>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Dave: We're here at Veritas Vision, #VtasVision, The Truth in Information. This is a company that was founded in 1983 and has gone through a very interesting history, acquired by Symantec for around 15 or 16 billion dollars and then spun back out and purchased by a private equity Carlyle Group in 2005 for about 7 billion net of cash; it's about a two and a half billion dollar company with a really interesting growth plan, one that involves transforming from what many consider to be a legacy backup company into a multi cloud, hyperscale, data protection, value of information organization. My name is Dave Valente and I'm here with Stu Miniman. Stu! Good to see you. >> Stu: Great to be here with you, Dave. It's interesting, yeah, Veritas Company, I've known for, I don't know, gosh, about 20 years and they kind of went under the radar a little bit, under the Symantec piece and now back at it, but you know gosh, felt like a time warp hearing about like Netbackup, you know? A product that you know well, entrenched in the market, has lots of customers, so you know, in talking to the people here, people on board Veritas, some, you know, very veteran to the company, a lot of new faces though, and you know, they say it's energy, innovation, bringing as Bill Coleman who we're going to have on shortly, it's about the software-defined, multi cloud, hyperscale word so you know, A for hitting all the buzzwords and excited to, in the next two days, to kind of dig in and see where the reality is. >> Dave: Yeah, and you know, Stu, you know me, Stu. I like to look at the structure and the organizational structure and the market caps and things like that, but I always felt like, you know Veritas kind of disappeared under Symantec's governance and now, it is breaking out. I love the new private equity play, I want to hear from Bill Coleman about that, what the relationship is with Carlyle, you know it used to be that private equity would come in and they would just suck all the cash out of a company, I mean the classic example was ZA, right? They would maybe do some acquiring companies, they would maybe buy cashflow positive companies, take on more debt, suck all of the cash out and leave the carcass. That's not the new private equity way. We see that with Riverbed, we see that with Infor, VMC, and many, many others have said, you know what, the public markets aren't going to give us the love that we need, we're going to go private, we're going to get a deal on the company, we're going to invest in that company, invest in R&D, build the asset value of that company, maybe even in some cases do acquisitions, grow it, and then maybe do another exit, and that is a great way, a better way in fact, for these private equity firms to really cash in and I think Veritas is an interesting asset from that regard. >> Stu: Yeah, absolutely, I think back, you know, Dave, when I worked at EMC, you know Veritas was one of those competitors that EMC was like, we got to keep an eye on them. Veritas would put out, you know, billboards and have people running around in shirts that said No Hardware Agenda. One of the reasons I think that Veritas also disappeared a little bit under Symantec, is while they were great for lots of environments, they didn't really hit hard that wave of virtualization. Interesting thing is that, you know, EMC bought VMware, everybody knows, but the company that almost bought VMware was Symantec, and lots of us say, what if? What if Symantec had bought Vmware, would they, as a software company, really kind of squash that, you know, could Veritas have then really, integrated very deep here, and now as, Dave, you and I were at the Veem show earlier this year, and they said Veem and VREN, you know, the tenures of virtualization, and now hopping on multi cloud, well, you know, a lot of that message I hear from companies like Veem, companies like NetApp, you know, software-based storage companies, if you're not living in that multi cloud world, you know, what is your future, so. >> Dave: Well, to your point. >> Stu: Microsoft and Google, Amazon, and how those all fit. >> Dave: To your point, with no hardware agenda, Veritas was always viewed as the company with that sort of open software glue to bring together the data management pieces, and as I said, it sort of got lost over the last several years under Symantec. When you hear the keynotes this morning, you hear a story of information, information value, leveraging that information, information governance, a lot of talk about GDPR, obviously a lot of talk about backup, multi cloud, really an entirely new vision from the brand that has frankly become Veritas over the last decade, and new management really trying to affect that brand and send a message to customers that we hear you, that we're self-deprecating, talking about their UX not being what it should be, listening to customers, and putting forth the vision around not just the backup, but data management, now, that's always been the Holy Grail. Can you use that data protection backup corpus of data to really leverage that, to turn information into an asset, that's something that we're going to be unpacking all week with executives, partners, customers, analysts and the like. Last thought before we get to our next guest. >> Stu: Yeah, Dave, absolutely, you know, a bunch of new products are out there, it's that balance of how do they build off of their brand, all of their customer adoption, and now they have a lot of new things going on, so how do they fit in that environment, how do they differentiate, because everyone's trying to partner with the mega clouds, and it's not just the big three that we talk about. IBM and Oracle are two big partners that Veritas is talking about here, and something like hyperconverged infrastructure, Veritas has a play there. They came out with an object story, you know, you're asking me like wait, is this an array, or is it, well no, it's Veritas, it's software, it's always going to be software. Joseph Skorupa who was giving one of the super sessions, we're going to have him on to say your infrastructure does not differentiate you, it is your data, and that is what they want to highlight to the top. I think a message that we in general agree with, and looking forward to digging into it. >> Dave: Okay, so we'll be here for the next two days and what we like to do in theCUBE is what we hear in the messaging, and then we like to test that messaging, poke at it a little bit with the executives, talk to the customers about it, see how well it aligns, and then opine on where we think this is going, but if you were at Vmworld, you knew that data protection was the hottest category, it's an exploding area, a lot of dynamism, because it's all about the data, so we'll be talking about that, digital business. Keep right there everybody, this is theCUBE. Veritas Vision, #VtasVision. We'll be right back with our next guest, right after this short break. (electronic music)