(upbeat music) >> Welcome back. We're winding down theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. We're here at the Seaport in Boston. It's been two days of a little different Red Hat Summit. We're used to eight, 9,000 people. It's much smaller event this year, fewer developers or actually in terms of the mix, a lot more suits this year, which is kind of interesting to see that evolution and a big virtual audience. And I love the way, the keynotes we've noticed are a lot tighter. They're pithy, on time, they're not keeping us in the hall for three hours. So we appreciate that kind of catering to the virtual audience. Dave Vellante here with my co-host, Paul Gillin. As to say things are winding down, there was an analyst event here today, that's ended, but luckily we have Jim Mercer here as a research director at IDC. He's going to share maybe some of the learnings from that event today and this event overall, we're going to talk about DevSecOps. And Kirsten Newcomer is director of security, product management and hybrid platforms at Red Hat. Folks, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Great to see you. >> Great to be here. >> Security's everywhere, right? You and I have spoken about the supply chain hacks, we've done some sort of interesting work around that and reporting around that. I feel like SolarWinds created a new awareness. You see these moments, it's Stuxnet, or WannaCry and now is SolarWinds very insidious, but security, Red Hat, it's everywhere in your portfolio. Maybe talk about the strategy. >> Sure, absolutely. We feel strongly that it's really important that security be something that is managed in a holistic way present throughout the application stack, starting with the operating system and also throughout the life cycle, which is partly where DevSecOps comes in. So Red Hat has kind of had a long history here, right? Think SELinux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for mandatory access control. That's been a key component of securing containers in a Kubernetes environment. SELinux has demonstrated the ability to prevent or mitigate container escapes to the file system. And we just have continued to work up the stack as we go, our acquisition of stack rocks a little over a year ago, now known as Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security, gives us the opportunity to really deliver on that DevSecOps component. So Kubernetes native security solution with the ability to both help shift security left for the developers by integrating in the supply chain, but also providing a SecOps perspective for the operations and the security team and feeding information between the two to really try and do that closed infinity loop and then an additional investment more recently in sigstore and some technologies. >> Interesting. >> Yeah, is interesting. >> Go ahead. >> But Shift Left, explain to people what you mean by Shift Left for people might not be familiar with that term. >> Fair enough. For many, many years, right, IT security has been something that's largely been part of an operations environment and not something that developers tended to need to be engaged in with the exception of say source code static analysis tools. We started to see vulnerability management tools get added, but even then they tend to come after the application has been built. And I even ran a few years ago, I ran into a customer who said my security team won't let me get this information early. So Shift Left is all about making sure that there are security gates in the app dev process and information provided to the developer as early as possible. In fact, even in the IDE, Red Hat code ready dependency analytics does that, so that the developers are part of the solution and don't have to wait and get their apps stalled just before it's ready to go into deployment. >> Thank you. You've also been advocating for supply chain security, software supply chain. First of all, explain what a software supply chain is and then, what is unique about the security needs of that environment? >> Sure. And the SolarWinds example, as Dave said, really kind of has raised awareness around this. So just like we use the term supply chain, most people given kind of what's been happening with the pandemic, they've started hearing that term a lot more than they used to, right? So there's a supply chain to get your groceries, to the grocery store, food to the grocery store. There's a supply chain for manufacturing, where do the parts come for the laptops that we're all using, right? And where do they get assembled? Software has a supply chain also, right? So for years and even more so now, developers have been including open source components into the applications they build. So some of the supplies for the applications, the components of those applications, they can come from anywhere in the world. They can come from a wide range of open source projects. Developers are adding their custom code to that. All of this needs to be built together, delivered together and so when we think about a supply chain and the SolarWinds hack, right, there are a couple of elements of supply chain security that are particularly key. The executive order from May of last year, I think was partly in direct response to the SolarWinds hack. And it calls out that we need a software bill of materials. Now again, in manufacturing that's something folks are used to, I actually had the opportunity to contribute to the software package data exchange format, SPDX when it was first started, I've lost track of when that was. But an S-bomb is all about saying, what are all of those components that I'm delivering in my solution? It might be an application layer. It might be the host operating system layer, but at every layer. And if I know what's in what I'm delivering, I have the opportunity to learn more information about those components to track where does Log4Shell, right? When the Log4j or Spring4Shell, which followed shortly thereafter. When those hit, how do I find out which solutions that I'm running have the vulnerable components in them and where are they? The software bill of materials helps with that but you also have to know where, right. And that's the Ops side. I feel like I missed a piece of your question. >> No, it's not a silver bullet though, to your point and Log4j very widely used, but let's bring Jim into the conversation. So Jim, we've been talking about some of these trends, what's your focus area of research? What are you seeing as some of the mega trends in this space? >> I mean, I focus in DevOps and DevSecOps and it's interesting just talking about trends. Kirsten was mentioning the open source and if you look back five, six, seven years ago and you went to any major financial institution, you asked them if they use an open source. Oh, no. >> True. >> We don't use that, right. We wrote it all here. It's all from our developers-- >> Witchcraft. >> Yeah, right, exactly. But the reality is, they probably use a little open source back then but they didn't realize it. >> It's exactly true. >> However, today, not only are they not on versed to open source, they're seeking it out, right. So we have survey data that kind of indicates... A survey that was run kind of in late 2021 that shows that 70% of those who responded said that within the next two years 90% of their applications will be made up of open source. In other words, the content of an application, 10% will be written by themselves and 90% will come from other sources. So we're seeing these more kind of composite applications. Not, everybody's kind of, if you will, at that 90%, but applications are much more composite than they were before. So I'm pulling in pieces, but I'm taking the innovation of the community. So I not only have the innovation of my developers, but I can expand that. I can take the innovation to the community and bring that in and do things much quicker. I can also not have my developers worry about things that, maybe just kind of common stuff that's out there that might have already been written. In other words, just focus on the business logic, don't focus on, how to get orders or how to move widgets and those types of things that everybody does 'cause that's out there in open source. I'll just take that, right. I'll take it, somebody's perfected it, better than I'll ever do. I'll take that in and then I'll just focus and build my business logic on top of that. So open source has been a boom for growth. And I think we've heard a little bit of that (Kirsten laughs) in the last two days-- >> In the Keynotes. >> From Red Hat, right. But talking about the software bill of materials, and then you think about now I taking all that stuff in, I have my first level open source that I took in, it's called it component A. But behind component A is all these transitive dependencies. In other words, open source also uses open source, right? So there's this kind of this, if you will, web or nest, if you want to call it that, of transitive dependencies that need to be understood. And if I have five, six layers deep, I have a vulnerability in another component and I'm over here. Well, guess what? I picked up that vulnerability, right. Even though I didn't explicitly go for that component. So that's where understanding that software bill of materials is really important. I like to explain it as, during the pandemic, we've all experienced, there was all this contact tracing. It was a term where all came to mind. The software bill of materials is like the contact tracing for your open source, right. >> Good analogy. >> Anything that I've come in contact with, just because I came in contact with it, even though I didn't explicitly go looking for COVID, if you will, I got it, right. So in the same regard, that's how I do the contact tracing for my software. >> That 90% figure is really striking. 90% open source use is really striking, considering that it wasn't that long ago that one of the wraps on open source was it's insecure because anybody can see the code, therefore anybody can see the vulnerabilities. What changed? >> I'll say that, what changed is kind of first, the understanding that I can leapfrog and innovate with open source, right? There's more open source content out there. So as organizations had to digitally transform themselves and we've all heard the terminology around, well, hey, with the pandemic, we've leapfrog up five years of digital transformation or something along those lines, right? Open source is part of what helps those teams to do that type of leapfrog and do that type of innovation. You had to develop all of that natively, it just takes too long, or you might not have the talent to do it, right. And to find that talent to do it. So it kind of gives you that benefit. The interesting thing about what you mentioned there was, now we're hearing about all these vulnerabilities, right, in open source, that we need to contend with because the bad guys realize that I'm taking a lot of open source and they're saying, geez, that's a great way to get myself into applications. If I get myself into this one open source component, I'll get into thousands or more applications. So it's a fast path into the supply chain. And that's why it's so important that you understand where your vulnerabilities are in the software-- >> I think the visibility cuts two ways though. So when people say, it's insecure because it's visible. In fact, actually the visibility helps with security. The reality that I can go see the code, that there is a community working on finding and fixing vulnerabilities in that code. Whereas in code that is not open source it's a little bit more security by obscurity, which isn't really security. And there could well be vulnerabilities that a good hacker is going to find, but are not disclosed. So one of the other things we feel strongly about at Red Hat, frankly, is if there is a CVE that affects our code, we disclose that publicly, we have a public CVE database. And it's actually really important to us that we share that, we think we share way more information about issues in our code than most other users or consumers of open source and we work that through the broad community as well. And then also for our enterprise customers, if an issue needs to be fixed, we don't just fix it in the most recent version of the open source. We will backport that fix. And one of the challenges, if you're only addressing the most recent version, that may not be well tested, it might have other bugs, it might have other issues. When we backport a security vulnerability fix, we're able to do that to a stable version, give the customers the benefit of all the testing and use that's gone on while also fixing. >> Kirsten, can you talk about the announcements 'cause everybody's wondering, okay, now what do I do about this? What technology is there to help me? Obviously this framework, you got to follow the right processes, skill sets, all that, not to dismiss that, that's the most important part, but the announcements that you made at Red Hat Summit and how does the StackRox acquisition fit into those? >> Sure. So in particular, if we stick with DevSecOps a minute, but again, I'll do. Again for me, DevSecOps is the full life cycle and many people think of it as just that Shift Left piece. But for me, it's the whole thing. So StackRox ACS has had the ability to integrate into the CI/CD pipeline before we bought them. That continues. They don't just assess for vulnerabilities, but also for application misconfigurations, excess proof requests and helm charts, deployment YAML. So kind of the big, there are two sort of major things in the DevSecOps angle of the announcement or the supply chain angle of the announcement, which is the investment that we've been making in sigstore, signing, getting integrity of the components, the elements you're deploying is important. I have been asked for years about the ability to sign container images. The reality is that the signing technology and Red Hat signs everything we ship and always have, but the signing technology wasn't designed to be used in a CI/CD pipeline and sigstore is explicitly designed for that use case to make it easy for developers, as well as you can back it with full CO, you can back it with an OIDC based signing, keyless signing, throw away the key. Or if you want that enterprise CA, you can have that backing there too. >> And you can establish that as a protocol where you must. >> You can, right. So our pattern-- >> So that would've helped with SolarWinds. >> Absolutely. >> Because they were putting in malware and then taking it out, seeing what happened. My question was, could sigstore help? I always evaluate now everything and I'm not a security expert, but would this have helped with SolarWinds? A lot of times the answer is no. >> It's a combination. So a combination of sigstore integrated with Tekton Chains. So we ship Tekton, which is a Kubernetes supply chain pipeline. As OpenShift pipelines, we added chains to that. Chains allows you to attest every step in your pipeline. And you're doing that attestation by signing those steps so that you can validate that those steps have not changed. And in fact, the folks at SolarWinds are using Tekton Chains. They did a great talk in October at KubeCon North America on the changes they've made to their supply chain. So they're using both Tekton Chains and sigstore as part of their updated pipeline. Our pattern will allow our customers to deploy OpenShift, advanced cluster manager, advanced cluster security and Quay with security gates in place. And that include a pipeline built on Tekton with Tekton Chains there to sign those steps in the pipeline to enable signing of the code that's moving through that pipeline to store that signature in Quay and to validate the image signature upon deployment with advanced cluster security. >> So Jim, your perspective on this, Red Hat's, I mean, you care about security, security's everywhere, but you're not a security company. You follow security companies. There's like far too many of them. CISOs all say my number one challenge is lack of talent, but I have all these tools to deal with. You see new emerging companies that are doing pretty well. And then you see a company that's highly respected, like an Okta screw up the communications on a pretty benign hack. Actually, when you peel the onion on that, it's just this mess (chuckles) and it doesn't seem like it's going to get any simpler. Maybe the answer is companies like Red Hat kind of absorbing that and taking care of it. What do you see there? I mean, maybe it's great for business 'cause you've got so many companies. >> There's a lot of companies and there's certainly a lot of innovation out there and unique ways to make security easier, right. I mean, one of the keys here is to be able to make security easier for developers, right. One of the challenges with adopting DevSecOps is if DevSecOps creates a lot of friction in the process, it's hard to really... I can do it once, but I can't keep doing that and get the same kind of velocity. So I need to take the friction out of the process. And one of the challenges a lot of organizations have, and I've heard this from the development side, but I've also heard it from the InfoSec side, right. Because I take inquiry for people on InfoSec, and they're like, how do I get these developers to do what I want? And part of the challenge they have is like, I got these teams using these tools. I got those teams using those tools. And it's a similar challenge that we saw on DevOps where there's just too many, if you will, too many dang tools, right. So that is a challenge for organizations is, they're trying to kind of normalize the tools. Interestingly, we did a survey, I think around last August or something. And one of the questions was around, where do you want your security? Where do you want to get your DevSecOps security from, do you want to get it from individual vendors? Or do you want to get it from like, your platforms that you're using and deploying changes in Kubernetes. >> Great question. What did they say? >> The majority of them, they're hoping they can get it built into the platform. That's really what they want. And you see a lot of the security vendors are trying to build security platforms. Like we're not just assess tool, we're desk, we're this, whatever. And they're building platforms to kind of be that end-to-end security platform, trying to solve that problem, right, to make it easier to kind of consume the product overall, without a bunch of individual tools along the way. But certainly tool sprawl is definitely a challenge out there. Just one other point around the sigstore stuff which I love. Because that goes back to the supply chain and talking about digital providence, right. Understanding where things... How do I validate that what I gave you is what you thought it was, right. And what I like about it with Tekton Chains is because there's a couple things. Well, first of all, I don't want to just sign things after I built the binary. Well, I mean, I do want to sign it, but I want to just sign things once, right. Because all through the process, I think of it as a manufacturing plant, right. I'm making automobiles. If I check the quality of the automobile at one stage and I don't check it to the other, things have changed, right. How do I know that I did something wasn't compromised, right. So with sigstore kind of tied in with Tekton Chains, kind of gives me that view. And the other aspect I like it about is, this kind of transparency in the log, right-- >> The report component. >> Exactly. So I can see what was going on. So there is some this kind of like public scrutiny, like if something bad happened, you could go back and see what happened there and it wasn't as you were expected. >> As with most discussions on this topic, we could go for an hour because it's really important. And thank you guys for coming on and sharing your perspectives, the data. >> Our pleasure. >> And keep up the good work. Kirsten, it's on you. >> Thanks so much. >> The IDC survey said it, they want it in platforms. You're up. >> (laughs) That's right. >> All right. Good luck to both you. >> Thank you both so much. >> All right. And thank you for watching. We're back to wrap right after this short break. This is Dave Vellante for Paul Gill. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Denver, CO, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO 2019, brought to you by Commvault. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault GO '19 from Colorado this year. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and we are excited to welcome a couple of new guests to theCUBE. One of them brand new to Commvault. We have Mercer Rowe, VP of Global Channels and Alliances. Mercer, welcome to Commvault and TheCUBE. >> Thanks so much. >> Lisa: And we've got Carmen Sorice III, pinky out, GTM Chief of Staff for Commvault. You're the veteran here. You've been there for a year. >> A whole year, yes. >> Lisa: Exactly. Guys, so much excitement in the last, you know, nine months since Sanjay Mirchandani took over. Analysts saying, hey Commvault, you've got to upgrade your sales. You've got to upgrade your marketing. You've got to shift gears and expand the market share, and we're seeing a lot of movement in all three of those directions. The channel is really critical for Commvault, Mercer. It's responsible for a significant portion of revenue. You guys have made some strategic changes there with respect to channels and alliances. First of all, before we get into that, you're brand new, brand, brand new to Commvault. What attracted you to this company that's 20 years old that, as Sanjay was telling us, it's like the new Commvault. >> So, if I look back at my career in the last 10 years or so, I've been in IT for about 20 years, for the last 10 years or so, I've been a part of launching cloud businesses for a number of some upcoming and some new vendors, such as VMware, IBM, SoftBank and others. And a lot of that, in that process, what I've been working on is helping existing customers to move their workloads into the Cloud. We know that the market is evolving to a hybrid Cloud type of deployment model. I mean we can see that across the board with the way our customers are behaving, with the way that the Cloud vendors are behaving. But that's been a challenge because of the technology matching, right? Figuring out how to essentially put the same technology stack in the Cloud as you do on-prem to be able to move those apps over. I really started to look for companies that could bridge that gap and it could really operate in a hybrid Cloud scenario. Commvault is absolutely positioned perfectly for that in my mind, and so it's such an opportunity as we shift from our kind of act one as a great data protection company to a true hybrid Cloud data platform or data plane. >> Yeah, Carmen, maybe give us a little bit of your insight as to some of those change in roles as Mercer was just saying. Cloud is having a huge impact. You know, we've watched, you know, for years the shifting role of the traditional VAR or SI or the like, so bring us a little bit of insight as to what, today, is important to your go-to-market. >> Yeah, so what's important to our partners, especially the VARS is continuing to be relevant with our customers, right? Change is the only constant, and it's, the rate of change is just accelerating. So partners are looking for vendor partners like us to help them be relevant, to come out with the solutions that are going to be more relevant, even tomorrow. And, from a Commvault perspective, if you think about everything we've done from a data backup and a data management perspective, we've been the best in the industry, as we've just seen with Gartner and Forrester. All right, so we're proud of that. But what our partners were looking for is, where are we taking this next? Where's the innovation going to come from? So when you weave in things like Metallic that now gives our partners a consumption option. So if they have customers that want to buy software as a service, they now have that option. And then when you add software-defined storage, it takes us in to a completely different area, and you had asked Stewart about the Cloud, when you think of Cloud native applications and you think of containerization, that's changing the way backup data and primary storage data is being managed and the lines are blurring. Now with Hedvig software-defined storage, we have an opportunity to come out with integrated offers to help our partners be even more successful. >> So from a go-to-market perspective, in the last year, there's been a lot transformation, right? Not just in terms of leadership changes, but this big focus on ensuring that, as customers' environments change in this hybrid multicloud world that they are living in whether it's by design or its by acquisition or different types of growth, right? Talk to us a little bit about how Commvault foundationally is set up to really make some big shifts and big bets in new routes to market. >> Yeah, I can take that from where we were a year ago 'til now and then feel free to expand. So when you look at, we've always been a partner business, a partner friendly business. A significant percentage of our revenue, like north of 90% goes through our partners. What our partners were asking for is, hey, you guys are partner friendly, but we need you to be partner driven. So, when you come up with solutions, make sure they're channel ready, make sure they're partner ready, make sure we have our eyes on the market so that we're not just trying to sell software to our partners. We need to better understand their go-to-market models, how can we help them grow their business by offering a different variety, a variety of different services. So I think the evolution you've seen is a year ago the company made significant investments on becoming partner-first. So we've invested in channel leadership, partner leadership, not only at the corporate level but also in the field, and since Sanjay came on board, as you referenced, in February, that change is just continuing. So we're making our next level of investment in channel executives, in executives period, who have context about what channel is. And when you've lived in the channel, you've dealt with channel conflict, you bring that to the table, you bring that experience to the table. So I think you're seeing an evolution of us in our next phase of investments, helping our partners be successful, and becoming partner-first, and we've done a lot of new things with our programs that I can get in to. Financial incentives, rebates, making it easier on our partner portal to interface with us. And we're going to continue to do that, so that's we're not only just the right product choice, we're the right financial choice for our partners going forward. >> And I think, to add to that, if you look at our Metallic launch, obviously the reason we work with partners is in service of our customers. Right, that's the whole reason we partner, it's 'cause we want to great a better value proposition for our customers. And when we launched that product, a little tid bit, the company did a lot of research. Went out and talked to non, not-current Commvault customers, so potentially new greenfield customers and consistently got the feedback that they wanted to buy softwares and service applications that like that through a partner, because they could have a conversation about their entire IT environment. So it's really exciting to be in a spot where we are not only partner-first, partner-led but we're in a position where we know that this is the way our customers want to interact with us. That's number one. Number two is as we start to make some of these transitions into SaaS as we move into adjacencies like we're doing with Hedvig, it's so important to have our partners be the tip of the spear to help our customers through that journey. You know, innovation is great, but innovation also creates complexity. That's where partners help us move our customers through that journey and be successful. >> You know, we were talking to one of your launch partners earlier today and they were very excited about Metallic. On the same hide they did recognize that there is a significant change as to how they have to engage, you know, what part of the organization. You know, it's a good thing they have a Microsoft practice that this plugs into for the O365. So, bring us a little bit as to how you're helping the channel transform. >> Oh, absolutely. So, as you can see, a lot of the partners, you can see a lot of them that are here today, have moved from being pure, say in the solution of outer space, just to use as an example have moved from pure solution providers to also having MSP offerings, or other kind of services offerings, because they realize that customers want the flexibility of consumption economics while also, you know, being able to work with their trusted partner. So whether it's them, whether it's service providers who we want to drive into more of a, as a service model, and obviously we're planning to release all of this technology to our service providers to allow them to offer Commvault-based or Commvault-powered services in the market, or whether it's our great alliance partners. Companies like Nedap and Hitachi, where we have OEM relationships or other kind of very deep, collaborative relationships in the market. Adding some of these features and functions and capabilities as we move, as we help our customers to move into the Cloud, as we help them to give them more options for these multicloud or hybrid deployment models. This opens up additional apertures, additional opportunities for services, for wholistic end-to-end solutions from these partners that actually increase their ability to be relevant with the customers but also the share wallet. >> I want to get your perspective, Mercer, on differentiation, because partners, your partners work with a lot of your competitors. We know that there's a lot of coopetition, right, in technology but what is it about some of the things that Commvault is putting in place or some ideas that you have to really differentiate how you're enabling partners, whether we're talking about a VAR or a Disty or all the way up to a global services systems integrator that can deliver massive enterprise scale. >> Yeah, I can start with that if you're okay. So, it's all about listening to partners, right? Listening to what they need and what they're asking you for. Because many times a vendor becomes vendor-arrogant, right? And you're not listening to the partners. So our partners have been clear. They said we want a predictable financial model with Commvault. What translates to a program that's a full year program that gives them financial incentives so they don't have to guess what we're going to do in any given month or any given quarter with some kind of SPIF. So we've delivered on that. They've asked, number two, they said, they've said to me, and you're going to be hearing this, is you've always had great products, please, that has to continue. That's like a ticket for entry. And we've seen that we continue to lead in that space. And then I mentioned earlier about innovation. They want to know that we're going to take them into the future. So those three things are really critical for our partners. And then the last thing they ask for, which is basically a foundation across that, is field engagement. We need to be more tightly engaged with your sellers, so that we go in on joint sales calls. That we're bringing each other opportunities, and I think with the new sales leadership we have, Riccardo Di Blasio, our new CRO, our boss knows full well how to grow businesses with partners and through partners and it's by engaging in the field. And that's why we're going to have more people in the field, so that we can engage with partners and create opportunities together. So those are kind of the four foundational elements that we see. >> Mercer, I was wondering if I could get your viewpoint just in general about the channel. There was a lot of fear for a number of years about, you know, the Cloud, coming in and that readjustment. How do you think it's going? What's the general, you know, feel of the channel today, and how their interaction is with, you know, that ever-changing interaction with the big public clouds. >> You know, it's a great question, and I remember when we were first launching the cloud business as VMware. I used to go to, I built our channel model but I would introduce myself in the partner meetings with, Hey, I'm from VMware Cloud. We're here to kill your business. (laughter) Because there was a fear. And that fear, I think, in a certain way, has kind of dissipated as the market has realized as partners and mostly from the customers have realized that there is not a one size fits all strategy. The Cloud is not the solution to all IT needs. It is certainly an important part of most customer's strategy, in fact, I don't think that there are many customers that don't have Cloud as a part of their overall IT strategy, however, it's not the entire environment, and it certainly doesn't solve all needs. So, from a general perspective, the savvy partners have embraced the Cloud, they've embraced services, and they've look at it as a wholistic part of how they do business with their end customers. 'Cause as we think about, you know, to the last question, as we think about partner profitability, I think about it in two main vectors. There's margin, field engagement, revenue, and so forth, which is very, you know, this is the financial element of working with a partner like Commvault to make money. And that's obviously a very important part and that's something we will continue to invest in. Programs, and so forth, to support our partners to be profitable working with Commvault. But the other is in the practices, in how they build services, in how they build end-to-end solutions. Which, another tidbit on Metallic that some people picked up on was that we've released the telemetry APIs. Meaning that partners who are working with Metallic can see exactly what their customers are using. How are they growing? Oh, they've all of a sudden backed up a new workload. Hey, maybe they have a new project. Maybe I should call them, so I'm not waiting until renewals. I'm not waiting until the sort of forcing events to have an opportunity to place a call into my customer and say, hey, I noticed you're doing something new. How can I help? >> That insight, and sorry Carmen, we were talking about that a little bit earlier, I think with maybe with Rob Kaloustian. That was really interesting, because it really it changes the word partner, right? It can't. Because if they're actually able to follow along and maybe even make some educated predictions or suggestions to the customer, then the customer feels like, okay, you're not only selling me this, you're actively helping me optimize my deployment, learn from it and plan for what's next. So that definition of partner changes for the better. >> And I think the whole SaaS model is like the next step beyond Cloud. So you were asking me about Cloud. Very briefly, the way I've seen it over the last probably seven to nine years is, I had billion dollar VARS tell me nine years ago, don't ever try to come in here and sell me a multi tenant cloud service, 'cause I'm selling hardware. That moved to, hey, you know what? We see the customers changing. I was with a service provider. Why don't you come help us? And then a couple of years later they said, you know what? We're kind of building our own service now, so we don't need your services anymore. So, in a few, you know, three to five years, they went from stay out, I'm never going to sell a multi tenant service to quickly, well maybe not so quickly, some not as quick as others, realize that they have to get there. I think SaaS is like the next step beyond that. >> Well in this business I think if that teaches anybody anything it's never say never. Right? >> That's right. >> Well guys, thank you so much for joining Stu and me, sharing with us how things are really transforming here, but also what you're doing for global alliances and channel to really catalyze Commvault's business. We appreciate it, and we say best of luck as you enter week three? >> Yes. >> Lisa: Or day three? >> Day three, day three. >> Lisa: Gentleman, thank you for your time. >> Great, thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watchin' theCUBE from Commvault GO '19. (fast tempo music)

we're back at vemma in 2022 we're here at the aria hotel in las vegas this is thecube's continuous coverage we're day two welcome to the cxo session we have ceo cto cso chief strategy officer brett diamond is the ceo justin jardina is the cto and dante orsini is the chief strategy officer for 11 11 systems recently named i guess today the impact cloud service provider of the year congratulations guys welcome thank you welcome back to the cube great to see you again thank you great likewise so okay brett let's start with you tell give us the overview of 11 1111 uh your focus area talk about the the the island acquisition what that what that's all about give us the setup yeah so we started 11-11 uh really with a focus on taking the three core pillars of our business which are cloud connectivity and security bring them together into one platform allowing a much easier way for our customers and our partners to procure those three solution sets through a single company and really focus on uh the three main drivers of the business uh which you know have a litany of other services associated with them under each platform okay so so justin cloud connectivity and security they all dramatically changed in march of 2020 everybody had to go to the cloud the rather rethink the network had a secure remote worker so what did you see from a from a cto's perspective what changed and how did 11 respond sure so early on when we built our cloud even back into 2008 we really focused on enterprise great features one of which being uh very flexible in the networking so we found early on was that we would be able to architect solutions for customers that were dipping their toe in the cloud and set ourselves apart from some of the vendors at the time so if you fast forward from 2008 until today we still see that as a main component for iaz and draz and the ability to start taking into some of the things brett talked about where customers may need a point-to-point circuit to offload data connectivity to us or develop sd-wan and multi-cloud solutions to connect to their resources in the cloud in my opinion it's just the natural progression of what we set out to do in 2008 and to couple that with the security um if you think about what that opens up from a security landscape now you have multiple clouds you have different ingress and egress points you have different people accessing workloads in each one of these clouds so the idea or our idea is that we can layer a comprehensive security solution over this new multi-cloud networking world and then provide visibility and manageability to our customer base so what does that mean specifically for your customers because i mean we saw obviously a rapid move toward endpoint um cloud security uh identity access you know people really started thinking rethinking that as opposed to trying to just you know build a moat around the castle right um what does that mean for for your customer you take care of all that you partner with whomever you need to partner in the ecosystem and then you provide the managed service how does that work right it does and that's a great analogy you know we have a picture of a hamburger in our office exploded with all the components and they say a good security policy is all the pieces and it's really synonymous with what you said so to answer your question yes we have all that baked in the platform we can offer managed services around it but we also give the consumer the ability to access that data whether it's a ui or api so dante i know you talk to a lot of customers all you do is watch the stock market go like this and like that you say okay the pandemic drove all these but but when you talk to csos and customers a lot of things are changing permanently first of all they were forced to march to digital when previously they were like we'll get there i mean a lot of customers were let's face it i mean some were serious about it but many weren't now if you're not a digital business you're out of business what have you seen when you talk to customers in terms of the permanence of some of these changes what are they telling you well i think we go through this for ourselves right the business continues to grow you've got tons of people that are working remotely and that are going to continue to work remotely right as much as we'd like to offer up hybrid workspace and things like that some folks are like hey i've worked it out i'm working out great from home right and also i think what justin was saying also is we've seen time go on that operating environment has gotten much more complex you've got stuff in the data center stuff it's somebody's you know endpoint you've got various different public clouds different sas services right that's why it's been phenomenal to work with veeam because we can protect that data regardless of where it exists but when you start to look at some of the managed security services that we're talking about we're helping those csos you get better visibility better control and take proactive action against the infrastructure um when we look at threat mitigation and how to actually respond when when something does happen right and i think that's the key because there's no shortage of great security vendors right but how do you tie it all together into a single solution right with a vendor that you can actually partner with to help secure the environment while you go focus on the things they're more strategic to the business i was talking to jim mercer at um red hat summit last week he's an idc analyst and he said we did a survey i think it was last summer and we asked customers to your point about there's no shortage of security tools how do you want to buy your security and you know do you want you know best to breed bespoke tools and you sort of put it together or do you kind of want your platform provider to do it now surprisingly they said platform provider the the problem is that's aspirational for a lot of platforms providers so they've got to look to a managed service provider so brett talk about the the island acquisition what green cloud is how that all fits together so we acquired island and green cloud last year and the reality is that the people at both of those companies and the technology is what drove us to making those acquisitions they were the foundational pieces to eleven eleven uh obviously the things that justin has been able to create from an automation and innovation perspective uh at the company is transforming this business in a litany of different ways as well so those two acquisitions allow us at this point to take a cloud environment on a geographic footprint not only throughout the us but globally uh have a security product that was given to us from from the green cloud acquisition of cascade and add-on connectivity to allow us to have all three platforms in one all three pillars so i like 11 11 11 is near and dear to my heart i am so where'd the name come from uh everybody asked me this question i think five times a day so uh growing up as a kid everyone in my family would always say 11 11 make a wish whenever you'd see it on the clock and uh during coven we were coming up with a new name for the business my daughter looked at the microwave said dad it's 11 11. make a wish the reality was though i had no idea why i'd been doing it for all that time and when you look up kind of the background origination derivation of the word uh it means the time of day when everything's in line um and when things are complex especially with running all the different businesses that we have aligning them so that they're working together it seemed like a perfect man when i had the big corner office at idc i had my staff meetings at 11 11. because the universe was aligned and then the other thing was nobody could forget the time so they gave him 11 minutes to be there now you'll see it all the time even when you don't want to so justin we've been talking a lot about ransomware and and not just backup but recovery my friend fred moore who you know coined the phrase backup is one thing recovery is everything and recovery time network speeds and and the like are critical especially when you're thinking cloud how are you architecting recovery for your clients maybe you could dig into that a little bit sure so it's really a multitude of things you know you mentioned ransomware seeing the ransomware landscape evolve over time especially in our business with backup and dr it's very singular you know people protecting against host nodes now we're seeing ransomware be able to get into an environment land and expand actually delete backups target backup vendors so the ransomware point i guess um trying to battle that is a multi-step process right you need to think about how data flows into the organization from a security perspective from a networking perspective you need to think about how your workloads are protected and then when you think about backups i know we're at veeam vmon now talking about veeam there's a multitude of ways to protect that data whether it's retention whether it's immutability air gapping data so while i know we focus a lot sometimes on protecting data it's really that hamburg analogy where the sum of the parts make up the protection so how do you provide services i mean you say okay you want immutability there's a there's a line item for that um you want faster or you know low rpo fast rto how does that all work for as a customer what what am i buying from you is it just a managed service we'll take care of everything platinum gold silver or is it if if you don't mind so i'm glad you asked that question because this is something that's very unique about us years ago his team actually built the ip because we were scaling at such an incredible rate globally through all our joint partners with veeam that how do we take all the intelligence that we have in his team and all of our solution architects and scale it so they actually developed a tool called catalyst and it's a pre-sales tool it's an application you download it you install it it basically takes a snapshot of your environment you start to manipulate the data what are you trying to do dave are you trying to protect that data are you backing up to us are you trying to replicate for dr purposes um you know what are you doing for production or maybe it's a migration it analyzes the network it analyzes all your infrastructure it helps the ses know immediately if we're a feasible solution based on what you are trying to do so nobody in the space is doing this and that's been a huge key to our growth because the channel community as well as the customer they're working with real data so we can get past all the garbage and get right to what's important for them for the outcome yeah that's huge who do you guys sell to is it is it more mid-sized businesses that maybe don't have the large teams is it larger enterprises who want to complement to their business is it both well i would say with the two acquisitions that we made the go-to-market sales strategies and the clientele were very different when you look at green cloud they're selling predominantly wholesale through msps and those msps are mostly selling to smbs right so we covered that smb market for the most part through our acquisition of green cloud island on the other hand was more focused on selling direct inbound through vars through the channel mid enterprise big enterprise so really those two acquisitions outside of the ip that we got from the systems we have every single go-to-market sale strategy and we're aligned from smb all the way up to the fortune 500. i heard a stat a couple months ago that that less than 50 of enterprises have a sock it blew me away and you know even small businesses need one they may not be able to afford but certainly a medium size or larger business should have some kind of sock is it does that stat jive with what you're seeing in the marketplace 100 if that's true the need for a managed service like this is just it's going to explode it is exploding yeah i mean 100 right there is zero unemployment in the cyberspace right just north america alone there's about a million or so folks in that space and right now you've got about 600 000 open wrecks just in north america right so earlier we talked about no shortage of tools right but the shortage of head count is a significant challenge big time right most importantly the people that you do have on staff they've got alert fatigue from the tools that they do have that's why you're seeing this massive insurgence in the managed security services provider lack of talent is number one challenge for csos that's what they'll tell you and there's no end in sight to that and it's you know another tool and and it's amazing because you see security companies popping up all the time billion dollar evaluations i mean lacework did a billion dollar raise and so so there's no shortage of funding now maybe that'll change you know with the market but i wanted to turn our attention to the keynotes this morning you guys got some serious love up on stage um there was a demo uh it was a pretty pretty cool demo fast recovery very very tight rpo as i recall it was i think four minutes of data loss is that right was that the right knit stat i was happy it wasn't zero data loss because there's really you know no such thing uh but so you got to feel good about that tell us about um how that all came about your relationship with with veeam who wants to take it sure i can i can take a step at it so one of the or two of the things that i'm um most excited about at least with this vmon is our team was able to work with veeam on that demo and what that demo was showing was some cdp-based features for cloud providers so we're really happy to see that and the reason why we're happy to see that is that with the veeam platform it's now given the customers the ability to do things like snapshot replication cdp replication on-prem backup cloud backup immutability air gap the list goes on and on and in our opinion having a singular software vendor that can provide all that through you know with a cloud provider on prem or not is really like the icing on the cake so for us it's very exciting to see that and then also coupled with a lot of the innovation that veeam's doing in the sas space right so again having that umbrella product that can cover all those use cases i'll tell you if you guys can get a that was a very cool demo if we can get a youtube of that that that demo i'll make sure we put it in the the show notes and uh of this video or maybe pop it into one of the blogs that we write about it um so so how you guys feel i mean this is a new chapter for you very cool with a couple of acquisitions that are now the main mainspring of your strategy so the first veeam on in a couple years so what's the vibe been like for you what's the nighttime activity the customer interaction i know you guys are running a lot of the back end demos so you're everywhere what's the what's the vibe like at veeamon and how does it feel to be back look at that one at dante as far as yeah you got a lot of experience here yeah let me loose on this one dave i'm like so excited about this right it's been it's been far too long to get face to face again and um veeam always does it right and i think that uh for years we've been back-ending like all the hands-on lab infrastructure here but forget about that i think the part that's really exciting is getting face-to-face with such a great team right we have phenomenal architects that we work with at veeam day in and day out they put up with us pushing them pushing and pushing them and together we've been able to create a lot of magic together right but i think it's you can't replace the human interaction that we've all been starving for for the last two years but the vibe's always fantastic at veeam if you're going to be around tonight i'll be looking forward to enjoying some of that veeam love with you at the after party yeah that's well famous after parties we'll see if that culture continues i have a feeling it will um brett where do you want to take 11 11. a new new phase in all of your careers you got a great crew out here it looks like i i love that you're all out and uh make some noise here people let's hear it all right let's see you this is the biggest audience we've had all week where do you want to take 11 11. i think you know if uh if you look at what we've done so far in the short six months since the acquisitions of green cloud and ireland obviously the integration is a key piece we're going to be laser focused on growing organically across those three pillars we've got to put more capital and resources into the incredible ip like i said earlier that just and his team have created on those front ends the user experience but you know we made two large acquisitions obviously mna is a is a key piece for us we're going to be diligent and we're probably going to be very aggressive on that front as well to be able to grow this business into the global leader of cloud connectivity and security and i think we've really hit a void in the industry that's been looking for this for a very long time and we want to be the first ones to be able to collaborate and combine those three into one when the when the cloud started to hit the steep part of the s-curve kind of early part of the last decade people thought oh wow these managed service providers are toast the exact opposite happened it created such a tailwind and need for consistent services and integration and managed services we've seen it all across the stack so guys wish you best of luck congratulations on the acquisitions thank you uh hope to have you back soon yeah thank you around the block all right keep it right there everybody dave vellante for the cube's coverage of veeamon 2022 we'll be right back after this short break

(pleasant music) >> We're back at Veeamon 2022. We're here at the Aria hotel in Las Vegas. This is theCube's continuous coverage. We're in day two. Welcome to the CXO session. We have CEO, CTO, CSO, chief strategy officer. Brett Diamond is the CEO, Justin Giardina is the CTO, and Dante Orsini is the chief strategy officer for 11:11 Systems recently named, I guess today, the impact cloud service provider of the year. Congratulations, guys. Welcome to theCube. Welcome back to theCube. Great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> Great. >> Likewise. >> Thanks for having us. Okay, Brett, let's start with you. Give us the overview of 11:11, your focus area, talk about the Island acquisition, what that's all about, give us the setup. >> Yeah, so we started 11:11, really, with a focus on taking the three core pillars of our business, which are cloud, connectivity, and security, bring them together into one platform, allowing a much easier way for our customers and our partners to procure those three solution sets through a single company and really focus on the three main drivers of the business, which, you know, have a litany of other services associated with them under each platform. >> Okay, so Justin, cloud connectivity and security, they all dramatically changed in March of 2020. Everybody had to go to the cloud, had to rethink the network, had to secure remote workers. So what did you see, from a CTO's perspective, what changed and how did 11:11 respond? >> Sure, so early on, when we built our cloud, even back into 2008, we really focused on enterprise grade features, one of which being very flexible in the networking. So we found early on was that we would be able to architect solutions for customers that were dipping their toe in the cloud and set ourselves apart from some of the vendors at the time. So if you fast forward from 2008 until today, we still see that as a main component for IaaS and DRaaS and the ability to start taking into some of the things Brett talked about, where customers may need a point to point circuit to offload data connectivity to us, or develop SD-WAN and multi-cloud solutions to connect to their resources in the cloud. In my opinion, it's just the natural progression of what we set out to do in 2008. And to couple that with the security, if you think about what that opens up from a security landscape, now you have multiple clouds, you have different ingress and egress points, you have different people accessing workloads in each one of these clouds, so the idea or our idea is that we can layer a comprehensive security solution over this new multi-cloud networking world and then provide visibility and manageability to our customer base. >> So what does that mean specifically for your customers? Because, I mean, we saw obviously a rapid move toward end point, cloud security, identity access. You know, people really started rethinking that as opposed to trying to just, you know, build a moat around the castle. >> Right. >> What does that mean for your customer? You take care of all that? You partner with whomever you need to partner in the ecosystem and then you provide the managed service? How does that work? >> Right. It does and that's a great analogy. You know, we have a picture of a hamburger in our office, exploded with all the components and they say, a good security policy has all the pieces and it's really synonymous with what you said. So to answer your question, yes. We have all that baked in the platform. We can offer managed services around it, but we also give the consumer the ability to access that data, whether it's a UI or API. >> So Dante, I know you talked to a lot of customers. All you do is watch the stock market go like this and like that and you say, okay, the pandemic drove all these, but when you talk to CISOs and customers, a lot of things are changing permanently. First of all, they were forced to march to digital when previously, they were like, eh, we'll get there. I mean, a lot of customers were. Let's face it. I mean, some were serious about it, but many weren't. Now, if you're not a digital business, you're out of business. What have you seen when you talk to customers in terms of the permanence of some of these changes? What are they telling you? >> Well, I think, you know, we go through this ourselves, right? The business continues to grow. You've got tons of people that are working remotely and they are going to continue to work remotely, right? As much as we'd like to offer up hybrid workspace and things like that, some folks are like, hey, I've worked it out. I'm working out great from home, right? And also, I think what Justin was saying also is, as we've seen time go on, that operating environment has gotten much more complex. You've got stuff in the data center, stuff in somebody's, you know, endpoint, you've got various different public clouds, different SAS services, right? That's why it's been phenomenal to work with Veeam because we can protect that data regardless of where it exists. But when you start to look at some of the managed security services that we're talking about, we're helping those CSOs, you know, get better visibility, better control, and take proactive action against the infrastructure when we look at threat mitigation and how to actually respond when something does happen, right? And I think that's the key because there's no shortage of great security vendors, right? But how do you tie it all together into a single solution, right, with a vendor that you can actually partner with to help secure the environment while you go focus on the things that are more strategic to the business? >> I was talking to Jim Mercer at Red Hat Summit last week. He's an IDC analyst and we did a survey, I think it was last summer, and we asked customers to your point about, there's no shortage of security tools. How do you want to buy your security? And, you know, do you want, you know, best to breed bespoke tools and you sort of put it together or do you kind of want your platform provider to do it? Now surprisingly, they said platform provider. The problem is, that's aspirational for a lot of platform providers, so they got to look to a managed service provider. So Brett, talk about the Island acquisition, what Green Cloud is, how that all fits together. >> So we acquired Island and Green Cloud last year and the reality is, the people at both of those companies and the technology is what drove us to making those acquisitions. They were the foundational pieces to 11:11. Obviously, the things that Justin has been able to create from an automation and innovation perspective at the company is transforming this business in a litany of different ways, as well. So, those two acquisitions allow us at this point to take a cloud environment on a geographic footprint, not only throughout the US but globally, have a security product that was given to us from the Green Cloud acquisition of Cascade, and add on connectivity to allow us to have all three platforms in one, all three pillars in one. >> So I like 11:11. 11:11 is near and dear to my heart. So where'd the name come from? >> Everybody asked me this question, I think, five times a day. So growing up as a kid, everyone in my family would always say 11:11 make a wish whenever you'd see it on the clock. And during COVID, we were coming up with a new name for the business. My daughter looked at the microwave, said, dad, it's 11:11, make a wish. The reality was though, I had no idea why I'd been doing it for all that time and when you look up kind of the background origination, derivation of the word, it means the time of day when everything's in line and when things are complex, especially with running all the different businesses that we have, aligning them so that they're working together, it seemed like the perfect thing >> So when I had the big corner office at IDC, I had my staff meetings at 11:11. >> Yep. >> Because the universe was aligned and then the other thing was, nobody could forget the time. So they gave me 11 minutes to be there, so they were never late. >> And now you'll see it all the time, even when you don't want to. (chuckles) >> So Justin, we've been talking a lot about ransomware and not just backup, but recovery. My friend, Fred Moore, who, you know, coined the phrase backup is one thing, recovery is everything, and recovery time, network speeds and the like are critical, especially when you're thinking cloud. How are you architecting recovery for your clients? Maybe you could dig into that a little bit. >> Sure. So it's really a multitude of things. You know, you mention ransomware. Seeing the ransomware landscape evolve over time, especially in our business with backup NDR, is very singular, you know, people protecting against host nodes. Now we're seeing ransomware be able to get into an environment, land and expand, actually delete backups, target backup vendors. So the ransomware point, I guess, trying to battle that is a multi-step process, right? You need to think about how data flows into the organization from a security perspective, from a networking perspective, you need to think about how your workloads are protected, and then when you think about backups, I know we're at Veeamon now talking about Veeam, there's a multitude of ways to protect that data, whether it's retention, whether it's immutability, air gapping data. So, while I know we focus a lot sometimes on protecting data, it's really that hamburger analogy where the sum of the parts make up the protection. >> So how do you provide services? I mean, do you say, okay, do you want immutability? There's a line item for that. You want low RPO, fast RTO? How does that all work as a customer? What am I buying from you? Is it just a managed service? We'll take care of everything, platinum, gold, silver, or is it? >> If you don't mind, so I'm glad you asked that question because this is something that's very unique about us. Years ago, his team actually built the IP because we were scaling at such an incredible rate globally through all our joint partners with Veeam that, how do we take all the intelligence that we have and his team and all of our solution architects and scale it? So they actually developed a tool called Catalyst, and it's a pre-sales tool. It's an application. You download it, you install it. It basically takes a snapshot of your environment. You start to manipulate the data. What are you trying to do, Dave? Are you trying to protect that data? Are you backing up to us? Are you trying to replicate it for DR purposes? You know, what are you doing for production, or maybe it's a migration? It analyzes the network. It analyzes all your infrastructure. It helps the SEs know immediately if we're a feasible solution based on what you are trying to do. So, nobody in the space is doing this and that's been a huge key to our growth because the channel community, as well as the customer, they're working with real data. So we can get past all the garbage, you get right to what's important for them for the outcome. >> Yeah, that's huge. Who do you guys sell to? Is it more mid-size businesses that maybe don't have the large teams? Is it larger enterprises who want to compliment to their business? Is it both? >> Well, I would say with the two acquisitions that we made to go to market sales strategies and the clientele were very different, when you look at Green Cloud, they're selling predominantly wholesale through MSPs and those MSPs are mostly selling to SMBs, right? So we covered that SMB market for the most part through our acquisition of Green Cloud. Island, on the other hand, was more focused on selling direct, inbound, through VARs through the channel, mid-enterprise, big enterprise. So really, those two acquisitions outside of the IP that we got from the systems, we have every single go to market sales strategy and we're aligned from SMB all the way up to the Fortune 500. >> I heard a stat a couple months ago that less than 50% of enterprises have a SAQ. That blew me away. And, you know, even small businesses need one. They may not be able to afford, but there's certainly a medium size or a larger business should have some kind of SAQ. Does that stat jive with what you're seeing in the marketplace? >> A hundred percent. >> If that's true, the need for a managed service like this, it's going to explode. It is exploding, I mean. >> Yeah, I mean, a hundred percent, right? There is zero unemployment in the cyberspace, right? Just North America alone, there's about a million or so folks in that space and right now you've got about 600,000 open recs just in North America, right? So earlier, we talked about no shortage of tools, right? But the shortage of headcount is a significant challenge, big time, right? Most importantly, the people that you do have on staff, they've got alert fatigue from the tools that they do have. That's why you're seeing this massive surgence in the managed security services provider. >> Lack of talent is number one challenge for CISOs. That's what they'll tell you and there's no end in sight to that. And it's, you know, another tool and it's amazing 'cause you see security companies popping up all the time. I mean, billion dollar valuations, I mean, Lacework did a billion dollar raise. And so, there's no shortage of funding. Now, maybe that'll change, you know, with the market but I wanted to turn our attention to the keynotes this morning. You guys got some serious love up on stage. There was a demo. It was a pretty cool demo, fast recovery, very tight RPO, as I recall. It was, I think, four minutes of, of data loss? Is that right? Is that the right stat? I was happy it wasn't zero data loss 'cause there's really, you know, no such thing, but so you got to feel good about that. Tell us about how that all came about, your relationship with Veeam. Who wants to take it? >> Sure, I can take a stab at it. So two of the things that I'm most excited about, at least with this Veeamon, is our team was able to work with Veeam on that demo, and what that demo was showing was some CDP based features for cloud providers. So we're really happy to see that and the reason why we're happy to see that is that with the Veeam platform, it's now given the customers the ability to do things like snapshot replication, CDP replication, on-prem backup, cloud backup, immutability air gap, the list goes on and on. And in our opinion, having a singular software vendor that can provide all that, you know, with a cloud provider on-prem or not is really like, the icing on the cake. So for us, it's very exciting to see that, and then also coupled with a lot of the innovation that's Veeam's doing in the SAS space, right? So again, having that umbrella product that can cover all those use cases. >> I'll tell you, that was a very cool demo. If you can get a YouTube of that demo, I'll make sure we put it in the show notes of this video or maybe pop it into one of the blogs that we write about it. So, how do you guys feel? I mean, this is a new chapter for you. Very cool, with a couple of acquisitions that are now the main spring of your strategy, so the first Veeamon in a couple years. So what's the vibe been like for you? What's the nighttime activity, the customer interaction? I know you guys are running a lot of the backend demos, so you're everywhere. What's the vibe like at Veeamon and how does it feel to be back? >> I'll give that one to Dante as far as the vibes, so far. >> Yeah, yeah, you got a lot of experience. >> Yeah, let me loose on this one, Dave. I'm like, so excited about this, right? It's been far too long to get face to face again and Veeam always does it right. And I think that for years, we've been back ending like, all the hands on lab infrastructure here, but forget about that. I think the part that's really exciting is getting face to face with such a great team, right? We have phenomenal architects that we work with at Veeam day in and day out. They put up with us, pushing them, pushing them, pushing them and together, we've been able to create a lot of magic together, right? But I think you can't replace the human interaction that we've all been starving for, for the last two years. But the vibe's always fantastic at Veeam. If you're going to be around tonight, I'll be looking forward to enjoying some of that Veeam love with you at the after party. >> Yeah, well, famous after parties. We'll see if that culture continues. I have a feeling it will. Brett, where do you want to take 11:11? New phase in all of your careers. You got a great crew out here, it looks like. I love that you're all out and, make some noise here, people. Let's hear it! (audience cheering) You see, this is the biggest audience we've had all week. Where do you want to take 11:11? >> I think, you know, if you look at what we've done so far in the short six months since the acquisitions of Green Cloud and Island, obviously the integration is a key piece. We're going to be laser focused on growing organically across those three pillars. We've got to put more capital and resources into the incredible IP, like I said earlier, that Justin and his team have created on those front ends, the user experience. But, you know, we made two large acquisitions, obviously M and A is a key piece for us. We're going to be diligent and we're probably going to be very aggressive on that front as well, to be able to grow this business into the global leader of cloud connectivity and security. And I think we've really hit a void in the industry that's been looking for this for a very long time and we want to be the first ones to be able to collaborate and combine those three into one. >> When the cloud started to hit the steep part of the S-curve, kind of early part of last decade, people thought, oh wow, these managed service providers are toast. The exact opposite happened. It created such a tailwind and need for consistent services and integration and managed services. We've seen it all across the stacks. So guys, wish you best of luck. Congratulations on the acquisitions, >> Thank you. >> And hope to have you back soon. >> Absolutely, thanks for having us. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. Dave Vellante for theCube's coverage of Veeamon 2022. We'll be right back after this short break. (pleasant music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Cybersecurity stocks have been sending mixed signals as of late, mostly negative like much of tech, but some such as Palo Alto Networks, despite a tough go of it recently have held up better than most tech names. Others like CrowdStrike, had been out performing Broader Tech in March, but then flipped in May. Okta's performance was pretty much tracking along with CrowdStrike for most of the past several months, a little bit below, but then the Okta hack changed the trajectory of that name. Zscaler has crossed the critical billion dollar ARR revenue milestone, and now sees a path to five billion dollars in revenue, but the company stock fell sharply after its last earnings report and has been on a down trend since last November. Meanwhile, CyberArk's recent beat and raise, was encouraging and the stock acted well after its last report. Security remains the number one initiative priority amongst IT organizations and the spending momentum for many high flying cyber names remain strong. So what gives in cyber security? Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we focus on security and will update you on the latest data from ETR to try to make sense out of the market and read into what this all means in both the near and long term, for some of our favorite names in cyber. First, the news. There's always something happening in security news cycles. The big recent news is new President Rodrigo Chavez declared a national emergency in Costa Rica due to the preponderance of Russian cyber attacks on the country's critical infrastructure. Such measures are normally reserved for natural disasters like earthquakes, but this move speaks to the nature of today's cyber threats. Of no surprise is modern superpower warfare even for a depleted power like Russia almost certainly involves cyber warfare as we continue to see in Ukraine. Privately held Arctic Wolf Networks hired Dustin Williams as its new CFO. Williams has taken three companies to IPO, including Nutanix in 2016, a very successful IPO for that company. Whether AWN chooses to pull the trigger this year or will wait until markets are less choppy or obviously remains to be seen. But it's a pretty clear sign the company is headed to IPO at some point. Now, big point of discussion this week at Red Hat Summit in Boston and the prior week at Dell technologies world was security. In the case of Red Hat, securing the digital supply chain was the main theme. And from Dell building, many security features into its storage arrays and cyber resilience services into its as a service offering called Apex. And we're seeing a trend where buyers want to reduce the number of bespoke tools they use if they, in fact can. Here's IDC's Jim Mercer, sharing data from a recent survey they conducted on the topic. Play the clip. >> Interestingly, we did a survey, I think around last August or something. And one of the questions was around where do you want your security, right? Where do you want to get your DevSecOps security from? Do you want to get it from individual vendors, right? Or do you want to get it from like your platforms that you're using and deploying changes in Kubernetes? >> Great question. What did they say? >> The majority of them, they're hoping they can get it built into the platform. That's really what they want-- >> Now, whether that's actually achievable is debatable because you have so much innovation and investment going on from the likes of startups and for instance, lace work or sneak and security companies that you see even trying to build platforms, you've got CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler and many others, trying to build security platforms and put it all under their umbrella. Now the last point will hit here is there was a lot of buzz in the news about Okta. The reaction to what was a relatively benign hack was pretty severe and probably overblown, but Okta's stock is paying the price of what is generally considered a blown communications plan versus a technical failure. Remember, identity is not an easy thing to rip and replace and Okta remains a best-of-breed player and leader in the space. So we're going to look at some ETR data later in this segment to try and make sense of the recent action in the market and certain names. Speaking of which let's take a look at how some of the names in cybersecurity have fared relative to some of the indices and relative indicators that we like to look at. Here's a Google finance comparison for a number of stocks and names in the bottom there you can see we plot the hack ETF which tracks security stocks. This is a year to date view. And so we don't show it here but the tech heavy NASDAQ is off around 26% year to date whereas the cyber ETF that we're showing is down 18%, okay. So cyber holding up a little bit better than broader tech as we've reported earlier, was actually much better and still seems to be a gap there, but the data are mixed. You can see Okta is way off relative to its peers. That's a combination of the breach that we talked about but also the run up in the stock since COVID. CrowdStrike was actually faring better but broke this month, we'll see how it's upcoming earnings announcements are received when it announces on June 2nd after the close. Palo Alto in the light blue has done better than most and until recently was holding up quite well. And of course, Sailpoint is another identity specialist, it is kind of off the charts here because it's going private with the acquisition by Thoma Bravo at nearly seven billion dollars. So you see some mixed signals in cyber these past several months and weeks. And so we're trying to understand what that all means. So let's take a look at the survey data and see how spending momentum is holding up. As we've reported IT spending forecast, at the macro level, they've come off their 8% highs from the end of the year, the ETRS December survey, but robust tech spending is still there. It's expected at nearly seven percent and this is amongst 1200 ETR respondents. Here's a picture from the ETR survey of the cybersecurity landscape. That y-axis that's net score or a measure of spending momentum and that horizontal access is overlap. We used to talk about it as a market share which is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set. That dotted red line at 40% indicates an elevated spending momentum level on the vertical axis and we filter the names and limited to only those with a hundred or more responses in the ETR survey. Then the pictures still pretty crowded as you can see. You got lots of companies above the red dotted line, including Microsoft which is up into the right, they're so far off the chart, it's just amazing. But also Palo Alto and Okta, Auth0, which of course is now owned by Okta, Zscaler, CyberArk is making moves. Sailpoint and Cloudflare, they're all above that magic 40% line. Now, you look at Cisco, it shows a very large presence in the horizontal axis in the data set. And it's got pretty respectable momentum and you see Splunk doing okay, no before and tenable just below that 40% line and a lot of names in the very respectable 20% zone. And we've included some legacy names just for context that fall below the zero percent line with a negative net score. And that means a larger proportion, that negative net score means a larger proportion of their customers in the survey are spending less than those that are spending more. Now, typically for these legacy names you're going to have a huge proportion of customers who have flat spending that kind of fat middle and that's why they sort of don't have that highly elevated score, but they're still viable as they get the recurring revenue each year. But the bottom line is that spending remains robust for some of the top names that we've talked about earlier despite their rocky stock performance. Now, let's filter this data a bit more to make it a little bit easier to read. So to do that, we take out Microsoft because they're just so dominant and we cherry pick some names to make the data more consumable and scannable. The other data point we've added is Okta's net score breakdown, the multicolored rows there, that row in the bottom right. Net score, it measures the percent of customers that are adding the platform new, that's the lime green, at 18% for Okta. The forest green is at 42%. That's the percent of customers in the survey that are spending six percent or more. The gray is flat spending. That's 32% for Okta, this past survey. The pink is customers that are spending less, that's three percent. They're spending six percent or worse in the survey, so only three percent for Okta. And the bright red at three percent is decommissioning the platform. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get a net score, well, into the 50s for Okta and you can see. We highlight Okta here because it's a name that we've been following for quite some time and customers have given us really solid feedback on the technology and up until the hack, they're affinity to Okta, but that seems to be continuing. We'll talk more about that. This recent breach to Okta has caused us to take a closer look. And you may recall, we reported with our ETR colleague, Eric Bradley. The breach was announced right in the middle of ETR collecting data in the last survey. And while we did see a noticeable downtick right after the announcement, the exposure of the hack and Okta's net score just after the breach was disclosed, you can see the combination of Okta and Auth0 remains very strong. I asked Eric Bradley this morning what he thought about Okta, and he pointed out that you can't evaluate this company on its price to earnings ratio. But it's forward sales multiple is now below 7X. And while attractive, these high flyers at some point, Eric says, they got to start making a profit. So you going to hold that thought, we'll come back to that. Now, another cut of the ETR data to look at our four star security names here. A while back we developed a methodology to try and cut through the noise of the crowded security sector using the ETR data to evaluate two key metrics; net score and shared N. Net score again is, spending momentum, the latter is an indicator of presence in the data set which is a proxy for market presence. Okay, we assigned those companies that cracked the top 10 in both net score and shared N, we give them four stars, okay, if they make the top 10. This chart here shows the April survey data for those companies with an N that's greater than, equal to a hundred responses. So again, we're filtering on those with a hundred or more responses. The table on the left that you see there, that's sorted by net score, okay. So we're sorting by spending momentum. And then the one on the right is sorted by shared N, so their presence in the data set. Seven companies hit the top 10 for both categories; Palo Alto Network, Splunk, CrowdStrike Okta, Proofpoint, Fortinet and Zscaler. Now, remember, take a look, Okta excludes Auth0, in this little methodology that we came up with. Auth0 didn't make the cuts but it hits the top 10 for net score. So if you add in Auth0's 112 N there that you see on the right. You add that into Okta, we put Okta in the number two spot in the survey on the right most table with the shared N of 354. Only Cisco has a higher presence in the data set. And you can see Cisco in the left lands just below that red dotted line. That's the top 10 in security. So if we were to combine Okta and Auth0 as one, Cisco would make the cut and earn four stars. Now, some other notables are CyberArk, which is just below the red line on the right most chart with an impressive 177 shared N. Again, if you combine Auth0 and Okta, CyberArk makes the four star grade because it's in the top 10 for net score on the left. And Sailpoint is another notable with a net score above 50% and it's got a shared N of 122, which is respectable. So despite the market's choppy waters, we're seeing some positive signs in the survey data for some of the more prominent names that we've been following for the last couple of years. So what does this mean for the markets going forward? As always, when we see these confusing signs we like to reach out to the network and one of the sharpest traders out there is Chip Simonton. We've quoted him before and we like to share some of his insights. And so we're going to highlight some of that here. So technically, almost every good tech stock is oversold. And as such, he suggested we might see a bounce here. We certainly are seeing that on this Friday, the 13th. But the right call tactically has been to sell into the rally these past several months, so we'll see what happens on Monday. The key issue with the name like Okta and some other momentum names like CrowdStrike and Zscaler is that when money comes back into tech, it's likely going to go to the FAANG stocks, the Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and of course, you put Microsoft in there as well. And we'll see about Amazon, by the way, it's kind of out of favor right now, as everyone's focused on the retail side of the business meanwhile it's cloud business is booming and that's where all the profit is. We think that should be the real focus for Amazon. But the point is, for these momentum names in cybersecurity that don't make money, they face real headwinds, as growth is slowing overall and interest rates rise, that makes the net present value of these investments much less attractive. We've talked about that before. But longer term, we agree with Chip Simonton that these are excellent companies and they will weather the storm and we think they're going to lead their respective markets. And in cyber, we would expect continued M&A activity, which could act as a booster shot in the arms of these names. Now in 2019, we saw the ETR data, it pointed to CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Okta and others in the security space. Some of those names that really looked to us like they were moving forward and the pandemic just created a surge in these names and admittedly they got out over their skis. But the data suggests that these leading companies have continued momentum and the potential for stay in power. Unlike the SolarWinds hack, it seems at this point anyway that Okta will recover in the market. For the reasons that we cited, investors, they might stay away for some time but longer term, there's a shift in CSO security strategies that appear to be permanent. They're really valuing cloud-based modern platforms, these platforms will likely continue to gain share and carry their momentum forward. Okay, that's it for now, thanks to Stephanie Chan, who helps with the background research and with social, Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out and do some great work as well. Alex Morrison is on production and handles all of our podcast. Alex, thank you. And Rob Hof is our Editor in Chief at SiliconANGLE. Remember, all these episodes, they're available as podcast, you can pop in the headphones and listen, just search "Breaking Analysis Podcast." I publish each week on wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com. Don't forget to check out etr.ai, best in the business for real customer data. It's an awesome platform. You can reach me at dave.vellante@siliconangle.com or @dvellante. You can comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBEinsights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We're covering Red Hat Summit 2022. We're going to wrap up now, Dave Vellante, Paul Gillin. We want to introduce you to Stephanie Chan, who's our new correspondent. Stephanie, one of your first events, your very first CUBE event. So welcome. >> Thank you. >> Up from NYC. Smaller event, but intimate. You got a chance to meet some folks last night at some of the after parties. What are your overall impressions? What'd you learn this week? >> So this has been my first in-person event in over two years. And even though, like you said, is on the smaller scale, roughly around 1000 attendees, versus it's usual eight to 10,000 attendees. There's so much energy, and excitement, and openness in these events and sessions. Even before and after the sessions people have been mingling and socializing and hanging out. So, I think a lot of people appreciate these in-person events and are really excited to be here. >> Cool. So, you also sat in some of the keynotes, right? Pretty technical, right? Which is kind of new to sort of your genre, right? I mean, I know you got a financial background but, so what'd you think of the keynotes? What'd you think of the format, the theater in the round? Any impressions of that? >> So, I think there's three things that are really consistent in these Red Hat Summit keynotes. There's always a history lesson. There's always, you know, emphasis in the culture of openness. And, there's also inspirational stories about how people utilize open source. And I found a lot of those examples really compelling and interesting. For instance, people use open source in (indistinct), and even in space. So I really enjoyed, you know, learning about all these different people and stories. What about you guys? What do you think were the big takeaways and the best stories that came out of the keynotes? >> Paul, want to start? >> Clearly the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is a major rollout. They do that only about every three years. So that's a big deal to this audience. I think what they did in the area of security, with rolling out sigstore, which is a major new, I think an important new project that was sort of incubated at Red Hat. And they're trying to put in to create an open source ecosystem around that now. And the alliances. I'm usually not that much on partnerships, but the Accenture and the Microsoft partnerships do seem to be significant to the company. And, finally, the GM partnership which I think was maybe kind of the bombshell that they sort of rushed in at the last minute. But I think has the biggest potential impact on Red Hat and its partner ecosystem that is really going to anchor their edge architecture going forward. So I didn't see it so much on the product front, but the sense of Red Hat spreading its wings, and partnering with more companies, and seeing its itself as really the center of an ecosystem indicates that they are, you know, they're in a very solid position in their business. >> Yeah, and also like the pandemic has really forced us into this new normal, right? So customer demand is changing. There has been the shift to remote. There's always going to be a new normal according to Paul, and open source carries us through that. So how do you guys think Red Hat has helped its portfolio through this new normal and the shift? >> I mean, when you think of Red Hat, you think of Linux. I mean, that's where it all started. You think OpenShift which is the application development platforms. Linux is the OS. OpenShift is the application development platform for Kubernetes. And then of course, Ansible is the automation framework. And I agree with you, ecosystem is really the other piece of this. So, I mean, I think you take those three pieces and extend that into the open source community. There's a lot of innovation that's going around each of those, but ecosystems are the key. We heard from Stefanie Chiras, that fundamental, I mean, you can't do this without those gap fillers and those partnerships. And then another thing that's notable here is, you know, this was, I mean, IBM was just another brand, right? I mean, if anything it was probably a sub-brand, I mean, you didn't hear much about IBM. You certainly had no IBM presence, even though they're right across the street running Think. No Arvind present, no keynote from Arvind, no, you know, Big Blue washing. And so, I think that's a testament to Arvind himself. We heard that from Paul Cormier, he said, hey, this guy's been great, he's left us alone. And he's allowed us to continue innovating. It's good news. IBM has not polluted Red Hat. >> Yes, I think that the Red Hat was, I said at the opening, I think Red Hat is kind of the tail wagging the dog right now. And their position seems very solid in the market. Clearly the market has come to them in terms of their evangelism of open source. They've remained true to their business model. And I think that gives them credibility that, you know, a lot of other open source companies have lacked. They have stuck with the plan for over 20 years now and have really not changed it, and it's paying off. I think they're emerging as a company that you can trust to do business with. >> Now I want to throw in something else here. I thought the conversation with IDC analyst, Jim Mercer, was interesting when he said that they surveyed customers and they wanted to get the security from their platform vendor, versus having to buy these bespoke tools. And it makes a lot of sense to me. I don't think that's going to happen, right? Because you're going to have an identity specialist. You're going to have an endpoint specialist. You're going to have a threat detection specialist. And they're going to be best of breed, you know, Red Hat's never going to be all of those things. What they can do is partner with those companies through APIs, through open source integrations, they can add them in as part of the ecosystem and maybe be the steward of that. Maybe that's the answer. They're never going to be the best at all those different security disciplines. There's no way in the world, Red Hat, that's going to happen. But they could be the integration point. And that would be, that would be a simplifying layer to the equation. >> And I think it's smart. You know, they're not pretending to be an identity in access management or an anti-malware company, or even a zero trust company. They are sticking to their knitting, which is operating system and developers. Evangelizing DevSecOps, which is a good thing. And, that's what they're going to do. You know, you have to admire this company. It has never gotten outside of its swim lane. I think it's understood well really what it wants to be good at. And, you know, in the software business knowing what not to do is more important than knowing what to do. Is companies that fail are usually the ones that get overextended, this company has never overextended itself. >> What else do you want to know? >> And a term that kept popping up was multicloud, or otherwise known as metacloud. We know what the cloud is, but- >> Oh, supercloud, metacloud. >> Supercloud, yeah, here we go. We know what the cloud is but, what does metacloud mean to you guys? And why has it been so popular in these conversations? >> I'm going to boot this to Dave, because he's the expert on this. >> Well, expert or not, but I mean, again, we've coined this term supercloud. And the idea behind the supercloud or what Ashesh called metacloud, I like his name, cause it allows Web 3.0 to come into the equation. But the idea is that instead of building on each individual cloud and have compatibility with that cloud, you build a layer across clouds. So you do the hard work as a platform supplier to hide the underlying primitives and APIs from the end customer, or the end developer, they can then add value on top of that. And that abstraction layer spans on-prem, clouds, across clouds, ultimately out to the edge. And it's new, a new value layer that builds on top of the hyperscale infrastructure, or existing data center infrastructure, or emerging edge infrastructure. And the reason why that is important is because it's so damn complicated, number one. Number two, every company's becoming a software company, a technology company. They're bringing their services through digital transformation to their customers. And you've got to have a cloud to do that. You're not going to build your own data center. That's like Charles Wang says, not Charles Wang. (Paul laughing) Charles Phillips. We were just talking about CA. Charles Phillips. Friends don't let friends build data centers. So that supercloud concept, or what Ashesh calls metacloud, is this new layer that's going to be powered by ecosystems and platform companies. And I think it's real. I think it's- >> And OpenShift, OpenShift is a great, you know, key card for them or leverage for them because it is perhaps the best known Kubernetes platform. And you can see here they're really doubling down on adding features to OpenShift, security features, scalability. And they see it as potentially this metacloud, this supercloud abstraction layer. >> And what we said is, in order to have a supercloud you got to have a superpaz layer and OpenShift is that superpaz layer. >> So you had conversations with a lot of people within the past two days. Some people include companies, from Verizon, Intel, Accenture. Which conversation stood out to you the most? >> Which, I'm sorry. >> Which conversation stood out to you the most? (Paul sighs) >> The conversation with Stu Miniman was pretty interesting because we talked about culture. And really, he has a lot of credibility in that area because he's not a Red Hat. You know, he hasn't been a Red Hat forever, he's fairly new to the company. And got a sense from him that the culture there really is what they say it is. It's a culture of openness and that's, you know, that's as important as technology for a company's success. >> I mean, this was really good content. I mean, there were a lot, I mean Stefanie's awesome. Stefanie Chiras, we're talking about the ecosystem. Chris Wright, you know, digging into some of the CTO stuff. Ashesh, who coined metacloud, I love that. The whole in vehicle operating system conversation was great. The security discussion that we just had. You know, the conversations with Accenture were super thoughtful. Of course, Paul Cormier was a highlight. I think that one's going to be a well viewed interview, for sure. And, you know, I think that the customer conversations are great. Red Hat did a really good job of carrying the keynote conversations, which were abbreviated this year, to theCUBE. >> Right. >> I give 'em a lot of kudos for that. And because, theCUBE, it allows us to double click, go deeper, peel the onion a little bit, you know, all the buzz words, and cliches. But it's true. You get to clarify some of the things you heard, which were, you know, the keynotes were, were scripted, but tight. And so we had some good follow up questions. I thought it was super useful. I know I'm leaving somebody out, but- >> We're also able to interview representatives from Intel and Nvidia, which at a software conference you don't typically do. I mean, there's the assimilation, the combination of hardware and software. It's very clear that, and this came out in the keynote, that Red Hat sees hardware as matter. It matters. It's important again. And it's going to be a source of innovation in the future. That came through clearly. >> Yeah. The hardware matters theme, you know, the old days you would have an operating system and the hardware were intrinsically linked. MVS in the mainframe, VAX, VMS in the digital mini computers. DG had its own operating system. Wang had his own operating system. Prime with Prime OS. You remember these days? >> Oh my God. >> Right? (Paul laughs) And then of course Microsoft. >> And then x86, everything got abstracted. >> Right. >> Everything became x86 and now it's all atomizing again. >> Although WinTel, right? I mean, MS-DOS and Windows were intrinsically linked for many, many years with Intel x86. And it wasn't until, you know, well, and then, you know, Sun Solaris, but it wasn't until Linux kind of blew that apart. And the internet is built on the lamp stack. And of course, Linux is the fundamental foundation for Red Hat. So my point is, that the operating system and the hardware have always been very closely tied together. Whether it's security, or IO, or registries and memory management, everything controlled by the OS are very close to the hardware. And so that's why I think you've got an affinity in Red Hat to hardware. >> But Linux is breaking that bond, don't you think? >> Yes, but it still has to understand the underlying hardware. >> Right. >> You heard today, how taking advantage of Nvidia, and the AI capabilities. You're seeing that with ARM, you're seeing that with Intel. How you can optimize the operating system to take advantage of new generations of CPU, and NPU, and CPU, and PU, XPU, you know, across the board. >> Yep. >> Well, I really enjoyed this conference and it really stressed how important open source is to a lot of different industries. >> Great. Well, thanks for coming on. Paul, thank you. Great co-hosting with you. And thank you. >> Always, Dave. >> For watching theCUBE. We'll be on the road, next week we're at KubeCon in Valencia, Spain. We're at VeeamON. We got a ton of stuff going on. Check out thecube.net. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Wikibon.com. We publish there weekly, our breaking analysis series. Thanks for watching everybody. Dave Vellante, for Paul Gillin, and Stephanie Chan. Thanks to the crew. Shout out, Andrew, Alex, Sonya. Amazing job, Sonya. Steven, thanks you guys for coming out here. Mark, good job corresponding. Go to SiliconANGLE, Mark's written some great stuff. And thank you for watching. We'll see you next time. (calm music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of CONMEBOL. Future ready 2020. Brought to you by combo. >>Hi and welcome back. I'm Stew Minuteman, and we're at the Cube's coverage of Con Volt Future Ready. You've got the power panel to really dig in on the product announcements that happened at the event today. Joining me? We have three guests. First of all, we have Brenda Rajagopalan. He's the vice president of products. Sitting next to him is Don Foster, vice president of Storage Solutions. And in the far piece of the panel Mersereau, vice president of Global Channels and Alliances. All three of them with Conn Volt. Gentlemen, thanks all three of you for joining us. Exactly. All right, so first of all, great job on the launch. You know, these days with a virtual event doing, you know, the announcements, the engagement with the press and analyst, you know, having demos, customer discussions. It's a challenge to put all those together. And it has been, you know, engaging in interesting watch today. So we're going to start with you. You've been quite busy today explaining all the pieces, so just at a very high level if you put this really looks like the culmination of the update with Conn Volt portfolio new team new products compared to kind of a year, year and 1/2 ago. So just if you could start us off with kind of the high points, >>thank you still, yeah, absolutely exciting day for us today. You did comrade multiple reasons for that excitement and go through that we announced an exciting new portfolio today knows to not the culmination. It's a continuation off our journey, a bunch of new products that we launched today Hyper scaler X as a new integrated data protection appliance. We've also announced new offerings in data protection, backup and recovery, disaster recovery and complete data protection and lots of exciting updates for Hedwig and a couple of weeks like we introduced updates for metallic. So, yes, it's been a really exciting pain. Also, today happens to be the data, and we got to know that we are the leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for the ninth consecutive. I am so a lot of goodness today for us. >>Excellent. Lots of areas that we definitely want to dig deep in to the pieces done. You know, we just heard a little bit about Hedvig was an acquisition a year ago that everybody's kind of looking at and saying Okay, you know, will this make them compete against some of their traditional partners? How we get integrated in So, baby, just give us one level deeper on the Hedvig piece on what that means to the portfolio? Yeah, sure, So I >>guess I mean, one of the key things that the random mentioned was the fact that had hyper scale that's is built off the head Day files. So that's a huge milestone for us. As we teased out maybe 10 months ago. Remember, Tomball, Go on the Cube and talking about, you know, kind of what our vision and strategy was of unifying data and storage management. Those hyper hyper scale X applying is a definite milestone improving out that direction. But beyond just the hyper scale ECs, we've also been driving on some of the more primary or modern workloads such as containers and the really interesting stuff we've come out with your recently is the kubernetes native integration that ties in all of the advanced component of the head to distribute storage architecture on the platform itself across multi cloud and on premise environments, making it really easy and policy driven. Um, for Dev, ops users and infrastructure users, the tie ins applications from a group, Friction >>Great and Mercer. There's some updates to the partner program and help us understand how all of these product updates they're gonna affect the kind of the partnerships and alliances beasts that you want. >>Absolutely. So in the time since our last meeting that go in the fall, which is actually right after I had just doing combo, we spent a good portion of the following six months really talking with partners, understanding the understand the impact of the partner program that we introduced last summer, looking at the data and really looking at barriers to evolve the program, which fell around three difference specific. Once you bet one was simplicity of the simplicity of the program, simplicity of understanding, rewards, levers and so forth. The second was paying for value was really helping, helping our partners to be profitable around things like deal registration on other benefits and then third was around co investment. So making sure that we get the right members in place to support our partners and investing in practices. Another training, another enablement around combo and we launched in over these things last week is a part of an evolution of that program. Today is a great follow on because in addition to all of the program evolutions that we we launched last week now we have an opportunity with our partners to have many more opportunities or kind of a thin into the wedge to open up new discussions with our customers now around all of these different use cases and capabilities. So back to that simplification angle, really driving more and more opportunities for those partners toe specific conversations around use cases. >>Okay, for this next question, I think it makes sense for you to start. Maybe maybe Don, you can get some commentary in two. But when he's firstly the announcements, there are some new products in the piece that you discuss but trying to understand, you know, when you position it, you know, do you call the portfolio? Is it a platform? You know, if I'm an existing Conn Volt customer, you know, how do I approach this? If I use something like metallic, how does that interplay with some of the new pieces that were discussed today. >>Sure, I can take the business. I'm sure Don and mostly will have more data to it. The simplest way to think about it is as a port for you. But contrary to how you would think about portfolio as independent products, what we have is a set off data management services granular. We're very aligned to the use case, which can all inter operate with each other. So maybe launched backup and recovery and disaster recovery. These can be handled separately, purchased separately and deployed standalone or for customers who want a combination of those capabilities. We also have a complete data protection are fine storage optimization, data governance E discovery in complaints are data management services that build on top off any of these capabilities now a very differentiating factor in our platform owners. All the services that you're talking about are delivered off the same software to make it simpler to manage to the same year. So it's very easy to start with one service and then just turn on the license and go to other services so I can understand the confusion is coming from but it's all the same. The customer simplicity and flexibility in mind, and it's all delivered off the same platform. So it is a portfolio built on a single Don. Would you like to add more to it? >>Yeah, I think the interesting thing due to add on top of that is where we're going with Hedvig Infrastructure, the head of distributed storage platform, uh, to to run this point, how everything is integrated and feed and work off of one another. That's the same idea that we have. We talked about unifying data and storage manager. So the intricate storage architecture components the way data might be maneuvered, whether it's for kubernetes for virtual machines, database environments, secondary storage, you name it, um, we are. We're quickly working to continue driving that level of of unification and integration between the portfolio and heads storage, distribute storage platforms and also deliver. So what you're seeing today going back to, I think wrong his first point. It's definitely not the culmination. It's just another step in the direction as we continue to innovate and integrate this >>product, and I think for our partners what this really does, it allows them to sell around customer use cases because it'll ask now if I have a d. Our use case. I can go after just PR. If I have a backup use case, I can just go after backup, and I don't have to try to sell more than that. Could be on what the customer is looking for in parallel that we can steal these things in line with the customer use case. So the customer has a lot of remote offices. They want to scale Hedvig across those they want to use the art of the cloud. They can scale these things independently, and it really gives us a lot of optionality that we didn't have before when we had a few monolithic products. >>Excellent. Really reminds me more of how I look at products if I was gonna go buy it from some of the public cloud providers living in a hybrid cloud. World, of course, is what your customers are doing. Help us understand a little bit, you know, Mercer talked about metallic and the azure partnership, but for the rest of the products, the portfolio that we're talking about, you know, does this >>kind >>of work seamlessly across my own data center hosting providers Public Cloud, you know, how does this fit into the cloud environment for your customer? >>Yes, it does. And I can start with this one goes to, um it's our strategy is cloud first, right? And you see it in every aspect of our product portfolio. In fact, I don't know if you got to see a keynote today, but Ron from Johns Hopkins University was remarking that comment has the best cloud native architectures. And that's primarily because of the innovation that we drive into the multi cloud reality. We have very deep partnerships with pretty much all the cloud vendors, and we use that for delivering joint innovation, a few things that when you think of it from a hybrid customers perspective, the most important need for them is to continue working on pram while still leveraging the cloud. And we have a lot of optimization is built into that, and then the next step of the journey is of course, making sure that you can recover to the cloud would be it work load. Typically your data quality and there's a lot of automation that we provide to our solutions and finally, Of course, if you're already in the cloud, whether you're running a science parents or cloud native, our software protects across all those use cases, either true sass with metallic auto downloadable software, backup and recovery so we can cover the interest victims of actual presence. You. We do definitely help customers in every stage of their hybrid cloud acceleration journey. >>And if you take a look at the Hedvig protect if you take a look at the head back to, um, the ability to work in a cloud native fast, it is essentially a part of the DNA of that storage of the storage, right? So whether you're running on Prem, whether you're running it about adjacent, set up inside the cloud head, that can work with any compute environment and any storage environment that you went to essentially then feed, we build this distributed storage, and the reason that becomes important. It's pretty much highlighted with our announcement around the kubernetes and container support is that it makes it really easy to start maneuvering data from on Prem to the cloud, um, from cloud to cloud region to region, sort of that high availability that you know as customers make cloud first a reality and their organizations starts to become a critical requirement or ensuring the application of and some of the things that we've done now with kubernetes in making all of our integration for how we deliver storage for the kubernetes and container environments and being that they're completely kubernetes native and that they can support a Google in AWS and Azure. And of course, any on premises community set up just showcases the value that we can provide in giving them that level of data portability. And it basically provides a common foundation layer, or how any sort of the Dev ops teams will be operating in the way that those state full container state workloads. Donna Oh, sorry. Go >>ahead, mark area >>because you mentioned the metallic and azure partnership announcement and I just want to get on that. And one thing that run dimension, which is we are really excited about the announcement of partnership with Microsoft and all the different news cases that opens up that are SAS platform with Azure with office 3 65 and all of the great application stack it's on. If you're at the same time, to run this point. We are a multi cloud company. And whether that is other of the hyper scale clouds Mess GC, P. Ali at Oracle and IBM, etcetera, or Oliver, Great service writer burners. We continue to believe in customer choice, and we'll continue to drive unique event innovations across all of those platforms. >>All right, Don, I was wondering if we could just dig in a little bit more on some other kubernetes pieces you were talking about. Let me look at just the maturation of storage in general. You know, how do we had state back into containers in kubernetes environments? Help us see, You know what you're hearing from your customers. And you know how you how you're ready to meet their needs toe not only deliver storage, but as you say, Really? You know, full data protection in that environment? >>Certainly it So I mean, there's been a number of enhancements that happened in the kubernetes environment General over the last two years. One of the big ones was the creation of what the visit environment calls a persistent volume. And what that allows you to do is to really present storage to a a communities application. Do it be typically through what's called a CSR container storage interface that allows for state full data to be written, storage and be handled and reattached applications as you leverage them about that kubernetes. Um, as you can probably imagine that with the addition of the additional state full applications, some of the overall management now of stateless and state collapse become very talent. And that's primarily because many customers have been using some of the more traditional storage solutions to try to map that into these new state. Full scenario. And as you start to think about Dev ops organization, most Dev ops organizations want to work in the environment of their choice. Whether that's Google, whether that's AWS, Microsoft, uh, something that might be on Prem or a mix of different on Prem environments. What you typically find, at least in the kubernetes world, is there's seldom ever one single, very large kubernetes infrastructure cluster that's set to run, Dev asked. The way and production all at once. You usually have this spread out across a fairly global configuration, and so that's where some of these traditional mechanisms from traditional storage vendors really start to fall down because you can apply the same level of automation and controls in every single one of those environments. When you don't control the storage, let's say and that's really where interfacing Hedvig and allowing that sort of extension distribute storage platform brings about all of this automation policy control and really storage execution definition for the state. Full statehood workloads so that now managing the stateless and the state full becomes pretty easy and pretty easy to maintain when it comes to developing another Dev branch or simply trying to do disaster recovery or a J for production, >>any family actively do. That's a very interesting response, and the reality is customers are beginning to experiment with business. Very often they only have a virtual environment, and now they're also trying to expand into continuous. So Hedwig's ability to service primary storage for virtualization as well as containers actually gives their degree of flexibility and freedom for customers to try out containers and to start their contingent. Thank you familiar constructs. Everything is mellow where you just need to great with continuous >>Alright, bring a flexibility is something that I heard when you talk about the portfolio and the pricing as to how you put these pieces together. You actually talked about in the presentation this morning? Aggressive pricing. If you talk about, you know, kind of backup and recovery, help us understand, You know, convo 2020 how you're looking at your customers and you know how you put together your products, that to meet what they need at that. As you said, aggressive pricing? >>Absolutely. And you use this phrase a little bit earlier is to blow like flexibility. That's exactly what we're trying to get to the reason why we are reconstructing our portfolio so that we have these very granular use case aligned data management services to provide the cloud like flexibility. Customers don't have the same data management needs all the time. Great. So they can pick and choose the exact solution that need because there are delivered on the same platform that can enable out the solution investment, you know, And that's the reality. We know that many of our customers are going to start with one and keep adding more and more services, because that's what we see as ongoing conversations that gives us the ability to really praise the entry products very aggressively when compared to competition, especially when we go against single product windows. This uses a lot of slammed where we can start with a really aggressively priced product and enable more capabilities as we move forward to give you an idea, we launched disaster recovery today. I would say that compared to the so the established vendors India, we would probably come in at about 25 to 40% of the Priceline because it depends on the environment and what not. But you're going to see that that's the power of bringing to the table. You start small and then depending on what your needs are, you have the flexibility to run on either. More data management capabilities are more workloads, depending on what your needs will be. I think it's been a drag from a partner perspective, less with muscle. If you want a little bit more than that, >>yes, I mean, that goes back to the idea of being ableto simply scale across government use functionality. For example, things like the fact that our disaster recovery offering the Newman doesn't require backup really allows us to have those Taylor conversations around use cases, applications >>a >>zealous platforms. You think about one of the the big demands that we've had coming in from customers and partners, which is help me have a D R scenario or a VR set up in my environment that doesn't require people to go put their hands on boxes and cables, which was one of those things that a year ago we were having. This conversation would not necessarily have been as important as it is now, but that ability to target those specific, urgent use cases without having to go across on sort of sell things that aren't necessarily associated with the immediate pain points really makes those just makes us ineffective. Offer. >>Yeah, you bring up some changing priorities. I think almost everybody will agree that the number one priority we're hearing from customers is around security. So whether I'm adopting more cloud, I'm looking at different solutions out there. Security has to be front and center. Could we just kind of go down the line and give us the update as to how security fits and all the pieces we've been discussing? >>I guess I'm talking about change, right, so I'll start. The security for us is built into everything that we do the same view you're probably going to get from each of us because security is burden. It's not a board on, and you would see it across a lot of different images. If you take our backup and recovery and disaster recovery, for instance, a lot of ransomware protection capabilities built into the solution. For instance, we have anomaly detection that is built into the platform. If we see any kind of spurious activity happening all of a sudden, we know that that might be a potential and be reported so that the customer can take a quick look at air Gap isolation, encryption by default. So many features building. And when you come to disaster recovery, encryption on the wire, a lot of security aspects we've been to every part of the portfolio don't. >>Consequently, with Hedvig, it's probably no surprise that when that this platform was developed and as we've continued development, security has always been at the core of what we're doing is stored. So what? It's for something as simple as encryption on different volume, ensuring the communication between applications and the storage platform itself, and the way the distributors towards platform indicates those are all incredibly secured. Lock down almost such for our own our own protocols for ensuring that, um, you know, only we're able to talk within our own, our own system. Beyond that, though, I mean it comes down to ensure that data in rest data in transit. It's always it's always secure. It's also encrypted based upon the level of control that using any is there one. And then beyond just the fact of keeping the data secure. You have things like immutable snapshots. You have declared of data sovereignty to ensure that you can put essentially virtual fence barriers for where data can be transported in this highly distributed platform. Ah, and then, from a user perspective, there's always level security for providing all seeking roll on what groups organization and consume storage or leverage. Different resource is the storage platform and then, of course, from a service provider's perspective as well, providing that multi tenanted access s so that users can have access to what they want when they want it. It's all about self service, >>and the idea there is that obviously, we're all familiar with the reports of increased bad actors in the current environment to increased ransomware attacks and so forth. And be a part of that is addressed by what wrong and done said in terms of our core technology. Part of that also, though, is addressed by being able to work across platforms and environments because, you know, as we see the acceleration of state tier one applications or entire data center, evacuations into service provider or cloud environments has happened. You know, this could have taken 5 10 years in a in a normal cycle. But we've seen this happen overnight has cut this. Companies have needed to move those I T environments off science into managed environments and our ability to protect the applications, whether they're on premises, whether they're in the cloud or in the most difficult near where they live. In both cases, in both places at once, is something that it's really important to our customers to be able to ensure that in the end, security posture >>great Well, final thing I have for all three of you is you correctly noted that this is not the end, but along the journey that you're going along with your customers. So you know, with all three of you would like to get a little bit. Give us directionally. What should we be looking at? A convo. Take what was announced today and a little bit of look forward towards future. >>Directionally we should be looking at a place where we're delivering even greater simplicity to our customers. And that's gonna be achieved through multiple aspects. 1st 1 it's more technologies coming together. Integrating. We announced three important integration story. We announced the Microsoft partnership a couple of weeks back. You're gonna see us more longer direction. The second piece is technology innovation. We believe in it. That's what Differentiators has a very different company and we'll continue building it along the dimensions off data awareness, data, automation and agility. And the last one continued obsession with data. What more can we do with it? How can we drive more insights for our customers We're going to see is introducing more capabilities along those dimensions? No. >>And I think Rhonda tying directly into what you're highlighting there. I'm gonna go back to what we teased out 10 months ago at calm Bolt. Go there in Colorado in this very on this very program and talk about how, in the unification of ah ah, data and storage management, that vision, we're going to make more and more reality. I think the, uh, the announcements we've made here today let some of the things that we've done in between the lead up to this point is just proof of our execution. And ah, I can happily and excitedly tell you, we're just getting warmed up. It's going to be, ah, gonna be some fun future ahead. >>And I think studio in the running that out with the partner angle. Obviously, we're going to continue to produce great products and solutions that we're going to make our partners relevant. In those conversations with customers, I think we're also going to continue to invest in alternative business models, services, things like migration services, audit services, other things that build on top of this core technology to provide value for customers and additional opportunities for our partners >>to >>build out their their offerings around combo technologies. >>All right, well, thank you. All three of you for joining us. It was great to be able to dig in, understand those pieces. I know you've got lots of resources online for people to learn more. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you too. Thank you. Alright, and stay with us. So we've got one more interview left for the Cube's coverage of con vault. Future Ready, students. Mannan. Thanks. As always for watching the Cube. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, welcome back to the cubes coverage of combo go 19. Stu Miniman is here with me, Lisa Martin and we are wrapping up two days of really exciting wall to wall coverage of the new vault and we're very pleased to welcome a couple of special guests onto the program. To help us wrap up our two days, we have Miranda foster, the vice president of worldwide communications for comm vault and Al Bunty is here, the co founder, former COO and board member. Welcome Miranda and Al. Great to have you on the program. Thanks Lisa. So a lot of energy at this event and I don't think it has anything to do with our rarefied air here in the mile high city. Al, let's start with you. >>Well, there's other things in Colorado. >>There are, yeah, they don't talk about it. They talked about that on stage yesterday. So owl, you have been with convo ball as I mentioned, co-founder. What an evolution over the last 20 years. Can you take us back? >>Surely. So, um, yeah and it's been, it's, it's really kind of cool to see it coming together at this point. But if you go back 20 years when we started this, the whole idea was around data. And remember we walked into a company that was focused on optical storage. Um, we decided it would be a good company to invest in. Um, for two reasons. One, we thought they were really great people here, very creative and innovative and two, it was a great space. So if we believed we believe data would grow and that was a pretty decent thesis to go with. Yeah. And then, then it started moving from there. So I tell people I wasn't burdened with facts so I didn't understand why all these copies were being made of the same set of data. So we developed a platform and an architecture focused on indexing it so you just index at once and then could use it for many different purposes. >>And that just kept moving through the years with this very data centric approach to storage, management, backup protection, etc. It was all about the data. I happened to be lucky and said, you know, I think there's something to this thing called NAS and sand and storage networks and all those things. And I also said we have to plan for fur on scale on our solution of a million X. Now it was only off a magnitude of about a thousand on that, but it was the right idea. You know, you had to build something to scale and, and we came in and we wanted to build a company. We didn't want to just flip a company but we thought there is a longterm vision in it and if you take it all the way to the present here it's, it's really, um, it's, it feels really good to see where the company came from. It's a great foundation and now it will propel off this foundation, um, with a similar vision with great modern execution and management. >>Yeah. Al, when we had the chance to talk with you last year at the show in Nashville, it was setting up for that change. So I want to get your view there. There are some things that the company was working on and are being continued, but there's some things that, you know, Bob hammer would not have happened under his regime. So want to get your viewpoint as to the new Convolt, you know, what, what is, what are some of those new things that are moving forward with the company that might not have in the previous days? >>Yeah, that's a good questions. Do I think Mo, a lot of the innovation that you've seen here, um, would have happened maybe not as quickly. Um, we, the company obviously acquired Hedvig. Uh, we were on a very similar path but to do it ourselves. So you had kind of been a modern, we need to get to market quicker with some real pros. I think, um, the, the evolution of redoing sales management essentially was probably the biggest shift that needed to be under a new regime, if you will. Yeah. >>So Miranda, making these transitions can be really tricky from a marketing standpoint. Talk, talk us through a bit, some of the, how do you make sure trusted yet innovative and new that you've accomplished at this show? >>Well, trust it is obviously the most important because the Bob, the brand that Bob and Al built really embodies reliability for what we provide to our customers. I mean that's what gives them the peace of mind to sleep at night. But I'll tell you, Sanjay has been with us for just eight months now, February of 2019 and it's been busy. We've done a lot of things from a points on J transition with Bob and now to his point we've, we've acquired Hedvig, we've introduced this new SAS portfolio and you're exactly right. What we need to do is make sure that the reliability that customers have come to rely on Convolt for translates into what we're doing with the new Convolt and I think we've done a really good job. We've put a lot of muscle behind making sure, particularly with metallic that it was tried, it was trusted, it was beta tested, we got input from customers, partners, industry influencers. We really built it around the customer. So I think the brand that comm brings will translate well into the things that we've done with these, with these new shifts and movements within the company >>on, on that questions too as well. Um, I think Miranda is a good example of somebody that was with the company before a tremendous talent. She's got new opportunities here and she's run with it. So it's kinda that balance of some, uh, understood the fundamentals and the way we're trying to run the business. And she's grasped the new world as well. So, >>and Rob as well, right? Robin in his new, >>yeah, that's another good point. So that was all part of the transitioning here and Sanjay and the team had been very careful on trying to keep that balance. >>Change is really difficult anywhere, right? Dissect to any element of life. And you look at a business that's been very successful, has built a very strong, reliable brand for 20 years. Big leadership changes, not just with Sanjay, but all of the leadership changes. You know, analysts said, all right, you've got to upgrade your Salesforce. We're seeing a lot of movement in the area. You got to enhance your marketing. We're seeing metallic has the new routes to market, new partner focus, so PSI focuses. We're also seeing this expansion in the market, so what folks were saying, you know a year ago come on is answering in a big way and to your point in a fast way that's not easy to do. You've been here nine years since the beginning. Can you give us a little bit of a perspective, Miranda, about some of the things that were announced at the show? >>How excited everybody is, customers, partners, combo folks. How do you now extend the message and the communications from go globally after the show ends? That's an awesome question. I'm really passionate about this. So you know, Monday we announced metallic, we announced a new head of channels and alliances and Mercer Rowe, we had crazy technology innovation announcements with activate, with the acceleration of the integration with Hedvig with the momentum release that we put out today. We're also doing cool stuff with our corporate social responsibility in terms of sponsoring the new business Avengers coalition. That's something that Chris Powell is really championing here at, at the show and also within combo. So we're very excited about that. And then when you add people like yourselves, you know the tech field day folks, because not everybody can be here, right? Not everybody can be at go. So being able to extend the opportunity for, for folks to participate in combo, go through things like the cube through things like tech field day and using our social media tools and just getting all of the good vibes that are here. Because as Al says, this really is an intimate show, but we try to extend that to anybody who wants to follow us, to anybody who wants to be a part of it. And that's something that we've really focused on the last couple of years to make sure that folks who aren't here can, can get an embrace the environment here at Commonweal go. >>It's such an important piece that you're here helping with the transition I talked about. It's important that some of the existing >>get new roles and do responsibility going forward. What's your role going to be and what should we expect to see from you personally? Somebody has got to mow the lawn. >>Yeah. >>But yes, do I, I'll stay on the board. Um, we're talking through that. I think I'll be a very active board, not just the legal side of the equation. Um, try and stay involved with customers and, and strategies and, and even, uh, potential acquisitions, those kinds of things. Um, I'm also wandering off into the university environment. Uh, my Alma mater is a university of Iowa. I'm on the board there and uh, I'm involved in setting up innovation centers and entrepreneurial programs and that kind of thing. Um, I'll keep doing my farming thing and uh, actually have some ideas on that. There's a lot of technology as you guys know, attacking Nat space. So, and like I said, I'll try to keep a lot of things linked back into a combo. >>What Al can have confidence in is that I will keep him busy. So there's that. And then I will also put on the table, we agree to disagree with our college athletic loyalties. So I'm a big kid just because we don't compete really. Right. So I mean, but if I won Kansas wherever to play, then we would just politely disagree. Yeah. Well that's good that you have this agreement in place. I would love to get some anecdotal feedback from you of some of the things that you've heard over the last three days with all this news, all these changes. What are you hearing from customers and partners who you've had relationships with for a very long time? >>I think they're, I think they're all really excited, but, and maybe I'm biased, but they liked the idea that we're trying to not throw out all the old focus on customers, focus on technologies, continue the innovation. I'm pleased that we, Miranda and the team started taking this theme of what we do to a personal level, you know, recovery and those kinds of things. It isn't just the money in the business outages. It's a really a effect on a personal lives. And that resonates. I hear that a lot. Um, I asked our bigger customers and they've loved us for our support, how we take care of them. The, the intimacy of the partnership, you know, and I think they feel pleased that that's staying yet there's lot of modern Emity if that's a good word. I think fokai was what you, I think it's the blend of things and I think that really excites people. >>We've heard that a lot. You guys did a great job with having customers on stage and as a marketer who does customer marketing programs, I think there's nothing more validating than the voice of a customer. But suddenly today that I thought was a pivot on that convo, did well as Sonic healthcare was on main stage. And then he came onto the program and I really liked how he talked about some of the failures that they've been through. You know, we had the NASA talking yesterday, NASA, 60 years young, very infamous, probably for failure is not an option, but it is a very real possibility whether you're talking about space flight or you're talking about data protection and cyber attacks and the rise of that. And it was really, I'd say, refreshing to hear the voice of a customer say, these are the areas in which we failed. This is how come they've helped us recover and how much better and stronger are they? Not just as a company as Sonic healthcare, but even as an individual person responsible for that. That was a really great message that you guys were able to extend to the audience today and we wanted to get that out. >>I loved that as well. I think that was good. I have also back on driving innovation, I always felt one of my biggest jobs was to not punish people that failed. Yeah. I, you know, with the whole engineering team, the bright people in marketing, I, I would be very down on them if they didn't try, but I never wanted them to feel bad about trying and never punish them. >>And one of the things Matthew said on main stage, first of all, I love him. He's great. He's been a longtime CommonWell supporter. I love his sense of humor. He said, you know, combo came to me and said, can you identify, you know, your biggest disaster recovery moment? And he was like, no, because there's so many. Yes. Right? Like there's so many when you're responsible for this. It's just the unpredictability of it is crazy. And so he couldn't identify one, but he had a series of anecdotes that I think really helped the audience identify with and understand this is, these are big time challenges that we're up against today. And hearing his use case and how con ball is helping him solve his heart problems, I think was really cool. You're right. I loved that too. He said, I couldn't name one. There are so many. That's reality, right? As data proliferates, which every industry is experiencing, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. There's also great risk as technology advances for good. The bad actors also have access to that sort of technology. So his honesty, I thought was, was refreshing, but spot on. And what a great example for other customers to listen to the RA. To your point, I, if I punish people for failure, we're not going to learn from it. >>Yeah, you'll never move forward. >>Miranda. So much that we learn this week at the shows. Some, a lot of branding, a lot of customers, I know some people might be taking a couple of days off, but what should we expect to be seeing from con vault post go this year, >>continue to innovation. We're not letting our foot off the gas at all. Just continuing innovation as as as we integrate with Hedvig continued acceleration with metallic. I mean those guys are aggressive. They were built as a startup within an enterprise company built on Comvalt enterprise foundation. Those guys are often running, they are motivated, they're highly talented, highly skilled and they're going to market with a solution that is targeted at a specific market and those guys are really, really ready to go. So continued innovation with Hedvig integrate, sorry, integration with Hedvig with metallic. I think you're just going to be seeing a lot more from Combalt in the future on the heels of what we consider humbled, proud leadership with the Gartner magic quadrant. You know the one two punch with the Forrester wave. I think that you're just going to be seeing a lot more from Combalt and in terms of how we're really getting out there and aggressive. And that's not to mention Al, you know what we do with our core solutions. I mean today we just announced a bunch of enhancements to the core technology, which is, which is the bread and butter of, of what we do. So we're not letting the foot off the gas to be sure >>the team stay in really, really aggressive too. And the other thing I'd add as a major investor that I'm expecting is sales. Now I'd love to just your, your final thoughts that the culture of Convolt because while there's some acceleration and there's some change, I think some of the fundamentals stay the same. Yeah, it's, it's right to, and again, that's why I feel we're at a good point on this transition process. You alluded to it earlier, but I feel really good about the leadership that's in, they've treated me terrifically. I'm almost almost part of the team. I love that they're, they're trying to leverage off all the assets that were created in his company. Technology, obviously platform architecture, support base, our support capabilities. I, I told Sandy today I wish she really would have nailed the part about, and by the way, support and our capabilities with customers as a huge differentiator and it was part of our original, Stu knows he's heard me forever. Our original DNA, we wanted to focus on two things. Great technology, keep the great technology lead and customer support and satisfaction. So those elements, now you blend that stew with really terrific Salesforce. As Ricardo says, have you guys talk with Ricardo soon? But anyway, the head of sales is hiring great athletes, particularly for the enterprise space. Then you take it with a real terrific marketing organization that's focused, Oh, had modern techniques and analytics on all those things. You know, it's, it's in my opinion, as an investor especially, I'm expecting really good things >>bar's been set well. I can't think of a better way for Sue and me to our coverage owl veranda. Thank you. This has been fantastic. You've got to go. You get a lawn to mow, you've got a vacation to get onto and you need some wordsmithing would focus your rights. You have a flight ticket. They do five hours. Hi guys. Thank you. This has been awesome. Hashtag new comm vault for our guests and I, Lisa Martin, you've been watching the cubes coverage of Convault go and 19 we will see you next time.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, good morning. Welcome to the cubes coverage of combo go 19 I'm Lisa Martin and it was stupid man. Hey Sue. Hey Lisa. Are you ready? I was going to ask you. Yes. Are you ready? >>I believe the statement this morning was, we're born ready. >>We are born ready? Yes. That was a big theme this morning. It's the theme of the event here at con Volvo 19 in Colorado and great parody this morning of all these old video clips of all these actors including the Lego movie stars from saying I'm ready. Even SpongeBob. That one got me, so we had a great day. Yesterday's to love some news came out Monday and Tuesdays a lots of great stuff to talk about. We had there a lot of their C level execs and let a new changes a call yesterday. Really got the vibe of, Hey, this is a new Combalt. >>It's interesting Lisa, because one of the things we've been talking about is the 20 years of pedigree that the company has. This Andre Mirchandani said yet they're doing some new items. I was talking to some of the partners in there like how come metallics like a separate brand, don't you worry about brand spread? We knew a thing about having too many brands on the program so it is the history, the experience, the lessons learned, the war chest as they said of all of the things that have gone wrong over the years and I sure know that from my time living on the vendor side is there's no compression algorithm for all the experience you've had and like, Oh we fixed something in that stays in the code as opposed to there's something brand new might need to work through things over time but metallic a separate brand but leveraging the partnerships and the go to market and the experience of Convolt overall. >>So if you want, my quick take is, you know metallic. I definitely, I think coming out of here is the thing we will be talking the most about their SAS plus model. I want to see how that plays in the marketplace. As I probed Rob, when we interviewed him, customers, when you think about SAS, it should just be, I worry about my data and I get up and running and they said they have a very fast up and running less than 15 minutes. That's great. But some of that optionality that they built in, Oh well I can bring this along or I can add this and do this. It's always worried that a wait, do I have to remember my thing? And as it changes down the road, do I have everything set up right? Those are things that we're trying to get away from when we go to a SAS or cloud model. >>And to your point, another theme of the show has been about operational simplification, not just what Combolt is doing internally to simplify their operations, but what they need to deliver to customers. Customers want simplicity rates. Do we, we talk about that at every show regardless of industry, but there is this, this line, and maybe it's blurring, >>like we talked a lot about blurred lines yesterday of too much choice versus simplification. Where's the line there? >> Yeah and a great point Lisa, so one of the items Sandra Mirchandani said yesterday in his keynote was that blurring the line between primary and secondary storage and I probed him on our interview is Convolt going into the primary storage market with Hedvig. Hedvig has got a, you know, a nice offering, strong IP, good engineering team. I think they want to make sure that customers that have bought head vigor want to keep buying Hedvig we'll do it, but it really, I think two years from now when you look back at is that core IP, how does that get baked into the solution? That's why they bought it. That's where it's going to be there. I don't think we're going to be looking two years from now and saying, Oh wow know Convolt they're going up against all the storage star Walton competing a bit gets HCI and everything. >>They have a strong partnership, so I think I got clarity on that for the most part, even though the messaging will will move over time on that, it will move over time on that. >> That's a good point that the song blurred lines kept popping into my head yesterday as we were talking about that. But one of the things that was clear was when we spoke with Rob Kalusi and about metallic, we spoke with Avinash Lakshman about Hedvig Sanjay as well as Don foster. They're already working on the technical integration of of this solutions and we even spoke with their VP of pricing. So from a customer, from a current Hedvig customer perspective, there is focus on that from Combolt's perspective. It's not just about integrating the technologies and obviously that has to be done really well, but it's also about giving customers that consistency and really for combo kind of a new era of transparency with respect to pricing. >>And another thing we talked about some of that transformation of the channel and Mercer row came on board only a couple of days officially on the job. He's helped a number of companies get ready for multicloud and absolutely we've seen that change in the channel over the last five to 10 years. Know back in his days when he was at VM world at VMware there the channel was, Oh my gosh, you know, when Amazon wins we all lose and today we understand it as much more nuance there. The channel that is successful partners with the hyperscale cloud environments, they have practices built around it. The office three 65 and Microsoft practices are an area that Convolt in their partners should be able to do well with and the metallic will tie into as well as of course AWS. The 800 pound gorilla in this space will be there. Combolt plays into that and you know, setting the channel up for that next generation with the SAS, with the software and living in a broader multicloud environment is definitely something to watch you a lot of news about the channel, not just from a leadership standpoint but also so metallic for the mid market >>really delivered exclusively through the channel but also the new initiative that they have. And we talked a little bit about this yesterday about going after and really a big focus with global systems integrators on the largest global enterprises. And when we spoke with their GTM chief of staff yesterday along with Mercer with Carmen, what they're doing, cause I said, you know, channel partners, all the channel partners that they work with work with their competitors. So you have to really deliver differentiation and it can't just be about pricing or marketing messaging goes all the way into getting those feet on the street. And that's another area in which we heard yesterday Combolt making strategic improvements on more feet on the street co-selling with partners, really pulling them deeper into enablement and trainings and to them that's one of the key differentiators that they are delivering to their partners. Yeah >>and Lisa, he, we got to speak to a number, a couple of customers we have more coming on today. It's a little bit telling that you know the average customer you talk to, they have five 10 years of experience there. They are excited about some of the new offerings, but as we've said many times metallic, the new Hedvig we want to talk to the new logos that they're going to get on board. That is something that for the partners has been an incentive. There were new incentives put in place to help capture those new logos because as we know, revenue was actually down in the last fiscal year a bit and Convolt feels that they have turned the corner, they're all ready to go. And one other note I'd like to make, the analogy I used last year is we knew a CEO was canoe CEO search was happening, a lot of things were in motion and it's almost as if you were getting the body ready for an organ transplant and you make sure that the antibodies aren't going to reject it. And in conversation with Sanjay, he was very cognizant of that. His background is dev offs and he was a CIO. We went for it, he was the CEO of puppet. So he's going to make things move even faster. And the pace of change of the last nine months is just the beginning of the change. And for the most part I'm not hearing grumbling underneath the customer seem fully on board. The employees are energized and definitely there was good energy last year, but a raise of the enthusiasm this year. >>Well Stu, first of all, you have just been on fire the last two days comparing their CEO transition to getting a body ready for a transplant. It's probably one of the best things I've heard in a long time. That was awesome. But you're right, we've heard a lot of positivity. Cultural change is incredibly difficult. You talked a minute ago about this as a 20 year old company and as we all have all experience and the industries in which we're in, you know, one of the things that's important is, is messaging that experience and talking about the things that that worked well, but also the things that didn't work well, that they've learned from that message was carried through the keynote this morning. That three customers on stage that we saw before we had to come to the side. And I, I had, my favorite was from Sonic healthcare. Matthew McCabe's coming on in shortly with us and I always appreciate, you know, I think the voice of the customer is the best brand validation that you can get. However, what's even better is a customer talking about when the technologies that they're using fail because it does happen. How are they positioned with the support and the training and the education that is giving them to make those repairs quickly to ensure business continuity and ensure disaster recovery. I think that to me that speaks volumes about the legacy, the 20 years of experience that combo has. >>Yeah, no, Lisa, you're absolutely right. There's certain products out there that we talk about uptime in 100% in this space. You, I believe the stat was about 94% success rate and we had NASA in the keynote yesterday talking about success versus partial success versus failures and Convolt really embraces that and has customers that we'll talk about that because there are times that things will happen and there are things that you need to be able to recover from ransomware. Often it is not a question of if, when it is going to be happened, at least. The other thing I want to get your comment on Jimmy chin who is the director and one of the, the cameraman of the free solo Oscar-winning free solo documentary definitely gave me a little bit of, Oh my gosh, look at some of the Heights and I was nervous just looking at some of this stuff they're doing. I like a little bit of lightweight hiking. I'm not a mountain climber, nothing like that. But he talked about when the camera goes on, there's that added pressure that goes on and it's sitting there. It's like, yeah, you know, we sit here live all day doing that. There's that, that energy to perform. But you know, we all appreciate the everybody watching and understanding that we're all human here and every time, every once in awhile a word or a mistake gets in there, but we keep going summit. Yeah, >>that's life. But also Jimmy chin, phenomenal. I think at 2018 they just won the Oscar just earlier this year for free. Solo. I have to watch that this weekend. But a couple of things that he talked about is that failure is a huge part of preparation. Couldn't agree more. What a simplified statement for somebody that not only has has skied Everest, the climbed Meru, I think they call it the shark fin of India, but what you talked about with what he documented with free solo and all of the thousands of sequences and he talked about that, Alex, I'm forgetting his last name, the guy who closed, who free soloed, El Capitan, all of these different failure scenarios that he rehearsed over and over again in case he encountered any of them, he would immediately be to remedy that situation and get himself back on track. I thought that message to me, failure is a good F-word if you use it properly. You know NASA, you mentioned yesterday and NASA was famous for coining in the 60s failure is not an option and I always say onto that cause I used to work for NASA, but it's a distinct possibility. And so what Jimmy chin shared this morning was electrified, but it also was a great understatement of what Combolt is helping their customers. We have to help you prepare for this. We can't help you prepare for all of it. As you mentioned, ransomware, it's not if but when. >>Well, right and both NASA and when the climbing is understanding where something could go wrong and therefore what the failures scenarios are. So you know rockets today you can't have a failure and by failure they mean look, if the rocket isn't going to work or something goes wrong, we need to make sure we don't have loss of life. That is something that if you look at blue origin and SpaceX that is pre eminent in there is we can't have another challenger disaster. We can't have some of these environments where we have the loss of human life. So that is number one. Some of the other ones, sometimes we know that the unknown happens or things don't go quite right. So being prepared to understand if something goes wrong, how do we recover from that? And that brings us back to the whole data protection and recovery of the environment because the best laid architecture, eventually something will happen and therefore we need to make sure that that data, the lifeblood of the company is able to be recovered and used and that the business can go forward even if some piece of infrastructure or some attack got through. >>There are, and there's inherent risk in every industry, whether you're talking about healthcare data, we talked with AstraZeneca yesterday, you know, genetics, clinical data, or you're talking about a retailer, doesn't matter. There's an inherent risks with every business and one of the most important things that I got out of the NASA talk yesterday, Jimmy Chin's talked today, some of the customers, is that preparation is key. You can't be over prepared. You really can't act fact. He said that you can't be overprepared in his line of work, but I think it applies to the inherent risks that any business has. Managing data. As we talk about Sue all the time, it's the lifeblood. It's the new oil. It is. It has to be available, accessible 24 by seven if it isn't and can't be. Businesses are massive risk in this day and age. Competitive competitors who have maybe better risk fault tolerance scenario in play. >>So that risk that they have to mitigate comes a preparation. We're going to be talking with Sandra Hamilton in just a few minutes about who leads customer success for combo. Really want to dig into the training, the support. We've heard that articulated from customers on stage that I don't wake up in the middle of the night anymore because I have this support from my trusted vendor combo and that is critical to any business staying up. Absolutely. We're going to hear from number of customers. I'm sure they're ready and we are ready for day two. We are ready. See, let's have a great day. Yeah, thanks. All right, so Sue and I will be right back with our first guest on day two of our coverage of comm Volkow for Stu. I'm Lisa Martin. We'll be right back.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. Hey, >>I'll come back to the cube date to have our coverage of Combalt go. 19 Lisa Martin with Stu. Met a man. We are in Colorado. Please welcome to the cube Sandy Hamilton, the VP of customer success. Been a convo four and a half months. So welcome to the Q book and the call. Sandy, thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to sit here with you this morning and share a little bit about what's going on at Commonwealth and it's been great. You guys are here. It's been fantastic. We had a great day yesterday. We got to speak with Sanjay, with Rob, Don foster, Mercer, a whole bunch of your customers. Well exactly the vibe, the positivity from the channel to the customer to the course. Even the OJI calm ball guys that I worked a couple of 10 years ago that are still here, it does really feel like a new combo and you're part of that on. >>Sanjay probably brought you in and the spring of 2019 and we've seen a lot of progress and a lot of momentum from comm vault in terms of leadership changes, sills structured new programs for channel. Exciting stuff. You kicked off this morning's keynote and you had the opportunity to introduce Jimmy Chen who if you haven't seen free solo, I haven't seen it. I'm watching it as soon as they get home from us. Amazing. But what a great way to introduce failure and why it's important to be prepared because it is going to happen. I just thought that was a great tone. Especially talking with you. Who leads customer success. >> Absolutely. Thank you Lisa very much and good morning Sue. Appreciate it. You know it's interesting cause when I think about customer success here at Comvalt, there's so many different facets to it. There really is all about engaging with our customers across everything that they do and we want to make sure our customers are prepared for something that will likely happen to them someday. >>Right. We have one of our customers talking about a cyber attack down there on their environment and how we were actually able to help them recover. So it's also that preparedness that Jimmy talked about, right? And making sure that you are training as much as you can, being prepared for what may come and knowing how to recover from that as he, as he talked about. I also think one of the things that we do really well is we listened to our customers when they give us feedback. So it's about how did those customers use what we did differently or how did they try it? And it wasn't exactly what they thought. And so how do we continue to innovate with the feedback from our customers? >>Sandy, one of the things we're hearing loud and clear from your customers is they're not alone. They're ready. I love, we have, Matthew is coming on a little bit later talking about, he's like, I'm here and my other person that does disaster, he's here too. So you know, I'm doing my own free solo. We've been talking about in tech, it's the technology and the people working together. You talked a little bit in your keynote about automated workflows, machine learning, talk about some of those pieces as to how the innovation that Combolt's bringing out is going to enable and simplify the lives of, >>yeah, I mean I think it, I think it does come down to how are we really taking care of the backend, if you will, from a technology perspective and what can we make more automated, you know, more secure. You know, you think about things like, I was even talking about new automated workflows around scheduling, even your backup windows, right? And if you think about, you know, the complexity that goes into scheduling all of that across all of your environments, we have the ability to actually have you just set what your windows should be and we'll manage all the complexities in the background, which allows you to go do things like this for customers to come to do things like this. >>So Sandy, I tell you, some of us, there's that little bit of nervousness around automation and even customers talking about, Oh well I can just do it over text. And I'm just thinking back to the how many times have I responded to the wrong text thread and Oh my gosh, what if that was my, you know, data that I did the wrong thing with. >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the things that I love about this company, and again I've been here for a short period of time, but our worldwide customer support organization is just, you know, one of the hallmarks I think of this company, right? And how we're actually there for those customers at any point in time whenever they need any type of um, you know, help and support. And it isn't just the, you know, when you actually need that, when something goes wrong, it's also proactively we have professional services people, you know, we have all kinds of folks in between. Our partners play a huge role in making sure that our customers are successful with what they have going on. Let's dig into and dissect the customer life cycle. Help us understand what that's like for one and existing combo customer. Cause we talked to a couple of yesterday who've been combo customers for you know, a decade. >>So walk us through a customer life cycle for an incumbent customer as well as a new customer who is like Sanjay said yesterday, one of the things that surprised him is that a lot of customers don't know Combolt so what's the life cycle like for the existing customers and those new ones? >> Yeah, so you know, our fantastic install base of customers that we have today, one of the things that we are striving to continue to do is to make sure we're engaged with them from the beginning to the end. And the end isn't when they end, it's when you know, we're then fully deployed helping them do what they need to go in their environment. I think one of the great things about where we are with Comvalt right now is we actually have new products, new technologies, right? Have you guys had been exposed to, how are we making sure that the customers that we've had for a while are truly understanding what those new capabilities are? >>So if you think about it for us, it's how are we helping them to actually do more with their existing Convolt investment and potentially leverage us in other ways across their environment. Um, so we have, you know, our team of, you know, great, uh, you know, sales reps as well as our fantastic, you know, sales engineers, um, all the way through. Again, you know, PS and support, those people are always in contact with our customers, helping them to understand what we can really do across that life cycle and if they need to make changes along the way, we're here to help them, you know, do that as well. For a newer customer. One of the things that we're really focused on right now is that initial sort of onboarding for them and what set experience like for those customers. So having more of a, of a programmatic touch with those customers to make sure that we're more consistent in what we're doing. So they are actually receiving a lot of the same information at the same time and we're able to actually help them actually frankly in a more accelerated fashion, which is I think really important for them to get up and running as well. >>And when we talked about metallic yesterday with Rob and some other folks and I think a gentleman from Sirius, one of your launch partners, yes, Michael Gump. And you know the fact that that technology has the ability for partners to evaluate exactly what is going on with their customers so that they can potentially be even predictive to customers in terms of whether they're backing up end points or O three 65 I thought that was a really interesting capability that Colombo now has. It's giving that insights and the intelligence even to the partners to be able to help those customers make better decisions before they even know what to do makes exactly. >>They and their son, our partners are such a key part here to everything that we're really trying to do. And especially with the metallic, it's all through partners, right? And so we're really trying to drive that behavior and that means we've really have to ensure that we are bringing all of those partners into the same fold. They should have the same, you know, capabilities that we do. It's one of the, one of the also things that I'm trying to work on right now is how are we making sure our partners are better enabled around the things that we have in the capability. So we're working on, as part of those partner programs that you mentioned is do they have the right tools, if you will, and knowledge to go do what they need to go do to help our customers as well because it really is a partnership. >>Yeah. So Sandy, we've been looking at various different aspects of the change required to deliver metallic, which is now a SAS offering from a services and from a support standpoint, I think of a different experience from SAS as opposed to enterprise software. So bring, bring us, bring us your perspective. Yeah. This >>comes back a little bit to the onboarding experience, right? Where it's got to be much more digital touch. It's gotta be much more hands off cause that's the way the are thinking about buying metallic in the first place. Right? They don't have to have a sales rep, they can go by metallic, you know, frankly on their website right now, metallic.io, you know, you can go there, you can get everything you need to get started. Um, and so we want to make sure that the customers have different ways of engaging. And so some of that could very much be digital. Some of that can be, you know, different avenues of how they're working. They're wanting to work with us. But when you also then think about that type of a model, you start to think about consumption matters, right? And how much they're using and are they using everything that they purchased. >>And so we actually have a small team of customer success managers right now in the organization that are working with all of the new customers that we have in the SAS world to say, how are you doing? How's that going? You know, how's your touch? Is there anything that's presenting a challenge for you? Making sure they really do fully understand the capabilities end to end of that technology so that we can really get them onboarded super quick. As you probably know from talking to those guys, we're not having any services really around metallic cause it's not designed to need those services, which is huge. You know, I think in not only the SAS space but for Convolt as well. I think it's a new era and it also provides, frankly an opportunity for our partners to continue to engage with those customers going forward as well. >>One of the first things that I reacted to when I saw metallic, a Combalt venture was venture. I wanted to understand that. And so as we were talking yesterday with some of the gentlemen I mentioned, it's a startup within Combalt. Yeah. So coming from puppet but shoot dead in which Sonjay Mirchandani ran very successfully. Got puppet global. Your take on going from a startup like puppet to an incumbent like convo and now having this venture within it. Yeah. You know, I think it's one of the brilliant things that Sanjay and the team did very early on to recognize what Rob Calu, Ian and the rest of the folks were doing around this idea of what is now metallic. And they had been noodling it and Sanjay's like, that's got a really good opportunity. However we got to go capitalize on that now and bring that to market for our customers now. >>And if we had continued on in the way that we were, which is where it was night jobs and we didn't necessarily have all the dedicated people to go do it, you know, we may not have metallic right now. And so it was, it was really a great thing within the company to really go pull those resources out of what they were doing and say, you guys are a little startup, you know, here you go do it. And we actually had a little celebratory toast the other night with that team because of what, just a fantastic job that they've done. And one of the common threads in something everybody said was the collaboration that it really brought, not only within that team but across Combalt because there's a singular goal in bringing this to market for our customers. So it's been a great experience. I think we're going to leverage it and do more. So Sandy, >>before we let you go, need to talk a little bit about the. >>Fabulous. If I had one here I would, but I don't. So, um, a couple of months ago at VMworld, I don't know if you guys were there, you guys were probably there. Um, we actually started this thing called the D data therapy dog park. And there we had a number of puppies and they were outside. Folks came by, you know, visited. They stopped, they distressed, they got to pet a puppy. I mean, the social media was just out of this world, right? And we had San Francisco policemen there. It was, it was, it was great. Even competitors, I will say even competitors were there. It was, it was pretty funny. But, um, by the end of it, over 50% of the dogs that were there actually got adopted out, um, you know, into homes where they otherwise wouldn't have. Um, since then there've been a couple of people that have actually copied this little idea and you know, P places are springing up. >>So we have a, what we call it, data therapy dog park here where you can go in and get your puppy fix, you know, sit with the dogs and relax for a bit. But you know, we're super excited about it as well because, you know, it's sort of a fun play on what we do, but, but it's also, I think, you know, a great thing for the community and something that is near and dear to my heart. I have four dogs. Um, and so I'm not planning on taking another one home, but I'm doing my best to get some of these adopted. So if anybody out there is interested, just let me know. >>Oh, that was adoptable. All of them cheese. I'm picking up a new puppy and about eight days. So other ones of friends. I've got to have dogs enough for you. Do you need a third? We'll have a friend that has two puppies at the same time and said it's not that much more. I have had one before. You're good to go. We can, we can hook you up. Oh no. But one of the great things is it also, first of all, imitation is the highest form of flattery or for other competitors that are doing something similar, but you also just speak to the fact that we're all people, right? We are. We're traveling, especially for people that go to a lot of conferences and it's just one of those nice human elements that similar with the stories that customers share about, Hey, this is a failure that we had and this is how it helped us to recover from that. It's the same thing with, you can't be in a bad mood with, I think puppies, cupcakes and balloons. So if there were, I know that I could finish a show today >>that's like I took one of the little puppies when I was rehearsing yesterday on main stage. I took one of them with me out there and I was just holding it the whole time, you know? It was really, >>this was great. I'm afraid to venture back into the data therapy document. You're proud taking another one home OU was. Andy. It's been a pleasure to have very much. I appreciate it. Appreciate the time. Thank you and hope you have a great rest of the event. If you need anything, let us know. I'm sure we will and I can't wait to talk to you next year when you've been a comm vault for a whole like 16 months and hearing some great stories we do as well. All right. Take care. First two men, a man, Sandy Hamilton, the puppies, and I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cue from Convault go and 19 thanks for watching.

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. Hey, >>welcome to the cube at Lisa Martin in Colorado at convo go 19 I'm assuming a man and stew and I are pleased to welcome back to the cube and Alon my who hasn't visited us in awhile, but he's kind of a big deal is the CEO of Commonwealth's on Jay Mirchandani. Sanjay, welcome back. >>Thank you Lisa. Good to be a good too. >>So exciting. This is the fourth go. I love the name go and lots of stuff. So you have come onboard to combo in about about nine months ago and man, are you making some changes? You know the analysts said combo, you gotta, you gotta upgrade your sales force, you gotta expand your marketing, you've gotta shift gears and really expand your market share. And we've seen what Combolt is doing in all three of those areas along with some pretty big announcements in the last couple of days. Talk to us about this, this first nine months here. And really maybe even, I would start with the cultural change that you have brought to a company that's been run by the Bob hammer for 20 years >>right now. Firstly, I'm very fortunate to be here because the company is, it has incredible foundation. The bones of the company, if you would, are solid a great balance sheet, um, over 800 patents, no debt, cash on the books, profitable. It's just, you know, and great, great technology wrapped around some amazing people. So when I look at the, when I look at it and you go, this is this, this is an incredible asset. My role really when I came in when I transitioned with Bob and Al for a period of time was really about making sure we didn't break anything, making sure that we kept the momentum, understood the culture, took time to talk to customers, talk to partners, talk to our employees, shareholders and understand, um, what are the focus areas that we needed to go after. And the last nine months has been about, you know, a lot of learning on my part. >>But also a very receptive group of employees and partners saying, you know, we'll give you a chance. Let's get this done, let's see where it goes. So that's where the nine months had been around and it's been a, it's been fabulous. >> So that's actually one of the things I've heard from your team is you've come in loud and clear with the voice of the CIO. Having been a CIO yourself, that's something you want them to focus on. Everybody, we always talk about listening to the customers, but you know, the role of the CIO has changed an awful lot. You know, since you first became a CIO, clouds change everything in a Nicholas CARF said for a while, does it even matter? Right. Um, so you know, Ferguson side a little bit as to how you want to make sure you're delivering for what the CIO is need. >>Not necessarily what, you know, they were saying that they want. No, it's fair. And, and as much as the role of the CIO has evolved, I don't think it's changed fundamentally. They still, you know, the guardians of the data, the, you know, the compliance and everything else and of course more than anything else, the productivity and the competitive edge that businesses need, technology and business, regardless of which business you're in, are interested intrinsically tied. Your delivery of anything you do today is tied to technology. If you, if you want to be future proof. So if anything, the role of the CIO has only been elevated. I'm, I say this playfully, but I do say it. I said, if I wasn't running this great company that I am now, I'd love to be the CIO of a dysfunctional it organization at a large company because there's so much you can do. >>Many of the decisions that we would spend an inordinate amount of time on the infrastructure, the application, how do you bind it, what are the protocols? Which data center, how much, who runs it, which partner? I kind of dissipated if you're not going to the cloud in some form of fashion, come on, right? If you're not building cloud native applications, come on. If you're not using dev ops, come on. So you've got all this time back now where you're not hopefully having conversations that don't matter and you're really go and building new things. So I think it matters. That's great stuff. And absolutely we agree. We've talked many times on the cube. It definitely actually matters more than today. If anything. Not only did they need to be responsive to the business, but oftentimes it can be one of those drivers for innovation in change in the business. >>Um, I love something you said in your keynote, you said data is at the center of everything you do because right. Most CEO's, hopefully infrastructure is something they might have under their purview, but it's not what drives the business. It's the data, it's the application, it's their customers that matters. So to speak a little bit to the role of data has changed a lot. You know, you and I worked for that big storage company where we even didn't talk as much about storage back about data back in the day. Today it's the life blood of the company. It's everything like that. >> And you know that that is one of the reasons I'm at Convolt because for the past 30 years I've been in technology, I've done app side, I've done infrastructure side, I've done a mix of all of those. And the more I think of an dev ops, I've done that. >>The more I think about it. If I were, if I was sitting with a CEO today and having a conversation about what matters in technology, who's maybe a CEO is not a technologist, I would say data matters. I would say the asset of your company is the data. It's gone from something that you used to manage down, compress deduplicate and hope it went away and you wanted to minimize its footprint to something where you want to maximize its value. And those aren't just words. I mean that is what makes great companies, great companies today, the way they use data to their competitive advantage. So this is, this is exactly the mindset where the mindset, the Guppy do to convo because all we do, all we do is help our customers be data ready. As I was saying this morning, that's, I love that term because that kind of encapsulates it for me. So that's, that's where my head's at. >> Yeah. I mean, we've always said that the thing that defines a company that's gone through debt, that digital transformation is that data drives the business. >>It, it absolutely should, but we're, when you talk with customers that have, whether it's a big university, a research university, healthcare organization or whatever type of organization that has multiple departments, so much data that potentially has a tremendous amount of value that they actually aren't managing well or can't get visibility out of. When you say we want to help you be data ready, w what does that mean to them? >>It means a few things. You summed it up perfectly. That's the world, the customer, the chaos that customers could live in because fundamentally, Lisa, if I had over-simplified applications, we're intrinsically to date data that you use for tied intrinsically to the application to build. So if you had an SAP system, your data was very tightly tied to that. If an Oracle ERP system, it was very tight detail yet it'll supply chain system. You were tied to that. And once data side of getting released from the abstracted, from the system that was built on, you've got a little bit of chaos, then you had to figure out who had access, where, how, how are you replicating and how are you backing it up over the policies, your plan compliance. And then it became chaos. And what I say to customers being data ready, saying do you have a strategy and a capability, more importantly to protect, manage, control and use that information in the way you wish to for competitive advantage. >>Just protecting it is like a life insurance policy, controlling, managing and using it as where you get the value out of it. Right? And so as companies become more data driven, this is where we help them. So the whole concept of the show, what we're sort of bringing to market is the fact that we can help our customers be data ready. And some of the technologies we've talked about today lend themselves to exactly that. Alright. So Sanjay, one of the questions many of us had coming into the show is how exactly Hedvig your, your first acquisition was going to play out. You made a comment in your, your opening keynote this morning that we need to rethink primary and secondary storage. So some of us read the tea leaves and be like, well, you know, you're selling an SDS storage, your, you're in the primary storage market as we would've called it before. >>Yes, the lines are blurring. I don't think those there. So I want to give you the chance to let us know where we're going. Years primary and secondary storage as we classified them, we're looking grayer and grayer mean they'll always be primary storage because there's always a certain user use cases for, for high-performance scale up capabilities. But a lot of the stuff was getting murky. You know, is it really primary? Is is it lower end primary, is it secondary and it doesn't, it shouldn't really matter. And with that, would that segmentation game a set of other capabilities like Oh, you know, file block, object cloud, more, more segmentation, more silo and more fragmentation. And I'm a big believer that this is all about software. The magic is in the software. And if you, if you forget for a minute that it's software defined storage as we call it today, but a set of capability's, a universal plane that allows you to truly define how customers get that ubiquity between any infrastructure that they run. >>Okay. Which in turn gives them the abstraction from the data that they bill. Okay. We've just taken a lot of workload and pressure off the customer to figure all that stuff out, keep whole manage. So I wouldn't get, I wouldn't get wrapped up on the whole storage thing as much as I would on the SA on the universal data plane or the data brain as I called it, nicknamed it in the show, you know, earlier as the left and right side one size, the data management, the other sizes, you know, traditional storage management. Yeah. Maybe I was reading too much in this. There's two brains. I think you've, you turn them sideways. They look like clouds too. But uh, yeah. Yeah. Um, partners wonder if you could speak, you know, we're talking about obviously the channel hugely important, we're going to talk to a lot of your team, but from a technology standpoint, you've got a lot of those hardware providers as well as different software companies that are here in the expo hall. >>Does metallic and Hedvig in those, you know, how will that change the relationships? I mean there's one, I've never built a business in my life that wasn't partner centric and partnerships to me is where both sides feel like they won. They went together. And so I've been very clear with our team, our channel, our board, our ecosystem that we're not doing this alone. That's not my intent. And our goal is to work together. Now we have partners in across the spectrum, cloud partners, technology partners like NetApp, HPE, Cisco. We've got ecosystem partners, the up the, the startups that are building new capabilities that we want to be, they want to be part of our ecosystem and vice versa. Traditional channel. Okay. so we've got the whole run of those, of those partnerships and we've been very focused. But we've also being very clear that we're in this for the long haul with them. Hedvig is today sold through channel and will continue to and metallic is built to be only sold through the channel. >>And you guys also, I was looking at some of the strategic changes that you've implemented since you've been here. Leadership changes to the sales organization, but even on the marketing side go to market. You mentioned that the channel opportunities for Hedvig as well as metallic, but also you guys have a new partner programmed, really aimed at going after and cultivating those large global enterprises with your SIS. So in terms of of you know, partner first, it really seems like the strategic directions that you're moving in are really underscoring that. >>Absolutely. Everything we do, every single thing we do is, you know, the question, the reviews we do, the internal inspection we do with the business. The, the way I look at the, the, the go to market conversations as to uh, the, you know, the pipeline is always about which partners involved, who's the partner involved, you know, and on an exception where we don't have a partner involved. My um, my F it's a flag to me going why? Um, no, we're, I don't know if you're speaking with Ricardo today or at some point he'll, he'll, he'll let you know exactly what we're doing there and how we think about it. And then we've just hired Marissa Rowe, I don't know, you know, Mercer and so Mercer's just come on board as our sort of partner lead worldwide. Yup. >>We're going to be talking with him as well. >>It's a cultural shift folks and we're completely committed to it. 100% committed. >>So one of the things that, that Stu and I were chatting about earlier today that you guys talked about in the keynote is in terms of how quickly metallic was conceived, design built really fast. Does that come from kind of a nod to your days at puppet where you are used to much shorter cycles? And how did, how did internally, the Combolt folks kind of react and we're able to get that done so quick. >>They embraced it. And I'll tell you, I'm, people will tell you that I'm used to saying this, this, this thing. I say that competition and time are not our friends. So we have to, we have to get out there before somebody else does. And if you're coming out with something, it's gotta be better than anybody else has. And so we all agreed there was a need for world-class solution, but we also understood that we had to do a differently doing it the way we've always built something probably probably wasn't the best answer. We needed to go shake things up because it's a different audience, a different delivery capability. But the beauty of the whole thing was that we had core technology at vault that was truly multi-tenanted, truly secure, truly scalable, which we had. This was years of, of great IP, which we took and we built on top of. >>And so we ended up focusing on the user experience and the capabilities of a SAS solution, the modern SAS solution as opposed to putting a wrapper of SAS around substandard technology. So in full credit to the team, we do 90 day releases on our core technology today. Right. So yeah, I think, I think that refresh cycle is what customers expect of us. That you know the and, and then that's what we do today. Right. So something, I don't think it's, I'm not giving myself any credit for it. Yeah. And Sanjay actually we had a customer on earlier talking about that cadence release cycle and he said to Combolt's credit, they're hitting it and it makes my life more predictable when the channels yeah. You know, and so they know when to expect something. So we have a 90 day and Tom will talk to you about this when he, when he comes on, how we get our channel ready for it, how are we enabled them, our own support so we give, so we are completely buttoned up and taking advantage of that release cycle. >>All right. Great. Sunday, nine months, you've already made quite a few moves in the test board, making a lot of pieces there from what we hear, you know, this is just the beginning. Give us a little bit going forward though those people watching what does Sanjay's next nine to 12 months, you know, foretold and as much as you think it's a lot of moving parts that we've, we've changed, um, there we're all part of a, of a roadmap that and so that, and I've been very open and public about it. When I came in there was a lot we had to do and I wanted to be really focused about getting this company back to growth and really helping you realize the potential that it had with, with its heritage of great technology, great customer base, great ecosystem. So I laid out a very simple three point plan, simplify, innovate, execute and tell. >>People are tired of me talking about it and giving me proof points that I'm done. I'm going to keep talking about it. And so simplify is everything about how we use the product, the user experience with us and how you engage with us. OK. innovators innovate in everything we do, products, experiences, everything we have to, we have to challenge the status quo and say it's a smarter way of doing it. Metallic is a complete encapsulation of that, of that energy. Okay. And the last is execute. It's all about getting out there and getting it done. Doing what we say and saying what we do. Just get it out there, get it done. And um, and I think the team has been amazing. They've just rallied around it. And if I embraced it, this is what I think this is what they want. So the changes, sorry, just sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off but it, I'll sum it up by saying that, you know, the nine months have been very focused in the direction making. Now it's about really making sure we help the company and how customers realize its true potential because the technology is great. The people are great. We're a good company. People love our technology. They stay with us forever. Because it does what it's supposed to. We just think we have a lot more to offer. Now. >>I know we're only day one at the show. Things did kick off a little bit yesterday with partners. What's some of the feedback that you've heard from those customers? Either those that have been using vault for 10 years or those that are maybe newer to the bandwagon? >>Well, somebody asked me if I had 10 cups of coffee before I went on stage in the sporting, but I think it's a good proxy for what I feel on the show. I feel incredible energy. I think that the customers, the partners, our own people, it's just, there's a buzz and you've been to shows before and some of them are just, you know, some of them have that energy and some of them are flat. Well this one's just full of energy and uh, and it's, it feels like a lot of adrenaline here and this people are excited and um, you know, I'm excited to go walk the floor. >>Well, your competitors are taking notice. There was some interesting digital signage yesterday at the airport. I noticed that that wasn't okay. I didn't, I missed it. Invitation. Highest form of flattery. Sanjay, >>I got the notice that there's, there's a lot of investment that goes into this. Uh, this, this segment of the market. It's been really hot. Um, what, what's your take on all the startups in as well as the, the, the big companies that have been putting a lot of it that it's an important space, right? Um, it's, it's, it's in the top three to five depending on which study you look at data protections back because it's one thing to have data and nothing to know that it is the way you want it. It's also a testimony to the a, it's not an easy space to get into when you're telling your customer that you're protecting them. That's a big word. Okay. I believe that you earn your way there day on day release, on release. And we've done that. I mean the animals the same good things about as in half a years we had customers on stage, you know, and it, customers don't just come up on stage and they, they really believe it. We have a, we had a pretty decent turnout at the partner event yesterday. You know, I think we're, we're in a great space at a great time and we've got 20 years of, of great pedigree that I don't take for granted as much as people sort of go, Oh, you're an old company. I go, Oh, don't mistake pedigree for anything else. You know, we've got some incredible IP over 800 active. >>Yes. >>You were sharing some of those thoughts this morning. I was looking to see where I put them. How are you guys leveraging the data that you have under management to make combos technology even better and to help make some of those strategic, >>it's this deep learning. It gives as much, you know, we applying AI implicitly. I don't want it to be an AI washing my technology for my customers. It's in there. It just works for them and it's my job to make my product better so they get more value out of it as opposed to for them to bolt on something to make my product better. So I don't, I really don't care what other shit about it. What I care about is I'm building that right into, into the intelligence. We have all the data, we know we, our customers use it, how they back it up, what their expectations are, what the SLS are, what their protocols are. We know this stuff and you, you have to, you know, we've been around enough to know this stuff. So now we're taking all of that with technologies like deep learning and machine learning and making the product better. >>So Sunday, one of the toughest things to do out there is have people learn, learn about somebody again for the, for the second time, you know, you only get one chance to make a first impression. So maybe I'd love your insight. You've been on board for nine months, you know, everybody knows Combolt it has a strong pedigree as you said, has a lot of patents. There's the culture there, but anything you've learned in the last nine months that you didn't know from the outside, he was still a pretty good secret. And there's a lot of people that don't know us as long as even though we've been around in the enterprise and and have have achieved a ton, there's still a ton of customers that don't know us and you know in our chops to get it out there. And if you've looked at our digital presence, if you've looked at how we're engaging online, it's a different Convolt. In fact, one of my favorite hashtags that's a, that that's trending at the show is a hashtag new comm vault. Is that right? I like that one. >>As I say, I might have started it, I don't know. But it is, it's an opportunity, right as to said, you know, we all wish sometimes in certain situations we could make a first impression. Again, I think you have that opportunity is you're saying there's, you have I she was saying close to 80% of, I think I read the other day, 75 80% of Commonweal's revenue comes from the fortune 500 you have the big presence with Bleagh global enterprises. This sustainability initiative that you were doing with the U N that Chris talked about. So there's, there's a lot of momentum behind that as well to take and really kind of maybe even leverage the voice of those enterprises to share with the world the benefits that Convolt provides. Like you said, data protection is hot. Again, if you have the data and it's, and you don't have the insight and it's not protected and you can't recover it quickly, then what value >>or used, if you can't use that know, why does it have to be compartmentalized where you say, Oh, that is my archive. Why can't I, why can't I say that? Yes, it is my archive, but I can, I can leverage that data for other things in my business. Okay. And so our product orchestrate allows customers to discovery to do, sorry, activate, not orchestrate to do eDiscovery, to curate information to use it for R and D to have a policy on sensitive governance needs. There's so much we can do with that, with with the data that's just sitting there, that and from different sources that I believe that at some level, protecting and protecting, managing and controlling our almost table stakes. So I'm raising the stakes uses where the magic is. >>All right, raising the stakes. Well, Sanjay, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on the cube today. Can't wait to see where those stakes are going to be. Combo go 2020 hashtag new comm volt hashtag new comm vault. Thanks Lisa. Thanks. Thank you so much. Hashtag new cobalt for Stewman eman and Sanjay Mirchandani and Lisa Martin, you're watching the cube from Cannonball. Go.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Live from Washington D.C. It's theCUBE. Covering Inforum D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> And welcome back to Washington D.C. We're in the Washington Convention Center here for Inforum 2018, continuing the coverage here on theCUBE, I'm John Walls with Dave Vellante, we're joined now by Anne Benedict, who is the S.V.P. of human resources at Infor. Anne good afternoon to you. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> You bet, thanks for being here. Now, 17,000 employees, so obviously you've got a lot of responsibility there. You're not only an Infor Executive, but you wear the hat of being an Infor client, (laughs) as well. Tell us about that, and how that works out, and, I guess, how you can test drive a lot of different services on your own before it goes out to the market. >> I like to joke that I feel like I have the best HR leadership role in the business, or in the world perhaps, because I get to not only lead a great company full of great people, 17,000 employees around the world, I'm so proud of them, but then I also get to be a customer of one of the greatest products in the HCM world that there is, and I have a direct line to the product managers, to the developers, to the consultants who can really help us to use our product to it's fullest advantage internally for our selves. So, it's like a toy box that every H.R. executive dreams of, and it's right there at my door step to test, to use, to innovate with them. They're always open to our ideas, our feedback internally. We're often a beta customer for the features, and functionality that are coming out to our customers, so it's a great position to be in. >> So what about the relationship, because there is a great give and take. Obviously, because you are a tremendous resource on the development side. What is that exchange like, and how does that work in terms of what's working, what's not, what you think others would want instead, or what they'd like to tweak a little bit. How does that work? >> So, you know, we're trying to sort of straddle a balance between using the product as it's intended to be designed for the breadth of our customers, no matter what industry they're in. We're obviously in a technology industry, but we have a lot of health care customers, government customers, services customers who have their own particular needs. So, we like to experiment with the technology the way it's designed for other industries, but then also I can make adjustments for use for our own company as a services company, as a technology company, and a good example of that for example is I'm working very closely with product management right now to help them design the next iteration of what our talent management suite will look like. So, we have a design concept for how we want to give performance feedback, for example, internally at Infor, and we're sharing that design the product management team to help them create the next version of the product that will meet the design requirements that we've set out for ourselves, and that I think a lot of other companies are moving towards. It's a modern approach to talent management, and we're working very closely hand in hand with product management to make sure they're designing something that we, we're co-designing it with them really. So, what I'm expecting is for us to have a really great next iteration of that product that is very modern, and up to date on what science is telling us about performance feedback. >> So, you're a pioneer, in a way, but you probably don't want to mess with with core H.R., that's table stakes. Talent management is something that, frankly, not a lot of companies do well. So, you may be more receptive to experimentation there. Is that a fair assertion? >> Yeah, I would say that's true, and also my background is, I grew up in H.R. with quite a breadth of experiences, but my depth of expertise has always been on the talent management and leadership development side. So, that's been sort of where I've been wanting to play with the product, and give my point of view on where I think it should evolve. It's just my particular strength that I bring, I think, to this role and to the product as well. >> How do you see the role of the Senior H.R. Executive evolving? How has it changed in the last several years? How is, maybe, digital transformation, this whole big data, the data movement? How does that factor into that role, and your vision of where that goes? >> Yeah, I think companies are looking for a different type of H.R. Executive than they have in the past. And I was fortunate that this wasn't by design. It was very serendipitous, but my career path led me, I think, in the exact right direction. So, I started my first 10 years of my career as a consultant at Mercer doing H.R. consulting. So, I was consulting the companies how to make, how to create the best H.R. department possible, how to create H.R. strategy, how to operationalize that. And, it was that consulting mindset that I've taken with me throughout my career. After consulting I moved internally to various companies, and that skill set of just being able to identify a problem, come up with a solution, and measure an implementation, I've taken with me in my role. So, I think companies are looking for H.R. executives who bring that sort of mind set to the role. And, I think that's what I've been able to do at Infor. And then, I think also when I was a consultant I was also advising customers and clients on technology, and how to use technology for H.R., so that's why I'm so thrilled to have this role, because it's the best of both worlds where I get to play with the technology, and also be a cutting edge H.R. leader. >> Alright so-- >> Hopefully. >> How do you asses the Infor HCM capabilities? Come on, give us the good, the bad, what's on the to do list. You know, give us the rundown. >> Yeah, I think it's a phenomenal product, and I'm not just saying that. >> Okay, what makes it phenomenal? >> When I walked in the door a year and nine months ago we were just about to go live with the multi-tenant cloud product. We were one of the first to do that, and we did it in over 65 countries with 17,000 employees, and since then we have subsequently rolled out more functionality, benefits enrollment, absence management, compensation planning, LMS, and each time we learn a little bit more. I can't underestimate the importance of getting the process right before you get the technology in, and the change management that goes around it. If I would say, I would give us a B it might have been around those areas, but the product itself is really it has the perfect balance of coming out of the box with some functionality that you can use right away that's best practice process. >> So you get value right off the bat. >> Yeah, and not a lot of configuration required, easy to get in. We implemented it with that broad scope in a very, very short amount of time, which is almost impossible with our competitors, so. So, I think for that it's fantastic, and then for the specific needs that we've had it's been very easy to build that in as well, so it has best of both worlds I would say. >> So, we saw some pretty cool demos yesterday around talent science, and it struck me as an audience member. There were all kinds of different kinds of attributes of, you know, ambition and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but you know the one that wasn't on there was like performer, but it struck me that these attributes lead to performance. I guess that's the basic philosophy, but I wanted to test that with you. Just give me the bottom line. >> Yeah. >> But it really is more complicated than that, isn't it? >> It is, yeah, and that's one of the most exciting things about H.R. right now too, I think. And this comes back to H.R. Executive of the future is, I come from an IO Psychology background where data, we used to have to do experiments on subjects with, and collecting data was always the hardest part to studying work, and studying personalities, studying behavior, and now we have all this data available to us that we've never had before. And, talent science is a perfect example of how data is really empowering our decisions. And, to answer your question about how it is predicting performance; A particular attribute doesn't necessarily lead to performance in any role. So, in one role, ambition, really high ambition is actually not a factor for success. In another role, it is. So, it really is, there is no right personality profile that can predict success in any role. It's very role specific. And what talent science is able to do is really find the science behind what is the specific role that will lead to success, and what are the attributes that will lead to non-success, also in a role. And, that's such a powerful thing. What we've found with talent science is that depending on the role we can reduce turnover by 20 up to 70% by choosing people who fit a role profile versus those who don't. >> It's interesting it's like, you know, those books, like the seven attributes or-- >> Or Covey-- >> Of highly successful people, but essentially you're codifying that by role. And, that's true. It doesn't just work for any role. Sales person may be different than an engineer, may be different than a an operations person et cetera. >> So, this is really fascinating, because you have the human science, right, we're all imperfect, we make crazy decisions, sometimes irrational, we act wild, or predictably, whatever it is. And, now you're taking data science, and overlaying with that, so you're trying to come up with some kind of predictable markers, or whatever, for imperfect beings in a way. How's all that merging, I mean, how is technology being the glue in that process? >> Yeah, well I think there's no such thing as right and wrong, or perfect and imperfect. You know, I could get into a leadership speil, but any strength that either of you might have, if you use that to an extreme it becomes a weakness, actually. And, like I used in the example of ambition, high ambition in certain roles, may not be a factor toward success. Where as other roles it might be. Whatever particular DNA, behavioral DNA, that you bring to a role as an individual, it's incumbent upon us as a company to figure out what is the right role for the personality that you bring, and the behavior, and the strengths that you have. And, that's what we're really able to do with talent science, which is, so, if you apply for a role where you don't match the profile I may be able to propose to you, hey, you have really high ambition that's not right for this role, but it may be right for this other role. Have you ever considered that? And, that way we can really, you know, we talk about human potential here, at Inforum. That's the real tool, real tangible way that we can really find the human potential in every single person, no matter what their profile looks like, or strengths, or weaknesses, or faults, as you say. Whatever-- >> Whatever it is, right? >> Whatever they come with we can find the right fit. >> Does technology, generally, and say artificial intelligence or machine intelligence, specifically, can it moderate or adjudicate human bias? Or, does it actually reinforce it? >> Yeah, that's a very good question, and obviously very pertinent to today. I think, a couple of things. So, the assessment I'm speaking of, we would never rely on the machine to make a decision. So, it's telling you, as a manager, here are some of the gaps that a particular individual has towards the role that you are planning to hire them for, but we suggest that you ask these interview questions, and make a decision for yourself. So, you really can't replace that human intervention in the process, that human judgment, their sense from an interview, but it really helps them hone the interview in on the things that they really should focus on. Figuring out, are we comfortable with those gaps? Does the person realize they have those gaps? And, really, for both the candidate and the manager to make the right decision. So, in the assessment it's always, we never rely on the machine to make a decision. But, it is incumbent on us to make sure that as we're designing these tools, as we're designing the technology behind them that we have as much diversity in the people who are designing them as possible. To make sure they're being designed in a way that doesn't have bias built into them. And, that's why it's so important for us to have diversity in technology. Why we're doing SB code. Why we believe in bringing up people from all backgrounds to participate in technology, 'cause it's so important to have that diversity, as we're building this stuff. >> Can't take the humans out of the equation, yet. >> There's still some gut check, right, there's still some intuition that has to come into play here. >> Yeah, absolutely, and that's one of the attributes of humans that we, machines can't replace yet. So, that ability to empathize, the ability to show all the emotional skills, we know machines can't do that today, maybe someday they will. But, today they can't, so humans will bring that. But, I really think that the power comes in the combination of AI, and machines, and humans. And, that's what we're talking about here around human potential. It's the power of the combination of the two. And, I think we will see that that combination will be required for a very long time, before machines take over the world (laughs) >> I always tell the story, John and I interviewed Garry Kasparov. >> That was great. >> The great chess champion. >> Chess master. >> When he lost to the IBM supercomputer, instead of giving up he said, "I'm going to beat the supercomputer", so he took machines plus humans to beat the supercomputer, so to this day the greatest chess player in the world is a machine and a supercomputer. So, that is a great example of augmentation. Now, it probably doesn't work so well for autonomous vehicles, but-- (all laughing) >> Well now, thanks for being with us. Thanks for sharing the story. We appreciate that, the time. And, if you see our application come down the pike-- >> Okay (laughs) >> Flag us where we're deficient, if you would, please. >> You'll be welcome, you're welcome. >> Excellent (laughs) >> Thanks for having me. >> Thank you, Anne Benedict, thanks for being with us. We'll be back with more here on theCUBE. We're live in the nation's capitol, Washington D.C. >> That was awesome. >> Thank you. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, DC, it's the Cube, covering .conf2017, brought to you by Splunk. (busy electronic music) >> Welcome back to the Washington Convention Center, the Walter Washington Convention Center, in our nation's capital as our coverage continues here of .conf2017. We're here at Splunk along with Dave Vellante. I'm John Walls, and kind of coming down the home stretch, Dave. There's just something about the crowd's lingering still, the show for, still has that good vibe to it, late second day, hasn't let off yet. >> Oh, no, remember, the show goes on through tomorrow. There's some event tonight, I think. I don't know, the band's here. >> Yeah, but-- >> Be hanging out, partying tonight. >> But you can tell the Splunkers are alive and well. We have Terry Ramos with us, who's going to join us for the next 15 minutes or so, the VP of Business Development of Palo Alto Networks. Terry, good to see you, sir. >> Good, really appreciate you having me here. >> You bet, you bet, thanks for joining us. You've got a partnership now, you've synced up with Splunk. >> Terry: Yes. >> Tell us a little bit about that. Then we'll get into the customer value after that. But first off, what's the partnership all about? >> Sure. We've actually been partners for about five years, really helping us solve some customer needs. We've got about several thousand customers who are actually using both products together to solve the needs I'll talk about in a minute. The partnership is really key to us. We've invested a ton of time, money, effort into it, we have executive level sponsorship all the way down to sales. In the field, we have reps working together to really position the solution to customers, both us and Splunk and then how we tie together. We're the number one downloaded app for Splunk by far that's a third party, so they have a couple that are more downloaded than us, but for third party, we've done that. We develop it all in house ourselves. For customers out there who think the app's great, I'll talk about the new version coming, I'd love any feedback on what should we do next, what are the next things we should do in the app, because we're really developing this and making this investment for customers to get the value out of it. >> What about the business update for Palo Alto Networks? I mean, can you give us the sort of quick rundown on what's going on in your world? >> Sure. I think most people know Palo Alto Networks has done pretty well. We just finished our FY '17, finished with about 42,500 customers. Revenue was, I think, 1.8 billion, approximately. We're still a very high growth company, and been growing the product set pretty well, from products next-gen firewall, all the attached subscriptions. Then we've got things like the Endpoint Traps now that's really doing well in the market, where customers need help on preventing exploits on the endpoint. That's been a growing market for us. >> It's the hottest space in the data center right now, and everybody wants to partner with you guys. Obviously, Splunk, you go to all the big shows, and they're touting their partnerships with Palo Alto. What do you attribute that sort of success to? >> Customers, truly. I run the partnerships for the company. If we do not have a customer who will be invested in the integration and the partnership, we don't do it. The number one thing we ask when somebody says, I want to partner with you, is, who's the customer, what's the use case, and why, right. Then if we can get good answers to that, then we go down the path of a partnership. Even then, though, we're still pretty selective. We've got 150 partners today that are technology partnerships. But we've got a limited number, Splunk's a big one, that we really invest heavily in, far more than the others, far more than just an API integration, the stuff of getting out to customers in the field the development of apps and integration, those things. >> Talk about, we laugh about Barney deals sometimes, I love you, you love me, let's do a press release. What differentiates that sort of Splunk level of partnership? Is it engineering resources? Is it deeper go to market? Maybe talk about that a little. >> Yeah, I hate Barney partnerships completely. If I do those, fire me, truthfully. I think the value that we've done with Splunk that we've really drawn out is, we've built this app, right, so BD has a team of developers on our team that writes the app for Splunk. We have spent four years developing this app. We were the first company to do adaptive response before it was called adaptive response. You see something in Splunk, you can actually take action back to a firewall to actually block something, quarantine something, anything like that. The app today is really focused on our products, right, through Endpoint, WildFire, things like that, right, so it's very product focused. We're actually putting in a lot of time and effort into a brand new app that we're developing that we're showing off now that we'll ship in about a month a half that's really focused on adversaries and incidents. We have something called the adversary score card where it'll show you, this is what's actually happening on my network, how far is this threat penetrating my network and my endpoints, is it being stopped, when is it being stopped. Then we've got an incident flow, too, that shows that level down to Traps prevented this, and here's how it prevented it. Then if we go back to the adversary score card, it ties into what part of the kill chain did we actually stop it at. For a CISO, when you come in and you say, there's a new outbreak, there's a new worm, there's a new threat that's happening, how do I know that I'm protected? Well, Splunk gives you great access to that data. What we've done is an app on top of it that's a single click. A SOC guy can say, here's where we're at, here's where we've blocked it. >> I guess I've been talking to a lot of folks here the last two days, and we've got a vendor right over here, we're talking, they have a little scorecard up, and they tell you about how certain intrusions are detected at certain intervals, 190 days to 300 and some odd days. Then I hear talk about a scorecard that tells you, hey, you've got this risk threat, and this is what's happened. I mean, I guess I'm having a hard time squaring that all up with, it sounds like a real time examination. But it's really not, because we're talking about maybe half a year or longer, in some cases, before a threat is detected. >> Yeah, so as a company, we've really focused on prevention. Prevent as much as you can. We have a product called WildFire, where we have tens of thousands of customers who actually share data with us, files and other things, files, URLs, other things. What we do is we run those through sandboxing, dynamic analysis, static analysis, all sorts of stuff, to identify if it's malicious. If it's malicious, we don't just start blocking that file, we also send down to the firewall all the things that it does. Does it connect to another website to download a different payload, does it connect to a C&C site, command and control site? What's that malware actually doing? We send that down to the customer, but we also send it to all of our customers. It may hit a target, right, the zero day hit one customer, but then we start really, how do we prevent this along the way, both in the network and at the endpoint? Yeah, there are a lot of people that talk about breaches long term, all that, what we're trying to make sure is we're preventing as much as we can and letting the SOC guys really focus on the things that they need to. A simple piece of malware, they shouldn't be having to look at that. That should be automatically stopped, prevented. But that advanced attack, they need to focus on that and what are they doing about it. >> The payloads have really evolved in the last decade. You mentioned zero day. Think about them, we didn't even know what it was in the early 2000s. I wonder if you could talk about how your business has evolved as the sophistication of the attackers has evolved from hacktivist to organized crime to nation state. >> Yeah, yeah. It has evolved a lot, and when you think about the company, 42,500 customers says a lot. We've been able to grow that out. When you talk about a product, something like WildFire that does this payload analysis, when we launched the product it was free. You'd get an update about every 24 hours, right. We moved it down to, I think it was four hours, then it was an hour, 20 minutes, and now it's about five minutes. In about five minutes, we do all that analysis and how do we stop it. Back to the question is, when you're talking about guys that are just using malware and running it over and over, that's one thing. But when you're talking about sophisticated nation states, that's where you've got to get this, prevent it as quickly as you possibly can. >> If we're talking about customer value, you've kind of touched on it a little bit, but ultimately, you said you've got some to deal with Splunk, some to deal with you, some are now dealing with both. End of the day, what does that mean to me, that you're bringing this extra arsenal in? How am I going to leverage that in my operations? What can I do with it better, I guess, down the road? >> Yeah, I think it really comes down to that, how quickly can you react, how do you know what to react to. I mean, it's as simple as that, I know it sounds super simple, but it is that. If I'm a SOC guy sitting in a SOC, looking at the threats that are happening on my network, what's happening on my endpoints, and being able to say, this one actually got through the firewall. It was a total zero day, we had never seen it before. But it landed at the endpoint, and it tried to run and we prevented it there. Now you can go and take action down to that endpoint and say, let's get it off the endpoint, the firewall's going to be updated in a few minutes anyway. But let's go really focus on that. It's the focus of, what do you need to worry about. >> Dave: Do you know what a zero day is? >> You've kind of, yeah, I mean, it's the movie, right? >> He's going, no, no, there was a movie because of the concept-- >> Because of the idea. >> David's note, there's been zero days of protection. But you can explain it better than I can. >> Yeah, zero day means it's a brand new attack, never seen before, whether it be-- >> Unique characteristics and traits in a new way that infiltrate, and something that's totally off from left field. >> When you think about it, those are hard to create. They take a lot of time and effort to go find the bugs in programs, right. If it's something in a Microsoft or an Oracle, that's a lot of effort, right, to go find that new way to do a buffer overflow or a heap spray or whatever it is. That's a lot of work, that's a lot of money. One of the things we focused on is, if we can prevent it faster, that money, that investment those people are making is out the window. We really, again, are going to focus on the high end, high fidelity stuff. >> The documentary called "Zero Days," but there was, I don't know how many zero day viruses inside of Stuxnet, like, I don't know, four or five. You maybe used to see, the antivirus guys would tell you, we maybe see one or two a year, and there were four or five inside of this code. >> Loaded into one invasion, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's the threat from within. I mean, one of the threats, if I recall correctly, was actually, they had to go in and steal some chip at some Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer, so they had to have a guy infiltrate, who knows, with a mop or something, stick a, had to break in, basically. These are, when you see a payload like that, you know it's a nation state, not just some hacktivist, right, or even organized crime doesn't necessarily have the resources for the most part, right? >> It's a big investment, it is. Zero days are a big investment, because you've got to figure it out, you may have to get hardware, you have to get the software. It's a lot of work to fund that. >> They're worth a lot of money on the black market. I mean, you can sell those things. >> That's why, if we make them unusable fairly quickly, it stops that investment. >> We were talking with Monte Mercer earlier, just talking about his comments this morning, keynotes about you could be successful defending, right. It's not all bets are off, we're hopeless here. But it still sounds as if, in your world, there are these inherent frustrations, because bad guys are really smart. All of a sudden, you've got a whole new way, a whole new world that you have to combat, just when you thought you had enough prophylactic activity going on in one place, boom, here you are now. Can you successfully defend? Do you feel like you have the tools to be that watch at the gate? >> I'd be a liar if I say you can prevent everything, right. It's just not possible. But what you've got to be able to prevent is everything that's known, and then take the unknown, make it known as quickly as possible, and start preventing that. That's the goal. If anybody out here is saying they prevent everything, it's just not true, it can't be true. But the faster you take that unknown and make it known and start preventing it, that's what you do. >> Well, and it's never just one thing in this world, right? Now there's much more emphasis being placed on response and predicting the probability of the severity and things of that nature. It really is an ecosystem, right. >> Terry: It is, that's what I do. >> Which is kind of back to what you do. How do you see this ecosystem evolving? What are your objectives? >> I think that from my standpoint, we'll continue to build out new partnerships for customers. We really focus on those ones that are important to customers. We recently did a lot with authentication partners, right, because that's another level of, if people are getting those credentials and using them then what are they doing with them, right? We did some new stuff in the product with a number of partners where we look at the credentials, and if they're leaving the network, going to an unknown site, that should never happen, right? Your corporate credentials should never go to some unknown site. That's a good example of how we build out new things for customers that weren't seen before with a partner. We don't do authentication, so we rely on partners to do that with us. As we continue to talk about partnership and BD, we're going to continue to focus on those things that really solve that need for our customer. >> Well, I don't know how you guys sleep at night, but I'm glad you do. >> Dave: No, we don't. What do you mean? I'm glad you don't. >> It's 24/7, that's for sure. >> Terry: Yes. >> Terry, thanks for being with us. >> Thank you very much. >> We appreciate the time, glad to have you on the Cube. The Cube will continue live from Washington, DC, we're at .conf2017. (busy electronic music)