>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by. >>Hey, welcome back to the cube Lisa Martin with Steven and Amanda. We are covering combo go 19 in Colorado day two of our coverage and we're excited to welcome a successful comm vault customer to the cube. We have from the main stage this morning, Matthew mag meet data center, director of Sonic healthcare. Matthew, welcome. Thank you for having me. This is so exciting. Oh good. We're excited to have you. So you got to, you are, you're, as your pen says, a combo customer champion. >>I am a customer champion a, I've kind of prided myself on that for the last few years. Uh, I like to get involved in the community and kind of help the other newcomers to come volt as well. As better my understanding and try to give the guys on the other end of the support line and break. >>So before we dig into Sonic and what you guys are doing and how you're working with combo, give our audience an overview of Sonic healthcare, what you guys do, where you're based, all that good background stuff. Okay. >>So I worked for a Sonic healthcare USA, so that's obviously in the United States. Uh, we are an anatomical and clinical pathology laboratory company. Um, we are based, uh, West coast central and East coast of the United States and we work with hospitals, doctor's office to provide, you know, quick and reliable laboratory results. >>So this is patient data. Yes. We think of, we think of data as I'm sure you do as well. It's the lifeblood. It's the new oil. It's all the things, right? That you hear the new bacon. It's the new bacon is that was like your quote? I saw that combo last year. >>Yeah, they had, they had teachers last year with that data. Yeah. Data is the new bacon. >>Well it's, it's critical, you know, regardless of if you're for Kim comparing it to bacon, I do like that. But it's also, there's the proliferation of it is hard to manage. Tell us a little bit about the it environment at Sonic. You guys have been using combo for about four years, but give us an overview of what you were working with before and how, what may be some of the compelling events were. >>So coming on board with Sonic, uh, the combo rollout was relatively new. We didn't, I didn't really come into a preexisting environment. It was like, okay, this is, this is what we're going to use. I need you to learn it and run with it, make sure that it works. Right. And um, you know, coming from other companies that had different software applications, I was always in charge of the disaster recovery. That's always been kind of like a, a beating heart for me. >>You're the Dr. Guy. It is apparently, >>it's really hard to find someone who's excited about backups. So I've put, it's like, yes, please take it. So I'm coming in and being able to mold this application to kind of how I wanted it was a little like touch and go at first because we had people out of our, um, overseas office that were, uh, handling already and is, they kind of set the stage of how they wanted it to go. But, you know, things change. We've got to kind of move things as we go, but I kind of owe a lot to them to kind of really introducing me to combo. >> So Matthew, one of the things that we've really enjoyed talking about at this show is everybody's ready. They're born ready, they know what they're doing, what it's preparing for when things do fail. So you talked a little bit on stage about some of those times when things fail and how today you're able to be here and you're, the other person in the D R group is here and you don't have to worry about walking away from the office and you know, having, you know, I guess not a Pedro anymore, but getting that call. >>Yeah, they need to be there. So my cell phone. But yeah, so bring us through some of those, you know, failure scenarios. We are always trying different things. You know, combo does offer a wide array of different solutions they have for plans and one of them is their active directory plan. And I'm leaning towards this cause this is my most recent failure is, you know, we were just, I've always had issues with active directory testing. The fail over and my first attempt at it was a failure. But I learned so much off the bat that I'm actually comfortable now that there might be a few tweaks that we have to do. By worst case scenario, we'd definitely be able to get it back online without any issue. But if we would've gone into it without testing, without that failure, who knows what could have happened. It could've been just a resume generating event, you know? >>Well, so you, you Stu alluded to it and what you mentioned in the keynote was, Hey, my other only other Dr. Guy is here in the audience. So I actually, I have >>team a data center team and we're all in charge. It's eight, eight people and we're, we're in charge of the disaster recovery. But, uh, the old gentleman who's with me is the only other one who's, uh, uh, done a lot of the combo training. He comes to Kai, he's been to all three combos, goes with me and uh, he's, he's probably the, if I'm not around, he's the next in line to take that. So if there's a major issue it would be one of us that they would contact by. We're both here >> and you're both here. Well that actually speaks volumes. It does. And we're comfortable and you know, we've been checking email for things but you know, everything's smooth sailing so far. >>I think I saw a quote from you, I think it was in a video where you said before it was like having a newborn. >>Absolutely, absolutely. I used to check like sign in. It's like 10 o'clock every single night for the first year that I worked for sign cause I was petrified cause you know, I knew that I was backing stuff up but I don't know, was it still running with it still being backed up? Did it pause? Was it causing performance issues on the other end? There were so many what ifs and I just, I was, I was a mess. I was a nervous wreck constantly, you know, working till one or two in the morning and then go to bed and then eagerly get up and start checking stuff even before I left the house, you know? And I'm like, Oh, okay, that's finished. But now it's like, yeah, I know I finished not worried about Matthew. I think back to early in my career it was the dreaded backup window is, you know, when am I going to be able to get that in there? >>Can I finish the backup in the window that I have? And we've mostly gotten beyond that. But you know, there's so many new now we were just talking with Sandy Hamilton who was on stage before you about some of that automation. Really great automation sounds good, but there's gotta be a little bit of fear. It's like shit, you know, talking about like texting, I said like we've all texted the wrong thing or the wrong person or you had the wrong person. So tell us your thoughts about how automation is impacting your world and how calm voltage. >> I actually have very little automation workflow running through comm vault right now. A lot of the stuff that we do automation wise lies on the VMware side. Um, so that's, that's been good. I haven't really implemented a lot just because I personally am not comfortable with it yet. >>I'm not against it. It's just something that I haven't really trained myself enough to say I'm going to leave and let this run by itself. I'm still like, Oh no, this could be better. This could be better. This can be better. So until I'm 100% comfortable with that, I think we'll just leave it at a semiautomated task of just, sorry, you said something down the road that you're absolutely even even sitting in keynote yesterday and listening about the Alexa automation and SMS tax, I like writing in a piece of paper to test that because it's something that I've always wanted and ever since combo go last year when they were using Alexa to check SLA and RPO and RTO, I'm like, I want to be able to do that. So that's definitely down the road, but it's on the back burner right now. >>So give us a landscape view distributed organization. You talked about your base in the U S but all of the different clinics and organizations that you work with, are you living in this multi-cloud world? >>So, uh, we are pretty much zero cloud initiative company. Yeah. I'm actually trying to work on a slogan, Oh no, cloud zero cloud and proud or something like that. But I'm not 100% sure. It's definitely not out of the question. But with FedRAMP co compliancy and HIPAA, there's just a lot of regulation between the data that we have for the U S that transmits back and forth, let's say Australia or Ireland or something like that. There's certain regulations that we have to deal with and uh, in the cloud there's, there's very few options of where you can actually have those servers. So it's right now, you know, on prem is kind of, it's kind of our jam. >>So as a lot of organizations are going through FedRAMP certification, I was just at one of Dell's events the other week. They're going through it. I know some other like e-signature companies are doing, a lot of companies are, are you paying attention to that? Is that something that you think in the future might provide more confidence? >>Completely transparent. It's something I should be paying more attention to that I'm, I've just, I really haven't really done as much research as I should have and you know, I take full responsibility for that. But at the same time, you know, there's, there's a lot of other things going on in the U S that until we implement something of that nature, I don't really think that I'm really too concerned about it. So Matthew, you've been to a few of these events. Last one, last year there was a lot of talk about the coming change in this year. Lot of new faces, new Hedvig metallic. Yeah. So what we'll want to get your impression on the executive changes, some of the, you know, are you seeing any indications of organizational changes and the products? What I'm seeing is I'm seeing new life to a product that I've always been told is a dinosaur, which I kind of laugh cause I'm like, well if this dinosaur is doing things that, you know, the greatest and latest and greatest things aren't or aren't really doing. So to see this new life, the new rebranding of the logo, the new leadership, the new acquisitions and everything is just like feeding fuel to the fire. That is combo. And, and I'm, I'm pretty excited. I will say that I'm a little bit more excited about the new additions to like orchestrate and activate since stuff like metallic. I won't really be implementing just because of our business practices. But yeah. >>Let's talk about in our last few minutes here, cause they actually talked about some of the new technologies with orchestrate activate yesterday and today, but in terms of support we just had as to mention, we just interviewed Sandy Hamilton and she's come on board in the last, I think she said four and a half months. Owning professional services systems, engineering support, customer success throughout the entire life cycle. Tell us a little bit in, in our closing minute or so about the support and training that you've gotten from combat that give you the confidence for you and one of your other guys to be here and not tied to your phone. >>I don't think I'd still be with combo if it wasn't for their support. I, I owe so much to their support. They've brought me through some pretty dark times with deployment, with troubleshooting, with failures where I thought that I had things right and it just didn't work. I've called in at one in the morning, got great support, I've caught any 10 in the morning and got great support, phenomenal follow up. Um, their, their community impact, like their forums and their customer champion. So much. Just additional information that helps you not have to call in and not make you feel like that, Oh, that failure. So I owe a lot to their support and their training because without a, like I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be on stage. I'm, I'm wonder if you could put a point on that, the, the forums in your participation as a customer champion, you're spending your own time, you're working with your PBM. >>Why is that so important and how is this the vibrancy of this community, you know, it belongs to the worlds, you know, naming the things that you learn. Somebody taught me, so why shouldn't I teach somebody else? And if that makes someone else be able to go out and ride mountain bikes or cook with their daughter or do anything like that, then I'm all for it because it got me, it got me through all that. So I mean I have 10 15 minutes on the customer forum to answer you. Oh yeah, I know that. I've seen that. I had a gentleman the first morning at breakfast, like I've had a ticket open for two weeks and they can't figure it out. And we worked together and actually got his problem solved, you know? And it was like the only reason is because I've seen that and I worked with combat and they showed me how to fix it and I retain that knowledge. >>That's awesome. DOE takes paying it forward to a whole new level. And it also volumes about how you followed Jimmy chin this morning and nailed it. I tried. It was very difficult, you know, I'm sure that you know why he was filming that solo climber. He was sweaty palms. I was definitely sweaty phone calls. It was, well, Matthew, what a pleasure to have you on the program. So much fun. Thank you. Congratulations on your success and we look forward to hearing it. Many more great things out of Sonic. Thank you. All right. First to a minimum I and Lisa Martin, you're watching the cube from combo go 19.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, good morning. Welcome to the cubes coverage of combo go 19 I'm Lisa Martin and it was stupid man. Hey Sue. Hey Lisa. Are you ready? I was going to ask you. Yes. Are you ready? >>I believe the statement this morning was, we're born ready. >>We are born ready? Yes. That was a big theme this morning. It's the theme of the event here at con Volvo 19 in Colorado and great parody this morning of all these old video clips of all these actors including the Lego movie stars from saying I'm ready. Even SpongeBob. That one got me, so we had a great day. Yesterday's to love some news came out Monday and Tuesdays a lots of great stuff to talk about. We had there a lot of their C level execs and let a new changes a call yesterday. Really got the vibe of, Hey, this is a new Combalt. >>It's interesting Lisa, because one of the things we've been talking about is the 20 years of pedigree that the company has. This Andre Mirchandani said yet they're doing some new items. I was talking to some of the partners in there like how come metallics like a separate brand, don't you worry about brand spread? We knew a thing about having too many brands on the program so it is the history, the experience, the lessons learned, the war chest as they said of all of the things that have gone wrong over the years and I sure know that from my time living on the vendor side is there's no compression algorithm for all the experience you've had and like, Oh we fixed something in that stays in the code as opposed to there's something brand new might need to work through things over time but metallic a separate brand but leveraging the partnerships and the go to market and the experience of Convolt overall. >>So if you want, my quick take is, you know metallic. I definitely, I think coming out of here is the thing we will be talking the most about their SAS plus model. I want to see how that plays in the marketplace. As I probed Rob, when we interviewed him, customers, when you think about SAS, it should just be, I worry about my data and I get up and running and they said they have a very fast up and running less than 15 minutes. That's great. But some of that optionality that they built in, Oh well I can bring this along or I can add this and do this. It's always worried that a wait, do I have to remember my thing? And as it changes down the road, do I have everything set up right? Those are things that we're trying to get away from when we go to a SAS or cloud model. >>And to your point, another theme of the show has been about operational simplification, not just what Combolt is doing internally to simplify their operations, but what they need to deliver to customers. Customers want simplicity rates. Do we, we talk about that at every show regardless of industry, but there is this, this line, and maybe it's blurring, >>like we talked a lot about blurred lines yesterday of too much choice versus simplification. Where's the line there? >> Yeah and a great point Lisa, so one of the items Sandra Mirchandani said yesterday in his keynote was that blurring the line between primary and secondary storage and I probed him on our interview is Convolt going into the primary storage market with Hedvig. Hedvig has got a, you know, a nice offering, strong IP, good engineering team. I think they want to make sure that customers that have bought head vigor want to keep buying Hedvig we'll do it, but it really, I think two years from now when you look back at is that core IP, how does that get baked into the solution? That's why they bought it. That's where it's going to be there. I don't think we're going to be looking two years from now and saying, Oh wow know Convolt they're going up against all the storage star Walton competing a bit gets HCI and everything. >>They have a strong partnership, so I think I got clarity on that for the most part, even though the messaging will will move over time on that, it will move over time on that. >> That's a good point that the song blurred lines kept popping into my head yesterday as we were talking about that. But one of the things that was clear was when we spoke with Rob Kalusi and about metallic, we spoke with Avinash Lakshman about Hedvig Sanjay as well as Don foster. They're already working on the technical integration of of this solutions and we even spoke with their VP of pricing. So from a customer, from a current Hedvig customer perspective, there is focus on that from Combolt's perspective. It's not just about integrating the technologies and obviously that has to be done really well, but it's also about giving customers that consistency and really for combo kind of a new era of transparency with respect to pricing. >>And another thing we talked about some of that transformation of the channel and Mercer row came on board only a couple of days officially on the job. He's helped a number of companies get ready for multicloud and absolutely we've seen that change in the channel over the last five to 10 years. Know back in his days when he was at VM world at VMware there the channel was, Oh my gosh, you know, when Amazon wins we all lose and today we understand it as much more nuance there. The channel that is successful partners with the hyperscale cloud environments, they have practices built around it. The office three 65 and Microsoft practices are an area that Convolt in their partners should be able to do well with and the metallic will tie into as well as of course AWS. The 800 pound gorilla in this space will be there. Combolt plays into that and you know, setting the channel up for that next generation with the SAS, with the software and living in a broader multicloud environment is definitely something to watch you a lot of news about the channel, not just from a leadership standpoint but also so metallic for the mid market >>really delivered exclusively through the channel but also the new initiative that they have. And we talked a little bit about this yesterday about going after and really a big focus with global systems integrators on the largest global enterprises. And when we spoke with their GTM chief of staff yesterday along with Mercer with Carmen, what they're doing, cause I said, you know, channel partners, all the channel partners that they work with work with their competitors. So you have to really deliver differentiation and it can't just be about pricing or marketing messaging goes all the way into getting those feet on the street. And that's another area in which we heard yesterday Combolt making strategic improvements on more feet on the street co-selling with partners, really pulling them deeper into enablement and trainings and to them that's one of the key differentiators that they are delivering to their partners. Yeah >>and Lisa, he, we got to speak to a number, a couple of customers we have more coming on today. It's a little bit telling that you know the average customer you talk to, they have five 10 years of experience there. They are excited about some of the new offerings, but as we've said many times metallic, the new Hedvig we want to talk to the new logos that they're going to get on board. That is something that for the partners has been an incentive. There were new incentives put in place to help capture those new logos because as we know, revenue was actually down in the last fiscal year a bit and Convolt feels that they have turned the corner, they're all ready to go. And one other note I'd like to make, the analogy I used last year is we knew a CEO was canoe CEO search was happening, a lot of things were in motion and it's almost as if you were getting the body ready for an organ transplant and you make sure that the antibodies aren't going to reject it. And in conversation with Sanjay, he was very cognizant of that. His background is dev offs and he was a CIO. We went for it, he was the CEO of puppet. So he's going to make things move even faster. And the pace of change of the last nine months is just the beginning of the change. And for the most part I'm not hearing grumbling underneath the customer seem fully on board. The employees are energized and definitely there was good energy last year, but a raise of the enthusiasm this year. >>Well Stu, first of all, you have just been on fire the last two days comparing their CEO transition to getting a body ready for a transplant. It's probably one of the best things I've heard in a long time. That was awesome. But you're right, we've heard a lot of positivity. Cultural change is incredibly difficult. You talked a minute ago about this as a 20 year old company and as we all have all experience and the industries in which we're in, you know, one of the things that's important is, is messaging that experience and talking about the things that that worked well, but also the things that didn't work well, that they've learned from that message was carried through the keynote this morning. That three customers on stage that we saw before we had to come to the side. And I, I had, my favorite was from Sonic healthcare. Matthew McCabe's coming on in shortly with us and I always appreciate, you know, I think the voice of the customer is the best brand validation that you can get. However, what's even better is a customer talking about when the technologies that they're using fail because it does happen. How are they positioned with the support and the training and the education that is giving them to make those repairs quickly to ensure business continuity and ensure disaster recovery. I think that to me that speaks volumes about the legacy, the 20 years of experience that combo has. >>Yeah, no, Lisa, you're absolutely right. There's certain products out there that we talk about uptime in 100% in this space. You, I believe the stat was about 94% success rate and we had NASA in the keynote yesterday talking about success versus partial success versus failures and Convolt really embraces that and has customers that we'll talk about that because there are times that things will happen and there are things that you need to be able to recover from ransomware. Often it is not a question of if, when it is going to be happened, at least. The other thing I want to get your comment on Jimmy chin who is the director and one of the, the cameraman of the free solo Oscar-winning free solo documentary definitely gave me a little bit of, Oh my gosh, look at some of the Heights and I was nervous just looking at some of this stuff they're doing. I like a little bit of lightweight hiking. I'm not a mountain climber, nothing like that. But he talked about when the camera goes on, there's that added pressure that goes on and it's sitting there. It's like, yeah, you know, we sit here live all day doing that. There's that, that energy to perform. But you know, we all appreciate the everybody watching and understanding that we're all human here and every time, every once in awhile a word or a mistake gets in there, but we keep going summit. Yeah, >>that's life. But also Jimmy chin, phenomenal. I think at 2018 they just won the Oscar just earlier this year for free. Solo. I have to watch that this weekend. But a couple of things that he talked about is that failure is a huge part of preparation. Couldn't agree more. What a simplified statement for somebody that not only has has skied Everest, the climbed Meru, I think they call it the shark fin of India, but what you talked about with what he documented with free solo and all of the thousands of sequences and he talked about that, Alex, I'm forgetting his last name, the guy who closed, who free soloed, El Capitan, all of these different failure scenarios that he rehearsed over and over again in case he encountered any of them, he would immediately be to remedy that situation and get himself back on track. I thought that message to me, failure is a good F-word if you use it properly. You know NASA, you mentioned yesterday and NASA was famous for coining in the 60s failure is not an option and I always say onto that cause I used to work for NASA, but it's a distinct possibility. And so what Jimmy chin shared this morning was electrified, but it also was a great understatement of what Combolt is helping their customers. We have to help you prepare for this. We can't help you prepare for all of it. As you mentioned, ransomware, it's not if but when. >>Well, right and both NASA and when the climbing is understanding where something could go wrong and therefore what the failures scenarios are. So you know rockets today you can't have a failure and by failure they mean look, if the rocket isn't going to work or something goes wrong, we need to make sure we don't have loss of life. That is something that if you look at blue origin and SpaceX that is pre eminent in there is we can't have another challenger disaster. We can't have some of these environments where we have the loss of human life. So that is number one. Some of the other ones, sometimes we know that the unknown happens or things don't go quite right. So being prepared to understand if something goes wrong, how do we recover from that? And that brings us back to the whole data protection and recovery of the environment because the best laid architecture, eventually something will happen and therefore we need to make sure that that data, the lifeblood of the company is able to be recovered and used and that the business can go forward even if some piece of infrastructure or some attack got through. >>There are, and there's inherent risk in every industry, whether you're talking about healthcare data, we talked with AstraZeneca yesterday, you know, genetics, clinical data, or you're talking about a retailer, doesn't matter. There's an inherent risks with every business and one of the most important things that I got out of the NASA talk yesterday, Jimmy Chin's talked today, some of the customers, is that preparation is key. You can't be over prepared. You really can't act fact. He said that you can't be overprepared in his line of work, but I think it applies to the inherent risks that any business has. Managing data. As we talk about Sue all the time, it's the lifeblood. It's the new oil. It is. It has to be available, accessible 24 by seven if it isn't and can't be. Businesses are massive risk in this day and age. Competitive competitors who have maybe better risk fault tolerance scenario in play. >>So that risk that they have to mitigate comes a preparation. We're going to be talking with Sandra Hamilton in just a few minutes about who leads customer success for combo. Really want to dig into the training, the support. We've heard that articulated from customers on stage that I don't wake up in the middle of the night anymore because I have this support from my trusted vendor combo and that is critical to any business staying up. Absolutely. We're going to hear from number of customers. I'm sure they're ready and we are ready for day two. We are ready. See, let's have a great day. Yeah, thanks. All right, so Sue and I will be right back with our first guest on day two of our coverage of comm Volkow for Stu. I'm Lisa Martin. We'll be right back.