>> Narrator: From Chicago, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day, 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, we're here covering the Veritas Vision Solution Day. Veritas last year had a big tent event thay thousands and thousands of customers. They decided this year to go out to the customers. Like us, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Jeff Kroth is here, he's the manager of data management and analytics at Softchoice, which is a Veritas partner. Welcome to theCube, thanks for coming on, Jeff. >> Thanks for having me. >> So tell me more about Softchoice, what's your sort of niche and differentiation in the market? >> Sure, so Softchoice is about a two billion dollar North American IT Solution proivder, we're actually the number three Global Midmarket Managed Service provider. We provide the breadth and coverage across a variety of vendors, helping our customers modernize their IT infrastructure. >> So Midmarket is unique, you know, it's not big enough to have like thousands of people do it, data protection for example, they're Generalists, typically, IT Generalists, they're not small, not like the CEO doing the back up. So talk a little bit about the unique aspects of Midmarket from your perspective. >> Well I think some of the things that we bring to the bare Midmarker is helping customers who don't have that deep IT staff with our technology mentorship, with our skills transfer that we provide our customers, we have a managed service that we provide which really helps our customers do more with what they have. >> So data protection is one of the hottest topics going here at VMworld in August, and for the last two years it's been probably one of the hottest topics. That along with Cloud and obviously the AWS partnership with VMWare. Why is data protection so hot right now? What are the factors? >> I would say data protection and data management is hot. It actually comes back to the underlying data behind it, they say, Gardener says data is the new gold and the new natural resource. Well if you don't have your data protected, available, and modernized, you can't leverage things like data analytics to get the most out of your data. Our customers, we see, customers use data as a competitive advantage. Go back look at Blockbuster and Netflix, they weren't able to take advantage of their data and understand that, so really to me data protection is the foundation and building block to grow into an analytics environment where you're really taking advantage of the underlying data for that competitive advantage. >> And I want to do a little tangent here, cause when you hear things like, "data is the new oil, its the new gold," it's actually, in our view, even more valuable, and here's why. Oil, you can put a quart of oil in your car or in your house, but you can't put the same quart in both. Data, using the Netflix example, you can use the same data in a variety of different ways. So in some regards, it's even more valuable. So I guess the bottom line here is digital transformation, which is real, is all about how you use data and that has direct implications on how you protect data, doesn't it? >> It does. >> And so, the other thing is Cloud. You hear a lot of talk about Cloud, and Multicloud, and we're moving into this world of more distributed data. What kind of challenges does that present for customers? >> I mean we are a big Microsoft partner and have a big partnership with Azure, you know, helping our customers on that Cloud journey I think is an important part. One of the things and one of the trends that we're finding is ensuring that you're monerizing your current data platform as you do that data migration to the Cloud. One of the things we see is customers really struggle with cost containment as they make that Cloud migration. So being able to understand what the data is and ensuring that you're only moving the right amount of data and the right workloads to the Cloud to keep costs down, I think is one of the important things, one of the things we're helping our customers, making sure they're getting real value out of the Cloud and doing that cost containment. >> We heard this morning Joe T was talking about some Cloud repatriation and you definitely are seeing it he gave an example of a large company in Dubai who said, "we're going all in on Cloud," and they went all in on Cloud and said, "wow, this is really expensive." Make sense, right? Renting is often times more expensive than owning. So I look at that as, you know, those that have had to repatriate, a lot of that is poor planning so how do you help your customers plan which work loads should be in the Cloud and follow those laws of economics, and physics, and governance, you know the law of the land, how do you help them? >> So it's really a couple of things, we have a couple of assessments that we use to help customers understand their existing workloads and what makes sense to move to the Cloud and what makes sense to keep on premise. So that's an assessment that Softchoice offers. The other thing is aligning to Veritas's 360 data management strategy is really getting a deeper understanding of what that data is that you have so you're aligning the right costs associated with that data to decide what you move to the Cloud and what stays on prem and I think that's a big thing, it's really understanding what that data is and aligning it to what needs to be moved. >> We talked to senior leaders in IT and business, they tell us that if you got to move to the Cloud you really want to change the operating model, that's where you're going to get the biggest bang for the buck. What does that mean in terms of data protection? If you're going to go digital, go Cloud, change your operating model, that's going to have implications on data protection, isn't it? And what do you see as the-- >> It is, and what I think we're seeing in Softchoice as a whole, you know we are a big proponent of the Cloud, what I think we see that, you really don't think that customers are going to go fully Cloud. It's really taking that hybrid approach and aligning what applications make sense to go to the Cloud, what applications make sense to stay on prem. So really having that full view of your environment so you can make intelligent decisions on what to move to the Cloud and what to keep on prem, aligning to the usage of that data. >> Now what about your partnership with Veritas? You kind of exclusive Veritas, you work with other back up vendors? Maybe talk about that a little bit and then what do you see as Veritas's strengths and what's on their to-do list? >> Yeah, so we're a Veritas Gold Partner both in the US and in Canada. We're not an exclusive to Veritas, we like to take a very agnostic approach and really help customers understand what their environment looks like and what makes sense for them. Veritas is a key player as part of our data management strategy and going down the road of our analytics strategy, helping customers really understand the value of their data. You can't get into the analytics world unless your data is in the right place so, again we like to take an agnostic approach but Veritas does align very well from a data management strategy for Softchoice. >> Why, why is that? Is that their stack, they've just been around longer, they focus a lot on governance, and I heard things like categorization, throwing out Federal rules of civil procedure today, that's a long history, so why, what's so special? >> I would say it's the overall breadth of their portfolio, it's helping customers back up to Cloud, back up for the Cloud, it's helping customers do things like DR and replication. It's really getting that full 360 view, you know one of the things we're big on is things like Infomap and Data Insights and really helping customers really understand what the underlying data is, associating the cost with that, so as they move workloads to the Cloud they get a full understanding of what they're moving so they're just not blindly moving things to the Cloud, helping keep costs down. Again, when customers, like as in the example we saw earlier today, a lot of customers think that Cloud is a logical strategy for them but over time they see that it increases cost. So it's really about aligning the right sizing of your environment, moving the right applications, the right data to the Cloud and using that as part of your overall strategy. We really see customers really taking a hybrid approach, it's not ever going to be fully public Cloud, it's not going to be fully private Cloud, it's going to be a combination. >> So we're going to ask you about the competitive landscape cause you are sort of Switzerland here, even though got an affinity, it seems, to Veritas, but you've seen a lot of VC money move into the space, you're seeing a lot of specialists emerge, you've seen some startups come after the Incumbents like Veritas, certainly you know Commvault's another, IBM's another, of course DELL EMC, add those guys up they probably have three quarters on the market place so of course the startups are going to come after them. And they're got shiny new toys and probably developing in Cloud Native and probably talking all the right language. But how do you squint through the hype from the marketing side and sort of help customers figure out how they're going to have the greatest business impact? >> I mean I think that's a good point. I think we're seeing a lot of small niche players that are born in the Cloud or have this shiny new marketing collatoral that they're going to market with and I think what's important for us is making sure our customers understand a full road map on what they're trying to do. So, we do see a lot of upstarts that are going after some of the Veritas, the IBM, the DELL EMC businesses, the world. But it's really making sure you're not taking a point solution and trying to go forward with that, it's understanding Portfolio, like Veritas's that has that depth and breadth and really has that history and background. You know, Veritas has been doing this forever and they really know their stuff. >> Yeah, so we've stressed that platforms are important to pay attention to, you know an API based platform is going to beat a product every time and have some legs. It might be it might have other implications in terms of complexities, but it can drive your business forward as opposed to your point, being a point product. And I'm curious as to your thoughts, particularly as it relates to analytics, which is in your title. For years people have looked at back up as just insurance, people that are trying to get more out of it. But how are people using the corpus of back up data and analytics use cases, why the affinity between data protection and analytics? >> I think data protection and data management are kind of clumped into one category. If you don't have a modernized IT infrastructure and you don't have a good data management strategy, it's impossible, you know poor data in, poor data out. You can't make intelligent analytics decisions or have that data for your analytics team if the information isn't there and accessible and good data. So it's really having a very keen data management strategy enabling your analytics users to have the right data to make the right decisions, cause if you don't have the right data you can't make the right decisions, and no analytics tool can go in and make informed decisions based off bad data. So data management is definitely part of the overall analytic strategy cause it's really the first step. >> And why the, in the back up corpuses, because you've got visibility on that data and it's the logical-- >> Sure. >> The logical one place, even if it's virtual, to actually be able to do those analytics, right? >> Exactly. >> Okay, and then I'll give you the last word. Thing's that your learning here today at the Vision Event, customers obviously Chicago, big customer center, you're based in Atlanta another big customer center. We were just in New York a few weeks ago meeting some pretty senior level folks. What are you learning here, what's the conversation like? >> I think the one key thing that I've taken out is that really customers aren't going full Cloud. It's you know, I think I saw a stat and 92% of customers are taking a hybrid approach and leveraging a really full data management policy to be able to handle on prem, to be able to handle private Cloud, public Cloud, and the combination. Really having that tool set to give you visualizations across an entire hybrid IT infrastructure I think it important. And that's really one of the key takeaways. >> We would agree, we've talked for quite some time now, years actually how organizations can't just shove data into the Cloud, they can't just put their business up into the public Cloud, rather they need to move the Cloud operating model to their business. it's very clearly, that's the trend, you're seeing so many signs of that. AWS and VMware partnering up. You certainly saw Google do that and this summer with Istio on prem, Microsoft obviously with Azure Stack, huge presence in hybrid Cloud. So those predictions are coming true. Jeff thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Yep, thanks for having me. >> Oh you're very welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody, this is Dave Vellante, we'll be back from Veritas Vision Day in Chicago at the Palmer House Hotel, you're watching theCube. (soft techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you be Veritas. (light music) >> Welcome back to the Aria Hotel and Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stewart Miniman. Rama Kolappan is here, he's the Vice, worldwide Vice President of Product Management and Global Alliances. Rama, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. So, 360 is a big topic of conversation. It's a fundamental, strategic evolution for Veritas. Why is 360 Data Management needed? >> So, 360 Data Management is an integrated set of products and solutions, if you will, that helps you with data protection, also with copy data management use cases. If you want to move the data and workload for some of the resiliency services as well, and if you, if a customer is also looking for any of the data visibility, which is a very important part of the 360 Data Management. So, we can offer all of it as part of one platform. So it is a very powerful integrated solution set, if you will. >> So we should think of it as a platform, not a product. Everybody talks about platforms today, the API Economy, Platforms beat Products is sort of the mantra, right? Is that the right way to think about it? >> Correct. And, also, we make sure that the different solutions, which is part of 360 Data Management Suite, works with each other, right? For example, if you actually back up your data, you should be able to use the same copy to do a DevTest. So we have a solution called Velocity that is part of our copy data management solution. It should be used, you should be able to use the backup data to do your disaster recovery if you can, right. >> So how does that resonate with customers? I mean, I get the platform perspective, certainly from a vendor view, you got to have the platform. Do the customers see it the same way? Or do they just want to buy products? >> No, so it is a suite, right? And what customers want, especially enterprise customers, they're looking for, to partner with a vendor, like, for example, us. One is for data protection, primarily, in many cases. Once you protect your data, they're looking for instead of finding the products to use, I can use the same data and how can I get value out of it? So I need to have the visibility about the data itself, so we have our InfoMap solution as part of 360 DM suite, to give you the visibility of what that data is with all the metadata information through that, and once they back up the data, they also have other things to do with respect to moving your data, moving your workload, and especially with the cloud adoption, many of them are going through the transformation. There are some pre-consolidation cloud adoption, and so on, so forth, and they need to move their data and workload, say, from on-prem to cloud, and you can also do it from cloud to cloud also, which is coming soon. So, some of those challenges are very critical, and they are looking for someone like Veritas who can offer that solution for them, which is essentially protect it, move your data, workload, be able to do copy data management on it for DevTest use cases, be able to provide visibility, and the digital compliance is a big factor, which I haven't even gone deeper into. There are lot of solutions to offer for the customers. >> Rama, take us inside how 360 Data Management fulfills the vision that was laid out a year ago. I think back to early in my career it was, like, it was the hardware, you know, you follow the Tick-tock of Intel. Today, software, we can usually talk a little bit further about the roadmap but, you know, customers are going to hold you well, "Can I use it now?" Do you have all those pieces, you know? What kind of pieces have been filled in this week, and, you know, where are the pieces where it's more aspirational than where we are today? >> I'm surprised you remembered the Tick-tock Model, which is essentially go through the process and architecture change, alternating with Intel, right? That's the model, I was there for like nine years or so. >> Marching to the cadence of Moore's law, that's what we used to do as an industry. >> Exactly. So, for 360 Data Management, we announced it last year at Vision and at that point, we are putting in the solutions and the use cases together. And what we did, we worked really hard the past one year to make sure that we put these solutions together. One, they should work with each other. Two, we have a tighter integration. And three, we should be also adding more solutions together and we made it also easier for a customer to buy, it's one SKU, right? So, you don't need to have multiple SKUs to do 10 different things. It's much easier to buy. It'll do all the things that an enterprise customer want with all the stuff that I talked about earlier, and from there on, they should be also, we should be able to also cater to some of the newer problems that customers have, which is, essentially, we launched CloudPoint, for example, which does a snapshot management, and we're adding more capabilities to it, and going forward, you will see that the 360 Data Management will evolve to cater to the customer needs. We always place customer in the forefront and make sure that their needs are met first, and that's the stuff that will design the solution, based on their needs. >> We spoke to Mike Palmer this morning and one of the things he said that kind of matured a little bit is, "That interaction with the cloud, when you get down into it, it's nice to talk about public clouds and people use many clouds but they're all a little bit different." So, maybe take us inside, there's a couple announcements you made, maybe give us a little bit of color on that and, you know, come on, tell us how is it working with all these big players? >> So, I run the technology alliances team here as well, so my team works with the various cloud vendors, which is essentially Azure through IBM to Google, AWS, and so on, so forth, right? So we are already working with AWS on multiple product integration, deeper integration. With Azure we are making sure that from some of the roadmap, like when recently we launched EnterpriseWorld, to make sure that it supports Azure, and then also we launched the VIP release that happened very recently. Support for Azure, as well. And we make sure that the other products that I talked about have the cloud as a significant piece of it, part of the roadmap. We have other vendors that are, we have partners that we are working with like IBM, Google, et cetera. They have their own strengths and we are initially going to go, we already sell on a backup as part of our, with IBM. We've been doing that business with them for more than 10 years, right? So there's a lot of moving parts in the sense that they are coming up with a lot of innovation. We are coming up with a lot of innovation and we make sure that we deliver what the customers want with those cloud vendors. And a very simple example is that if you want to do a data and workload migration on-prem to cloud, we can help with that very critical use case for anyone who's going through, looking at cloud transformation and journey to cloud. And, likewise, basic use cases also like backup to cloud, backup in cloud, disaster recovery, migration, DevTest, and these use cases is what we target, and it is part of the 360 Data Management suite itself. >> Can I ask you, it's kind of a wonky question, but it's something I'm curious about, and we talked to Mike Palmer a little bit about it, the challenge of integrating to various cloud services, in the non-trivial nature that, his answer was actually quite interesting. He said, "Listen, it was a lot harder "when we had a gazillion OS's, a lot easier now." But I want to understand that better. So, when you look at, and I am going to pick AWS only because I know it a little bit better and their services, but when you look at the myriad of data, sort of services that they have, are you just targeting the data stores? Like, an S3 or an EBS or a Glacier, or do you have to also think about integrating with other data types, DynamoDB, Kinesis, RedShift, Aurora, et cetera, et cetera. How far do you have to go, and what are the complexities of doing that? >> It's a very interesting time, right. There are various cloud service providers who are there, and each of them have their own services and their own storage, right? So, there's no one standard. S3 has been a standard for last one or two years or so. What we are doing is that we're looking at the portfolio, and we look at the use cases for what we are trying to solve for the customers in the cloud and based on that, we actually have some basic use cases which you don't need a full integration. You need some integration with some of those services, which is where we have people that are doing a lot of closer integration with AWS, and other service providers as well. Going forward, we will be using some of those, you mentioned about many DynamoDB, and other services that they have, machine learning services that they have. >> Stu: Sure. >> And different cloud providers have their own strengths and where they, what they offer. So, we will be looking to integrate with our existing portfolio with some of those services so that it is beneficial for customer. For example, if a customer wants to use only AWS, we are tightly integrated so that they get the best experience in AWS, same thing with Azure, same thing with Google cloud, same thing with IBM cloud, same thing with Oracle public cloud. So, that's our direction. First things first, get all of these basic use cases catered to for the customer. Going forward, have a tighter integration with their services. >> And your value in that chain is visibility and management. It's not so much optimization of that service, is it? >> So, I wouldn't call it as optimization of services. We focus a lot on the data visibility. I think in the keynote, and in my keynote, you might have heard also, is that some of the things that customers, we talk with customers a lot and we find that many of the, many times, they don't know what they have it. Everyone knows that it's called dark data, right. We provide the visibility so that they know what data they have before they do any migration. They know what needs to be migrated. And, as you all know, there are different storage tiers in cloud, like your S3, S3IA. You have your Glacier and it is expensive to bring data back from, say, Glacier to any other storage tier all on-prem. So, you need to have the visibility before you send the data out, right? So, we helped with that as well. So, visibility plays a very critical role in so many areas, not even just cloud but also on-prem as well. >> Rama, 360 Data Management's vision was laid out a year ago. A lot of the pieces are in place now. How are you tracking success, you know? Can you give us how many customers you're doing or just kind of growth, adoption, and how should we be looking forward to kind of measure and say how good this is doing? >> So, we actually launched 360 Data Management not too long ago. In the sense we put the package together, program together, and, as part of it, we saw extremely a lot of good traction not just from one geo, we actually saw a lot of traction in Asia Pacific, in MER, in Americas as well. A lot of the customers are looking for, I mean, there are three tiers to it, as well. We have bronze, gold, silver, right? And we see equal traction across the board. And, right now, I can't give you the numbers numbers, but, having said that, we see a lot of traction from customers on adoption and we have a huge pipeline where customers are very interested. These are backup customers who are looking to do many other things like resiliency services, like copy data management, and so on, so forth. So, the 360 Data Management really solves the problem, what they're looking for. >> Yeah. Can you give us a little color to that packaging and pricing? It's a subscription model to my understanding. >> It is a subscription model but-- >> Which is a little different than if you have a traditional and, you know, what are you seeing, what's the feedback been from customers? >> So, it is a subscription model when we went to market. We are going to be offering as a perpetual as well. So there is a gold, silver bronze tier, I had mentioned it. We have a Backup, InfoMap, and also EBFile as part of the bronze. And then you have, we have P as part of the silver plus bronze together and then in the gold, we have Access, also, as part of the solution. So, they can pick what they want and from our... Going forward, we do hear feedback from customers that they want perpetual as well. So, we already, we heard them. We'll make it happen. >> How about the small, midsize business, what are you, what are you doing for them? And can you talk about that a little bit? >> I'm glad you asked that because a lot of the 360 Data Management is centered around net backup, right? And with net backup, adark, all the good releases. There are also a lot of SMB and mid-market customers, and we have a solution called BackupExec, and I'm sure most of you are aware of BackupExec, it's been there for many years. So, BackupExec solves their problem and within BackupExec, we make sure that there are a lot of SMB customers who have like three or four backup products. And we want to make sure that there's one product that can protect the physical, virtual, and cloud environments. So, BackupExec does that. >> Last question. So, the ecosystem, it's evolving. You guys have great ambitions. Microsoft was here, had a big, big presence. Maybe just general thoughts on the ecosystem and, specifically, your relationship with Microsoft and other cloud suppliers. >> So, we work very closely from a strategic level with the CSPs. We call them the Cloud Service Providers. With Microsoft, we are doing a lot of, not just product integration for Azure, we'll also be supporting many things for AzureStack going forward. We're working with them on that. Also, I mentioned about BackupExec, we're also going to market. We are spending a significant amount of money to define the goal, to go to market with them, with their partners, and so on, so forth. Not just for BackupExec but across for all other products. That said, we also have other partners from the Cloud Service Provider point of view. There is a lot of effort happening from product integration, defining goal market, and as we define that, we're also engaging with their channel partners, who are also our channel partners, to help with the goal market. >> Cool, alright. Well, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, Rama. Really great to meet you and great to talk to you. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back. (light music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you by Veritas. (upbeat techno music) >> This is the Cube, the leader in live coverage and we're covering Veritas Vision 2017, Veritas the tagline here is Truth and Information. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman and we're excited to have Tom Shaffstall here, he's the storage network analyst at Exelon energy company and we love, Tom, having practitioners on because we get the truth, so welcome, good to have you. >> Thanks, good to be here. >> Set it up for us, your role, start with Exelon. Tell us about your interest in energy and what you guys are doing and of course your role at the company. >> We are a utility company that deals with both wind, solar, natural gas and nuclear generation. We have multiple, Exelon has multiple companies that are providing electricity in Chicago area and Philadelphia area, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland. We are a pretty big company, employee wise and we have tons and tons of data and I'm in charge of making sure that that stuff gets backed up and stored properly. >> You saw the Richard Branson keynote this morning I presume? >> Tom: Yes, I enjoyed that, that was very good. >> It was very good, providing a little tailwind for much of your business, certainly the wind and solar parts of it. Okay, let's get into it. You're looking after that portion of the infrastructure, maybe paint a picture for us as to what it looks like in your environment, the applications that you're supporting and actually, let me check that. Before we get into that, what's happening in your business that is affecting your IT strategy? You hear a lot about digital transformation, obviously costs, pressures, what are your priorities from the business and how does it affect IT? >> Of course there's cost pressures from the management, but we also have, we're moving into the cloud as of the last couple years, we're also starting to look at data center as a service for our customers, for the businesses, so I'm involved in several different things in regards to the data centers, the service, cloud infrastructure and managing and monitoring all that stuff. >> What is that, data centers as a service? >> Unpack that a little bit for us, cloud strategy, how's that coming about? >> It's actually been done very well for us. We've gone through a whole set of stages and proof of concepts but we've also worked well with Microsoft Azure because that's where we're putting all our stuff and we have a production side, we have a development side and we also have now a sandbox which is pretty interesting for testing. We're putting all those in together with the infrastructure that we already have in regards to making sure things are done properly, the security is done properly, the ownership of the accounts are done properly, so everything is done in a real precise manner through our process. >> Data center as a service is essentially your hybrid cloud strategy that encompasses the public piece which is Azure, your private cloud on prem and all the associated corporate edicts and security and compliance, stuff that goes with that, is that correct? >> Correct and we also have remote sites that we're going to be doing, we have a lot of energy plants around the country that are really small, they don't have real big pipe so data center as a service really works for them as well, that's the things we're starting to look into as well. >> Part of that is the service catalog, getting that house in order, is that right? >> Tom: Yes. >> Do you do chargebacks or showbacks? >> Tom: Yes we do. >> You do chargebacks. >> Yeah so that's all included in that. >> Have you always done chargebacks? >> Over the past several years, we've really built it up more and been more precise in our chargebacks. >> I've always wondered, I wonder if you can comment from your experiences and your peers, you know 10 years ago you would ask folks if they're doing chargebacks they say no, it's just too complicated, we just put it out there. Sometimes we do showbacks but as cloud has come into prominence, people seem to be doing more and more chargebacks to be more cloud like and more precise. Maybe that's tooling, maybe that's culture, what's your experience been? >> We actually started doing more and more reporting on our physical and virtual environments about two years before we actually started into the Azure cloud. I think that was in preparation for that because they saw that that kind of technology was already there in the cloud and we wanted to be prepared for that and make sure that the accounting side of things was a little bit more precise in what we were doing, in charging back. >> Okay let's get into it, Stu. >> Can you maybe sketch out for us a little bit, how much data does your engineering team cover how many sites, what's the purview and how do we, give us this thumbnail sketch. >> We have three main data centers right now in Chicago and in the Baltimore area. Currently we're taking one of those data centers and we're consolidating into the sister data center which is about 20 miles away from each other. We're dwindling it down and our utilities for instance, are managing their own data centers as well. We have multiple data centers all over the country. We're putting most of our corporate stuff into two major data centers so we're in the process of moving those and we have about nine petabytes of data that we're actually backing up and managing, storage wise. That's just on the corporate side, that's not even on our nuclear side, we have more on that side. >> And the primary applications that you're supporting, you don't have to do an application portfolio, we only have 15, 20 minutes, but generally speaking, maybe talk about some of the more critical ones from a backup perspective. >> Backup perspective, we have Just Net backup, both on the nuclear side and on the corporate side, we are also using Data Insight as well on the corporate side and we just I believe got our nuclear guys interested in Data Insight stuff. >> But in terms of the applications that you're, the data that you're protecting, what applications are they supporting, if I could ask it that way. >> We have HP applications, suites, we have R Man, we have Oracle databases, we have SQL databases, and I'm at a loss. >> A lot of the core database stuff, so pretty high SLA. Tight RPO, RTO requirements on those or they vary? >> They vary depending on the categorization of the actual database or the actual application. >> And how do you deal with the variability of those service level agreements? Are you able to provide granular levels of service or is it one size fits all? >> We go down to the granular level. We don't try to do one size fits all, that just didn't work in the starting of things when I first started in the company, we saw that they were trying to do that and it just doesn't work. >> Predominantly or exclusively a Net Backup shop in terms of your data protection, is that right? >> Yes, we also have snap falding and stuff with our net apps our shares so we are backing those up and snapping them off to the other data center and vice versa. We have that capabilities as well. >> You've been at this position for over a decade and you've seen the end of the client server era, not the end, but the tail end of the curve, internet era, obviously now seeing the cloud, virtualization and into the cloud, how have those changes affected your data protection strategy over the years? >> With our virtual side of things, we've actually migrated most of our virtual backups just to VM ware. They are actually handling all that within our infrastructure where we hold all the VM ware servers. That's all done outside of Net Backup all together. We do take care of the production side of the VM ware servers that we have through Net Backup and we treat them as physical servers, but all our test and dev, all that stuff, that's done and held for 14 days and then it's gone. >> We talked a little bit about, off camera, you said you were very happy with Net Backup so you really haven't brought in alternatives. What about the product and the company is appealing to you? >> There's been a history with me because in a previous life if you want to call it, I was in the financial business, working in the data center and I had the opportunity to get into the early stages of Veritas Net Backup four I think it was and then I got out of the financial industry and got into the utility industry and it was automatically Net Backup, I was familiar with it, it's very easy to use, it's just pretty reliable for restores and all that kind of stuff, good management. >> Tom one of the things we've been poking at this week is, of course Veritas has a lot of Net Backup customers, you're a loyal one, talking about this digital transformation and software defined multicloud, hyperscale world, some of those things I think resonating, what are you hearing, what interests you from some of the new products that they're announcing and how do you see the relevance of what Veritas is saying in your world? >> What has interested me so far in our sessions and in the keynote sessions and all, I'm looking into possibly talking to our architects about Infomap and getting that maybe possibly in house and/or the data resiliency because we're already got most of our stuff in the cloud that we're pushing out there. We don't have to push any extra data out there right now, but we may still do that, we may be still migrating some data like for archiving and that kind of thing. That's a possibility but we will probably look to Veritas for that when we go to do those things. >> Thinking about what you've heard this week, you hear a lot from Veritas about modern data protection, cloud, application mobility, things of that nature. As a practitioner, how do you look at those things, those capabilities, are those things that you're considering actually actively architecting or building a plan around. Maybe you could talk about the futures a little bit. >> With our data, we have to make sure there's accountability somewhere, we have to make sure that we know who the owners of these things are and we have to coordinate with them in regards to moving anything, of course. With sip infrastructure and all that kind of stuff, all those regulations, we had to make sure that all our data is held properly and going into the cloud, we want to make sure that what we're putting out there is going to be put out there and held securely. There's still some trepidation in regards to that but I believe our company is moving forward and wanting to do more and could get less of a footprint in our data centers for hardware and all that kind of stuff. For the governance of this stuff, we have the Data Insight software out there, it's helping us to recognize what kind of files are out there, who's using them, who has access to them, and we are starting to use that more as well. We're currently doing a POC to try and get ownership to that actual data because we really don't other than what Data Insight already gives it, this is the number of people that have been using this data, I'm giving you ownership is the way it was before, but now we're able to actually classify, this is the owner, he's going to be the one that takes care of that side. >> Tom I'm just curious, we talk a lot about there's the opportunity of data. Is data for your business, is it a challenge to keep up with the growth and manage it and govern it or is your business turning that into an opportunity? >> It's my full time job and my boss's full time job to make sure that we have enough room for all the data that we're doing. We are trying to do some neat things in regards to managing it better and keeping data, especially for us, our upper management decided to ask us the question recently is are we doing replication between data centers to keep our DRs and all that kind of stuff viable? We were like, yeah and then we started going into that perspective and actually got it so that we can definitely say yes, we have everything here and here, we are DR safe. >> Do you test that? >> Yes. In fact we just recently did a full test of our corporate financial DR data and it went off without a hitch. >> Excellent, all right Tom, we'll give you the last word on the conference, Veritas Vision, how do you like it, why do you come to this, shows like this, what kinds of things do you learn, what's of interest to you? >> I like to get more information as to what Veritas is offering. They're a very good company, I've had a very good rapport with our salespeople and with the engineers, with the help desk people that come in and talk to you and make sure that if we're having issues, they're right on, I've just had a real good experience with Veritas and the whole realm of things. >> Things at the show, anything interesting that pops out to you? Things that you've learned, the take aways? >> We're looking more now into some of the cloud capabilities that you guys have, especially with the resiliency program with the Infomap and again, more information with the Data Insight, all the capability's there, it's going to start bringing out. Just the beauty of all that stuff actually working together and being more cohesive, because before you had Data Insight you had Infomap, you had, and they weren't really communicating properly to really help each other report. It's really good stuff that's happening. >> Tom Sheffstall, thanks very much for coming on the Cube, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. Keep right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest, this is the Cube, we're live from Veritas Vision 2017, we'll be right back. (upbeat techno music)