>> Narrator: From Chicago, it's theCube covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here on the ground covering the Veritas Vision Solution Days in Chicago. Just a couple weeks ago we were in New York City at the iconic Tavern on the Green. We're here at the Palmer House Hotel. Jyothi Swaroop is here, he's the Vice President of Global Marketing for Veritas. Great to see you again. >> Thanks Dave, glad to be here. >> A few weeks ago we saw you in New York. Since then you've been around the globe talking to customers. You just gave a great presentation to about 60, 70 customers here in Chicago. Obviously a lot of your customers here, New York, one of the big NFL cities, so what have you learned in the last couple of weeks? >> Well, a lot. It's been exciting, right. Since New York I've been in Dubai, Milan, Rome, all over the place. Sounds exciting but a lot of jet lag and travel but a lot of exciting customers with interesting challenges that we can solve for. But I guess I would summarize it into three parts. Obviously there are data protection challenges that we solve at Veritas and have done so over 20 years. There are a lot of storage challenges that we talked about and how they're moving to the cloud and how we can assist with that. And lastly, interesting thing is the whole compliance in AI and ML related challenges as to how do they look ahead while staying compliant with what they have already. >> There are some major trends forcing people to rethink their data protection strategies. Obviously, cloud is one, the whole security and data protection world's coming together, the edge, just the whole distributed data trend. Machine intelligence is another one. There are things that you can do with all that data, machine plus data plus cloud really changes the game. You guys have some hard news in that area. Bring us up to date, what are you announcing? >> Right, so we're announcing Veritas Predictive Insights. Really excited about this announcement because when I joined Veritas about 16 months ago, I felt like Veritas sits on top of all these exabytes of data. We protect the largest number of exabytes of data, right. So we have access to the metadata of that data. So my question to the engineering team is what are we doing with that metadata? Are we going to use it, leverage it, so our customers can benefit from it? From all of this user data that we get from other customers. And the answer was, "Yes, we're working on something. Hold on, you're new." And now we have it. So at Veritas, yes it takes 12 to 16 months to build something at scale, right. We have hundreds of engineers that have worked on this. So what we have done now is, especially with our appliances portfolio, we're able to give our customers intuitive, predictive, and proactive maintenance and support of their systems. Now what does that mean? It means firmware upgrades, patches, things like that. They don't have to be a personalized, you know, fly in an engineer in to do kind of things. They can be automated. Oracle recently at Oracle OpenWorld announced this whole autonomous database. Why can't data protection be autonomous, right? So that's how we think, right. Make everything autonomous, make everything predictive and proactive and that's what Predictive Insights is about. >> So let's unpack that a little bit. So what are the enablers that allow you to actually take this next step. Obviously you've got the data, you've got a classification engine that allows you to put data in buckets, if you will. Explain what that is and why it's important. >> I'm glad you brought up the classification engine because that was at the heart of everything Veritas did for the last 20 years, right. We call it Big Veritas Information Classifier where we classified all of the data that came in on Ingest, unlike other people, other customers and other vendors. We classified all of the data that came in from that back up and we told our customers, "Here's PII numbers, your sensitive information is structured data, is unstructured data." We did this really well for a long time. Now we wanted to take that to the next level, right. We wanted to tell our customers what's actually going on with your infrastructure. You've classified the data, you've put it in here, what can you do with it next? Where can you put it? Can you optimize it after the cloud? How much will you pay for it? Can you remove something off of it? How much do you pay for that? Can you put some data retention on prem? How much would that cost you? So we would not only want to give them information about the classification of that data, but how to monetize that data, how much money would it cost to store that data in different areas. >> So this is a case where, if you go back to something you might remember, 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure mandated that you were able to recover and deliver to a court of law electronic records. Well data classification was critical component there. This is one of those cases like, if you've got an older athlete, like Tom Brady, maybe he's not as fast as he used to be, but he's got it all up here, he knows the plays before he sees it. You guys have the experience around things like data classification which are table stakes to allow you to do this but it's still a challenge for many folks in the industry. It's a metadata problem, isn't it? >> Yup, it absolutely is. It is a metadata problem and it's a metadata advantage for us at Veritas because we sit on top of the highest amount of metadata. >> So how do I take advantage of the Veritas Predictive Insights? Where does it live? >> So where we've announced it, it'll be out there the beginning of the year, 2019. We're rolling out with our appliances portfolio first because we have more control over it because the appliances and the hardware have been integrated with our software. So we give our customers predictive insights on all of their appliances that they buy from Veritas and their systems. Going forward, we'll extend that to our software only sales motions, as well. As extending it to other software platforms and other hardware platforms from other vendors, as well. So we're working on some integrations that I can't talk about today but we want to essentially take predictive insights and move it beyond Veritas in the future. >> Okay, so, talk a little bit more about how it works. Using machine learning technology, you're building models and training the data for different customers, how does it all actually come to fruition? >> Sure, so the first thing is, you know, we're generating what we call SRS or a system reliability score, right. So our engine processes all of this information that comes from a customer's data, the usage data, and maps it to the hundreds of other customers, thousands of other customers usage data that we have to find patterns, right. So for example, if a disc hasn't had a firmware upgraded and hasn't done so for months, we can predicatively let the customer know this disc is going to fail if you didn't upgrade this. But that's not enough. We actually allow them to click a button and upgrade the firmware right there to that disc so it's done, right. So it's not only letting customers know that here's something that's going to go wrong, but here's how to fix it, as well. That's just one example of what we can do. >> Well that's key, it's like the old days. You know, you have a pager and you get an alert and then you got to go do something. You're saying you're actually building automation into the process. >> Right, it's like chat bots. You respond to the chat bot right there and it does the action for you. You don't actually have to go somewhere and figure it out. >> So you've got this SRS score. >> Jyothi: Right. >> So what happens when you cross that threshold, it tells the system, "Okay, take some remedial action," or does it allow the customer to sort of make that choice? What's next? >> Sure, so the SRS score is like a credit score, right. There's a lot of complexity underneath that score. So at the highest level we tell the score, the customer if your score is above a certain point, your systems are healthy, they're running well. If they go below a certain point, right, let's say a 700 score for a credit score, you got to go watch or widen your goal below and we'll give them the 10 or 20 reasons why the score went down. Whether it's a firmware thing or a support issue or a hard drive issue. We tell them exactly what's about to go wrong so they can go fix it before it actually goes wrong. >> What do you, actually, before we go there, just some examples, some use cases that you expect in the field, you've talked to customers about. Give us some more. >> Sure, so data, like we talk to a lot of companies with massive data centers. So one of the things that it says with our appliances, simple things like temperature changes. I was in Dubai, look, the temperature there can be crazy. It goes over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. So it says simple things like temperature changes can have massive effect on your hard drives and how that works. If my AI and ML algorithms or my software can proactively tell me the temperatures going up, this is what's going to happen, you increase the cooling, do something different, move the data somewhere, back it up. That's great for the customer. Can I take action just based on a simple thing like temperature. There's another interesting customer, here in New York actually, that came to me and said, we had this problem like every so many weeks, their discs would fail. And they thought it was their temperature because it was in the summer. It wasn't and after a lot of research, it turns out it was the fire alarms that were going off. So the fire alarm and the fire alarm testing that was going on was actually causing discs to fail. >> Because of the vibration or? >> For the vibration and the decibel level. It was interesting, right. And now our AI, ML knows that so it's recorded, we know it and we'll be better off going forward, right. We'll tell other customers now that have data centers with massive, loud, high decibel fire alarms that this could be a potential issue. I'm not saying that is the issue, but this could be a potential issue that they would have never thought of otherwise. >> So what do you expect the business impact to be? When you talk to customers about this capability, you know, under non-disclosure, etcetera, how are they seeing this impacting their business? >> So it's three things, right. Proactive support and maintenance, that's really important. The customers are tired of talking to large vendors where the support connections are horrible, right. They have to go in and raise a ticket and do certain things and then they will ship a guy over to their site who'll come and fix it. That's just too long. >> Dave: Slow and reactive. >> Slow and reactive. We want to make this proactive and autonomous, that's number one. Number two is total cost of ownership, right. So when customers are able to predict these failures, they don't have to have a certain set of money set aside for solving problems when the occur. They're like, "I know this problem has come up. I need to budget for it." So their TCO models get better and more predictable, right. And last but definitely not the least, you know, when we extend this to beyond Veritas, they will be able to do more with their data. Again, what is that more? We don't know yet today. But when we are able to extend this to beyond Veritas, customers will be able to do a lot more with their data centers. >> So a couple of things this plays into. Obviously digital transformation is all about being on all the time, you don't want to have, you don't want planned downtime or unplanned downtime. This allows you to at least plan more effectively and potentially eliminate any downtime so your data is always accessible. And it's also cloud-like in that you're automating a lot of the either recovery from failures, or you know, you're pushing a button and saying okay, remediate this, patch that so you don't have the failure. So that's a sort of cloud-like approach. So you said it's available the first part of '19. And it's available, is it in appliances or? How do I get this. >> So we'll be rolling it out in appliances first, all the Veritas appliances. And then we'll extend it to software only, as well as beyond Veritas going forward. >> Awesome, Jyothi, thanks very much for taking us through the new capability. AI brought to data protection, anticipating problems before they occur, remediating them in an autonomous way. I appreciate your time. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thanks for coming back on. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guess right after this short break. You're watching theCube from Chicago, Veritas Vision Solution Day. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware. And, it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas. Third day, some of us, our voices are a little bit rough. But, we've still got a lot of stuff to do, and summit people are still looking quite good. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host, Justin Warren. Now talking about our current guest who, you know, came in looking great, good energy, Jyothi Swaroop, welcome back to the program. You're the vice president of Global Marketing with Veritas. >> Thanks Stu, thanks for those kind words. I mean, I'm just joining the party here, in terms of good-looking guys. So it's, it's not unique to me at all. >> Yeah, you know, didn't have as much, you know, time to spend on our hair this morning. >> (laughs) Hey I wake up this way. >> That's odd, alright. >> So do I. (everybody laughs) >> Alright, so Jyothi, first of all, VMworld, you know this ecosystem. There's a good energy at the show, what's been your impression so far? >> Look, I mean, haven't been on the other side, right? I've actually having worked for Dell EMC in the past, and, you know, being part of organizing an event like this It's great to see the VMworld, the diaspora expanding with every year, and how they've reinvented themselves. In every three to four years people were like, "Oh, VMworld's going away, VMworld is not relevant anymore." But it's been amazing to see the evolution of VMware, and how they've reinvented themselves, what they're doing with AWS et cetera. And at Veritas, we're trying to map to that strategy we're going where the buck's going right? So, we're literally map into everything VMworld's doing with their customers, which tends to be a lot of our customers. There's a significant overlap between Veritas' customers and VMware install base. >> Yeah, I absolutely, I mean, we talk about things like software to find these days, and especially like in the storage world, I mean, Veritas were like, was the original in that space. When you, oh how do I get software out of hardware? It's like Veritas was the no-hardware-agenda company. So at this show, the last few years, you know, data, you know, data protection, multi-cloud, and how that impacts data, have been, big themes. Tell us how that ties in to what you're hearing from customers, and what you do at Veritas. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the two words that come out are data management, right? So, increasingly yes, we are in a multi-cloud world. Everybody will tell you that there are at least, four to four and a half clouds on average, that most of our enterprise customers use. And when I say that, it doesn't mean public clouds only, obviously right? There are SAS portals that people access, there are actual Infrastructure as a Service public clouds that people access. So, it's a combination of those. At Veritas, what we want to do is we want to focus on the one of the most important elements of managing data, which is protected. Right? Look, recently, you know, there have been news about you know, large transportation companies, I won't say which type, but, transportation companies, you know, being grounded. Because their clouds were not up. Or, you know, data wasn't protected enough. Not because the planes or the trains weren't working well, they were working fantastically well. It's just because their systems were not up, they weren't protected, they weren't backed-up. They just trusted their cloud vendors, or, whoever else to manage it for them. Doesn't work that way, right? You are responsible, if you actually read through some of the contracts that are out there from multi-cloud vendors or cloud vendors, it will clearly say, "You, Mr. Customer are responsible for your own data protection." So that's where Veritas comes in. So, we help customers protect their data where it's at. Whether it's in a public cloud environment, whether it's virtualized through VMware, or with some physical servers, right? And we've been doing this for 30 years. >> Yeah. And I've used NetBackup for many many years, I have a long heritage and even before that, Veritas was pretty much the standard for the way that we did all kinds of storage and data management, as to your point there. So, give us a bit, some examples of, of what customers are doing with Veritas in this new year of cloud, and data could be anywhere. >> Absolutely. So I think the first step to all of this, is visibility. A lot of people don't talk about data visibility enough. Why don't they talk about it enough? Is because most of the management and visibility tools that companies have these days or vendors have, are limited to their own infrastructures. So they're basically IT ops tools, right? To help manage their particular software-defined infrastructure, or a hardware box, et cetera. They're not really trying to be Switzerland for everybody. At Veritas we have this unique honor almost of being the Switzerland. Everybody wants to work with us, has worked with us for the last 30 years. We don't really come out there and say, "We're competing against every infrastructure company out there.", no. We're very good at data protection, we've extended our leadership from data protection to software-defined storage, as two talked about earlier on, we launched our portfolio three years ago, and Gartner has published the fact that we're number one in software-defined storage market share, already, in three years. Because, it's in our DNA. We build the first software-defined product, and we used that, back in the Veritas Oracle Sun Microsystem days, VOS, as it was called. And we've used that DNA to build this out and extend our data-protection into storage. And that's why I said it's visibility, protection, and then storage. And that storage could be anywhere. >> Yeah, Jyothi, one of the challenges that we have in the industry is you say, NetBackup has, you know, a long history, decades out there. People be like, "Oh well, you know, I was using it for a while but then something changed, then you know, I haven't looked at it in five years, ten years." So tell us why, you know, the NetBackup of the day isn't you know, our father's NetBackup. >> Oh great question, I love that question, right? So, it's not your father's net back up, clearly. Look, NetBackups has been great for your what we call traditional workloads, for the last, what, 25 years. Oracle, you know, SQL, we've done phenomenal with that. But the world has moved on. The world's move to NoSQL. The world's moved to Hadoop. The world's moved to a lot of unstructured data-related infrastructure. >> We're talking about RDS at this show, so... >> Exactly. You know, and NetBackup has had to evolve as well. Look, I'm an engineer. I know how difficult it is to take a product that's 20, 25 years old. And to kind of make it relevant to today's workloads. And we did take our time. So until our last week's launch of NetBackup, the latest version, you know, we didn't go out there and market ourselves as the modern workloads' data protector. We did market ourselves as, "Hey listen, your mission critical workloads that still run on Oracle et cetera, yes then backup is the product for you. But we do have other data management technologies that will support you." But today, I'm very happy to announce that we've not only, kind of, we protect most modern workloads, but we've simplified the UX as well. So, I'll make a comment on the market. Before I get into NetBackup again. So, if you notice there's a lot of money being raised in the data protection space. A lot of new vendors that have come out there right? And what's the message they use? The messages of, that of simplicity. Because they can't come out to gate and say, "We're the most reliable, scalable, product that's being used by the, by 86% of the Fortune 500." They can't say that throughout the gates. So what do they use, they say, "We're simpler to use. We're not about job security, we're going to cater to you Mr. Customer, three clicks to Nirvana.", right? That's literally what the message is. So what we try to do with NetBackup is, look, we are the king of scale. We're the king of reliability. We know that. So we've completely modernized, Killian was here at theCUBE yesterday and she's the Head of User Experience. So we created an entire team for user experience alone, and we've simplified all of the operations on NetBackup. So if you're a VMware admin or a backup admin, or a storage admin, it doesn't really matter. Looks, feels the same, and you get three clicks to value. Right, even if you don't reach Nirvana, you get three clicks to value. With everything you do. So we've really simplified the operations, we continue to be the king of scale, we continue to be deployed at multi-terabyte scale, and that innovation's going to roll on. >> That's a really encouraging thing to hear, because, I mean, all of the new vendors as, a good point that you make there is it, they can't reduplicate that idea. We have 10 years of history, or 25 years of history. So, we've been doing this for a long time. And that means that you can trust us with your data. If anything, that you need from a data-protection vendor is, the ability to trust them, that when I go to try to recover my data, it'll be there and it will work. You've fixed that. You've been doing that for such a long time. So now you're just, updating the software to be able to make it easy to use, doing some of the new things, well of course anyone needs to be able to adapt and do some of the new things. So the fact that you're adding some of these features, so maybe you could give us a bit of a flavor of some of the changes that people would notice in, from, if you've experienced that backup before, what does it actually look like now? >> So, for those NetBackup admins that have been using NetBackup for decades now, right? They will, cannot be used to the Windows interfaces where it's a file structure and things have to be dragged and dropped and things like that. But if they go to the new interface now, it's available for download of our website, it's literally just all tiles and buttons and clicks. The new user experience that you expect from an iPhone, that's exactly what we put into NetBackup 812. Now the other thing I want to talk about is, we spoke to about, I think I've personally spoken about 15 customers at this show. Day one and day two. They said, "While the simplification is great Jyothi, we're actually looking ahead already. We're looking ahead to machine learning and AI where, I want your software, tell me when jobs are going to fail." I don't want an alert when the job has fail, and then I have to do something about it. Yeah, it's cool that I can pull my phone up or my iPad up and take actions right away, and make sure data is protected. But I really would love for, you know, your software to predict when something's going to fail. Help me, warn me to take action in advance. If not, take action yourself, for the simple job failures that you can take action on, based on policy driven actions, right? So that's essentially what our customers are asking for and that's what we've been incorporated into 812. >> Yeah, Jyothi, great stuff. What I want to step up level for a second here, and what you're hearing from customers about kind of the challenges and opportunities with data, and maybe start with, we spent the last year, or year and a half, hearing a lot about the impending GDPR, it doesn't feel like it ended up being like the Y2K, you know, scramble at the last minute, couple of lawsuits against like Google and Facebook. But other than that, I haven't heard nearly as much since we passed, you know, that deadline earlier this year. Start there as the update and tell me what else is facing customers into kind of their challenges. >> Sure. Look, if I have to use a loose analogy here, I considered GDPR as, filing your taxes. Most people wait 'til the last day, right, and they get extensions, if things are not right, et cetera. But having said that, filing taxes is one of the most important things you do, right? So, as a corporation this is very similar. Most corporations, you know, want to wait to see if there are others that will take missed steps, and they can learn from that. There's nothing wrong with that. But a lot of the Fortune 500 customers that we deal with, take GDPR extremely seriously. Yes, you mentioned a couple of companies that have been fined, or are being investigated, et cetera. Nobody wants to be in that book, right? You know, a large company can take a little, a fine of some magnitude, but a smaller to medium business company, that could be you know-- >> That could end the business. >> That could end the business for them. And they don't want that. So a lot of these customers are taking GDPR seriously, but what is different to what we expected, not just as Veritas but as an industry is they're taking a consultative approach to this GDPR. It's not a product-based approach. There's no magic bullet, like, I buy three products and stitch them together and I'm GDPR compliant. They're taking a very consultative approach looking at their data, especially companies that have existed for many years, it's really hard for them to go back. The data sitting on some archaic systems, they really don't know, you know, how do I delete? I mean, if Stu was a European citizen for example, and he said, "Hey listen, X, Y and Z company, I want you to delete everything you have on me." It's sitting on some mainframe or bunch of tape, et cetera. There's no way for them to get that out, and Stu's able to sue them if they're not able to take action by X number of months or years. So, you know, it's an interesting but a very important challenge for companies. >> We're experiencing some of those challenges here in Australia as well, which is not actually subject to GDPR, but there's certainly a lot of a, a lot of legislators and a lot of other organizations looking at it, particularly if they're global organizations, they do need to be compliant. It applies to EU citizens, so, if we have EU citizens and you have systems in another country, then you need to actually deal with GDPR issues even though you're not part of the EU. So a lot of organizations are grappling with that. So, maybe you could give us a bit more of an indication of how Veritas is helping those customers to grapple with that situation. >> Yeah, absolutely you're right. So, as long as you have a connection to the EU, whether through a customer or through some sort of a transaction, you're already part of the GDPR compliance initiative. Right, that's what customers need to realize if they haven't already, that's number one. Number two is going back to my original point about visibility. Compliance has been a thing for a long time. GDPR's yet another new thing that are on compliance. So if you don't have end to end visibility into your infrastructure, and if your data is not classified, and it's not classified on ingest going forward. Look, yes I made a big deal about the fact that over the third, last 30 years we've created on our data, and we put it away in archaic systems, but if you consider that as a percentage of the amount of data that we have today, it's very small. What they should be most worried about as customers is, what they're going to create in the future. So the classification of the data has to happen on ingest. As soon as it comes from a Hadoop system, et cetera, needs to be classified, this is ROT data, right? This is redundant, obsolete, et cetera, I need it classified this data has PII information, so I need to put it separately. I can't just ship everything off for the cloud. So that's what we help with Veritas. Our products help you classify the data on ingest. Right, so you can actually tier this data to the right, you know, storage mechanisms, and have visibility, end to end visibility of that data. Globally. And then you can actually take actions when you have that visibility, you can actually say, "You know what, I don't need six petabytes of browsing history, of the 100,000 employees that I have. They've literally gone Amazon and bought diapers for their babies or whatever. I don't really need to store that stuff. I can just delete it, boop and it's gone right?" Customers don't have that confidence today 'coz they don't have that visibility. >> Jyothi last thing I want to have you help us cover is, we know Veritas has a long history. Learned a lot I think being inside Symantec, now coming out. Bring us up to speed as to kind of Veritas today, position in the marketplace, what the customers are coming to you at this show and outside this show for specifically. >> Absolutely. So, Veritas continues to be the leader in data-protection. That's not going away, that is still at the heart of everything we do, right? Whether it's NetBackup, or other products that we put out to market, it will still be at the core of everything we do. We protect the customer's most valuable data. From the Fortune 500 all the way down to the SMB level, right? That's number one. Number two, we're extending that leadership into new areas like software-defined storage. We're already number one in market share for that. We're going to continue to work on our archiving business, we're number one in there as well, according to Gartner. Right? So the three key areas that we're already in, we're number one. The next area we're going into is, you know, paper over rocks. We want to get into the data management business because we realized, we are the true Switzerland of infrastructure. There are very few companies that, you know, would say, "Okay, I'm competing head-to-head with Veritas and a lot of thing, I don't want to work with them." Right, unless you're a core data protection vendor. Everybody else wants to work with it. We have partnerships with all the major public cloud vendors, to VMware, to you know, on-prem traditional vendors, who you might even consider as competition. They all want to work with us because we sit on top of the most number of exabytes of data in the world. We protect the most number of exabytes of data. So there's a lot we can do with that data. Protection is not enough. Our next step in this journey is to make management, visibility, and compliance on top of that data, a lot easier for our customers. >> Alright, so if you're to sum it up in one word, is this still Veritasome? >> It's Veritasome. It's very very Veritasome. >> Alright, well we've been having an awesome week here at VMworld. Jyothi Swaroop, thank you for the update with Veritas for Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. We hope you've had an awesome time watching theCUBE. (techno music)