>> Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE! Covering CommVault Go 2018. Brought to you by CommVault. >> I hear the train a'comin'. It's rollin' round the bend, and I ain't seen the sun shine since I don't know when. Oh, you're watching theCUBE, and we're in Nashville, Tennessee. Yes, Johnny Cash, he played his last days here. And I'm Stu Miniman with Keith Townsend. And helping us to round up the program, he's wearing a He Wore Black shirt >> Yes I am. >> Which is a Johnny Cash tribute band. And my only guest of the day wearing cowboy boots. Friend of mine, happy to help us round this up, David Chapa, who's the founder of the CTO Group, also known as Mister Recovery in the industry. David, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. CTE Group. >> CTE Group, I'm sorry. >> I haven't made the O level yet. >> I'm sorry, I'm confusing things with the CTO Advisor here. >> I know, you got an O, you got an E, we have almost all the letters. >> We got all these TLEs, TLAs in the industry here, but thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, so my first time at the CommVault show. I've known CommVault for a lot of years. Keith's been here twice. What's your experience been at the show so far? >> This is my first time to the show. So far it's been very impressive. This show room floor is huge. I like how they set it up. They want it set up like it's a street, and they were successful. You can walk down, you can stroll down a street. You can go and see different vendors. I thought it was, as far as the design, I thought it was really really good. Information's great. >> Yeah. What I found, "engaging" is what I'd say, that's what you want with a show floor. The booths did pretty well, but there's little pavilions where they're having lots of sessions. Every time I went by, there were people there. There's labs, people going away, and there's media and podcasts, and food and beverage, and all that stuff there, but a nice dynamic and really kept it going and that's been this show itself. I found it to be engaging. There's a lot going on, a lot of announcements. What's your take on CommVault? >> Well, I think that their transformation, they've been talking about, you know, transform the company. I heard a lot about, you know, people tag us as a legacy company. We're too expensive, we're this, we're that. I heard Bob say a couple times, "What 20-year-old company is not going to be called legacy?" There's some truth to that. But they've done, I think, a pretty good job of kind of laying out what it is they plan on doing. They've tried to simplify things. I look at different companies and I often say this to clients. You know, there's four things you really want to worry about in life when you're running a business. You want to make money, that's one of them. You want to make sure you have good customer satisfaction. You make sure your people are happy, and you want to make sure you make it easy for people to do business with you. And I think CommVault's really taking a hard look at the, how do we make it easy for them to do business with us. And so they've reduced the, they put all our products on one slide, which I thought was pretty impressive. They've also simplified the pricing, which I thought was pretty impressive. So, I think, what they are doing is they are trying to make some good strides to make those things happen and they are focusing on the customers as a result. >> All right. So, Keith, I'm going to let you ask some questions. But we talked some in our opening analysis, but after talking to customers, talking to their execs, what are you walking away with from this show? >> You know what? Some companies are transformed because it's just the natural flow of business. They are forced into competition. They have to react. CommVault's transformation is not a fluke. From the top down, this is not silos. This is not individual product silos competing in their individual silo. We talked to Al Bunte, the COO, and he talked about doing the right thing by the customer because it's the right thing to do. And if you don't focus on money, money will come. I think we all like to have those idealistic views, but, I think, it's something that on the surface, at least from this show, is working for CommVault. They are transformed. I ran a backup project. One of my first major projects of my IT career almost 20 years ago. And one of the big dogs was CommVault. Needless to say with any technology, much, much different company dealing with today than I dealt with 20 years ago. And I think I'd go as far as to say CommVault was a much different company than three years ago versus the first CommVault Go. >> Coming into this show certain things I was looking for. How do they play in the cloud? Okay. Are they actually doing things with AI? Or as I saw this joke on the internet that was a zoo took a donkey and painted stripes on it and said, "Typical AI start-up VC funded." You know, not actually a zebra and the like. And I tell you, the questions that I had, I think CommVault had a good solid answer. At the open this morning we said there wasn't anything that jumped out that was like, "Wow. I've never heard of that or thought of it." But, you know, good customer base. You know, strong brand in the industry. And making a lot of the right moves to get there. The announcements this week, anything jump out at you? Anything surprise you? >> Nothing surprised me. But, you know, things that jump out cause my focus with the CT Group is on really disaster recovery, business continuity, helping customers really understand the value of the data, and how to recover that data. I shouldn't say the data because it's about recovering the mission of the business, whatever that may be. And one of the things that I liked that I heard this yesterday and today, was about their recovery readiness report. I thought that was pretty interesting. Their interface is very clean and a customer can drill into the RP that they want. And I got a demo earlier from one of the developers and that was one thing that stood out. Because for me, it's all about the recovery. Backup is great. I've been doing backup for a long time. But if you can't recover that stuff, man, they, you know, once someone said that a backup admin is a great job because no one knows your name. >> (laughs) >> Until you can't restore the data, and then they know your first name, last name, and middle initial. And my middle initial is A, so you can imagine the kind of names I was called when that stuff wasn't happening. When you can have a plan, and that's the idea, disaster recovery plan, and then you can respond and not react, that's where you want to be. And I think that's what CommVault needs to deliver to their customers to be successful in this transformation is, how can they achieve that plan, and how can they be responsive and not reactive, cause reactive is when you make mistakes. >> So I think one of the things that I had tweeted earlier was that CommVault isn't asleep at the wheel. And we asked Al a challenging question, which was, "How do you provide these new features that's expected in the modern backup data protection platform, but yet please your legacy customer? I mean, some customers don't want the change. If they didn't have to upgrade their backup software for three years, they'd prefer not to. So one of the things I thought is interesting is that their walking a tightrope. And, Dave, I'd like to hear from you on your thoughts around their ability to please their traditional legacy customer while attracting net new customers. >> There's that word again, legacy. Now it's with the customers. I think as you look at the market, and you guys know this, I had a conversation with a health care customer months and months and months ago. Actually, I think it was about two years ago. And the CTO was really a legacy minded person. Why should we go to the cloud when everything is working? Why should we do this when everything is working? Well, the conversation I had with him was, "Your business is going to be accelerating. Your competition will be accelerating. And you need to keep up with the competition by adopting some of these things that will help you move faster, smarter, and make better decisions for your business." So those legacy customers at some point will have to make a decision that we need to be competitive in the market place and we're going to need new tools. Now for those customer that are using CommVault today, well, CommVault is sitting there with their new platform, the transformative ideas that they have to help them get there. So, you know, to try to answer your question, it's really hard. There will be legacy customers, of course, but those legacy customers need to survive. And you've got to survive by responding to the market demands. >> It was interesting for me to look at this ecosystem here. Talk about the partnerships. Talk about how their playing in multi-cloud. There are, potentially, a lot of threats to a CommVault out there. Not just, you know, the start-ups that are coming directly after this space that are well funded, but, you know, the same people that are trying to partner with in the public cloud, well stop partnering with the public cloud. They are driving a lot of innovation in the industry in doing this. What does CommVault need to do to stay successful, you know, grow their customer base, and, you know, accelerate through this transformation? >> Well I saw the interview that you did with Al. And the one thing he said was, "Listen to the customers." And that is one thing I would tell them too is, you have to listen to your customers. And you have to comprehend what they are saying. Not just understand what they are saying. Those are two different things. When you can comprehend what someone is saying that means you can repeat that with the same passion in your own words. So listen to your customers, really comprehend what their challenges are and how you can help them, either with the existing product or the features that you need to develop to help them get over that hump or that challenge they have. So that to me is the biggest thing, listen to the customers. That's going to drive the market. >> Yeah, David. I'm really taken a back by the amount of change, the amount of conversation around multi-cloud. We had a great conversation with the tech field data guys a little bit earlier about data management. One of the things that I'd like to hear from you from your industry perspective from CTE and helping customers with data recovery, and not just data recovery as you mentioned, business recovery. Are customers hearing the message from the CommVaults of the world that your cloud strategy, your multi-cloud strategies, starts with data, data management, data protection. Is that actually resonating with customers? Or is that a niche, I think, awareness? >> It depends on who you're talking to. So for me, I think any organization that wants to win the hearts and minds of the mid-market and the lower end of enterprise, you have to really start thinking more business centric. That's the focus of what we do. We look at business centric IT. And what does that mean? Well that means that you throw away the lexicon that we're so used to using in IT, and you really start to try to use the terms that the business will understand and comprehend. And the way you do that is by asking a lot of questions of the business. What's important? Why is it important? What's the mission? In IT, we should not be the ones that own the data, that own the application. We are the stewards or the custodian of that. And as the steward or custodian, we do know we have to protect it, but we don't know necessarily know why. But we need to understand that. And then, when we have that conversation with the with the business, then we can start talking to them about recovering the mission of that particular business unit. It might be two servers. It might be 40 servers. So is that message resonating with companies? I think, I think CommVault needs to do a better job at communicating at that business value level. And I think that this conference, this launching pad, if you will, is the starting point for them to do that. More companies want to understand how they can solve real business problems and challenges and not hear how fast your feature is or how cool this new widget is that you have in your product. They have real business challenges. They want to solve those challenges. >> All right. Well, David, that critical analysis is one of the reasons that I asked you on the program. Keith, it's been a pleasure doing the show with you today, as always. But before I let you off the hook, David, this is our first time doing the show in Nashville. I've barely gotten to see much of the city. Keith and his wife are checking out a little bit of it. I did get some Nashville hot chicken. But for those in our audience that maybe haven't been to Nashville, what are they missing here culturally, musically, and the like? >> Wow. What are you missing? Well there's a lot of great music. You can't find a bad musician in Nashville. If you do, they're not in town very long. >> (laughing) Run them out of town. >> Yeah. But Nashville is a very, very cool town. Downtown Nashville you walk around there at 10:00 in the morning you're hearing music. Live music anywhere you walk in. The country side is beautiful. So from a Johnny Cash perspective, you can go to Hendersonville and you can drive by where Johnny Cash's house was at right on the Old Hickory Lake there. It's burned down, but it's still, the foundation is still there. A lot of rich history in Nashville. You've got to come check it out. This is one of my favorite cities, man. And there's a reason why I changed my flight to get down to this show. I was already here in Nashville last week playing a music gig. I thought I could play the CommVault gig for a little while. I could do that. >> Excellent. So when you closed the show, what was the closer for the Johnny Cash tribute band? >> For me it's The Man In Black. >> All right. Well I appreciate you joining, David. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. For the whole crew here, thanks so much for joining us. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of the coverage from this show. All the shows we'll be at the future. Feel free to hit us up through social media if you have any other questions. And once again, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (techno music)