>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Welcome to the cube. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are in Denver, Colorado, specifically Aurora, actually for the fourth annual comm vault. Go. Stu, I'm super excited to be back hosting with you again. Lisa, it's great to be with you our second year doing Convolt go last year. Keith Townsend with here with me and so glad you're here with me because you've got a little bit of background with this company I was with come out 10 years ago. It's scary to think that it's been 10 years that we're at the Gaylord Gaylord Rockies, which is one of their customers, massive conventions that aren't, as you said, the first conference that the Gaylord that probably heard that this, this convention center just opened up a couple of months ago. I think it holds like 1500 people, the 1500 rooms at the hotel and supposedly this is the first large event that they've done and this was planned last year. >>Last year we were in Nashville at the Gaylord the year before. I think they were in DC at the Gaylord and next year I know there'll be at another Gaylord, so definitely putting their customers first. Just like in the keynote this morning they had the state of Colorado opening up the event. We always love to hear a local customer welcoming us and talking about their partnership with the supplier. Absolutely agree with that. The state of Colorado, the statue share the highest number of micro breweries per capita and I don't know about you, I'm not a beer person. I would be super blown away if that, if I was there is the too much choice in beer. It used to be, you know, you'd go in and say, okay, here's the five or 10 beers I like. Now you go in and it's like, all right, there's a hundred new ones. I haven't tried that because they weren't here last time. >>So many beers here, a greater Denver. I've been to Boulder a couple of times. They say if you want to start a microbrewery, there's one that's ready to hand you over a place because they're going out of business. They just churn and go over and everything like that. So yeah, my first time actually hosting an event of the cube here in Colorado. Super excited for that. It's a great locale. And yeah, we're talking about, you know, so Convolt a 20 year old company, a lot of customers, but a lot of new faces. You look, we're going to be talking to the next two days. They run a whole new executive team. We knew this was coming last year. Our final guest in our two days is going to be Al Bunty, who is the CEO, was one of the original 20 years with the company. So we'll, we'll talk about the Baton and some of the changes in some of the things that are, are the same. >>So yeah. Interesting. You mentioned they started things off this morning with the customer at the state of Colorado. I too, like you always love to hear the voice of the customer. And I also really like it when customers talk about the challenges that they had. They talked about the Samsung attack and all of the exposures and vulnerabilities. I love that because that's what happens. We're seeing data protection as a service, the market positive trends in the market. There are a rise in cyber attacks. I love it when customers articulate, yep, nothing is perfect, but here's how working with Combalt we were able to recover quickly from something like that. A lot of big news, you mentioned a lot of new executive leadership. This is Sanjay merchant Donnie's first go. As CEO came in about nine months ago. He's a cube alumni, said we'll get to talk to him later this morning, but he came in after successfully leading puppet through many rounds of millions and venture funding. >>He took puppet worldwide, but he came into a company with declining revenues and one where folks said combat, you've got pressures to find alternative sources of growth. They said three things specifically. One, you need to upgrade your sales force. Two, you need to enhance your marketing, and three, we need to shift gears and expand your market share and there's been a whole bunch of news, not just yesterday, today, but in the last month or so, last few weeks actually where combo is making headway in all three of them. >> At least so right, because you look on paper and you look in the key, the keynote and say we have 20 years of experience. Here's all of the analyst reports that show us as the clear leader in this space. But then you look at it and say, Oh, 2018 to 2019 declining revenues. There are a lot of competitors both as some of the big stalwarts in technology as well as many startups. >>Heck, I'm even seeing the startups now. They're trying to call the last generation of startups that are going after con vault as the legacy. So if you're not fully cloud native microservice sass base architecture, you're the old way. And that's one of the news from Combolt already is they, they've done a couple of what they call Convult ventures. So the first one you were alluding to is they bought Hedvig, which was a software defined storage company. They just bought them back in September. What was their a two 40 $250 million, which was almost half of the cash that Combolt had sitting there. Hedvig company that had been around for a number of years. We're going to have Avinash who's the founder and CEO on the program here. He was on the keynote stage going through the demo. They kind of sat at this interesting line between software defined storage and actually hyperconverged infrastructure because you could in the early days do either storage only or fully converged environments, but massive scale. >>The customer that he talked about was a very large scale deployment. Those large scale deployments are really tough and can be challenging and they're not something that you just deploy everywhere. Unlike the other announcement that Convolt announced is metallic. If you go to metallic.io, they have this new sass based architecture. They built it in months from the ground up from the internal team. Part of me is sitting there saying, okay, wait, if they could do this and you know, six months or nine months or whatever it was, why hadn't they done it before? What has changed what Convolt technology is under there? It's great. It's working, you know, Azure and AWS as well as you can have a local copy in your environment. They call it SAS plus. Um, and we need to understand a little bit more of the technology. So a lot of exciting things. >>Definitely getting awareness, but both metallic and Hedvig they call Convolt ventures. So new areas, areas that they're looking to add some incremental growth. And one of the things Sandra said in his keynote is we want to, you know, rethink primary and secondary storage. So where is Convolt will they start dipping their toe into the primary storage? Does that line blur? We've got HP on the program, you know, NetApp is up on stage with them. They have partnerships. So changing landscape Convolt has long had a strong position in the market, but as things change they want to make sure that they make themselves relevant for the next era. >>Absolutely. And the Hedvig acquisition gives them a pretty significant, a much larger presence in the software defined space. But it also is going to give them a big Tam expansion. We look at metallic as you mentioned, the venture. I want to, I want to break that down. We've got Rob Kelly's, John Colussy, and on a little bit later, what is this Combolt venture, but also giving them, it sounds to me like giving customers in mid market more choice, but one of the things I mentioned that that analysts were saying is, Hey you guys, you gotta, you gotta expand your market share, you really gotta expand marketing. So we're seeing not just the technology announcements with Hedvig for the large scale enterprises of which I think most of their revenue, at least three quarters of combat revenue does come from that large space, metallic for mid market, but also some of the seals, leadership changes that they've made to are really positioning them. New initiatives, new partner initiatives, really focused on the largest global enterprises. We're gonna break some of that down today. So in terms of routes to market, you're seeing a lot of focus on mid-market and enterprise. >>Well, at least 80% of the convulse revenue comes from the partners. So that is hugely important. How does metallic fit in? Will that be as a SAS offering? Will that be direct? Will that go through the channel? Believe it's going to, you know, the channel's going to be able to be enabled. How do all of these pieces go together? One, one note on Hedvig you talk about Tam expansion. Hedwig was not a leader in the market when it comes to where they are. There's a lot of competition there. You know, they were not a, you know, a unicorn that had a road to $1 billion worth of actual revenue there. So they got bought at a very high multiple of what their actual revenue was. And the question was did they just not have the go to market to be able to bring that and maybe Convolt can bring them there where they miss positioned in the market. >>Should they not be really primary storage? Should they go more to secondary storage where partner closely with secondary storage, because I know some of Combolt's competitors did work with Hedvig. I've talked to a number of partners out there that liked Hedvig and was like, Oh it's a nice complimentary offering to what we have, whether they be a hardware or place. So we'll being in Convolt hyper charge that growth. Obviously they've got some smart team, smart team members, have an Ash, came from Amazon and Facebook and his team. But what will this do to accelerate what they're doing? How will there be hit the word but synergies between the two sides of the company. So Sanjay and team really laying out their vision for where they want to take the company and it's challenging to be, we're the trusted, reliable enterprise and we're going to go down to the lower end of the market and we're going to go on all these cool new spaces and everything. So Combalt only has limited resources just like any other company. And how will they maintain and grow their position going forward. >>We are going to hear from a number of their customers do today who been combo customers for 10 plus years. Some of them who have a number of Convolt competitors within, you know, disparate organizations. I love to hear from them, why are you running, you know, comm vault, the backup exec within these different departments. For example. AstraZeneca is one of them. And what makes Combalt in certain departments really ideal. So going to get a good picture of that, but also love to understand from these customers who've been using Combolt for years. Do you see a new combo in 20 in their fiscal year 2020 talked about the leadership changes. As you mentioned, this is a company that's not only 20 years old but at low run. Some stats by you that Sandra Mirchandani shared this morning, they've got 2.8 million. The virtual machines protected, they've got over 700 millions of petabytes. They're protecting in the cloud, 1.6 million servers on and on and on. How is con vault of fiscal year 2020 different and and really poised at this intersection of unified >>in? One of the answers for that that we'll dig into is it's about data. So while con vault does 45 million weekly backup jobs, we used to know backup is something that you just kind of had, but you didn't necessarily use it. Now it's not just having my data and making sure that it's relied on, but how can I leverage that data? It's, you know, data at the core and you know, Sandra said data is the heart of everything they're doing. So coming from puppet, Sanjay knows about dev ops and agile and he's going to bring some of that in. He's brought in a team that's going to infuse some change in the culture and we'll see. I expect Convolt to be moving a little, little faster. They definitely have made a number of changes in the short time that he has already been there and we'll get a little bit of a roadmap as to where we see them going. >>Yeah, there's certainly seems Stu to be moving quickly. You mentioned, you know, Sonjay being nine months metallic. You mentioned also being developed in house in a matter of months, announcing the Hedvig acquisition in September. It closed October 1st there Q2 earnings come out in just a couple of weeks right before Halloween. So it seems like a lot of momentum carrying into the Denver aura area. Is it going to be a trick or a treat? Ooh, I like that as a marketer, I'm jealous that you thought of that and I didn't, but I liked that. We'll go with that all these years on the cube. You gotta you gotta have the snappy comebacks, right? So, Steve, it's gonna be a great day today we are jam packed session interview after interview with combat executives, really dissecting what they're doing, what's new, what's positioning them to really kick the door wide open and really reverse those revenues, taking them positive and really not only meeting the endless expectations, but exceeding them. So I'm looking forward to an action packed two days in Aurora with use to, can't wait. All right, first two minute, man. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from comm vault. Go 19 we'll be right back with our first guest.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combalt. >>Hey, welcome back to the cube Lisa Martin with steam and man we are live on the show floor of comm vault go 2019 fourth annual event, a couple thousand customers here and Steve and I are welcoming back the COO of combo. Chris pal. Chris, welcome back. Thanks. Great to be here. We're excited to be here. We just came out of the keynote. Some interesting news to talk about but let's, let's to talk about what's happened. Combat is a 20 year young company, tremendous amount of acceleration in the last nine months. Lot of leadership changes he must be going to hold onto the table cause you got like the whiplash, right? So tell us, here we are at the fourth annual go news in terms of sales leadership changes go to market opportunities with metallic, with a new partner programs for the enterprise. Tell us what are some of the things that are exciting to you and how come vault is really in 20 FYE 2020 position? Like, Hey, we're listening to our customers and partners. >>Yeah, yeah. Well, and a lot of the things that you're seeing here at this show is just that it's, it's, it's market-driven. It's us responding to what we're seeing in the market, working with our partners. And a show like this is all about working with partners. Our customers and the, the announcements that we're making here are really releasing a completely new combo that the brand refresh that we've done just over the last month or so is been tied to a lot of the things that are changing with regards to the product portfolio. Uh, that Hedvig acquisition and a lot of the different leadership changes that you're seeing and the leadership changes are really driving a lot of this shift of focus. And really, I shouldn't say shift really extended focus for the organization from a technological standpoint as well as from working with our partners. >>Yeah, it's interesting. The news ahead of the show of metallic Convult now a SAS providers. So it's interesting to get you give us your, your view as a marketer. On the one hand you need to be the trusted enterprise supplier with a lot of customers. And the other one, you know, they've got cloud microservices, all the latest buzz words and you know sasses the model that a lot of customers want to be able to consume their software standpoint. So, so >>I know you have Rob Kalusi and who's going to be coming on. So I'll steal some of his thunder and I'll try not to steal too much to don't tell them the what excites me so much about the metallic product when leap, when we first started down this path, it was we, we really started looking at the market and the challenge that came from Sanjay when he just first entered the building really was we have industry leading technology. A lot of folks will talk about how we have industry leading technology. But if you really took a step back, you would have to have an honest view and say, sometimes they would say, well look, if it's a, if it's a really straight forward installation, maybe Commonwealth and might be a bit bring too much to the party, so why don't you look at some of the other solutions. >>And as we were talking to different customers out there, they were looking for SAS solutions and but they at the same time, they didn't want to make any compromises. And so much of the research that Rob and team working with Janet and with David, no, we're seeing is that as they were going out there, the Seuss solutions that were available today, and this sounds like marketing spin, right? But it's really what we were hearing back, that they weren't very good there, that they weren't SAS solutions. They're supposed to be easy. The customers really didn't see them as easy. They were running into scale issues, they were running into flexibility issues. So from the standpoint of building the solution, what we quickly realized is if we could reach Sanjay's challenge to us, which is bringing this fundamentally solid technology to a broader audience with a simplified use cases that there's a great opportunity for us to bring value to more companies. So that's, that's where this went. And then the beginning reviews of this as we brought this into beta and different people were seeing at different customers, different partners, they even came into the conversation a little bit pessimistic and they all left excited about what they were seeing. It's it's, it's really good. It's really good. >>So targeted towards mid market companies with around 2,500 or 500 to 2,500 employees. Give me just a little bit of a perspective on the choice that Commonweal is now offering the midmarket with complete backup and recovery. That's one of your flagship and metallic. >>So the the metallic offerings your men for some of the most common use cases that are out there. So 65 and the what we're, what we're trying to inject into the market and the target of 500 to 2,500 employees is really just where we see the sweet spot of most of the customers of those sizes are the ones that are looking at SAS solutions right now. But that's not to say as we've talked to larger enterprises, many of them are considering the addition of metallic as into their either subsidiaries or other areas of their business. And what Sanjay talks about, he sort of refers to as the data brain is really bringing this together where you can add SAS solutions onto your existing on prem solution. So if you're running combo complete, you can also be running metallic across other aspects of your business. So that's, that's one of the things that makes it powerful upmarket, but then we're also targeting the more common use cases that are more turnkey down-market. Yeah. >>Let's switch gears a little bit. So your team had a little bit of fun opening up the keynote. You had some of the stunt doubles a for Thor from Starwood and the woman has done both star Wars and Marvel on and talking about the unsung heroes behind the scenes. Kind of like your, your customers here. But there was another connection because they were vendors and con vault is, I believe it's the global Avengers and it has to do with sustainability, which I know is something near and dear to your heart. So explain a little bit about why that's important in what it is. >>So it's definitely a passion of mine and something that we accumbent are looking to every company as we're driving this should try to stand for something bigger than themselves. And as we look at this all started two years ago when we sponsored and I joined Robert Swan's expedition to the South pole. We were the data sponsor for that expedition and it was the first expedition to rely solely on renewable energy. And what has evolved from that from different conversations, we started having discussions throughout about the carbon footprint of data and with 5g the internet of things coming and more and more data on the horizon. The people that we're speaking with. And the reality I think that tech has come to is that we can't be part of the problem. We have to be part of the solution. So through a series of connections, we ended up speaking with the folks who were responsible for the UN global goals. Um, it's the 17 global goals around the world that were endorsed by all of the UN countries five years ago and there's 10 more years of it. And Kamahl is extremely proud to be joining some of the largest companies in the world. Coca Cola, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, many in our industry and outside, obviously to sponsor one of the global global goals. But the way the program works is it 17 global goals and there's one company for each one of them in order to try to represent it and drive it forward. >>Chris, you actually took a few of us around the show floor before it opened last night. We know conferences can have a bit of an impact from a negative standpoint. So tell some of what Combolt's doing to make sure that this conference, you know, doesn't have such an impact. >>So as you mentioned before, it's about 2000 people that are here and I was shocked to learn and a lot of this is all in education. As you go through life, the, an event of this size typically will generate 25,000 pounds of rubbish of trash. So what we've done is partner with our good customer, which is the Gaylord Gaylord hotel systems and leaf put together a model where we're trying to minimize the overall footprint. So we donate a lot of what you see around here. Construction materials are donated to schools and local organizations. We're using all of the natural plants that will go back into the, uh, into the environment after this. Um, no plastic. I'm trying. And then the, uh, the cups you see here on the table are all plant based. So we're, we're trying to be very conscientious about everything that we're doing here at the show and minimize the footprint. >>When you're talking with customers, as I'm sure as cou are doing a lot, we talk, we often Sue and I and the rest of the cube crew. Sustainability is a topic that comes up at every event. We're, is that when you're talking with customers in any industry, whether it's healthcare or oil and gas, where is sustainability in >>terms of conversation? Is that one of the key things that comes up? That was also really important for Commonwealth to say, Hey, we want to be able to make sure that the technologies we're delivering are going to help our customers meet their sustainability goals. >>Absolutely. And it's, it's increasingly part of some, a number of RFPs. They will come in for Combalt. So they're there. Companies are looking to have us be able to really represent what our sustainability, what our corporate social responsibility systems are and what we put in place. And so we look at this through the lens of what do we do within our facilities? What do we do in events like this? And then also what can we do with our customers? So it's increasingly relevant and their sons of research, I'm sure you guys have seen the, the, as the millennial generation becomes more and more part of either significant influencers or decision makers, they're looking for companies that have a mission, you know, and that that stand for something all. >>So Chris, we're talking about sustainability is something you're passionate about. How does that tie into the broader brand discussion of Convolt companies going through, we talked about the executive change and you've got a lot of new products. So when people leave Combalt go 2019 how do you want them to think of Convult? >>That's a great question. I think what we're hoping that we were really using combo Alco as a combination of so many of the things that have been happening over the last couple of quarters. And certainly as I looked through what we're representing now, it's what are we as an organization, what's the story we're trying to tell? So we launched just in the last few weeks a new tagline, which is be ready. And that whole concept of data readiness is something that we're having within this show and it'll be in a lot of our messaging as we move forward. So this, I'm thinking of as the organization that enables you to be ready and then extending that should of saying, well what does that mean? And that's around how we protect the data, help you control where it resides, help you manage it for compliance and different regulatory needs, and then help you use it and get value from it. So that's the big takeaway we're hoping that people have. The other piece of this that we have each year is we expose people to such expertise here at the show. This is not combo talking about combo. 70% of our sessions in the breakout theaters are partners or customers or other influencers. So we want people to come here and really see convolve as data experts, as the people who are willing to work with them. >>Yeah. One little nugget you shared also, you've been growing. How many developers you bring from internal to the show. I have to think that Sanjay has a little bit of push from that based on his last. Yeah, yeah. >>Roll. Yeah. Certainly the DevOps community is increasingly, especially with some of the moves we've made in Hedvig, the dev community is going to be increasingly an audience for us to, to engage with. But the, we bring 45 developers to the show this year. It's about 40 from a combo and five more that have joined with Hedvig and they have 30 or 60 minute whiteboard sessions and they're completely jam packed. There's, I think last year there was over 150 whiteboard sessions over two days with customers just coming in and going through the details of this because a lot of organizations, they're there, they're faced with right now and in Sanjay's words, they have to move from something to something and they need people to be able to sit down and have honest conversations with them. Um, I joke with people sometimes that one of the terrible things that happened has happened to marketing with the advent of technology is we have to be truthful now when you know you can't, you can't just spin things. And so we're stuck having to tell the truth. But, but combo has a great truth that sets, we've got a really solid truth to tell. We just need to tell it. >>Well, and I love how marketing is so scientific these days. You're right, you have to tell the truth. But you also have, if you have the right foundation within your organization, the ability to access data actually glean insights from it, develop, whether it's a new partner program or new technologies, new routes to market. That's the power of that. Having visibility and access to the data can deliver to any type of organization. When you, when you talk with customers who've been, we've got some on the show today, Hey, we've been using Convolt for 10 years. When you talk to them today, this theme of be ready more than ready. How are they perceiving their foundation with combo and all of the changes that you've made, not just in the last 10 years, but in the last nine months alone. Which like customer feedback. Yeah, >>the customer feedback has been tremendous. I think they, they, so many customers are something that's so great about combo. Does our customers want us to succeed and they, they see this market shifting tremendously. They've been with us for a while and they want us to succeed. When they look at the changes that they're having to overcome, they're excited about really beginning to learn that as they move from something to something that we can help them on that journey. That they don't have to go somewhere else for that journey. So whether that's looking into SAS areas, whether it's modernizing their infrastructure, whether it's moving to multi-cloud and those environments, we, we have the right solutions in the right way for them to be able to make this transition for their company. So >>Chris, we're relatively early still in this show, so I hate to ask, but give us a little bit of a go forward. Lot of change in the last nine months. What should your customers be expecting from comm vault through the rest of the year? And by the time we come back to Convolt go 20, 20? >>Well, I think when you talk to Sanjay, he always says, puts me back on my heels a little bit and tells me that it's a, there's more coming, there's more coming, we're going to keep going. So it, Sanjay is a very dynamic leader and he's looking to make sure that the company isn't just driving to combo go and then it's going to sort of be smooth sailing with these things. I think this is an exciting time to be here at combo. This is an exciting time to be in the industry. So as we look forward to, um, the new leadership that's come in and some of the things they'll be able to do in terms of our go to market, I think we're going to be exciting. Avinash coming into this organization and his expertise, his skill set and all of the brilliant engineers he's, he's brought in to sort of join our industry leading engineering team. Uh, it's, it's going to be, uh, I can't wait to see what they come up with from a marketing standpoint. You know, we, we had a solid product for a number of years, but it's always challenging to sort of continue to tell a story and come up with new ways to tell it. As you get new things in your, in your box to be able to talk about, it's, it's great to be here. >>Well, Chris, we want to thank you for joining us on the queue today. We're excited about the next two days of all of the folks, leaders, new leaders, customers, partners that we're going to be talking to you and really unpacking what being ready means to them. So we thank you for your time and we look forward to a great event. Thanks very much for Steven. Amen. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the Q from ball go 19.