>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of CONMEBOL. Future ready 2020. Brought to you by combo. >>Hi and welcome back. I'm Stew Minuteman, and we're at the Cube's coverage of Con Volt Future Ready. You've got the power panel to really dig in on the product announcements that happened at the event today. Joining me? We have three guests. First of all, we have Brenda Rajagopalan. He's the vice president of products. Sitting next to him is Don Foster, vice president of Storage Solutions. And in the far piece of the panel Mersereau, vice president of Global Channels and Alliances. All three of them with Conn Volt. Gentlemen, thanks all three of you for joining us. Exactly. All right, so first of all, great job on the launch. You know, these days with a virtual event doing, you know, the announcements, the engagement with the press and analyst, you know, having demos, customer discussions. It's a challenge to put all those together. And it has been, you know, engaging in interesting watch today. So we're going to start with you. You've been quite busy today explaining all the pieces, so just at a very high level if you put this really looks like the culmination of the update with Conn Volt portfolio new team new products compared to kind of a year, year and 1/2 ago. So just if you could start us off with kind of the high points, >>thank you still, yeah, absolutely exciting day for us today. You did comrade multiple reasons for that excitement and go through that we announced an exciting new portfolio today knows to not the culmination. It's a continuation off our journey, a bunch of new products that we launched today Hyper scaler X as a new integrated data protection appliance. We've also announced new offerings in data protection, backup and recovery, disaster recovery and complete data protection and lots of exciting updates for Hedwig and a couple of weeks like we introduced updates for metallic. So, yes, it's been a really exciting pain. Also, today happens to be the data, and we got to know that we are the leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for the ninth consecutive. I am so a lot of goodness today for us. >>Excellent. Lots of areas that we definitely want to dig deep in to the pieces done. You know, we just heard a little bit about Hedvig was an acquisition a year ago that everybody's kind of looking at and saying Okay, you know, will this make them compete against some of their traditional partners? How we get integrated in So, baby, just give us one level deeper on the Hedvig piece on what that means to the portfolio? Yeah, sure, So I >>guess I mean, one of the key things that the random mentioned was the fact that had hyper scale that's is built off the head Day files. So that's a huge milestone for us. As we teased out maybe 10 months ago. Remember, Tomball, Go on the Cube and talking about, you know, kind of what our vision and strategy was of unifying data and storage management. Those hyper hyper scale X applying is a definite milestone improving out that direction. But beyond just the hyper scale ECs, we've also been driving on some of the more primary or modern workloads such as containers and the really interesting stuff we've come out with your recently is the kubernetes native integration that ties in all of the advanced component of the head to distribute storage architecture on the platform itself across multi cloud and on premise environments, making it really easy and policy driven. Um, for Dev, ops users and infrastructure users, the tie ins applications from a group, Friction >>Great and Mercer. There's some updates to the partner program and help us understand how all of these product updates they're gonna affect the kind of the partnerships and alliances beasts that you want. >>Absolutely. So in the time since our last meeting that go in the fall, which is actually right after I had just doing combo, we spent a good portion of the following six months really talking with partners, understanding the understand the impact of the partner program that we introduced last summer, looking at the data and really looking at barriers to evolve the program, which fell around three difference specific. Once you bet one was simplicity of the simplicity of the program, simplicity of understanding, rewards, levers and so forth. The second was paying for value was really helping, helping our partners to be profitable around things like deal registration on other benefits and then third was around co investment. So making sure that we get the right members in place to support our partners and investing in practices. Another training, another enablement around combo and we launched in over these things last week is a part of an evolution of that program. Today is a great follow on because in addition to all of the program evolutions that we we launched last week now we have an opportunity with our partners to have many more opportunities or kind of a thin into the wedge to open up new discussions with our customers now around all of these different use cases and capabilities. So back to that simplification angle, really driving more and more opportunities for those partners toe specific conversations around use cases. >>Okay, for this next question, I think it makes sense for you to start. Maybe maybe Don, you can get some commentary in two. But when he's firstly the announcements, there are some new products in the piece that you discuss but trying to understand, you know, when you position it, you know, do you call the portfolio? Is it a platform? You know, if I'm an existing Conn Volt customer, you know, how do I approach this? If I use something like metallic, how does that interplay with some of the new pieces that were discussed today. >>Sure, I can take the business. I'm sure Don and mostly will have more data to it. The simplest way to think about it is as a port for you. But contrary to how you would think about portfolio as independent products, what we have is a set off data management services granular. We're very aligned to the use case, which can all inter operate with each other. So maybe launched backup and recovery and disaster recovery. These can be handled separately, purchased separately and deployed standalone or for customers who want a combination of those capabilities. We also have a complete data protection are fine storage optimization, data governance E discovery in complaints are data management services that build on top off any of these capabilities now a very differentiating factor in our platform owners. All the services that you're talking about are delivered off the same software to make it simpler to manage to the same year. So it's very easy to start with one service and then just turn on the license and go to other services so I can understand the confusion is coming from but it's all the same. The customer simplicity and flexibility in mind, and it's all delivered off the same platform. So it is a portfolio built on a single Don. Would you like to add more to it? >>Yeah, I think the interesting thing due to add on top of that is where we're going with Hedvig Infrastructure, the head of distributed storage platform, uh, to to run this point, how everything is integrated and feed and work off of one another. That's the same idea that we have. We talked about unifying data and storage manager. So the intricate storage architecture components the way data might be maneuvered, whether it's for kubernetes for virtual machines, database environments, secondary storage, you name it, um, we are. We're quickly working to continue driving that level of of unification and integration between the portfolio and heads storage, distribute storage platforms and also deliver. So what you're seeing today going back to, I think wrong his first point. It's definitely not the culmination. It's just another step in the direction as we continue to innovate and integrate this >>product, and I think for our partners what this really does, it allows them to sell around customer use cases because it'll ask now if I have a d. Our use case. I can go after just PR. If I have a backup use case, I can just go after backup, and I don't have to try to sell more than that. Could be on what the customer is looking for in parallel that we can steal these things in line with the customer use case. So the customer has a lot of remote offices. They want to scale Hedvig across those they want to use the art of the cloud. They can scale these things independently, and it really gives us a lot of optionality that we didn't have before when we had a few monolithic products. >>Excellent. Really reminds me more of how I look at products if I was gonna go buy it from some of the public cloud providers living in a hybrid cloud. World, of course, is what your customers are doing. Help us understand a little bit, you know, Mercer talked about metallic and the azure partnership, but for the rest of the products, the portfolio that we're talking about, you know, does this >>kind >>of work seamlessly across my own data center hosting providers Public Cloud, you know, how does this fit into the cloud environment for your customer? >>Yes, it does. And I can start with this one goes to, um it's our strategy is cloud first, right? And you see it in every aspect of our product portfolio. In fact, I don't know if you got to see a keynote today, but Ron from Johns Hopkins University was remarking that comment has the best cloud native architectures. And that's primarily because of the innovation that we drive into the multi cloud reality. We have very deep partnerships with pretty much all the cloud vendors, and we use that for delivering joint innovation, a few things that when you think of it from a hybrid customers perspective, the most important need for them is to continue working on pram while still leveraging the cloud. And we have a lot of optimization is built into that, and then the next step of the journey is of course, making sure that you can recover to the cloud would be it work load. Typically your data quality and there's a lot of automation that we provide to our solutions and finally, Of course, if you're already in the cloud, whether you're running a science parents or cloud native, our software protects across all those use cases, either true sass with metallic auto downloadable software, backup and recovery so we can cover the interest victims of actual presence. You. We do definitely help customers in every stage of their hybrid cloud acceleration journey. >>And if you take a look at the Hedvig protect if you take a look at the head back to, um, the ability to work in a cloud native fast, it is essentially a part of the DNA of that storage of the storage, right? So whether you're running on Prem, whether you're running it about adjacent, set up inside the cloud head, that can work with any compute environment and any storage environment that you went to essentially then feed, we build this distributed storage, and the reason that becomes important. It's pretty much highlighted with our announcement around the kubernetes and container support is that it makes it really easy to start maneuvering data from on Prem to the cloud, um, from cloud to cloud region to region, sort of that high availability that you know as customers make cloud first a reality and their organizations starts to become a critical requirement or ensuring the application of and some of the things that we've done now with kubernetes in making all of our integration for how we deliver storage for the kubernetes and container environments and being that they're completely kubernetes native and that they can support a Google in AWS and Azure. And of course, any on premises community set up just showcases the value that we can provide in giving them that level of data portability. And it basically provides a common foundation layer, or how any sort of the Dev ops teams will be operating in the way that those state full container state workloads. Donna Oh, sorry. Go >>ahead, mark area >>because you mentioned the metallic and azure partnership announcement and I just want to get on that. And one thing that run dimension, which is we are really excited about the announcement of partnership with Microsoft and all the different news cases that opens up that are SAS platform with Azure with office 3 65 and all of the great application stack it's on. If you're at the same time, to run this point. We are a multi cloud company. And whether that is other of the hyper scale clouds Mess GC, P. Ali at Oracle and IBM, etcetera, or Oliver, Great service writer burners. We continue to believe in customer choice, and we'll continue to drive unique event innovations across all of those platforms. >>All right, Don, I was wondering if we could just dig in a little bit more on some other kubernetes pieces you were talking about. Let me look at just the maturation of storage in general. You know, how do we had state back into containers in kubernetes environments? Help us see, You know what you're hearing from your customers. And you know how you how you're ready to meet their needs toe not only deliver storage, but as you say, Really? You know, full data protection in that environment? >>Certainly it So I mean, there's been a number of enhancements that happened in the kubernetes environment General over the last two years. One of the big ones was the creation of what the visit environment calls a persistent volume. And what that allows you to do is to really present storage to a a communities application. Do it be typically through what's called a CSR container storage interface that allows for state full data to be written, storage and be handled and reattached applications as you leverage them about that kubernetes. Um, as you can probably imagine that with the addition of the additional state full applications, some of the overall management now of stateless and state collapse become very talent. And that's primarily because many customers have been using some of the more traditional storage solutions to try to map that into these new state. Full scenario. And as you start to think about Dev ops organization, most Dev ops organizations want to work in the environment of their choice. Whether that's Google, whether that's AWS, Microsoft, uh, something that might be on Prem or a mix of different on Prem environments. What you typically find, at least in the kubernetes world, is there's seldom ever one single, very large kubernetes infrastructure cluster that's set to run, Dev asked. The way and production all at once. You usually have this spread out across a fairly global configuration, and so that's where some of these traditional mechanisms from traditional storage vendors really start to fall down because you can apply the same level of automation and controls in every single one of those environments. When you don't control the storage, let's say and that's really where interfacing Hedvig and allowing that sort of extension distribute storage platform brings about all of this automation policy control and really storage execution definition for the state. Full statehood workloads so that now managing the stateless and the state full becomes pretty easy and pretty easy to maintain when it comes to developing another Dev branch or simply trying to do disaster recovery or a J for production, >>any family actively do. That's a very interesting response, and the reality is customers are beginning to experiment with business. Very often they only have a virtual environment, and now they're also trying to expand into continuous. So Hedwig's ability to service primary storage for virtualization as well as containers actually gives their degree of flexibility and freedom for customers to try out containers and to start their contingent. Thank you familiar constructs. Everything is mellow where you just need to great with continuous >>Alright, bring a flexibility is something that I heard when you talk about the portfolio and the pricing as to how you put these pieces together. You actually talked about in the presentation this morning? Aggressive pricing. If you talk about, you know, kind of backup and recovery, help us understand, You know, convo 2020 how you're looking at your customers and you know how you put together your products, that to meet what they need at that. As you said, aggressive pricing? >>Absolutely. And you use this phrase a little bit earlier is to blow like flexibility. That's exactly what we're trying to get to the reason why we are reconstructing our portfolio so that we have these very granular use case aligned data management services to provide the cloud like flexibility. Customers don't have the same data management needs all the time. Great. So they can pick and choose the exact solution that need because there are delivered on the same platform that can enable out the solution investment, you know, And that's the reality. We know that many of our customers are going to start with one and keep adding more and more services, because that's what we see as ongoing conversations that gives us the ability to really praise the entry products very aggressively when compared to competition, especially when we go against single product windows. This uses a lot of slammed where we can start with a really aggressively priced product and enable more capabilities as we move forward to give you an idea, we launched disaster recovery today. I would say that compared to the so the established vendors India, we would probably come in at about 25 to 40% of the Priceline because it depends on the environment and what not. But you're going to see that that's the power of bringing to the table. You start small and then depending on what your needs are, you have the flexibility to run on either. More data management capabilities are more workloads, depending on what your needs will be. I think it's been a drag from a partner perspective, less with muscle. If you want a little bit more than that, >>yes, I mean, that goes back to the idea of being ableto simply scale across government use functionality. For example, things like the fact that our disaster recovery offering the Newman doesn't require backup really allows us to have those Taylor conversations around use cases, applications >>a >>zealous platforms. You think about one of the the big demands that we've had coming in from customers and partners, which is help me have a D R scenario or a VR set up in my environment that doesn't require people to go put their hands on boxes and cables, which was one of those things that a year ago we were having. This conversation would not necessarily have been as important as it is now, but that ability to target those specific, urgent use cases without having to go across on sort of sell things that aren't necessarily associated with the immediate pain points really makes those just makes us ineffective. Offer. >>Yeah, you bring up some changing priorities. I think almost everybody will agree that the number one priority we're hearing from customers is around security. So whether I'm adopting more cloud, I'm looking at different solutions out there. Security has to be front and center. Could we just kind of go down the line and give us the update as to how security fits and all the pieces we've been discussing? >>I guess I'm talking about change, right, so I'll start. The security for us is built into everything that we do the same view you're probably going to get from each of us because security is burden. It's not a board on, and you would see it across a lot of different images. If you take our backup and recovery and disaster recovery, for instance, a lot of ransomware protection capabilities built into the solution. For instance, we have anomaly detection that is built into the platform. If we see any kind of spurious activity happening all of a sudden, we know that that might be a potential and be reported so that the customer can take a quick look at air Gap isolation, encryption by default. So many features building. And when you come to disaster recovery, encryption on the wire, a lot of security aspects we've been to every part of the portfolio don't. >>Consequently, with Hedvig, it's probably no surprise that when that this platform was developed and as we've continued development, security has always been at the core of what we're doing is stored. So what? It's for something as simple as encryption on different volume, ensuring the communication between applications and the storage platform itself, and the way the distributors towards platform indicates those are all incredibly secured. Lock down almost such for our own our own protocols for ensuring that, um, you know, only we're able to talk within our own, our own system. Beyond that, though, I mean it comes down to ensure that data in rest data in transit. It's always it's always secure. It's also encrypted based upon the level of control that using any is there one. And then beyond just the fact of keeping the data secure. You have things like immutable snapshots. You have declared of data sovereignty to ensure that you can put essentially virtual fence barriers for where data can be transported in this highly distributed platform. Ah, and then, from a user perspective, there's always level security for providing all seeking roll on what groups organization and consume storage or leverage. Different resource is the storage platform and then, of course, from a service provider's perspective as well, providing that multi tenanted access s so that users can have access to what they want when they want it. It's all about self service, >>and the idea there is that obviously, we're all familiar with the reports of increased bad actors in the current environment to increased ransomware attacks and so forth. And be a part of that is addressed by what wrong and done said in terms of our core technology. Part of that also, though, is addressed by being able to work across platforms and environments because, you know, as we see the acceleration of state tier one applications or entire data center, evacuations into service provider or cloud environments has happened. You know, this could have taken 5 10 years in a in a normal cycle. But we've seen this happen overnight has cut this. Companies have needed to move those I T environments off science into managed environments and our ability to protect the applications, whether they're on premises, whether they're in the cloud or in the most difficult near where they live. In both cases, in both places at once, is something that it's really important to our customers to be able to ensure that in the end, security posture >>great Well, final thing I have for all three of you is you correctly noted that this is not the end, but along the journey that you're going along with your customers. So you know, with all three of you would like to get a little bit. Give us directionally. What should we be looking at? A convo. Take what was announced today and a little bit of look forward towards future. >>Directionally we should be looking at a place where we're delivering even greater simplicity to our customers. And that's gonna be achieved through multiple aspects. 1st 1 it's more technologies coming together. Integrating. We announced three important integration story. We announced the Microsoft partnership a couple of weeks back. You're gonna see us more longer direction. The second piece is technology innovation. We believe in it. That's what Differentiators has a very different company and we'll continue building it along the dimensions off data awareness, data, automation and agility. And the last one continued obsession with data. What more can we do with it? How can we drive more insights for our customers We're going to see is introducing more capabilities along those dimensions? No. >>And I think Rhonda tying directly into what you're highlighting there. I'm gonna go back to what we teased out 10 months ago at calm Bolt. Go there in Colorado in this very on this very program and talk about how, in the unification of ah ah, data and storage management, that vision, we're going to make more and more reality. I think the, uh, the announcements we've made here today let some of the things that we've done in between the lead up to this point is just proof of our execution. And ah, I can happily and excitedly tell you, we're just getting warmed up. It's going to be, ah, gonna be some fun future ahead. >>And I think studio in the running that out with the partner angle. Obviously, we're going to continue to produce great products and solutions that we're going to make our partners relevant. In those conversations with customers, I think we're also going to continue to invest in alternative business models, services, things like migration services, audit services, other things that build on top of this core technology to provide value for customers and additional opportunities for our partners >>to >>build out their their offerings around combo technologies. >>All right, well, thank you. All three of you for joining us. It was great to be able to dig in, understand those pieces. I know you've got lots of resources online for people to learn more. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you too. Thank you. Alright, and stay with us. So we've got one more interview left for the Cube's coverage of con vault. Future Ready, students. Mannan. Thanks. As always for watching the Cube. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah