live from Miami Beach Florida Biman 2019 brought to you by beam welcome back to sunny Miami everybody you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we like to go out to the events extract the signal from the noise and we're here at Vemma on 2019 I'm Dave Volante with my co-host this is day 2 Peter Burris and I have been covering wall-to-wall coverage with the cube folks from net APIs are here Jeff McCullough who's the vice president of Americas partner sales for net app and our good friend Keith Norby who runs alliances for net up guys great to see you thanks for coming on thanks for having us so Keith let's start with you V has been a partner of yours for a while now you guys go to market together year you have always been very partner friendly particularly when it comes to data protection but what's the state of the partnership today yeah this is something that we'd looked at a couple years ago and got into a very much more strategic relationship with veem over a year ago kind of work through a lot of ways to reconnect and establish a better together and this is something that we think is a strategic opportunity is kind of backed by a lot of the data you see at this show talking about you know organizations are gonna change roughly 60% of the organization is going to change their platform because of cost complexity reasons and together we've been working with Veeam to figure out how to deliver data protection for a data fabric and and IDC validates that in a number of ways that we can unpack here on this on the show or in the conversations with customers and and we've gotten great reaction to it and Jeff you lead America's partner sales from North America South America the whole kit and kaboodle talk more about your role sure well my responsibility is net at partners I am I'm successful when our partners successful are successful so everything I do is all around putting our partners in the position of you know executing being successful within that brand certainly being profitable right having profitable strong businesses and and growing right growing and taking taking market share and and helping them expand and grow their respective business law you guys have dramatically increased the percentage of your sales that come through the channel over the last you know 10 10 12 years yes pretty significantly and there's a fundamental part of your strategy stager at this executive level so yeah for sure you know channel is its core to what we do you know when we go to market you know with developing our products or executing our marketing plans it's all around how do we go execute with partners right whether it's the tools the partners need the pricings the programs to help them go engage in the market that leads to man generation and we're at various stages in all these but you know what I think you'll see consistently from the partners that you know certainly will talk and talk about their net businesses we generally lead in profitability across our partner base and we absolutely lead in terms of total profitability when you include things like services attached and how we go and execute on us partner delivered services strategy so you know from I always say NetApp is it's not just a product category it's a whole economy for our channel and it puts people to work it allows them to expand and grow their teams and it's it's a critical part of many many of the partners that are here today at veeneman certain v-mon and and certainly in the marketplace and your partner friendly and assess that you don't have a huge services organization that's competing with your channel i mean that's a jerk yeah we put partner services in the forefront of everything we do Keith you talked about better together yeah what does that mean just in terms of engineering integration go to market I mean how did you sort over the last two years you know get better together what specific actions were you guys taking I think you got to look at it first from kind of the customer in the markets in and you got a look at what's the dynamic that requires change right that sort of shapes what your PRD and your Mardis are to make a product in this case you know we've got platforms that have incredible snapshot technologies so to me it really starts there with simplifying the way that you get the first copy of data and then simply working with the strengths that veem has and their platforms and making sure that we have great option ality between our replication and other snapshot technologies their replication tech to be able to give a level of flexibility for this data fabric to come to life you know no matter if you've got the traditional data center that's got these enterprise apps like at sa P Hana or others or you built the next generation data center like on that FH CI and you're building up scale out via more private cloud or you've got the hyper scalar cloud you know with our cloud volumes you know we have options on how we get data throughout the copy process of primary to secondary to you know cloud and tertiary data so you know to us it was about really making that as simple and as pre-wired as possible via the api's and then really making that easy for partners to go and grab on to to make it easy for someone to buy us because you always want to build something that people want to buy no one wants to be sold any of this stuff and so building the right thing that people want to buy the next step then with Jeff and reason why is so critical to this is getting that ready for the partners be able to have an easy process with their customers that frankly they love people hate to be sold they love to buy yeah let's talk about they love to buy one of the challenges that the entire industry has is we move through the significant transformation is customers user organizations or themselves in the midst of huge transformations institutional transformations technology transformations relationship with their business transformation mission transformation just starting with this whole role that the channel is has been playing it's going to play how will the channel be an increasing source of value add in the deal yeah how's that playing out to help these customers you know smooth their changes yeah and I think you know I was just watching the news this morning right target announced their earnings and a big part of their earnings announcement was the improvement they made in customer interaction through digital platforms right the ability to order online pick up in the store or order online and have it delivered same-day right and these are and it's just you know one example you can go down the list of customers that have really used transformation to change their business right and you know Chipotle who's trans you know they've transformed burritos now and a lot of their successes come through digital transformation platforms so you know the evidence is overwhelming that digital transformation drives better results and we've done a lot of study at this right we we have lots of detail around customers that know how to use data and you know that the basic fact is one out of ten customers is in a position to actually leverage data effectively right this is all of the research we've done along you know with partners with with other companies the other nine need help and this is where channel partners come in this is what I tell partners all the time is this digital transformation wave is real the results are real and the customers need to move is is real and so they play a role in can play a role in helping customers accelerate that digital transformation and so our portfolio is all around accelerating customers and their ability to leverage data to transform their business and partners through both of the portfolio that they sell but then the partner driven services that we promote and drive you know really stand out in the forefront of being able to help a customer execute these these really tough strategies and in you know the thing that reason why customers love partners is partners bring choices right and you know for us as vendors we have to deal with the other side of that which is partners have choices and who they sell so we represent a portfolio that is forward thinking it aligns to where the market is going the lines to the tough problems that customers have and it's you know in its a position that allows partners to be profitable and and make money helping customers transform and deliver their own success but it's got to be more than just partners cat create choices and here's one explain what I mean by that it's increasingly your typical CIO medium-sized company large size company which is where we spend most of our time is thinking in terms of what is going to bring me value today and also generate a stream of value for me in the future so I need choice now but options for the future that are relevant and meaningful and so partners increasingly have to be part of that options equation how are they going to create options for customers and you know one of the nice things about the relationship that you have the theme is that you are a partner to veem and presumably you're going to help Veen customers create additional types of options through this expanding folio of value that you guys have so so talk about that dynamic because it really requires an even greater dependency on that customer partner engagement including you know the dependency the beam has on on you guys yeah doing it maybe start with just the veem partnership partnership yeah I think you know which we create the conditions with which I think a partner comes to life with what we've tried to do in in the product building solutions and then trying to develop the go-to-market around the partners ability to go meet the market and what the market is asking for in such you know the partners have natural services on the front side of the assessments a bit like trying to help you plan your 401 K they help you like see what kind of data you don't even see we have a wealth of partners that just have incredible skills there and then as they take that through our solution we do everything we can to make that process easy to match our technology to that design requirement and then afterwards the partners always have these these great capabilities for things like you know a one call or a managed service to help take even more complexity off the table for people to just live with the ability to have data protected across all spectrums of where they have data live so the partner equation is definitely getting more complicated right if you dial back you know half a decade decade you had guys who sold hardware boxes they livox sellers we love them but and they moved a lot of a lot of product and they worked with you okay now the cloud comes in you guys they're going you know software-defined so you can run your services in the cloud you know or you run it on Prem you've got hybrid so it's a complicated equation much more so than it was in the past so how are you seeing the partners evolve and transform you know beyond the sort of box selling mentality of course you know VMware specialists you get those guys at sa P maybe Oracle but yeah but it's even more than that now with cloud isn't it oh yeah yeah you know cloud is you know kind of the third big disruptive wave in the channel right if you think of kind of client-server is the big first disruptive way of virtualization the second disruptive way to now cloud just purely from a channel perspective the third big one and maybe the biggest right because it is completely changing the dynamics and the economics of how partners operate and you know and we've been looking at this for you know for a long time and certainly as we move our portfolio as we transition our portfolio to be cloud enabled and native to the cloud it creates options but but you know the market is moving from you know deal based revenue to reoccurring revenue and what I see partners moving to is various various degrees of reoccurring revenue strategies whether they're setting up their own MSP business and they're opening up shop and they're doing data protection on demand or they are doing managed services on premise and they're charging customer or they're buying out the infrastructure I'm charging a customer once a month or they're selling services in the cloud and in what I think is also interesting and you can see the kind of the direction where the industry of a channel is going is when you look at the acquisitions that partners are making not only of each other but of software development right IP there are going out and buying software development because the the the long term opportunity is not just selling the infrastructure it's selling a solution solving a big problem right which could be this digital transformation opportunity but it's it's more than just sure I can I can upgrade your servers it's their digital transformation right it is you know you know kind of clouds not really a destination right everybody thinks clouds the destination I got to get to you know it's not a destination it's a tool in the bag that you know customer is going to use and certainly a partner is going to leverage cloud to create a money stream write a business model that is sustainable and can grow but it's super dynamically different than what we do you know what they're doing today so you guys talk about profitability before you had a point go ahead and I say balance all that against I think we're the volume the mass of the volume is even though the hyper scalars have a tremendous amount of growth it is still VM based it is still kind of on-prem based and so there's still in this two-year window of change the vast majority of the opportunity is going to be on Prem but you also have to factor in how you involve the cloud and that strategy as what ratmir would called second wave right of beams strategy and we're right in the heart of that I mean there isn't any greater strength than what we're doing as a company with NetApp than what we're doing with cloud and it's just a natural way for us to extend you know a partner's capability a customer's ability to buy what they what you'd want to get from NetApp and beam together well and what the hyper scales have done is they've changed the way in which people consume technology absolutely understand and NetApp is a great case study of a company that's moving through that process from a product orientation to a services orientation the key I want to come back to this notion of how the NetApp relationship with Veen creates new classes of options for Ravine customers as they thought try to think about data protection differently because precisely because it's Dave said you have expanded your portfolio you are going to market with a different value proposition than a couple years ago how is that playing out in your conversations with customers as they think about moving from a data protection that's focused on devices to a data protection that's focused on delivery of digital services yeah well it's not a great topic to talk about where do you start with that organically I think you look at the way people try to operate and deal with the operations of data protection you know it really starts there because you know cloud is really about IT operations what we've done is really try to simplify that stack to get beyond it being one single endpoint of technology so it's not just about how we take data sets you know from say a net F as or a net of HCI and bring it through Veeam to another thousand or eseries and then off to the cloud you know it's beyond just the basic technology it's much more operational and it's in its nature so if you look at all the stuff they're talking about here with VOA and all the discovery elements that they're doing to help make it easier one of the one of the areas that IDC caught particularly in one of our benefit statements on taking complexity off the table is our ability to have autodiscover of yemm's you know it's it's ways that you could make much more autonomy and orchestration of operations kind of come to life as a way of you doing this technology together that's only just one of the example points that we have on this better together with veem taking the heart of their core technology and where they're being you know pervade of in in not just a VM centric crowd but also hyper-v and some of the other things they talked about that's kind of the top of their rationalize stack and then bringing that down through the heart of our data fabric portfolio and saying you know any one point at which you're at we were able to put these things together at the heart of the first step and we kind of mapped this customer journey out in our presentation to the attendees here was this customer journey from the current form of complexities you have you know and moving that all the way through to snapshot integration platform selection of which ones would make sense for what scenario how we work through veem x' data replication and management technologies our data replication our data fabric technologies to get from one endpoint to the other so and then ultimately you gotta be able talk about the ability to restore or you really shouldn't be talking about backup all right we got a wrap but I'm gonna ask you guys each question Jeff from trip reports so from your standpoint you talkin sales momentum with partners what are you gonna tell your colleagues and Keith obviously the partnership with Veen what what are you gonna tell your colleagues when you get back home yeah so so for me it's you know this is we've talked about transformation this you know I think our relationship with Veeam and the strategies that we're executing is all around transforming data protection right and it's really around this concept of simplification and I think as we were chatting before before we started taping the you know simple simple matters right simplification or simple is really attractive feature and you know our ability to simplify data protection for customers in partnership with Veeam deliver solution that's you know clearly world-class and you know NetApp bringing world-class technology to the table it's a great partnership it creates an opportunity for us to go and have conversations with customers that made me never thought of NetApp before and and it's you know an opportunity for us to open a lot of doors and certainly for me what I care about it's an opportunity for our partners to open a lot of doors yeah I would just say listen we worked from our joint CEOs together so George and ratmir starting this like joint bond of alignment all the way down through product solutions feel Geo's channels we're gonna have explosive growth together you know we're gonna go address this market that is looking to change we've got something we're bringing together and it's absolutely better together great power players aligning at the top all the way down through the channel to the partners into the cloud bringing you all the data here the cube Jeff and Keith thanks very much for coming on the cube keep it right to everybody Peter Burris and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break we're live from Miami at Vemma in 2019 over a pack