>> Narrator: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE covering COMMVAULT GO 2018 brought to you by COMMVAULT. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee. This is COMMVAULT GO and you're watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program Lauren Nelson who's a principal analyst with Forrester. Thank you so much for joining us. >> My pleasure! >> Alright, our first time doing theCUBE in Nashville. COMMVAULT goes third year at the show. Have you been to the COMMVAULT shows in the past? >> I have. Not last year but the year prior, first year. >> So you skipped a year. From two years ago, just from my own knowledge COMMVAULT's changed quite a bit. I mean, they had some pressures on them. They've been going through a lot of pricing models. What's your take on what COMMVAULT's been doing in the last couple years? >> Yeah, a lot of focus on the show on pricing model changes, packages changes, emphasis on selling through partners and how to try and foster that in the actual village space. So, how do you bring partners into conversations early on and in a smoother way and just looking around, you've got white boards on tables, you've got spaces very changed in terms of collaborative space right in the middle of the booths rather than around the perimeter. So, very very interesting layout. >> Alright, so Lauren, your research, one of the things that you focus on is cloud and cloud migrations which is, of course, one of the key messages COMMVAULT talks about. When I talk to users, the multi-cloud strategy that they're figuring out, as I say, the ink's still drying and it's one of those things that's revisited quite often. What are you hearing from customers? What's your research showing of the state of cloud and how cloud migration fits in to it? >> Yeah, so you've got two really big topics right now on the cloud space. You've got the migration side and you've got the multi-cloud side and they are the conversations going on right now. First of all, you've got migration which is not SAS migration but migrating an app to an infrastructure as a service environment and that is something that is difficult. And a lot of companies that are talking about cloud migration don't always recognize that. They sum it up to SAS migration and often find that they are going to have higher performance when they move. They don't look at the challenges or the architectural changes from moving to vertical scaling to horizontal scaling and it's this conversation where, well, if we hear one company doing it, then maybe that should be our entire cloud strategy, And for a number of organizations, it is. Especially if you look at small mid-size organizations, they're looking at cloud migration as a data center replacement method. If you look at the average enterprise, that's not the typical story unless they're in a unique moment of change. Typically, what they're looking at is a few apps typically driven by location or app specific support that they're planning to get from their service provider of choice and they're moving this app for specific reasons. If you look holistically at our latest stats, survey taken in August, shows that 69 percent of enterprises in North America and Europe are actually migrating workloads to the cloud. If you then ask about how, they're methods are all over the map, the number of total apps they're moving is far less than what we're made to believe, in some of the more sensationalized or exaggerated stories or kind of unique use cases. When you look at the other side of that, you've got the multi-cloud story which is, all of a sudden with this migration topic, you get organizations questioning, "Should I be multi-cloud? "Am I doing this wrong? Am I adding needless complexity?" And we saw a bit of a drop in 2016, after GE presented at Amazon Re: Event, on associating with the term multi-cloud, that that was their specific strategy. And we've actually seen that come back in spades. In fact, we've seen a number of organizations actually say they are multi-cloud and then they have various definitions of what multi-cloud means for them. Multi-cloud is either public and private, private and some public cloud usage, multiple public, non cloud plus cloud. It's all over the map. And so, I think organizations are starting to take a step back, starting to think about, "How does my cloud strategy map to my larger organizational values?" Should seem obvious that should've been done that way from the start but for a lot of organizations it's a unique step that they're doing this year of being more pragmatic on how they should approach cloud. Not trying to force fit deployment models and look at the real opportunities that are there. And that includes all of these things. It includes private cloud and your on-prime data center for using it for specific workloads, for use cases that it just does not make sense to have that much change at once or to force the economics. The other side, you do see cloud migration. That is very much a real thing. It is not the most exciting use case to cloud. You're moving an app that you're not changing at all in terms of customer experience to an environment that is not meant to handle it that may suffer from performance. So it tends to be the less sexy side of the cloud strategies that we see today but very much apart. And it is the use of infrastructures of service for just that cheap infrastructure rather than some of it's more compelling past services. So it's an interesting time! All of those conversations are emerging, in fact, I can't tell you how many research reports we have on queue on these very topics around just the one-on-one level which I think is what we've primarily covered. Just the grazing the surface versus some of the latest conversations around, how do we have cloud neutral pass services that are obstructed from the underlying platform. Who will deliver those? What technologies will be standardized beneath that? How will we leverage kubernetes and the many different types. So, It's an interesting thing that I'm pretty passionate about as you can see. >> Well Lauren, let's talk about that step to when I'm out talking to customers about multi-cloud. One, multi-cloud or even cloud migration, that you're absolutely right, I see the same thing. They need to answer the why question like, "why are we even considering that?" And for multi-cloud I think customers are starting to look back and really wonder, "do I need that complexity?" "Is it really worth the effort?" But the second thing that I think customers underestimate the complexity of is having a data strategy unique to cloud versus their data strategy on PRIM. Are you seeing the same, that customers are realizing, wow, that I can't just take wholesale of my data strategy, my own PRIM data strategy and take that to the cloud. >> Yup, and it's the classic analyst response is, it depends. There's some organizations that are literally creating two different data hubs where they're having different access levels and different apps that you're allowed to connect to based on what classification is for that particular data. It's this theme of zero trust model of, how do you secure from the data out? And simply put, some data sets are more valuable than others. Some have security requirements that are far more expensive to meet and when you try and problem solve for this, some people try and think, well, is the easiest way just to completely segment the two, and be able to have control of how you access these two, Or, is it more complex than that? Do we need different databases that we're leveraging? Do we need to look at migrating some days or replicating some data to avoid data out fees from some of the major service providers? Do we leverage a third party like a collocation provider that can provide some ease for us in terms of movement of data? So, I think that's one of the big topics in the upcoming year is if I'm going to to multi-cloud, if I'm going to take on that effort, why am I doing that? You know, why am I taking on this as an important app? Is it because of fear of lock-in and flexibility long term? And if I do that, what are the implications in terms of data both security wise and cost wise. And a lot of organizations' challenge is, you know, you write out your cloud security, or your actual cloud strategy map and you don't really understand the proof points or where that strategy breaks until you start getting in to the details, testing out and trying to do this to try and figure out what are the actual costs of this scenario. So it's a challenging problem but it's one that I think organizations are going to be facing for the next few years. >> Yeah, it's interesting and I'm thinking through some of this. A lot of what we're talking about is infrastructure. And it's like, my private cloud, how do I modernize it? How do I simplify it? The reason we have infrastructure is to run my applications and the most important piece there is the data. How much does the cloud strategies that the data companies are working on look at data and how they are going to take advantage of data even more in the future? >> Yeah, it's a great question and there's so many different sides of this. There's one, you've got GDPR which is making them think about data in a whole new level just from a security and compliance perspective and how quickly they can react to requests that are put in by a particular citizen about their knowing what's on file for them as well as requesting it to be deleted and being held accountable for ability to complete that. On the other hand, you've got organizations that are trying to draw insights that are trying to change customer experience, design new products, market to their organizations more effectively leveraging data that they don't know where it is, they don't know how to use it or even how to start thinking about it together. They have a shortage of data scientists. They have a shortage of ... tools and solutions that can help them try and piece together this challenge. So, I would say companies have done very little of this so far. It is something that's on the road map. You get some organizations that are in the lead, that are testing the waters right now but if you look at the average organizations, they haven't even gotten to this. They're trying to use public cloud for very low end use cases at this point. >> Alright. So, I want to ask you when you talk about your research, of course, it depends. The customer by customer what they're having, but what differentiates a customer that can really start kind of moving up the stack, being more strategic, having IT really answering to the business and doing things with their data versus the laggards out there? Is there anything that you're finding in your research as to what separates those leaders from laggards? >> There's a few things and I'm not the first. A lot of vendors look for changes in executive boards. So, typically new folks coming in trying to change the way things are being done. Kind of, fresh innovative talent. That's a good flag that they're ready for it. Other organizations, there's the classic, they're threatened by others in their industry or believe they'll be threatened soon. For some organizations, it happens to be the right place, the right time. They have a leader they can trust that they believe will head this cloud strategy and that can tackle some of these challenges. For a lot of organizations, there's the desire, there is some action but often times the action is delayed. They face very stagnant cloud strategies. They face very stagnant data problems cause they're either missing cash, they're missing the ear of their executive board, or they have the wrong individuals that are trying to take the torch forward. So it takes a lot of critical self reflection as an organization that isn't easy. >> So let's talk a little about that (mumbles) within organizations. A lot of times, I'm seeing multi-cloud, cloud migration, cloud efforts being driven by, not just IT but infrastructure organizations within IT. Are you seeing successful efforts being driven from, I call that bottom up, versus whether if it's evens some VP or above, driving the effort from a business perspective? >> I think it varies. So, there some organizations where it's, our VPs are bringing a cloud first policy to our organization and then you have to figure out what that means to that particular executive. It may mean, we are going to go AWS completely all now! For a lot of organizations, it's a progress of, we're going to include all things that could be possibly labeled as cloud technologies, which, doesn't really describe much. If it does anything, it's to describe change is on the horizon. We are going to do things differently than we previously did. For a lot of companies, they have been tasked by their executives of, you need to tell me what to do for the cloud strategy and so they're trying to figure out, how do we problem solve for cloud from our perspective. I think that's been on of the biggest problems of the cloud industry for the last seven years, is this bottom up approach or top down approach with very little thinking about where's the value. So, bottom up, typically you get folks thinking about how to we have more efficient infrastructure, how do we modernize, how do we add in automation and build the best private cloud in the world? And often times over spending, often times delaying and having no self service access for developers for five years into their strategy. From that you see a lot of organizations trying to redesign their cloud strategies to deliver real business value up front early on and then look to see, how do they modernize, how do they mature, to help support and scale that effort, where as, top down approaches are very froofie, high level, shiny objects and so a lot of organizations that are trying to change that are trying to get individuals in the same room together, figure out, let's start from our business strategy and work our way in to how cloud serves that greater purpose. >> Lauren, when Forrester talks to customers, this space of data protection, secondary storage, whatever you call it, is pretty crowded. Are there specific things that, customers are calling out or that Forrester gives advices to how to differentiate in the market place or what they're looking for? And along those lines, what're customers looking for down the road to even expand more and get more value from vendors in the future? >> Yeah, I tend to focus on the cloudy questions. So, when I'm looking at data protection, I'm looking at it as a module of, how you manage multiple clouds. And when you look at the hyper cloud management space, it's a very busy space. It tends to focus on orchestration, template building, occasionally some compliance and policy, tags that can be applied, and then cost optimization. Very little has been done on the security side so far and very little has been done on data production side. So, when you look at, how do you differentiate, there's not a lot of players in this market yet. For as many security players as there are, it has not been aggressively tackled as heavily as the classic management providers have been attacking other management challenges. You look at the cloud costs optimization space, it's done very well. It's the first cloud challenge that organizations are trying to solve is, how much am I spending? Who's spending it? How do I integrate with my billing system? The next challenge is, how do I problem solve for data. They see that as a potentially huge cost escalator if they don't get this under control for many reasons, compliance, from data out costs. So, that's the next beach head. So, I would actually argue that there's not a lot that's been done specifically around cloud in this space yet. >> Lauren Nelson, we really appreciate you sharing your insight in customer views with us. >> My pleasure! Thank you. >> Alright, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more coverage here from COMMVAULT GO, in Nashville, Tennessee, Thanks for Watching theCUBE.