>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California It is a cute conversation. >> Hi, I'm Peter. Boris, And welcome to another cube conversation from our wonderful studios and beautiful Paolo Alto, California. One of the biggest challenge that every enterprises faces how to attend to the volumes of data that are being generated by applications. But more importantly, that the business is now requiring because they want to find new derivative sources of value in their digital business. Transformations is gonna require a significant retooling and rethinking of how we used eight is an asset. And the directions that infrastructure, data management and business are gonna move together over the course of next few years. Now, have that conversation. Got a couple of great guests here. Josie Swoop is a VP of marketing veritas. Welcome to Cuba or back to the Cube. Yeah, thanks. Peter and Rick Clark is a CEO of opt are welcome. Thank you for the first time. >> Great to be here, >> So let me start here. Joey, why don't we start with you? Give us a quick update on Veritas and where your customers are indicating the direction needs to go. >> We've just had, ah, record breaking financial year for us, which ended in end of March. So since divestiture from semantic, as you know better, Toss has been through a transformation and then on a path to growth. So our core businesses are humming with just like I said, the second half of the year specifically was great for us. What we're hearing from customers, Peter, is that they want to elevate their their business problems away from infrastructure to business outcomes. That what they ask veritas to do is, can you abstract away some of those infrastructure plumbing problems, storage, security, data protection and focus on what the applications can give us. That's number one. Number two is Can we standardize? I mean, the example of Southwest comes to mind, right? They have the same plane so they can reroute those planes anytime they have the same pilots flying those planes so they can to standardize. So they collapsed better. And then, lastly, to your point value of data over volume. Everybody talks about the volume. What about the value of data? What is veritas do for for me? Mr. You know God's a customer in our tax extract value of that data, which is growing day by day. >> Well, one of the most interesting things about this challenge of businesses faces they try to attend to these things is that data is often characterizes the new oil. And we we push back against that Because >> data is a new kind of asset, it's an asset that's easily copied. It's an asset that's easily shared. You can easily integrate it. You can apply it to multiple uses with zero loss of fidelity and what it does currently. And so the whole notion of creating new options in the value of data's intrinsic to the questions of digital business. So that suggests that we need to start thinking Maur about data protection, not just from the standpoint of protecting data once it's been created and is sitting there so we can recover it. But new types of utilization, new ways of thinking about data data as it's going to be used, understanding more about dating, protecting that Rick, would you kind of Does that resonate? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of the things that we've sort of seed in the marketplace is certainly over the last 10 years, the Data Sena has become so complex. This is massive fragmentation of data across highly virtualized infrastructures. And then, when public clouds came along, customers didn't really know what workloads they should move up into those clouds. And so what we saw is a huge problem. Is areas of cost and efficiencies, massive problems of risk and then obviously the amount of money that cos of spending on compliance. And so what we were really focusing on is the gaps. What do you not know about? And so we would really >> about your data >> about your data. Exactly. So we really measure the hot beat off the data protection environment, and from that we could actually see where are you? Risk where your exposure, where you're spending too much money, >> Where's your opportunities? Seize your opportunities. So we've got a notion of the the solution that folks are looking for, something that provides greater visibility into their end and data from a risk exposure opportunity. New sources of utilization standpoint talk a bit about how >> at four >> rounds out the veritas portfolio as it pertains of these things that you're seeing customers asked for taking data closer to outcomes and away from the device orientation? >> Absolutely. So Vatos has always been known to be a leader and data protection. We've done that for over 20 years. We also were the first pioneers in software defined storage. And we're number one in market share, according to I. D. C and Gardner as well. Ah, but again to my earlier point, customers have been asking. So what? We've done the plumbing really well and you've scaled. How do you take this to the next level? Extract value from all that data you're sitting on top of that you're protecting. And that's where apt are comes into the picture. We've built some tools natively within veritas of the last three or four years where we try to go and classify the data on in jest, identify things like P I information sensitive data, rock data, redundant, obsolete, trivial data that we can delete. There was a customer who recently deleted 30,000,000 files, just press the delete button and this isn't a highly regulated environment, >> but they were still pretty darn eggs. >> They definitely where but we were able to give them that visualization and information that they required. Now the question those customers are asking us or we're asking us. Before avatar came into the picture was at the infrastructure level. How do I know how much I'm spending on my data protection environments? Do I know where the growth ISS is it all in the traditional workloads of oracle ASAP, Or is it in virtual or is it in the cloud? Right. Am I putting too much data on tape? Is it costing me enough? Can extract the value from that data. So they were asking us infrastructure visualization and i D analytics. Questions which only apt are could answer. And we have some joint customers they were actually using. Apt are already not just with to monitor the vatos ecosystem, but even some of our competitors and the broader i t ecosystem on a single planet class. And that's where I think after really shines is is the agnostic approach they take beyond just veritas are beyond just another storage vendor. >> Well, so way certainly subscribed to this notion that data protection is going to It's gonna be extended, but it's gonna become a strategic digital business capability that does have to be re funk around the concept of data value and sounds like that's the direction you're taking, and you guys have clearly seen that as well. But obviously some of your customers have seen it. So talk to us a little bit about how customers helped you two guys together. >> Yeah, that's a great question. Was interesting. Actually. We had some of the largest companies in the globe actually using ourself with many of the fortune Tien using up self with J. P. Morgan Chase quote calm Western digital. And they came to us with these very precise problems around, you know, howto optimize my risk within the environment, had a streamline, obviously the costs and compliance. And we found that they were very common questions. And so we actually created this agnostic intelligence built into the software a rules engine that would have to correlate data from all of these disparate data sources. Whether Tom primer on the cloud tying that together would provide impactful insights to our customers that could sold real world problems. And we'll do it with kind of what we call the easy button. One of the big problems with a lot of software products out there today. Is there a point solutions to manage pots of the infrastructure companies wanted a single pane of glass where I could see everything across all of my storage. All of my data protection on prim and cloud. And that's really what we bring to the table, that single paying the class. And we do it very simply at scale for the largest customers. And that's in many ways was the synergy, obviously, with a partnership with Veritas. >> So give us some sense of how how customers will see the benefits of this from a rollout standpoint over the next 6 to 18. >> Right? So Step One in this journey for us is to ensure there are customers. Understand that we're going to continue to have that open an agnostic approach Apt are suddenly is not gonna become proprietary batter toss product. It's going to continue on its on its mission to be agnostic across various storage data protection and cloud environments. That's number one. Number two is we're gonna bring the the artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that we have in house with Veritas combined that with some of the things that Rick just docked, abide with the capabilities adapt our has combine, it's our customers can gain. I know add value. The one plus one equals three approach there as well. So those air, like the two key pillars for us going forward and eventually will extend apt are to an end to in Data Analytics platform not just I d analytics, where we're looking at infrastructure, but an end to end data. Plus I t analytics platform that spans Veritas is will Is the broader a IittIe ecosystem? >> Well, so it's good to hear that you're gonna let apt are continue to focus on data value as opposed to veritas value. Right talk. Talk to me a little bit. About what Does that analytics piece really mean? Howard Customers going to use it? How are they using it today? How are they gonna >> let me carry that? Said is roughly 30,000 unique metrics that we actually gather across the whole I t infrastructure and we'll look at a classic use cases. One of exposure. What? A lot of companies been enormous amount of money on the data protection infrastructure. The using disparity, tools and technologies they don't always go with. One platform like net backup is an example, right? And so with that, come challenges because there's gonna be gaps they might be backing up a Windows server where they're the backup policy says they're just backing up. The C drive will interrogate VM, where all the hyper visor will look at the network and see that there's a D Dr attached to that volume as well. And there's no backup data protection policy. So enormous amount of exposure if they tried to do a restore, obviously, from the d Dr where there's no protection, right from a cost perspective, there's an enormous amount of white space problem in the storage industry. More and more companies are moving from spinning distal flash arrays. A lot of companies is struggling with How do I protect those old flash A raise the using snapshots that using cloud they're tearing to the cloud the using different backup products. Obviously, we'd prefer that they used their backup, but with our software, we can provide that that inside across the entire data protection framework and storage and show you where is your risk? Where is your inefficiency, where you double protecting things into spending too much, much money? This whole notion of data protection is transaction. A lot of people do what's called distant, distant eight still being voted off site. How do you know that all those transactions are successful? How do you know you can restore based on those s L A's and tying that into you? See, M d B. That's what appetite does. >> So I'ma throw a little bit of a curveball here. So having worked within 90 worked with N i t organizations, it can be I ke historically can has been rolled to the compartmentalizing segment you administrated for servers in Australia for storage of people who are administrating applications and and subsystems. And the cloud is munge ing a fair amount of that together. But one of the places that has always required coordination, collaboration and even more important practice has been in the area of restore firms were shops that did not practice how they would restore, you know, hopefully they never had a problem. But if they did have a problem, if they hadn't practiced that process, they would likely we're not gonna be successful in bringing the business up. Gets even more important digital business. Can you give us a little bit of visibility into how this combination taking the metadata, the metrics of visibility. Taking the high quality service is bringing them together is going to streamline, restore within their prices. >> So first, let me address the first point you made, which is what I call the rise of the versatile is too right. So there are no more specialists in certain jobs. The versatile listen, the cloud or in virtual tend to do three or four jobs when there's back up our story virtualization itself on DDE. What the's Verceles want is to explain an easy barton to restore their VM environment or their big data. And my mother there Hadoop environment. They're not really worried. As a central I t. Team that Hey, what am I going to do with the entire data estate? How did I restore that? So that's the first step. Second step, as the world of I t gets more more complicated on the rise of the worst list continues to happen. Thes folks want to be able to have a resiliency plan. They want to be able to rehearse these restores right, and if they don't have a resiliency plan built in if the data protection is so siloed and does not help them build a resiliency plan. And to end that restore is not gonna be successful. Likely? Right. And that's where Veritas and companies like Veritas come in to help them build those resiliency plans and to end. >> But let me take you back to so the financial industry, for example, there are rules about how fast you you have to be able to restore. I gotta believe that visibility into data that is a value level can help set priorities. Because sometimes you want to bring up this application of this class of applications of this class of users of functions before you bring up those so does does apt are apt are going to provide even greater clarity in the crucial restore >> at 70. One of the biggest challenges for >> a lot of companies with restores is actually finding the data. We had a classic use case with a large Fortune 10 company where they had a bunch of service that were being backed up. There were bolted off the tape, and then it was obviously a different backup product they were using. The actually lost the catalog. The data was still there on tape. They had millions of tapes in the vaults, and they used apt title, identify the barcodes and recover that data literally within a matter of hours. And so not only can we find you your freshest copy the most recent copy, if that's what you want, but we can find where is your data? Because in a lot of cases there's multiple replications, multiple copies of the data across all sorts of assets within your >> infrastructure. Interesting. So last thoughts. When we have you back in the Cube in a year, Where you guys going? Big? >> Hey, listen, the two things that I talked about we're going to continue to expand the support of the ecosystem. The world of I t. Whether it's on Prem virtual or in the cloud with Apt are we? We're going to continue to invest in the artificial Intelligence and ML capabilities are not just apt are but all of that tosses ecosystem and you'll see amore integrated approach on the platform based approach on standardization When we come here >> next, guys, thank you so much. Great conversation. Thanks for being here in the Cube to talk about this important relation between data tooling and sources of business value. Rick Clark is the vice president of the outdoor business unit. Used to be the CEO of actor, but now the vice president. The outdoor business unit Veritas. Josie Stroop is vice president of marketing of Veritas. Once again, guys, thanks very much for being here. Thank you so much for having us. And once again, I'm Peter Burgers. You've been listening to another cube conversation until next time.

>> Narrator: From Chicago, it's theCube covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here on the ground covering the Veritas Vision Solution Days in Chicago. Just a couple weeks ago we were in New York City at the iconic Tavern on the Green. We're here at the Palmer House Hotel. Jyothi Swaroop is here, he's the Vice President of Global Marketing for Veritas. Great to see you again. >> Thanks Dave, glad to be here. >> A few weeks ago we saw you in New York. Since then you've been around the globe talking to customers. You just gave a great presentation to about 60, 70 customers here in Chicago. Obviously a lot of your customers here, New York, one of the big NFL cities, so what have you learned in the last couple of weeks? >> Well, a lot. It's been exciting, right. Since New York I've been in Dubai, Milan, Rome, all over the place. Sounds exciting but a lot of jet lag and travel but a lot of exciting customers with interesting challenges that we can solve for. But I guess I would summarize it into three parts. Obviously there are data protection challenges that we solve at Veritas and have done so over 20 years. There are a lot of storage challenges that we talked about and how they're moving to the cloud and how we can assist with that. And lastly, interesting thing is the whole compliance in AI and ML related challenges as to how do they look ahead while staying compliant with what they have already. >> There are some major trends forcing people to rethink their data protection strategies. Obviously, cloud is one, the whole security and data protection world's coming together, the edge, just the whole distributed data trend. Machine intelligence is another one. There are things that you can do with all that data, machine plus data plus cloud really changes the game. You guys have some hard news in that area. Bring us up to date, what are you announcing? >> Right, so we're announcing Veritas Predictive Insights. Really excited about this announcement because when I joined Veritas about 16 months ago, I felt like Veritas sits on top of all these exabytes of data. We protect the largest number of exabytes of data, right. So we have access to the metadata of that data. So my question to the engineering team is what are we doing with that metadata? Are we going to use it, leverage it, so our customers can benefit from it? From all of this user data that we get from other customers. And the answer was, "Yes, we're working on something. Hold on, you're new." And now we have it. So at Veritas, yes it takes 12 to 16 months to build something at scale, right. We have hundreds of engineers that have worked on this. So what we have done now is, especially with our appliances portfolio, we're able to give our customers intuitive, predictive, and proactive maintenance and support of their systems. Now what does that mean? It means firmware upgrades, patches, things like that. They don't have to be a personalized, you know, fly in an engineer in to do kind of things. They can be automated. Oracle recently at Oracle OpenWorld announced this whole autonomous database. Why can't data protection be autonomous, right? So that's how we think, right. Make everything autonomous, make everything predictive and proactive and that's what Predictive Insights is about. >> So let's unpack that a little bit. So what are the enablers that allow you to actually take this next step. Obviously you've got the data, you've got a classification engine that allows you to put data in buckets, if you will. Explain what that is and why it's important. >> I'm glad you brought up the classification engine because that was at the heart of everything Veritas did for the last 20 years, right. We call it Big Veritas Information Classifier where we classified all of the data that came in on Ingest, unlike other people, other customers and other vendors. We classified all of the data that came in from that back up and we told our customers, "Here's PII numbers, your sensitive information is structured data, is unstructured data." We did this really well for a long time. Now we wanted to take that to the next level, right. We wanted to tell our customers what's actually going on with your infrastructure. You've classified the data, you've put it in here, what can you do with it next? Where can you put it? Can you optimize it after the cloud? How much will you pay for it? Can you remove something off of it? How much do you pay for that? Can you put some data retention on prem? How much would that cost you? So we would not only want to give them information about the classification of that data, but how to monetize that data, how much money would it cost to store that data in different areas. >> So this is a case where, if you go back to something you might remember, 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure mandated that you were able to recover and deliver to a court of law electronic records. Well data classification was critical component there. This is one of those cases like, if you've got an older athlete, like Tom Brady, maybe he's not as fast as he used to be, but he's got it all up here, he knows the plays before he sees it. You guys have the experience around things like data classification which are table stakes to allow you to do this but it's still a challenge for many folks in the industry. It's a metadata problem, isn't it? >> Yup, it absolutely is. It is a metadata problem and it's a metadata advantage for us at Veritas because we sit on top of the highest amount of metadata. >> So how do I take advantage of the Veritas Predictive Insights? Where does it live? >> So where we've announced it, it'll be out there the beginning of the year, 2019. We're rolling out with our appliances portfolio first because we have more control over it because the appliances and the hardware have been integrated with our software. So we give our customers predictive insights on all of their appliances that they buy from Veritas and their systems. Going forward, we'll extend that to our software only sales motions, as well. As extending it to other software platforms and other hardware platforms from other vendors, as well. So we're working on some integrations that I can't talk about today but we want to essentially take predictive insights and move it beyond Veritas in the future. >> Okay, so, talk a little bit more about how it works. Using machine learning technology, you're building models and training the data for different customers, how does it all actually come to fruition? >> Sure, so the first thing is, you know, we're generating what we call SRS or a system reliability score, right. So our engine processes all of this information that comes from a customer's data, the usage data, and maps it to the hundreds of other customers, thousands of other customers usage data that we have to find patterns, right. So for example, if a disc hasn't had a firmware upgraded and hasn't done so for months, we can predicatively let the customer know this disc is going to fail if you didn't upgrade this. But that's not enough. We actually allow them to click a button and upgrade the firmware right there to that disc so it's done, right. So it's not only letting customers know that here's something that's going to go wrong, but here's how to fix it, as well. That's just one example of what we can do. >> Well that's key, it's like the old days. You know, you have a pager and you get an alert and then you got to go do something. You're saying you're actually building automation into the process. >> Right, it's like chat bots. You respond to the chat bot right there and it does the action for you. You don't actually have to go somewhere and figure it out. >> So you've got this SRS score. >> Jyothi: Right. >> So what happens when you cross that threshold, it tells the system, "Okay, take some remedial action," or does it allow the customer to sort of make that choice? What's next? >> Sure, so the SRS score is like a credit score, right. There's a lot of complexity underneath that score. So at the highest level we tell the score, the customer if your score is above a certain point, your systems are healthy, they're running well. If they go below a certain point, right, let's say a 700 score for a credit score, you got to go watch or widen your goal below and we'll give them the 10 or 20 reasons why the score went down. Whether it's a firmware thing or a support issue or a hard drive issue. We tell them exactly what's about to go wrong so they can go fix it before it actually goes wrong. >> What do you, actually, before we go there, just some examples, some use cases that you expect in the field, you've talked to customers about. Give us some more. >> Sure, so data, like we talk to a lot of companies with massive data centers. So one of the things that it says with our appliances, simple things like temperature changes. I was in Dubai, look, the temperature there can be crazy. It goes over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. So it says simple things like temperature changes can have massive effect on your hard drives and how that works. If my AI and ML algorithms or my software can proactively tell me the temperatures going up, this is what's going to happen, you increase the cooling, do something different, move the data somewhere, back it up. That's great for the customer. Can I take action just based on a simple thing like temperature. There's another interesting customer, here in New York actually, that came to me and said, we had this problem like every so many weeks, their discs would fail. And they thought it was their temperature because it was in the summer. It wasn't and after a lot of research, it turns out it was the fire alarms that were going off. So the fire alarm and the fire alarm testing that was going on was actually causing discs to fail. >> Because of the vibration or? >> For the vibration and the decibel level. It was interesting, right. And now our AI, ML knows that so it's recorded, we know it and we'll be better off going forward, right. We'll tell other customers now that have data centers with massive, loud, high decibel fire alarms that this could be a potential issue. I'm not saying that is the issue, but this could be a potential issue that they would have never thought of otherwise. >> So what do you expect the business impact to be? When you talk to customers about this capability, you know, under non-disclosure, etcetera, how are they seeing this impacting their business? >> So it's three things, right. Proactive support and maintenance, that's really important. The customers are tired of talking to large vendors where the support connections are horrible, right. They have to go in and raise a ticket and do certain things and then they will ship a guy over to their site who'll come and fix it. That's just too long. >> Dave: Slow and reactive. >> Slow and reactive. We want to make this proactive and autonomous, that's number one. Number two is total cost of ownership, right. So when customers are able to predict these failures, they don't have to have a certain set of money set aside for solving problems when the occur. They're like, "I know this problem has come up. I need to budget for it." So their TCO models get better and more predictable, right. And last but definitely not the least, you know, when we extend this to beyond Veritas, they will be able to do more with their data. Again, what is that more? We don't know yet today. But when we are able to extend this to beyond Veritas, customers will be able to do a lot more with their data centers. >> So a couple of things this plays into. Obviously digital transformation is all about being on all the time, you don't want to have, you don't want planned downtime or unplanned downtime. This allows you to at least plan more effectively and potentially eliminate any downtime so your data is always accessible. And it's also cloud-like in that you're automating a lot of the either recovery from failures, or you know, you're pushing a button and saying okay, remediate this, patch that so you don't have the failure. So that's a sort of cloud-like approach. So you said it's available the first part of '19. And it's available, is it in appliances or? How do I get this. >> So we'll be rolling it out in appliances first, all the Veritas appliances. And then we'll extend it to software only, as well as beyond Veritas going forward. >> Awesome, Jyothi, thanks very much for taking us through the new capability. AI brought to data protection, anticipating problems before they occur, remediating them in an autonomous way. I appreciate your time. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thanks for coming back on. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guess right after this short break. You're watching theCube from Chicago, Veritas Vision Solution Day. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware. And, it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas. Third day, some of us, our voices are a little bit rough. But, we've still got a lot of stuff to do, and summit people are still looking quite good. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host, Justin Warren. Now talking about our current guest who, you know, came in looking great, good energy, Jyothi Swaroop, welcome back to the program. You're the vice president of Global Marketing with Veritas. >> Thanks Stu, thanks for those kind words. I mean, I'm just joining the party here, in terms of good-looking guys. So it's, it's not unique to me at all. >> Yeah, you know, didn't have as much, you know, time to spend on our hair this morning. >> (laughs) Hey I wake up this way. >> That's odd, alright. >> So do I. (everybody laughs) >> Alright, so Jyothi, first of all, VMworld, you know this ecosystem. There's a good energy at the show, what's been your impression so far? >> Look, I mean, haven't been on the other side, right? I've actually having worked for Dell EMC in the past, and, you know, being part of organizing an event like this It's great to see the VMworld, the diaspora expanding with every year, and how they've reinvented themselves. In every three to four years people were like, "Oh, VMworld's going away, VMworld is not relevant anymore." But it's been amazing to see the evolution of VMware, and how they've reinvented themselves, what they're doing with AWS et cetera. And at Veritas, we're trying to map to that strategy we're going where the buck's going right? So, we're literally map into everything VMworld's doing with their customers, which tends to be a lot of our customers. There's a significant overlap between Veritas' customers and VMware install base. >> Yeah, I absolutely, I mean, we talk about things like software to find these days, and especially like in the storage world, I mean, Veritas were like, was the original in that space. When you, oh how do I get software out of hardware? It's like Veritas was the no-hardware-agenda company. So at this show, the last few years, you know, data, you know, data protection, multi-cloud, and how that impacts data, have been, big themes. Tell us how that ties in to what you're hearing from customers, and what you do at Veritas. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the two words that come out are data management, right? So, increasingly yes, we are in a multi-cloud world. Everybody will tell you that there are at least, four to four and a half clouds on average, that most of our enterprise customers use. And when I say that, it doesn't mean public clouds only, obviously right? There are SAS portals that people access, there are actual Infrastructure as a Service public clouds that people access. So, it's a combination of those. At Veritas, what we want to do is we want to focus on the one of the most important elements of managing data, which is protected. Right? Look, recently, you know, there have been news about you know, large transportation companies, I won't say which type, but, transportation companies, you know, being grounded. Because their clouds were not up. Or, you know, data wasn't protected enough. Not because the planes or the trains weren't working well, they were working fantastically well. It's just because their systems were not up, they weren't protected, they weren't backed-up. They just trusted their cloud vendors, or, whoever else to manage it for them. Doesn't work that way, right? You are responsible, if you actually read through some of the contracts that are out there from multi-cloud vendors or cloud vendors, it will clearly say, "You, Mr. Customer are responsible for your own data protection." So that's where Veritas comes in. So, we help customers protect their data where it's at. Whether it's in a public cloud environment, whether it's virtualized through VMware, or with some physical servers, right? And we've been doing this for 30 years. >> Yeah. And I've used NetBackup for many many years, I have a long heritage and even before that, Veritas was pretty much the standard for the way that we did all kinds of storage and data management, as to your point there. So, give us a bit, some examples of, of what customers are doing with Veritas in this new year of cloud, and data could be anywhere. >> Absolutely. So I think the first step to all of this, is visibility. A lot of people don't talk about data visibility enough. Why don't they talk about it enough? Is because most of the management and visibility tools that companies have these days or vendors have, are limited to their own infrastructures. So they're basically IT ops tools, right? To help manage their particular software-defined infrastructure, or a hardware box, et cetera. They're not really trying to be Switzerland for everybody. At Veritas we have this unique honor almost of being the Switzerland. Everybody wants to work with us, has worked with us for the last 30 years. We don't really come out there and say, "We're competing against every infrastructure company out there.", no. We're very good at data protection, we've extended our leadership from data protection to software-defined storage, as two talked about earlier on, we launched our portfolio three years ago, and Gartner has published the fact that we're number one in software-defined storage market share, already, in three years. Because, it's in our DNA. We build the first software-defined product, and we used that, back in the Veritas Oracle Sun Microsystem days, VOS, as it was called. And we've used that DNA to build this out and extend our data-protection into storage. And that's why I said it's visibility, protection, and then storage. And that storage could be anywhere. >> Yeah, Jyothi, one of the challenges that we have in the industry is you say, NetBackup has, you know, a long history, decades out there. People be like, "Oh well, you know, I was using it for a while but then something changed, then you know, I haven't looked at it in five years, ten years." So tell us why, you know, the NetBackup of the day isn't you know, our father's NetBackup. >> Oh great question, I love that question, right? So, it's not your father's net back up, clearly. Look, NetBackups has been great for your what we call traditional workloads, for the last, what, 25 years. Oracle, you know, SQL, we've done phenomenal with that. But the world has moved on. The world's move to NoSQL. The world's moved to Hadoop. The world's moved to a lot of unstructured data-related infrastructure. >> We're talking about RDS at this show, so... >> Exactly. You know, and NetBackup has had to evolve as well. Look, I'm an engineer. I know how difficult it is to take a product that's 20, 25 years old. And to kind of make it relevant to today's workloads. And we did take our time. So until our last week's launch of NetBackup, the latest version, you know, we didn't go out there and market ourselves as the modern workloads' data protector. We did market ourselves as, "Hey listen, your mission critical workloads that still run on Oracle et cetera, yes then backup is the product for you. But we do have other data management technologies that will support you." But today, I'm very happy to announce that we've not only, kind of, we protect most modern workloads, but we've simplified the UX as well. So, I'll make a comment on the market. Before I get into NetBackup again. So, if you notice there's a lot of money being raised in the data protection space. A lot of new vendors that have come out there right? And what's the message they use? The messages of, that of simplicity. Because they can't come out to gate and say, "We're the most reliable, scalable, product that's being used by the, by 86% of the Fortune 500." They can't say that throughout the gates. So what do they use, they say, "We're simpler to use. We're not about job security, we're going to cater to you Mr. Customer, three clicks to Nirvana.", right? That's literally what the message is. So what we try to do with NetBackup is, look, we are the king of scale. We're the king of reliability. We know that. So we've completely modernized, Killian was here at theCUBE yesterday and she's the Head of User Experience. So we created an entire team for user experience alone, and we've simplified all of the operations on NetBackup. So if you're a VMware admin or a backup admin, or a storage admin, it doesn't really matter. Looks, feels the same, and you get three clicks to value. Right, even if you don't reach Nirvana, you get three clicks to value. With everything you do. So we've really simplified the operations, we continue to be the king of scale, we continue to be deployed at multi-terabyte scale, and that innovation's going to roll on. >> That's a really encouraging thing to hear, because, I mean, all of the new vendors as, a good point that you make there is it, they can't reduplicate that idea. We have 10 years of history, or 25 years of history. So, we've been doing this for a long time. And that means that you can trust us with your data. If anything, that you need from a data-protection vendor is, the ability to trust them, that when I go to try to recover my data, it'll be there and it will work. You've fixed that. You've been doing that for such a long time. So now you're just, updating the software to be able to make it easy to use, doing some of the new things, well of course anyone needs to be able to adapt and do some of the new things. So the fact that you're adding some of these features, so maybe you could give us a bit of a flavor of some of the changes that people would notice in, from, if you've experienced that backup before, what does it actually look like now? >> So, for those NetBackup admins that have been using NetBackup for decades now, right? They will, cannot be used to the Windows interfaces where it's a file structure and things have to be dragged and dropped and things like that. But if they go to the new interface now, it's available for download of our website, it's literally just all tiles and buttons and clicks. The new user experience that you expect from an iPhone, that's exactly what we put into NetBackup 812. Now the other thing I want to talk about is, we spoke to about, I think I've personally spoken about 15 customers at this show. Day one and day two. They said, "While the simplification is great Jyothi, we're actually looking ahead already. We're looking ahead to machine learning and AI where, I want your software, tell me when jobs are going to fail." I don't want an alert when the job has fail, and then I have to do something about it. Yeah, it's cool that I can pull my phone up or my iPad up and take actions right away, and make sure data is protected. But I really would love for, you know, your software to predict when something's going to fail. Help me, warn me to take action in advance. If not, take action yourself, for the simple job failures that you can take action on, based on policy driven actions, right? So that's essentially what our customers are asking for and that's what we've been incorporated into 812. >> Yeah, Jyothi, great stuff. What I want to step up level for a second here, and what you're hearing from customers about kind of the challenges and opportunities with data, and maybe start with, we spent the last year, or year and a half, hearing a lot about the impending GDPR, it doesn't feel like it ended up being like the Y2K, you know, scramble at the last minute, couple of lawsuits against like Google and Facebook. But other than that, I haven't heard nearly as much since we passed, you know, that deadline earlier this year. Start there as the update and tell me what else is facing customers into kind of their challenges. >> Sure. Look, if I have to use a loose analogy here, I considered GDPR as, filing your taxes. Most people wait 'til the last day, right, and they get extensions, if things are not right, et cetera. But having said that, filing taxes is one of the most important things you do, right? So, as a corporation this is very similar. Most corporations, you know, want to wait to see if there are others that will take missed steps, and they can learn from that. There's nothing wrong with that. But a lot of the Fortune 500 customers that we deal with, take GDPR extremely seriously. Yes, you mentioned a couple of companies that have been fined, or are being investigated, et cetera. Nobody wants to be in that book, right? You know, a large company can take a little, a fine of some magnitude, but a smaller to medium business company, that could be you know-- >> That could end the business. >> That could end the business for them. And they don't want that. So a lot of these customers are taking GDPR seriously, but what is different to what we expected, not just as Veritas but as an industry is they're taking a consultative approach to this GDPR. It's not a product-based approach. There's no magic bullet, like, I buy three products and stitch them together and I'm GDPR compliant. They're taking a very consultative approach looking at their data, especially companies that have existed for many years, it's really hard for them to go back. The data sitting on some archaic systems, they really don't know, you know, how do I delete? I mean, if Stu was a European citizen for example, and he said, "Hey listen, X, Y and Z company, I want you to delete everything you have on me." It's sitting on some mainframe or bunch of tape, et cetera. There's no way for them to get that out, and Stu's able to sue them if they're not able to take action by X number of months or years. So, you know, it's an interesting but a very important challenge for companies. >> We're experiencing some of those challenges here in Australia as well, which is not actually subject to GDPR, but there's certainly a lot of a, a lot of legislators and a lot of other organizations looking at it, particularly if they're global organizations, they do need to be compliant. It applies to EU citizens, so, if we have EU citizens and you have systems in another country, then you need to actually deal with GDPR issues even though you're not part of the EU. So a lot of organizations are grappling with that. So, maybe you could give us a bit more of an indication of how Veritas is helping those customers to grapple with that situation. >> Yeah, absolutely you're right. So, as long as you have a connection to the EU, whether through a customer or through some sort of a transaction, you're already part of the GDPR compliance initiative. Right, that's what customers need to realize if they haven't already, that's number one. Number two is going back to my original point about visibility. Compliance has been a thing for a long time. GDPR's yet another new thing that are on compliance. So if you don't have end to end visibility into your infrastructure, and if your data is not classified, and it's not classified on ingest going forward. Look, yes I made a big deal about the fact that over the third, last 30 years we've created on our data, and we put it away in archaic systems, but if you consider that as a percentage of the amount of data that we have today, it's very small. What they should be most worried about as customers is, what they're going to create in the future. So the classification of the data has to happen on ingest. As soon as it comes from a Hadoop system, et cetera, needs to be classified, this is ROT data, right? This is redundant, obsolete, et cetera, I need it classified this data has PII information, so I need to put it separately. I can't just ship everything off for the cloud. So that's what we help with Veritas. Our products help you classify the data on ingest. Right, so you can actually tier this data to the right, you know, storage mechanisms, and have visibility, end to end visibility of that data. Globally. And then you can actually take actions when you have that visibility, you can actually say, "You know what, I don't need six petabytes of browsing history, of the 100,000 employees that I have. They've literally gone Amazon and bought diapers for their babies or whatever. I don't really need to store that stuff. I can just delete it, boop and it's gone right?" Customers don't have that confidence today 'coz they don't have that visibility. >> Jyothi last thing I want to have you help us cover is, we know Veritas has a long history. Learned a lot I think being inside Symantec, now coming out. Bring us up to speed as to kind of Veritas today, position in the marketplace, what the customers are coming to you at this show and outside this show for specifically. >> Absolutely. So, Veritas continues to be the leader in data-protection. That's not going away, that is still at the heart of everything we do, right? Whether it's NetBackup, or other products that we put out to market, it will still be at the core of everything we do. We protect the customer's most valuable data. From the Fortune 500 all the way down to the SMB level, right? That's number one. Number two, we're extending that leadership into new areas like software-defined storage. We're already number one in market share for that. We're going to continue to work on our archiving business, we're number one in there as well, according to Gartner. Right? So the three key areas that we're already in, we're number one. The next area we're going into is, you know, paper over rocks. We want to get into the data management business because we realized, we are the true Switzerland of infrastructure. There are very few companies that, you know, would say, "Okay, I'm competing head-to-head with Veritas and a lot of thing, I don't want to work with them." Right, unless you're a core data protection vendor. Everybody else wants to work with it. We have partnerships with all the major public cloud vendors, to VMware, to you know, on-prem traditional vendors, who you might even consider as competition. They all want to work with us because we sit on top of the most number of exabytes of data in the world. We protect the most number of exabytes of data. So there's a lot we can do with that data. Protection is not enough. Our next step in this journey is to make management, visibility, and compliance on top of that data, a lot easier for our customers. >> Alright, so if you're to sum it up in one word, is this still Veritasome? >> It's Veritasome. It's very very Veritasome. >> Alright, well we've been having an awesome week here at VMworld. Jyothi Swaroop, thank you for the update with Veritas for Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. We hope you've had an awesome time watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Veritas Vision 2017, #VtasVision. Jyothi Swaroop is here. He's the vice president of product and solutions marketing at Veritas. Jyothi, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thanks, Dave. I'm an officially an alum, now? >> A CUBE alum, absolutely! >> Two times! Three more times, we'll give you a little VIP badge, you know, we give you the smoking jacket, all that kind of stuff. >> Five or six times, you'll be doing the interviews. >> I'm going to be following you guys around, then, for the next three events. >> So, good keynote this morning. >> Jyothi: Thank you. >> Meaty. There was a lot going on. Wasn't just high-level concepts, it was a lot of high-level messaging, but then, here's what we've done behind it. >> No, it's actually the opposite. It's a lot of real products that customers are using. The world forgets that Veritas has only been out of Symantec, what, 20 months? Since we got out, we were kind of quiet the first year. That was because we were figuring our strategy out, investing in innovation and engineering, 'cause that's what Carlyle, our board, wants for us to do is invest in innovation and engineering, and build real products. So we took our time, 18 to 20 months to build these products out, and we launched them. And they're catching on like wildfire in the customer base. >> Jyothi, Bill came on and talked about, he made a lot of changes in the company. Focused it on culture, innovation, something he's want. What brought you? You know, a lot of places you could've gone. Why Veritas, why now? >> Well, Bill is one of the reasons, actually. I mean, if you look at his history and what he's done with different companies over the years, and how the journey of IT, as he put it during his keynote, he wants to make that disruption happen again at Veritas. That was one. Two was just the strategy that they had. Veritas has a Switzerland approach to doing business. Look, it's granted that most Fortune 500 or even midmarket customers have some sort of a Cloud project going on. But what intrigued me the most, especially with my background, coming from other larger companies is, Veritas was not looking to tie them down or become a data hoarder, you know what I mean? It's just charge this massive dollar per terabyte and just keep holding them, lock them into a storage or lock them into a cloud technology. But, we were facilitating their journey to whichever cloud they wanted to go. It was refreshing, and I still remember the first interview with Veritas, and they were talking about, "Oh, we want to help move customers' data "into Azure and AWS and Google," and my brain from previous storage vendors is going, "Hang on a minute. "How are you going to make money "if you're just going to move all of this data "to everyone else?" But that's what is right for the customer. >> Okay, so, how are you going to make money? >> Well, it's not just about the destination, right? Cloud's a journey, it's not just a destination. Most customers are asking us, "On average, we adopt three clouds," is what they're telling us. Whether it's public, private, on-prem, on average, they have about three separate clouds. What they say is, "Jyothi, our struggle is to move "an entire virtual business service "from on-prem to the Cloud." And once we've moved it, let's say Cloud A is suddenly expensive or is not working out for them. To get out of that cloud and move it to Cloud B is just so painful. It's going to cost me tons of money, and I lost all of the agility that I was expecting from Cloud A, anyway. If you have products like VRP from Veritas, for example, where we could move an entire cloud business service from Cloud A to Cloud B, and guess what. We can move it back onto on-prem on the fly. That's brilliant for the customers. Complete portability. >> Let's see. The portfolio is large. Help us boil it down. How should we think about it at a high level? We only have 20 minutes, so how do we think about that in 15, 20 minutes? >> I'll focus on three tenets. Our 360 data management wheel, if you saw at the keynote, has six tenets. The three tenets I'll focus on today are visibility, portability, and last, but definitely not the least, storage. You want to store it efficiently and cost-effectively. Visibility, most of our customers that are getting on their cloud journey are already in the Cloud, somewhere. They have zero visibility, almost. Like, "What applications should I move into the Cloud? "If I have moved these applications, "are they giving me the right value? "Because I've invested heavily in the Cloud "to move these applications." They don't know. 52% of our customers have dark data. We've surveyed them. All that dark data has now been moved into some cloud. Look, cloud is awesome. We have partnered up with every cloud vendor out there. But if we're not making it easy for customers to identify what is the right data to move to the Cloud, then they lost half the battle even before they moved to the Cloud. That's one. We're giving complete visibility with the Info Map connectors that we just announced earlier on in the keynote. >> That's matching the workload characteristics with the right sort of platform characteristics, is that right? >> Absolutely. You could be a Vmware user, you're only interested in VM-based data that you want to move, and you want role-based access into that data, and you want to protect only that data and back it up into the Cloud. We give you that granularity. It's one thing to provide visibility. It's quite another to give them the ability to have policy-driven actions on that data. >> Jyothi, just take us inside the customers for that. Who owns this kind of initiative? The problem in IT, it's very heterogeneous, very siloed. You take that multi-cloud environment, most customers we talk to, if they've got a cloud strategy, the ink's still drying. It's usually because, well, that group needed this, and somebody needed this, and it's very tactical. So, how do I focus on the information? Who drives that kind of need for visibility and manages across all of these environments? >> That's a great question, Stu. I mean, we pondered around the same question for about a year, because we were going both top-down and bottoms-up in the customer's organization, and trying to find where's our sweet spot. What we figured is, it's not a one-strategy thing, especially with the portfolio that we have. 80% of the time, we are talking to the CIOs, we are talking to the CXOs, and we're coming down with their digital transformation strategy or their cloud transformation strategy, they may call it whatever they want. We're coming top-down with our products, because when you talk visibility, a backup admin, he may not jump out of his seat the first thing. "Visibility's not what I care about, "the ease of use of this backup job "is what I care about, day one." But if you talk to the CIO, and I tell him, "I'll give you end-to-end visibility "of your entire infrastructure. "I don't care which cloud you're in." He'll be like, "I'm interested in that, "'cause I may not want to move 40% of this data "that I'm moving to Cloud A today. "I want to keep it back, or just delete it." 'Cause GDPR in Europe gives the citizens the right to delete their data. Doesn't matter which company the data's present in. The citizen can go to that company and say, "You have to delete my data." How will you delete the data if you just don't know where the data is? >> It's in 20 places in 15 different databases. Okay, so that's one. You had said there were three areas that you wanted to explore. >> The second one is, again, all about workload data and application portability. Over the years, we had storage lock-ins. I'm not going to name names, but historically, there are lots of storage vendors that tend to lock customers into a particular type of storage, or to the company, and they just get caught up in that stacked refresh every three years, and you just keep doing that over and over again. We're seeing more and more of cloud lock-in start to happen. You start migrating all of this into one cloud service provider, and you get familiar with the tools and widgets that they give you around that data, and then all of a sudden you realize this is not the right fit, or I'm moving too much data into this place and it's costing me a lot more. I want to not do this anymore, I want to move it to another local service provider, for example. It's going to cost you twice as much as it did just to move the data into the Cloud in the first place. With VRP, Veritas Resiliency Platform, we give our customers literally a few mouse clicks, if you watched the demo onstage. Literally, with a few mouse clicks, you identify the data that you want to move, including your virtual machines and your applications, and you move them as a business service, not just as random data. You move it as an entire business service from Cloud A to Cloud B. >> Jyothi, there's still physics involved in this. There's many reasons why with lock-in, you mentioned, kind of familiarity. But if I have a lot of data, moving it takes a lot of time as well as the money. How do we handle that? >> It goes back to the original talk track here about visibility. If you give the customer the right amount of visibility, they know exactly what to move. If the customer has 80 petabytes of data in their infrastructure, they don't have to move all 80 petabytes of it, if we are able to tell them, "These are the 10 petabytes that you need to move, "based on what Information Map is telling you." They'll only move those 10 petabytes, so the workload comes down drastically, because they're able to visualize what they need to move. >> Stu: Third piece of storage? >> Third piece of storage. A lot of people don't know this, but Veritas was the first vendor that launched the software to find storage solution. Back in the VOS days, Veritas, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, we had the first file system that would be this paper over rocks, if you will, that was just a software layer. It would work with literally SAN/DAS, anything that's out there in the market, it would just be that file system that would work. And we've kept that DNA in our engineering team. Like, for example, Abhijit, who leads up our engineering, he wrote the first cluster file system. We are extending that beyond just a file system. We're going file, block, and object, just as any other storage vendor would. We are certifying on various commodity hardware, so the customers can choose the hardware of their choice. And not just that. The one thing we're doing very differently, though, is embedding intelligence close to the metadata. The reason we can do that is, unlike some of the classic storage vendors, we wrote the storage ground-up. We wrote the code ground-up. We could extract, if you look at an object, it has object data and metadata. So, metadata standard, it's about this long, right? It's got all these characters in it. It's hard to make sense of it unless you buy another tool to read that object and digest it for the customer. But what if you embed intelligence next to the metadata, so storage is not dumb anymore? It's intelligent, so you avoid the number of layers before you actually get to a BI product. I'll just give you a quick example in healthcare. We're all wearing Apple Watches and FitBits. The data is getting streamed into some object store, whether it's in the Cloud or on-prem. Billions of objects are getting stored even right now, with all the Apple Watches and FitBits out there. What if the storage could predictively, using machine learning and intelligence, tell you predictively you might be experiencing a stroke right on your watch, because your heartbeats are X and your pulse is Y? Combining all of the data and your history, based on the last month or last three months, I can tell you, "Jyothi, you should probably go see the doctor "or do something about it." So that's predictive, and it can happen at the storage layer. It doesn't have to be this other superficial intelligence layer that you paid millions of dollars for. >> So that analytic capability is really a feature of your platform, right? I mean, others, Stu, have tried it, and they tried to make it the product, and it really isn't a product, it's a byproduct. And so, is that something I could buy today? Is that something that's sort of roadmap, or, what's the reaction been from customers? >> The reaction has been great, both customers and analysts have just loved where we're going with this. Obviously, we have two products that are on the truck today, which are InfoScale and Access. InfoScale is a block-based product and Access is a file-based product. We also have HyperScale, which was designed specifically for modern workloads, containers, and OpenStack. That has its own roadmap. You know how OpenStack and containers work. We have to think like a developer for those products. Those are the products that are on the truck today. What you'll see announced tomorrow, I hope I'm not giving away too much, because Mike already announced it, is Veritas Cloud Storage. That's going to be announced tomorrow, and we're going to go deep into that. Veritas Cloud Storage will be this on-prem, object-based storage which will eventually become a platform that will also support file and block. It's just one single, software-defined, highly-intelligent storage system for all use cases. Throw whatever data you want at it. >> And the line on Veritas, the billboards, no hardware agenda. Ironic where that came from. Sometimes you'll announce appliances. What is that all about, and when do you decide to do that? >> Great question. You know, it's all about choice. It's the cliched thing to say, I know, but Veritas, most people don't know this, has a heavy channel revenue element to what we do. We love our partners and channel. Now, if you go to the channel that's catering to midmarket customers, or SMBs, they just want the easy button to storage. Their agility, I don't have five people sitting around trying to piece all of this together with your software and Seagate's hardware and whatever else, and piece this together. I just want a box, a pizza box that I can put in my infrastructure, turn it on, and it just works, and I call Veritas if something goes wrong. I don't call three different people. This is for those people. Those customers that just want the easy button to storage or easy button to back up. >> To follow up on the flip side, when you're only selling software, the knock on software of course is, I want it to be fast, I want it to be simple, I need to be agile. How come Veritas can deliver these kinds of solutions and not be behind all the people that have all the hardware and it's all fully baked-in to start with? >> Well, that's because we've written these from the ground up. When you write software code from the ground up, I mean, I'm an engineer, and I know how hard it is to take a piece of legacy code that's baked in for 10, 20 years. It's almost like adding lipstick, right? It just doesn't work, especially in today's cloud-first world, where people are in the DevOps situation, where apps are being delivered in five, 10, 15 minutes. Every day, my app almost gets updated on the phone every day? That just doesn't work. We wrote these systems from the ground up to be able to easily be placed onto any hardware possible. Now, again, I won't mention the vendor, but in my previous lives, there were a lot of hardware boxes and the software was written specifically for those hardware configurations. When they tried to software-define it forcefully, it became a huge challenge, 'cause it was never designed to do that. Whereas at Veritas, we write the software layer first. We test it on multiple hardware systems, and we keep fine-tuning it. Our ideal situation is to sell the software, and if the customer wants the hardware, we'll ship them the box. >> One of the things that struck me in the keynote this morning was what I'll call your compatibility matrix. Whether it was cloud, somebody's data store, that really is your focus, and that is a differentiator, I think. Knocking those down so you can, basically, it's a TAM expansion strategy. >> Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, TAM expansion strategy, as well as helping the customer choose what's best for them. We're not limiting their choices. We're literally saying, we go from the box and dropboxes of the world all the way to Dell EMC, even, with Info Map, for example. We'll cover end-to-end spectrum because we don't have a dollar-per-terabyte or dollar-per-petabyte agenda to store this data within our own cloud situation. >> All right, Jyothi, we got to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE. It's good to see you again. >> Jyothi: No, it's great to be here. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE. (fast electronic music)

>> Announcer: From Chicago, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Chicago, everybody. We're here covering the Veritas Solution Days. Veritas used to have a big tent event last year. This year they're going out to, I think, seven cities around the globe. Probably touching more people than they would've with the single event, but they're road warriors, and we're here with them. theCUBE is the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, Roger Dombrowski is here. He's a data protection specialist at dcVAST, one of Veritas' big solution partners based here in Chicago. Roger, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. >> You're very welcome. So, data protection specialist, so you're into it. Data protection is changing quite dramatically. There's cloud, there's the edge... We just talked to Jyothi about AI, and so lots is changing. From your prospective, how are customers responding to those change? What are some of the key drivers? >> A lot of the key drivers... You used to be able to differentiate with backups and things like that. Now it's table stakes, it's an insurance policy. And that's kind of the old classic way of looking at it, but I think with today what we're finding, and I think Veritas is doing such a great job of, is mining value out of stuff that's even been around a while. So while the workloads have changed, our best practices haven't changed, our strategies haven't changed. It's where things are going, but it's also mining that metadata to get more value out of the backups than to just be a insurance policy. >> So I mean one of the obvious things is, I've talked about, is DR, but DR is still insurance. It's just more insurance and maybe you're killing two birds with one stone, but when you talk about mining data and analytics, and getting more out of the metadata, give us some other examples of how customers are exploiting and leveraging that investment in what used to be just backup pure insurance. >> Yeah, and in fact it's kind of interesting 'cause Info Map's been out for a little while, and I think we've been going around to the customer base with a slide stack, maybe a couple of slides, and really underselling the value. And what I've had a great opportunity to do with a couple of customers here very recently, is get into some deep use cases, and it's been an eye opening experience. And what's so amazing is the date we're and the information we're gathering has been in their backups for years, right? It's like the data has been there. It's been on tap, we're tapping that with Info Map. Finding stale data, ransomware, age data, all kinds of better ways to tier. You know some of the discussions were around cloud. And hey do you really want put cat videos in the cloud? Well, we can find those things with the backups. And we've been looking a that data for years. We're finally now pulling the value out of that data. >> And one of those speakers earlier today talked about, he took us all the way back to the federal rules of civil procedure, and bringing together IT and legal. So those discussions now with GDPR, et cetera, coming back to the fore. And it's important you don't want data that could be a legal risk hanging around. Everybody says, oh big data, keep all the data. And General Council's go I don't want to keep all the data. So the backup corpus is a way you're saying to investigate that and reduce risks, and also potentially identify diamonds in the rough. That you can-- >> Absolutely. >> You can mine. >> Absolutely. >> Okay. Let's talk about. I want to ask you about, there was a little company called Network Appliance, I think they were founded back in the '80s, they changed their name in the 2000s to NetApp, got out of that appliance, but appliances are still strong in the marketplace. Everybody's talking about software-defined. I think even Veritas uses it as part of its description of who they are and yet they continue to announce appliances as do others. Why appliances, from your practitioner perspective, what's going on there? >> Well, actually there's a customer whose actually here at the even today, and one of the things that really sold them on that whole form factor was the larger the company gets the more siloed, different aspects of business are. If you know if you wanted to make a change or implement something, you'd have the network team, you'd have change control, you'd have the OS team, the application teams. The appliance form factor's allowing the backup admins to wrangle in a lot of that crazy, hey, I've got to have 20 groups involved in something. Purpose built and performance tuned. I mean see it all the time. Customers, they still look at us and go, well, I think I can do it cheaper, and I've seen them try to do it, and maybe they'll save a few bucks, but the soft cost in terms of headaches, and problems, and tuning, and just limitations of building your own versus the appliance form factor. >> It's still going to run on hardware? So you're saying let the vendor do the integration and that's sort of the appeal of the appliance. There are use cases for PureSoftware based solutions, but if you just want to set it and (laughs) forget it. >> Roger: It really is that yeah. >> The appliance comes to play. What are some of the other big things and trends that you see, but let's talk cloud. You know the whole, I've often said renting is always more expensive than owning. You don't necessarily want, if you want to rent a car for a day, well go for it but if you want to drive at 100,000 miles, it probably make sense to buy it or even lease it. We heard today about cloud repatriation, I mean that's certainly a narrative that a lot of the on-prem guys want to talk about. What are you seeing in the marketplace? >> I'm seeing, I mean even before. I mean, we'll go back four or five years. Everyone's asking me, Roger, I want to get off of tape. Let's go to the cloud. What's been so interesting is to do those calculations, and I think that some people fly over that 100 miles an hour, and Veritas was one of the first ones to actually preserve deduplication all the way through the process. So it really changed, I call it that cost versus rent, or own versus rent ratio where depending on how long you're keeping data, how well the data dedupes, things like that, that's going to affect your cost model. And that's really, in my role at dcVAST, that's a big part of what I do, is to take the feature sets that Veritas brings to the table and apply them, and say, hey, does this make sense to put this in the cloud? Should this be on prem? And the great thing again is Veritas isn't. This isn't your dad's backup anymore. I mean the Access Appliance, the Flex Appliance, some of these things we're bringing to the table, Info Map, these other tools, we're not just doing backups, we're doing ancillary things to all that. >> Just geeking it out a little bit. You just talking about dedupe through the whole process. You mean without having to rehydrate the data. >> Roger: Exactly, exactly. >> Which is just a time consuming and complicated process. >> Roger: Absolutely. >> That's a technology they're pretty proud of, they talk about it a lot. >> Very, very, very much so. And I mean, if you look it, we've always been able to do it but it's the cost, right? If I have to virtualize an appliance in the cloud, it's a very expensive proposition, but if I can dedupe and all I'm doing is storing small fragments in a cheap storage target in the cloud, that's all better for the economics for the customer. >> All right, Roger, I'll give you the last word. Takeaways from today, and any other thoughts? >> Oh, I loved hearing about the telemetry. There's some new features coming in. I've heard some of this material before, but again, to hear the different perspectives, customers talking about the technology and where we're going, I'm glad we got to go and participate. >> All right Roger Dombrowski. Thanks very much for sharing your perspective. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. >> Great to see you. >> Take care. >> All right, keep it right there everybody, theCUBE. We'll be back at Veritas Vision in Chicago right after this short break, I'm Dave Vellante. (upbeat electronic music)

>> From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day, brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to New York City everybody. We're here in the heart of Central Park at Tavern On the Green, a beautiful facility. I'm surrounded by Yankee fans so I'm like a fish out of water. But that's okay, it's a great time of the year. We love it, we're still in it up in Boston so we're happy. Dave Vellante here, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Nathan Hall is here, he's the field CTO at Pure Storage. Nathan, good to see you. >> Good to see you too. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. >> So you guys made some announcements today with Veritas, what's that all about? >> It's pretty exciting and Veritas, being the market leader in data protection software. Now our customers are able to take Veritas's net backup software and use it to drive the policy engine of Snapshots for our FlashArrays. They're also able to take Veritas and back up our data hub, which is our new strategy with FlashBlade to really unify all of data analytics onto a single platform. So Veritas really is the solution net back up that's able to back up all the workloads and Pure is the solution that's able to run all the workloads. >> So what if I could follow-up on that, maybe push you a little bit? A lot of these announcements that you see, we call them Barney deals, I love you, you love me, we go to market together and everything's wonderful. Are we talking about deeper integration than that or is just kind of press release? >> Absolutely deeper integration. So you'll see not just how-to guides, white papers, et cetera, but there's actual engineering-level integration that's happening here. We're available as an advanced disk target within that back up, we've integrated into CloudPoint as well. We certify all of our hardware platforms with Veritas. So this is deep, deep engineering-level integration. >> Yeah, we're excited about Pure, we followed you guys since the early days. You know we saw Scott Dietzen, what he built, very impressive modern architecture, you won't be a legacy for 20, 25 years so you've got a lot going for you. Presumably it's easier to integrate with such a modern architecture, but now at the same time you got to integrate with Veritas, it's been around for about 25 years. We heard a lot about how they're investing in API-based architectures, and microservices, and containers and the like, so what is that like in terms of integrating with a 25-year-old company? >> Well I think, from Pure's perspective we are API first, we're RESTfull APIs first. We've done a ton of integrations across multiple platforms whether it's Kubernetes, Docker, VMware, et cetera, so we have a lot of experience in terms of how to integrate with various flavors of other infrastructure. I think Veritas has done a lot of work as well in terms of maturing their API to really be this kind of cloud-first type of API, this RESTful API, that made our cross-integration much easier. >> You guys like being first, there were a number of firsts, you guys were kind of the first, or one of the first with flash for block. You were kind of the first for file. You guys have hit AI pretty hard, everybody's now doing that. You guys announced the first partnership with NVIDIA, everybody's now doing that. (laughs) You guys announced giving away NVME as part of the Stack for no upcharge, everybody's now doing that. So, you like to be first. Culturally, you've worked at some other companies, what's behind that? >> Well culturally, this is best company I've worked at in terms of culture, period, and really it all starts with the culture of the company. I think that's why we're first in so many places and it's not just first in terms of first to market. It's really about first in terms of customer feedback. If you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant we're up, we've been at leaders quadrant for five years in a row. But this year, we're indisputably the leader. Furthest to the right on the X-axis, furthest north on the Y-axis and that's all driven by just a customer-obsessed culture. We've got a Net Promoter Score of 86.6 which is stratospheric. It's something that puts us in the top 1% of all business-to-business companies, not just tech companies. So, it's really that culture about customer obsession that drives us to be first. Both to market, in a lot of cases, but also just first in terms of customer perception of our technology. >> You guys were a first at really escape velocity, the billion dollar unicorn status, and now you're kind of having that fly-wheel effect where you're able to throw off different innovations in different areas. Can you talk more about the data hub and the relevance to what you're doing with Veritas and data protection? Let's unpack that a little bit. >> Sure, sure, the data hub, we had a great keynote this morning with Jyothi the VP of Marketing for Veritas and he had an interesting customer tidbit. He had some sort of unnamed government agency customer that actually gets penalized when they're unable to retrieve data fast enough. That's not something that many of our customers have, but they do get penalized in terms of opportunity costs. The reason why is 'cause customers just have their data siloed into all these different split-up locations and that prevents them from being able to get insight out of that data. If you look at AI luminaries like Andrew Ng or even people like Dominique Brezinski at Apple, they all agree that you have to, in order to be successful with your data strategy, you have to unify these data silos. And that's what the data hub does. For the first time we're able to unify everything from data warehousing, to data lakes, to streaming analytics, to AI and now even backup all onto a single platform with multidimensional performance. That's FlashBlade and that is our data hub, we think it's revolutionary and we're challenging the rest of the storage industry to follow suit. Let's make less silos, let's unify the data into a data hub so that our customers can get real actionable information out of their data. >> I was on a crowd chat the other day, you guys put out an open letter to the storage community, an open challenge, so that was kind of both a little controversial but also some fun. That's a very important point you're making about sort of putting data at the core. I make an observation, it's not so much true about Facebook anymore 'cause after the whole fake news thing their market value dropped. But if you look at the top five companies in terms of market value, include Facebook in there, they and Berkshire keep doing this, but let's assume for a second that Facebook's up there. Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon, top five in terms of US market value. Of course markets ebb and they flow, but it's no coincidence that those are data companies. They all have a lot of hard assets at those companies. They've got data at their core so it's interesting to hear you talk about data hub because one of the challenges that we see for traditional companies, call them incumbents, is they have data in stovepipes. For them to compete they've got to put it in the digital world, they've got to put data at their core. It's not just for start-ups and people doing Greenfield, it's for folks that are established and don't want to get disrupted. Long-winded question, how do they get, let's think of traditional company, an incumbent company, how do they get from point A to point B with the data hub? >> I think Andrew Ng has a great talked-point on this. He basically talks about your data strategy and you need to think about, as a company, how do you acquire data and then how do you unify into a single data hub? It's not just around putting it on a single platform, such as FlashBlade. A valuable byproduct of that is if you have all the stove-piped data, though you probably in terms of your data scientist trying to get access to it, now have to, they have 10 different stovepipes you've got 10 different VPs that you have to go talk to in order to get access to that data. So it really starts with stopping the bleeding and starting to have a data strategy around how do we acquire and how do we make certain or storing data in the same place and have a single unified data hub in order to maximize the value we are able to get out of that data. >> You know when I talked to, I'll throw my two cents in, I talk to a lot of chief data officers. To me, the ones that are most insightful talk about their five imperatives. First of all, is they got to understand how data contributes to monetization. Whether it's saving money or making money, it's not necessarily selling your data. I think a lot of people make that mistake, oh I'm going to monetize my data, I mean I'm going to sell my data, no, it's all about how it contributes to value. The second is, what about data sources? And then how do I get access to data sources? There's a lot implied there in terms of governance and security and who has access to that. And in the same time, how do I scale up my business so that I get the right people who can act on that data? Then how do I form relationships with a line of business so that I can maximize that monetization? Those are, I think, sensible steps that aren't trivial. They require a lot of thought and a lot of cultural change and I would imagine that's what a lot of your customers are going through right now. >> I think they are and I think as IT practitioners out there, I think that we have a duty to get closer to our business and be able to kind of educate them around these data strategies. To give them the same level of insight that you're talking about, you see in some chief data officers. But if I looked out at the, there's a recent study on the Fortune 50, the CXOs, and these aren't even CIOs, they're actually, we think as IT practitioners that the cloud is the most disruptive thing that we see, but the CEOs and the CFOs are actually five times more likely to talk about AI and data as being more disruptive to their business. But most of them have no data strategy, most of them don't know how AI works. It's up to us as IT practitioners to educate the business. To say here's what's possible, here's what we have to do in order to maximize the value out of data, so that you can get a business advantage out of this. It's incumbent on us as IT leaders. >> So Nathan, I think again, that's really insightful because let's face it, if you're moving at the speed of the CIO, which is what many companies want to do, because that's the so called, fat middle and that's where the money is. But you're behind, I mean we're moving into a new era, the cloud era, no pun intended, is here, it's solid but we're entering that data of machine intelligence and we built the foundation with the dupe even, there's a lot of data now what do we do with it? We see, and I wonder if you could comment on this, is the innovation engine of the future changing it? It use to be Moore's Law, we marched to the cadence of Moore's Law for years. Now it's data applying machine intelligence and then, of course, using the cloud for scale and attracting start-ups and innovation. That's fine because we want to program infrastructure, we don't want to deploy infrastructure. If you think about Pure, you got data for sure. You're going hard after machine intelligence. And cloud, if I understand your cloud play, you sell to cloud providers whether they're on-prem or in the public cloud but what do you think about those? That innovation sandwich that I just described and how do you guys play? >> Well, cloud is where we get over 30% of our revenue so we're actually selling to the cloud, cloud service providers, et cetera. For example, one of the biggest cloud service providers out there that I think today's announcement helps them out a lot from a policy perspective actually used FlashBlade to reduce their SLAs, to reduce their restore time from, I think, it was 30 hours down to 38 minutes. They were paying money before to their customers. What we see in our cloud strategy is one of empowering cloud providers, but also we think that cloud is increasingly, at the infrastructure layer, going to be commoditized and it's going to be about how do we enable multicloud? So how do we enable customers to get around data gravity problems? I've got this big, weighty database that I want to see if I can move it up to the cloud but that takes me forever. So how do we help customers be able to move to one cloud or even exit a cloud to another or back to on-prem? We think there's a lot of value in applying our, for example deduplication technology, et cetera, to helping customers with those data gravity problems, to making a more open world in terms of sharing data to and from the cloud. >> Great, well we looked at Pure and Veritas getting together, do some hard core engineering, going to market, solving some real problems. Thanks Nathan for hanging out, this iconic beautiful Tavern on the Green in the heart of New York City. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, keep it right there everybody, Dave Vallante. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Veritas Solutions Day, #VeritasVision, be right back. (digital music)