live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2018 brought to you by Amazon Web Services Intel and their ecosystem partners welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of AWS reinvent here at the Venetian in Las Vegas I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host Dave Volante Rebecca we work together this week and I'm excited for our next guest he is an esteemed cube alum Harish Venkat vice president global sales enablement and marketing at Veritas technologies welcome back to the Q thank you very much thank you see you Gary good to see you David so you've been to this is not your first rodeo you know many AWS reinvents what are you hearing what what are you hearing on the ground from your customers what trends are you seeing what most excites you yeah first of all that's great to be part of reinvent you know love the buzz here it's very electrifying and we're very happy about our partnership with AWS and we're very happy about the sponsorship for reinvent as well if there are any skeptics out there who's still thinking cloud is still a fashion statement they really need to reassess their statement because proud is in full effect for both computer and storage the other trend that I'm seeing is globalization is in full effect ideas are flowing swiftly and freely through the borders and then when you think about technology technology is very exciting the global GDP is what about 79 trillion IT spend about four trillion but it's interesting to see the four trillion sort of fueling the growth for the 79 trillion I also think AI machine learning deep learning all of this is going to reshape not only the software industry but I think it's going to reshape the way we live our lives and the last thing I'll say is data hands down as the new currency for enterprise right exactly we keep hearing this data is the new oil data is the it is the currency it's even more valuable I got our take on this okay so I can take a quarter oil and/or a gallon oil I can put it in my house or I can put it in my car I can't do both with that same resource data it doesn't follow the laws of scarcity I can use that same data from multiple use cases so by premises it's more valuable than oil what do you think I think the versatility of data is not the same as oil oil has very limited purpose and I think it's important and we are all dependent on it but data is so meaningful the amount of insights you can get it provides you a competitive edge in the industry it is unbeatable so yeah oil not say mono reefs I've had the pleasure of doing a couple of Veritas solution days yes I did Veritas vision last year you guys have broken that up into multiple cities this year I did New York and Chicago just at ease with the last 30 to 45 days yeah had some great conversations with customers some Veritas execs the conversation was obviously heavy kool-aid injection of Veritas technology your roadmap your vision really really detailed stuff obviously a cloud was a piece of that the conversations here I'm sure a much more cloud oriented now can you talk about the discussions that you're having the focus that you have on cloud generally in AWS specifically yeah sure look I mean data is growing year over year and and customers are still trying to figure out how to manage the data how am I going to work out the economics of this by leveraging cloud and this is not an easy equation to solve by no means and this is where Veritas and cloud service providers like AWS are really taking the market leadership role and then figuring out how do we leverage the entire data landscape if you will so before you even think of cloud the first thing you want to know is where does my data reside and what type of data do I have so Veritas is able to provide that visibility of data classification of data we provide immense amount of deduplication ratio which helps with the economics of this ratio this equation so I think we provide an end to solution from visibility classification deduplication even helping new application and data to the cloud and the partnership with AWS is really enabling customers to solve that conundrum that you're talking so I want to double click on this you know so as a as a as a person who understands backup and recovery deeply as a working for a company that's that's their business and of course you're extending beyond backup and I understand that but you know snapshots replication that's not backup in recovery so when I see something like outpost outpost is this on Prem infrastructure appliance that AWS is bringing as part of its hybrid strategy I want to know how is that gonna be protected now of course they'll talk about the way in which they protect it but a company like yours has a different philosophy your recovery is everything the whole data management approach how do you guys think about data management and data protection you know beyond snapshots or beyond just replication can you explain that yeah so I think the best way to explain that would be to talk about a customer use case great and while several customers come to mind I want to talk about see IMC I think it's a perfect embodiment of all the business use cases that we've been discussing so far ok see IMC is China International Marine container and they've been in business since 1980 you know employ about 51,000 based out of Shenzhen in in in China and they started their digital transformation in 2017 and what they're trying to do is really achieve three things one move all of their business application to the cloud starting with their strategic ERP in this case it was s AP and s AP Hana and the other thing is because they've been around since 1980s a lot of their processes are outdated it's very manual and they had a lot of dependency on tape as part of their backup and recovery so they want to modernize but they want to modernize that piece of it and then the last thing is they wanted a state-of-the-art disaster recovery which is also required by the local compliance laws in China where it doesn't matter where your business application is running they needed a copy of data on Prem so they evaluated all the different vendors market and clearly they chose Veritas as well as AWS to solve that business problem why why did they choose you guys yeah so you know obviously Veritas is number one in data protection 15 years in a row we got more than 50 thousand customers 96 percent of Fortune 100 trust their data with us but more importantly I think it's the partnership with AWS that really helped solve this problem and let me tell you how they did it I think that's important so the first thing they did is they launched an instance of net backup in AWS you know gone are the days where you're completely dependent on purpose-built appliance people are switching over to virtual appliance and they were able to do that by the partnership with Veritas and AWS so an instance in AWS leveraging s3 for the immediate server two days after the data they moved on s3 data over to s3 ia and eventually to glacier you know obviously Andy Jessee has been talking quite a bit in terms of increased throughput from s3 to glacier which is going to help this cause and then when you when you think about how customers are dealing with the transition to the cloud not everyone's ever going to move there all of their application to the cloud it's going to be a journey with time but what that creates in a customer environment is you got critical data in the cloud critical data on prem and they're looking at one data protection solution for both on prem and cloud and this is where Veritas net back really comes and that backup really comes in well I want to ask a little bit about that journey because as you said they don't have everything in the cloud so how has Veritas and any available AWS this sort of three-way partnership how are you how does that work I mean our user hand-holding them are you is it a co-creative process can you can you riff on that a little bit yeah sure so you know just like any of their lines we start off with the technical alliance we want to make sure that whatever use case that we're going to the market and all of those use cases are really coming from customers we understand customer challenges we work with different companies and cloud service providers in this case AWS to make sure that the solution that we take to the market is complete there's absolutely no hiccups we got professional services to help them to mitigate the risk factors and to considerations that most customers are thinking about one is costs another one is performance and thanks to net backup a IR or auto image replicator you know we are able to take a 2/3 of the network bandwidth out so you can achieve all of that performance with one third the network we got incredible deduplication ratio the storage cost as a result as 50 times less than what you would get and so back to the to consideration factor performance and cost we're able to do that in collaboration with AWS so I wonder we could talk about multi cloud or poly cloud as we sometimes call it so you can infer from listening to AWS that it really is better off having a one cloud strategy but as we know oh you say you talk to customers there's no one customer cloud strategy the customers are made up of there's like the government there's multiple constituencies in the company and shadow IT and so there's multi clouds you don't care whether it's one cloud a moment about you're there to protect it but I'm interested in what years you're seeing so what are you seeing and how are you because we we know it's not more than it's more than just one it's not just on Prem in one cloud how are you approaching that problem talk about customers and what their kind of roadmap looks like in their strategic plans and where you fit yeah so back to your point I don't think we'll ever see just one cloud the dependency on just one cloud is not happening we're seeing multiple clouds we're seeing hybrid clouds obviously you know Azure stack is coming up with their own version and so is AWS and in a customer's environment you are seeing that now there's also talks about are we going to see cloud to cloud movement cloud to cloud disaster recovery I am not seeing that at all I think the economics of cloud to cloud move over our failover is just too expensive so I think we're still seeing physical to cloud cloud back to physical and then one physical to another cloud I don't see a whole lot of cloud movement so where Veritas really comes in as our ability to provide that disaster recovery both from physical to physical protect your data in the same assured way on Prem as well as the cloud allowing you to leverage the cloud as a disaster recovery mechanism in fact I was having breakfast with Bell media this morning and they have two sides in Canada that they're using disaster recovery and they're wanting to leverage cloud and he's super excited about net backup eight one two cloud catalyst you know ability to leverage cloud as the disaster recovery and with our VRP was just Veritas resiliency platform to achieve that so a culmination of all of that hopefully answers their question absolutely and I think that's right on you had referenced earlier in your commentary Harish that you see some major changes coming for the software industry and we were we were talking to Jerry Chen the other day from Greylock in a really sharp former VMware now he's you know VC so he sees a lot of stuff and he put forth the premise that everything's changing in software development as a software company I wonder if you could you could comment that Amazon is essentially giving all these this tooling to create new software apps but as a software player how do you guys look at that how are you modernizing you know your platform and what do you see is the outcome yeah so you know it's interesting you talked about VSD in New York obviously and I spoke about it and when I talked about two things over there which was really ease of use and simplicity and and that's really where the customers are gravitating we have to make sure that any platform in the software industry has the 3.click to value mantra built in you can't be having the green screens anymore so Veritas has taken the same approach we're really looking at ease of use and simplicity and three clicks to value so that's a big trend you know I talked about AI and machine learning and deep learning you know gone are the days where everyone is reacting to something now it's all predictive analytics how do I garner more information so we're building AI and machine learning into our platform where if there's an outage we're going to tell you beforehand some of the reasons before or beforehand into some of the reasons behind it and that way you can address it and not be a subject to a reactive catastrophe so I think those are two big things that I'm seeing in the software-defined storage and the second thing is just an overall ecosystem right so it's not just about standalone value but how do you collaborate with the rest of the software providers to build a bigger and better solutions as an example our relationship with AWS is speaking very highly of that we're solving bigger and better problems as a result of this we just announced our alliance with pure storage with their data hub architecture we're able to do you know data protection with IOT s which is again another trend in the marketplace where we can share protect and collaborate with pure data as well well let's talk with the edge in terms of data protection for the edge how'd how does the edge IOT how does that affect customers data protection strategies and what's Veritas is angle there yeah so you know I mentioned this in in Microsoft ignite because Satya had mentioned this in his keynote saying that the edge computing there's a lot of proliferation around that and it's not just a compute fact because a lot of data has been generated in that too so how do you make sense of all of that data how do you which ones do you protect which ones do discard so Veritas has that solution which allows you to sift through all of that data figure out which one's important classify that and then help you provide data protection for the edge computing I'm thinking about yesterday's keynote with Andy Jesse a dizzying number of announcements of new products and services new innovations and it's and this is really de rigueur at an AWS reinvent is this is this pace sustainable I mean this this constant innovation I mean is that sustainable what are you you know it's interesting you asked me that question because it's the same concept of is Moore's lot going to be sustainable right so far we're seeing that it is and as a result you're seeing all these madness around innovation you know driverless cars and you know journey to the another planet in a I and and ml and full effect and all of this is going to reshape our future so far I'm not seeing any signs of slowing down as long as Moore's law is going to keep up with its multiplier effect I think we'll see better better lifestyle and more and more innovation just the amount of patents that we're seeing with new startups it's just off the charts so I'm a big proponent of innovation and I think this will this will continue going on well I think if I could comment I think Moore's Law in many ways was was one-dimensional I mean you had the doubling of you know performance every 18 months whatever it is now you have this multi-dimensional innovation combination Moore's Law fine but you've got data you've got machine intelligence applied to that data and you've got the cloud at scale so this you have this combinatorial effect that has multiplicative effects on innovation so that our argument is the curve is actually bending you know into a nonlinear and it's mind-boggling there's big pace of innovation you certainly see that here from from Amazon it seems to be accelerating and it's it's underscored by the number of announcements that this company is making others trying to keep pace them forcing their customers to keep pace it's him it actually feels like it's it's speeding up not decelerating without a doubt and I think it depends on the type of company you're talking about if you're a startup company you know and have any of the legacy things that you're talking about you're spending all of your IT spent on innovation you look at a classy IT spend equation 85% of it just to keep the lights on and less than 10% on innovation I think that is mind-boggling to me and that's why some of these new startups are constantly challenging you know fortune 500 companies whose lifespan used to be 65 years but now at 16 years and it's constantly getting down because of this effect as well and I think that's a great point if if you're stuck in that 85% technical debt world and you don't allocate enough for innovation yeah it's it's going to be problematic and so what we see is customers looking at it as a portfolio we got run the business we have grow the business we have transformed the business we're going to deliberately allocate cash to each of those and hopefully bet on the right things yeah not a doubt I mean look at the at the end of it as a result of all these different phenomenons that we're talking about it is good for consumers because they're looking at more and more options better technology and those sort of fierce competition is always good for everyone as consumers as well as enterprise great well Harish thank you so much for coming on the cables my pleasure I'm Rebekah night for DES Volante we will have more of the cubes the live coverage of AWS re-invent coming up in just a little bit [Music]

>> From Tavern on the Green, in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day, brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the beautiful Tavern on the Green, in the heart of Central Park. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name's Dave Vellante. We're covering Vertias Solution Days, #VtasVision. Veritas used to have the big, single tent, big tent customer event, and decided this year, it's going to go belly to belly. Go out to 20 cities, intimate customer events where they can really sit down with customers across from the table; certainly, this beautiful venue is the perfect place to do that. Harish Venkat is here as the VP of Marketing and Global Sales Enablement at Veritas. Thanks for coming on, Harish. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> So, we're going to change it up a little bit. Let's hit the Escape key a few times and talk about >> Yeah. >> some of the big mega trends that you're seeing. You spend a lot of time with customers. You had some intimate conversations today. What do you see as the big trends driving the marketplace? >> So at my level, what I observe with the highest thing is simplicity, instant gratification, is two things that customers love. Forget about customers, even we as individuals, we love simplicity and instant gratification. Examples around that, you know, think about back in the days where you had to take a picture, process the film, and then realize, "oh my god, the film's not even worth watching." Now you have digital photography, you take millions of pictures, and instantly you view the picture, and keep whatever you want, delete whatever you don't want. A small example of how simplicity and instant gratification is changing the world. In fact, if you listen to Warren Buffett, he'll say, "Invest in companies that is making your life a lot easier," so, if I spread that across the entire industry, I can go on with examples like Netflix disrupting Blockbuster because it made it easy for customers to watch movies at their time, and making it easy for consumption. You look at showrooming concept, where you go to Best Buy's of the world and many others, and look at a product, but you don't buy it right there. You go to your phone and say, "okay, do I do a price compare?" And then order it on the phone, where someone delivers it to your house So the list goes on and on, and the underpinning result as a result of this is disruption, all right? You look at Fortune 500 companies, just in the last decade. Over 52% of those companies have been disrupted and the underpinning phenomenon is all about instant gratification and simplicity. >> And Amazon is another great example of, I remember when my wife said to me, "Dave, you got to invest in this company." It was like... 1997. >> Yeah. >> Invest in this company, Amazon? >> Yeah. >> At the time, it was mostly books, but they started to get into other retail, so right-- >> We missed that boat, didn't we? >> I actually did, but I sold, ah! (laughs) >> I never lost money making a profit, so okay. So, at the same time, customer... Customers just can't get there... >> Yeah. >> Overnight, so what are some of the challenges that they have in getting to that level of simplicity? >> Yeah, so you look at IT spend, and when you look at the breakdown of IT spend, you'll see that about 87%, and in many cases, even greater than 90%, they spend just to keep the lights on and these are well-established companies that I'm talking about. In fact, I was doing a Keynote in, in Minneapolis one time and a CIO came and said, "Harish, I totally disagree." "In my company, it's 96%." >> (Dave laughs) >> Just to keep the lights on! So you're talking about less than 10% of your IT spend gone towards innovation, and then you look at emerging companies who are spending almost 100% all around innovation, leveraging the clouds of the world, leveraging the latest and greatest technology, and then doing these disruptions, and making things simple for consumption, and as a result, the disruption happens, so I think we have an opportunity to re-balance the equation in the enterprise space, and making it more available for innovation than just keeping the lights on. >> So part of that... the equation of shifting that needle, moving that needle, if you will, just eliminating non-value-producing activities that are expensive. We know, still, IT is still very labor-intensive, so we got to take that equation down and shift it. Are you seeing companies have success in shifting, re-training people toward digital initiatives and removing some of the heavy lifting, and what's driving that? >> Yeah, so I think it's a journey, right? So, I mean, the entire notion of journeying to the cloud is one of the big initiative to take out heavily manual-intensive, data center-intensive, which is costing a lot of money. If I can just shift all of those workloads to the cloud, that'll help me re-balance the equation. I view the concept of data intensity, which is really two variables to it. Back to your point, if I can take the non-core activity, rely on my partner ecosystem to say what is best in class solutions that I can use as my foundation layer, and then innovate on top of it, then yes, you have the perfect winning formula to really have a lot of market share and wallet share. If you're trying to do the entire stack by yourself, good luck. You'll be one of those guys who will be disrupted. There is no doubt. >> So well, okay, that says partnerships are very important. >> Without a doubt. >> You're not too alone. >> Channel is very important. >> Yes. >> So, so what do you see, in terms of the ebb and flow in the industry, of partnerships, how those are forming? Hear a lot about "co-opetition," which is kind of an interesting term, that is now, we're living. >> Yeah. >> What's your, what's your observation about partnerships, and how companies are able to leverage them? What's best practice there? >> Yeah, so just as Veritas, we're a data protection leader company. We have incredible market share and wallet share, amongst the Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies, but even within our incredible standing, we have to rely on other partners. We don't do everything on our own. We have incredible relationship with our cloud service providers, with the hyper-converged system to the world, like Nutanix. We just announced Pure today, so when we combine those partnerships, we can offer incredible solutions for our customers, who can then take care of the first variable that I talked about, and then innovate on top of it. So I think partner ecosystem is extremely important. For customers, it's very important that they pick the right players, so they don't have to worry about the data, and they can continually focus on innovation. >> We were talking to NBC Universal today, and one of themes in my take-aways was he's trying to get to the... he's a, basically a data protector, backup administrator, essentially, but he's trying to get to the point where he can get the business lines to self-serve. >> Yeah. >> And that seems to me to be part of the simplicity. Now... an individual like that, got to re-skill. Move toward a digital transformation. Move that needle so it's not 90% keeping the lights on. It's maybe you get to 50/50. >> Yeah. What are you seeing in terms of training and re-education of both existing people and maybe even how young people are being educated, your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think the young people coming out of college, they're already tuned to this, so to me, those are the disruptors of the world. You got to keep an eye on those millennials of the world because you don't have to train them more, because they're coming out of college, you know. They don't have the legacy background. They don't have the data centers of the world. They are already in the cloud. They're born in the cloud, sort of individuals, so I think the challenge is more about existing individuals who have the pedigree of all the journey that, you and I, we have seen, and how do you re-tune yourself to the modern world? And I think that presents an opportunity to say, "Okay look, if you don't adapt real quick," "you don't have a chance to survive" "in this limited amount of time you have in the IT space," but having said that, we're also seeing that you have some time window, and that time window will continue to shrink, so when we talk about this transformation journey, you can see year after year, the progress that, that's been made in the transformation, this leap and bound, and that's all related to Moore's Law. You think about computer and storage, it's becoming a lot cheaper, and so the innovation rate is continuing to go up. So you have very limited window: adapt or die. >> So, Harish, we were talking about, we've talked about digital transformation. We talk about simplifying; we're talking about agility. We're talking about shifting budget priorities, all very important initiatives. How is Veritas helping customers achieve these goals, so that they can move the needle from 90% keep the lights on to maybe 50/50, and put more into innovation. >> So four major themes: one is data protection. If you don't have your core enterprise asset, which is your data protected, then you can't really innovate anything on top of it. You'll constantly be worrying about what happens if I have a ransomware attack, what if I have a data outage, so Veritas takes care of it, back to the notion that you pick the best players to take care of the fundamental layer, which is around the data. The second thing that I... I would say Veritas can help is the journey to the cloud. Cloud, again, is another instrument for you to take out cost out of your data center. You're agile, you're nimble, so you can focus on innovation. Do you see the trend? So again, Veritas helps you with that journey to the cloud. It allows to move data and application to the cloud. When you're in the cloud, we protect your data in the cloud. The third thing I would say is doing more with less. I talked about the IT equation already. Software-defined storage allows you to do that. And the last thing I would say is compliance. We can't get away from compliance, the fact that Veritas has solutions to have visibility around the data. You can classify the data. You can always be compliant working with Veritas. You take care of these four layers, you don't have to worry about your data asset. You can worry about innovation at that point. >> So it, to me, it's sort of a modern version of the rebirth of Veritas. When Veritas first started, I always used to think of it as a data management company, not just a backup company. >> Right. >> And that's really what we're talking about here today, evolving toward a data-centric approach, that full life cycle of data management, simplifying that, bringing the cloud experience to your data wherever it is. Could be "on-prem." >> Yeah. >> Could be in the cloud, sort of this API-based architecture, microservices, containers... >> Yep. >> All the kind of interesting buzzwords today, but they enable agility in a cloud-like experience, that Netflix-like experience that you were talking about. >> Absolutely, right, so we're super excited. The one thing I would also say is what our latest net backup, 812, the other thing that I talked about, which is simplicity and ease of use: we are addressing both of that in addition to the robust brand that we have around protecting data. So you now you have simplicity, ease of use, instant gratification, all the basic ingredients, and Veritas is here to protect them. >> Harish, it's been a great day. Thanks for helping me close out the segment here. This venue is really terrific. It's been a while since I've been at Tavern on the Green. Some of you guys, I don't think you've ever seen it before. Seth's down here; he's, he's a city boy but we country bumpkins up in Massachusetts, we love coming down here, in the heart of Yankee country. So thanks very much-- >> Of course. >> For helping me close out here, great segment. All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We're out here, from New York City, Tavern on the Green. You've been watching theCUBE; I'm Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (light electronic music)