you live from Miami Beach Florida Biman 2019 brought to you by beam welcome back to Miami everybody this is the cube the leader in live tech coverage I'm Dave Volante with my co-host Peter burst we're wrapping up day two of v-mon 2019 and so we've been talking about cloud hybrid cloud data protection backup evolving to more of an automated data management environment can bring dollars here and he is in charge of really building out the VM ecosystem that he's the vice president of global alliance architecture at VM Kent great to see you again thanks for coming on yeah thanks Dave preciate so the ecosystem is evolving you know you're in a competitive marketplace but one of the things that differentiates Veeam is you know billion dollar company and people want to do business with your customers and so the ecosystem keeps growing and growing and you guys have some you know blue chip names at the top of your sponsor list we do a good job but you're not done yet so not at all and I think Dave you know it's it's really great to see how v-mon has evolved and you know in our partner ecosystem you know we have you know you talked about us hitting a billion dollars you know we rat marinelle's we hit 350,000 customers that customer number is a huge asset for us when we talked to our partners you know that is something that they're all trying to tap into right they love you know and our customers are really passionate and we have partners that come to us and they say hey look you know and that you know the bigger partners than us and they're saying hey will you please work with us will you please you know we want to do deeper integration because our customers you know are saying we're Veeam customers and and you you know you know mister partner you have to go work with teams so that so that our solutions will work better together so it's a it's a great asset to us yeah and it's it's evolved since you know it's just certainly just the first Vemma and I was at the very first one I think was we were talking was at the Aria whatever it was five years ago so so you know ecosystem is I think Jason Buffington was quoting Archimedes today and you know livre and and that ecosystem is is you know a huge opportunity for growth ok so let's get into it well first of all I want to ask you if time was interesting global alliance architecture yes so we're not talking technical architecture necessarily we're talking about what the architecture of the ecosystem or both yeah so some money you know my role my responsibilities and what my team looks after is everything technical related to our partners so veem we're a hundred percent is fee and you know ratmir and aundrea to co-founders and leaders to the company you know that that's something that they take to heart and it's something that's actually really valuable when we talk to our partners is we don't really overlap very much especially with the infrastructure partners that we have and so you know my job is to take the great products we have and make it work really well and go deep with our partners so create value with these partners there's sometimes their product integrations storage snapshot integrations we announced the width beam program two weeks ago we are together at that next with the rest of your team talking about Nutanix mine with theme which is a secondary storage integrated solution so all of those that's all part of my roles so solution architecture and product integrations you know through our partner ecosystem which which is very broad it stretches from storage partners to platform partners to other is feeds like Oracle SAT even healthcare partners yeah Peter we were excited about the width Eames stuff dat who is with Fein yours with Vemma yeah so my team is responsible for the overall architecture with Vemma it's it's really a joint collaboration within within Veeam so we have an R&D investment that's building the intellectual property that powers the you know the system under the covers my team's responsible for the broader architecture how we bring it together how we bring it to market through the channel right and and and how we bring it to our customers and that whole experience so my team is is intimately involved in that so a lot of people talk about inflection points in the industry and clearly were in the middle one way of describing it is that the first 50 years were known process unknown technology we never gonna do accounting we knew are going to do HR where you were going to do blah blah blah blah blah and there was mainframe client-server with a lot of other stuff but the whole notion of backup and restore and data protection grew up out of the complexity in the infrastructure as we move forward it's interesting because it's known technology it's gonna be cloud relatively known yes but what's interesting is we don't know what the processes are gonna be we don't know what we're gonna automate we don't know how we're going to change the business it's all going to be data driven which places an enormous burden on IT and specifically how they use data within the business so I'm gonna ask your question it's a long preamble but I'm asking the question I asked you out in there too and this is not the test but the question is look as we move forward as data is used to differentiate a business it suggests that there's going to be greater specialization in how data use is used which could and should lead to greater specialization in the role that veem and related technologies will play within the business and the question then is is the with veem approach a way to let allow innovation to bloom so that specialization can be accommodated and supported within the VM ecosystem yeah so yeah Peter good question and so I tell you that the short answer is yes the longer answer is I wasn't shorter than the short answer is yes the longer answer is it doesn't have to be with Veeam but really our goal and and what we want to empower our partners and so really the goal of with Veeam is hey we're already working across our partner ecosystem and we you know we work with with the likes of NetApp and HP and pure and Nutanix and you know and all the platform providers as well public clouds you know our goal is is to make VM ubiquitous and drive better value to our customers and through our partners right we need partners no matter what when we're working with a customer there's always there's always a workload we're protecting and we need a place to land our backup so no matter what we're always working with one or two partners in a deal and sometimes it's multiple because then you TR out to cloud storage and in other places you know with with veem what we're trying to do is is really simplify that process for customers and so make that process from the buying experience all the way through the delivery and the deployment and the management and the ongoing management day 1 and day 2 operations we want to make that all seamless and give them higher value now one thing we're looking to enable and by adding api's with veeam is we want to leverage the strengths of the partners we have and so you know I often end up in these discussions because we have a broad partner ecosystem we've already announced - with VM solutions we have a third that you know we did last year with Cisco that's in the market that's sort of similar in nature and we're gonna add more and you know the question our partners even ask us is you know you already got three of them why are you gonna add another one you know how am I going to differentiate and the answer is you know they differentiate with their own technology and and the idea is we have these open API so that they can they can build their own solutions they fit different markets and fit different use cases some are small small customer solutions some are enterprise but our goal is to enable them to be creative and how they build on top of eeeem but but have you know Veen be a core part of that solution rather so so it is a core part of solution yes apply to specific customer absolutely okay so the term seamless always you know triggers me in a way because seamless is like open right it's evolved over time and so what was seamless you know 10 years ago wasn't really seamless in today's terms so when you talk about seamless we're talking about if I understand it deep engineering right getting access to primitives through api's and creating solutions that are differentiable as a function of your partner's core value proposition and obviously integrating with meme with 350,000 customers so you're now in the ball game with with Veen customers so so so talk about the importance of api's and how that actually gets done yeah and seamless to whom to the partners to the customer to ultimately it's to the customer boom but but but there's got to be an ease of integration as well with the partners and I'd like to understand that better yeah absolutely so I'll give you an example of something we've done in the past that's that we're trying to model this with veem program after so but a year and a half as part of our 9.5 update 3 we introduced what we call universal storage API and we've talked about our version 10 there were five core features of version 10 when we announced that two years ago in New Orleans you're the first time you were you were with us at a v-mon and one of those was Universal storage API and what that means is you know we help we help our partners we help our customers ultimately by way of our partners on the primary side of integrating storage snapshots with vmware vsphere and so when we when we go to backup a vm we take a snapshot of that vm and with this with our storage snapshot integration we then take a storage snapshot of the volume that vm is on and we can release that VM where a snapshot very quickly so it's very low touch and low impact on the environment well we we introduced this API so that we could scale we had we had done our own storage snapshot and integration with you know call it 5 or 6 storage vendors over the previous seven years eight years right in the last year and a half we've added seven right and that's the scale we're talking about and allowing our partners to build the storage snapshot plug-in together right so we have a program we invite them into that program we collaborate on it they develop the plug-in we jointly test it and we release it and so we're trying to sort of take and that's been very successful as I said eight years five or six storage snapshot vendors year and a half we've done like another seven or eight so it's been very successful and we have more that are in queue so we'll be talking about more of these as time goes on in the very near future with the width beam program we're looking to do something very similar it's gonna be an invite-only program realistically the secondary storage partner is this the universe is probably 20 the logical universe for us is probably 10 to 12 so it's not going to be huge but it's gonna be impactful for our partners and so we'll invite them into the program we'll have an agreement of us working together we'll jointly develop and test it and we'll bring it to market together at the end of the day you know both our partner and veem we have our name on it and I'm sure you heard from rat mayor and Danny and others right we have our NPS score which we really really value and it's really high it's best in the industry and if we're putting our name on a solution in the market we also want to make sure that we're working on it together in it you know it really goes through the rigor of what it takes to bring a Vemma solution tomorrow actually you know what nobody's talked this week this week about the NPS core if they maybe they have in the keynote so that it might have missed it but well I was in the keynotes what is it today well yeah so so an NPS score is basically you know from from 0 to 100 it's it's you know we'll a customer reference you or recommend you right right and so ours is 73 ok the industry the the general average in in in our space is about 28 to 30 so we're about 2 and a half times that that's core you know and that's in Frank Zubin said to me one time it's easy to have a high NPS core if you're a one product company but you're not a one product company no no we've we've evolved substantially I mean you know we've we've added agents to cover physical workload we've we've added cloud support we've added other applications we've added veem availability Orchestrator we've added beam backup for office 365 we have VA C which is the availability console for our service providers which has cloud connected it's a very broad portfolio everything comes back to beam backup and replication as the flagship foundation but we have all these other products that that now help our customers solve their problems the reason we were so excited about this with wid theme is this notion of cloud and hybrid cloud and you talk about programmable infrastructure you really have been pushing just bringing the cloud experience to your data talking about that for a while and part of that has to be infrastructure as code and it can't really do that without open api's and this sort of seamless integration well the cloud is testing us with you as well the cloud is a really an architecture for how you're going to distribute work as opposed to how you can centralize Handicap I think for a long time we got it wrong it's all presumed and it's all gonna go to the center we're in fact when you get that level of standardization and common conventions and the technologies are built to make a tea that much easier it allows you to distribute the work a lot more effectively get the data closer to where the works going to be done and that is enormous implications for how we think about things but it also means that we when we talk about bringing the cloud to the data that the data has to be there the data services that make that data part of a broader fabric have to be there and it all has to be assured so that the system knows something about where the data is and what services can be applied to it in advance of actually moving the workloads that suggests ultimately that the technology set that veem is offering is going to evolve relatively rapidly so the whole notion of you know with V today for secondary storage but I could see that becoming something that you guys take two new classes of data service providers pretty quickly I don't want you to pre-announce anything but what do you think yeah Peter I think I think you're really on to something and when we when we sort of look at the worlds right the infrastructure world were in you know and and certainly some of our partners would draw a slightly different picture but we see Veen as as the common thread in the middle right because at the end of the day and I think you mentioned it as you were just talking there you know when we talk about hybrid cloud right we see now our customers especially commercial and enterprise and large enterprise customers it is it is a very heterogeneous environment it's multiple hypervisors different storage platforms it's multiple cloud providers because they're picking best to breed for the workload and so they need a platform that's got really breadth in depth of coverage and so the the one common thread we weave between there is Veeam right so if if we are that data protection layer as I mentioned before you know we're in the middle we're protecting a primary workload and we're writing our data to a secondary workload but in the middle is Veeam and so that workload we're protecting on Prem cloud secondary data centers theme is the thread in between there you can move that data around and wherever that is we can make use for now I'll give you a good example today you know let's say we're protecting a visa or workload on Prem right we back that up to it to assist them locally so we can have fast restore but ultimately we tear that out bean cloud tier capacity tear tear that's AWS so we can we can actually recover workloads in Atos one or two we have directory store which would take a backup from on-prem and directly move it there for DRAM migration purposes or we can simply consume that that backup that's now up in the cloud because Veen backups are self-describing we can lose the system on Prem and recover it so your point about making the data close to your workload with with veeam in the middle we enable that for our customers regardless of where they want to go yeah so we think that that's going to change the mindset from protection to assurance so assure your data is local and then it's the right data it's Integris and all the other things and then ultimately you know move it and back it up to some other site so it's but it's a subtle switch it's gonna be interesting to see how it plays out this is obviously well and as we talked about as you need to begin to protect things like containers like functions that come and go super quickly assurance has more meaning because there's the security threats and if you can help solve those problems through your partners through automation spinning containers up and down making it harder for the bad guys to you know a target a specific container raising essentially the cost so lowers their ROI that is a new game yeah and and I'll call out one thing a rat mayor I thought did a really good job on stage yesterday in his keynote he popped the slide which talked about the universal storage API and with theme and it had all our partners sort of around that you know that that I think he Illustrated our strategy which is hey we're focusing on the core parts of backup and replication and helping the core parts the data protection we're gonna partner with everything else that's adjacent to that we're not going to go solve maybe some of the security problems ourselves we're gonna enable some hooks secure restore maybe as an example we've announced you know in the technology keynote yesterday we announced a new API that allows partners to come in and crack open Veen backups and take a look at them one of the things could be deep inspection so you know our strategy and our goal is really to be open to our partners so that they can come in and add value and again our our goal for our customers is give them choice so give them choice of to choose best-of-breed solutions don't go do it and say hey you got to go use partner a you know hey we're gonna we're gonna have an API that others can build to and you go choose your best debris partner or your platform technology choice well and with 350,000 customers you've got a big observation space so guys have always been customer driven can give you the last word on vivant 2019 you're our last guest then we're gonna wrap with a little analysis on our end but give us the bumper sticker yeah I think the bumper sticker is hey you know we've you know from a business perspective you know we hit a billion dollars in bookings we have hit 350,000 customers the Innovation Train is really moving our Veen clouds here that we announced with update four earlier this year has gone way beyond our expectations and and we're looking to continue to build on that momentum so we're just super excited you know we if I'm the closer I'll say thanks to all of our sponsors we have a lot of great sponsors and on the cloud side on the on the Alliance partners side the channel side you know it's just it's it's a testament to where we are as a companies yeah and you're building out a great ecosystem congratulations on that and and good luck going forward and we'll see you around at the shows it's great it's great to have you guys right thank you all right you're welcome all right keep it right there everybody Peter and I went back to wrap right after this short break and watching the cube live from V Mon 2019 from Miami we'll be right back