal with a lot of partners that had an on-prem practice, where they would drive out and service an account. The new definition of the channel now is one that's untethered by a GEO, because they're taking advantage of cloud services and can get turned on anywhere, and can get supported anywhere. So what we're saying is, man and service providers that are showing up, and they're acting as an outsourced IT and a virtual CIO to a small business. Now to do that, what they're doing is, they're building a stack of technology, saying, when you sign with me, this is how I interact with you, I have a stack of technologies, I'll deliver it, configure it, I'll answer questions for you. And they're going even further then that. These guys are also partnering with other partners who have specialty, because what they realize is, to be a generalist it's hard to win. Now you got to be niche razor focused, because what we see is customers are now educating themselves before they call a partner, right? 70% of the research is done before they even call, so you'd better know what you're doing. And so what we're seeing is that the channel of the future is one that's focused on their specialty, they're not afraid to partner with other partners who have a specialty that their customers may want. And everyone is dealing with automation and integration. So it has to happen at the speed of light. >> John: Time to value. >> Time to value, speed to market. This is a progressive partner today, and they're growing. They're growing rapidly and they're buying each other. There's a huge M and A activity now because they recognize there's a fragmented market. So if you're really good at your focus, you really can take advantage of that. >> So speed, agility, profitability, customer satisfaction? >> Core drivers, core drivers. But then, what you need though is, there's no reason to go it alone. This is where at Pax8 you would say, well, okay, that's value for the service provider, why do you need Tier II? Well, you need to aggregate these solutions and bring it into one place for that partner. You need somebody to help them out to be by their side. This is something that we're finding, this is a part of the value chain. >> Well, I think, you know certainly directive consumer is happening, but there's still value creation opportunities out there in the new shift. Acronis is doing a good job with you guys, you think? Acronis good for you guys? >> I tell you what, Acronis is blowing up with us. We were just talking to Serguei about this, like why, why is this happening? Well, one of the things that they've done, that's really adapting to what the market wants is one, they put multiple solutions together in a single place and made that easy. Two, they made an upgrade to their user interface, so it's really easy to interact with. And so you can have a great technology, but if it's not easy to work with, customers are moving on, that's the state of reality today in the market. They put those things together at a great price, and they're maniacal about support, and so they're built to make sure that partners and their customers sort of get up and running with their product quickly. And add to that, then we've got integration with that platform and ours, now it's like it's a perfect opportunity, because now we can all move quickly, automated. This is why it's a great union. >> Ryan, thanks for coming on and sharing your insight. Take a minute to give a quick plug for Pax8. What are you guys working on? What are you guys looking to do, hire, take new territory? What's the plug? >> Pax8 is blowing up distribution and we're growing rapidly. One of the things we're focused on right now is that with the focus on the customer experience, and digitizing operations, what we're focused on now is thinking differently about how you target your customers and what they need. If you take a page of the Amazon marketplace playbook, and I'm talking about consumer products, they're really taking advantage of understanding the characteristics of each buyer. This is what Pax8's focused on for the future, so that you can really have a more targeted conversation, and focus and marketing campaign with your customers. And we're going to deliver that with our platform. >> And being cloud guys, I'm sure data's a big part of it? >> Data's a big, this is the future. We're hiring data scientists to really be prescriptive about how to target and what comes next. >> Ryan, thank you so much for sharing that insight. Good stuff, congratulations. Looking forward to tracking your progress in the industry. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much, John, I appreciate it and, yeah, I look forward to talking to you in the future. >> Okay, it's theCUBE coverage from Miami Beach for Acronis' Global Cyber Summit 2019, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's two day coverage of Acronis' Global Cyber Summit 2019, here in Miami Beach, at the Fontainebleau Hotel. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're with Katya Fisher, Partner Chief and Chief Privacy Officer at Greenspoon Marder. Legal advice is right here on theCUBE, ask her anything. We're going to do a session here. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, I'm going to have to do the little disclaimer that all lawyers do, which is, nothing here is to be construed as advice. It's just opinions and information only. >> I didn't mean to set you up like that. All kidding aside, you closed for the panel here for Acronis' conference. Obviously, cyber protection's their gig. Data protection, cyber protection. Makes sense, I think that category is evolving from a niche, typical enterprise niche, to a much more holistic view as data becomes you know, critical in the security piece of it. What was on the, what were you guys talking about in the panel? >> Well, so, the first issue that you have to understand is that cyber protection is something that has now become critical for pretty much every individual on the planet, as well as governments. So something that we talked about on the panel today was how governments are actually dealing with incoming cyber threats. Because now, they have to take a look at it from the perspective of, first of all, how they themselves are going to become technologically savvy enough to protect themselves, and to protect their data, but also, in terms of regulation and how to protect citizens. So, that was what the panel discussion was about today. >> On the regulatory front, we've been covering on SiliconANGLE, our journalism site, the innovation balance, is regulatory action helpful or hurtful to innovation? Where is the balance? What is the education needed? What's your thoughts on this, where are we? I mean early stages, where's the progress? What needs to get done? What's your view on the current situation? >> So, I'm an attorney, so my views are perhaps a bit more conservative than some of the technologists you might speak with and some of my clients as well. I think that regulation is, as a general matter, it can be a good thing. And it can be quite necessary. The issues that we see right now, with regard to regulation, I think one of the hottest issues today is with respect to data laws and data privacy laws. And that's obviously something that I think everyone is familiar with. I mean take a look at, in the United States alone. We've seen the city of Baltimore dealing with breaches. We've seen other parts of the government, from the Federal level all the way down to municipalities, dealing with breaches in cyber attacks. We've seen data breaches from banks, Capital One, right? I believe Dunkin' Donuts suffered a breach. Equifax, and then at the same time we've also seen individuals up in arms over companies like 23andMe and Facebook, and how data is used and processed. So data seems to be a very very hot button issue today across the board. So something that we're really thinking about now is, first of all, with respect to the regulatory climate, how to deal with it, not only in the United States, but on a global level, because, when we talk about technology and the internet right, we're in an era of globalization. We're in an era where a lot of these things go across boarders and therefore we have to be mindful of the regulatory regimes in other places. So, I'll give you an example. You might be familiar with the GDPR. So the GDPR is in the European Union. It's been in effect now for the last year and a half, but it affects all my U.S. clients. We still have to take a look at the GDPR because at the end of the day my clients, my firm, might be dealing with foreign companies, foreign individuals, companies that have some sort of nexus in the European Union, et cetera. So because of that, even though the GDPR is a set of regulations specific to the European Union, it becomes extremely important in the context of the United States and globally. At the same time, the GDPR has certain issues that then end up conflicting often times with some of the regulations that we have here in the United States. So, for example, the right to be forgotten is perhaps the most famous clause or part of the GDPR and the right to be forgotten is this concept in the GDPR that an individual can have information erased about him or her in order to protect his or her privacy. The problem is that from a technical's perspective, first of all, it's an issue because it becomes very very difficult to figure out where data is stored, if you're using third-party processors, et cetera. But from a regulatory perspective, the conflict comes in when you take a look at certain U.S. laws. So take a look for example at banking regulations in the United States. Banks have to hold some types of data for seven years and other types of data they can never delete. Right? Lawyers. I am licensed by the New York State Bar Association. Lawyers have their own rules and regulations with regard to how they store data and how they store information. HIPAA, medical records. So, you see these conflicts and there are ways to deal with them appropriately, but it becomes some food for thought. >> So it's complicated. >> It's really complicated >> There's a lot of conflicts. >> Yeah. >> First of all, I talked to a storage guy. He's like data? I don't even know which drive that's on. Storage is not elevated up to the level of state-of-the-art, from a tracking standpoint. So, it's just on the business logic is complicated. I can't imagine that. So, I guess my question to you is that, are you finding that the jurisdictional issue, is it the biggest problem, in terms of crossport and the business side or is the technical underpinnings, that with GDPR's the problem or both? What's your-- >> I mean it's both, right? They're a lot of issues. You're right, it's very complicated. I mean, in the United States we don't have some sort of overarching federal law. There's no cyber protection law in the United States. There's no overarching data protection law. So, even in the U.S. alone, because of federalism, we have HIPAA and we have COPPA which protects children and we have other types of acts, but then we also have state regulations. So, in California you have the California Privacy Act. In New York you have certain regulations with regard to cyber security and you have to deal with this patchwork. So, that becomes something that adds a new layer of complexity and a new layer of issues, as we take a look, even within the U.S. alone, as to how to deal with all of this. And then we start looking at the GDPR and all of this. From a technical perspective. I'm not a technologist, but. >> Katya, let me ask you a question on the (mumbles) and business front. (mumbles) I think one of the things. I'm saying it might or may not be an issue, but I want to get your legal weigh-in on this. >> Katya: Sure. >> It used to be when you started a company, you go to Delaware, very friendly, domicile in Delaware, do some formation there, whether you're a C corp or whatever, that's where we tend to go, raise some money, get some preferred stock, you're in business. >> Is there a shift in where companies with domicile, their entity, or restructure their companies around this complexity? Because, there's two schools of thought. This brute force act, everything coming at you, or you restructure your corporate formation to handle some of the nuances, whether it's I have a Cayman or a Bermuda... whatever's going on in the regulatory regime, whether it's innovative or not. Are people thinking like that? Or, what's your take on it? What's some of the data you're seeing from the field around, restructuring around the problem? >> So, with respect to restructuring, specifically around data laws and data protection laws, I'm not seeing too much of that, simple because of the fact that regulations like the GDPR are just so all-encompassing. With respect to companies setting up in Delaware as opposed to other jurisdictions, those are usually based on two issues, right, two core ones, if I can condense it. One has to do with the court system and how favorable a court system is to the corporation, and the second is taxes. So, a lot of times when you see companies that are doing all of this restructuring, where they're setting up in offshore zones, or et cetera, it's usually because of some sort of a tax benefit. It might be because of the fact that, I don't know, for example, intellectual property. If you have a company that's been licensing IP to the United States, there's a 30% withholding tax when royalties are paid back overseas. So a lot of times when you're looking at an international structuring, you're trying to figure out a jurisdiction that might have a tax treaty with the United States, that will create some sort of an opportunity to get rid of that 30% withholding. So, that's where things usually come into play with regard to taxes and IP. I haven't seen yet, on the side of looking for courts that are more favorable to companies, with respect to data privacy and data protection. I just haven't seen that happen yet because I think that it's too soon. >> How do companies defend themselves against claims that come out of these new relations? I mean GDPR, I've called it the shitstorm when it came out. I never was a big fan of it. It just didn't. I mean, I get the concept, but I kind of understood the technical issues, but let's just say that you're a small growing business and you don't have the army of lawyers or if someone makes a claim on you, I have to defend it. How are companies defending themselves? Do they just shut down? Do they hire you guys? I mean, obviously lawyers need to be involved. But, at some point there's a line of where having a U.S. company and someone consumes my media in Germany and it says, hey I'm a German citizen. You American company, delete my records. How does that work? Do I have to be responsible for that? I mean, what's? >> So, it's really case-by-case basis. First of all, obviously, with regard to what I was talking about earlier, with respect to the fact that there are certain regulations in the U.S. that conflict with GDPR and the right to be forgotten. If you can actually assert a defense and sort of a good reason for why you have to maintain that information, that's step one. Step two is, if it's some complaint that you received, is to delete the person's information. There's an easier way to do it. >> Yeah, just do what they want. >> Just comply with what they want. If somebody wants to be off of a mailing list, take them off the mailing list. The third is, putting in best practices. So, I'm sure a lot of things that people see online, it's always great to go ahead and obtain legal counsel, even if you're consulting with a lawyer just for an hour or two, just to really understand your particular situation. But, take a look at privacy policies online. Take a look at the fact that cookies now have a pop-up whenever you go to a website. I'm sure you've noticed this, right? >> John: Yeah. So, there are little things like this. Think about the fact that there are, what is known as clickwrap agreements. So, usually you have to consent. You have to check a box or uncheck a box with respect to reading privacy policies, being approved for having your email address and contact information somewhere. So, use some common sense. >> So, basically don't ignore the prompt. >> Don't ignore the problem. >> Don't ignore it. Don't stick your head in the sand. It'll bite you. >> Correct. And the thing is, to be honest, for most people, for most small companies, it's not that difficult to comply. When we start talking about mid-size and large businesses, the next level, the next step, obviously beyond hiring attorneys and the like, is try to comply with standards and certifications. For example, there's what is known as ISO standards. Your company can go through the ISO 27001 certification process. I think it costs around approximately $20,000. But, it's an opportunity to go ahead, go through that process, understand how compliant you are, and because you have the certification, you're then able to go to your customers and say, hey, we've been through this, we're certified. >> Yeah. Well, I want to get, Katya, your thoughts, as we wrap up on this segment, around Crypto and Blockchain. Obviously, we're bullish on Blockchain. We think this is a supply chain. (mumbles) Blockchain can be a good force, although some think there's some work needs to be done on the whole energy side of it, which is, we would agree. But, still. I'm not going to make that be a wet blanket of excitement. But cryptocurrency has been fraudulent. It's been. The SCC's been cracking down in the U.S., in the news. Lieber's falling apart, although, I called that separately, but, (laughing) it had nothing to do with that Lieber. It was more of Facebook, but. Telegram. We were talking about that, others. People are getting handcuffed on this stuff. They're really kind of clamping down. But, overseas in Asia, it's still an unregulated, seems to be (mumbles) kind of market. Your advice to clients was to shy away, be careful? >> My advice to clients is as follows. First of all, Blockchain and cryptocurrency are not the same thing. Right? Cryptocurrency is a use case coming out of Blockchain technology. I think that in the United States, the best way to think about it is to understand that the term cryptocurrency, from a regulatory perspective, is actually a misnomer. It's not a currency. It's property. Right? It's an asset. It's digital assets. So, if you think about it the same way that we think of shares in a company, it's actually much easier to become compliant, because, then you can understand that it's going to be subject to U.S. securities laws, just like other securities. It's going to be taxed, just like securities are taxed, which means that it's going to be subject to long and short-term capitol gain, and it's also going to be subject to the other regulatory restrictions that are adherent to securities, both on the federal and state level. >> It's interesting that you mentioned security. The word security. If you look back at the ICO craze, internet coin offerings, crypto offerings, whatever you call it, The people who got whacked the most were the ones that went out as a utility tokens. Not to get nerdy on this, but utility and security are two types of tokens. The ones that went out and raised money as the utility token had no product, raised money using the utility that doesn't exist. That's essentially a security. And, so, no wonder why they're getting slapped. >> They're securities. Look, Bitcoin, different story, because Bitcoin is the closest to being I guess, what we could consider to be truly decentralized, right? And the regulatory climate around Bitcoin is a little bit different from what I'm talking about, with respects to securities laws. Although, from a tax perspective, it's the same. It's taxed as property. It's not taxed the way that foreign currency is taxed. But ultimately, yeah. You had a lot of cowboys who went out, and made a lot of money, and were just breaking the law, and now everyone is shocked when they see what's going on with this cease-and-desist order from the SCC against Telegram, and these other issues. But, none of it is particularly surprising because at the end of the day we have regulations in place, we have a regulatory regime, and most people just chose to ignore it. >> It's interesting how fast the SCC modernized their thinking around this. They really. From a speed standpoint, all government agencies tend to be glacier speed kind of movement. They were pretty fast. I mean, they kind of huddled on this for a couple months and came out with direction. They've been proactive. I got to say. I was usually skeptical of most government organization. I don't think they well inform. In this case, I think the SCC did a good job. >> So, I think that the issue is as follows. You know, Crypto is a very very very small portion of what the SCC deals with, so, they actually paid an inordinate amount of attention to this, and, I think that they did it for a couple of reasons. One is because, you asked me in the beginning of this interview about regulations versus innovation. And, I don't think anyone wants to stifle innovation in America. It's a very interesting technology. It's very interesting ideas, right? No one wants that to go away and no one wants people to stop experimenting and stop dreaming bigger. At the same time, the other issue that we've seen now, especially, not only with the SCC, but with the IRS now getting involved, is the fact that even though this is something very very small, they are very concerned about where the technology could go in the future. The IRS is extremely concerned about erosion of the tax space. So, because of that, it makes a lot of sense for them to pay attention to this very very early on, nip this in the bud, and help guide it back into the right direction. >> I think that's a good balance. Great point. Innovation doesn't want to be stifled at all, absolutely. What's new and exciting for you? Share some personal or business updates in your world. What's going on? What's getting you excited these days, in the field? >> What's getting me excited these days? Well, I have to tell you that one thing that actually has gotten me excited these days is the fact that the Blockchain and cryptocurrency industries have grown up, substantially. And, now we're able to take a look at those industries in tandem with the tech industry at large, because they seem to sort of be going off in a different direction, and now we're taking a look at it, and now you can really see sort of where the areas that things are going to get exciting. I look at my clients and I see the things that they're doing and I'm always excited for them, and I'm always interested to see what new things that they'll innovate, because, again, I'm not a technologist. So, for me, that's a lot of fun. And, in addition to that, I think that other areas are extremely exciting as well. I'm a big fan of Acronis. I'm a big fan of cyber protection issues, data protection, data regulation. I think something that's really interesting in the world of data regulation, that actually has come out of the Blockchain community, in a way, is the notion of data as a personal right, as personal property. So, one of the big things is the idea that now that we've seen these massive data breaches with Facebook and 23andME, and the way that big government, big companies, are using individuals' datas, the idea that if data were to be personal property, it would be used very very differently. And technologists who are using Blockchain technology say that Blockchain technology might actually be able to make that happen. Because if you could have a decentralized Facebook, let's say, people could own their own data and then use that data as they want to and be compensated for it. So, that's really interesting, right-- Yeah, but, if you're just going to use the product, they might as well own their data, right? >> Katya: Exactly. >> Katya, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for the insight. Great, compelling narrative. Thanks for sharing. >> Sure, thank you very much. >> Appreciate it. I'm John Furrier here on theCUBE, Miami Beach, at the Fontainebleau hotel for Acronis' Global Cyber Summit 2019. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.

>> Announcer: From Miami Beach, Florida it's theCUBE, covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE coverage here at the Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019 in Miami Beach at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Not a bad venue for an event. It's their first inaugural event around cyber protection. Our next guest is a great guest. He's going to go into great detail. Very fun job. Stressful job. Graeme Hackland, CIO of ROKiT Williams Racing Formula One team. Thanks for joining me. >> Thanks Joe. >> Great job you have. I mean, it's high pressure, high stakes, data's involved. You can nerd out on all the tech and it's a part of the business these days. Take a minute to explain the Williams Racing Team history and what are you guys up to these days. >> So Williams, this is Sir Frank Williams' 41st year with this team. 50 years in total he's been in Formula One. Won 16 world championships. Not recently, we want to do that again for him and that's the mission, right? Get up every day wanting to get back to the front of the grid and help Williams to win. I joined them in 2014. I've been 23 years in total in Formula One. I love the industry, the fast pace, everything you describe. There's a bit of stress obviously but I just love the industry and I joined Williams in 2014 to help with the digital transformation and it's been brilliant and now we're not using the transformation word anymore. We're on a digital journey. We've already put a lot of that infrastructure in place, moved to the cloud, and it's just been, it's been brilliant and we've had some success on the track. More recently it's been tough but we'll get back there. >> You know, I just had a conversation with Dan Havens who's the Chief Growth Officer, he's done all of the sports deals. We were talking about, you know, baseball and the other football, European football, and also Formula One. The competitive advantage edge is there in the data. AI is here, machine learning feeds AI, so now do you set up the infrastructure, you get operationalized properly. This is a big job. It's not just loading software. You got to really think about the wholistic system at work. >> That's the great thing, right? We've go to do the infrastructure right. So you've got to get the basics right. But then if we can do a better job with AI, with machine learning, with the analytic tools that are out there than the other teams are doing. We can beat them. We don't have the same funding levels that they do but we got really smart people, and people is our biggest asset. And then the second biggest is data and making sure that the right engineer has the right data at the right time so that they can do their job, so that we can set the fastest pit stop time or that we can challenge the cars in front of us. It is really important, so we put a lot of time and effort into data analytics, but especially video. Video has become huge for us and obviously then, the data size grows massively. But data and being able to analyze your competitors, analyze your own car, your two drivers against each other. There's a huge amount of data that we are dealing with. >> Without giving any secrets away Graeme, talk about some of the data dynamics that you have going on. What is some of the workflows? What are some of the things you're optimize... You said video. Where are you guys looking at? What are some of the key, cool things that you're seeing as an edge opportunity for you? >> So, Formula One team has this life cycle of a Formula One car where you start in aerodynamics, either in a wind tunnel with a physical model or you do virtual wind tunnel with computational fluid dynamics. There's CFD, so that computation power is really important. Then you go into design, CAD design, that really turns it into something that you can make so then we're into manufacturing. Then we got a race engineer, and all the tools that they use to get the optimum out of the car that they're given on a race weekend. And then you feed that back in so that every race were adding performance to the car, and all through the season. We'll add one and a half to two seconds per lap of performance onto that car every season. And so that's a really important loop that you need to be constantly doing. And if you don't, you know, we've had some issues in this year, if you don't get that completely right, you will lose time to your competitors. >> Give me an example where it didn't work out, where you've gone back to the drawing board. >> So, I think there's been, and it's been well publicized, Clay Williams has talked about it. There's been a bit of a gap between the results we were getting in the wind tunnel and the reality that was happening on the track. And so we've had to bring that back and make sure that there was a correlation between the tunnel and the track. And our engineering group will be working really hard on that, so that kind of thing can happen. >> Talk about the engineering backgrounds that are going on behind the scenes. A lot of people look at Formula One's, only the hardcore nerd that are nerding out and geeking out on the sport know that the depth but, what's going on in the engineering front because there's a lot of investment you guys are making on engineering. >> Yeah, and so, Formula One fans love the data. I think they really love to see the data and work with it and, fortunately, the people who run Formula One are opening more of that data to the fans. If you left it to the teams, we wouldn't share it with the fans because then our competitors see it and we see it as a competitor's advantage. But if something's shared for everyone then that's fair. So, I think the fans love to see the data and see what we're doing. What we're trying to look at now is automation. Humans making decisions has been okay up until probably the last couple of years where some errors have been made in strategy, in real-time where you've got a few seconds to make a decision. Are you going to pit? Virtual safety car has just been called. You've got three seconds to make a decision. Sometimes the humans are making the wrong decision. So we see automation, AI, as really having a role in that real-time decision making. But we think AI can help us in our factory. The things that we're making, something happens at the track, and now we have to change that design. We think introducing automation and AI into that process will really help us as well. >> Yeah, sports market, sports teams, and sports franchises, to me, optimize digital transformation or digital journey because the fans want it. >> Graeme: Yeah. >> There's competitive advantage in running the team. There's the player's decision making whether it's baseball or a driver. >> Graeme: Yup. >> And then there's the fans. So, I got to ask ya on, what are you guys thinking about the fan experience because now you got some data opening up, you got visualization, potentially apps that show you that cars in 3D space and some virtual reality potential. >> Yup. >> The old experience was, ooh, there's a car, goes by again, hey we're (giggles) comes by again. So, bringing, extending the digital fan-based experience, what do you guys, what's your view there? >> Oh, there's a huge amount of work happening in Formula One and it's great to see the people who are running Formula One talking about a digital transformation, not just the teams, right. And it was all about the fan experience. We want the fan to feel like they're a part of it. So Williams did a couple of experiments with virtual reality, so that you could either be one of the pit crews, so you could be the person holding the gun, feel the car coming in, and changing the tire. >> That's awesome. >> Or you could have the driver's view. So the cameras that are on the car are above the driver's head so you don't get an accurate view. So we brought that down into the helmet and now you're getting the view of what it's like to be the driver. >> Wow. >> So, there's been a lot of focus on that fan experience and making sure that you're not at a disadvantage sitting in this, you know, at the track, compared to someone who's at home with two televisions or multiple devices that they're tracking the data on. And the GPS data of where the cars are and hearing some of the commentary of why they're making the decisions they are and when the driver's challenge their engineers, I love that bit. So the engineers got all that data, tells the driver we're going to do this strategy and the driver challenges it because they're in the car feeling how the car feels. >> I think you guys have a great opportunity as an industry because, you look at Esports and the gaming culture, the confluence of that experience based product coming to Formula One. >> Graeme: Yup. >> It's just the perfect fit. >> Well, it's gone, the Esports Formula One has gone huge. We run a team as well. Most of the Formula One teams now have an Esports team. And actually, the people who are driving in the Esports teams, their skills are transferrable. I remember one of the competitions a couple of years ago was to win a drive in the simulator. You became a development driver for one of the Formula One teams. And that shows that those skills are transferrable, so it's great. >> Yeah, that's beautiful stuff. All right, I want to get back to the Acronis cyber.. >> Yup. >> Global Cyber Summit 2019. You're here talking to folks, also sharing knowledge, you guys were hit with ransomware. >> Graeme: Yup. >> Not once, but twice. >> Graeme: Yup. >> I think you had just joined, I think at that time before.. >> It was during 2014 when I first joined and we would, I know, we had put as much investment as we could into our cyber security and to our protection. But we had gaps and I think, so the first ransomware that we got hit by was inside our network and it encrypted 50,000 files before we discovered it. Now we were lucky. We were able to recover all the data from back-up, but we knew that, because it had happened in the middle of the day, someone had looked at some websites during their lunch break and within a couple of hours we had discovered it, contained it, corrected it, restored the data. But the second time we got hit, it was an individual on their computer off network, and we lost data. And that's the thing I hate the most. That data is so precious to us. Losing it was really upsetting. And so we went out into the market, how can we make sure that our data is being backed up? But more than that, how can we make sure that backed up data is protected? And there's a number of reasons we want to protect it. We want to protect it from things like ransomware, but also, the thing that people often don't thing about with their data is, how do we make sure that it's not tampered with at any point? So, when we're at the track, and the car's running around the track, we're pushing data locally, inside the network. We're pushing it to the cloud to do computation and we're sending it back to the UK so that engineers at base can work with it. >> Yeah. >> What it someone was in those stream of data tampering with it? >> Yeah. >> And we then had fake data? And as we go to more machine learning and automation, if those decisions are being made on bad data, that's going to be a real problem. So, we wanted to make sure that our data couldn't be tampered with, so we can adopt new technology. So that was really important. But, Williams also have an advanced engineering company, so beyond Formula One, we apply that knowledge and know how, to all sorts of other industries. From healthcare to retail to automotive. We've been helping Unilever with some really interesting projects to make ice cream better and more efficiently and to help with soap powder. We got to make sure that that customer data is never tampered with. If we're going to put technology into road cars, that's a very different challenge to Formula One. >> John: Yeah. >> We got to make sure that, that whole, the IP chain, how we develop that technology can be proven and isn't tampered with. >> It's interesting, supply chain concepts data protection merging together. Data protection used to be thought after.. Oh, we've got a design. Well let's brush up, we'll get back it, bolt it on. Not anymore. >> Now having to build it into the solutions up front. As we're preparing technology for customers, we're having to make sure that we're thinking about the data challenge. So if it's in a car, so we did battery technology, we won the supply for the first ever gas to electric model, right. As that car is driving around, there's going to be data that's important around the health of the battery. >> John: Yeah. >> And information that is going to be needed by the driver, but also for later for when they're doing the servicing on the car. We got to make sure that that data is protected properly. >> You guys are pushing the envelope on instrumentation, sensors, data, real-time telemetry? >> To be honest, Formula One has always been like that. We put our first data logger in 1979 on a Formula One car. Honestly, it's been an IOT device since then. (laughs) It's not a new thing for F Ones. I think we are really experienced. Our electronics group are real experienced in how to protect that data as it comes off the car and we've applied that knowledge to road cars as well. >> Well you, what's great about you guys and the whole industry is that, that innovation for the sport is now translating as a benefit for society. >> Exactly. >> And I think that is really kind of a, I think, an example of where innovation can come from. Places you least expect it. The people doing hard work pays off. >> It always worried me that Formula One, we spend all the money we spend, right, hundred million pounds, three hundred million pounds per year. And at the end of the year, the product that we created gets retired and we create a whole new product. It always worried me that that technology wasn't reused. Williams are reusing it. You know, we take the carbon fiber that we use to protect a driver in a Formula One car. We've now applied that to babies in hospitals when they get moved around. We built a carbon fiber unit that moves them around. Aerodynamics design, we've applied to fridges to make them more efficient. If you've got an open fridge, the cold air doesn't come out into the aisle of the supermarket. We push it back into the fridges. I love that. Reuse, taking loose end leaf batteries and putting them into a unit that you bought on the side of a house and it helps to power the house over night. >> You know, it's interesting Graeme, you mentioned digital transformation versus digital journey, you guys are operationalize it as it's used. >> Graeme: Exactly. >> Difference, there's nuance but transformation. You have yet transformed. >> Graeme: Yup. >> You guys up transformed so you're on a journey. I got to ask you, what is some learnings in your operationalize digital? I mean, obviously you got your sport, but now it's translating out to other areas. What's the big learnings that you take away from, as a professional and as an individual in the industry, from all this? >> I think, initially, we were quite conservative and we only went with big players that we were convinced were going to be around in three to five years. I think, there's a lot more established cloud providers now but early on we only went with the big guys because we wanted to make sure we could get our data out. If they disappeared, we weren't going to lose our data. I think what the partnership with Acronis and other partnerships we've done has helped us to be more aggressive in terms of our approach towards CAD vendors. We can now take risks with a smaller player. We've got a really niche product but it's something that could give us a competitive advantage for half a season, three, four races sometimes. We'd go for it. Whereas, I think we were a bit conservative at first. I think all CIOs have to think about what's their appetite for risk. We did a really good process of mapping that out, discussing it all the way to board level. What exactly are we prepared to risk? There's some things, you know, car data, we're just not prepared to risk that. >> Yeah. >> But there are some things that we can afford to take risks with. And I've talked to CIOs at finance institutes, they're starting to take risks now. There's core data that they won't be able to, either by regulation or just doesn't make sense. But there's a lot you can commoditize and put out into the cloud. >> And if you have a cyber protection foundation, you can take those risks. >> Graeme: Exactly. >> You don't want to be looking over your shoulder worrying. >> Because you own the data. And sometimes when you go with a cloud provider, it feels almost like they own the data. But when you've got a partnership like the one we have with Acronis, we know that we own the data. We're backing that data away from the cloud vendor so we can always get it back. >> Graeme, thanks so much for the insight. Love this conversation. I think it's really innovative, cutting edge, and great fun to talk about. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, cheers. >> CUBE coverage here at Miami Beach at the Fontainebleau Hotel for Acronis Global Cyber Security 2019 Summit, I'm John Ferrier, stay with us for more CUBE day two coverage after this short break. (fun music)

>> Announcer: From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's coverage here in Miami Beach, Florida at the Fontainebleau Hotel for Acronis' Global Cyber Summit 2019's inaugural event with cyber protection, the new category that's emerging. It's been really exciting, it's a platform to really protect the data, protect cyber. Data protection's evolving to cyber protection. This is part of the Cloud 2.0 coverage that we've been covering on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. Over the past year we're seeing more and more modernization of IT and systems. We're here with Ryan Davis, director of enterprise sales for Acronis. He's out on the front lines. This company has a great platform and a great field team out pushing the envelope, educating customers, having great success. I thought it would be great to have you on. Ryan, welcome to theCUBE. >> Ryan: Thank you for having me. >> So one of the things that I've observed and noticed with you guys is that you have a very strong field customer presence, you guys do a great job across the board on a direct touch basis, but also a huge channel operation, so you guys sell a lot through the channel, which is all good stuff, but you still got to talk to the big companies, still got to go to the large enterprises where you're having success. So you're doing that. What are some of the things that you're seeing when you're out pitching clients on Acronis, what are some of the concerns that you're hearing, what are the patterns, what's going on in the general broader market that's teasing out the Acronis value proposition? >> Sure, absolutely. So really where a lot of the focus and a lot of the attention is is on the edge. Five years ago, all the data was generated, produced, and analyzed in the core, in the data centers, whereas now, with the IoT devices, the proliferation of smart devices generating the data, they can't send it all to one central location. So networks are springing up out there in a distributed manner, and they have to be able to secure those smart devices and those edge networks. And that's where Acronis has a really compelling story, especially for enterprise. Because while they have a lot of consistency in the core, there's a lot of diversity on the edge. So it creates challenges for their IT teams to be able to manage it. So we can work with their field teams to provide a platform that can actually secure the devices in place and then protect them as well. >> So what's the pitch? Give us the pitch on that problem that you've just addressed, because that is legit. The edge is springing up, you're seen more and more edge cases and there's the outer edges, wearables, right? But the industrial edge, the company's edge, where you guys have a solution, that's challenging. The surface area for attacks are high, you have data as a challenge, you move compute to the data, you move data across the network, these are all costs, so costs are going up too. So with that problem, what is the pitch? >> Sure, well it really depends on who you're talking to, but there's two levels to it, right? So when you're talking industrial networks, the cost of downtime is huge, you know? You have 1,200 employees, at an automotive plant and you have a key industrial controller goes down, and that plant stops production, the cost is enormous. So at the plant level, they feel that pain, so they recognize the need for disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities. But when you start moving up a level at the executive level, it's what's really compelling and what's sexy for them. And that's really enabling digital transformation. And so I mentioned the concept of diversity a little bit earlier today. It's really hard for IT teams to do things on the edge when they may have 20,000, 40,000 edge devices that are going to run from NT, XP up to the most modern operating systems. It's difficult to implement a solution that's going to touch all of those devices. And backup and disaster recovery is critical for that, because if you're going to touch that many devices, you need the rollback capability. So being able to communicate a path forward to digital transformation on the edge is what is really exciting a lot of our executive customers. >> All right, so pretend I'm a customer for a minute, I'm like, hey Ryan, so hey, love the pitch, but I had XYZ data recovery company just came in earlier, they said they got an amazing platform. Why are you different, why should I not go with them? Why should I go with you? >> Sure, absolutely. Well all the competing vendors, all they know is the data center, right? So Acronis, part of our unique value proposition is not just the technology, it's really people, processes, and technology. So our experience working with industrial companies, pharmaceutical companies, working in compliant GXP, NERC CIP, this allowed us to develop expertise to come in not just with our product and the tech, but with people that know their environments and processes for successful implementation that other vendors can't bring. And our relationship with key automation vendors, we have our partners Honeywell, Emerson that embed our product, these are leading automation vendors that touch thousands of enterprises, and again, those experiences give us an understanding of these environments that other companies don't have. >> All right, so now I can come back and say, okay, well Ryan, you know, I like what you're saying, but I don't want to boil the ocean over. I don't see a path from what you're saying to execution. How can you help me figure this out? What do you offer me, as a client, if I'm the client, how do I get started? Is there a methodology, land, adopt, expand, how do you guys do that? >> Absolutely. Well, again, every customer's going to be different, right? But we don't like to boil the ocean either. What we're talking about is a path to digital transformation. We're not talking about the end result, right? So the first piece, the land, is always backup, right? When you backup the system, that provides a rollback mechanism so that provides an opportunity for you to do a lot more things with the computer. But the first piece is always just an assessment. You have to do an assessment, take stock of what you have, and Acronis is building technologies around discovery to help customers wrap their arms around these environments to make decisions on what they should do. >> So what's in it for me when I hear a platform, I hear about maybe complexity, is the platform really going to be the silver bullet? How do you manage that concern? >> Sure, sure. Well, most enterprises have at least five to seven different data protection solutions out there. So when you start talking about platform, you start talking kind of jargon words like unifying, consolidating their data protection suite. And that's really what Acronis is trying to do but not just in backup, but also offering more services through a single platform, so reducing the overall stack of tools that they're using to manage these environments. And again, going back to the edge, they don't have their big IT team that is versed in managing complex applications, right? You have controls engineers, plant engineers, scientists, that are interacting with these devices just enough to be dangerous. Think of it like a mechanic, so he's been working on cars his whole life, is very familiar with carburetors and brakes but now he gets a Tesla that's got sensors all over the place, and infotainment systems that run diagnostics, that doesn't make him an expert in that computer. So what Acronis is trying to do is provide you an easy-to-use platform that can solve multiple problems so that way a non-IT expert can service their compute infrastructure on the edge. >> So you guys have a good story for the edge. Also one story that's coming up here is ransomware. >> Correct. >> Ransomware is one of those disruptions that wasn't factored into the design of, you know, old-school legacy data protection and recovery systems. Those disruptions were hurricane, floods, some sort of mechanical failure, not a logical vector, in this case, security, which is going up high frequency. More and more every day, ransomware, malware, ZeroDay, others, incidents are on the rise. So more disruption. >> Correct. >> You guys are coming from that angle. >> Well, we're building security first into the platform. And that's a pivot that we made over the last 12 to 24 months. The first piece of that has already been released, which is called Active Protection, which is a module that actually monitors for changes and can prevent unauthorized changes to the file system like encryption. And so we're the only backup application that creates that proactive layer of protection. Everybody else is only going to be able to recover and be reactive. So we're trying to create a layered approach there and improve our customer security posture through an agent that's-- They would need to do the backup anyways. >> All right, so final track I want to chat with you about is take us through the real-life use case of an ideal sales process motion that encapsulates this modern era challenges and opportunities. You don't have to name the customer's name, you can use an anonymized case, but take use through what is a typical motion for you guys where you're successful, and what does it look like? >> Sure, absolutely. So it's pretty consistent, and I would say a pretty simple sales motion. The first piece is you have to do an assessment and a basic inventory in terms of what platforms are you going to have out there, and then, you're going to assess the sites that you have 'cause you need to create a deployment plan. And edge environments, it's not like the data center where you're just going to login to SCCM and push this out to your thousands of devices. They got to go to 40, 60 different plants. So you have to build, typically, a 12-month deployment plan where you're going to hit all of these different sites, build change windows, build maintenance windows. But before you can get to that, we do a POC on-site, where you touch, make sure that you have compatibility with the automation vendors, make sure you have compatibility with these networks, which are, again, very diverse and customized at each plant. Once you have a validated deployment process, you build out a timeline where you go site to site to site to deploy it. >> Take us through a POC. What does that look like, what's a typical POC for you guys? >> Sure, it's very simple based on what the ultimate objectives are. Most of our customers on the edge are primarily interested in business continuity, which would be backup, system recovery, application restore, right? On the edge it's not as much about the data, it's about securing the application that's performing the work, and so we protect the system, allow them to roll it back, once you validate that on the different platforms that they have, they're ready to move forward. >> And workloads are key criteria in all of this, that's a key factor. >> Absolutely, distributed control systems, R and D systems, lab systems, they have a lot of different types of applications you're not going to see in the data center, and we just want to get validated. >> John: So you hit your number? >> Absolutely, every year! (laughs) >> Over quota? >> Every year! >> All right. Ryan, thanks for coming on and sharing stories from the field, really appreciate it. >> Appreciate it, have a great one. >> CUBE Coverage here in Miami Beach, not a bad venue for a conference. This is the first conference that Acronis is putting on around cyber protection, Acronis' Global Cyber Summit 2019. Cyber protection new category emerging from the data protection world, this is the big story here. TheCUBE's covering two days, we'll be back with more after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: From Miami Beach, Florida, it's The Cube, covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >> Welcome back everyone. We are here with The Cube coverage for two days. We're wrapping up, getting down on day one in the books for the Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host of The Cube. We are in Miami Beach, the Fontainebleau Hotel. I'm personally excited for this next guest because I'm a huge Red Sox fan, even though I got moved out to California. Giants is in a different area. National League is different than American League, still my heart with the Red Sox. And we're here with an industry veteran, seasoned professional in IT and data, Brian Shield. Boston Red Sox Vice President of Technology and IT. Welcome to The Cube, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> John: So congratulations on the rings. Since I moved out of town, Red sox win their World Series, break the curse of the Bambino. >> Hey we appreciate that. Thank you. >> My family doesn't want me back. You got to show >> Yeah, maybe I'll put this one up for the, maybe someone can zoom in on this. Which camera is the good one? This one here? So, there ya go. So, World Series champs for at least for another week. (laughter) >> Bummer about this year. Pitching just couldn't get it done. But, good team. >> Happens. >> Again, things move on, but you know. New regime, new GM going to come on board. >> Yup. >> So, but in general, Red Sox, storied franchise. Love it there. Fenway Park, the cathedral of baseball parks. >> Brian: Defnitely. >> And you're seeing that just play out now, standard. So just a great place to go. We have tickets there. So, I got to ask you. Technology, sports, really is modernized faster than I think any category. And certainly cyber security forced to modernize because of the threats. But sports, you got a business to run, not just IT and making the planes run on time. >> Sure. >> Scouts, money, whatever. >> Fans. >> You got fan experience. >> Stadium opportunities. >> Club management, scouts are out there. So you got business, team, fans. And data's a big part of it. That's part of your career. Tell us what the cutting edge innovation is at the Red Sox these days. >> I think baseball in general, as you indicated, it's a very evolving kind of environment. I mean historically I think people really sort of relish the nostalgia of sports and Fenway Park being as historic as it is, was probably the pinnacle of that, in some respects. But Red Sox have always been leaders and baseball analytics, you know. And everyone's pretty familiar with "Moneyball" and Brad Pitt. >> John: Is that a true story, he turned down the GM job? >> I'm told it is. (laughter) I don't know if I fully vetted that question. But over the last six, seven years, you know we've really turned our attention to sort of leveraging sort of technology across the businesses, right? Not just baseball and analytics and how we do scouting, which continues to evolve at a very rapid pace. But also as you pointed out, running a better business, understanding our fans, understanding fan behavior, understanding stadiums. There's a lot of challenges around running an effective stadium. First and foremost to all of us is really ensuring it's a great fan experience. Whether it's artificial intelligence, or IoT technologies or 5G or the latest Wifi, all those things are coming up at Fenway Park. You and I talked earlier about we're about to break ground for a new theater, so a live theater on the outside, beyond the bleachers type of thing. So that'll be a 5,400-seat arena, 200 live performances a year, and with e-sports, you know, complementing it. It just gives you an example of just how fast baseball is sort of transitioning. >> And the theater, is that going to be blown out from where that parking garage is, structure and going towards >> So the corner of Landsdown and Ipswich, if you think of that sort of corner back there, for those that are familiar with the Fenway area. So it's going to be a very big change and you'll see the difference too from within the ballpark. I think we'll lose a couple of rows of the bleachers. That'll be replaced with another gathering area for fans and things like that, on the back end of that theater. So build a great experience and I think it really speaks to sort of our ability to think of Fenway as more of a destination, as a venue, as a complementary experience. We want people to come to the area to enjoy sports and to enjoy entertainment and things. >> You know Brian, the consumerization of IT has been kicked around. Last decade, that was a big buzzword. Now the blending of a physical event and digital has certainly consumed the world. >> Absolutely. >> And we're starting to see that dynamic. You speak to a theater. That's a physical space. But digital is also a big part of kind of that complementary. It's not mutually exclusive for each other. They're integrated business models. >> Absolutely. >> So therefore, the technology has to be seamless. The data has to be available. >> Yup. >> And it's got to be secure. >> Well the data's got to be ubiquitous, right? I mean you don't want to, if we're going to have fans attending theater and then you're going to go to Fenway Park or they leave a game and then go to some other event or they attend a tour of Fenway Park, and beyond maybe the traditional what people might think about, is certainly when you think about baseball and Fenway Park. You know we have ten to twelve concerts a year. We'll host Spartan games, you know. This Christmas, I'm sorry, Christmas 2020 we now have sort of the Fenway Bowl. So we'll be hosting the AAC ACC championship games there with ESPN. >> John: Hockey games? >> Hockey games. Obviously we have Liverpool soccer being held there so it's much more of a destination, a venue for us. How we leverage all the wonderful things about Fenway Park and how we modernize, how we get basically the best of what makes Fenway Park as great as it is, yet as modern as we can make it, where appropriate to create a great fan experience. >> It's a tough balance between balancing the brand and having things on brand as well. >> Sure. >> Does that come into your job a lot around IT? Saying being on brand, not kind of tearing down the old. >> Yeah absolutely. I think our CEOs and leadership team, I mean it's not success for us if you pan to the audience and everyone is looking at their phone, right? That's not what we aspire to. We aspire to leverage technology to simplify people's experience of how do you get to the ballpark, how do I park, how do I get if I want to buy concessions or merchandise, how do I do it easily and simply? How do we supplement that experience with maybe additional data that you may not have had before. Things like that, so we're doing a lot of different testing right now whether it's 4D technologies or how we can understand, watch a play from different dimensions or AI and be able to perhaps see sort of the skyline of Boston since 1912, when Fenway Park launched... And so we sort of see all these technologies as supplemental materials, really kind of making it a holistic experience for fans. >> In Las Vegas, they have a section of Las Vegas where they have all their test beds. 5G, they call it 5G, it's really, you know, evolution, fake 5G but it's a sandbox. One of the challenges that you guys have in Boston, I know from a constraint standpoint physically, you don't have a lot of space. How do you sandbox new technologies and what are some of the things that are cool that people might not know about that are being sandboxed? So, one, how do you do it? >> Yeah. >> Effectively. And then what are some of the cool things that you guys are looking at or things they might not know about that would be interesting. >> Sure. Yeah so Fenway Park, we struggle as you know, a little bit with our footprint. You know, honestly, I walk into some of these large stadiums and I get instant jealousy, relative to just the amount of space that people have to work with and things. But we have a great relationship with our partners so we really partner, I think, particularly well with key partners like Verizon and others. So we now have 5G partially implemented at Fenway Park. We expect to have it sort of fully live come opening day next year. So we're really excited about that. We hope to have a new version of Wifi, the latest version of Wifi available, for the second half of the year. After the All-Star Break, probably after the season's over. But before our bowl game hopefully. We're looking at some really interesting ways that we can tease that out. That bowl game, we're really trying to use that as an opportunity, the Fenway Bowl, as an opportunity to make it kind of a high-tech bowl. So we're looking at ways of maybe doing everything from hack-a-thons to a pre-egaming sort of event to some interesting fan experiential opportunities and things like that. >> Got a lot of nerds at MIT, Northeastern, BU, Bentley, Babson, all the schools in the area. >> Yeah, so we'll be reaching out to colleges and we'll be reaching out to our, the ACC and AACs as well, and see what we can do to kind of create sort of a really fun experience and capitalize on the evolving role of e-sports and the role that technology can play in the future. >> I want to get to the e-sports in a second but I want to just get the plug in for Acronis. We're here at their Global Cyber Summit. You flew down for it, giving some keynote speeches and talks around security. It's a security company, data protection, to cyber protection. It is a data problem, not a storage appliance problem. It's a data problem holistically. You get that. >> Sure. Sure. >> You've been in the business for a long time. What is the security kind of posture that you guys have? Obviously you want to protect the data, protect privacy. But you got to business. You have people that work with you, supply chain, complex but yet dynamic, always on environment. >> That's a great question. It's evolving as you indicated. Major League Baseball, first and foremost, does an outstanding job. So the last, probably last four plus years, Major League Baseball has had a cyber security program that all the clubs partake in. So all 30 clubs are active participants in the program. They basically help build out a suite of tools as well as the ability to kind of monitor, help participate in the monitoring, sort of a lot of our cyber security assets and logs And that's really elevated significantly our posture in terms of security. We supplement that quite a bit and a good example of that is like Acronis. Acronis, for us, represents the ability for us to be able to respond to certain potential threats like ransom-ware and other things. As well as frankly, what's wonderful about a tool like this is that it allows us to also solve other problems. Making our scouts more efficient. We've got these 125 scouts scattered around the globe. These guys are the lifeblood of our, you know, the success of our business. When they have a problem, if they're in Venezuela or the Dominican or someplace else, in southeast Asia, getting them up and running as quickly as we can, being able to consume their video assets and other things as they're scouting prospects. We use Acronis for those solutions. It's great to kind of have a partner who can both double down as a cyber partner as well as someone who helps drive a more efficient business. >> People bring their phone into the stadiums too so those are end points now connecting to your network. >> Definitely. And as you pointed out before, we've got great partnerships. We've got a great concession relationship with Aramark and they operate, in the future they'll be operating off our infrastructure. So we're in the point of rolling out all new point-of-sale terminals this off-season. We're excited about that 'cause we think for the first time it really allows us to build a very comprehensive, very secure environment for both ourselves and for all the touchpoints to fans. >> You have a very stellar career. I noticed you were at Scudder Investments back in the '80s, very cutting-edge firm. FTD that set the whole standard for connecting retailers. Again, huge scale play. Can see the data kind of coming out, they way you've been a CIO, CTO. The EVP CIO at The Weather Channel and the weather.com again, first mover, kind of pioneer. And then now the Red Sox, pioneering. So I got to ask you the modernization question. Red Sox certainly have been cutting-edge, certainly under the last few owners, and the previous Henry is a good one, doing more and more, Has the business model of baseball evolved, 'cause you guys a franchise. >> Sure. >> You operate under the franchisor, Major League Baseball, and you have jurisdictions. So has digital blurred the lines between what Advanced Media unit can do. You got communities developing outside. I watch the games in California. I'm not in there but I'm present digitally. >> Sure. Sure. >> So how has the business model flexed with the innovation of baseball? >> That's a great question. So I mean, first off, the relationship between clubs like ours and MLB continue to evolve. We have a new commissioner, relatively new commissioner, and I think the whole one-baseball model that he's been promoting I think has been great. The boundaries sometimes between digital assets and how we innovate and things like that continues to evolve. Major League Baseball and technology groups and product groups that support Major League Baseball have been a fantastic partner of ours. If you look at some of the innovations with Statcast and some of the other types of things that fans are now becoming more familiar with. And when they see how fast a runner goes or how far a home run goes and all those sort of things, these kinds of capabilities are on the surface, but even like mobile applications, to make it easy for fans to come into ballparks and things like that really. What we see is really are platforms for the future touchpoints to all of our customers. But you're right, it gets complicated. Streaming videos and people hadn't thought of before. >> Latin America, huge audience for the Red Sox. Got great players down there. That's outside the jurisdiction, I think, of the franchise agreement, isn't it? (laughs) >> Well, it's complicated. As this past summer, we played two games in England, right? So we enjoy two games in London, sadly we lost to the Yankees in both of those, but amazing experience and Major League Baseball really hats off to those guys, what they did to kind of pull that together. >> You mentioned Statcast. Every year when I meet with Andy Jassy at AWS, he's a sports fan. We love to talk sports. That's a huge, kind of shows the power of data and cloud computing. >> No doubt. >> How do you guys interface with Statcast? Is that an Amazon thing? Do they come to you? Are they leveraging dimensions, camera angles? How does that all work? Are you guys involved in that or? >> Brian: Oh yeah, yeah. >> Is that separate? >> So Statcast is just one of many data feeds as you can imagine. One of the things that Major League Baseball does is all that type of data is readily available to every club. So every club has access to the data. The real competitive differentiator, if you will, is how you use it internally. Like how your analysts can consume that data. We have a baseball system we call Beacon. We retired Carmine, if you're familiar with the old days of Carmine. So we retired Carmine a few years ago with Beacon. And Beacon for us represents sort of our opportunity to effectively collapse all this information into a decision-making environment that allows us to hopefully to kind of make the best decisions to win the most games. >> I love that you're answering all these questions. I really appreciate it. The one I really want to get into is obviously the fan experience. We talked about that. No talent on the field means no World Series so you got to always be constantly replenishing the talent pool, farm system, recruiting, scouting, all these things go on. They're instrumental. Data's a key driver. What new innovations that the casual fan or IT person might be interested in what's going on around scouting and understanding the asset of a human being? >> Right. Sure. I mean some of this gets highly confidential and things, but I think at a macro level, as you start to see both in the minor leagues and in some portions of the major leagues, wearable technologies. I think beyond just sort of player performance information that you would see traditionally with you might associate it with like Billy Beane, and things like that with "Moneyball" which is evolved obviously considerably since those days. I mean understanding sort of player wellness, understanding sort of how to get the most out of a player and understanding sort of, be able to kind of predict potential injuries and accelerate recoveries and being able to use all of this technology where appropriate to really kind of help sort of maximize the value of player performance. I mean, David Ortiz, you know, I don't know where we would have been in 2018 without, you know, David. >> John: Yeah. >> But like, you know >> Longevity of a player. >> Absolutely. >> To when they're in the zone. You wear a ring now to tell you if you're sleeping well. Will managers have a visual, in-the-zone, don't pull 'em out, he can go an extra inning? >> Well, I mean they have a lot of data. We currently don't provide all that data to the clubhouse. I mean, you know, and so If you're in the dugout, that information isn't always readily available type of thing. But players know all this information. We continue to evolve it. At the end of the day though, it's finding the balancing act between data and the aptitudes of our coaching staff and our managers to really make the wise decisions. >> Brian, final question for you. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now? Besides the fan having a great experience, 'cause that's you kind of touched on that. What's the coolest thing that you're excited about that you're working on from a tech perspective that you think is going to be game-changing or interesting? >> I think our cloud strategy coming up in the future. It's still a little bit early stage, but our hope would be to kind of have clarity about that in the next couple months. I think is going to be a game-changer for us. I think having, you know, we enjoy a great relationship with Dell EMC and yet we also do work in the cloud and so being able to leverage the best of both of those to be able to kind of create sort of a compelling experience for both fans, for both player, baseball operations as well as sort of running an efficient business, I think is really what we're all about. >> I mean you guys are the poster child for hybrid cloud because you got core, data center, IoT, and >> No doubt. So it's exciting times. And we're very fortunate that with our relationship organizations like Dell and EMC, we have leading-edge technologies. So we're excited about where that can go and kind of what that can mean. It'll be a big step. >> Okay two personal questions from me as a fan. One is there really a money-counting room like in the movie "The Town"? Where they count a big stack of dollar bills. >> Well, I'm sure there is. I personally haven't visited it. (laughs) I know it's not in the room that they would tell you it is on the movie. (laughter) >> And finally, can The Cube get press passes to cover the games, next to NESN? Talk tech. >> Yeah, we'll see what we can do. >> They can talk baseball. We can talk about bandwidth. Right now, it's the level five conductivity. We're looking good on the pipes. >> Yeah we'll give you a tech tour. And you guys can sort of help us articulate all that to the fans. >> Thank you so much. Brian Shield, Vice President of Technology of the Boston Red Sox. Here talking about security and also the complications and challenges but the mega-opportunities around what digital and fan experiences are with the physical product like baseball, encapsulates kind of the digital revolution that's happening. So keep covering it. Here in Miami, I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage here in Miami Beach, Florida at the Fontainebleau Hotel for the Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019, where cyber protection is becoming an emerging trend. And we see these once in a while, when you have these big waves, you know, some unique trends. Observability and cloud computing, automation and cloud computing came out of nowhere from these white spaces. Now you're seeing the confluence of data protection and cyber security coming together to the platform. That's what they're talking about here. And my next guest, to break it all down, is an analyst from Forrester Research, Naveen Chhabra. Thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you for having me here. >> So Miami Beach, not a bad venue is it? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. (laughing) >> Get a dip in the ocean there, the water's warm. I got to ask you this, break down this market. Acronis is on here earlier. They've got a story to tell, and their story is not something that's obvious. It's kind of a new category, I guess, emerging, not really a traditional category from a research standpoint. But cyber protection by combining traditional thinking about data protection and cyber security software, bringing them together into one thinking, wholistic data model, with a platform that can enable services. I mean, this is a classic platform. This is what these guys have. What's your take on the industry? Is the industry ready for this? Is this a real trend? >> The industry certainly needs the technology, and I'll give you some examples as to why. So if you think upon the ransomware attacks that have happened in the past, the ransomware attacks would cripple any organization, right? And the best defense that an organization has to recover from, backups. Now, what that means is, okay, I can certainly recover from a backup which was taken last hour, last yesterday or a few days back, a few weeks back. But the most important question is how do I find out that the last copy or the last snapshot is a clean, uninfected copy? Because that's important, right? So if you recover from an infected copy, you're going to be hit again. And you don't want that, right? So, the million dollar question there is how do I get back to the copy which is clean and uninfected? Right? And you cannot do that traditionally the way organizations have been structured. You have infrastructure and operations guys, those who are responsible for operations, you know, keeping copies in their place, wherever required, and then you have the second group, which is security and risk, which is responsible for identifying all things security, right? But, ransomware is one thing in the industry which is pulling these two teams together. But the organizations are not ready yet. In one of the surveys that I did, I asked the respondents, "Do you have these two teams working together "to solve this problem?" And the answer was abysmally low. You know, no they don't work with each other. >> You point at a great point. I think one of the things you highlight there that I think is really critical is backup and recovery was because of some operational disruption. >> Naveen: Yes. >> Outage, flood, so rollback. The disruption wasn't a hack, so to that point, all those mechanisms around, generations of backup and recovery didn't actually take into account security. >> Exactly. >> Meaning the malware or the infection, the disruption is coming from a secure breach, not some electrical outage or some sort of other disruption. And they used to call that non-disruptive operations. I remember all the stories when we just talked about that. >> Right. >> Now it's not that anymore. The disruption is coming from security, so how do you bake security in from day one? That's the million dollar question that I always hear. What's your answer to that? What's the industry doing to get security baked in? What are some of the mechanisms you've seen successful for a large enterprise to adopt a plan that way? >> So I, specifically from a technology standpoint, I see very little efforts. The technology vendors are doing their own efforts, but you know, my guidance to clients is to be proactive in terms of your using the right storage for that matter. Let's say, if you have a WORM storage which can not be encrypted. Written once, cannot be changed, right? Use that model which will ensure that whatever you backed up yesterday, one, the backup is not infected, right? Or even from your core business application standpoint, you know, you want to schedule the data to be kept at a particular point in time to that WORM storage, for example, right? I don't see much of an effort from the organizations because, again, inner security is a domain which is handled by security, backup has not looked at using WORM as a potential storage target. >> WORM being "Write Once Read Many" for the folks-- >> Yes. >> at home tracking this. >> Right, and not that they do not know the technology. They know the technology. It's also about thinking out of the box and applying what's available to another-- >> To a known problem, right? >> Yes. >> And ransomware is so bad, it's such a hard problem to solve. I've heard (mumbles) has been in solution, WORM's a good one. That's the first time I heard that. That's awesome. It makes sense. >> Absolutely. >> But how do you deploy that to scale throughout the enterprise where you had these traditional work stream workflows that-- >> That becomes a problem. >> A people problem. You've been doin' a lot of work around the people equation. People process technology, everyone says it's digital transformation. But the people equation is a hard nut to crack. What's your take on the people situation? >> It certainly is a hard nut to crack because security would not trust more infrastructure in place that our guys would be doing. They've been told to operate in that model and now comes a situation, ransomware situation, where they're asked to trust each other and work with each other. Boy, that's not happening, is it? (chuckles) >> Yeah, they hate each other before, now they have to like each other. I mean, that's been a 20 year, 10 year, 5 year you've seen it evolve over time. Dev Ops is certainly with the cloud enforced a lot of that. That's kind of what brought people together under the Dev Ops infrastructure's code. But we're talkin' about application development that's growing like crazy. (mumbles) C.s want to build in-house stacks and communicate via A.P.I.s and, or some data-sharing with vendors. So this idea of a lot of this there's a restructuring that's going on at least from a architectural, technically, and staffing. What's some of the best practices that you've seen? What is some of the customer environments out there that you can talk to to show and point at a success story? >> I think some of the examples I've seen organizationally addressing this problem, wholistically, is to start from the top. I came out with this report a couple of years back titled Ransomware is a Business Continuity Issue. So don't approach it with a technology solution. Eventually, you will end up in adopting that same technology but I didn't define why do you need to use that technology so that it ties up your business requirements. So start from identifying that as a business risk which I see very little organizations do that today. Cyber risks are not identified as vulnerable as important a risk as they should be. So start off from that and trickle down into the next sub-steps that you must be taking, going eventually to the same technology. >> You know, one of the things I want to get your thoughts on is that obviously the digital threats are the industrialization of automating attacks. You're seeing Zero-day, you're seeing all this malware out there. You got surface errors with I.O.T.s increasing. So, the threats are coming. They're not going away. In fact, they're going to be increasing over time. Maybe get, you might not see it like D-DOS kind of been distracted away. But now the complexity is a huge issue because the costs will kick off of the complexity, this is something that Acronis is talking about and this is what I want to get your thoughts on. Complexity is one of those things that if you don't solve it and you look the other way, it gets more expensive to solve over time. So as complexity piles up, it's like climate change or cleaning up the Boston harbor. The longer you wait the more expensive it's going to be. >> Exactly. >> So that's startin' be be realized in some people's minds. They call it re-platforming, digital transmission, there's just buzz words for that. But I think this is a reality that people like, "Oh, I got to get... "I got to take care of business." I got I.O.T., I got complete industrial I.O.T., N.I.O.C. I got all those data centers movin' to the cloud. I got to clean up the complexity problem. What's the answer? How do you, What's the research tell you? >> Unfortunately, there's no easy answer because all the tools, technologies the organizations are using, they're using it for a purpose. So silos is a challenge, increasing silos is a challenge. So, I would highly recommend organizations start to think about reducing the silos, not be reducing the tools, but by potentially looking at cross-liberating by integrating, right? And one of the examples here is very important around recovery from ransomware attacks. So, going back to the point that, "Okay, how do you identify where is the right, "clean copy of the backup?" So these two teams would have to work together. Now the teams would work right out of their heads. They got to depend on technology, right? So that's where the requirement of the tools, themselves, working with each other, security to identifying, "Okay, when to do the forensics tracing "you know where the ransomware part "would identify when did the ransomware get in? "When did the malware get in? "Which systems did it infect?" And then, the backup tools correspondingly acting on those backup instances which have been identified as clean and uninfected. Easier said than done, but that's a part forward. >> And the other thing to make that more complex is that you said business continuity before, that's a people issue, as well. Not just technical process. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, so the two has to have a plan. Like, "What's the plan?" Do they actually huddle and do dry runs? Do they have fire drills? I mean, these are the things that most cyber groups do. They tend to have, you know, very structured approaches to either incidents, response,... So as these worlds come together, what does your research tell you around (chuckles) the questions of working together, proactively, show you? >> Interestingly, enough. I, a couple of years back, I did a survey asking those organizations who have been hit by ransomware attack and have lost data. I asked them, "How many of you have these two teams "working together?" Apparently, you know, some thirty-odd percent responded and said, "Yes, we have these two teams working together." But among, you know, asking final questions, qualifying questions about, "Yes, these two teams "work together," but do they effectively and eventually get to where they should be. Like, have a common plan, right? I think three, four, five percent of the respondents would say, "Yes, we do have a common operating, "understood plan "between the two teams." But largely, all I can say almost all organizations do not have that plan, unfortunately. >> You're, I think, one of the first ransomware experts I've had on theCUBE that's done a lot of research in the area, directly. So I got to ask you on ransomware, first of all it's really bad news and it comes from multiple actors. People lookin' for cash and also state-sponsored, which I believe is goin' on a lot, but no one's reporting on it, but, you know, still that's not proofed yet, but I still get a feeling it's done. On ransomware, do you have any data or insights around if the people clean up their act and get fixed, because I see a lot of ransomware coming back to the same places where they hit once, solve it, pay some bit-coin or whatever their extortion currency is, and then they get hit again. And hit again. Because (clap) there's cash there. Do you see that as a trend? What's the data? Is there any anecdotal insight or are people gettin' hit twice? Three times? >> There are incidents, and I was speaking on, you know, on a panel like half an hour back, and I gave this example. There was a hotel chain in central Europe which was attacked. And the key management system, like if you're one of the guests of that you would not be able to get in, into our rooms. And while they paid a ransom for to release that key management application, they didn't secure that infrastructure and applications further, which was required. And three months later, they were attacked once again. So such incidents are happening. And that's where, you know, guidance from Forrester where we have published a paper about when to consider to pay ransom. Because, you would not be sure that you get the keys. You get the keys for all the data? You don't get any traces of malware left behind or a new malware coming in. You never know, right? >> Of course, yes. >> While this is an untrusted world, but you got to trust if you're paying. (chuckles) >> Yeah, well I think I would bet that the criminals would come back for, you know, new shoes, new coat, new car... They need new things. They need cash (clap), they're going to come back to the bank. >> Absolutely! And they're coming back to basic prey. >> Naveen, thanks for comin' on. I want to get your thoughts on the industry as we wrap up this segment on the trends around cyber protection, data protection, platform. You know, really we're living in a cyber data-driven world. And data is a key part of it. What's the most important trend or story that you think needs to be told or is being told today, in terms of customers to pay attention to? What's, is it ransomware? What's, in your mind, are the top three things that are the most important stories that must be covered or need to be covered, or aren't covered? >> So I think it's not just my story, it's about the state of affairs at an industrial level, globally. I was referring to the World Economic Forum where all the global risks that economies face. It could be famine. It could be a country going bankrupt, right? It could be any other risk that the industry faces. We have seen that, to that starting the World Economic Forum did, in the last 10 years, cyber risk has started to appear on the list of top four, top five risks for the last three years. >> In the world? >> Globally. >> Global issues? >> Global issues, yes. And one of our research also tells us that the number of ransomware incidents have grown 500% in the preceding last 12 months. And the impact, intensity, and frequency of a ransomware attack is simply great. Many organizations are actually shutting down operations. Medical practice in mid-west, called upon the practice and said, "Oh, they are closing operations?" And in fact, it's in public domain. "We're closing operations, you can come back to us "for whatever data we currently have on you." But, I mean I think that from a regulation standpoint, people (mumbles) so that you have to keep control of the data and also be able to provide. But guess what? In this case, the medical practice doesn't have data. If you were their client, if you were a patient they don't have any data on you. Guess what? If it was there for years, you've lost years of your medical data. >> So global issues, ransomware's real and cyber attacks are happening at high frequency. >> Absolutely. >> Naveen, thanks for comin' on. Naveen Chhabra, senior analyst at Forrester Research here inside theCUBE. We are at the Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier. Back with more coverage for two days here, in Miami Beach, after this short break. Stay with us. (techno music)

>> From Boston, (upbeat music) Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering Actifio 2019, Data Driven. Brought to you by Actifio. >> Welcome back to Boston everybody. You're watching the Cube, the leader in on the ground tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. Stu Miniman is here. John Furrier is also in the house. This is Actifio's Data Driven conference, the second year that they've done this conference, #DataDriven19. Ash Ashutosh is here. He's the founder and CEO of Actifio, a good friend to the Cube, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Likewise Dave. Always good to see you. >> Yeah, so second year. You chose Boston, that's great. Last year was Miami at the very swanky Fontainebleau Hotel. >> Yup. >> It's a great location. >> Yup. >> Right in the harbor here. So you've got a nice crowd, and you guys focus on the substance, you know. Not a lot of Actifio marketing stuff coming out, as you market through substantive content. Explain that theory. >> Yeah. Well, I think from inception, there's a very fundamental culture the company has had is about driving customer success, and that is the number one and probably the only one that we drive by. And if you truly are focused on customer success, when you bring a whole bunch of customers together, having more customers talk about their success, so that they help and share with other customers who are looking for some of these initiatives, almost becomes natural. People become tired of seeing and sometimes even participating in our own user conferences, where you would bring a whole bunch of very enthusiastic users, lock the doors, and start talking about your vision, and start talking about your roadmap, your new line, your new partnership. One, we believe we should be doing that throughout the year with our customers. Two, we felt it was a lot better if the customer actually talked about how it mattered to them versus how it mattered to us as Actifio. So that was the theme for why Data Driven, in general, and even before that, you used to have some colleague cloud summit as you were transitioning into use of hybrid cloud in 2016. Across the board, I think this is one theme you'll hear from Actifio and the users who are here is we pay a very, very close attention to what users want, and we give them a forum to explain that to share with other users across the world. >> Well, it sounds like a great way to build a company, you know, focus on the customer and the customer success. Sounds simple, it's not. It's very challenging, and you've been a successful entrepreneur. When I've asked you in the past and David, you know, kind of why you started the company, you focused on a problem, and you guys created the category of copy data management, which is a problem. We had copies everywhere, copy creep, and you felt as though, okay, we can help people not only organize that but maybe even get more out of their data. >> Yeah. >> And so, and that has evolved, and obviously on that journey, people wanted to use you for backup. I mean, that's the big problem. >> Yeah. >> And so you created the category. You kind of monetized the backup space and tried to change the way people thought about that, and then all of a sudden, all this VC money sort of flowing into the whole space. >> Yup. >> From your standpoint, what's going on in the marketplace? Why is it so hot today? >> Yeah. Well I think, as you'll see at this conference, there is absolutely no doubt about how data is a strategic asset, and you'll see the more reason acquisitions of Tableau, of Looker, or even Qualtrics, where the use of data, which is what actually users see, has become one of the killer apps for anybody who is running a cloud. Your own business here, right. It's a use of data, and that's the first app that's out there, that's happening across the board. But right behind that, there's an entire ecosystem about supplying that data to these applications that becomes really important. And we figured this out almost nine years ago. We figured out that for an enterprise, having data available as a strategic asset, wherever, whenever they need, and whoever, as long as it complies with the operations requirements. Instantly is absolutely what we should provide. Now in order to do that, the first place to make it available for users was to capture it. And the best place to start was backup, and we always treated copied data, journey begins with capturing data, and backup happens with the best use case, one that you already spend money on. And that's how we always treated backup as a starting point for the journey. We have over 3,600 enterprise users who range from some of the largest financial services, energy, retail, airline industries, service providers, and the focus has been on companies that are at least $500 millions of (mumbles) more normally for a billion or more who really view data as a strategic asset in their digital transformation. And almost 78 percent of our business now comes from people, they are (mumbles) applications faster. So a small person did almost 20 percent now is coming from people using Actifio data for running machine only analytics faster. And almost 100 percent of them obviously collect the data from backup. That's how we view the market. We view it as application, analytics, machine learning, DevOps, down, and infrastructure happens to be a place where you start. It's not lost on anybody in the market that data is important. It's not lost on investors who see this as an opportunity to pursue in a different way. And so you have different approaches being taken, one that starts with more infrastructure, (mumbles) has provided infrastructure to keep all this (mumbles). And we've always focused on the one thing that really matters to the customer, which is applications, and one that matters to every other application that's using this application, which is the data for this application the point in time. So you see a lot of backup-centric appliances. You see a lot of consolidation appliances. So it's a bottom-up approach. It's a great approach for people who want to buy another single-purpose storage. We fundamentally believe you're not going to be a lot on the storage system. We think this, there's a lot of companies who do a phenomenal job, and we're better off being suppliers of a multi-cloud data management, multi-cloud copy data management, and to leverage all this infrastructure. >> No box. >> Completely no box. In fact, that is the reason why we think 2016, when we saw the emergence of cloud in our user community, it took us two years, but we have the world's best multi-cloud, just copy data and data management. The largest software company, enterprise software company in the world uses Actifio today to manage their SaaS offerings in four different public-wide platforms. We couldn't do that if you had a box. You could not. I mean-- >> Because it wouldn't scale. >> Well, firstly, you can't take your box and go into a cloud. They already have infrastructure. >> Right. >> You can't bring the scale out stuff, because they already have scale out. You can't take your scale out and put in another scale out. And if you start from bottom up, you're fundamentally providing infrastructure on top of an infrastructure that's already provided as a service. What you really needed to do was to allow the applications to come back and use any infrastructure that is most relevant for their workload, for their use case, and most importantly, for that particular time. It's really important, especially if data is persistent. It stays there for 20, 30, forever. And the opportunity for me to come back and leverage infrastructure there just happens to be the right one. That's what we try to describe. >> We always say at the Cube that the difference between a business and a digital business is how the business uses data, how it leverages data. >> Yeah, yeah absolutely. >> So that's been a real tailwind for you. You guys have been on the, you know, data virtualization, it was part of that. You know, it seems to me that one of the challenges that incumbents have is their data is locked inside. Frank James talked about it today, and sort of his maturity model. Actually no, it was Brian Regan, >> Yup. >> talking about the extension maturity model. >> Yup. >> Through the early stages, it's siloed. And it's not easy to go, you know, from that siloed data that's built maybe around a modeling plant or a bank, you know, to sort of this virtualized vision. So that's something that you guys caught early on. Clearly, digital transformation has been a tailwind for you guys, but how are your customers capitalizing on your solutions to transform themselves into a data driven company? >> Yeah, well the first thing you're seeing is, as I mentioned 2016. In 2016, 100 percent of our use cases were people who wanted a backup NDR solution that was a 100x faster and 50 percent or 90 percent cheaper and manage large sets of data. From 2016 into now, we have a massive shift of almost, between 56 percent on DevOps, another 20 percent on machine (mumbles). Think about it, you have a bunch of customers, large enterprises, whose number one focus is now around how to use data, and these are people who are consumers of data, not custodians of data, who are our previous customers. The best part is as you saw their own evolution of DevOps, the merge of the consumers and custodians managing as an agile system, that's exactly what's happening in our customer base. These are people who maybe have a role of a chief data officer, whose job is to supply data but also make sure it complies with governance rules. So there's a big shift of how data is now the new infrastructure. Data is now the one that I have to provide and enable access to wherever I need. And that does require a very, very different approach then build a box, you know, build something that centralizes all this silos into one place. When you build a box, fundamentally, you create another silo, 'cause you just broke in the whole idea about I need something that just drops down that is more global as a single lane space versus you know a box that is providing a single lane space and somehow, I'm going to assume that nobody else exists in the world. >> Yeah. I want to come back to sort of building a company and your philosophy there. A couple of questions I have for you. So you mentioned cloud and how you embraced cloud early on. You know, Amazon announces a backup service. You know, we talk to the backup vendors, and they say, yeah, but it's recovery, it's wonky, it's, you know, it's really not that robust. But it's Amazon, and you know, if you don't move fast, you know Amazon's going to gobble you up. You saw with the (mumbles), you know. It was down to cloud era, and (mumbles) reeling, it's like, that was going to take over the world. How do you think about that, maybe not in terms of competition, but in terms of staying ahead, of getting, you know, Uber'd by Amazon? >> Yeah. >> Thoughts on that. >> I think, number one, as Amazon and every other cloud provider has proven, and one that started nine years ago, enterprise cloud is hybrid. It's hybrid not just on frame and cloud, but it's also on frame and multi-cloud. Number one. Two, it's about applications. It is not about infrastructure. It is not about providing a single function that ties to a single platform. I as a customer, and we have several of those, I want to be able to manage my enterprise applications exactly the same way whatever cloud platform I choose to have, and that opens up a very different engineering, marketing, sales challenges, and most importantly, keeping the focus on the user. Now if I'm Amazon, I have a focus on my platform, not exactly the 50 other platforms you want to support. >> Right. >> And that's what we focus on. We focus on the 50 other platforms you want to support at the moment. Second, you know, there's this whole notion of a stacked fallacy. You might have heard of this paradigm where it's a lot easier for people on top of the stack to come down. It's a lot harder to go from bottom up. So if you're Amazon, and you're trying to drive infrastructure as a service, it takes a little while to go up the stack. It's a lot easier for somebody like us to come down from the stack, which is why we also announced Actifio GO, our SaaS offering. >> Right. >> That today, our version runs in Amazon, providing a much more robust, much more multi-cloud, much more heterogenous, and much more enterprise class and enterprise grade solution. And we also announced one for Actifio GO for TCV for IBM cloud. >> Yeah. >> And that's how our customers want it. >> And it's a much more facile experience for the customers. It seems to me that it makes sense what you're saying is you're happy to build on top of Amazon's infrastructure. For them, you know, frankly, people always say, oh, is Amazon going to get into apps? To me, yeah, maybe some day. They don't have to. Give developers tools to build apps seems to me. Last question I have is just the philosophy of building a company. You know, you've raised I think $200 million since inception. That's a lot of money. Software's a capital efficient business, but it fails in comparison to some of what the west coast companies have done. You know, you guys, you know, I'm from Massachusetts, where maybe more conservative. You are very deliberately building a company. How do you think about, you know, the craziness in the west coast. I call it craziness, but it obviously works. You (mumbles) storage, you know, they hit escape velocity, TSX had a very successful IPO. >> Yeah. >> You're kind of slow and steady. Your philosophy there, explain that. >> Yeah, I think a couple of things. One, it was about creating a sustaining company that was growing responsibly. And two, it's also the speed of how much our customers in the market can absorb a paradigm like what we are trying to drive. And most importantly, the class of customer you're focused on. These are, like I said, $1 billion plus in revenue and above. >> Yeah. >> Sales process for them is longer, which is actually where the money goes. The money isn't on software development. It's about supporting these customers on their initiatives. Any of these customers are somewhere about eight years with us and continue to expand. Some of the largest financial institutions have started with about $500,000 and almost $20 million with us. So that journey of making the customer successful costs money, but it builds long-standing customer whose foundation is built on Actifio. We are the data provider for these customers. We are not a widgit who throws something in there and calls you in three years when your maintenance is up. That is not the business we're building. So I don't think it's about east coast, west coast as much as it's about what we deliver requires being at the customer's side, working with them for years, as they go through the transformation, and I don't think we can do that by supporting 10,000 users at the same time. Maybe we can support 1,000, 2,000. And that's just the product and the market is going now. >> True to your mission, close to the customers, you know, clear differentiation at the app levels, I'm going to just say top down. You guys didn't talk about it, but you know, database affinity, some of the unique things you have going on there. Ash, it's great to see you. Congratulations on all your success, and you'll keep it going. Really appreciate it. Have a good day. >> All right, you're welcome. >> Thank you again. Welcome again for Data Driven 19. >> All right. It's great to be here. Actifio Data Driven 19, day one, the Cube, from Boston. We'll be right back right after this short break. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live U.S. 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and my name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host Stu Miniman and Lisa Martin is also in the house. This is day three of our coverage, Danny Allan is here. He's the Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam and one of the key thought leaders at the company, one of the main figures at VeeamON, which we were just doing three weeks ago. Danny, great to see you again. >> Wonderful to be here with you. >> That was a really fun show VeeamON, it always is. You guys got a cool vibe. >> You chose the Fontainebleau Hotel this year in Miami, in Miami Beach which is just a great location. Many thousands of customers and you guys hit some milestones recently. You talked about a billion dollars in revenue, it's been something you're going after for a while, you've seen that happen. Of course things change, right? All the subscription stuff started to happen. That slowed you down a little bit but that's awesome that you guys finally hit that, so congratulations. Raised a big pile of dough and you just keep moving that ball forward. Give us the update on Veeam. >> So as you said, Veeam has a great culture, right? There's a passionate green army out there that loves us and we're thankful for that. We hit one billion in bookings for the trailing 12 months, we have 350,000 customers and the business is going well. One of the interesting things about Veeam is because we're private, we actually have the opportunity to decide when and how we do things like switch from perpetual to subscription type bookings. But business is doing great, we love it, we're glad to be here. >> One of the things that you talked about at VeeamON was kind of getting back to the basics. You talked a lot about look, it starts with backup. There's a lot of noise in the market today. You hear a lot about, you know, data management. We talk a lot about date assurance but at the end of the day, it starts with backup. That's something that you gave a lot of thought to. I mentioned that you were one of the thought leaders at Veeam. Double click on that, add some color. What were you thinking in terms of that being the starting point and that really driving a lot of your messaging at VeeamON? >> Yeah, I always say it's three things, right? This is a journey that we're on and I get excited about the end stages of that journey. But how many people actually have a budget for machine learning or blockchain or artificial intelligence? No one has a budget for that. What they have a budget for is backup and so we believe A, it's a journey, B, it does start with backup. There's a budget for that and the key thing is choose a partner for this journey and we believe Veeam is the right partner obviously to choose for that but we really wanted to go back to who is spending money to buy the products and for that, it's the technical decision maker who has the budget for backup today. >> Yeah, all right. So Danny, we talk about the Cisco relationship and budgets like you were talking about there. Cisco UCS was from day one a heavily virtualized environment and therefore had strong affinity with Veeam there. But you've got some great visibility into where UCS is going, what CI and HCI solutions are really starting to gain traction. So talk a little bit about that partnership and which ones of those Cisco solutions are really starting to, you know, kick in the market. >> We have a great partnership with Cisco, first of all and really in two areas, if you're talking infrastructure. So on the HyperFlex, the Converged Infrastructure but also on just the S3260 for example, a storage dense system and we have a target this year, this is public information, we have a target, a joint target of $100 million. We're actually at 80% of that right now. Business has been doing really well. In fact, we've been on the Global Price List now for 18 months and in 18 months, we've actually closed over 350 transactions. Like it's been going really, really well and here's what's exciting about that. Those customers that are spending money on Cisco gear with Veeam software, they might start in the drag, these are quantifiable numbers, it's about five to one. So every dollar they spend on Veeam, it's about $5 on Cisco. But over 35% of those customers within twelve months come back and buy more Cisco gear and actually if you look at the actual drag, quantifiable drag that we're bring for Cisco, it's 11 to one. So for every dollar they spend with Veeam, they're spending $11 in Cisco HyperFlex or S3260. So it's been a great partnership both for us obviously because we're on their resell list but also for them. >> And you said you're 80% of the way there. We're talking a calendar year or is that a fiscal year? >> That is their fiscal year, so that's ending in August or July. I should know the date but I know we're 80%. We're on track to hit that $100 million. >> What do you think is driving that? I mean obviously this is a partnership, which takes time. >> Yes. >> This is not just a press release partnership. What else have you done to really facilitate this? >> Well I would say two things. One is their infrastructure is great. In fact we have one of our Veeam cloud service providers that is protecting over a million VMs right now. So these are massive scale, are using S3260s in the backend as a repository, so their hardware actually works. But I would say the other thing that really resonates is, so they have this Hyper FEX Solution and on top of that they have Intersite and that concept of a cloud management plain that can roll out the hardware, can update it not only at the infrastructure but also the Veeam software is really critical and that resonates with customers. It's again, good for them but it's also good for us. >> Let's see. The last couple years you guys have had a big emphasis on the enterprise and then again we're hearing this theme of kind of back to basics. I mean you heard at VeeamON, it starts with backup. You talk to people at VeeamON, the customers. It's the, you know, a lot of medium sized customers, a lot of smaller customers. Do you feel like you over-rotated to the enterprise or do you feel like hey, we could get there just by slow and steady and still putting the accelerator on our core business? Can you just add some color to that and explain? >> Yeah, so if you back three years, our focus was very much on the small and medium enterprise where we said we wanted to capture the major enterprise and that by the way has worked. If you look, since January of 2017 we've done over a billion just in enterprise, enterprise being 1,000 employees or above. So focusing on the enterprise for a few years was the right thing to do. However, that was all on the messaging side and we had this core constituent that has been with us for over decade now and we didn't want to pivot away from them. So in the last six months, nine months, what you've seen is pivoting back towards the center. So we do a third of our business with SMB, a third with commercial and a third with enterprise. So we believe we're right there on the fairway now and it's a perfect alignment of that messaging. >> Well I mean history would show that the disruptors oftentimes come from, you know, down below and move up. I mean you certainly saw that with Microsoft in the 80s and there are many other examples. Is that part of the philosophy, that you guys just can keep adding value that will appeal to the enterprise customers? It sounds like with a 30 year business, you're actually already there in terms of functionality. Is there a functionality gap though still that you need to close in your opinion? >> I don't think so. We announced as you know probably v10 a few years ago and what we've done is we've introduced that over the years and so the final check box if you will for v10 is coming in our next release later this year. But that really covers off the gambit of everything that needs to be done and that's been resonating really strongly. We believe we have a portfolio that addresses everything from the smallest customer to the largest customer. >> Yeah and you don't live and die, we heard this from Radmere, you don't live and die by your long term product development roadmap. You tend to be very tactical and listen to customers and-- >> We're very agile, so we keep a backlog of all the things that we want to do but we will pivot on a dime if we believe hey, this is really strategic for our customer base. We'll change something that, you know, we had planned for year out and do something else in the interim. >> Dave: Pretty judicious about how you decide there. >> Yeah so Danny, bring us inside some of the customer conversations you're having here to show, you know, when I watch the keynotes, many of the messages about multi-cloud sound like the same kind of things that I've been hearing at VeeamON for the last couple of years. What are you hearing from the customers at this? >> Well, definitely cloud date management is top of mind. I ate dinner last night with an enterprise customer. They're rolling this out across about 100 different locations around the world and they very much wanted a local repository of data but they also wanted to tier that data into the HyperScale public cloud, so that is clearly an enterprise-centric message. But that same capability goes down to the SMB. But if you asked me what is the conversation on everyone's, on the tip of their tongue, it is cloud. How are you addressing cloud? And we've done that a number of ways. One is we take the backup data, we'll tier it into cloud. We'll recover workloads in cloud. It's not so much a lift and shift. You know what's interesting is the cloud is not a charity. If you just take what you had on premises and move it into the cloud, there's merge-in layered in there, right? But for some use cases, disaster recovery, business continuity, you want to be able to turn it on in cloud and then after it's in cloud of course, then you need to protect it. And so we've been addressing all of those capabilities within the Veeam portfolio. >> Do you think there's going to be a backlash? I mean you don't see it in the numbers. You see, you know, AWS's growth and I'm not talking about repatriation but the cloud as a target is just another piece of infrastructure, even though it's kind of virtual, that I have to manage. I mean it does add complexity in that sense. So do you think there'll be, there's maybe somewhat over-enthusiasm now or do you see this as an unstoppable trend? >> I believe that cloud is a tool in the toolbox and it's both the smallest, most precise tool and also the largest tool and everything in between. What I mean by that is this isn't just a lift and shift and move it over to the cloud. It's how do I leverage the cloud to extend my data center? I actually, a lot of people talk about multi-cloud, I actually think that the era is really hybrid cloud. It's how do I extend what I have on premises into the cloud? And we're only now really being pragmatic about how to leverage it. The people that jumped in, all in and said, "I'm going all to cloud," those are the ones that you're seeing a bit of buyers remorse but those that are a lot more pragmatic, they're now saying, "How do I deliver business outcomes?" Because it's not about cloud, it's actually about business outcomes, right? Focus on the services. How do I deliver business outcomes that are improved by leveraging aspects of the cloud? >> Yes. So Danny, I know you've talked to our team. You know, we look at the environment and customers today, they have multi-cloud. But the strategy has been well, I've got some stuff here and I use that service here and wait, I need to spin that stuff over here. We've almost remade multi-vendor into multi-cloud. >> Yes. >> So the goal we've been looking for is the solution should be more than just the sum of the parts. Veeam sits in an interesting layer to help customers leverage that and get value out of their data across all of those environments. So you know, do we see that as a viable future that is not just the state that we're in but be able to get more value out of those pieces in the near future? >> Yeah, so I'm obviously biased 'cause I work for Veeam but I think we sit at the intersection of all of this because what we do is we take services, we take workloads and we make them portable. I can take something from on premises, I can put it in cloud A, I can put it in cloud B, I can take it back on premises, I can move it to a private cloud provider. So we have the ability to be completely flexible and agnostic as to where it lands and the reason why that's important, people don't go out and say "I'm going to put 50% "of my workload in this cloud or this cloud." They say, "I need a data center in this geography" or "I need a data center that has this kind of service." So the reason they end up in multi-cloud is not because of a multi-cloud strategy but because they have a business need that is met by that infrastructure and we allow the portability, the flexibility to move the workloads as the business needs. >> So we have some data here. I want to dig into it a little bit. Can you share with us some of the fun facts? Like when, maybe the timeline of your relationship with Cisco, some of the things you've done. Walk us through that, Danny. >> So, we partnered with, we've had a longstanding relationship with Cisco. Officially we went on their Global Price List like I said, 18 months ago. Since then, 300 and, earlier this week, 359 transactions. But almost a transact, two transactions every three days and we have a great go-to-market program with them right now, so we do a lot of joint activities, both in the channel as well as between. We fund heads with them and vice versa. >> Who's your favorite partner? No, you don't have to answer that. >> We have, we have a lot of partners. They're all of my favorite children. >> So we're hearing kind of this land and expand strategy. We've heard that from many other companies. But it's actually happening inside of or within the Veeam ecosystem and what I heard here was you're selling with Cisco and then people are coming back and buying more Cisco. So that's part of land and expand but another dimension of land and expand is you sell it to an organization. Not only do they buy more but other parts of the organization, you sort of fan out horizontally. How much of that is happening? >> It's happening quite a bit. I would say the most significant expansion right now is actually at a line of business level and so you'll have multiple lines of business and then they will begin to coalesce together and say "Okay, let's supply a central policy to that." So that's what we're seeing. What we do know is that 35% of Cisco customers that are joint Veeam and Cisco customers, they'll come back within the next 12 months and they'll buy more Veeam and more Cisco gear. >> Okay last question, why Veeam? You got a lot of competitors obviously in this market. You and I have talked about that a lot. You got, Cisco has made an investment in one of them. Why Veeam? >> So, simple, reliable, flexible and the flexible is probably the key to all of this because we don't lock people in. We don't lock them into our hardware, we don't lock them into a specific cloud, we don't lock them into any one of our children if you will, we love them all equally and that flexibility, future proofing the organization is a huge deciding point for the organizations. Because they don't know what the landscape's going to look like two, three years from now. Is this still going to be your partner or is it not? So having an organization that will partner with you, that will be flexible in, and this isn't just flexibility at a technology level, it's also at a business level. Licensing, for example. Flexibility to move licenses from physical systems to virtual systems to cloud systems to back again. They want to partner with someone that has that flexibility. >> Danny, great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, always a pleasure. >> Yes, likewise. >> Okay, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin from Cisco Live in San Diego 2019. You're watching theCUBE, we'll be right back. (upbeat electronic tones)

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody. This is Dave Volante with Peter Burris and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, and we're here at VeeamON 2019 in Miami at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Raj Perumal is here. He's the CIO of Ducks Unlimited, Canada-based wetland and waterfowl conservation. Great to have you on theCUBE, thanks. >> Thank you. >> The keynote yesterday was awesome. You guys were talking about some of things that you're doing. We're going to get into that. You made a great statement. You said "the wetlands are the kidneys of the world." >> Raj: Yes. >> You know, explain that. >> (laughs) Sure, so, most people are very familiar with the Amazon rain forest, right? When you think about saving the planet and saving the environment, that's where everyone's mind or eyes go to, right? Well, wetlands are Mother Nature's way of essentially filtering water, stopping overland flooding, and so on. So, that's why we say they are the kidneys of the earth. >> Yeah, and so talk a little bit about the trends in the earth. It's been very challenging, right? I mean despite the great work that you're doing, you're still fighting this battle which sometimes might feel unwinnable. But give us the data, yeah. >> Absolutely, urban expansion, right? At the end of the day, you know as humans we're going across the planet. We're constantly building more cities, more parking lots, more everything, right? So wetlands are getting replaced with various things. Same thing with various resource mining, et cetera. Wetlands go away. So what Ducks Unlimited likes to do is adopt a no net loss policy. So what we do is we work closely with governments in various provinces across Canada. So if someone destroys an acre of wetlands, we can try and restore maybe four or ten acres for every one destroyed. It's better not to destroy it in the first place, but if it's going to happen, restore it somewhere else. >> Dave: So, some of the stats I saw. You've done 12,000 projects since you started this in the 1930's. 163.5 million acres that you have preserved. And as I say, still the wetlands loss is enormous. Is it not regulated to the point where public policy can help? >> Raj: Well, there's policy and there's law. And when it comes to Canada, there's policy but there's always exceptions. So what ends up happening is, you have these policies that say you can't do this, but then there's exception, exception, exception, exception. And usually corporations can get a way through some various exception and actually get through. Ducks Unlimited helped pass a law in Quebec not too long ago, so we actually have it in law in Quebec where it is actually being supported. >> So, the old adage that if you can't measure it, it doesn't get done. >> That's right. >> One of the most amazing things about some of these digital transformations is satellite imagery, other types of weather and related data, are making it possible to track typology in unbelievable minute detail. >> Absolutely. >> Peter: Now that's got to help you, but at the same time, it's got to really dramatically require a greater focal point on things like data protection. Especially since operational time series for wetlands is not measured in nanoseconds. It's measured in years. >> That's right. >> So you got to be able to use this technology to both enhance your mission right now, but also be able to show over time how things are changing. Have I got that right? >> That's absolutely correct. With climate change as an example, and yes, that's a real thing. With climate change, you're measuring, We want to keep data like over 30 years. And that's where we actually see true change. We're just talking about five, ten years. That's just weather, that's not climate change, right? So we need to keep that data. So yes, we have a whole GIS department, Geographical Information Systems, where we have satellite imagery, drone imagery of Canada, going years and years and years back. We have to keep all of that data and we can never get rid of it. >> So what does this mission have to do with Veeam? >> Sure, absolutely. So with all of that data, GIS data is very imagery intense. So think of it like x-rays or CAD. So it takes up a lot of space. So we have to back up that data. Every map has layers and layers and layers, so it's almost like a Google Maps for the environment. You can think of it that way. We run something called the Canadian Wetland Inventory. It's the largest inventory of wetlands, mapping of wetlands, in Canada. And we leave that as open data, so anyone can access the data and use it. So we use Veeam to back all of that up, and also to maintain our disaster recovery and so on for all our different operations. That's just one aspect of our operations, another big part, and you talked about the 12,000 projects we were doing. We started a division called conservation technology which is all about using technology to monitor the wetlands. So putting internet of things sensors out in the wetlands, gathering that data automatically through satellite and cellular networks, analyzing it with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Once we have that, we can get those insights, give them to our scientists or PhDs where the big minds can go and crunch that and go and look at it and go, okay, this is what's happening in the world. We need to back that data up too. And once again, going back to what I said before, we need to keep that data over long periods of time so we can actually see patterns and figure out what's going on with our planet. >> Do you do video on the ground as well? I mean, you're right Peter. With satellite imagery, you can get pretty minute detail. But then, like the ground truth, sometimes you got to go on the ground. . Are you capturing video on the ground? >> A little bit, not a lot. >> Dave: The changes in flora and fauna? Do you see that as useful in the future? Or is it just too much data or not as useful to sort of deploy those kind of cameras? >> I would love to be able to capture all of that data real-time. The problem with that is in Canada, our internet infrastructure is quite poor in the rural areas. In some places, you have better-than-dial-up speeds. That's it. So unfortunately, we can't bring that data back. So a lot of the times, we can't capture the video. But where we can, we do. >> Dave: Okay, but so you are putting sensors there and so talk more about that data. What are you doing with that data? Does that come back into a cloud? Yes, so we pull that into the cloud, Microsoft Azure, where we analyze it and do that AI and machine learning, and then spit it out from there. So we are in the hybrid cloud. So we have some stuff internally, some in the public cloud. A little mixture of everything. That's where Veeam comes into play. >> So I had a couple questions. One is on the data source side and one is on the data sync side, starting with the data sync. Certainly, climate scientists and others, folks who are looking at geopolitics and other types of things, are taking this kind of information and they're using it as a source for even more complex and advanced applications. Are you seeing communities evolve and emerge and evolve in response to the availability of your data? >> Absolutely, people are clamoring for more though. Everyone wants real-time data. A lot of our data is manually gathered at this point. We have people driving out to a specific project in the middle of nowhere, gathering the data manually, driving back and then uploading it because that's the only way we can do it. So, absolutely, we are seeing people wanting more use of it and making use of that data, but they want it live. They want it right now. We kind of live in an instant-on society, right? But once again, the challenges of rural areas kind of tie our hands. >> Well that was my second question. Do you see an opportunity to do crowdsourcing of video or other types of information? >> Absolutely. >> So is that becoming a way and are you using artificial intelligence? Start taking an extended number of data sources as people go out and take pictures of ducks, or whatever else it is, and then ingesting that into your system. Does that become part of the flow? >> Yeah, absolutely, so that kind of takes us back to the 1930's when Ducks first started. We had the key men of old that actually kind of stewarded their local areas for conservation. So, absolutely, we can use crowdsourcing in this day and age, and it's something we want to explore. We're not doing it yet, but we're getting there. >> How is your data pipeline? 1930's, you know the data, the data model in 1930's is a lot different than it is today. The keynote speaker today talked about the sort of bending of the innovation curve and how the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years we're going to see more change than we've ever seen before. We'll see. But the data model that you guys are doing, I mean at least in the last 10 years you've seen new technologies come out, new processes. How are you evolving that data model? >> It's more like data models. (laughs) For the various line of business because we do so many different things, right? But essentially what we're trying to do-- >> The big thing is keeping it all connected. Keeping it all in sync. Implementing things like master data management. We're a big partner with Dell Boomi for example. So we leverage them to move our data back and forth between all our systems, et cetera, while Veeam backs it up. So I would say it's hugely important to be continually pushing the envelope and how you move data and how you synchronize data, how you authenticate that data and how you verify that data. Especially in science, you want to make sure that it's not being tampered with. You got to make sure that the data is consistent and true. >> Raj, how long have you been in this role? >> At Ducks Unlimited? A little over two years, but in the industry, over 25. >> So Veeam at Ducks preceded you, is that right? >> No, I brought it in. >> Dave: So you brought it in? Talk about that. Why did you bring it in and what was going on before? Maybe tell us a before and after. >> Sure, absolutely. So I actually used to be on the reseller side of the business. I used to be a CIO for one of the larger IT consulting companies in Canada. And during my time there, I brought Veeam into the province of Manitoba and spent a lot of time with various different customers, putting Veeam into various different projects and company types. So lots of exposure to the product. So when I came into Ducks Unlimited Canada, I already came in knowing what was possible, and gave the existing backup product a shot because I didn't necessarily want to rip and replace everything on my team with the CIO coming in day one. >> Dave: New sheriff in town! Ugh, who's this guy? >> But when it wasn't doing exactly what I needed it to do, we decided to bring Veeam in and the rest is basically history. >> Talk more about that. What was the business impact of bringing-- >> Oh sure, absolutely, so before Veeam, we were spending over 40 hours a week just administering backups. >> Peter: 40 hours a week? >> Yeah, easily. And we have large data sets, and so as I was talking about in the keynote, with those large data sets, if you're doing a backup or a restore, especially a restore, if it fails, you can blow a day trying to get that data back. And so you've lost a day. So that's how you easily end up losing that much time. Especially with an organization where you have 27 locations across Canada, and 500 staff, and 4,500 volunteers all accessing this data in some way, shape, or form. So by moving to Veeam, all those tasks that we used to do before, just worked. Veeam always says "it just works." It's true. And so what ended up happening is stuff that was taking the team a week, all of a sudden was taking them minutes. Like literally minutes. And it's unbelievable. That FT, that full-time equivalent staff member all of a sudden becomes freed up to do the work I was talking about in conservation technology and other areas of our business. We're directly impacting science on the planet, so a lot more fun that just supporting regular IT. >> So you have that 40 hours, was arms and legs of the team? And how large was the team? >> 16. >> So six, zero? >> Raj: 16. >> 16! Okay, so it was 16, pieces of 16. Which a lot of times, people hear that and they're like oh, it's going to reduce jobs. I don't want to talk about that. But these guys must have hated that. That job, the 40 hours-- >> Absolutely, they're doing mund-numbing work, right? >> Dave: It's interruptive and-- >> Yeah, and so now they're doing a lot funner stuff, right? >> What funner stuff are they doing? >> Absolutely, so once again being involved directly with conservation technology and our IOT play and all of that AI and machine learning research. All the sexy stuff in IT that's happening now, right? So they're very happy. >> You guys got a pretty interesting IOT use case. So how, I'm curious as to, you know we've been watching various companies come in and announce their grand IOT strategies and say "Okay we're going to bring this box to the edge." What are your thoughts on IOT, the edge, all those sort of buzz words. How do you look at it from a practitioner and a customer standpoint? >> It's very much like building a mobile app. So, you know everyone says we need an app for their company, right? They don't know why they need an app. They just say they need an app. And then they go and build that app and then nothing happens with it, right? And then it all fails. IOT is much the same way. Internet of things, AI, machine learning, it's all the buzz words. But then you need to understand what you want to get out of it in the first place. Like where are you trying to go? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to accomplish? And then if IOT fits that, AI, machine learning, if that fits that, then great. And if it doesn't, then don't waste your time. That's my thought. >> So, specifically, what's your IOT strategy? What can you accomplish with edge? >> Absolutely, if we can get instant live data streaming into the cloud and actively analyzing it on the fly using cloud services like Azure, AI, machine learning IOT et cetera, or even Amazon services, a lot of different services out there. If we can do that on the fly and feed that into the Canadian Wetland Inventory that I was talking about before, using open data initiatives, we can now feed data to the planet about what's happening real-time to academia, to governments, et cetera, so they can make decisions with evidentiary-based statistics, right? Right now it's very hard for, this is why the fight over climate change, people go "There is such a thing." Other people go, "No there isn't", and this happens because there's not enough data available to the general public, right? So by having this open data and making it available to the general public, not just the scientific communities, I think that would go a long way to helping get support for these causes. >> That's awesome, changing the world. What are the skill sets you need to achieve that vision? Is it data science-heavy? Can you sort of outsource some of that? Is the tooling simplified enough now? Talk about that. >> It's a little bit of networking, little bit of data science, a lot of GIS, and a lot of old fashioned networking and talking to people, right? So that's really what makes up the team and allows us to do what we do. >> Are you hiring data scientists? >> Not at the moment, no. We have everyone we need. >> But you have data scientists on staff. >> Yes, exactly. Because even before the IOT thing, we have scientists on staff that do just that, right? It's just in the traditional sense, before that. >> So did you sort of create that role? Take somebody who's good in math and computers and stats and say "Hey, you're the data scientist now. Go do some training and make it happen." Or did you actually hire in a data scientist? >> We actually created that role, so we have numerous people that feed different aspects of that, but the main man that's actually running that for me is our right hand man and your manager of IT. He started as a biologist that became a GIS guy that became my manager of IT. So he has a little bit of experience in all these different areas and he's like the perfect person to run the conservation technology division for us. >> Cool. >> And he's here today. >> Oh really? So what do you think of VeeamOn? Have you been to previous Veeam shows? >> Yeah, most of them actually. >> Dave: Really? >> It's great, yeah. >> Oh, that's awesome, seeing the CIO crowd hang out with all us backup wonks. So, thoughts from the show, takeaways? >> Sure, absolutely. Well, first of all, if anyone isn't using Veeam, they should be using it already. I got to say that right now. So many people waste their time picking and choosing and hemming and hawing. Just use it, it just works. So please do that. You won't regret it whatsoever. Veeam has done some really great things. I love the announcements with Orchestrator in version 2 there, and some of the good things that are coming with the restore plans and the scopes, et cetera. And that's fantastic. So I think there's a lot of great things that Veeam is bringing to data management and data availability. >> Yeah, so they made a big deal out of being able to do restores from the backup corpus. Not having to go to a replicated chunk of data. Why is that important for you, and will you take advantage of that? >> It's just the speed. It's just the speed, so I don't have to bring it back from another place, right? It's just instant. >> Yeah, okay, so then you're going to use that other place for disaster recovery or just a second copy for just in case? >> Yup! >> But you've got basically a local copy that you can bring back instantaneously. Okay, great. And I presume that supports your sort of compressed RTO and RPO. Which, as long as I've been in this business, they've shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. >> Yup, that's right. >> Shrunk the RPO. Great, okay, I'll give you final words. Cool stuff you're working on, things you'd like to see our industry do better, you pick it. >> Sure, cool stuff we're working on. So, talking about what we're doing at Ducks Unlimited with IT and really kind of changing the shape of IT and how it's involved in science, and I talked about Wetland Inventory, that live data, et cetera. If we can build a model like that here, imagine what we can do across the world, right? I'd love to take that model and take it to other countries where they can do the same type of work, so altruistically, and share that data, that whole open data initiative, so other people can go and save wetlands. If we can get everyone working together that way, I think we'll all be better off. >> That's awesome, Raj, thank you so much for coming to theCUBE, sharing your insights and experiences. Appreciate it. All right, keep it right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE live from VeeamON 2019 from Miami. We'll be right back.

live from Miami Beach Florida it's the queue covering beam on 2019 brought to you by V hello everyone welcome back to Miami this is the cubed a leader and live tech covers is day two of our coverage of v-mon 2019 at the Fontainebleau Hotel in sunny Miami Dave Volante with Peter Burroughs Trevor stars is here is the director of systems engineering for pure storage Trevor great to see you again yeah thanks for having me yeah well we've been following pure since the did the early days I remember interviewing Scott Dietzen it's a snw way back when and seeing the ascendency and the rise fewer hits escape velocity he goes public just been an awesome ride you guys have really kind of transformed the industry started out as you know the flash play but now really getting much deeper into sort of data and data strategies and data protection is one of those so we're here at v-mon what are your impressions so far this week the conference has been great a lot of great interactions theme has been an incredibly strong alliance partner for us the synergies are just incredible because you know as we've evolved as you mentioned from a singular product in all flash array and disrupting the market there back in the early 2010's evolving into more of a data platform company and data protections actually turned out to be a great business for us it's growing incredibly fast and you know like I said a lot of great synergies with beam so the systems engineering role has always been a critical part of the the sales process right this right the SC's is like I need an se you know and then you guys will go in help the sales team really understand what the customer needs you'll help solve problems but how was that roll it to find a pure and how was it evolving in the industry yeah absolutely and I think similar to our products in the early days we we hired a lot of folks who were storage specialists and and we've evolved into having to go far beyond that right into the different realms around things like AI machine learning data protection you know virtualization containers and so it it's definitely evolving it's challenge to us as a company and we're certainly trying to not maintain a status quo we want to continue to disrupt and do that in adjacent markets so how do you work with veem just in terms of taking your platform and their software and making a solution that's kind of simple for customers it's not you know stove-piped you know single throat to choke describe that whole process yeah yeah so we recently earlier this year maybe it was late last year we we developed some integration with beam to where we we actually integrate with their universal storage API so beam can control pure storage snapshots which you're which are probably familiar with pure snapshots on flash are incredibly powerful it's a it's a very powerful metadata engine in purity and which means we can take thousands of snapshots with no performance impact in their near instantaneous with veeam we can instantly integrate that into Veen backup and data protection workflows and vm can completely control pure storage snapshots both honoré and offer a which we'll talk about without having to have a storage administrator log into pure at all okay and so talk more about how the system plays with your customers I mean when you're when you're in with the customer and you're sort of scoping it out how is that conversation changing is just in terms of as you say you went from okay here's an array and flash now there's all the spectrum of other things that you're doing that's what's the data protection conversation like how does it relate to their digital transformation their digital business where do you guys fit there well operationally we've seen a huge trend from customers that a decade or so ago you saw the trend of going from disk to disk to tape tape for long term archive what we're actually here at the conference really promoting is this idea of the next big wave of evolution there which is we see customers going from flash to flash for the first step in backup and then instead of off-site tape going to the cloud so that's been an incredibly successful message for us early on and so that actually started with you know I mentioned the pure flash or a snapshot integration but actually moving those snapshots off of flash array to our second product which is flash blade flash blades a really unique product it was originally designed with the next big wave of innovation in mind around things like containers and deep learning where high amounts of bandwidth and parallelism are just absolutely critical billions of small files it just so happens that actually caters really well to backup performant and restore performance so backing up to disk was a big success for a lot of customers but what they're seeing now and what we're seeing as workloads continue to get more diverse is that there's a restore challenge so we have customers that are backing up to disk but they're seeing massive challenges around getting their data back and getting back online the recovery time objective pressures from the business are becoming more and more important this actually started for us in the SAS industry where one of the world's largest SAS providers out in Silicon Valley had to do an increasing amount of restore and they've they actually started using flash blade as what we call a rapid restore platform so they're able to nearly instantaneously restore these databases and what we found is nearly across the board and in all other industries that there's a large number of customers that have that challenge more so then we find you know going to market with flash played for like AI for example there's not as many people doing that quite yet we've been successful in the ones that are but across the board healthcare legal high-tech you name it it there's a restore problem and with flash played we've seen people go you know for example one of our really other customers outside of the SAS world is in the healthcare space the industry's number one cancer center in the in the world is actually leveraging it for rapid restore for databases but they're also doing some other neat things because flash blades not a purpose-built backup appliance it can be used for other things anything file an object works great so what you can do is you can combine the use cases and that's been really powerful from a TCO perspective you might say customers might say well you know flash is too expensive but if there's a restore problem that may not matter and then if you combine it with other use cases we call that our data hub story it's even more powerful in the TCO becomes you know really attractive so the healthcare using it for PACs and rapid restore you know there's other industries like you know my gaming industry like I mentioned high tech so that data hub message has been really powerful that's return on asset and asset leverage oh absolutely and and and one of the things I'd like to talk about Trevor is relating to that is there are a lot of ways of describing some of those fundamentals some of those really contingent and essential changes that are taking place in the industry today but one of them clearly is flash allows us to move from a data storage orientation of record and you know save the data to one of deliver the data to new applications pure has been at the vanguard of that and has seen a lot of these new use cases as we think about no return on data assets and whatnot how is your visibility into those new use cases changing Pure's perspective and pure customers perspective on data protection because it seems like the notion of data protection which has been around for a long time is starting to fray as these new use cases say it's not just protecting about what's happened it's setting me up for doing new types of work in the future so how is that how is pure seeing that how does that conversation about data protection changing because of some of the drive that purus got in them in the marketplace yeah and I think the first step is hey I can backup my data but if I can't use it it's kind of worthless right so being able to use that data and much much more rapidly but also repurposing that this idea of data silos has been around IT for years and with flash blade and that data hub story we're really breaking down those silos to be able to say hey the same the same platform that you're storing your data protection data as well as other data it's the same platform that I might be able to spin that data up so beams got a great story with data labs where you can actually spin up these virtual environments and run and on a purposeful backup device you know you it's it's questionable if that actually works right and having to pull that back over the network to another silo with Flash blade and the data hub it makes that realistic and and getting so much more out of the data delivering that back to the business and actually be able to deliver these key insights into what my data is actually doing and be able to make better business decisions as what the output you see kind of an analogy of a relationship between previous to now where storage was about persisting data and therefore was about protecting what has happened to flash being about delivering data to new applications and therefore there's some new concept our customers pushing you guys towards something that goes that's bigger than data protection I mean it's something that we're struggling with and one of the customers we have is struggling with how do I talk about what these services are when I'm spitting up kubernetes clusters like that that's right so is it is there some new conversation that you're starting to see you guys are one of the first to have a conversation about data you know flash data for AI are you starting to have conversations about you know deliver data something more than protection yeah near real-time ability to spin up development environments see ICD pipelines all of those things we actually have a product that as a pure customer you get as inclusive of maintenance contract called pure source service Orchestrator which can actually help provision end-to-end container environments and being able to repurpose that data for like I said test dev development pipelines and those kind of things and we're also as you've probably heard we're tying that into a cloud strategy as well so there's there's products we've announced cloud block storage side as well as object engine which is a product we haven't talked about yet which enables customers to truly see the benefit of a hybrid cloud scenario so they may be developing an application on Prem and pushing the cloud or vice versa and we're actually going to give them that back capability to do that talk more about object engines specifically what it is that means been inferring object yes store and object engine you know you hear the name it could mean a number of things but clearly it has to do with object storage so object engine was actually a technology that was born in the cloud so it was a cloud native application that was really designed around data reduction for cloud workloads what we've done as part of that product it folded into peers we've actually ironically it is not what we used it for first we'd developed an appliance and we call that our object engine appliance that's just phase one so what object engine delivers is a highly scalable highly performant data reduction platform we're starting with backup and data protection workloads so vemma obviously does their in-line data reduction technology if the customer finds that they need something more scalable they can actually leverage object engine to do that and then flash blade on the back end as the initial tier and then the future vision for object engine is that it's going to give you the cloud connectivity to be able to say okay I want to automatically push my backup workloads from an archive perspective out to the cloud we're starting in AWS we're gonna do Azure and others as well so the next big wave of that that you'll see is actually running object engine in the cloud in a hybrid scenario and be able to move those work clothes back and forth so kind of envision you know the the near-term backup and restore most of the resource happen within a week or two on Prem and then 100% also stored in the cloud for more long-term archives so that really it really completes the flash to flash the cloud story but we're not gonna stop with backup workloads either and where's your sort of value added in that equation and where's VM and how do you sort of what's the connection points there good question good question so I you know I think again I mentioned via obviously has their in line data reduction technology where we insert object engine is really one of two reasons one if if our data reduction offsets the cost of the whole solution without using it with just using beams data reduction because it is it's a hardware offload essentially and then the second one is if you need a you know a large amount of data that you want to push out to the cloud as our kind of phase two of that product right okay I want to ask you about the partnership from the terms from the standpoint of values sure the values of pure are you guys are fun company I love orange you go to pure accelerate everybody's wearing orange to come here everybody's wearing green so these seem to be kind of birds of a feather but but we just talked about value add what about the values of your company and sort of how you guys getting along yeah we're getting along great I like I said there's a lot of synergies from a solution standpoint but just from a go-to market standpoint trying to be you know a disruptive company it just technology disruptive solutions what is that next thing right not being a me-too player in the market and so I think we share a lot of those those same values but also customer success we really focus on the outcomes and a happiness of the customer and that that's down in the core of our engineering same thing with beam where I think we can really help each other is Veeam has a big push right now to move up market into the enterprise and we feel like we can help beam in that respect we've been very successful in enterprise and likewise veem obviously has a major presence in amia and that's a market that is is is growing for us substantially but we've got a lot of upside so we really think we can help each other there and I actually failed to mention the very first object engine flash Blade sale we did was with him so you know it was it was it was just natural in that perspective and I think pre object engine and before this whole idea of rapid restore really took off with flash blade it was it was just the flashier a protection and even that's still pretty new but now it's much more comprehensive so we've got common common competitors as well and pure accelerates coming up in September it's in Austin you're your hometown I'm town in Austin Texas so yeah we'll be there September 15th to 18th and we're going to be talking about a ton of stuff obviously flash to flash the cloud but well beyond storage as well so even if you know don't think of it as just a storage conference it's always fun event we've covered now I think twice this will be our third year so in Austin is a great great town and looking forward to that Trevor thanks so much for coming on the cube love that loved it thanks for having me feel very welcome all right keep it right to everybody we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break I'm Dave Volante with Peterborough's v-mon 28 2019 from Miami right back

live from Miami Beach Florida Biman 2019 brought to you by beam hi everybody welcome back to Miami I'm Dave Volante and this is day two of veeam on 2019 we're here at the Fontainebleau Hotel in beautiful sunny Miami a lot of swanky people a lot of big boats parties going on last night of course it's v-mon so you know there's a lot of fun this is the cube the leader in live tech coverage Allen Stern is here he's that technical solutions architect at Cisco really what that means is he's an evangelist the cube alam al and good to see you again great to see you again david coming on so yeah this is quite a venue as always Vemma action going on a lot of customers here 2,000 plus people so let's get into it hey Cisco we're gonna be at Cisco live in a couple weeks really excited about that it's gonna be a great show in San Diego absolutely another awesome venue we were in Barcelona earlier this year to do Cisco so we you know we love the circuit it's a great customer show I want to start with something that we talked about in Barcelona which is Cisco really as it evolves into the multi cloud world is is making the case that it's networks are more secure higher performance and more cost effective than anybody out there and it's in a good position to do that now we're gonna talk deep about infrastructure but I want to start there and just get your take on that sort of overall challenge to Cisco well it's not really a challenge it's an opportunity for us because we look at the cloud is this great opportunity you still have to have networking within your cloud provider you've still got to do all the things you do on your on-prem datacenter you just have to do it in somebody else's data center and what we've done is we wanted to simplify that operation so the way you deploy Cisco ACI on Prem you deploy it the same way in the cloud provider you're using the same interface and yeah on the backend we're doing different things because we're interfacing with their networking api's but to the end-user they don't have to know each cloud providers interface they just have to know Cisco and they know that it'll be configured correctly and if we think about what happens with a lot of the threats and attacks that occur in networks what's one of the easiest ways to get attacked it's a misconfigured network a firewall port that's left open but if you're doing it the same way every time regardless of where you're doing it that makes it a lot easier and reduces the the chance that you're going to make a mistake yeah and you guys can do the deep packet inspection you've got a lot of experience around that you're driving a lot of analytics and obviously machine intelligence is going to come into play and so but you've been able to go back to what you just said so give me an example so you guys have announced a multi cloud strategy is support basically you're essentially describing what we talked about on the cube all the time is bringing the cloud experience to your data wherever it is so whether it's on Prem in the public cloud supporting hybrid so you're saying for example if you've got a customer who's running on AWS and using you know heavily using AWS primitives and api's you make that transparent to the user is that correct absolutely okay and so it sounds like magic but it's a lot of hard work I'm sure a lot of software it is a lot of hard work from a lot of really smart people inside of Cisco that are we have some amazing developers now your your sweet spot is the infrastructure side of the business so UCS and and and obviously the partnership with Vemma which we'll get into but what's your swimlane so my swimlane really is our software-defined storage partners and our data protection partners and when when I started on this role a few years ago they seemed very very much separate and now what we're seeing is they're coming very much together because what are we what are customers looking to get away from tape what do they need large amounts of storage because we've seen this explosion of data we talked about it last year and we're seeing terms like yottabyte and branagh byte and I remember when I first saw branagh byte I was like is this something you know somebody watched too many episodes of The Flintstones but no it's it's a real term a yottabyte is a thousand exabytes and a branagh byte is a thousand yottabytes so data is growing at multiple orders of magnitude on a regular basis and we've got to store it differently than we have in the past if somebody sent me a stat and no just would you just reminded me of it Allen a couple months ago and I got to go back and research it but if anybody out there knows the stat it was astounding to me it said by by like 2025 or 2022 there's gonna be more bytes of data created or stored than there are stars in the universe now that just blew my mind and we could do the math and figure that out but I gotta go back and check out the link but to your point the the growth curve it's it's nonlinear you know used to be Moore's law and now their curve is is reshaping so when everybody talks about digital transformation they're what they're really talking about is making their business digital which is all about data and you talk about getting away from tape you can't have a bit digital business that runs on tape you could save tape you know for deep archive and stick it in the iron mountain or whatever but you can't recover yeah right now keep your business running 24/7 so to your point about those worlds coming together that really underscores it so what's your role in supporting digital business strategies and keeping businesses up and doing fast recovery and your partnership with Veen so we provide great platforms for folks like beam and the object storage vendor so beam now has fantastic integration with the s3 interface that many of these object providers allow cisco has very deep platforms you know we've got a 4u box that can hold 768 terabytes of data and if you think about how much data that is you know two of these units it's a petabyte and a half of data I mean that's a fantastic amount of data it's online it's available to them if they need to restore it they can do it quickly because each of those nodes has 160 gigabits per second of network connectivity but more importantly if they want to use some of this data it's available to them right on the platform they don't have to pull back the tape restore from tape and hope they got the right one it's about data management really yeah you're talking about all these fights and yottabytes and exabytes and and the growth of storage are you seeing a really a big a big wave a trend toward the petabyte data center yeah absolutely I mean it used to be petabytes where the purview of only the fortune 500 maybe and now we're seeing it really across the board as companies yeah we're digital hoarders and you look at my laptop I've got emails from 10 years ago I've got pictures of everything from forever companies are no different because we're there looking at data and saying I've got this data I'm not sure if it's valuable today but it may be worth something tomorrow let me hold on to it but their ability to access it and use it that's going to be the critical piece because you know it's like an oversized storage unit you stuff it full of stuff you're not really sure what's in there and if you have to find that one little widget that's in there forget it as the tools get better to go find the data within the bit bucket I mean that's where the real value is coming so we could go a little journey down memory lane and talk about the Cisco strategy and how its evolved I remember when you started you know it would ucs and I was like wow that's Cisco's getting into servers and kind of didn't really understand it until I dug into it and you guys obviously we're trying to change the game with converged infrastructure and you had some partnerships to do that but I remember one of my first questions was you had like a zillion VMs that you can run on on this this block yep and I said how do you protect that and they're really at the time it was like 2009 it was like well we could kind of bolt on and that's the way backup was back then fast forward to 2019 it seems like data protection is much more of an integrated component of people's digital strategy so one of you could talk about that a little bit and how your strategy has evolved yeah and and it absolutely is because we're not just talking about data protection anymore if you look at the capabilities of folks like beam it's really about data management it's not just hey back it up put it over in the vault and forget about it never use it again it's back it up put it in the vault and if you need it I can bring it back really quickly I can use it to test data with I can use it to scan for malware so I'm not reintroducing an infection after I've cleaned it out so a lot of ways to use it and in Cisco's providing the platforms to do that the days of the old monolithic storage arrays they're still going to be here but the world for them is shrinking because you think about what do they do they're the last bastion of vertically integrated systems we saw storage you know the mainframe still here but the world for it shrunk as we had x86 systems with the operating system of choice so we're seeing the same thing happening with storage customers are just they want to be able to use all this data that's out there and in my career I've observed it's always been about recovery like when something goes wrong how do you recover that that's always the killer question right and and so but now it's even more complicated because of Eames messaging this week has been fast recovery they announced a bunch of stuff that you could recover you know directly from backup don't have to go to a replicated you know set of data and so the compression that the time to recover has really compressed so have you seen that how are you guys responding to that you know both technically and just from a business standpoint it's a great question you and I have enough gray hair to remember the days of planned downtime that's going on yeah so now it's how do we build a platform they're going to enable the software side of the recovery but if the platform isn't capable of keeping up with the software then you've got a disconnect so you've got to have disk systems disk up systems that are capable of keeping up you've got to have networking you've got to have a completely integrated system that not only do we look at it and go okay well this software should work here we know that it does and we do cisco validated designs with folks like beam to make sure that the customers don't have to turn all the different nerd knobs to make sure they're going to get the optimal performance because at the end of the day they don't have time for that that's not their area of expertise and we want to make sure that they've got the always-on enterprise so I'd love to talk about the the horses on the track of the competitive landscape and I especially want to explore a little bit with you Alan the multi cloud you know some people don't like that term III think it's fine a hybrid you know to me is different than multi cloud I've argued that multi cloud has largely been a system of multi bender where people just line a business shadow IT and then all of a sudden you have these multiple clouds and Sasa's and but increasingly now organizations organizations saying ok CIOs get a handle on this okay so multi-cloud strategies have started to come into play Cisco announced in February I believe at Cisco live Barcelona a big push into multi-cloud you certainly see Dell EMC talking about it Google announced you know certainly Microsoft is there you guys have partnerships you were onstage David Koechner was at Google next cloud next so it's at Red Hat IBM's acquisition of Red Hat so you you have all these interesting you know cooperative to a petition and and and and people companies going after this multi cloud so question how do you see the multi cloud opportunity what's Cisco's strategy with regard to that obviously you're coming at it from a standpoint of network and infrastructure strength but I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit and sort of summarize the opportunity and what your strategy is sure so I want to go back to a quote a famous quote by John Chambers he said we were plumbers for the network and being a plumber is an honorable profession and I think while we've certainly expanded beyond that we still do that whether you know you're talking about multi cloud strategies well you still got to connect to all of these different clouds whether it's you know infrastructure or as a service you've still got to connect to it so that it works efficiently for your enterprise we want to make sure that we enable that technology that we're giving the customers what they need from that technology and there's still room for for on-prem it's not like any of this is going away it's select whatever feature is best for that particular customer so you know if there's an as a service provider that does customer CRM better than anybody else by all means go use them and we'll help you connect to them help you secure it and with partners we may help you back up if it's email you know without saying who it is we know who it is but you've still got to back that up where are you going to back it up how are you going to have the networking how are you going to have security so Cisco provides all of that enabling technology to make sure that you've got the enterprise that's secure and you can connect all of them so it operates seamlessly for you as as your multi virtualized enterprise well and so cisco has always been a a partner friendly organization you've stressed optionality every one of those companies I mentioned is a partner of yours as well and you know it's like Joe Tucci said hey sometimes we compete sometimes we partner at the end of the day it's the customers going to decide right so if I understand you correctly just from a from a control playing standpoint you've got software technology that that your customers can use if a customer wants to use a VMware control plane you'll you'll play there or some other you know third party that's the strategy correct and but at the same time you're investing in your own IP to build the best control plane and other I guess you know network capabilities data playing infrastructure as possible yeah we wanted we're gonna leverage you know their infrastructure because in some ways they're ubiquitous but there's things that they don't do you know network analytics we do that better than anybody else with you know products like tetration also performs some security functions we have stealth watch you know at the branch you want to make sure that nefarious things aren't happening on your network that without you knowing it so we want to enable that visibility and allow the customers to take action so it's not just enabling the technologies it's protecting the technologies as well so I think a lot of it is things that these other infrastructure providers aren't doing or they're not doing well we can do well because of our history because of our continued investment in all of these areas you know Cisco we have a lot of money to spend on R&D and we spend it well to other areas I want to absolutely you get great engineers and also you do you do acquisitions pretty well but to other areas you want to cover that we haven't touched upon that much hyper-converged you know you said you guys kind of started the converged infrastructure or at least the modern era and then hyper-converged comes in you've got to play there and I want to talk about the edge but let's start with HCI so HCI we've got a fantastic platform in Cisco hyperflex we've continued to evolve it you know we have spinning disks we have all flash we have nvme we've got hybrid so whatever the customers performance needs are we're there with them and if as we look at it this is about simplifying and collapsing the infrastructure that's what converged infrastructure did we went out partnered with some leading companies in the storage space at the time and said how do we make this easier for customers consume we reel it into the data center they turn it on they move their workloads to it well now we've seen this cost model in in technology shift towards hyper-converged where it's x86 servers running the storage and the compute together and you wheel it in you move your workloads to it and you grow it in very nice easy to consume increments and it just it just works and that's coupled with our management plan and and I can never overemphasize that when you look at how we manage hyperflex how it plugs into our new inter-site product which is a cloud offering to let you manage the the infrastructure anywhere inter-site will help you deploy the hyper-converged infrastructure so we continue to focus on making this easy to consume well so now that leads me to your tagline the anywhere data center which which I want to ask you about the edge IOT I know it's not your area of expertise but I love what what the dev net group has done with infrastructure is code I see all these CC II's gettin retrained and and coming up with really some amazing use cases I mean I saw one at Cisco live in Barcelona you know basically an edge case in a police vehicle with some with some cisco HCI infrastructure it was unreal and just collecting data at the edge which is critical but so what's your strategy with the edge what do you see as the opportunity there so we've got you the hard part is always defining the edge is the edge the branch is it my home office is it a telephone pole but well where the answer is yes yes and yes right absolutely so at some of the edge we've got the Cisco hyper flex edge device which is a two node hyper flex cluster we've got small servers that fit into our routers for collecting edge data there so really the idea is meet the data where it is and to the degree that we can let's help process it there because you can't always bring all the data back yeah and what I like about Cisco strategies to sort of set the context there's many infrastructure providers I would observe are trying to take a top-down approach to say okay we've got this box we're gonna go put it on the edge and you guys do that too but what I really like about of your approach is that your box is programmable so I can develop applications at the edge I can do that with a cloud provider if I want to I can do that directly using you know Cisco api's and so I think that gives you guys an advantage and obviously your networking estate you know helps as well Alan great to have you back in the cube thanks so much and give you the last word on v-mon 2019 you know it's a great show we love being here beam is a fantastic partner we're doing some really innovative things and you know it's just it's wonderful to be here I'm almost speechless yeah so the cube is here all day today we got keynotes now coming up so we're going to come back after those keynotes of course Veeam has its big customer party tonight the bean parties are renowned always a lot of fun always great food and then always some kind of interesting twist so Alan thanks again for coming on the cube great to see you pleasure I keep it right there buddy we'll be back right after this short break I'm Dave Volante you're watching the cube from v-mon 2019

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

(upbeat music) >> Live From Miami Beach, Florida. It's theCUBE! Covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam! >> Welcome back to Miami everybody this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris. Two days of wall to wall coverage of VeeamON 2019. They selected the Fontainebleau Hotel in hip, swanky Miami. Tad Brockway is here he's the corporate VP of Azure Storage, good to see you! >> Yeah great to see you thank you for having me. >> So you're at work for a pretty hip company, Microsoft Azure is where all the growth is, 70 plus percent growth, and you doing some cool stuff with storage. So let's get into it. Let's start with your role and kind of your swim lane if you will. >> So our team is responsible for our storage platform that includes our disc service for IAS virtual machines, our scale our storage we call Azure blob storage. We have support for files as well with a product called Azure Files, we support SMB based files, NFS based files, we have a partnership with NetApp, we're bring Azure NetApp files is what we call it, we're bringing NetApp on tap into our data centers delivering that as a first priority service we're pretty excited about that. And then a number of other services around those core capabilities. >> And that's really grown over the last several years, optionality is really the watch word there right, giving customers as many options, file, block, object, etc. How would you summarize the Azure Storage strategy? >> I like that point, optionality and really flexibility for customers to approach storage in whatever way makes sense. So there may be customers, there are customers who are developing brand new cloud base taps, maybe they'll go straight to object storage or blobs. There are many customers who have data sets and work loads on-prem that are NFS based and SMB based, they can bring those assets to our cloud as well. We're the only vendor in the industry that has a server side implementation of HDFS. So for analytics workloads we bring file system semantics for those large scale HDFS workloads. We bring them into our storage environment so that the customer can do all of the things that are possible with a file system hierarchy's for organizing their data, use ACl's to protect their data assets and that's a pretty revolutionary thing that we've done but to your point though, optionality is the key and being able to do all of those things for all of those different access types, and then being able to do that for multiple economic tiers as well from hot storage all the way down to our archive storage tier. >> And I short changed you on your title cause your also responsible for media and edge, so that includes Azure stack is that right? >> Right so we have Azure stack as well within our area and DataBox and DataBox edge, DataBox edge and Azure stack are our edge portfolio platforms. So the customers can bring cloud based applications right into their on-prem environments. >> Peter you were making a point this morning about the cloud and it's distributed nature, can you make that point I'd love to hear Tad's reaction and response. >> So Tad we've been arguing in our research here Wikibon SiliconANGLE for quite some time. The common parlance the common concept of cloud, move everything to the center was wrong. We've been saying this for probably four or five years, and we believe very strongly that the cloud really is a technology for further distributing data, further distributing computing so that you can locate data approximate to the activity that it's going to support. But do so in a way that's coherent, comprehensive, and quite frankly confident. That's what's been missing in the industry for a long time so if you look at it that way, tell us a little bit about how that approach, that thinking informs what you're doing with Azure and specifically one of the other challenges is how does then data services impact that? So maybe we'll come to that in a second I'm sure. >> Great insight by the way, I agree that the assumption had been that everything is going to move to these large data centers in the cloud and I think that is happening for sure, but what we're seeing now is that there's a greater understanding of the longer term requirements for compute and that there are a bunch of workloads that need to be in proximity to where the data is being generated and to where it's being acted upon, and there are tons of scenarios here. Manufacturing is an example where we have one of our customers who's using our DataBox edge product to monitor an assembly line as parts come out of the assembly line our DataBox edge device is used with a camera system attached to it, AI inferencing to detect defects in the assembly line, and then stop the assembly line with very low latency where a round trip to the cloud and back to do all the AI inferencing and then do the command and control to stop the assembly line that would just be too much round trip time so in many different verticals we're seeing this awareness that there are very good reasons to have compute and storage on-prem, and so that's why we're investing in Azure stack and DataBox edge in particular. Now you asked well how does data factor in to that, because it turns out in a world of IoT and basically an infinite number of devices over time, more and more data is going to be generated. That data needs to be archived somewhere so that's where public cloud comes in and all the elasticity and the scale economies of cloud. But in terms of processing that data you need to be able to have a nice strong connection between what's going on in the public cloud and what's going on on-prem, so the killer scenario here is AI. Being able to grab data as it's being generated on-prem, write it into a product like DataBox edge, DataBox edge is a storage gateway device so you can map your cameras in the use case I mentioned or for other scenarios you can route the data directly into a file share, an NFS, blob, or SMB file share, drop into DataBox edge, then DataBox edge will automatically copy it over to the cloud, but allow for local processing to local applications as if it were, in fact it is local, running in a hot SSD NVME tier, and the beautiful thing about DataBox edge it includes an FPGA device to do AI inference offloading. So this is a very modern device that intersects a whole bunch oft things all on one very simple, self contained unit. Then the data flows into the cloud where it can be archived permanently in the cloud, and then AI models can be updated using the elastic scale of cloud compute, then those models can be brought back on-prem for enhanced processing over time. So you can sort of see this virtuous cycle happening over time where the edge is getting smarter and smarter and smarter. >> So that's what you mean kind of when you talked about the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge, I was going to ask you you just kind of explained it and you can automate this, use machine intelligence to actually determine where the data should land and minimize human involvement. You talked about driving marginal cost of storing your data to zero, which we've always talked about doing that from the standpoint of reducing or even eliminating labor cost through automation, but you've also got some cool projects to reduce the cost for storing a bit. >> Yeah. >> Maybe you could talk about some of those projects a little bit. >> Thats right so, and that was mentioned in the keynote this morning and so our vision is that we want for our customers to be able to keep their artifacts that they store on our cloud platform for thousands of years and if you think about sort of the history of humanity that's not outside the question at all, in fact wouldn't it be great to have everything that was ever generated by humankind for the thousands of years of modern or human history. We'll be able to do that with technology that we're developing so we're investing in technology to store data virtually indefinitely on glass, as well as even in DNA, and by investing in those advance types of storage that is going to allow us to drive that marginal cost down to zero over time. >> Epigenetic storage systems. I want to come back to this notion of services though, and where the data's located. From our research what we see is we see as you said, data being proximate or being housed, approximator created and acted upon, but that increasingly businesses want the options to be able to replicate that, replicates a strong word it's a loaded word, but to be able to do something similar in some other location if the action is taking place in that location too. That's what Kubernetes is kind of about, and server list computing and some of these other things are about. But it's more than just the data, it's the data, it's the data services, it's the meditate associated with that , how do you foresee at Microsoft and what role might they play in this notion of a greater federation of data services that make possible a policy driven, back up, restore, data protection architecture that's really driven by what the business needs and where the actions taking place. Is that something you were seeing in a direction that you see it going? >> Yeah absolutely and so I'll talk conceptually about our strategy in that regard and where we see that going for customers, and then maybe we can come back to the Veeam partnership as well cause I think this is all connected up. Our approach to storage, our view is that you should be able to drop all your data assets into a single storage system like we talked about that supports all the different protocols that are required, can automatically tier from very hot storage all the way down to overtime glass and DNA, and we do all of that within one storage system and then the movement across those different vertical and horizontal slices that can all be done programmatically or via policy. So customers can make a choice in the near term about how they drop their data into the cloud but then they have a lot of flexibility to do all kinds of things with it over time, and then with that we layer on the Microsoft whole set of analytics services. So all of our data and analytics products, they layer on top of this disaggregated storage system so there can be late binding of the type of processing that's used including AI to reason over that data relatively to where and how and when the data entered into the platform. So that's sort of modularity, it really future proofs the use of data over the long haul we're really excited about that, and then those data assets can then be replicated to use your term to other regions around the globe as well using our backbone. So the customers can use our network, our network is a customers network, and then the way that docs into the partnership with Veeam is that just as I mentioned in the keynote this morning, data protection is a use case that is just fundamental to enterprise IT. We can make together with customers and with Veeam, we can make data protection better today using the cloud and with the work that Veeam has done in integrating with 0365, the integration from there into Azure storage and then over time customers can start down this path of something that feels sort of mundane and it's just been a part of daily life at enterprise IT, and then that becomes an entry point into our broader longterm data strategy in the cloud. >> But following up on this if we agree that data is not going to be entirely centralized, but it's going to be more broadly distributed and that there is a need for a common set of capabilities around data protection which is a very narrowly defined term today and is probably going to evolve over the next few years. >> I agree with that. >> We think you're going to have a federated model for data protection that provides for local autonomous data protection activities that is consistent with the needs of those local data assets, but under a common policy based framework that a company like Veeam's going to be able to provide. What do you think? >> So first of all a core principle of ours is that while we're creating these platforms for large data sets to move into Azure the most important thing is that customers own their own data. So there's this balance that has to be reached in terms of cloud scale and the federated nature of cloud and these common platforms and ways of approaching data, while simultaneously making sure that customers and users are in charge of their own data assets. So those are the principles that we'll use to guide our innovation moving forward and then I agree I think we're going to see a lot of innovation when it comes to taking advantage of cloud scale, cloud flexibility and economics but also empowering customers to advantage of these things but do it on their terms. I think the futures pretty bright in that regard. >> And the operative term there is their terms. Obviously Microsoft has always had a large on-prem install base and the software estate, and so you've embraced hybrid to use that term, with your strategies. You never sort of run away from it, you never said everything's going to go into the cloud, and that's now evolving to the edge. And so my question is what are the big gaps, not necessarily organizationally or process wise, but from a technology standpoint that the industry, generally in Microsoft specifically, have to fill to make that sort of federated vision a reality. >> I mean we're just at the early stages of all this for sure in fact as we talked about this morning, the notion of hybrid which started out with use cases like backup is rapidly evolving toward a more sort of modern enduring view. I think in a lot of ways hybrid was used as this kind of temporary stop along a path to cloud, and back to our earlier discussion for by some I guess, maybe there's a debate you all are having there. But what we're seeing is the emergence of edge is being and enduring location for compute and for data, and that's where the concept of intelligent edge comes in. So the model that I talked about earlier today is about extending on-prem data assets into the cloud, where as intelligent edge is taking cloud concepts and bringing them back to the edge, in an enduring way. So it's pretty neat stuff. >> And a big part of that is much of the data if not most of the data, the vast majority even might stay at the edge permanently and of course you want to run your models up in the cloud. >> That's right, at least for realtime processing. >> Right you just don't have the time to do the round trip. Alright Tad I'll give you the last word on Azure, direction, your relationship with Veeam, the conference, take your pick. >> Yeah well I thank you, thanks great to be here. As I mentioned earlier today the partnership with Veeam and then this conference in particular is great because I really love the idea of solving a very real and urgent problem for customers today, and then helping them along that journey to the cloud so that's one of the things that makes my job a great one. >> Well we talk about digital transformation all the time on theCUBE it's real, it's not just a buzz word, it can happen without the cloud but it's not all in the central location, it's extending now to other locations. >> It reflects your data assets. >> And where your data wants to live. So Tad thanks very much for coming to theCUBE it was great to have you. >> Thanks guys! >> Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest. This is VeeamOn 2019 and you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida it's the CUBE covering VeeamON 2019 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody, you're watching the CUBE the leader in live tech coverage as we go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise, this is day one of VeeamON 2019 the CUBE's third year covering Veeam first year we were in New Orleans, last year Chicago, very cool and hip location here at the Fontainebleau Hotel, I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Peter Boroughs. Colin Chatelier is here, he's the manager of storage and compute for Europe at Rabobank, Colin thanks for coming on the CUBE it's good to see you. >> Yeah glad to be here. >> So tell us about Rabobank, what are you guys all about? >> Okay, so Rabobank is obviously a bank we have two main focuses, first of all we're trying to be the biggest high street bank in the Netherlands, biggest retail bank in the Netherlands and we've got 7.3 million customers there, in an adult population of 14 million so that's not bad. And secondly the Netherlands is only of certain size and we're not going to grow it that much so the biggest part of our new business is international. And that's the bank is all focused on providing food and agriculture expertise loans, FX, spot work, anything that can help people or help businesses improve their efficiencies and get more food from spade to plate. >> So what are some of your, the drivers in your business that are affecting your technology strategy? >> Drivers in a business I guess again we've got two different parts of the bank I should probably explain, so two years ago we brought the IT of those two different parts of the bank together. >> [Dave} That's the Retail And The International? >> The retail and the international and if you think about it the international is all wholesale work, the retail is all high street banking so the retail those people really want to see their data, they want to see it on the, on the web, their check and balances, transferring pocket money to their kids and if that doesn't happen, that's a tragedy and embarrassing. So we can't be responsible for that as a result one of our watch words is always on, so we need to make sure that data is always available and we need to make sure that systems are always up for them. Part of that really is, occasionally it won't always be on so you need to be able to recover very quickly and getting a product that's simple to use for recovery and fast to recover was really part of that strategy, that's where Veeam came in. >> So when you had to merge those two IT operations, obviously it was more than the data protection side of things, but talk generally about what the challenges were but then specifically about the data protection piece. >> Okay, so bringing two IT departments together of course gives you a choice, "am I going to use product A or product B?" "Or sometimes product A and product B and not C." That gave us an opportunity to really do something that's not that common in the backup world and introduce a bit of churn, especially in retail environments, we have monthly backups, sorry especially in wholesale we have monthly backups. And those monthly backups go for anything from one year to ten years. So trying to get away from a backup product where there's ten years worth of legacy there, to recover, it's very tricky. But bringing the two banks together gave us that opportunity to say, okay well we'll invest in in a move and we really put a whole series of criteria together to try and figure out which one we were going to use. We moved from vmware and Hyper-V we're moving everything to vmware and from, we have a number of other backup products which I won't name because we're moving away from them. And Veeam was the winner there. Now, why? We needed something that would recover quickly we needed something that would scale to the enterprise, we have 13 thousand VMs being backed up today. We needed something that we could deploy reasonably quickly and without too much effort and actually when we deployed Veeam, we started off in November last year and by the end of January we were finished. Now there were a couple of thousand VMs on Veeam at that point >> Hold on, I'm sorry so it took you two months to effectively move out an old backup infrastructure and move in a new one? >> Sort of correct yes, for dailies. For monthly's we haven't touched that yet so we decide to just bite off one chunk at a time. >> Because you've got ten years of legacies with your monthly's... >> We have at least ten years, yeah >> All right but still >> That's pretty quick >> Yeah, yeah yeah >> Now what about cloud, every conference you go to you see the sign, cloud data management everything is cloud, cloud, cloud it used to be in your business, the financial services business, that cloud was an evil word >> Yeah >> Is it still? What's your clod strategy and how does data protection fit in? >> Well we have a strategy of public cloud first, that's a lot easier to do for new applications than it is for existing applications of course. So it tends to be that the existing applications are waiting for a technical refresh or are waiting for a an application re-write and new applications are going straight into the cloud. How we are protecting that, at the moment most of our data is held on prem where as a lot of our applications which can easily be refreshed and re-published is held on the cloud so we, those guys, the dev ops teams are performing their own backup, their own recovery. >> So are you able to sort of, for the on prem stuff are you trying to sort of make that cloud-like so it'll substantially mimic the cloud are you able to do that? You know, Peter you're always talking about bringing the cloud experience to your data, is that something that you're able to do or is that just sort of good marketing tagline? >> It's something that we are just starting to do again, so a year ago we had a private cloud that was just on the verge of being deployed, but we decided then that strategically we'd mothball that and encourage everybody to go to public cloud, and not confuse them with two different choices. That's proving a little difficult so one of the things that we find is development teams who are currently in the cloud can develop things with software defined infrastructure but when they try and interface with the data or with some of the systems that are on prem, then they come to a dramatic holt and they have to wait for the normal on prem processes to kick through. So what we're looking at doing now is we just started a new process or a new project an on prem, proof of concept, on prem cloud that will interact with the off prem cloud and give the cloud-like experience. So we'll see. >> So you have that challenge of agile meets waterfall and now you're trying to create some kind of equilibrium or really trying to modernize the on prem, what's the strategy there? >> Well I don't think it's agile meets waterfall I think its dev ops meets traditional process. It's and, yeah... (laughter) But how are we going to do it you say? >> Yeah, well I guess what I'm getting to is are you gong to find sort of a common ground or are you really going to try to drive that sort of dev ops mentality into the legacy process? >> We'll, continue to have a traditional or legacy, depending on what you want to call it, environment there, but we'll also have a software to find infrastructure environment on prem, if this proof of concept works, it's being built at the moment or being designed at the moment based on a vmware stack. >> What role will containers and microservices play in terms of facilitating that transformation? >> At the moment we have containers on prem which are coming with applications but we don't have a specific container platform which we're offering as a service on prem That's just where, there's containers off prem of course you know as Euro Cloud. >> Right, right, so for the on prem stuff what does that do for you and where do you see that going? >> For containers? >> Yeah >> At the moment we have a policy of not providing a container service on prem >> Oh, oh, oh, sorry, I heard wrong, sorry. Okay so that's not a direction that you're going currently? >> No but it maybe, because we're feeling our way forward I think. >> As you think about, for example banks or financial services companies have been at the Vanguard of a lot of digital business practices because you're core offering is data and how it gets used so is your overall business starting to rethink this notion of backup and restore from something that's just there to you know, make sure the data's available to becoming an essential strategic capability that can span between the two modes that you're describing but a common approach to making sure the data assets aren't compromised by vendor relationships, by application development style, by locations, is that, are you thinking in those terms of a federated approach to ensure the services on the data that you need? >> Okay well that was a very long question >> Yes >> But it's quite a short answer, yes we're thinking about it, no we haven't done it yet. So, but I think you're absolutely right, one of the problems could be for example we deploy in I don't know as your AWS, Google, and we fall out with one of those cloud providers and we try and move our backup data from provider A to provider B, is it transportable? You know, is, have we got the same policy that's been deployed in each of them so that whole thing needs to be... >> You don't want to recreate that problem that you got with those ten years of monthly backups with the new stuff too? >> Exactly, yeah yeah, we've already made that mistake. >> What are the other challenges, well but you made it for good reason, that was the state of the technology at the time and you had to have hardened processes and that was how you did it you know, ten or fifteen years ago. What are the other problems or challenges that you hear from when we talk to financial services organizations is if their data exists, they're data companies as Peter said but their data exits in hardened silos, again for good reason, you had to protect that data it was mission critical family jewels type of stuff >> Regulatory reasons >> Now as you transform into the so-called digital business everybody wants access to that data and so you've got that tough balancing act so, is that obviously a challenge for you, how are you dealing with that challenge and data protection generally was unique to each of those silos, so how are you thinking about data protection going forward in terms of busting those silos? >> Well, I don't think we've eve had silos in data protection, I think we've, our data protection has been uniform across the two banks of course >> Yeah, right. >> So now we've brought them together again, we have what, different retention characteristics, different ways of using the product. But over the last year and a half, two years we've pretty much brought in the same processes. But I don't think that any application on prem or any that will be on the private cloud or on the prem cloud will have anything different. It will use the same product, the same processes and perhaps have more access by the development teams, dev ops teams to be able to fire off their own backups at the right time. >> You're talking from a data protection perspective >> Perspective, yeah >> And then potentially other things like microservices or containers over time? >> Yeah >> Yeah, okay what's happening at the show here? Things you've learned, anything you've seen that's exciting you? Any announcements? >> Well, it's early days isn't it? It's early days so I think the, the best thing for the show so far was last night when it, going on the boat, meeting some of the other execs and sharing some experiences with them. I think, you know one of the things I always think is the best practice comes from worst experience and I don't want to have all that worst experience myself I wouldn't mind it from everybody else. (laughter) So I think you can learn more in an hour in a social situation then you can perhaps in two hours in the conference room there. >> So what are yo hearing from your peers, what are they doing, some of the challenges they're facing this digital business stuff is it real? How are they dealing with it? >> Okay, my peers, I think what they're feeling is that the traditional backup solution, the traditional backup providers are just not quick enough on their feet, agile in a real sense rather than a >> Quotes >> Quotes and marketing sense yeah, and I think the traditional providers tend to be, less grateful for the business perhaps. You know I heard about the number of new customers that Veeam are getting today but they seem to give a lot of attention to those new customers. Now deploying 13 thousand vms in a relatively short period of time we needed a lot of help from Veeam to overcome the obstacles as we hear them and they were there when we needed them and you know that makes a difference I think especially when you're protecting your data and you need to be ale to restore that data you need a partner not a vendor. >> So it's as much the relationship as the technology is what I'm hearing? >> I don't think we would get into bed with a vendor who wasn't a partner as well. >> Or in manner respects it's almost like Veeam understands how to solve the problem and their technology is a way of doing it easily, and simply, and reliably? >> Exactly yeah. >> I want to follow up on that because some of the large companies that can infer what you're talking about, they might have big established direct sales forces, meat eating guys that are in the field that just go belly to belly. You know Veeam all channel, all indirect how are they successfully partnering with you in ways that the other guys may not be with that type of go to market model? >> So we used a company called Pro*Act a reseller to buy into Veeam, I guess Veeam trained them up well because they had all the information at their finger tips and they represented us in the negotiation with Veeam, so it took away perhaps some of the conflict that you would get in an early situation. And then when we needed the direct help from Veeam, Veeam stepped up to the board and started giving that direct help and not cut out the reseller but the reseller wasn't needed anymore at that point. >> And that was help from a technology stand point or a business terms stand point or both? >> Technology, just over coming the problems, you know a big organization has got a lot of networks a lot of lans, v-lans, and we need to be able to punch holes through those v-lans so it's quite interesting to be able to be told up front where we need to punch. >> Make this work >> Yeah >> Great, all right Colin, well thanks very much for coming to the CUBE, it was great having you, give your final thoughts on Miami, you're coming in from out of town and you got the tour last night on the boat, and what'd you think and impressions of the conference? >> Well Miami first of all, it looks like a nice place to live as we cruised past all of those gigantic homes, I didn't notice anyone in them so, perhaps one's going cheap. The conference it looks good, I am always surprised by how big it is, it's my second event and yeah, they've got a hell of a lot of customers and seem to be loyal customers as well, nobody has a bad thing to say. >> Were you here in Chicago last year? >> I wasn't I was here in New Orleans >> New Orleans, yeah, two years ago, all right great well thanks very much of coming to the CUBE we appreciate it >> Thank you >> All right keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest you're watching the CUBE live from VeeamON 2019, be right back. (upbeat music)