>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's the CUBE, covering VeeamON2019. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody. This is Dave Vellate with Peter Burris here. Day One of VeeamOn2019, at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. Rat Pack used to hang out here Which is kind of the big theme of the reception last night. Dale Hoffman is here. He's the Director of Offering Management for VMWare Solutions at IBM. Dale, thanks for coming to the group. >> Thanks, David. It's a pleasure to be here and Peter, nice to meet you. >> Okay, yeah, pleasure to meet you as well. So lets unpack the sort of notion of Offering Management that sort of people generally refer to as Product Management. IBM calls it Offering Management. So you are focused on the public cloud, but specific to the VMWare swimlane. Is that right? >> Yeah, that is correct. So, if you think about it I own the VMWare Offering Solutions on our cloud. So, that is everything associated with the whole VMWare software defined data center stack, but also a lot of our partner solutions. Many solutions in the security space. Many solutions in the business resiliency space. And that's kind of where Veeam had came in on that aspect. >> So the first public cloud deal that VMWare did, correct me if I'm wrong, was with IBM, was it not? >> Yeah, so if you just go back a little bit in time, IBM itself is probably the largest, if not the largest, provider of VMWare workloads. And mainly that's due to a lot of our GTS services business. But back in 2016, this looked like a great opportunity to actually go on the public cloud and actually stand up a software defined data center stack from VMWare. So, we started on that in that partnership with VMware and started to just basically grow that business. That business has been growing at about a 75% CAGR, and then that was kind of like step one, get the stack, and then step two was how do you get those security services in, and some of those business resiliency services in. And that's where we started to go in and do a real deep partnership with Veeam and happy to say that we started that in 2017 and we have about 12,000 plus VMs, both bare metal and also on virtualized VMWare on our cloud. Its been about 170% year to year growth rate. So Veeam's killing it on our cloud. They really are. >> And your scope is anything in the IBM cloud that's VMWare related so it could be >> That is correct. >> Data base services, it could be >> Absolutely. >> Object stores, obviously data protection with Veeam. What do you think is driving the Veeam-IBM momentum? >> Well, I think what's driving it is if you think about a lot of these, you know, critical customers, first thing they're going to want to do is take advantage of a lot of things that you get with the cloud. Whether its moving from a capex to an opex model with being able to get that capacity expansion. And there's a whole bunch of different use cases that you've got, but one of the key things to them is this whole business continuity. The ability to make sure that I can back it up, I can recover as quickly as I possibly can, and maybe more importantly, we have about 60 data centers worldwide. And being able to, essentially, have that geographic span is a huge advantage. And also the, fact that, just take backup as a simple example. When I back up I may be moving data back and forth in a particular region. I'm looking for some latency. And not to be able to be charged for that is a powerful value proposition for the customer. So, we don't charge for any type of data movement inside our cloud. And also, when you go outside, maybe for high availability, outside into the geographic reach, the same thing happens. So I think those are some very key things. That it's the security, the very fast backup and recovery, and knowing that you're not getting charged for that private secure network. It brings a real good value proposition to our customers that are leveraging Veeam and other services. >> So we think that we're now entering into a third era of cloud where the first one was basically makers, companies that created SAS companies, gaming companies, and then people moved analytics into there for a variety of reasons. Now the enterprise seems to be getting in it in a big way. Certainly at the large size. But that's starting to move down into the mid-range as well. Your advantage, IBM's advantage, has always been your ability to engage and bind with your customer base. How are you, how is IBM helping to move these customers forward, and what is the backup restore conversation in that process? Is it an afterthought? Is it something that's becoming more central to their thinking? How is it working? >> Yeah, so that's a great question, Peter. So, the way I think we in IBM cloud have thought about this is we've kind of divided the journey to cloud into two pieces. The 20% that are there, they weren't the real I'll call them business critical type of workloads that are going on, but that next 80% that's where we really see a huge advantage to us. Its out enterprise relationships. Its what we do from a security aspect on the cloud, and how easily we could help them, what we call lift and shift and migrate things over. And then once you're there, how can I help give you that assurance that we're going to give you the best backup, the best recovery in the event of a disaster, something that can, if you do see a failure, being able to have a very fast recovery point, you know, objective, and get you knowing that everything is secure and backed up and has this wide geographic spread. And even think about in the areas of compliance these days. GDPR. I mean, you have to have these data centers worldwide and sometimes they have to be you know, fixed. So, we provide that whole value proposition, I think, to those clients, in that essence. And I think the business critical, and, eventually, what we call mission critical workloads that will eventually move over, its probably the best choice to be able to have that trusted place to put workloads. >> So, the other, related to that, is you've got customers who are now moving and we're going to see them moving at varieties of speeds, but increasingly, the enterprises are going to move faster to do this than they've done in almost anything previously. And you've got Veeam, a very hard charging vendor, that has a reputation for great quality stuff, but a lot of innovation, moving very quickly. How is, how are you ensuring that there's no impedance mismatch between you, IBM, IBM customers, and Veeam and the technology vectors that it's on. >> Yeah, well first of all, its a very, very deep partnership. I mean very, very6 close relationship with them. This is not a vendor supplier relationship. This is a very, very deep partnership. And the other thing is, from a technology standpoint, one of our big differentiators on the cloud is, we actually provide that access all the way down to the hypervisor level. So, you have full freedom of action to do whatever you want to be able to do. So, from a Veeam standpoint, since its really based on a hypervisor type of technology, that gives us a real big advantage, because let's say, David, you're using Veeam on-prem. I give it the exact same look and feel as if you're off-prem, and I essentially make that data center look like an extension, like it was just in the next building and such. >> It's just another group, it's just another pool of VMs. >> Absolutely. And that whole, control and management of that gives you extreme flexibility that you really can't get in any other type of cloud. I like to say that You can come in and custom build your infrastructure, your VMWare software defined data center stack, your services such as Veeam. You custom build it any way that you want. It's like leasing a car. After you custom built that car, we hand you the keys. It's client managed. You go out and do whatever you want with that. And if you don't like it you can turn those keys back in, because we just do things not on a long term commitment, but on monthly commitments and such. >> And I want to, I want to maybe drill down on that a little bit, Dale. >> Sure. >> And try to better understand some of the flexibility that I'm inferring from your statement. So, you're a mainframer. You remember the days of SMS, and one of the things about it was that I could set policy for data protection, for backup, based upon the workload. I could say back this up once a week or back this up every day or back this up every hour or what is was. I had a granular level of capability. It was mainframe so it was, you know, big stuff. A lot of the challenges within, certainly the mid-size and smaller businesses, it's like one size fits all. This has been a, you know, a problem for everybody for years. Danny Allen, this morning, in the analyst and media session was talking about... >> This is the products guy here at VM. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talking about the ability to sort of set granular levels, the pressures of RPO and RTO. And I want to sort of test how challenging it is to do that by workload or by application, and how IBM and Veeam are supporting that. How complicated is it? Are your clients doing it or is it still kind of a one size fits all world. >> I wouldn't say its one size fits all, but what I would say is by giving the clients full control and having the freedom and flexibility to do things that they want, the tight integration of this Veeam technology into the V-Center console and such, it gives them the ability, I like to say, do it at your own pace. Do it when you want to. Even something as simple as, lets say, managing VMWare and patching it, instead of having somebody else do it for you at their pace, we essentially allow you to do it at your pace when you want to. And its the same thing with the backup. You do it when you want to, at your frequency, what regions you want to go, or your whole geographic spread. And we try to provide the maximum flexibility and control to our mutual clients to enable that. >> And on the automation scale, or you know, the 9-inning game of automation, where are we? How, how automated can I make that, but more importantly, how fast are customers adopting that sort of automation scenario. >> Yeah, so you're experience when you come into our, our cloud, and essentially you click on "I want to go to the cloud," you click on the VMWare offering, its a very simple menu. You pick your infrastructure, compu... network storage. I'll keep it simple for now. You pick your software defined data center stack and we even enable a BYOL. A lot of people have their own Vsphere licenses. We enable them to go in and insert their key which is a cost advantage to them. Then you pick your partner services and such. So you pick your Veeam, and then you go in there and say "Well, where do I want to put it? Do I want to put it into Vsan? Do I want to put it into a file based storage?" And I think what we're really excited about is, we just recently announced being able to put this into IBM's cloud object storage. And that's huge, because, if you think about it, we all live in this area of regulatory and compliance and you can't throw anything away and the data is just exploding all over the place. So, having that ability to put it into a lower cost storage and all automated and essentially Veeam can essentially point to any of those multiple storage tiers. It gives our customers a big advantage so that they could essentially, I'll call it right-tune what they want to do and where they want to do their backups. So, they want something there quick or they say "Nah, you know, that could be a cold vault. I can keep that out there for a while and when I need it I'll go back and get it." So a lot of flexibility on storage options, a lot of flexibility on the pricing. But Veeam essentially is that powerhouse behind it that's actually interfacing that VMWare world as well as on the bare metal side over to those various levels of storage. >> So David, to answer your question, where are we in that 9 innings. I would have said bottom of the 1st, 1 out, 2 men on, 1 of them is Manny Ramirez. [Laughter] Because you just don't know what's going to happen next, and that's what I want to bring up. Veeam talked about... >> Is he a Boston fan? >> No, I'm not. [Laughter] I'm not. But Veeam talked about the "with Veeam" and I'm wondering how IBM sees it bringing its, this massive innovation, you still are one of the leading generators of patents in certainly the tech industry, but globally. How do you see IBM bringing IBM intellectual property, IBM invention, to this "with Veeam" platform to increase the degree to which it can serve a broader range of customers of different sizes, different geographies, and different workload forms. How do you see IBM participating in that process? >> Yeah, let me give you a couple examples. So, let me just take a non-Veeam example, just to talk about some IBM innovation. So, about a month ago we actually introduced something called hyperprotect cryptoservices. That's a big word there. Basically, it is, it's the same technology that we have in system Z, that's used by our large enterprise customers that gives you that, that FIPS 140-2, level 4. We are the only cloud in the world that has that technology that's on there. Basically, once you put your keys in there nobody's going to get to them at all. And it's an innovation of taking something that was done in a different division within IBM and now making that as an endpoint service within our cloud. Now, let me give you an example of doing a little bit of innovation even with Veeam. So, one of the things that we're trying to do is, you know, we started out hey, let's lay down the software data center stack, let's lay down partner services. Now, let's focus on what's that solution layer on top of it. How do we add more value into our clients? So, just take SAP, for example. We just recently announced both on a bare metal and also on our VMWare side, to be able to have a, we're the only cloud that has a certified SAP server in the cloud. And what we've just recently done is, we've integrated and put Veeam as that backup choice for that. So, now what that really enables everyone to do is leverage a lot of innovative work that Veeam was doing to make sure that you can back up SAP correctly. We married that with our infrastructure and our bare metal/VMWare stack with Veeam as that backup. And just a little bit of foreshadowing in the future, we're going to look at ways to further automate a lot of that SAP landscape so that our clients see, you know, a much better automated solution so that they essentially, using your baseball analogy, are going to see that full range of automation and say "Wow. I think we're at the end of the game here. This thing truly is automated, easy to consume, and I'll have the confidence of the security and the business resiliency knowing that it's got the trusted IBM name behind it. >> You know, give us the summary of 2019. Maybe some of the first half highlights and maybe show a little leg for the second half. >> Sure, sure. Why not? >> What can we expect leading up to IBM thing. >> So, I mentioned a few things about what we did in the security space already. So, we've enabled, besides our, what we've done with high trust, with data and key protection. We've also enabled IBM's key protect services. We brought the System Z hyperprotect services into the mix. We've enabled things like cavionics to bring the risk foresight. So, now, we can monitor a lot of compliance and keep things in compliance and monitor that for you. We brought some app modernization to essentially help people on their journey modernize their apps, leveraging both a tight integration of VMWare and what we call ICP-hosted or IBM Cloud Private hosted to get that tight integration and such. But moving forward I see a couple big things, and I'll try to maybe put them in the Veeam perspective and such. You heard me mention before about this 80% of that real key workload coming over to the cloud that, you know, business critical or mission critical. We announced last year something called mission critical VMWare, and basically what it is, it's two, two active, active type of sites with a witness site and you essentially are moving things back and forth so if you have a failure within a region you instantly can go in and switch over. And the idea is to give you the highest availability into the cloud. And Veeam is a very much integral part of that solution in the sense that it'll be our backup. And then since you said do a little bit of foreshadowing, say what's coming in the future. We have a very very strong single tenant VMWare offering on the cloud. Like I was saying, you know, it's client managed, the hypervisor access. You've got that extreme flexibility and control. But what we like to do is kind of look into a little bit more of that multi-tenant type of space. And we think it opens up a whole new market segment for us in that emerging market and commercial market space. Guess who's going to be our partner in that to make the backup happen? That's going to be Veeam. >> Cool. Dale Hoffman, thanks so much for coming to the CUBE and sharing. >> Oh, thank you for having me. >> Some of the ways in which IBM is differentiating, not doing infrastructure service and just racing to zero, but really trying to pick your spots and I really appreciate your insights and thanks again. >> Okay, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris. Day one at VeeamON2019, and from Miami you're watching the CUBE. We'll be right back.