>>We've often said that the next 10 years in cloud computing won't be like the last 10 cloud is firmly planted its operating model in the minds of technology pros and organizations of all sizes are thinking cloud first. But the definition of cloud is evolving to include on-prem experiences, workloads across clouds, and even out to the edge as the cloud universe expands, how can organizations best manage workloads across clouds? How can they ensure the best performance and security and the most efficient use of resources all while maintaining the agility that the cloud promises for developers and project teams. And with me to discuss these issues is Colm Keegan, who was a senior consultant at Dell technologies. Them good to see you again, how you been >>Did great. That brings me back. >>So you heard my little open here. How do you see the landscape of on-prem public cloud multi-cloud and all these workload migrations that are going on? >>I think, I think you hit it well, I mean, what we're seeing is I think the last research chart I saw was that, you know, 95% of organizations are using public cloud and 78% of those respondents are doing it in a multi-cloud fashion. So it's not just a single public cloud, it's multiple public clouds. Uh, and to your point, you know, organizations are trying to do it as efficiently as possible. They're trying to enable their developers to leverage those resources in the cloud because oftentimes developers want to build in the cloud and then deploy on prem and, you know, have that agility. Um, and it's, it's great because it does help with innovation, but it can create blind spots for it organizations. And so as part of the, uh, data protection marketing team, you know, one of the things that we're trying to emphasize with our customers is there's ways that we can help get those efficiencies. We can help you maintain that agility, but as importantly, ensure that the critical data and workloads you depend on are protected and secure wherever they are. >>Yeah, exactly. You want to do that across clouds? We we've kind of tongue in cheek here, but we kind of coined a term called Supercloud, which is, Hey, I don't really care about the underlying infrastructure. I care about this value in the services on, on top of that. And to that end, there's a lot of concern about cyber resiliency. Obviously we've been covering the increased threats in our reporting. You know, the solar winds hack in particular, it was like a watershed moment in cyber, highly sophisticated, and the ripple effects, as we know, are going to be felt for years to come, then you've got remote and hybrid work that creates new challenges for organizations. So Colm, how are you thinking about enhancing data protection and this new era of risk what's what's Dale's point of view there? >>Well, I mean, I, I, you know, it, it's everything you said, right, is that, you know, workloads are ubiquitous, they're everywhere. Uh, it's multiple workload types, right? So when you think about traditional workloads, people often think of things like physical machines and virtual machines. Uh, but now there are things like containerized there's cloud data of apps and their sadness. And, you know, we, we have, uh, an annual survey called the global data protection index. And what we've seen consistently is that organizations really still struggled with trying to find solutions for those more workload types. And I think part of it is that they're trying to retrofit existing application infrastructure to manage those workloads with varying degrees of success. Right? So, you know, what we can do is we can work with the customer, say, look, you know, let's help you simplify how you protect those workloads so that, uh, you can ensure that it has the right service level agreement. >>Uh, you can ensure that, um, if you're having a lot of portability, because again, you know, developers are gonna port workloads based on where the business needs them to be, while that you have the right protection policies assigned to those workloads, regardless of the workload type. Uh, and I think a critical part here, Dave is automation, right? Because another challenge we see is a lot of organizations are struggling with getting the skill sets for people to not only manage data protection, but also from a cybersecurity and cyber resiliency standpoint. You know, those folks are in super high demand, right? So you need ways to automate protection and resiliency wherever the workload lives. And we feel very strongly about what we can do for portfolio. >>I mean, I think it's pretty safe to say that the cloud operating model has changed all of our thinking. And, and I've seen a shift over the years, you know, going back a decade plus, and companies like Dell and how they think about the cloud, uh, really leaning in now and saying, Hey, this is a lot of really good ideas here. You mentioned automation, uh, the whole dev ops trend, which I hope we have time to talk about, but how should we be thinking about Dell's momentum in cloud? Like what can you tell us about your cloud business specifically? Are there any metrics that you can share use cases that are really driving your cloud business? >>I know you're a metrics driven guy, Dave, so I want this point yet. So, um, we're currently today. So, you know, let me just preface this with, you know, a lot of folks often think of us as well now. Yeah. That's my father's GLAAD cloud data or my father and data protection solution. Right. And, uh, sometimes we get knocked on innovation, but we came to market two and a half years ago with power to dictate amount of power, protect data manager as our go forward data protection platform for protecting workloads on premise, as well as in the cloud. And we're really executing and executing on that. And one of the signs of that is how much data is actually protected in the cloud. So as we stand today, we're protecting over 10 exabytes of data in the public cloud. That's a big number. Uh, and just to let some context to that, uh, that is 134% year over year growth compared to last year. >>So last year we were somewhere around four and a half exabytes protected in the cloud. So that's, that's showing some, some really, uh, significant growth and adoption. Um, and so, you know, that that's an area where we, we pointed back to as we're successful, but let me give you sort of something a little more anecdotal. Um, it's a bit anonymized, so I can't mention the customer. And again, I think this goes back to my point about what we're doing from an innovation standpoint, there was a, there's a global company, uh, you're, you know, the brand everybody's familiar with it. You probably have their app on your phone. And they issued an RFP. Uh, we respond to the RFP and they said, look, you know, we're really not interested unless your solution is programmable and needs to work in a microservices architecture environment. It's got to snap in, we gotta be able to automate those processes. >>And so we said, sure, no problem. In fact, you know what, let us help you spin up a, an environment right now. We can show you how it works with your workloads, with your data. And we did it very quickly and, uh, this RFP was responded to by all the, you know, the big players, as well as some of the newer entrants to the market. And there was a big incumbent in that account and we got the business, you know, and it, it was, it was a significant deal. Uh, and it, I think it, it goes to show that, you know, even in environments where in this particular company they're hugely digital driven, uh, they do a lot of business through that app. I just mentioned. So that, that I think a good proof point that we're, we're getting the adoption and we're getting customers that we didn't have before coming to us to help them solution for some of these challenges with protecting the cross class. >>Yeah. That's great. It sounds like, it sounds like a big win for you guys. Um, nothing I wanted to ask you about comas is, you know, you think about the cloud developers and cloud go hand in hand and, you know, thinking about Dell's play in cloud your as a service strategy, w with, with apex, the big question people have is what about developers? So, so what are you doing in the world of dev ops? How are we supporting developers? What's happening with automation? You mentioned that before, if you could add some color to your strategy, that would be great. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. So, you know, we're, we're, we're really driven, you know, across Dell from a dev ops perspective and the same holds true from a data protection stand from a data protection standpoint. And so one of the things that we want to do is we want to give dev ops teams the tools. And so this is, these are things like API scripts, you know, uh, Ansible libraries and things like that that allow them to plug these things, things into their environment. So they don't have to do all that work. Right. And so we, we give them the tools. And then as importantly, because I mentioned that, you know, there were, there are shortfalls skillsets, you know, across the industry is that we have an extensive professional services are, and we also work with a large ecosystem of partners. So we can fill the gaps where the customer may have gaps, get the solution deployed in their environment, get those automation tools in there so that, you know, for day two experience, you know, they got the keys to the kingdom and they can go there, they're off and running, but we're there to backstop them too. >>Right. So, so we're, in addition to the solutions, we have a big services arm to compliment that. Uh, and then, you know, you mentioned apex, so, you know, to talk about the, the breadth of the portfolio and this isn't so much related to developers, although it may be some developers interested in this is that, you know, if you want to deploy a solution, you're in the market for a solution and you don't want it to play in infrastructure because let's face a lot of organizations want to get out of the business of running data center infrastructure. So you can spin up as a service, a solution that will protect not only your containerized or your, the newer workload types, but it'll also protect, uh, hybrid workload. So that things like end points and desktops, as well as, you know, if you have virtual machines in your data center. And so there's, there's just more choice there. And, uh, you know, there may be developers that would decide to leverage that service, uh, to align with what they're doing and say, uh, AWS, for example. So, so lots of choices there in flexibility, >>I call him, let me, what about like SAS applications, office 365 Salesforce, et cetera, do you accommodate that today? >>Yeah, absolutely. In fact, apex backup backup services will protect SAS workloads. Like you said, whether it's office 365 or Google workspaces or Salesforce, uh, we can protect those workloads, very seamless seamlessly, and the customer just launches the service in, in, uh, in the cloud. And it will discover those, uh, those workloads and protect, protect them. And, uh, you know, that's a great point, David, because we still find that there's a lot of customers that are under this misperception that once their data's in the cloud, they're good, they can walk away and wash their hands. And, and obviously that's not the case because, you know, there are instances where customers made that mistake and then lost data and went to get it. And either weren't able to get it or is very expensive, right. So, so they can, they can protect themselves from that by, you know, using a, uh, solution to protect. Those says workloads and apex backup services provides that level of protection. >>Great. And I wanted to come back if I could to kind of ransomware the whole, you know, people talk about air gaps. W what are you guys seeing there? What are you recommending for customers? I mean, I saw a stat the other day. Ransomware is like the second, most common, you know, a reason for the hacks. And you're seeing these big ransoms get paid. What are you recommending to customers there? >>Yeah. So what we've been talking about for the last couple of years, they, and championing is that, you know, customers really need to have, uh, an isolated digital vault in an isolated recovery environment. That's separate from production, right? So we we've had a solution in market market now for almost five years, uh, and that's available that they can deploy into a secondary data center or to co-location facility, and now they can even, um, deploy it into AWS and in the very near future, we're going to make it available in Azure. Right? So now you can leverage the public cloud as that secondary environment, but the idea here is to make that environment, uh, insulated so that if something happens in your production infrastructure, it doesn't seep into your isolated recovery environment. And then even if it does, because as we all know, you know, ransomware usually kind of sits there on your network, watching things, and then executes at some point in the future, right? >>So we even have analytics in our solution that can go out and look for anomalies. And when it detects those anomalies, then you can remediate it and, and that'll protect you in case you need to do a recovery. You won't be recovering from a copy that has ransomware on it, but you'll be recovering from a clean copy. Uh, but you know, that's, that's what we're recommending to customers is that you need to have that isolated environment it's separate from production, uh, and that it has hardened capabilities, namely that, you know, dual factor authentication, uh, you know, there's all sorts of stringency in terms of who can access that vault and, you know, things like, uh, uh, data immutability. Uh, we often find that there's, you know, that immutability is, is looked at as the, be all end all, uh, by others out there. And we say immutability is important, but you also need these other capabilities in there, like having the analytics, for example, uh, and having that secure isolation, because if that's your copy of last resort, we want to make sure you'll be able to recover from it. >>Yeah. I mean, you said you'd been in the market almost five years now. Are there, are there example has had been battle-tested are there examples that you know of where, you know, somebody was getting attacked and they were, they had to recover from this air gap solution? >>Yeah, actually I do. In fact, I was just looking at this recently, uh, there's an aviation company, uh, over an Asia pack and what they have, they, they had a ransomware attack and they had our, fortunately they had our solution in place and they were able to recover over a hundred production servers without any data loss. Uh, and so, you know, that's, I think Testament to the power of the solution, uh, and, you know, we're, we have, you know, many, many more customers that have deployed in production. And as you know, David's such a sensitive topic that many organizations aren't, they're willing to raise their hand and say, Hey, we were attacked. Right. So, uh, we know that there's plenty more out there. And, um, you know, as customers become ready, willing, and able, we'll certainly share that. >>Yeah. I mean, I hear you, it's a great reference, but they don't want to be a reference. I don't blame it. All right. We got a wrap, but I'll give you the last word, uh, column, give us your takeaways. >>Yeah. You know, one of the things I mentioned Dave, is that we continue to hear that, you know, organizations want to get out of the business of it. They want to get out of the data center, infrastructure business. They want to spend more time innovating because frankly that's how they're going to differentiate themselves. And so when we look at how it is changing, it's moving into more of this dev ops paradigm. We want to spend more time enabling their developers, right. And they wanna spend more time actually driving an innovation. But the only way you can really do that is to simplify and to automate. And that's an area that we're spending a lot of time in, right? We're investing a lot of money and things like AI and ML. You know, obviously we're building more capabilities from a, from an automation tool set perspective so that we can give these dev op teams, you know, tested scripts and other automation tools that are actually running in many, many other production environments today that, that allows them to get that automation into their environment, you know, mean, and that's something that is not only true for data protection, but it's also true for pan Dell, you know, across the entire Dell portfolio. >>And I think that's a big differentiator for us, right? Because customers want to have the ability to do this across the entire stack. So oftentimes we see customers say coming to us for maybe a cyber resiliency solution or for a data protection solution. And then they say, wow, you guys are, can do this, all these other same automation capabilities across your stack. We need help here too, where it's, we're excited about the future, Dave. >>Yeah. So call them, it's been a couple of years since I've seen your face to face. Hopefully we will see you in may at Dell tech world. >>I'm looking forward to it. Thanks. >>Okay. Thanks to Colm Keegan for coming back in the cube and thank you for watching. This is Dave Volante and we'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering VMWorld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live CUBE coverage here at VMWorld 2017. Three days, we're on our third day of VMWorld, always a great tradition, our eighth year. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE co-hosted by Dave Vellante of Wikibon and our next guest is Keegan Riley, vice president and general manager of North American storage at HP Enterprise. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Thanks for coming on, love the pin, as always wearin' that with flair. Love the logo, always comment on that when I, first I was skeptical on it, but now I love it, but, HP doing great in storage with acquisitions of SimpliVity and Nimble where you had a good run there. >> Keegan: Absolutely. >> We just had a former HPE entrepreneur now on doing a storage startup, so we're familiar with he HPE storage. Good story. What's the update now, you got Discover in the books, now you got the Madrid coming up event. Software to find storage that pony's going to run for a while. What's the update? >> Yeah, so appreciate the time, appreciate you having me on. You know, the way that we're thinking about HPE's storage it's interesting, it's the company is so different, and mentioned to you guys when we were talking before that I actually left HP to come to Nimble, so in some ways I'm approaching the gold pin for a 10 year anniversary at HP. But the-- >> And they retro that so you get that grand floated in. >> Oh, absolutely, absolutely, vacation time carries over it's beautiful. But the HPE storage that I'm now leading is in some ways very different from the HP storage that I left sic years ago and the vision behind HPE's storage is well aligned with the overall vision of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which is we make hybrid IT simple, we power the intelligent edge, and we deliver the services to empower organizations to do this. And the things that we were thinking about at Nimble and the things that we're thinking about as kind of a part of HPE are well aligned with this. So, our belief is everyone at this conference cares about whether it's software defined, whether it's hybrid converge, whether it's all flash so on and so forth, but in the real world what clients tend to care about is kind of their experience and we've seen this really fundamental shift in how consumers think about interacting with IT in general. The example I always give is you know I've been in sales my whole career, I've traveled a lot and historically 15 years ago when I would go to a new city, you know, I would land and I would jump on a airport shuttle to go rent a car and then I would pull out a Thomas Guide and I would go to cell C3 and map out my route to the client and things like that. And so I just expected that if I had a meeting at 2:00 p.m., I needed to land at 10:00 a.m., to make my way to, that was just my experience. Cut to today, you know, I land and I immediately pull out my iPhone and hail an Uber and you know reserve an Airbnb when I get there and I, for a 2:00 p.m. meeting I can land at 1:15 and I know Waze is going to route me around traffic to get there. So, my experience as a consumer has fundamentally changed and that's true of IT organizations and consumers within those organizations. So, IT departments have to adapt to that, right? And so a kind of powering this hybrid IT experience and servicing clients that expect immediacy is what we're all about. >> Okay, so I love that analogy. In fact when we were at HP Discover we kind of had this conversation, so as you hailed that Uber, IT wants self driving storage. >> Keegan: Absolutely. >> So, bring that, tie that back, things that we talk a lot about in kind of a colorful joking way, but that is the automation goal of storage is to be available. We talk about edge, unstructured data, moving compute to the edge, it's nuanced now, storage and compute all this where they go through software. Self driving storage means something, and it's kind of a joke on one hand, but what does it actually mean for an IT guy? >> No, that's a great question and this is exactly the way that we think about it. An the self driving car analogy is a really powerful one, right? And so the way we think about this, we're delivering a predictive cloud platform overall and notice that's not a predictive cloud storage conversation and it's a big part of why it made a ton of sense for Nimble storage to become a part of HPE. We brought to bear a product called InfoSight that you might be familiar with. The idea behind InfoSight is in a cloud connected world the client should never know about what's going on in their infrastructure than we do. So, we view every system as being at the edge of our network and for about seven years now we've been collecting a massive amount of information about infrastructure, about 70 million telemetry points per day per system that's coming back to us. So, we have a massive anonymized dataset about infrastructure. So, we've been collecting all of the sensor data in the same way that say Uber or Tesla has been collecting sensor data from cars, right, and the next step kind of the next wave of innovation, if you will, is, okay it's great that you've collected this sensor data, now what do you do with it? Right? And so we're starting to think about how do you put actuators in place so that you can have an actual self managing data center. How can you apply a machine learning and global kind of corelation in a way that actually applies artificial intelligence to the data center and makes it truly touchless and self managing and self healing and so on and so forth. >> So, that vision alone is when, well, I'm sure when you pitched that to Meg, she was like,"Okay, that sounds good, "let's buy the company." But as well, there was another factor, which was the success that Nimble was having. A major shift in the storage market and you can see it walking around here is that over the last five, seven years there's been a shift from the storage specialist expert at managing LUNs and deploying and tuning, to the sort of generalist because people realize, look, there's no competitive advantage. So, talk about that and how the person to whom you've sold and your career has changed. >> Yeah, no, absolutely, it's a great point. And I think it's in a lot of ways it goes to, you're right, obviously Meg and Antonio saw a lot of value in Nimble Storage. The value that we saw as Nimble Storage is as a standalone storage company with kind of one product to sell. You know there's a saying in sales that if you're a hammer everything looks like a nail, right. And so, it's really cool that we could go get on a whiteboard and explain why the Castle file system is revolutionary and delivers superior IOPs and so on and so forth, but the conversation is shifting to more of a solutions conversation. It moves to how do I deliver actual value and how do I help organizations drive revenue and help them distinguish themselves from their competitors leveraging digital transformation. So, being a part of a company that has a wide portfolio and applying a solutions sales approach it's game changing, right. Our ability to go in and say, "I don't want to tell you about the Nimble OS, "I want to hear from you what your challenges are "and then I'm going to come back to you with a proposal "to help you solve those challenges." It's exciting for our sales teams, frankly, because it changes our conversations that makes us more consultative. >> Alright, talk about the some of the-- >> Value conversations. >> Talk about the sales engagement dynamic with the buyer of storage, especially you mentioned in the old days, now new days. A new dynamic's emerging we've identified on theCUBE past couple days and I'll just kind of lay it out for you and I want you to get a reaction. I'm the storage buyer of old, now I'm the modern guy, I got to know all the ins and outs of speeds and feeds against all the competitors, but now there's a new overlay on top of which is a broader picture across the organization that has compute, that has edge, so I feel more, not deluded from storage, but more holistic around other things, so I have to balance both worlds. I got to balance the, I got to know and nail the storage equation. >> Yeah. >> Okay, at well as know the connection points with how it all works, kind of almost as an OS. How do you engage in that conversation? 'Cause it's hard, right? 'Cause storage you go right into the weeds, speeds and feeds under the hood, see our numbers, we're great, we do all this stuff. But now you got to say wait a minute, but in a VM environment it's this, in a cloud it's like this and there's a little bit of bigger picture, HCI or whatever that is. How do you deal with that? >> No, absolutely, and I think that's well said. I mean, I think the storage market historically has always been sort of, alright, do you want Granny Smith apples or red delicious apples? It always sort of looked the same and it was just about I can deliver x number of IOPs and it became a speeds and feeds conversation. Today, it's not just not apples to apples, it's like you prefer apples, pineapples, or vacuum cleaners. Like, there's so many different ways to solve these challenges and so you have to take the conversation to a higher level, right. It has to be a conversation about how do you deliver value to businesses? And I think, I hear-- >> It gets confusing to the buyers, too, because they're being bombarded with a lot of fudd and they still got to check the boxes on all the under the hood stuff, the engine's got to work. >> And they come to VMWorld and every year there's 92 new companies that haven't heard of before that are pitching them on, hey, I solve your problems. I think what I'm hearing from clients a lot is they don't necessarily want to think about the storage, they don't want to think about do I provision RAID 10 or RAID five and do I manage this aggregate in this way or that way, they don't want to think about, right. So, I think this is why you're seeing the success of these next generation platforms that are radically simple to implement, right, and in some ways at Nimble, wen we were talking to some of these clients to have sort of a legacy approach to storage where you got like a primary LUN administrator, there's nothing wrong with that job, it's a great job and I have friends who do that job, but a lot of companies are now shifting to more of a generalist, I manage applications and I manage you know-- >> John: You manage a dashboard console. >> Exactly, yeah, so you have to make it simple and you have to make it you don't have to think about those things anymore. >> So, in thinking about your relationship over the years with VMware, as HP, you are part of the cartel I call it, the inner circle, you got all the APIs early, all the, you know, the CDKs or SDKs early. You know, you were one of the few. You, of course EMC, NetApp, all the big storage players, couple of IBM, couple others. Okay, and then you go to Nimble, you're a little guy, and it's like c'mon hey let's partner! Okay and so much has changed now that you're back at HPE, how has that, how is it VMware evolved from a ecosystem partner standpoint and then specifically where you are today with HPE? >> That's a great question and I remember the early days at Nimble when you know we were knocking on the door and they were like, "Who are you again? "Nimble who?" And we're really proud of sort of the reputation that we've earned inside of VMware, they're a great partner and they've built such a massive ecosystem, and I mean this show is incredible, right. They're such a core part of our business. At Nimble I feel like we earned sort of a seat at that table in some ways through technology differentiation and just grit and hustle, right. We kind of edged our way into those conversations. >> Dave: Performance. >> And performance. And we started to get interesting to them from a strategic perspective as just Nimble Storage. Now, as a part of HPE, HPE was, and in some ways as a part of HPE you're like, "Oh, that was cute." We thought we were strategic to VMware, now we actually are very strategic to VMware and the things that we're doing with them. From an innovation perspective it's like just throwing fuel on the fire, right. So, we're doubling down on some of the things we're doing around like VM Vision and InfoSight, our partnership with Visa and on ProLiant servers, things like that, it's a great partnership. And I think the things that VMware's announced this week are really exciting. >> Thank you, great to see you, and great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> I'll give you the last word. What's coming up for you guys and HP storage as the vice president general manager, you're out there pounding the pavement, what should customers look for from you guys? >> No, I appreciate that. There's a couple things. So, first and foremost are R&D budget just got a lot bigger specifically around InfoSight. So, you'll see InfoSight come to other HPE products, 3PAR, ProLiant servers so on and so forth and InfoSight will become a much more interesting cloud based management tool for proactive wellness in the infrastructure. Second, you'll see us double down on our channel, right. So, the channel Nimble's always 100% channel, SimpliVity was 100% channel, HPE Storage is going to get very serious about embracing the channel. And third, we're going to ensure that the client experience remains top notch. The NPS score of 85 that Nimble delivered we're really proud of that and we're going to make sure we don't mess that up for our clients. >> You know it's so funny, just an observation, but I worked at HP for nine years in the late '80s, early '90s and then I watched and been covering theCUBE for over seven years now, storage is always like the power engine of HPE and no matter what's happening it comes back down to storage, I mean, the earnings, the results, the client engagements, storage has moved from this corner kind of function to really strategic. And it continues that way. Congratulations. >> Thank you so much. Appreciate the time. >> Alright, it's theCUBE. Coming up Pat Gelsinger on theCUBE at one o'clock. Stay with us. Got all the great guests and alumni and also executives from VMware coming on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. (upbeat music) Now, here's your host Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this Cube Conversation on data protection. You know, I've been reporting for the last several months that spending on storage is reverting back to pre-2018 levels, but at the same time, it's not falling off a cliff. Now, one area of storage that is still very, very strong is the data protection segment. In the past 18 months, we've seen about a half a billion dollars in venture funding come into the market. We've just seen a big multi-billion dollar exit. And backup specifically in data protection, data management generally is where all the action is right now. And one of the leaders in data protection is Dell EMC. The company has the largest share of the market and the new entrants, believe me, want a piece of their pie. But anyone who follows this company knows that the firm is not likely to give up it's turf very easily. So much is changing in the market today. And I want to understand how Dell EMC's data protection division is responding to both the competitive threats and the changing market dynamics. With me are two experts from Dell EMC to address these issues. Nelson Hsu is Director of Solutions, Product Marketing for the data protection division at Dell EMC, and Colm Keegan is Senior Consultant, Product Marketing at Dell EMC. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> So you heard my intro. You guys are the leader. You got the biggest market share. You got all the upstarts coming at ya. What's your response? >> Want me to take that? >> Sure. >> Yeah. It's interesting, so we were talking about this before we came on set, you know and often times they want to poke holes at us 'cause you know we're perceived as being the old timers, or the stodgy ones of the group out there. And play a little jiu jitsu, you move in say you know well time in market counts for something. You know we've been solving data protection challenges for customers for literally decades now. You know and so, water under the boat and knowing the experience that we've derived from that allows us to bring solutions that are mature, that are proven. What we're doing is we're taking those proven solutions and pairing them with modern capabilities. So that, you know we look at it and say, hey, look, Mr. Customer. You have significant data protection challenges today because, as you said, the world's changing. It's changing rapidly. We can help you address those while also sowing the seeds for the foundation for the future. So we think that's a compelling message and we think that while some of our competitors, in particular the upstarts, have had some interesting things to say, big picture-wise, they don't know what they don't know. 'Cause they just don't have the time in the market. Their solutions are also largely absent upmarket, you know, when you look at the enterprise. So we're comfortable. We think we're in a very good spot right now. >> So cloud obviously was the huge mega trend of the past decade. You guys said from the beginning, it's going to be a hybrid world. Some of that was we hope it's going to be a hybrid world. Well you were right, it's a hybrid world. So how is cloud, hybrid cloud affecting your customer decisions around data protection, and how are you responding? >> Well, you know, there's no doubt that the growth in cloud and the growth in hybrid cloud is real. And it's there today. As we look, and as Colm mentioned, we've been protecting data across the enterprise, across the edge and in the cloud, and that growth continues. So today, we have over 1,000 customers that we're protecting their data in the cloud. To the tone of over 2.7 exabytes of data protected in the cloud by Dell EMC data protection. So there is absolutely no doubt that that growth is there. We have a lot of innovation that we're driving on, both in various ares of cloud native, cyber security and deep integration. >> Okay, so that's good, 1,000 customers. That's a pretty good observation space. But when you think about hybrid, what I think when I talk to customers is they want that same exact cloud experience. They don't want to have to context switch. They don't want to have to buy different platforms. So how are you specifically addressing that customer requirement? >> So there's a couple ways we look at that, right? For our customers, simplicity is very key in ease of use. So that's one of our core tenants as we go across both the edge, the core and the cloud. And the other aspect of that is consistency. So giving them and allowing them to use the tools that they know today to be able to protect their data, wherever that data resides. So with the cloud, with cloud native, your data becomes very, very distributed. And you have to be able to see all that data, and control and manage that data. So the whole aspect around cloud data management has now risen to the top as a major concern. We do that in a great way in a sense that we both have a hybrid strategy and a lot of that is working with Dell Technologies cloud. And it's based upon VMware. And so we have a very good deep relationship with VMware to utilize their tools that our customers use today. Whether it be vSphere or vcontrol that they can manage their data protection from one console, from one environment itself. >> Yeah, Dave, I think when you look at the split today, the latest cut of research is that roughly 52% of VM's are in the cloud, and 48 percent are on-prems so it's already hybrid, and as Nelson said, it's largely predicated on VMware. So as organizations start consuming cloud they're going to go with the platform that they've been operating under for years now. So it'll be VMware. We've always had very tight integration with VMware. We have a very strong partnership with them. And that's both on the existing portfolio as well as the agile portfolio that we're building out today under PowerProtect. So as that hybrid world evolves for the customers obviously we want to make sure they're protected from a virtual machine standpoint. And make that, as Nelson said, very simple for them because the last thing customers need is complexity particularly as their environments are becoming inherently more complex. Because now you look at most enterprises today, they're going to have a mix of workloads. It's physical, it's virtual, containers are unaccounted for. It's cloud native apps, it's SaaS. You know we were talking earlier about multi-clouds. Oftentimes it just kind of came up organically and now you've got this huge distribution of workloads and oftentimes, customers have been just sort of reactive to that. In other words, let me find a way to protect that and I'll worry about the details later. We're looking at that and saying, we have the portfolio to help you protect all your workloads, and as importantly, we'll help consolidate the management in that environment. It's going to start with VMware, but then longer term we're planning for things like a SaaS control plane so that we can give you a complete view of that environment and allow you to assign the policies you need in terms of SLA's, in terms of compliance. You're basically hitting all the security, hitting all the key things that you need and so directionally we think starting with VMware and building from there is probably the most realistic way we can get customers protected from a hyper cloud. >> So the vision is a single point of control that is SaaS based that lives in the cloud or lives wherever you want it to live? >> Right, it can be either. >> So one of our core tendencies here, right, is that we want and deliver the ability to protect our customer's data wherever it resides. Whether it's edge, core or cloud. >> So sticking on cloud for a second, and then sort of segue into the VMware conversation that I want to have is VMware is the sort of linchpin of your multi-cloud strategy. That makes a lot of sense. VMware is going to be a leader, if not the leader in multi-cloud. We'll see how that all shakes out. It's kind of jump ball right now but VMware is in pretty good position with 500,000 customers. But your perspective on cloud is different than say, take an AWS cloud provider, it's a place. Put your data in my cloud. You guys are talking about the experience. And that's really what you're trying to drive with VMware, whether is Ron-prem, whether it's in Google, Azure, AWS, wherever. The cloud, you name it. Is that the right way to think about your strategy? Specifically as it relates to multi-cloud. >> Yeah, so I think on the area of multi-cloud, it is a multi-cloud world. Years ago I was in a SaaS startup and we had customers that were looking to deploy to the cloud. And then that was the question. Okay, do we hedge on multi-cloud or not? As a SaaS provider, we actually implemented on both AWS and Azure at the time. Which became relevant, because now our customers are asking us, yes, my primary is with this particular hyper scaler. But do you also support this second hyper scaler? So the reality started to evolve. And so for us, yes, VMware is a very strategic aspect and partner with us, especially with Dell Technologies cloud. But we also have a multi-cloud relationship with AWS, with Azure and with Google. >> Yes, so the compatibility matrix, if you will, applies now to the cloud. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So now it's having that feature and functionality across multiple clouds. >> One of the things we obviously paid attention to is Project Tanzu with inside of VMware. All around bringing kind of Kubernetes and VMware together. How does that affect data protection? >> Well, I think it affects data protection in the sense that addressing the entire aspect of still your data is distributed now. And it's going to grow that way. I think that we've seen numbers upwards of 70% of applications will be container based. Some of that will be going forward to 2022 where there'll be multiple production applications that will be container based. I think what Tanzu will bring to the table is a cohesive way to manage and control that environment itself. >> Okay, and so maybe we could sort of drill into that a little bit. Containers, it's becoming more obvious that people want to persist some of that data. It's largely stateless, but you've got to figure out how to recover. So do you have solutions in that space, is that sort of more road mapping? You can talk about that a little bit. >> No, absolutely. So definitely we have concrete solutions with our Dell EMC PowerProtect data manager for Kubernetes. It's actually one of the first that was in the market to support cloud native environments. >> It is the first. >> Yeah, the first offering out there to support Kubernetes. And so the aspect there is that as cloud native has moved from DevOps, and now into production in the mission critical applications, now becomes the aspect of originally the DNA of DevOps was my data doesn't have to be persistent. Now when you move into a mission critical environment, you're entire environment needs to be protected. And to be able to bring those workloads back up should anything happen and to be able to protect that data that is critical to those workloads. >> Okay, and so you're saying you're first, and you see this as a differentiator in the marketplace, or is everybody going to have this, or it's one of these confusing ice cream cone of solutions. So why you guys? What's your big differentiation? Let's stick to containers. I have the same questions sort of overall come back to that. >> So great question, and the matter of fact is that with our experience across the edge, core and cloud, Kubernetes and containers will be prevalent throughout. And it'll be the way that applications will be developed. It's meeting the demands of the business and being agile. And I think that with our ability internally that would move to that agile emotion. We have that ability to address the customer's needs especially in the cloud native Kubernetes space. >> I think going back to what you said too about VMware, certainly our partnership there is differentiated. We even heard some echos of that during Vmworld. Pat Gelsinger usually doesn't give call outs on the main stage very frequently. And he said that they were working with us as a best-in-class partner for data protection with Tanzu. And so there is a very tight partnership there, so if I'm a customer and I'm looking at containers, I'm probably going to want to do it within the framework of VMware to start with. But it's important to point out that we're also not dependent on VMware. So we can still deliver protection for Kubernetes containers outside of say the VMware management domain. But I would say from a differentiation standpoint there are some real tight partnering going on to make these capabilities mature. >> Well it helps that your CEO owns 80% of the company. (laughing) But it's an interesting point you're making because again, dial back 10 years ago, VMware had much more of a Switzerland strategy under Maritz, almost to, at the time, EMC's detriment. I think Michael Dell is very clearly, as is Jeff Clarke, said look, we're going to do more integration. And Pat Gelsinger has been, look, I love all my partners. It's true but we're entering sort of a new era. And that integration is key, you know, again, because of the ownership structure, and your long history there. It's got to confer some advantages in the marketplace. >> Yeah, and he's also got to remove some of the headwinds to adoption of VMware cloud. And data protection, as we discussed often times can be a headwind if customers are concerned that they're not going to be able to protect their data, chances are they're going to stand pat for a while. So I mean you need to find ways to take some of those objections off the table. >> Yeah, and not to take anything away from your competitors. Look, it's an open API world, and again, people are going to compete. But at the end of the day this stuff is still really complex and if you can do some core engineering together it's definitely an advantage. Let's talk a little bit about cyber. I often say it's become a board level topic. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. SecOps teams are overtaxed. I think I put out a stat lately, I got it from Robert Herjavec actually. He said think about this. The worldwide economy is 86 trillion and we spend .014% on cyber, that's it. We're barely scratching the surface. And that's part of the problem. Okay, but with that limited resource we have to be as smart as possible. You've got this ransomware coming in. So what are your customers asking you for and how are you responding? >> So it's interesting, right, because it is top of mind, cyber and cyber attacks, and it takes many forms. The attacks can be malware, they could be encryption, they could be deletion. Which is ultimately the worst case scenario. And I think as you go forward and you look at it cyber is the number one concern for any CIO, CISO or anyone that's worried about their security infrastructure. >> Which is everybody >> Which is everybody, right, exactly. I think that we have delivered for the cloud data protection area a first and best offering with an air gap data protection solution. So inherently, we can insulate and protect our customer's data from cyber threats. So when a ransom event occurs you can recover your data without having to pay that ransom. Or not be concerned that in most severe cases your data gets deleted. I think most recently there was a healthcare provider who was threatened about their data being deleted. And that was the worst case. We were able to protect their data in the sense that with our cyber recovery offering they protected their data in an air gap vaulted solution. And they didn't have to pay for that ransom. >> So what I'm hearing from you guys is okay, cloud, very important. Hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, fundamental to our strategy. VMware, they say bet on sure things. VMware is pretty much a sure thing. Large customer base, leader in the space. And then cyber as a key concern of customers, you want to expand the notion of backup and data protection to really point it at cyber as well. >> Absolutely, in fact with this recent research, it's called the Global Data Protection Index Survey and we just refreshed it. And what customers identified as the most compelling reasons to adopt cloud is for better performance, better data protection, and better security. Not necessarily in that order but those were the top three. So we look at that and say, you know we've got plays there. Certainly we have capabilities protecting workloads in the cloud whether they be virtual machines, cloud native, containers. But the security aspect of it is huge. Because oftentimes customers, and Dave, you and I were talking about this, they make some broader assumptions about once data is in the clouds they can kind of wash their hands and walk away. Not so fast, because certainly there is a shared responsibility model that extends not only to data protection, but also to security. Look, don't get me wrong, the cloud service providers have fantastic security capabilities, have a great perimeter. But as you said, it's not a question of if, it's a question of when. And when something happens, are you ready for it? So these solutions extend not only to on-prem but into the cloud. So it's that ability wherever the workload lives that you can get the right protection and what we're really now referring to as safeguarding data. Because it's a combination of data protection and security that's embedded and doing it wherever the workload resides. >> I'm glad you brought that up Colm. I have a follow up on that, but Nelson, did you want to add something? >> Well, I just want to mention that one of the biggest concerns is making sure that that data you vaulted is actually clean and safe. So we have a cyber sense capability within our cyber recovery product, that when you vault that data it does about 100 analytics on that data to make sure that there's no malware. That it's not infected. And it does it automatically and even on incremental using machine learning. >> That's really important because mistakes happen really fast. (laughing) So if you're vaulting corrupted data, >> What do you do? >> Oops. >> Yeah, exactly. >> I want to come back, I think the shared responsibility model is not well understand and there's a lot of confusion in the industry. At a conference this year, AWS' CISO Stephen Schmidt was saying, look all this talk about security is broken it's not really productive. The state of security in the cloud is actually really good and to your point Colm, yeah, he's right about that. Then you hear Pat Gelsinger saying, he's told me many times in theCUBE security is a do-over. To my point, you know the 86 trillion. And so I kind of lean, when I talk to IT people what Pat is saying. So you say okay, where is the dissidence there? Well, the reality is is the cloud service providers and the shared security model, they'll secure the physical infrastructure. But it's up to the customer to be responsible for everything else. You know, the edicts of the organization are applied. We were talking to the CISO of a large insurance company and she said to us, oh no, shared responsibility means it's our responsibility. So you're not going to go after the cloud service provider, you're going to go after the insurance company, or the financial service institution. Their brand is the one that's going to get hurt. So that's misunderstood. My question, very long winded rant, but what role do you guys play in that shared responsibility model? >> Well, ultimately it comes down to the customer. And the shared responsibility model really is admissible, as you mentioned, right? And so at the end of the day, you as the customer own and are responsible to protect that data. So your data protection strategy, your cyber resilience strategy has to be sound. And it has to be secured by those that can actually do it across multiple distribution models and platforms, whether it's edge, core or cloud. Whether it's VM's, containers. It doesn't change. You're still ultimately responsible for it. >> I think maybe what you might be driving at the question, Dave, is empowering the customers to maintain control of their data. And having the tools in place so that they feel comfortable. And part of it too is moving more towards automation. Because as their applications grow, and as Nelson said, become more distributed, as the data grows exponentially, this just fundamentally isn't a task that humans can manage very much longer. >> I'm glad you brought that up, because you ask a CISO, what's your number one problem? And he or she will tell you the skill sets to keep up with all this complexity. And that's where automation comes in. >> Correct, it does. So that's where we're taking it. Is trying to make things more automated and take tasks away from humans that they just can't keep up with. >> All right guys, I'll give you the last word. We go back a decade or so ago and backup was a whole different situation. And we saw the rise of virtualization and now cloud and all these other things that we have been talking about. Edge, the cyber threats, et cetera. So bring us home, where do you see the future and how does Dell EMC data protection fit in? >> It's an exciting time, it really is. It's kind of like the coming of that second storm as you mentioned. Businesses have that demand of needing more services to load more quickly in an agile fashion. And as they pair that with the growth of their data which is distributed, they really have that challenge overall of how do I manage this environment? So you have to have the observability to understand where your data is and to be able to monitor it. You have to be able to orchestrate your workloads so that they're automated, and the data protection of those workloads are automated as well. And so the imperative that aspects like Tanzu are addressing with cloud native, that Kubernetes brings to the table to deliver containerized applications. That's really quite honestly is the biggest evolution I've seen in my last 20 to 30 years. This is definitely a different paradigm shift. >> Yeah, you know, six months ago I was with a competitor and was taking a look at EMC, sorry, I should say Dell EMC, and I was wondering, should I make a move over here? And really what convinced me was the fact that the company was willing to basically solve internally the innovator's dilemma. You're making so much money on your existing portfolio, now you're going to start investing in what appears to be almost internal competition to your portfolio. It's not, it's complimentary. So that's what drove the decision for me to come here, but I will also say it's great to be a part of an organization that has a long-term vision. You remember, I think the phrase that was being used, being held captive to the 90-day shot clock. You know, the earnings reports and stuff. And that drives behavior. Well, if your organization is looking at decade-long goals, that means that you can actually plan to do things that over time are going to actually bring real value to customers. So I think we're doing the right things. We're obviously innovating, we're on this agile software development cadence gives us the ability to solve the problems incrementally over time so customers can see that value instead of waiting for large batch releases. But is also gives us the ability to say, hey, when we've made mistakes or when we hadn't seen certain things come around the corner, we're agile enough to change with that. So I think the combination of having that vision and putting in the investments, and we've kind of likened ourselves to the biggest startup in the industry with the backing of a Fortune 50. And so from a customer standpoint you got to look at that and think, you know, that's interesting, because I need to solve my current problems today. I need to have a path forward for the future. And who am I betting on to deliver that? And the other thing I'll leave on is customers are trying to work with fewer suppliers, not more suppliers. Because they want to reduce the complexity. Well who has the ability to not only bring data protection to bear, but a whole portfolio of technology is really end to end. That can snap into those environments to again reduce complexity and drive more business value. >> That's a really interesting point you make about consolidations. Ever since I've been in this industry people want to deal with less suppliers and reduce the complexity. But you still see startups and VC's funding things. And what's happened is this consolidation, the big guys, you guys are the biggest consolidator. And I always say the rich get richer. There's always this tension between sort of, do I go out and buy the spoke, best of breed tools, or do I get them from somebody who can help me across the portfolio? That's really where your strength is. Guys, thank you so much. This is really a very important topic. Data protection is one of the most important areas that we've been covering. I've been reporting on it a lot. As I said, a lot of venture money has been flowing in. So I really appreciate you guys coming in, sharing your perspectives. And best of luck in the marketplace. >> Appreciate it, Dave. >> Thanks, this was great. >> You're welcome. All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)