(inspiring music) >> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022, from the Venetian in Las Vegas, the first Discover since 2019. I really think this is my 14th Discover, when you include HP, when you include Europe. And I got to say this Discover, I think has more energy than any one that I've ever seen, about 8,000 people here. Really excited to have one of HPE's longstanding partners, Veeam CTO, Danny Allen is here, joined by David Harvey, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam. Guys, good to see you again. It was just earlier, let's see, last month, we were together out here. >> Yeah, just a few weeks ago. It's fantastic to be back and what it's telling us, technology industry is coming back. >> And the events business, of course, is coming back, which we love. I think the expectations were cautious. You saw it at VeeamON, a little more than you expected, a lot of great energy. A lot of people, 'cause it was last month, it was their first time out, >> Yes. >> in two years. Here, I think people have started to go out more, but still, an energy that's palpable. >> You can definitely feel it. Last night, I think I went to four consecutive events and everyone's out having those discussions and having conversations, it's good to be back. >> You guys hosted the Storage party last night, which is epic. I left at midnight, I took a picture, it was still packed. I said, okay, time to go, nothing good happens after midnight kids. David, talk about the alliance with HPE, how it's evolved, and where you see it going? >> I appreciate it, and certainly this, as you said, has been a big alliance for us. Over 10 years or so, fantastic integrations across the board. And you touched on 2019 Discover. We launched with GreenLake at that event, we were one of the launch partners, and we've seen fantastic growth. Overall, what we're excited about, is that continuation of the movement of the customer's buying patterns in line with HPE's portfolio and in line with Veeam. We continue to be with all their primary, secondary storage, we continue to be a spearhead position with GreenLake, which we're really excited about. And we're also really excited to hear from HPE, unfortunately under NDA, some of their future stuff they're investing in, which is a really nice invigoration for what they're doing for their portfolio. And we see that being a big deal for us over the next 24 months. >> Your relationship with HPE predates the HP, HPE split. >> Mmm. >> Yes. >> But it was weird, because they had Data Protector, and that was a quasi-competitor, or really not, but it was a competitor, a legacy competitor, of what you guys have, kind of modern data protection I think is the tagline, if I got it right. Post the split, that was an S-curve moment, wasn't it, in terms of the partnership? >> It really was. If you go back 10 years, we did our first integration sending data to StoreOnce and we had some blueprints around that. But now, if you look what we have, we have integrations on the primary side, so, 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, all their top-tier storage, we can manage the snapshots. We have integration on the target side. We integrate with Catalyst in the movement of data and the management of data. And, as David alluded to, we integrate with GreenLake. So, customers who want to take this as a consumption model, we integrate with that. And so it's been, like you said, the strongest relationship that we have on the technology alliance side. >> So, V12, you announced at VeeamON. What does that mean for HPE customers, the relationship? Maybe you guys could both talk about that. >> Technology side, to touch on a few things that we're doing with them, ransomware has been a huge issue. Security's been a big theme, obviously, at the conference, >> Dave: Yeah, you bet. and one of the things we're doing in V12 is adding immutability for both StoreOnce and StoreEver. So, we take the features that our partners have, immutability being big in the security space, and we integrate that fully into the product. So a customer checks a box and says, hey, I want to make sure that the data is secure. >> Yeah, and also, it's another signification about the relationship. Every single release we've done has had HPE at the heart of it, and the same thing is being said with V12. And it shows to our customers, the continual commitment. Relationships come and go. They're hard, and the great news is, 10 years has proven that we get through good times and tricky situations, and we both continue to invest, et cetera. And I think there's a lot of peace of mind and the revenue figures prove that, which is what we're really excited about. >> Yeah I want to come back to that, but just to follow up, Danny, on that immutability, that's a feature that you check? It's service within GreenLake, or within Veeam? How does that all work? >> We have immutability now depending on the target. We introduced the ability to send data, for example, into S3 two years ago, and make it immutable when you send it to an S3 or S3 compatible environment. We added, in Version 11, the ability to take a Linux repository and make it, and harden it, essentially make it immutable. But what we're doing now is taking our partner systems like StoreOnce, like StoreEver, and when we send data there, we take advantage of an API flag or whatever it happens to be, that it makes the data, when it's written to that system, can't be deleted, can't be encrypted. Now, what does that mean for a customer? Well, we do all the hard work in the back end, it's just a check box. They say, I want to make it immutable, and we manage how long it's immutable. Because if you made everything immutable forever, that's hugely expensive, right? So, it's all about, how long is that immutable before you age it out and make sure the new data coming in is immutable. >> Dave: It's like an insurance policy, you have that overlap. >> Yes. >> Right, okay. And then David, you mentioned the revenue, Lou bears that out. I got the IDC guys comin' on later on today. I'll ask 'em about that, if that's their swim lane. But you guys are basically a statistical tie, with Dell for number one? Am I getting that right? And you're growing at a faster rate, I believe, it's hard to tell 'cause I don't think Dell reports on the pace of its growth within data protection. You guys obviously do, but is that right? It's a statistical tie, is it? >> Yeah, hundred percent. >> Yeah, statistical tie for first place, which we're super excited about. When I joined Veeam, I think we were in fifth place, but we've been in the leader's quadrant of the Gartner Magic- >> Cause and effect there or? (panelists laughing) >> No, I don't think so. >> Dave: Ha, I think maybe. >> We've been on a great trajectory. But statistical tie for first place, greatest growth sequentially, and year-over-year, of all of the data protection vendors. And that's a testament not just to the technology that we're doing, but partnerships with HPE, because you never do this, the value of a technology is not that technology alone, it's the value of that technology within the ecosystem. And so that's why we're here at HPE Discover. It's our joint technology solutions that we're delivering. >> What are your thoughts or what are you seeing in the field on As-a-service? Because of course, the messaging is all about As-a-service, you'd think, oh, a hundred percent of everything is going to be As-a-service. A lot of customers, they don't mind CapEx, they got good, balance sheet, and they're like, hey, we'll take care of this, and, we're going to build our own little internal cloud. But, what are you seeing in the market in terms of As-a-service, versus, just traditional licensing models? >> Certainly, there's a mix between the two. What I'd say, is that sources that are already As-a-service, think Microsoft 365, think AWS, Azure, GCP, the cloud providers. There's a natural tendency for the customer to want the data protection As-a-service, as well for those. But if you talk about what's on premises, customers who have big data centers deployed, they're not yet, the pendulum has not shifted for that to be data protection As-a-service. But we were early to this game ourselves. We have 10,000, what we call, Veeam Cloud Service Providers, that are offering data protection As-a-service, whether it be on premises, so they're remotely managing it, or cloud hosted, doing data protection for that. >> So, you don't care. You're providing the technology, and then your customers are actually choosing the delivery model. Is that correct? >> A hundred percent, and if you think about what GreenLake is doing for example, that started off as being a financial model, but now they're getting into that services delivery. And what we want to do is enable them to deliver it, As-a-service, not just the financial model, but the outcome for the customer. And so our technology, it's not just do backup, it's do backup for a multi-tenant, multi-customer environment that does all of the multi-tenancy and billing and charge back as part of that service. >> Okay, so you guys don't report on this, but I'm going to ask the question anyway. You're number one now, let's call you, let's declare number one, 'cause we're well past that last reporting and you're growin' faster. So go another quarter, you're now number one, so you're the largest. Do you spend more on R&D in data protection than any other company? >> Yes, I'm quite certain that we do. Now, we have an unfair advantage because we have 450,000 customers. I don't think there's any other data protection company out there, the size and scope and scale, that we have. But we've been expanding, our largest R&D operation center's in Prague, it's in Czech Republic, but we've been expanding that. Last year it grew 40% year on year in R&D, so big investment in that space. You can see this just through our product space. Five years ago, we did data protection of VMware only, and now we do all the virtual environments, all the physical environments, all the major cloud environments, Kubernetes, Microsoft 365, we're launching Salesforce. We announced that at VeeamON last month and it will be coming out in Q3. All of that is coming from our R&D investments. >> A lot of people expect that when a company like Insight, a PE company, purchases a company like Veeam, that one of the things they'll dial down is R&D. That did not happen in this case. >> No, they very much treat us as a growth company. We had 22% year-over-year growth in 2020, and 25% year-over-year last year. The growth has been tremendous, they continue to give us the freedom. Now, I expect they'll want returns like that continuously, but we have been delivering, they have been investing. >> One of my favorite conversations of the year was our supercloud conversation, which was awesome, thank you for doing that with me. But that's clearly an area of focus, what we call supercloud, and you don't use that term, I know, you do sometimes, but it's not your marketing, I get that. But that is an R&D intensive effort, is it not? To create that common experience. And you see HPE, attempting to do that as well, across all these different estates. >> A hundred percent. We focus on three things, I always say, our differentiators, simplicity, flexibility, and reliability. Making it simple for the customers is not an easy thing to do. Making that checkbox for immutability? We have to do a lot behind the scenes to make it simple. Same thing on flexibility. We don't care if they're using 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, whatever you want to choose as the primary storage, we will take that out of your hands and make it really easy. You mentioned supercloud. We don't care what the cloud infrastructure, it can be on GreenLake, it can be on AWS, can be on Azure, it can be on GCP, it can be on IBM cloud. It is a lot of effort on our part to abstract the cloud infrastructure, but we do that on behalf of our customers to take away that complexity, it's part of our platform. >> Quick follow-up, and then I want to ask a question of David. I like talking to you guys because you don't care where it is, right? You're truly agnostic to it all. I'm trying to figure out this repatriation thing, cause I hear a lot of hey, Dave, you should look into repatriation that's happened all over the place, and I see pockets of it. What are you seeing in terms of repatriation? Have customers over-rotated to the cloud and now they're pullin' back a little bit? Or is it, as I'm claiming, in pockets? What's your visibility on that? >> Three things I see happening. There's the customers who lifted up their data center, moved it into the cloud and they get the first bill. >> (chuckling) Okay. >> And they will repatriate, there's no question. If I talk to those customers who simply lifted up and moved it over because the CIO told them to, they're moving it back on premises. But a second thing that we see is people moving it over, with tweaks. So they'll take their SQL server database and they'll move it into RDS, they'll change some things. And then you have people who are building cloud-native, they're never coming back on premises, they are building it for the cloud environment. So, we see all three of those. We only really see repatriation on that first scenario, when they get that first bill. >> And when you look at the numbers, I think it gets lost, 'cause you see the cloud is growing so fast. So David, what are the conversations like? You had several events last night, The Veeam party, slash Storage party, from HPE. What are you hearing from your alliance partners and the customers at the event. >> I think Danny touched on that point, it's about philosophy of evolution. And I think at the end of the day, whether we're seeing it with our GSI alliances we've got out there, or with the big enterprise conversations we're having with HPE, it's about understanding which workloads they want to move. In our mind, the customers are getting much smarter in making that decision, rather than experimenting. They're really taking a really solid look. And the work we're doing with the GSIs on workplace modernization, data center transformation, they're really having that investment work up front on the workloads, to be able to say, this works for me, for my personality and my company. And so, to the point about movement, it's more about decisive decision at the start, and not feeling like the remit is, I have to do one thing or another, it's about looking at that workflow position. And that's what we've seen with the revenue part as well. We've seen our movement to GreenLake tremendously grow in the last 18 months to two years. And from our GSI work as well, we're seeing the types of conversations really focus on that workload, compared to, hey, I just need a backup solution, and that's really exciting. >> Are you having specific conversations about security, or is it a data protection conversation still, (David chuckles) that's an adjacency to security? >> That's a great question. And I think it's a complex one, because if you come to a company like Veeam, we are there, and you touched on it before, we provide a solution when something has happened with security. We're not doing intrusion detection, we're not doing that barrier position at the end of it, but it's part of an end-to-end assumption. And I don't think that at this particular point, I started in security with RSA and Check Point, it was about layers of protection. Now it's layers of protection, and the inevitability that at some point something will happen, so about the recovery. So the exciting conversations we're having, especially with the big enterprises, is not about the fear factor, it's about, at some point something's going to occur. Speed of recovery is the conversation. And so for us, and your question is, are they talking to us about security, or more, the continuity position? And that's where the synergy's getting a lot simpler, rather than a hard demark between security and backup. >> Yeah, when you look at the stock market, everything's been hit, but security, with the exception of Okta, 'cause it got that weird benign hack, but security, generally, is an area that CIOs have said, hey, we can't really dial that back. We can maybe, some other discretionary stuff, we'll steal and prioritize. But security seems to be, and I think data protection is now part of that discussion. You're not a security company. We've seen some of your competitors actually pivot to become security companies. You're not doing that, but it's very clearly an adjacency, don't you think? >> It's an adjacency, and it's a new conversation that we're having with the Chief Information Security Officer. I had a meeting an hour ago with a customer who was hit by ransomware, and they got the call at 2:00 AM in the morning, after the ransomware they recovered their entire portfolio within 36 hours, from backups. Didn't even contact Veeam, I found out during this meeting. But that is clearly something that the Chief Information Security Officer wants to know about. It's part of his purview, is the recovery of that data. >> And they didn't pay the ransom? >> And they did not pay the ransom, not a penny. >> Ahh, we love those stories. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on all the success. Love when you guys come on, and it was such a fun event at VeeamON. Great event here, and your presence is, was seen. The Veeam green is everywhere, so appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Okay, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and Lisa Martin. We'll be back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022, from Las Vegas. (inspiring music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Everyone welcome to this cube conversation here in the Palo Alto cube studios. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE, with a great guest here, Shanthi Vigneshwaran, who is with the Office of Strategic programs in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research within the US Food and Drug Administration, FDA, is the Informatica Intelligent Disrupter of the Year award. Congratulations, Shanthi welcome to this cube conversation. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you for having me. >> Congratulations on being the Informatica Intelligent Disrupter of the year award. Tell us more about the organization. I see FDA everyone's probably concerned these days making sure things going faster and faster, more complex, more things are happening. Tell us about your organization and what you work on. >> FDA is huge, our organization is Center for Drug Evaluation research. And its core mission is to promote public health by ensuring the availability of safety and effective drugs. For example any drugs you go and buy it in the pharmacy today, Our administration helps in trying to approve them and make sure it's so in term of quality and integrity of the marketed products in the industry. My office is specifically Office of strategic programs whose mission is to transform the drug regulatory operations with the customer focus through analytics and informatics. They work towards the advancement for the CDERs public health mission. >> What are some of the objectives that you guys have? What are some things you guys have as your core top objectives of the CDER, the drug research group? >> The core objectives is we wanted to make sure that we are promoting a safe use of the marketed drugs. We want to make sure there's the availability of the drugs that are going to the patients are effective. And also the quality of the drugs that are being marketed are able to protect public health. >> What are some of the challenges that you guys have to take in managing the pharmaceutical safety, because I can only imagine certainly now that supply chains, tracing, monitoring, drug efficacy, safety, all these things are happening. What are some of the challenges in doing all this? >> In our office there are challenges in three different areas. One is the drug regulation challenges because as drugs are being more advanced and as there are more increasingly complex products, and there are challenging in the development area of the drugs, we wanted to make sure here we have a regulation that supports any advancement in science and technology. The other thing is also Congress is actually given new authorities and roles for the FDA to act. For example the Drug Quality and Security Act, which means any drug that's they want to track and trace all the drugs that goes to the public is they know who are the distributors, who are the manufacturers. Then you have the 21st Century Cures Act, and also the CARES Act package which was recently assigned, which also has a lot of the OTC drug regulatory modernization. Then there's also the area of globalization because just as disease don't have any borders, Product safety and quality are no longer on one country. It's basically a lot of the drugs that are being manufactured are overseas and as a result we wanted to make sure there are 300 US ports. And we want to make sure the FDA regulated shipments are coming through correctly to proper venues and everything is done correctly. Those are some the challenges we have to deal with. >> So much going on a lot of moving purchase as people say, there's always drug shortages, always demand, knowing that and tracking it. I can only imagine the world you're living in because you got to be innovative, got to be fast, got to be cutting edge, got to get the quality right. Data is super critical. And can you share take a minute to explain some of the data challenges you have to address and how you did that. Because I mean I could almost just my mind's blown just thinking about how you live it every day. Can you just share some of those challenges that you had to address and how did you do? >> Some of the key challenges we actually see is we have roughly 170,000 regulatory submissions per year. There are roughly 88,000 firm registration and product listing that comes to us, and then there are more than 2 million adverse event reports. So with all these data submissions and organization as such as us we need it, we have multiple systems where this data is acquired and each has its own criteria for validating the data. Adding to it are internal and external stakeholders also want certain rules and the way the data is being identified. So we wanted to make sure there is a robust MDM framework to make sure to cleanse and enrich and standardize the data. So that it basically make sure the trust and the availability and the consistent of the data, is being supplied to published to the CDER regulatory data users. >> You guys are dealing with- >> Otherwise like it's almost to give them a 360 degree view of the drug development lifecycle. Through each of the different phases, both pre market which is before the drug hits the market, and then after it hits the market. We still want to make sure the data we receive still supports a regulatory review and decision making process. >> Yeah, and you got to deliver a consumer product to get people at the right time. All these things have to happen, and you can see it clearly the impacts everyday life. I got to ask you that the database question 'cause the database geek inside of me is just going okay. I can only imagine the silos and the different systems and the codes, because data silos is big document. We've been reporting on this on theCUBE for a long time around, making data available automation. All these things have to happen if there's data availability. Can you just take one more minute talk about some of the challenges there because you got to break down the silos at the same time you really can't replace them. >> That's true. What we did was we did leave it more of us I mean, step back like seven years ago, when we did the data management. We had like a lot of silo systems as well. And we wanted to look at we wanted to establish a, we knew we wanted to establish a master data management. So we took a little bit more of a strategic vision. And so what we ended up saying is identifying what are the key areas of the domain that will give us some kind of a relationship. What are the key areas that will give us the 360 degree lifecycle? So that's what we did. We identified the domains. And then we took a step back and said and then we looked at what is the first domain we wanted to tackle. Because we know what are these domains are going to be. And then we were like, okay, let's take a step back and say which is the domain we do it first that will give us the most return on investment, which will make people actually look at it and say, hey, this makes sense. This data is good. So that's what we ended up looking at. We looked at it as at both ends. One is from a end user perspective. Which is the one they get the benefit out of and also from a data silo perspective which is the one data domains that are common, where there's duplication that we can consolidate. >> So that's good. You did the work up front. That's critical knowing what you want to do and get out of it. What were some of the benefits you guys got out of it. From an IT standpoint, how does that translate to the business benefits? And what was achieved? >> I think the benefits we got from the IT standpoint was a lot of the deduplication was not theirs. Which basically means like a lot of the legacy systems and all of the manual data quality work we had to do we automated it. We had bots, we also had other automation process that we actually put into work with Informatica, that actually helped us to make sure it's the cost of it actually went for us considerably. For example it used to take us three days to process submissions. Now it takes us less than 24 hours to do it, for the users to see the data. So it was a little bit more, we saw the, we wanted to look at what are the low hanging fruits where it's labor intensive and how can we improve it. That's how we acted there. >> What are some of the things that you're experiencing? I mean, like, we look back at what it was before, where it is now? Is it more agility, you more responsive to the changes? Was it an aspirin? Was it a complete transformation? Was some pain reduced? Can you share just some color commentary on kind of before the way it was before and then what you're experiencing now? >> So for us, I think before, we didn't know where the for us, I mean, I wouldn't say we didn't know it, when we have the data, we looked at product and it was just product. We looked at manufactured they were all in separate silos. But when we did the MDM domain, we were able to look at the relationship. And it was very interesting to see the relationship because we now are able to say is. for example, if there is a drug shortage during due to hurricane, with the data we have, we can narrow down and say, Hey, this area is going to be affected which means these are the manufacturing facilities in that area , that are going to be not be able to function or impacted by it. We can get to the place where the hurricane tracks we use the National Weather Service data, but it helps us to narrow down some of the challenges and we can able to predict where the next risk is going to be. >> And then before the old model, there was either a blind spot or you were ad hoc, probably right? Probably didn't have that with you. >> Yeah, before you were either blind or you're doing in a more of a reactionary not proactively. Now we are able to do a little bit more proactively. And even with I mean drug shortages and drug supply chain are the biggest benefit we saw with this model. Because, for us the drug supply chain means linking the pre and post market phases that lets us know if there's a trigger and the adverse events, we actually can go back to the pre market side and see where the traceability is who's at that truck. What are all the different things that was going on. >> This is one of the common threats I see in innovation where people look at the business model and data and look at it as a competitive advantage, in this case proactivity on using data to make decisions before things happen, less reactivity. So that increases time. I mean, that would probably you're saying, and you get there faster, if you can see it, understand it, and impact the workflows involved. This is a major part of the data innovation that's going on and you starting to see new kinds of data whereas has come out. So again, starting to see a real new changeover to scaling up this kind of concept almost foundationally. What's your thoughts just as someone who's a practitioner in the industry as you start to get this kind of feelings and seeing the benefits? What's next, what do you see happening because you haven't success. How do you scale it? What how do you guys look at that? >> I think our next is we have the domains and we actually have the practices that we work. We look at it as it's basically data always just changes. So we look at is like what are some of the ways that we can improve the data? How can we take it to the next level. Because now they talk about power. They are also warehouse data lakes. So we want to see is how can we take these domains and get that relationship or get that linkages when there is a bigger set of data that's available for us. What can we use that and it actually we think there are other use cases we wanted to explore and see what is the benefit that we can get a little bit more on the predictability to do like post market surveillance or like to look at like safety signals and other things to see what are the quick things that we can use for the business operations. >> It's really a lot more fun. You're in there using the data. You're seeing the benefits and real. This is what clouds all about the data clouds here. It's scaling. Super fun to talk about and excited. When you see the impacts in real time, not waiting for later. So congratulations. You guys have been selected and you receive recognition from Informatica as the 2020, Intelligent Disrupter of the year. congratulations. What does that mean for your organization? >> I think we were super excited about it. But one thing I can say is when we embarked on this work, like seven years ago, or so, problem was like we were trying to identify and develop new scientific methods to improve the quality of our drugs to get that 360 degree view of the drug development lifecycle. The program today enables FDA CDER to capture all the granular details of data we need for the regulatory data. It helps us to support the informed decisions that we have to make in real time sometimes or and also to make sure when there's an emergency, we are able to respond with a quick look at the data to say like, hey this is what we need to do. It also helps the teams. It recognizes all the hard work. And the hours we put into establishing the program and it helped to build the awareness within FDA and also with the industry of our political master data management is. >> It's a great reward to see the fruits of the labor and good decision making I'm sure it was a lot of hard work. For folks out there watching, who are also kind of grinding away in some cases, some cases moving faster. You guys are epitome of a supply chain that's super critical. And speed is critical. Quality is critical. A lot of days critical. A lot of businesses are starting to feel this as part of an integrated data strategy. And I'm a big proponent. I think you guys have have a great example of this. What advice would you have for other practitioners because you got data scientists, but yet data engineers now who are trying to architect and create scale, and programmability, and automation, and you got the scientists in the the front lines coming together and they all feed into applications. So it's kind of a new things go on. Your advice to folks out there, on how to do this, how to do it right, the learnings, share. >> I think the key thing I, at least for my learning experience was, it's not within one year you're going to accomplish it, It's kind of we have to be very patient. And it's a long road. If you make mistakes, you will have to go back and reassess. Even with us, with all the work we did, we almost went back a couple of the domains because we thought like, hey, there are additional use cases how this can be helpful. There are additional, for example, we went with the supply chain, but then now we go back and look at it and say like, hy, there may be other things that we can use with the supply chain not just with this data, can we expand it? How can we look at the study data or other information so that's what we try to do. It's not like you're done with MDM and that is it. Your domain is complete. It's almost like you look at it and it creates a web and you need to look at each domain and you want to come back to it and see how it is you have to go. But the starting point is you need to establish what are your key domains. That will actually drive your vision for the next four or five years. You can't just do bottom up, it's more of like a top down approach. >> That's great. That's great the insight. And again, it's never done. I mean, it's data is coming. It's not going away. It's going to be integrated. It's going to be shared. You got to scale it up. A lot of hard work. >> Yeah. >> Shanthi thank you so much for the insight. Congratulations on your receiving the Disrupter of the Year Award winner for Informatica. congratulations. Intelligence >> Yeah, thank you very much for having me. Thank you. >> Thank you for sharing, Shanthi Vigneshswaran is here, Office of Strategic programs at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research with the US FDA. Thanks for joining us, I'm John Furrier for theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2019, brought to you by Dell Technologies, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019 from Las Vegas at the Sands Expo Center. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier, this is day one of two sets of coverage for three days for theCUBE. There are at least 15,000 people here, we just came from a great keynote, Michael Dell, Pat Gelsinger, Jeff Clarks, Sati Netella was here. John and I are pleased to welcome back to theCUBE one of our guests, we've got Doug Schmitt, president of Dell Technologies Services. Doug, welcome back. >> Well, thank you for having me. >> And you've brought a partner in crime, we have Alex Barretto, Senior Vice President of Dell Technologies Services, Strategic Planning, and Technology. Alex, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, happy to be here. >> So guys, I always love the keynotes. Michael always has- Michael and team always have great energy. Lot of cool announcements, all talking about digital transformation. But Doug, let's start with you, let's talk about the transformation of Dell Technologies Services. Give us an overview of your organization, and what you're doing for Dell Technologies Services. >> Yeah, well thank you for having us back. I know we were here last year talking a little bit about Dell Technologies, and wow, what an opening keynote this morning. And following up on that; look, service is key component, obviously. Helping our customers through their transformation. Our number one priority, it's really simple. It's literally about, for, and helping the customers. Whether it be specifically kind of, three areas: to sport, deployment, and their manning services. And helping them not only keep their data centers to the edge, running correctly. Making sure to help them through their transformations that they're going through, that we talked a lot about this morning. And then, what we do is we support our customers really with 60,000 people globally, about half of those are Dell Badge, the others, we leverage partners in various countries for. Look, it's about getting up every day and making sure everything runs correctly for them. And that's our job. >> Alex, talk about the strategy for services. Because one of the highlights in the keynote was Bank of America talking about how they got where they are today, and they go forward. It's not the same, things are changing, you guys have to change. What's changing in sevices? What's the strategy? Because it's a whole new ballgame. >> Yeah, great question. In fact, technology is- we have to ask ourselves of our own transformation. In fact, Doug and I spend quite a bit of time talking about a technology world map. Really, if you open the aperture of 'What is technology?', it's everything from data science, to our bots, to our software engineers, into the AI, engineers are developing both in-house as well as partnering with others. That is really the essence of what we're doing in services, and you see customers like Bank of America really adopting that. Because it's helpful in the value that customers get out of our technology. >> And the data was also important, they mentioned data. How are you guys using data in services? I'm sure you must be data-driven. I mean, the mandate up from high, Michael's like, "It's a data-driven world, it's clear as day." >> Absolutely, data is essential. In fact, if you look at the amount of data that's out there, and the growth of the data, it's just phenomenal. But the way I actually like to talk about data is the insights we get from data, right? Data is interesting, but the value that you get from data comes from the insights. So, we actually spent a lot of time developing models, and that's why we use a lot of data scientists, a lot of software engineers. Again, to develop models to generate value from the data. That value is what customers are looking for, and what we're focused on. >> In terms of value, one of the things that was also talked about this morning in the keynote is people and the workforce being massively distributed for any kind of business. 81% of the average worker, is outside of the traditional office, with over half of these people, I'm one of them, working in at least three different places every week. You've got customers that are highly distributed, as is your workforce. What can you talk to us, Alex, about the unified workspace announced on stage this morning? >> Fantastic new offering that we have, obviously you heard from Jeff onstage talking about that. And if you look at that, there are a couple elements that are interesting to me. First, you see all the pieces of Dell Technologies coming together to create greater value for the customer, and if you look at the value that's generated there, to your point, wherever you are as a customer, you're able to access your specific information, whatever the device. And so, if you think about your whole experience, device independent, as well as from a software standpoint, we can offer all in one. >> How, how is-- Sorry Doug, how is service integral to this, you know? >> Well that's-- yeah. What that's really about is so, you have workspace one, coming from VM, great offer and product. And then you have our services, which would be pro-deploy, are pro-support and in some cases, even the manning services, coming together with that to provide a wrapper around that. So, customers have that end-to-end experience with unified workspace, getting those four great service offerings together. Which really then brings it all together for the customer. So they have to do very little, quite frankly, to make that happen. >> One of the comments from Sati Netella was the whole new renaissance of IT needs infrastructure. You see the VX rail being bundled into data centers and service, the demo of the VM-ware cloud, where the just deploy a data center to the edge. I mean, this is just completely game-changing. How is that changing how you guys do the services? Because you guys, it was self-healing. There was a lot of stuff in the dashboard-- no one was deployed, it was all being done with software. How is this changing your mix of business, personnel, economics? >> Great question. You know, we talk about how we're helping customers transform Dell Technologies, well look, services is going through its own transformation as well. And I think that's what you're bringing up. And really, there's four pivots around that transformation we see inside of services that we have to do to stay up and make sure that we're cutting-edge for our customers. The first is around technology, Alex talked a little bit about that. But really, what that's about is the telemetry to help our customers. Data insights, it's not just the data. The second is around our systems that we're putting in place to leverage all that telemetry. You know, we're basically building a whole new CRM, bringing everything together. Our field capabilities, in terms of systems we're building out as well. So a massive transformation on the infrastructure inside just running this to support really. It's a $150 million install base. >> Can you share just stats or data on what's the most popular services you're deploying? And which ones are trending? Like, which ones are kind of, people kicking the tires on? Obviously, you've got the grooves swing on some of your key products. What's the hottest, services/products that you have? >> Well look, our Pro Support Plus is a very hot product for us, it literally provides end-to-end support for our customers, provides what we call a technical account manager, or service account manager with it. It gives you the insights then to really go help you. So it's not then about break/fix anymore. What it's about is proactive, predictive service, and then actually using that to go to the customer and say, "Hey, you know what? "Here's what we're seeing, here's how you can improve "your environment, not only prevent issues from happening, "but what are we doing to actually improve, "and carry that environment forward." And our customers love that. >> Any up and coming, trending products, services you see? Obviously, I can see yeah, there's probably going to be some new services there, but what are going to be the hot new techniques? >> I think seeing the same spot in ProManage which you'll see us carry forward here, and carrying it into the managing service is how do we continue to provide more of that end-to-end? Really, what you're seeing is a convergence of deployment, support, and managing service all really coming together. Our customers are really looking for more and more of that one-stop shop, but one offer across the board. So that's what we're seeing. >> But just to add to that, if you our ProSupport Suite, we have SupportAssist, which is our technology behind ProSupport. And the insights that we're generating; we have 55 million devices connected now. So you look at the connectivity, and the value customers are getting out of that, it's amazing. 20 Terabytes of data per day generated out of those devices. It's a lot of information coming in, customers see the value, they connect more, and again, back to your loop that you're talking about the data. >> Well, the security visibility too, just looking at the data, with all those devices now with Windows, and all the new multiple vendors. I mean, you've got all that data. >> That's right. But I think it's the insights, you know, we keep talking about that. Those insights are really helping us leverage that for the customer so they can see in front of them, and I think what we always say internally is "Look, customers aren't looking for a rear-view mirror. "They're looking through the windshield." The more we can use that insight, to help them see when and where they need to get through for their own transformation, is what it's all about. >> And talk to us about how both of you-- Doug, we'll start with you, how have customers been sort of symbiotic to the digital transformation of services in terms of knowing, "We've got to get predictive"? How are they helping you to evolve what you're delivering so that ultimately, services is part of this technology differentiation and product front that Dell Technologies has? >> Yeah, well, you know the history of Dell Technologies is really the core of our foundation. Culturally, for all 140,000 of us, is listening to the customer. And I think that culture has allowed us to adapt and stay close to not only what the customers are telling us, using the insights we're getting back, but knowing where the customers want to head. And it truly is a one-on-one listening to the customers, listening to where their issues are at, then using this technology and their solutions to solve their problems they're bringing up. But I got to tell you, there's not a big hammer that just- one answer for that. Literally, it's how are we helping consumers? How are we helping small, medium, business? Large? All of them have a variation of what's the same, and all of them have a variation of difference as well. >> Alex, how about strategy for a minute, the strategic landscape, how has Dell Technologies Services changed with the vendor landscape? Now you've got multiple vendors, it turns into multiple clouds, multiple clouds with open source software. You've got all kinds of new things emerging. How do you stay on top of it, what's the strategy, what's the long game look like for you guys? >> If I were to summarize in a nutshell, it's software. We're investing quite a bit in software, whether that is within our predictive capabilites, but as well as in deployment services, and Doug alluded to ProManage. So software is a pivotal, key component. So this is how we are approaching from a services standpoint. Whether you talk support, deploy, or manage services, the umbrella around that is really our capability to do the software component. So that's where we are placing our bets, we think that's where the future is. Whether it's SupportAssist, or our ProManager offering. It's all the backbone based on software development. >> And where is, we talked a lot about digital transformation and services, but the people, the people being essential to, we need the technology to do our jobs in any industry. What about skill, upleveling skills? It's great to have all the technology, but we need to have people to be trained, certified, professionals to be able to maximize the value of the services. Doug, go ahead and start, and then Alex, maybe from a strategic perspective, where is that people, cultural part of the services? >> Well, look it's huge. I don't think it's just for services, I hear our customers talk about it as well. And as Alex just mentioned, that software is driving more and more of it. You know, we use a lot of different acronyms and titles to kind of describe it, Digital Transformation, AI, BI. I mean there's all of this, but it is is all summarized in Digital Transformation. And the impact it has on our team members is vast. So look, open communication, yes, it is changing the way we do business, and quite frankly the world's doing business, the simple tasks are getting more and more automated through these insights, and they're going away. Making it easier for our customers means you're not getting as many break/fix calls, you're not getting these transactions. But what we're doing at the same time is we're upscaling the team, telling them where we need to be in the future, helping them with those skillsets, reset. The interesting thing is our team members are seeing the value of it, their jobs actually become more enriched because you're doing higher value things for our customers. But there is a transformation going on and-- >> And Doug, there's cultural changes as well, as we think about how we measure the business, some of the metrics that we look at, legacy metrics versus new metrics, they are different now. How we think about people development is different. So, I think it's a great question, 'cause the actual talent transformation, it's huge. There's short-term impact, and long-term impact. And if you don't plan that right, obviously you can't execute a strategy. >> How should your customers start rethinking about how they're leveraging the services? Because with unified workspace, data center as a service, and now multi-cloud, architecture is really important. Where the data sits, using real-time data you mentioned in software and data, so as they think about now, looking at not resetting, but taking services for their advantage. 'Cause they look at services, they want to be in the right position. It seems like architectures are more important now. Multi-cloud architecture. So, more technical people involved, the roles are changing. What should customers, how should they expect to be thinking about that? >> It's another great question. Well look, I'll let Alex follow up with his thoughts on this one. But I think this is really about us, the customers have to look as a true partnership. What we're really there trying to help them with every single day, is we talk about keeping the solutions in the system running to what they need, what they wanted. But we can also help by helping their staff free up time through the services we have, so they can stay focused on their transformation and provide the value that their teams and customers are looking for. That's really how we see that. So in other words, go into them and say, "Hey look, "we can take some of these tasks off, whether it be the deployment, unified workspace we talked about, you know, that was announced today. These are all about not only providing better technology for their team members and their customers, but then leveraging their time then to go spend it on their transformation. That's really it, quite frankly, simply put. >> Yeah, I would say it depends. Customers want to do a variety of things, so it depends on their business outcomes. So, at the end of the day, I would say, as you look at Dell Technologies, we have all the Lego blocks. You tell us what you're trying to achieve from a business standpoint, and we have the Lego blocks to make it happen. I think we're in a unique position to be able to deliver that valuable proposition to customers. So it's not a one size fits all. >> More data, more workloads, I've heard the term workload mentioned so many times in all my CUBE interviews, we all talk about workloads, but now with IOT and Edge, you're going to see a proliferation of more workloads, some small, some massive, and managing that workload is a huge challenge for organizations. This comes up as the number one issue. How does services play into that, how do you guys make that easier, and I love the operating model of simplicity, but when you guys take that realization into services, what do you guys bake out of that? What comes out of that? >> Yeah, I would say two things. First, the reason that workloads exists is that it's important for the business. So it's got to be up at times, it's got to be 100 percent. It's got to be up and running. We make sure that that happens. Second, if you look at the workloads, they're actually running critical pieces of the business. So we actually assure that we are providing additional value, beyond actually just running infrastructure, actually keeping value and how you should optimize that infrastructure so you can do more with less. >> Can you give, is there an example of a customer? John mentioned B of A was highlighted this morning, Draper was as well, I think some of the Trailblazer Winners were right before we started. A customer that comes to mind that really demonstrates the value that they're getting from Dell Technologies' suite of services? >> Well, look, I think there's a lot of those. But going back to maybe, we talked about the customers today in the keynote speeches that were happening. But look, there's a lot of small and medium businesses that are one, trying to stay with and ahead of technology. Lots of cases actually farther ahead in their transformation. I think I know of one that I recently had a conversation with, a doctor's office had four or five offices in a town here in the US. And they're staying ahead of that. They want us to "Look, we want to buy things that have "easy deployment, easy install/run. We also need you "to come in and help us tell us how to access "and leverage the technology we have better." Running it easier, staying ahead of that digital transformation, and providing really, their virtual CIO, with a technical account manager pulling all that together. You know, all from the storage, their server, their client products coming together; they don't view it as-- the customer's not coming to us and talking to us about individual products. It's not the discussion. What they're saying is "We need to purchase this, "we know we need this solution, we need to have you guys "come and pull it all together, we're looking "for our people to take care of the patients, "get the information that needs to the government, "and get paid, that's it. "And we need you to help us pull all that together." And we're doing that. >> Doug, my final question for you. Michael Dell always talks about this, within the hallway conversations, or on theCUBE. He says, "The best way to create valuable teams is to attract and retain the best talent." How are you guys attracting and retaining the talent, because the workforces are changing, the technology's changing. What are some of the hard problems? Because people love to solve hard problems. What's the pitch for people out there watching, that might want to work in the services group? What's the environment like? How do you attract great people? What kind of problems do they work on? Give a little taste. >> Well, first of all, you know, you have to love and want to take care of our customers, that's really exciting to me, and I know to the other 60,000 team members. That's why we get up for every day. There's an energy that comes from that. I mean, you're getting up and helping our customers whether they're hospitals, small, medium businesses, or consumers. Really being productive in their lives, whatever it may be. So there's an energy that comes from that, I think a lot of people enjoy doing that. It can't be more exciting than that, right? Second of all, career. Just so many aspects to this. You think about digital future technology, we have everything from being able to go out in the field and help our customers to remote, there's just so many different opportunities. And then we also have our employee resource group. So even participating beyond just work, we have the ability to join all of our different resources groups, whether it be Pride, or Veterans, or whatever they may be. People like and see value to just coming into work, but being able to take their passions that they have on the outside and bring it in as well. >> Real citizenship opportunities to bring and contribute back. >> Exactly right, giving back to our communities. very strong, very strong. You know I get an immense amount of pride in the things that I want to contribute to outside of work, and seeing and getting empowered by Dell to do those things. And then constant learning, constant, constant learning. >> I would also hint at a bit of competitive imagination. (Laughing) If you heard any barking during our interviews, speaking of things to do outside of work, we're next to Michael's Angel Paws, which is near and dear to Michael Dell's heart. That's the service dogs that are actually here for all of us to get our dog fixes on. So Doug, Alex, thank you so much for explaining to us the momentum, the excitement behind the digital transformation of Dell Technologies Services. >> Thank you for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE Live at Dell Technologies World 2019. This is day one of two sets of CUBE coverage. Stick around, our next guest will join us shortly.

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018. (upbeat electronic music) Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, in the NetApp booth, at Sapphire Now 2018. We are in Orlando, this is an enormous event, there's more than 20,000 people here, and there's about a million people that SAP is expecting to engage online, that's a lot. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Klara Young, the director of Strategic Alliances from AppBuddy and Steven Cox, the head of Global Sales Tools at NetApp, hi, guys. >> Howdy. >> Hello. >> Hi, Lisa. >> Thanks for having us. >> Absolutely, so Klara tell me about AppBuddy. Who are you guys and what do you do? >> So AppBuddy is a provider of a user experience layer that can sit on top of core systems like SAP Sales Cloud or SAP Service Cloud and that really allows the administrators to configure a dream workspace where you can get all the data that you need to work with in one place, and then, the users can interact with that very easily. And so, it's all very user friendly and it allows us to enable sales processes, I want to manage my pipelines, or my accounts, my contacts, all with a very easy to use interface right in the middle of the core system. >> So your target audience would be customers that are already using SAP or customers that are maybe in the transition from, say Oracle to SAP, or something like that? >> So any users that are planning to use SAP or are already using SAP and then want to enhance that user experience, want to give them a faster way to interact with the data, more intuitive, more functionality, right in the same core interface. So those would be good clients for us to enhance that experience, absolutely. >> And what about customers by industry know SAP really kind of being very, very strong in a lot of industries but manufacturing, digital supply chain, but if you look at their customers that are here at Sapphire and there's a million of them, they span so many industries. >> Yeah. >> I think yesterday they were saying HANA is installed in 23,000 customers across 60 industries. Does AppBuddy have a particular suite of industries where you really add even more value, or is it fairly horizontal? >> Oh, that's a real good question. Actually what's the beauty, I think, of AppBuddy's product, is that it is completely agnostic of which process or which industry that you're deploying it in. So you decide what objects, what information I want to put on that. It's not a purpose-built application specifically for one process or one industry. So we serve clients in all sorts of industries. We have a lot in high tech, or in the health care industry, manufacturing, as well but we're not specific to one industry. So really welcoming any use case and we'd love to hear from customers, hey, can I do this? With AppBuddy, could I put this object and that object together and build a process basically, almost in your own app. And we're very looking forward to those feedback from customers and wanting to build those use cases with them. >> And that's been such a huge theme or really an undertone at SAP Sapphire the last few days is how much SAP listens to their customers and really involves them and especially strategic accounts like in a collaborative way and yesterday, Steven, we spoke with your CIO Bill Miller. We talked to him about NetApp and SAP have been partners for 17 years. NetApp is 26 years young now and has undergone a big transformation. Bill talked about some of that yesterday, but you guys also did a big transformation that you were leading within your sales processes and your CRM move into SAP, talk to us about that. What were some of the reasons for that transformation? >> Yeah, it's working with Bill and his team I'm represent the business side and we're looking as NetApp is transforming from a traditional storage company to more a cloud. It's a change in the way we go to market. In the past we shipped boxes to people and they install them or we install them. And in the future, we're looking to more services and cloud-oriented things. And so the kind of infrastructure that we built up to support our large sales force doesn't work as well in the new world. And so we about two years ago, started a pretty big transformation journey to move from this more old-school hardware to more new cloud and through that process, we needed to change our systems. Changing out our CRM became an important component of that 'cause we need more flexibility and we needed to sort of be more contemporary and we worked with AppBuddy and our old system, we used to have Salesforce, and the field was pretty used to using that kind of interface. And when you build stuff like this, you don't always know how important it is to the field. You know, you have guesses at it, and as we looked at things that we had to do to prepare to move this was always something on our list that we felt like was important but we weren't able to do it immediately. It took us an extra release to get it out, so an extra few months. And through those few months, we learned the hard way that the field really wanted it. It was really impacting them. And we had guessed that we thought it was somewhere around 25% improvement in their overall productivity. And what we found was that it's at least that, if not more. >> Wow. >> Because they came back and said, "We can't do our jobs "without this, you guys gotta get it for us." >> So they said either AppBuddy or the highway? >> Yeah, pretty much. (laughs) Pretty much, AppBuddy or they're not happy. They're not happy all the time anyway but I feel like they-- >> Salespeople. >> That by getting that to 'em we were enabling them to go faster in a few things. And it's simple, it's hard to understand, I think, for everybody, it's a simple layer. Whenever you build a CRM or any kinda system, your job is to collect information and then display it back, make it easy to change. And the way CRMs typically work today is, you have a list for you of stuff, opportunities, or new registrations, quotes and you just have to look at that list and then pick one you wanna edit and then go to this details screen and look at it and then go to the edit screen and then edit it and then go back, back, back. And what AppBuddy provides, is it takes all that noise and makes it into one screen so that you can just simply make and change the data, the way you would expect to on a spreadsheet, in a simple experience. And once you give it to the reps, they sorta expect that as the tablestakes, and it's a gap if you look at most CRMs they don't have this kind of in-line edit capability out of the box. And so this is a great, SAP is really excited about this 'cause it gives them a way to solve this problem without having to build it themselves and that's the beauty of these kind of infrastructures where you can add capabilities by just plugging something in. >> Right. >> And it speaks using the APIs to the tool. And so all the rules that we build around the data about who should access it, what should happen when they change stuff, should we protect data. All that is followed, because AppBuddy works right through our APIs, through the SAP provides. And so it doesn't require a lot extra coding or anything. In fact. >> That's right. >> IT guys are standing over there somewhere. They don't like it 'cause I do it myself. I'll actually build experiences for the field really quickly 'cause that I can make a quick custom business process to support something that's needed. >> So, on the AppBuddy website, Klara, I saw, I love stats, and you guys said, we can save time and improve enterprise productivity by 5X to 10X. >> That's right. >> Those are big numbers. >> That's right. >> And you were saying there's been a massive improvement in employment productivity and I imagine in terms of the speed is essential. You know, we were talking, one of the underlying themes here at Sapphire, this year, is the intelligent enterprise, which demands the integration and the embedding of advanced emerging technologies, AI, for example, to make these enterprises truly intelligent, connecting supply chain and demand chain and it's essential, its table stakes these days. >> Yep. >> To be able to drive things faster, right? So that you guys can get what your customers need faster. >> Yep. >> So, you mentioned that huge productivity boost there but also that you were familiar with AppBuddy before your sales guys and gals were like, hey we need to have something that we're familiar with to be able to make our jobs better, so you're also doing, it sounds like a pretty good job of listening to your customers. >> Yeah, I try >> Who are probably very vocal. >> I try, I try, I mean, it's a hard job because you're sort of channeling the sales guys and in our world they're very different. In Europe, they sell very different than they sell in the US and APAC is different. And even within different sections of Europe or in the US, they act differently, and our goal is to try to streamline that so that they can act as much the same as they can across that and we can deploy sort of one experience without having to customize it totally. But tools like AppBuddy give us the ability to be much more targeted and flexible. A simple example I've been given pretty commonly is we have our sales kick-off this week also in Las Vegas and all of our sales guys are going there to learn about how to sell better, how to sell our new products and solutions and leverage some of our improved selling processes and before they go there, we wanted to have them identify a few key opportunities they're working on to say hey, these are the one's that I'm gonna use as my work case as I'm learning these new things, and in theory as we go through and finish our sales kick-off they go back and start the selling process those opportunities should sell at a higher rate then the other opportunities. And so to make that work, I configured a grid, or an AppBuddy list view, and all I put on it was the list of opportunities in one field that says, this is appropriate for our kick-off and so, instead of putting it in the middle of a very complex world, I sent 'em an email, they had a list and they just had to say this guy, this guy, and that guy, and that's all they had to do. And so our response rate on something, which if you sent a list of things to do for the field, they're not gonna respond. They're busy, they're makin' money. But in this case, because it was tied to the new learning and they felt value in it, 80% of 'em responded within 10 days. >> Yeah, wow. >> And you know, you just don't see that kind of response. But it works because it's a simple experience, right? The only thing they could do with that, they get an email that says, do this, they open it, they see the list, they click, yes, yes, yes, and it's done. And that's a whole business process that in the old days could take months to prepare for and create fields and deploy new code and do all the things you have to do. And in this case, I can create the fields in a day, create the grid in five minutes, and then I put it in an email, and done, you know? So this is where you take things to the next level and make it easier for the sales reps to do the things they need to do help us all be successful. >> Did it also sort of abstract, I can imagine, the fundamental challenges that go along with replacing an entire new CRM, going from Salesforce to SAP. >> Yeah. >> Has that been able to help kind of abstract some of the inner machinations of that so that the sales people can just focus on we know this same interface? >> It totally does, because the list views that we create are only the things they have to have. In any system like this you have a bunch of other fields that are specialized for, say, we have a professional services group and they really want to know blah blah but most sales reps, they don't deal with that at all. But you need it on the page, I need to build that. In these views, I can build it for a sales rep view that is perfect for them, right? Meaning there's no extra fields on that list. It's what you need to get your job done. And so it's like a laser focus, and then I can build a separate one for a different kind of role and give that one to them. So without changing the tool, I'm just creating a focused experience. It all uses the same things. You need sorting, you need filtering, you need a simple edit and that's all available and once they learn that core capability then the rest just kind of falls in. >> And then from your perspective it's probably business outcomes that, George, your CEO, is going to be really excited about, cost savings, employee productivity. >> Yep. >> I'm wondering though, we're talking about it in the context of what you're doing within your sales processes and your CRM. Klara, so obviously working with SAP, are there other businesses processes that AppBuddy can sit on top of and help to streamline the interface with? >> Yeah, great question, and actually thank you for asking 'cause I was gonna say, we talked a lot about sales but we could be enabling any other processes as well and services, for example, is a big one. I've got a list, a queue of cases, I want to make quick updates to that. I want to change things or I'm doing some forecasting, some account planning, but our vision, ultimately is to be able to bring from lead to cache all processes and again tailor it for each user, role specifically for them and we're not giving the solution, the customers are defining what do they need for each one of those processes and that's the power, I think, of this configurability and agility that you get. It's not built and hard coded. It's really you who puts it together. But again, we really have that vision of not only linking the CRM data but ultimately we would love to be able to get more use cases of, hey the CRM data together maybe with your ERP data, I want to see my opportunities but I also want to see the orders and I want to see the invoices so get really this 360 view of your customers that I think we've talked a lot about, even Bill McDermott was talking about it. It's so essential and critical to be customer focused is to have that visibility and with this application where you can basically pull data from wherever you need it for that specific view, you give your users that full visibility and therefore much faster answer questions, be in contexts, not lose critical information of a customer. >> Right, you're right, Bill McDermott did mention yesterday in the keynote about really what, SAP's been pretty vocal about for a while, they want to be one of the top 10 global brands. >> Mm-hmm. >> Right. >> Most valuable brands, and they want to be up there with Apple and Google. >> Right. >> And Coca-Cola, and that's for a software company that sells invisible technology, they're on their way. They're now ranked number 17, but he talked about this. >> Yeah. >> Kind of unique position that SAP's in to link and synchronize >> That's right. >> The demand chain with the supply chain >> That's right. >> Which is pretty revolutionary but ultimately, it's not about just having a 360 view of sales automation, it's of the entire customer process. >> Correct, yeah. >> So Steven, sounds like you are a rockstar in that app, with your sales guys going, hey, we need this AppBuddy technology to make our lives easier, our jobs easier. Do you foresee rolling the AppBuddy technology out to include other business processes? >> All the time, yeah, it's all about the data. And change management or getting the field to act in the same way is really hard and it doesn't sound like it should be but, (Lisa laughs) it's like having 1,000 cats on the table and getting them all to look one direction, it just doesn't happen, right? So my job is to make that and if I can have it with a single user experience, right, without having different flavors of screens and extra fields and narrow it down to what they need, bringing whatever data they need to flow from end to end it makes life easier and I've got 'em all trained. You know, we had very high usage in our previous platform and we're building now from that but they all know how to use it now so I don't have to train the cats to look in the same direction, they all know where to go. All I gotta do is add the data, right? And if you look at NetApp's transformation, from a storage company to a data company my job is really data, it's not about the tools as much. It's about how do we facilitate the salespeople to do more with what they have, right? How do I do a cross-sell, up-sell, how do I get them enabled so they can move faster so that's innate and built into what they do? >> Yeah. >> And in that you have to build, and we were just at another panel talking with SAP about, you have to give back to the sales reps and to the people doing the data 'cause CRM's not fun, I mean, it's not like, hey, I'm gonna go play my CRM tonight. (laughs) It's a different deal. CRM requires work and so you need to give them stuff back. Do machine learning, do things that provide scoring, show the probability of close, help them be more successful at their job and bring the data together in one spot. >> You know, I think yesterday one of the themes also was data and trust, the new currency, right? If you can't access it and extract valuable insights immediately and act on them then you risk being usurped by your competition. So being able to enable the data to be accessible, insights gleaned as quickly as possible, you must be the king. >> Well, I don't know about that. >> The data king. (laughs) >> Yeah, it's definitely our job. >> But as we wrap here in the last few seconds, digital transformation and every company has to go through it or you're not relevant but that requires a cultural transformation as well. >> It does. >> And it sounds like what you guys are doing together is helping that at least from the sales force's perspective of where change has to happen. >> Yep. >> Not only is it improving the efficiency of your SAP environment, your CRM environment, but it's also helping, sounds like, from a cultural perspective, as, hey, we've got to go through this transformation, let's make it where we can simplify, let's do that. >> Very much so. Just like I was talking about the cat problem. You've got the reps that are used to doing something the way and you're saying hey, we're gonna evolve and do something different and that change is rough and people don't feel like it's the right thing at times. The great news with this change and the timing of it is that when you're moving from one platform to the other, it's the one time in the life cycle of these products where you can make significant change, drop whole business process and they won't even notice it. I dropped three quarters of the stuff that we had before and just didn't build it. And I don't have people coming to me going, hey, I really miss doing that, and that's good news, we're helping drive the change. >> Yeah. >> Well, thank so much you guys for stopping by theCUBE and Klara telling us about AppBuddy, what you guys do, how you're working together with NetApp and SAP. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for the opportunity, Lisa, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin at SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering InterConnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for Day Three coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. This is the Cube's exclusive coverage of IBM's Cloud Show and their Watson Data, IoT and more. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next two guests are Matt Kalmenson, VP of North American Sales and Cloud Service Providers at Veeam and Andy Vandeveld, VP of Global Strategic Alliances at Veeam. Guys, welcome to the Cube. >> Andy: Thank you. >> Matt: Thank you for having us. >> Andy, I want you to just set the table. We are familiar with Veeam. We're going to do your event. You've got a big event coming up in New Orleans. The Cube will be there. We've been watching you guys for many, many years. The Cube is on its eighth season. I think Season One, 2010 at VMworld. You've been very, very successful. But you're not a public company, but yet you guys act like a public company. You release your revenue and earnings. Set the table about what Veeam is, where you guys are at, and the current status. >> Sure. We're a company that's been around for 10 years, founded by our founders, Andrei Baronov and Ratmir Timashev. The company has grown significantly in the data availability space over the 10 years. We just announced our earnings, or our revenue, for the first time just last quarter. Last year we did $607 million in total revenue. And that's at a 28% growth. So we're a very high-growth company, even though we're at significant run rate of revenue. We've got 2,500 employees worldwide. We'll grow that substantially this year. We've got 240,000 customers worldwide. We're growing 4,000 new customers a month. So we're really a growth company. But we're a privately-held company. We like it that way. It allows us to do things that public companies might not be able to do because of their quarterly reporting requirements. We can make investments where we think investments need to be made for the future, as opposed to having to always watch the profitability. >> Yeah, the 30-day shot clock, as they say, or the quarterly shot clock, 90-day shot clock I mean. So you guys are very successful. Congratulations. And that's, by the way, a great story that you guys kind of act like a public company without being public. So it's like the best of both worlds. You guys are doing well. Congratulations. What's the secret sauce for you guys? Just for the sound bite. We'll get into some of the questions. We have some specific questions about IBM InterConnect. But why is Veeam winning? What's happening? Because you guys are really moving the needle. Quickly explain the secret formula of why Veeam is so successful. >> Well, I think it cuts across a couple of different dimensions. One is, we have a really great culture within the company. And so we have a culture of innovation. People feel like they're invested in the success of the company. And everybody is joining in that. And I think that really helps. We have great technology. We used to have an "It Just Works" tagline. Customers love that, particularly when we talk about their backup and data-protection solutions. They don't want to have to have people monitoring it on a regular basis. It just works. So I think customers love the technology. We have a great employee base, great executive team, and we have great partnerships, like the one here with IBM. And I think those are all key to the success. >> So I want to go back a little bit and sort of set the table on some of the big mega-trends that led to Veeam's ascendancy. When you go back to the early days of virtualization, you had this situation where you had underutilized servers. And then VMware essentially allowed us to consolidate those servers and dramatically increase the utilization, 'cause applications running on these servers, the servers were highly underutilized. The one application that needed all that sort of dedicated server power was backup. So when virtualization went from nothing to whatever, 60, 70% of the market, backup got choked. And it needed an answer. And one of those answers was Veeam. And it shot up and exploded as a company. You've done very, very well. There's more to it than that, distribution channels and so forth. Now we enter the Cloud era. And people now talk beyond backup, about availability. So what can we learn from the virtualization era? What's similar, what's different now? And why is the discussion shifting from one of backup to one of sort of always-on availability? >> So, it's a really good question. And if you think about the trends that we've seen, we've gone through this trend to a completely virtualized world. Yet when we still talk to CIOs, and Veeam's gone out and done studies where we've talked to CIOs, and when we talk to them, we hear that they still have the same challenges that they've had in the past. And that is, over 90% of them are still saying that their most critical needs are application uptime and their access to data. So when we go out and talk to hundreds and thousands of CIOs, they say, "We still have these needs: "access to our applications and access to data." Yet when we talk to them about how those needs are being met, over 80% of them say there's this gap. There's this gap, and while they still have those needs, those needs are not being met. And we call that the availability gap. And Andy and I were talking this morning over a cup of coffee, and he said, "You know what the availability gap is? He said, "Think about it like this." Think about when you're using your cell phone, and that cell phone is going down to 10%, 9%, 8% and 1%. And you get that feeling inside that "I'm about to lose service." And we all know that feeling when you lose connectivity on your cell phone. Now think about that as the CIO or someone who's relying upon that data. That's the availability gap that we see in the marketplace. And that's the gap that Veeam bridges. We bridge that availability gap. So we've addressed that from a virtualization perspective and, now, moving into the physical world too. But now as we move forward, we're seeing another dynamic change in the marketplace, of course. And that's Cloud. Now consumers want to think about different ways to consume technology. They want it on-prem. They want a managed solution. They want in a public cloud. They want it in a private cloud. And the way Veeam addresses that solution is essentially by saying, "However you want to consume your technology, "that's okay by us." If you want to consume your virtualized environment and have it backed up on premises, fantastic. If you want it backed up and managed by a managed service provider, that's okay too. If you want to have that data and information and back it up in a public cloud, great. Or in a private cloud. Or move it between those environments. We'll have the solutions to meet those needs. So we're going to meet this need of having uptime of applications, uptime of data, and availability of data, minimizing that availability gap that these CIOs are facing and allow them to manage and run data and applications and have it available to them no matter what scenario or platform they're running it in. So that's a vision that's more than just selling backup insurance. >> Matt: Absolutely. >> I mean, you just kind of answered it, but I'll ask it generally. How do you guys communicate your vision to CIOs? >> Well, I think we communicate it just like Matt said. When you talk about backup, that is sort of a yesterday story. It's really about making sure that those customers can get access to their data and that they can keep their applications, and, frankly, their businesses up and running. So when we go in and have a conversation with a CIO, we can delineate for them the specific business impacts of not having a robust availability platform. And that takes on different dimensions from a product perspective. So it's not just backup and recovery anymore. It's backup and recovery, but it's availability. It's, how do you orchestrate data across platforms? These are the source of new issues that Veeam has been addressing for the past few years. And I think it's what gives us an advantage in the data protection space. >> Now, it's a very competitive market. A lot of legacy vendors, of which IBM is one of them. But yet you're here at InterConnect as a major IBM partner. Help us understand what the relationship is with IBM, where it fits in the organization. Is it just Cloud? Is it across the entire organization? Fill us in. >> Yeah, so it is a strategic partnership for us. It's not just a single business-unit partnership. We're across the business units inside of IBM. And sure, there's IBM Spectrum Protect, which is a competitive product. But there are so many more opportunities for Veeam and IBM to win together that we're not going to worry about the few areas where there's some overlap. We just announced a few months ago that we're integrating, doing snapshot integration, for IBM Storwize and SAN Volume Controller, which we'll provide in our next version, version 10. It's coming out later this year. And that's a big thing. We don't do storage integration, snapshot integration, with all storage vendors. So when we can make a commitment like that, it's a meaningful commitment to the partnership. And so we have this great relationship on the storage side and other parts, but the genesis of the partnership actually started in the Cloud area with Matt's team and some guys on Matt's team that really drove hard to get a foothold in the relationship. So I'll let Matt talk about the Cloud relationship. >> Thanks Andy, and it's been a great relationship, because, while Andy focuses on the global alliances, I have a little bit more of a narrow focus around the Cloud, which really isn't so narrow. So we tend to team up together very well. And what really got our relationship kicked off was having the VMware Cloud Foundation, which runs on the IBM Cloud, where Veeam is the essential backup product that runs the management components of that platform. So, anything on the VMware Cloud Foundation, which sits on the IBM Cloud platform, is backed up and managed by Veeam. So that's now available. And that was really the genesis of the relationship from a Cloud perspective, so that was very, very exciting. >> And Bluemix, they're in the mix? >> Bluemix is in the mix. And that VMware Cloud Foundation actually leverages the Bluemix platform. And then there's several layers of the Bluemix Cloud platform. And now we're going to be in the Bluemix catalog, what is called the IMS catalog, which will be for everyone who's looking to provision a cloud service, can go ahead and pull down and choose to provision VMware and some infrastructure and other services and have it backed up by Veeam. >> So that deal between IBM and VMware was a real catalyst for your relationship? >> Matt: A real catalyst for us. >> Now, of course, VMware's done other deals. They just did one with Amazon recently. But my understanding is the IBM relationship-- >> Well, Pat's been clear. It's a multi-cloud world. So the thing that's clear from this show is, multicloud is what's happening. So that's-- >> Well, what this has given us the ability to do is say, no matter what your customer looks like, there's an opportunity for us to partner and work together. So if you think about the VCF, the VMware Cloud Foundation, might be some organizations that are enterprise in scope, that have a large, on-premises type of deployment. So we're looking for large automation platforms that are looking to automate moving to the Cloud or maybe move back from the Cloud to on-prem, but nevertheless have these very high-end availability needs and business continuity needs. Now, if you think about the IMS platform in Bluemix, which might be a traditional hit-the-keyboard and looking for some infrastructure that you might spin up in a born-in-the-cloud company, from day one, we'll have some services available there for you as well. So you can go from a small SMB company that might be born in the Cloud to a legacy Fortune 100 company that has some kind of cloud foundation needs. And between the partnerships of our organizations we have solutions to meet those needs. >> One of the interesting things to me about Veeam is when you started out, when you were in your eating glass mode, you were going to VMUGs and doing all that sort of hard work with the hardcore VMware practitioners. Now you're on your way to a billion dollars. And you're striking partnerships with companies like IBM. How have the conversations changed in terms of who you sell to, who you're interacting with. Obviously more CIOs are probably paying attention to the investments that they're making. How has that changed? >> Well, just from the Veeam perspective, these partnerships are extremely important. Companies like IBM have relationships with enterprises that go back decades. And, for us, that's an opportunity for us to leverage their trusted advisor status with those decision makers in the enterprise. Our business started, and we have a very robust small and medium-size business. We have a strong and growing enterprise business. And we're looking for the enterprise as our growth vehicle to get to a billion dollars. So partnering with enterprise-class partners like IBM is really a key force. >> I mean, you guys can bring your value proposition pretty much to any environment. To your cell phone analogy about the battery power, which we've all seen. But, you know, Dave's on Verizon. I'm on AT&T. So this is the same dynamic in the Cloud. This is where you guys are looking for the growth. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, I think that's a pretty good analogy. And the way I kind of think of it is, we have the best solutions in the marketplace for availability needs, regardless of the size of the organization, the end-user needs, regardless of the go-to-market strategy and regardless of the platform. So by building, and as we continue to move up market and aggressively build partnerships like the ones with IBM, it allows to address the business needs no matter what those business needs are. And partnerships like the ones with IBM allow us to scale to great lengths. >> Matt and Andy, I want to ask you a question for the folks watching, 'cause here at IBM InterConnect, the IBM relationship that you guys outlined, what's the major to-do for Veeam this year? I mean, in terms of, as you accelerate. You've got 600 million in revenue. What's the core message that you're sending the marketplace in terms of where that growth's going to come from? And what's the tag, what's the bumper sticker for Veeam right now? >> I think it's around the Cloud. I think that's an area where we're putting a heavy investment. We're hiring great people. And for us, we see that data protection is going to have to span the Cloud environment. Now, it's going to be on-prem, it's going to be in the Cloud, it's going to be a hybrid. But from our perspective >> Matt: It's everywhere. >> Yeah, becoming much more robust in the Cloud is really going to be a focus area for us this year. >> Yeah, I would agree. I would tack onto that continuing to scale into the enterprises very aggressively. We've built out a large enterprise organization strictly focused on the enterprise. We've had the technology to address the enterprise needs, but now we've dedicated sales teams and organizational structures just to address the enterprise. And continuing to bring out our Cloud sales organizations and make sure that everyone within our organizations also has a benefit by not only understanding the Cloud business, but our sales teams are compensated to sell Cloud solutions. So it's not like we have a stovepipe organization that just goes sell Cloud, and then somebody else who goes out and sells an on-prem solution. We have teams that are focused on compensation that works together so that our teams can go out and send the message of, "consumption's your decision". We want to help you make the right business decision. We want to help make the right technological decisions. But how you consume, that's up to you. And we're here to help you coach, here to help guide, here to help show some maps on how you can do that. We know we have the right availability solution no matter what needs or what consumption model of what path you want to go down. >> And the enterprise has certainly changed. And you guys understand the enterprise readiness. And you've got product leadership. So that seems to me to be the magic. >> And also the relationship with an organization like IBM because that helps us bridge those gaps. >> Well, congratulations guys, for great success and a good relationship with IBM. Great story. Love the story of being private with this kind of transparency. It's rare, and so congratulations Andy, Matt. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for joining the Cube. More live coverage. Stay with us all day, Day Three of exclusive coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us. More after this short break.

>> Voiceover: Live from Orlando Florida it's TheCUBE covering SAPPHIRE NOW. Headlines sponsored by SAP-100 cloud the leader in platform as a service with support from Consulate the cloud internet company. Now here are your hosts John Furrier and Peter Mars. >> Peter: Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Orlando Florida for SAP SAPPHIRE NOW SiliconANGLE Medias flexure program TheCUBE where we go out to events and extract the signal for the noise. I'm John Furrier the host and my co-host Peter Burris head of research in SiliconANGLE Media general manager of Wikibon Research. Want to give a shout-out to our sponsors without them we would not be here SAP100 Cloud platform, Consul Inc, Capgemini, EMC thanks for your support and we got 4 over 40 videos go to siliconANGLE at youtube.com/siliconangle for all the videos. Our next guest is Bronwyn Hastings who is the senior vice-president of Global Strategic Service Partners global channels all the top in integrations. Welcome to TheCUBE. >> Bronwyn: Thank you, thanks for having me here today. >> So it's great to have the boss come on we've had a lot of the folks from your group come in certainly a lot of your partners. We've had Capgemini, we've had Accenture, we've had a bunch of folks come through EY, I think Deloitte and anyway Infosys came on too Deloitte was really the only one and PwC were the only ones I didn't see here. Now we'll get to them later but the message is clear. They have to focus on innovation. >> Bronwyn: Yes. >> Otherwise they are going to get put out of business 'cause right behind them warming up in the sidelines in the ecosystem is their replacement potentially. This is an interesting dynamic you got going on here you growing your future in the ecosystem putting the system integrators I wouldn't say on notice but like hey get busy. Great system model being and they are responding what's your thoughts on some of the feedback you've heard? >> Thank you. This is a really interesting question because I think there are two things happening one is that customers are asking for the innovation and asking us and the partners what's the way forward? They are hearing all this talk about digital they want to know how did this become more relevant to their customers in a quick and more dynamic way. And they are asking both of us that question. The first thing that we do with our partners in this instance is we look at where are the innovation areas one that make them different? How do they get chosen to actually add value to their customers? And these partnerships that you've mentioned actually do it in different ways some of them represent themselves or talk to the customer through business transformations so they talk about what are you trying to achieve? Where is your future? You know the normal business conversation to find out how that innovation can happen and what do they need to be relevant to the customer? The other partners have a look at it and say how do I be part of this world that's changing but then bring quick value to the customer? How do I accelerate that value in quicker chance? And therefore the customer gets what they need in quicker time frames and then others say I'm going to look at this innovation and what's going to really set me apart as a specialist and that's where I'm going to go. So these partners right now are looking at where is their place in this and how do they transform themselves to actually bring value to the customer. And luckily for us we have a lot of those innovation areas that they can make those choices so they can choose >> John: They pick their swim lanes? >> Bronwyn: Swim lanes, focus areas. >> Differentiation. >> Differentiation all of that to be part of the new conversation as well. >> Peter: But what are the duties of the platform strategy that you guys are putting forward? And the ease with which using things like the Apple partnership that you have of creating new great software is you've a lot of this partners buy competition and buying these different alternatives are going to be forced to really focus on the value and their distinction that they need to provide to customers. It's going to be very interesting over the next few years to see these companies that have historically for you know long-term lock-in like relationships have to themselves become real nimble and become really catalyst to thought leaders for renovation of the marketplace because so much of the enabling technology is going to make it more or easier and more likely of bringing success. Do you agree with that? >> I find your comments very interesting actually so where I agree totally is that but I'd a piece. We look at it as though people have competition here actually a number of these companies already have practices or developments or innovations using some of the technology components. We announced Apple, there is a Microsoft announcement all of these areas that you would not normally see all of a sudden we've made these announcements and now that we're with these partners same partners that we've worked with for a long time come to us and say well actually we've got an area that develops an iOS for Apple already because our customers needed us to do that. Then we come to another area and they say but you brought out a new user experience through Fiori so we've got those development tools. And now if you bring out something like your 100 Cloud platform which allows us to build extensibility and these three things together start to actually build even stronger innovation so it's actually had a magnifying effect >> John: Exactly. >> Even for us you know we. >> John: Because you've already had those practices that were not being tapped into so to speak. >> Bronwyn: Not tapped into not brought in and integrated in the same way. But now because we're doing co-development we are doing co-innovation or integration processes actually it strengthens their capability to use the innovation and make it something even more. For me you can hear my passion in this one >> John: I guess. >> For me the excitement in this is that people really now see ways of innovating further and customers see that as valuable because they're getting what they want out of these innovations as well. >> John: Well that you mentioned the co-innovation I want to talk about that. That seems to be an SAP playbook even going back to the seven years that you started covering SAPPHIRE there has always been geeky developer focus which is a good thing we like that. But now simplicity is the theme once you have results but co-development's been a big part of it we were talking with EY for instance and they have a co-development on a lab being put down in I think Atlanta area. They have Accenture's got a zillion data scientists so you start to see this they are romping up they are not just about delivery any more. >> Bronwyn: No. No. >> The old way was delivery back in the contract. >> Yeah. >> Where is the value in your mind for these partners? Is it the co-innovation? Is it the data science? All the above? Is there one thing that pops out at you that you see rising to the top in the terms of trending? >> I would say there are two or three things well to one is we've got a large install base and all of the move that we've got to the newer generations are the S4100 environments. These partners actually have strengths of their own which they have been known for. E&Y has their strength that they're known for in the market with or without us they have got a strength. What these things are allowing them to do is to take some of that shift into the newer technologies and their strength and then build extensible innovation. And what I mean by that is they can say okay I'm strong in finance so I'm going to choose a finance topic on the 100 club platform environment and I'm going to build my differentiation on that. >> John: Their domain expertise map right into it >> Their demand expertise right into it squarely into it really create a compelling thing for them creates the value for the customer and it really establishes this innovation so that would be one point. You come back to the data scientists then you take it a step further you've got your differentiation. Now where else can you excel in? Where else can you bring the things that would make fun ends completely different? Like the digital boardroom that you're seeing that is being created while it's through predictable analytics it's through data scientists type of things so they add in these other services now that still play to some of their core strengths. I'm finding that it's actually creating the next platform for their own differentiation and value and it can incorporate these insights into it. >> John: Yes as you're saying it brings the swim lanes concept the differentiation so I got to thaw up on that and because Peter brought the question earlier today about when you brought up the question around partners working together. >> Peter: Yeah. >> So this comes back down to a lot of (mumbles) >> Peter: By the way for anybody who is wondering thunder and rain opportunity is raining everywhere. >> John: The cloud is raining opportunities the thunder the clouds are moving over us it's an (mumbles) >> Peter: The cloud is here >> (mumbles) Okay so back to this point. I differentiate it here once it has been the greatest has been the greater but also on these bigger projects you might have to work with the other guy. >> Bronwyn: That's correct. >> So how is that playing out 'cause they have to share obviously data might be shared but how is that playing out for them where do you see that trend going obviously probably more of that not less of it. >> Bronwyn: Yeah so what I'm finding is people are also choosing the type of work they want to do and then leveraging the ecosystem for the other types of work they want to do so people rather say you know I choose to do transformational type of things but if I am taking the lead on something I'm going to be able to partner with other partners in this ecosystem that complement me. I actually think it is complementing or if there is a specialist area they can bring someone else in so I actually think the complementary nature of things are getting stronger in some areas. Of course they still stand alone business that they do as well. Second thing I'd say is and I'll add this in because it's not only about the partnerships it's about how do we work with the partnerships and you would have heard some of our announcements around SAP S4 value assurance programs. And what that means is the customers are saying we want skin in the game from SAP too the partners are saying actually this is valuable to us too that you've got your stamp of approval on what's going on so we've created these service offerings that are module arised that partners can include and it's anything from just check my scope is right or the journey that we're going on and our transformation the mapping is correct through to more custom services and then it also including that in their offering as complementary so that customers feel comfortable with where they're going as well so that's all coming together as well. >> Peter: I want to clear out something around here because we are research's very strong sponsors we talk about the three Cs of digital transformation. Context. What are you going to do? >> Bronwyn: Yep. >> Community, who are you going to do it with? >> Bronwyn: With. Yep. >> Capabilities. How are you going to get the capabilities so that you do what you are going to do with who you are going to do it with better than everybody else every time? Does that resonate? >> Bronwyn: Absolutely! Absolutely! For me it's a content context all of those sorts of things. The customers are asking and you would have heard it around here. I want to be here how do I get there what's the time frame and who's capable of doing it actually? The partner community is really well enabled but they also know that this is a journey of new technology areas, shifts in the market. >> Peter: New processes. >> New processes so trying to simplify digital processes to really get the true value of digital so they want people to say we are in. And these are the ways that these things happen and you can solidify it together as well. >> John: And the keywords are that they are enabled. >> Enabled. >> That's there because the platform has to be enabling. >> Enabling. >> Otherwise it doesn't work. And then the tools and the tooling has to kind of got to be there. Is there a process out there and this is what we talked about Peter brought this up yesterday it was a really great observation. In old days look backwards known processes unknown technologies and then they evolve and you automate those processes you have known and now you have unknown processes developing with known technology. >> Yes. >> What are some of those new unknowns is IoT a good example? Or if you ask what other process is there? >> Peter: (mumbles) just unlimited things that we could be doing. >> Things that are like not fully like known that's going to happen but like you can't say that (mumbles) is a clear process for every customer it might be different. >> Bronwyn: I actually think the way that I would answer that and sort of look at that topic is as the transformation to digital is happening I'm almost seeing that all the customers are testing the processes. It's not like everything's a stable process any more they are saying what processes 'cause if you just replicate what was there before you're not getting any gain. You could have the most beautiful fore intent and all these processes remain the same and nothing's actually changed except the user experience. Or you can change all the processes but the user experience doesn't change so these two things are coming together and the process has to be re-looked at. >> Peter: But the customer is becoming part of that process story. >> Process. Absolutely. >> And that's the thing that's most unknown. >> Absolutely. >> And so how customers go about catalyzing those processes through those beautiful user experiences is really what we want to do when we think about engaging customers in a security way. >> Correct. And that's the way really the services piece comes back into play. It's really testing what do you still need or can we make this a much more streamlined simpler process that gives you all the benefits the cost benefits, the user experience which one of those do we want to do? I can say this is where the services that the partners really bring knowledge experience as well into the same equation. >> John: Bronwyn Hastings SVP at Global Services and the third part is final point I'll give you the final word on our wrap up here day three of SAPPHIRE. Take a minute to explain to the folks out there what's going on for SAP with respect to all these system integrators what's your plans, what's the focus, what's the dynamics. >> I think the three areas that we focus on within is digital transformation and the ability for us to bring digital to the customer. Why I take that approach first is this is a transformation time that the market's changing and the customers need that guidance into that process so one is digital transformation. And depending on all of that is that we are asking for the innovation that we've spoken a lot about here is innovating to the future not creating what's gone by not replicating but innovating the new digital world with us and part of that is simplification for the customers. Our work with the system integrators right now is focus on the customer, bring value and it's innovate together that's what we do. >> John: Well, thanks so much for your time and welcome to being a CUBE alumni. >> Thank you. >> Here on SiliconANGLE Media as a CUBE. We are live in Atlanta for day three three days of wall to wall coverage. Thanks for watching that you are watching theCUBE.

okay we're back this is Dave vellante Wikibon org i'm here with jeff Frek we're here at knowledge service now is big customer event we're at the aria hotel a lot of enthusiasm a lot of great stories we're seeing a pattern emerged IT is essentially this collection of disparate processes we have a lot of activity going on spreadsheets people using email to really keep track of what's going on many many systems trying to keep track of inventory assets process these problems incidents changes etc etc and it's just this big web of mess here comes service now a single system of record a cmdb that allows you to essentially tailor your processes to your business as opposed to some kind of technology module or some other kind of software system jason wu yan is here he's the vice president of operations for a cloud sherpas works within the ServiceNow business unit at Cloud Sherpas was a big sponsor of the show Jason welcome to the cube thank you very much so you heard my little intro of guys must be excited big sponsor a lot of a lot of action going on in this this event how do you feel we feel outstanding we're happy to be a part of the the event this is my third knowledge conference and of course as the director of training in service now I like to say there are more people in training at this conference that attended the entire knowledge 11 conference so it's a pretty phenomenal event so how was it progressed over the years this is my first knowledge and so I don't have that history I'd say that you know we leave a long legacy with service now all the way back to some of the very first knowledge conferences that occurred in first knowledge conference we probably could have had a the entire conference in this table right and of course today with almost four thousand attendees it's it's certainly grown tremendously we've got somewhere the neighborhood 1,200 people that have gone through training at this event alone we did a big part of providing that training for on behalf of service now with other partners as well and it's an exciting event there's a large buzz here as I'm sure you've seen there really is yes sir Cloud Sherpas other than a great name you know tell us about the company it's a great it's a great story to tell Gartner likes to turma cloud services brokerage and so first and foremost we're cloud services brokerage we have three strategic partnerships we are a Salesforce a partner we are one of the largest Salesforce partners in the world actually top five from a certification standpoint we're the largest Google Enterprise integrator in the world we're actually Google Google's partner of the year in 2011 and 2012 of course we like to think we're pretty good at servicenow as well a little background on us in the ServiceNow business unit we were the first partner in the United States Forest Service now we are the first partner to achieve preferred status at servicenow and the only partner to achieve that status globally today so how's it work so a customer wants to implement service now or google enterprise or Salesforce you basically are that brokerage layer in between so talk about how that works well we help customers adopt manage and enhance their cloud solutions of course focusing on this particular context service now and we are there from day one we're there to help them bring the platform into their environment we're help there to help them refine their processes and practices and of course ultimately align that to the service now a tool and help them manage that through their life cycle so how do you get ready for this what do you tell customers they need to do I tell customers commonly it's best to start where you're at with any improvement activity and ultimately in an enterprise deployment of software you're going to take that as an opportunity to improve I say start where you're at take the time to understand how you do things today you'd be surprised to see how often customers don't aren't all on the same page as to how they perform incident or what the key processes are underneath that or even what the key performance objectives are for that of course we recommend starting where you're at of course we have requirements workshops opportunities we have a number of I tell practices and other types of areas where we can help elaborate those requirements and better align them to their business needs but first and foremost you need to understand what you want your environment to look like some a requirement standpoint the workflows are key so what are the big obstacles that you see people running into when they try to do implement like this I would say in general taking too big of a bite you know there are over twenty two applications as an example in service now you don't want to start day one with 22 applications it's not because ServiceNow wouldn't be able to handle it ServiceNow can deploy very rapidly you really start simple start where you're mature or start where you have the most profound opportunity to improve and align to better practices get the foundation of the platform in place stabilize that and then move on to your next phase and progressively adopt more and more of the application so it's with the pattern that's emerging here we're hearing from customers people starting with incident problem management change management you know why there why why do we see that pattern emerging I think more across the industry that it tends to be a place where customers have have focused on over time so that tends to be where they're more mature they tend to have a better understanding of maybe what their shortcomings are today in those spaces so they tend to be an easier place to start what percentage of them are displacing some other legacy software versus we've heard about I'm not counting excel in that in that list or lotus notes because we hear a lot about that but I would presume there's other software out there that they're displacing we see a lot of software that gets this place down there of course point solutions where there's a lot of databases and homegrown applications handling change your change approvals or cab boards or those types of things of course it's a good opportunity to consolidate that and of course you know service now is known within the industry is being a pretty proficient solution but there are other solutions and we are offering seen that we're offsetting those as well you have we have the steam of no.2 now do you have any you know favorite examples that you can share with us or what are you some of your customers doing ha we've got a lot of good examples i would say probably most recently we just helped a very large clothing manufacturer an american good american company that had nine support environments globally and they had nine different ways of doing everything and they look use this as an opportunity to consolidate those and get to a single source of record get to a single workflow globally and in that they also transformed and improve their processes and and that was something that they couldn't have accomplished with really any other project or really any other tool in the market they of course chose to go down the path with with service now and you know a short few months later they're implemented across incident problem changed service request Service Catalog a very profound Service Catalog spanning literally hundreds of request items employee self-service portal that's been branded to their to their corporate brands there's been a lot of excitement in their injuries or community because they look like their company when they're when they're asking for support and they get a much more automated and in much more efficient process what was the genesis of that was it again something was breaking they had to change it was it let's just take a step back there's opportunity that we wanted to do this or were the easing service now and some other minor role and said wow you know we can actually use this tool to take advantage and do something transformation and generally what we see is service now it's really the enabler it's the enabler to transition transform now we've seen global sis do this forever that's their big thing we're going to help you consolidate and get your hands around it I think service now gives you the ability to to do that neutral of a partner or neutral of an outsourcing provider you can get your arms around it on your own and again many customers are relatively mature and incident problem and change and so it's a good opportunity for them to find those areas where they can aspire to better practice better process and to implement that into service count tool how was your business involves I mean it's so interesting because the poster child of SAS and Salesforce you guys obviously you know chose well that was 1999 may we are in 2013 it's really taking a long time Google Enterprise okay that's make sense but Google you know big whale I see you know guys like workday you know service now come out why do you think it's taken such a long time for these applications to catch on and and how has cloud sherpas you know progressed over those over that time frame well what i would say is the notion of a cloud services brokerage didn't exist eight to ten years ago right that that aggregation point didn't really exist it was those point solutions were always provided by those point providers or their tightly coupled partners in that space and of course with the emergence of this notion of a brokerage that's helping aggregate and manage and enhance low solutions you know we're seeing a lot of degrees of freedom so you know where we started we started as a firm that was focused on Google that emerged into Salesforce and now is through in a company called Navitus a few earlier or late last year now the ServiceNow practice as well and you know moreover it's it's it's where things are going right the truth is is that end-users and corporations and and whether it's you on your iPhone and for personal use or business use you want those applications available you want to have a solid user experience ServiceNow was really first in this space to be able to offer that in a way that was truly platform neutral that just worked whether it was a smart phone or an iPad or a desktop or laptop of what happened so talk about your strategy clouds share purrs and talk a little bit about how you differentiate well we differentiated in a number of ways but specific in the ServiceNow business unit and III don't think it's it could be said enough the cloud services brokerage is a huge differentiating point for us right having the scale that we do globally having you know several key strategic partners enables us to see areas and aspects of the industry that I don't think other partners can but from a service town business you know perspective I think we have a live a couple a couple differentiating points when is we were one of the first adopters of the platform from a partner perspectives so obviously we have a lot of deep skills in this we've done over 320 implementations of service now to date to have and of course 320 over 320 and through that history we've seen we've seen a lot of heuristics we've seen a lot of customer success stories we've seen a lot of things in the platform that customers are asking for time and time again and we've been able to fit that need both by my IT service management but also by industry as well a great example of that is we've got a number of custom applications that we've developed one of them as is a document management document processing application that a lot of legal firms are using in fact what we found is we built it for one company a few years ago Morrison forest or better known as mofo and now five or six legal firms later they've all asking for that same application and so we're finding that there's also you know real opportunity from an industry perspective to align to some of those point solutions extend the platform and just include those in the solution here's so much today about Big Data and you know it's all about this unstructured mass of information a bring structure to unstructured data maybe lending structured and unstructured some people don't even like those terms because it's all sort of blending how does analytics play into this whole IT Service Management IT automation there's a lot of metrics so they get this automating this forms based process is there a place for that or is is there not right now because everybody's kind of doing their own thing you know ten years ago I t was all about the tnit right it's all about the technology now it's all about the eye it's all about the information a great examples we're seeing a lot of partner solutions emerge in the ServiceNow ecosystem that are trying to better rationalize data there are tools like mere 42 for example which it's whole purpose is to is to bolt onto service now and provide a more comprehensive analytic package and there are many other examples of that as well in truth it's a services lead operation at this point it's not a technology led operation the only way to really ensure that you're delivering any quality of services or support is the quality of data that you provide and that starts with your requirements and those requirements need to bridge the performance measures in those performance there is just being an easy way to be accessible transparent and manageable and of course that's a big part of what service now does so how do you see this cloud brokerage you know space evolving over the next three to five years what's going to change you're going to hear a lot more from Cloud Sherpas in the space in the next three to five years that's for sure you know I think what we're going to find is is that more and more you're going to you're going to see gsis and other types of firms moving to this sort of model right I mean we're only we're going to take a lot of business away from them and and in that process you know it's going to get the right levels of attention you know what what I really think that cloud services brokerage is is it's a firm that is extremely experienced in the platform and the products they sell but more importantly the underlying reason for selling that product in the first place you know services IT services in this case it's a company that's known for being a little bit more nimble than some of those GS is you know getting the proposals out quickly and being effect effective and efficient and not looking to establish this enormous agreement but but a series of agreements that gets a customer to to where they need to go and I think what we're going to see is it is time and time again that the the early adopters in the cloud services brokerage spaces are going to be are going to be growing at rates like our business unit for example are business units currently growing at one hundred and fifty percent it's a tough tough job to keep up with but tools like ServiceNow certainly help us manage that and keep us on track with our own projects your own time carts and our own tasks yeah so you guys are great on the rocket ship with good service now pulling them along are they pulling you along a little bit of both like bikers drafting yeah so hexcel and I Jason we'll listen thanks very much for coming on the cube and sharing the cloud sherpas story will give you the last word here what advice would you give to folks that are you know maybe kicking the tires and mostly thirty percent of the audience here are not ServiceNow customers they're thinking about it what would you tell those guys have a good understanding of where you're at have a good vision of what you want to achieve and don't be afraid to go to the cloud it's not as not as hard as it sounds its clouds not scary just jump right in the water's fine hi Jason thanks very much for coming on really appreciated a good luck with managing that crazy growth and pleasure meeting you thanks very much all right Jeff reckon I'll be back with our next guest keep right here this is the cube we drop it of these events and we're covering the wall-to-wall service now knowledge will be right back from Las Vegas right after this