>>Welcome back to Vegas guys, Lisa Martin and Dave Lanta here wrapping up our coverage of day two of snowflake summit. We have given you a lot of content in the last couple of days. We've had a lot of great conversations with snowflake folks with their customers and with partners. And we have an alumni back with us. Please. Welcome back to the queue. Mike Palmer, CEO of Sigma computing. Mike. It's great to see you. >>Thanks for having me. And I guess again >>Exactly. >>It's fantastic me. >>So talk to the audience about Sigma before we get into the snowflake partnership and what you guys are doing from a technical perspective, give us that overview of the vision and some of the differentiators. >>Sure. You know, you've over the last 12 years, companies have benefited from enormous investments and improvements in technology in particular, starting with cloud technologies, obviously going through companies like snowflake, but in terms of the normal user, the one that makes the business decision in the marketing department and the finance team, you know, in the works in the back room of the supply chain, doing inventory very little has changed for those people. And the time had come where the data availability, the ability to organize it, the ability to secure it was all there, but the ability to access it for those people was not. And so what Sigma's all about is taking great technology, finding the skillset they have, which happens to be spreadsheets. There are billion license spreadsheet users in the world and connecting that skillset with all of the power of the cloud. >>And how do you work with snowflake? What are some of the, the what's the joint value proposition? >>How are they as an investor? That's what I wanna know. Ah, >>Quiet, which is the way we like them. No, I'm just kidding. Snowflake is, well, first of all, investment is great, but partnership is even better. Right. You know, and I think snowflake themselves are going through some evolution, but let's start with the basics of technology where this all starts because you know, all of the rest doesn't matter if the product is not great, we work directly on snowflake. And what that means is as an end user, when I, when I sit on that marketing team and I want to understand and, and connect, how did I get a, a customer where I had a pay to add? And they showed up on my website and from my website, they went to a trial. And from there, they touched a piece of syndicated contents. All of that data sits in snowflake and I, as a marketer, understand what it means to me. >>So for the first time, I want to be able to see that data in one place. And I want to understand conversion rates. I want to understand how I can impact those conversion rates. I can make predictions. What that user is doing is going to, to Sigma accessing live data in snowflake, they're able to ask ad hoc questions, questions that were never asked questions, that they don't exist in a filter that were never prepped by a data engineer. So they could truly do something creative and novel in a very independent sort of way. And the connection with Snowflake's live data, the performance, the security and governance that we inherit. These are all facilitators to really expand that access across the enterprise. So at, at a product level, we were built by a team of people, frankly, that also were the original investors in snowflake by two amazing engineers and founders, Rob will and Jason France, they understood how snowflake worked and that shows up in the product for our end customers. >>So, but if I may just to follow up on that, I mean, you could do that without snowflake, but what, it would be harder, more expensive. Describe what you'd have to go through to accomplish that outcome. >>And I think snowflake does a good job of enabling the ecosystem at large. Right. But you know, you always appreciate seeing early access to understand what the architecture's going to look like. You know, some of the things that I will, you know, leaning forward that we've heard here that we're very excited about is snowflake going to attack the TP market, right? The transactional market, one of the transactional database market. I, yeah. Right. You know, one of the things that we see coming, and, and one of the bigger things that we'll be talking about in Sigma is not just that you can do analytics out of snowflake. I think that's something that we do exceptionally well on an ad hoc basis, but we're gonna be the first that allow you to write into snowflake and to do that with good performance. And to do that reliably, we go away from OAP, which is the terminology for data warehousing. >>And we go toward transactional databases. And in that world, understanding snowflake and working collaboratively with them creates again, a much better experience for the end customer. So they, they allow us into those programs, even coming to these conferences, we talk to folks that run the industry teams, trying to up level that message and not just talk database and, and analytics, but talk about inventory management. How do we cut down the gap that exists between POS systems and inventory ordering, right? So that we get fewer stockouts, but also that we don't overorder. So that's another benefit, >>Strong business use cases. >>That's correct. >>And you're enabling those business users to have access to that data. I presume in near real time or near real time, so that they can make decisions that drive marketing forward or finance forward or legal >>Forward. Exactly. We had a customer panel yesterday. An example of that go puff is hopefully most of the viewers are familiar with, as a delivery company. This is a complicated business to run. It's run on the fringes. When we think about how to make money at it, which means that the decisions need to be accurate. They need to be real time. You can't have a batch upload for delivery when they're people are on the street, and then there's an issue. They need to understand the exact order at that time, not in 10 minutes, not from five minutes ago, right. Then they need to understand, do I have inventory in the warehouse when the order comes in? If they don't, what's a replacement product. We had a Mike came in from go puff and walked us through all of the complexity of that and how they're using Sigma to really just shorten those decision cycles and make them more accurate. You know, that's where the business actually benefits and, >>And actually create a viable business model. Cuz you think back to the early, think back to the.com days and you had pets.com, right? They couldn't make any money. Yeah. Without chewy. Okay. They appears to be a viable business model. Right? Part of that is just the efficiencies. And it's sort of a, I dunno if those are customers that they may or may not be, but they should be if they're not >>Chewy is, but okay. You know, and that's another example, but I'll even pivot to the various REI and other retailers. What do they care about cohorts? I'm trying to understand who's buying my product. What can I sell to them next? That, that idea of again, I'm sitting in a department, that's not data engineering, that's not BI now working collaboratively where they can get addend engineer, putting data sets together. They have a BI person that can help in the analytics process. But now it's in a spreadsheet where I understand it as a marketer. So I can think about new hierarchies. I wanna know it by customer, by region, by product type. I wanna see it by all of those things. I want to be able to do that on the fly because then it creates new questions that sort of flow. If you' ever worked in development, we use the word flow constantly, right? And as people that flow is when we have a question, we get an answer that generates a question. We have, we just keep doing that iteratively. That that is where Sigma really shines for them. >>What does a company have to do to really take advantage of, of this? I, if they're kind of starting from a company that's somewhat immature, what are the sort of expectations, maybe even outta scope expectations so they can move faster, accelerate analytics, a lot of the themes that we've heard today, >>What does an immature company is actually even a question in, in and of itself? You know, I think a lot of companies consider themselves to be immature simply because for various constraint reasons, they haven't leveraged the data in the way that they thought possible. Good, >>Good, good definition. Okay. So not, not, >>Not, I use this definition for digital transformation. It very simple. It is. Do you make better decisions, faster McKenzie calls this corporate metabolism, right? Can you speed up the metabolism of, of an enterprise and for me and for the Sigma customer base, there's really not much you have to do once. You've adopted snowflake because for the first time the barriers and the silos that existed in terms of accessing data are gone. So I think the biggest barrier that customers have is curiosity. Because once you have curiosity and you have access, you can start building artifacts and assets and asking questions. Our customers are up and running in the product in hours. And I mean that literally in hours, we are a user in snowflake, that's a direct live connection. They are able to explore tables, raw. They can do joins themselves if they want to. They can obviously work with their data engineering team to, to create data sets. If that's the preferred method. And once they're there and they've ever built a pivot table, they can be working in Sigma. So our customers are getting insights in the first one to two days, you referenced some, those of us are old enough to remember pest.com. Also old enough to remember shelfware that we would buy. We are very good at showing customers that within hours they're getting value from their investment in Sigma. And that, that just creates momentum, right? Oh, >>Tremendous momentum and >>Trust and trust and expansion opportunities for Sigma. Because when you're in one of those departments, someone else says, well, you know, why do you get access to that data? But I don't, how are you doing this? Yeah. So we're, you know, I think that there's a big movement here. People, I often compare data to communication. If you go back a hundred years, our communication was not limited. As it turns out by our desire to communicate, it was limited by the infrastructure. We had the typewriter, a letter and the us postal service and a telephone that was wired. And now we have walk around here. We, everything is, is enabled for us. And we send, you know, hundreds and thousands of messages a day and probably could do more. You will find that is true. And we're seeing it in our product is true of data. If you give people access, they have 10 times as many questions as they thought they had. And that's the change that we're gonna see in business over the next few years, >>Frank Salman's first book, what he was was CEO of snowflake was rise of the data cloud. And he talked about network effects. Basically what he described was Metcalf's law. Again, go back to the.com days, right? And he, Bob Metcalf used the phone system. You know, if there's two people in the phone system, it's not that valuable, right. >>You know, exactly, >>You know, grow it. And that's where the value is. And that's what we're seeing now applied to data. >>And even more than that, I think that's a great analogy. In fact, the direct comparison to what Sigma is doing actually goes one step beyond everything that I've been talking about, which is great at the individual level, but now the finance team and the marketing team can collaborate in the platform. They can see data lineage. In fact, one of our, our big emphasis points here is to eliminate the sweet products. You know, the ones where, you know, you think you're buying something, but you really have a spreadsheet product here and a document product there and a slide product over there. And they, you know, you can do all of that in Sigma. You can write a narrative. You can real time live, edit on numbers. You, you know, if you want to, you could put a picture in it. But you know, at Sigma we present everything out of our product. Every meeting is live data. Every question is answered on the spot. And that's when, you know, you know, to your point about met cap's law. Now everybody's involved in the decision making. They're doing it real time. Your meetings are more productive. You have fewer of them because they're no action items, right. We're answering our questions there and we're, and we're moving forward. >>You know, view were meeting sounds good. Productivity is, is weird now with the, the pandemic. But you know, if you go back to the nineties here am I'm, I'm dating myself again, but that's okay. You know, you, you didn't see much productivity going on when the PC boom started in the eighties, but the nineties, it kicked in and pre pandemic, you know, productivity in the us and Europe anyway has been going down. But I feel like Mike, listen to what you just described. I, how many meetings have we been in where people are arguing about them numbers, what are the assumptions on the numbers wasting so much time? And then nothing gets done and they, then they, they bolt cut that away and you drive in productivity. So I feel like we're on a Renaissance of productivity and a lot of that's gonna be driven by, by data. Yeah. And obviously communications the whole 5g thing. We'll see how that builds out. But data is really the main spring of, I think, a new, new Renaissance in productivity. >>Well, first of all, if you could find an enterprise where you ask the question, would you rather use your data better? And they say, no, like, you know, show me, tell me that I'll short their stock immediately. But I do agree. And I, unfortunately I have a career history in that meeting that you just described where someone doesn't like, what you're showing them. And their first reaction is to say, where'd you get that data? You know, I don't trust it. You know? So they just undermined your entire argument with an invalid way of doing so. Right. When you walk into a meeting with Sigma where'd, where'd you get that data? I was like, that's the live data right now? What question do you want answer >>Lineage, right. Yeah. And you know, it's a Sen's book about, you know, gotta move faster. I mean, this is an example of just cutting through making decisions faster because you're right. Mike and the P the P and L manager in a meeting can, can kill the entire conversation, you know, throw FUD at it. Yeah. You know, protect his or her agenda. >>True. But now to be fair to the person, who's tended to do that. Part of the reason they've done that is that they haven't had access to that data before the meeting and they're getting blindsided. Right. So going back to the collaboration point. Yes. Right. The fact we're coming to this discussion more informed in and of itself takes care of some of that problem. Yeah. >>For sure. And if, and if everybody then agrees, we can move on and now talk about the really important stuff. Yeah. That's good. It >>Seems to me that Sigma is an enabler of that curiosity that you mentioned that that's been lacking. People need to be able to hire for that, but you've got a platform that's going here. You go ask >>Away. That's right in the we're very good. You know, we love being a SaaS platform. There's a lot of telemetry. We can watch what we call our mouse to Dows, you know, which is our monthly average users to our daily average users. We can see what level of user they are, what type of artifacts they build. Are they, you know, someone that creates things from scratch, are they people that tend to increment them, which by the way, is helpful to our customers because we can then advise them, Hey, here's, what's really going on. You might wanna work with this team over here. They could probably be a little better of us using the data, but look at this team over here, you know, they've originated five workbooks in the last, you know, six days they're really on it. There's, there's, you know, that ability to even train for the curiosity that you're referring to is now there, >>Where are your customer conversations? Are they at the lines of business? Are they with the chief data officer? What does that look like these days? >>Great question. So stepping back a bit, what, what is Sigma here to do? And, and our first phase is really to replace spreadsheets, right? And so one of the interesting things about the company is that there isn't a department where a spreadsheet isn't used. So Sigma has an enormous Tam, but also isn't necessarily associated with any particular department or any particular vertical. So when we tend to have conversations, it really depends on, you know, either what kind of investment are you making? A lot of mid-market companies are making best technology investments. They're on a public cloud, they're buying snowflake and they wanna understand what's, what's built to really make this work best over the next number of years. And those are very short sales for us because we, we prove that, you know, in, in minutes to hours, if you're working at a large enterprise and you have three or four other tools, you're asking a different question. >>And often you're asking a question of what I call exploration. We have a product that has dashboards and they've been working for us and we don't wanna replace the dashboard. But when we have a question about the data in the dashboard, we're stuck, how do we get to the raw data? How do we get to the example that we can actually manage? You can't manage a dashboard. You can't manage a trend line, but if you get into the data behind the trend line, you can make decisions to change business process, to change quality, accuracy, to change speed of execution. That is what we're trying to enable. Those conversations happen between the it team who runs technology and the business teams who are responsible for the decisions. So we are, you know, we have a cross departmental sale, but across every department, >>One of the things we're not talking about at this event, which is kind of interesting, cause it's all we've been talking about is the macro supply chain challenges, Ukraine, blah, blah, blah, and the stock market. But, but how are you thinking about that? Macro? The impacts you're seeing, you know, a lot of private companies being, you know, recapped, et cetera, you guys obviously very well funded. Yeah. But how do you think about, I mean, I asked Frank a similar question. He's like, look, it's a marathon. We don't worry about it. We, you know, they made the public market, they get 5 billion in cash. Yeah. Yeah. How are you thinking about it? >>You know, first of all, what's the expression, right? You never, never waste a good, you know, in this case recession, no, we don't have one yet, but the impetus is there, right. People are worried. And when they're worried, they're thinking about their bottom lines, they're thinking about where they're going to get efficiency and their costs. They're already dealing with the supply chain issues of inventory. We all have it in our personal lives. If you've ordered anything in the last six months, you're used to getting it in, you know, days to weeks. And now you're getting in months, you know, we had customers like us foods as a good example, like they're constantly trying to align inventory. They have with transportation that gets that inventory to their end customers, right? And they do that with better data accuracy at the end point, working with us on what we are launching. >>And I mentioned earlier, having more people be able to update that data creates more data, accuracy creates better decisions. We align that then with them and better collaboration with the folks that then coordinate the trucks with Prologis and the panel yesterday, they're the only commercial public company that reports their, their valuations on a quarterly basis. They work with Sigma to trim the amount of time it takes their finance team to produce that data that creates investor confidence that holds up your stock price. So I mean the, the importance of data relative to all the stakeholders in enterprise cannot be overstated. Supply chain is a great example. And yes, it's a marathon because a lot of the technology that drives supply chain is old, but you don't have to rip out those systems to put your data into snowflake, to get better access through Sigma, to enable the people in your environment to make better decisions. And that's the good news. So for me, while I agree, there's a marathon. I think that most of the, I dunno if I could continue this metaphor, but I think we could run quite far down that marathon without an awful lot of energy by just making those couple of changes. >>Awesome. Mike, this has been fantastic. Last question. I, I can tell, I know a lot of growth for Sigma. I can feel it in your energy alone. What are some of the key priorities that you're gonna be focusing on for the rest of the year? >>Our number one priority, our number two priority and number three priority are always build the best product on the market, right? We, we want customers to increase usage. We want them to be delighted. You know, we want them to be RA. Like we have customers at our booth that walk up and it's like, you're building a great company. We love your product. I, if you want to show up happy at work, have customers come up proactively and tell you how your products changed their life. And that is, that is the absolute, most important thing because the real marathon here is that enablement over the long term, right? It is being a great provider to a bunch of great companies under that. We are growing, you know, we've been tripling the company for the fast few years, every year, that takes a lot of hiring. So I would've alongside product is building a great culture with bringing the best people to the company that I guess have my energy level. >>You know, if you could get paid in energy, we would've more than tripled it, you know, but that's always gonna be number two, where we're focused on the segment side, you know, is really the large enterprise customer. At this point, we are doing a great job in the mid-market. We have customer, we have hundreds of customers in our free trial on a constant basis. I think that without wanting to seem over confident or arrogant, I think our technology speaks for itself and the product experience for those users, making a great ROI case to a large enterprise takes effort. It's a different motion. We're, we're very committed to building that motion. We're very committed to building out the partner ecosystem that has been doing that for years. And that is now coming around to the, the snowflake and all of the ecosystem changes around snowflake because they've learned these customers for decades and now have a new opportunity to bring to them. How do we enable them? That is where you're gonna see Sigma going over the next couple of years. >>Wow, fantastic. Good stuff. And a lot of momentum, Mike, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about Sigma, the momentum, the flywheel of what you're doing with snowflake and what you're enabling customers to achieve the massive business outcomes. Really cool stuff. >>Thank you. And thank you for continuing to give us a platform to do this and glad to be back in conferences, doing it face to face. It's fantastic. >>It it's the best. Awesome. Mike, thank you for Mike Palmer and Dave ante. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cube hopefully all day. We've been here since eight o'clock this morning, Pacific time giving you wall the wall coverage of snowflake summit 22 signing off for today. Dave and I will see you right bright and early tomorrow morning. I will take care guys.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE, we're live in Las Vegas for AWS Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2018. It's the sixth year of theCUBE coverage. Two sets wall-to-wall. Day two of day four, day one of our broadcast, two more days, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. Our next two guests are from Druva. We've got Jaspreet Singh, CUBE alumni, founder and CEO, and Mike Palmer, chief product officer from Druva. You guys are in the middle of it, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks very much. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Good to see you guys. I want to get into it because I just had another guest on earlier. We talked about the holy trinity of infrastructure has been compute, networking, and storage, right? Those things are not, those are evolving, now they're coming together and they're changing. You get a lot of compute here, you can do more storage there, you got networking. We're expecting to hear a lot of announcements about connectivity. But the new dynamics of the infrastructure really encapsulates why cloud's been so successful. Okay great, cloud's great, DevOps, microservices. Check check check. We all love that, we believe it. But the big thing that people, I won't say be blindsided by, but aren't talking as much about is just the impact of data. Okay, you guys were out early on it, you saw the architecture in the cloud. Are people finally getting it? The cloud and data are coming together architecturally, thinking-wise, impact to customer. You guys started attacking that problem early on. What's your vibe here at re:Invent about the role of data and cloudification? >> Sure, I think if you look back and understand why cloud happened in the first place, right? So if you look at Amazon itself or AWS, it's Amazon's retail API is applied to everything IP. Where you could, we could buy and consume services on a price point across the globe as APIs. And now if you fast-forward, the right decide the compute, network is all coming together, the new realm of self serverless computing, all these turns are pioneering more and more increased data creation. Either in the data center, at the edge, or in the cloud. And unless you do something more holistic, sort of manage it, to protect it, to manage it, it's getting harder and harder to put your arms around the data growth. And cloud is a great answer to the whole data management, or the whole creation and management of data, given that the traditional systems are not very, very defined in the way data is going. Data used to be in Oracle, and VMware, and Siebel Systems, and everything else, now it's more image sensor, media text, apps which have been created. The new realm of data is very hard to put arms around with traditional routes of putting in the box in the middle of data. That's why the cloud is key to it. >> On the product side, you guys have been attacking the data. Amazon's expecting to announce here, they've done some pre-announcements, the role of consistency. It's something that we've talked about on theCUBE in our studio and at events. You guys have been on this from day one. Cloud operations on-premises, and the cloud should look the same, has to be consistent. Andy Jassy is going to be banging that drum tomorrow in his keynote. You guys have been part of AWS for a long time, your relationship. Are they getting that messaging from you guys? (chuckles) I mean, Andy, they all be in the public cloud now that he's back on-premise. So he's listening to the customers. I mean, Andy's very straight up about it. He's like, hey, I'm a big guy. I can handle the criticism. Customers want it on-premise. I'd love her when it come to the cloud, but that's what they want. >> It certainly would be flattery that they took messaging from Druva. (John laughing) And I'm not sure that-- >> But you guys have been, cover the relationship with Amazon first. How long have you guys been working with Amazon? >> We work five years now. Very good relationship with Amazon. >> And the product side is impacted in their ecosystem. How are you guys doing relative to the architecture of Amazon? >> I think we're the only natively architected solution in the market today. And so, if you saw this morning, we were right there on the board with some of the companies that have been around for decades, primarily because if you think about the generations of data protection solutions where you started with tape on mainframe, and you moved to one of the four legacy providers in the client's server space, you had another one that really popped up with VMware. Druva really owns the cloud space. And that requires, as you mentioned, a different architecture, adoption of more of an object storage model, the ability to natively store data in a file system in the cloud. That's different than what anyone has built in the past, and I think that's what the relationship with AWS is built on. >> So you think that Jassy's going on his on-premise mess-ee-mah consistently validates what you guys do? >> Without a doubt. He's gotten a lot of customers moving to AWS over the years, and some of them have some real barriers. I think AWS is doing what they always have done well. Listen to their customers, create solutions for those customers, and in the case of Druva, for example, being able to be integrated in a Snowball Edge which is unique to Druva, serving those customers, moving data to the cloud but allowing 'em local restore? Give 'em-- >> Andy Jassy announces AWS on-premise which is what we're expecting to see tomorrow. It's maybe some sort of appliance or something along those lines. We'll see what it comes out as. That's essentially the Azure stack model done right. From their premier perspective. Amazon on Amazon, Amazon on-premise, you can run it in the cloud. This sounds like a tailwind for you guys. How will that impact your business? How is Druva going to be impacted? To me, it would seem like it's just, you don't miss a beat. Sounds like it's going to be a good thing. Your thoughts. >> I think as Mike mentioned when he joined the company as well, right? The beauty of, what I didn't even realize, is that every time Amazon improves the platform, Druva is almost automatically benefited, given they're so, they really build on them. So when Amazon announced Snowball Edge, we were a launch partner with them, and third-party apps should be provision on Snowball Edge. I have a different take on the on-premise word than what the world think of. I think ultimately cloud or no cloud, it's all about helping the customer. If my understanding is correct, what Amazon is trying to do is to create a better way for customers to adapt more to public cloud, which is going deep in data center. There's a difference between doing enough on the edge to make the way for the cloud versus trying to do the legacy of going on-premise. So as Amazon creates that corridor for the option, Druva's naturally a good fit for it and part of it. >> Yeah, certainly that being cloud native with AWS is going to give you guys a good lift. Kind of a lay up question there. Let's get into the customer latency question, 'cause this has come up, expect to hear this a lot as well. Latency matters, latency certainly is a key criteria. Why the on-premise strategy? I would say Snowball, they're kickin' the tires. They did the VMware RDS deal on-premise, then so, this was not like an awakening for Amazon, they were going down that road. A little bit more deeper. What is the impact to customers, in you guys' opinion, of the move from Amazon? What's your thoughts? How deep in the enterprise does it go? How will this impact cloud migration? Is it going to change lift-and-shift to be more of a container strategy where you containerize it, then shift it? Some will not shift? What's your thoughts on the impact of cloud on-premise? >> So, I think there's three kinds of clouds. One is where you're trying to build any new applications in cloud which is where mostly Amazon comes in. Second is you can build a pre-made SaaS application. And third is the lift-and-shift. They're trying to still keep it tied to the data center, and putting some local in the cloud. And the third category is where latency matters. And just like virtualization, the last critical app to be virtualized was Exchange and SQL, right? When Exchange got virtualized, the data center opened the door, right? >> Yeah. >> The last critical app left in the way for major clouded option is, seems like Oracle. So which is where our RDS on-premise announced, which is where latency becomes key if you have to adopt some of those financial applications being built in the cloud where hyper-critical latency or uptime is needed. So that's a last hinge for some of the large enterprises to see more clouded option. >> Mike, talk about the product innovations. So people that don't know Druva, they see a lot of hype out there in this market. A lot of advertising, a lot of funding, venture-backed funding, you guys are startup. Pretty competitive. Where are you guys winning? What are the key innovations in the product that you guys have? Take a minute to explain your key value for your customers. >> Well, the first thing I think we want our customers to remember is if you're moving your workloads into an Amazon environment, or you're adopting cloud, we're the only natively architected solution. So just like you would have bought, a competitor for example in the VMware space, you're going to buy Druva because of its advantages to scale with Amazon in terms of its compute, to be able to allow you to tier into the various storage options that they create almost on a quarterly basis for you. But beyond all the infrastructure basics, we are converging services that otherwise were separate silos on-premises. So if you are a customer of one of the legacy providers, and you needed eDiscovery, you bought an eDiscovery product. You needed archive? You bought an archive product. You got backup, you bought backup product. The beauty of having a file system in the cloud is you can buy all of those operations against a single object store. So the definition's changing, we're offering that advantage. >> And one more point to it is also the go-to-market strategy. You saw David McCann this morning talk about Marketplace and how it's going to reshape the selling motion for them. And he mentioned Druva as the key Marketplace partner. With also tooling, or retooling the go-to-market motion of how customers wants to best buy a SaaS service and not a hardware, software model, impacting the real agility and time to market for businesses. >> Are you guys in the Marketplace? >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> You guys are on to something really big here and I think it's not well understood, the industry yet. I want to just think out loud for a minute. You mentioned that I got to buy eDiscovery, siloed app. 'Cause that's the old way. I mean, cloud's kind of a horizontally scalable fabric. Some of the best solutions aren't pure plays. So you guys are I think the first company of its kind that kind of is not in a category. I mean, I see how you want to be in a category. Gartner has the Magic Quadrant, backup and recovery, okay. You got to be in some and you win that one, you get some good marks on that. But cloud is more, it helps, maybe it could be leading backup and recovery, but it's not a solution for that. Just delivers value that happens to be for backup and recovery, powered by software. >> That's right. >> So this is the cloud dynamic of having the kind of scale. This is a whole new paradigm of software development. Your reaction to that, do you agree? >> Tell-- >> I totally agree. And I think you hit on two very important points. You know, one is data is a platform in the cloud, now it's a surface that you can operate on. You can add services, you can integrate with ecosystem services. Not everything is going to come from Druva. But unlike competitors, when you are with Druva, we are going to enable you to work with those providers. I think the second one, and the one, personally having come from an ISV environment, is this. If I have a great idea today, 65% of my customers wouldn't be in production with my idea for 2 1/2 years. >> Yeah, the time. >> That model's gone. If Amazon announces a service today as Jaspreet mentions, we want our customers to be taking advantage of that with their data today. >> Talk about the impact of the ecosystem that you guys are seeing, just thoughts on the industry. Jaspreet, you seem to have been around them. You've seen the movie a few times. What's coming? Because if these net-new workloads, again, you're going to hear Andy Jassy talk about this on the keynote tomorrow, new net-new workloads. AI's being powered, ML is being powered by compute availability. So that changes that industry. Kind of a slow, stuck in the mud for 20 years AI. You see Lumi's been around for not new science. But with compute, new magic happens. This the dynamic. What's your thoughts on the ecosystem. Those old solutions are going to die. There's going to be winners and losers. Who are the winners and who are the loser? >> I think the time will say how people take on the challenges. We believe that three core changes coming to cloud. One is serverless computing. In a big way. To drive the cost down of computing dramatically. And also converge the whole networking storage compute in a single mine center. Second is machine learning, or what in Druva we call AI of Things. How machine learning will be like mobility of 10 years ago to impact almost every single piece of software to make it smarter. >> Machine learning first is going to be a new trend. >> Exactly. >> We just called it right now on theCube. ML first. (Mike chuckling) >> And then the third trend is going to be around the nature of enterprise to analyze content. The whole Spark, or Kafka, or, the entire availability of metadata on your fingertips to sort of mine information, the available data, data on the platform, is going to be a predominant thing in the future. So put them together, the possibilities are limitless. You have a data platform which you can mine more cost effectively to the serverless, and be a lot more effective through machine learning. >> I think you guys are a data platform without a doubt. You're not backup and recovery. It's just one of the things you happen to do. And you need a category to start with. I mean, this is a data platform. And you're seeing that all over the place. I just saw a presentation from the FBI, counter-terrorism, they just can't put the puzzles together fast enough on these investigations 'cause the databases are everywhere. So just latency, talk about time to value, just ridiculous. Bad guys are winning. IT is going through the same thing. >> I think software in general has moved away from proprietary and more toward open standards, and so you're going to look for solutions that enable an ecosystem, that don't lock you into a container for one purpose, and we're taking a hold of that trend. >> Alright, guys, real quick, we going to end this segment. What's going on with Druva? Quick plug. How many people? What's on the roadmap? Where's the new innovation, where's the disruption coming? >> You take that? >> Roadmap, 600 people and growing. And the company was just an exciting place to be. Jaspreet mentions one of the most important things. Customer's think about three things. How much does it cost me? It it reducing my risk, or making me more agile? And we're focused on all three. You'll see us, serverless architecture's going to continue to reduce costs. Adopting Amazon storage tiers is going to help our customers reduce costs. From the making them better point of view, you're going to see more eDiscovery, legal hold, performance is going to improve, integration with premises, we got a lot going on at Druva. >> Lambda is so much faster than spitting up an instance, that's for sure. >> That's right, that's right. >> Your thoughts, final word. >> I think data science and machine learning is a big core focus of Druva. I think we have over 100 petabyte in management today. About, as he said, about 600 employees and growing very, very rapidly. How we monetize this 100 petabyte with the cloud through us, with customers, know how our knowledge is a big focus area for us. And also the data born in the cloud. The focus has shifted to your point of newer clouds. How do we tackle the new world clouds? Born in the cloud, born outside the core center of data center, and tackling those. A big focus for us going into next year. >> Congratulations, guys. Jaspreet, I know as founder it's always hard to stand up a company. You guys are doing well, congratulations. You got the right architecture, you got the right product roadmap. Congratulations, I'm looking forward to hearing more. Cloudification, new workloads, scale. This is the new buzzwords around competitive advantage and value. It's theCUBE bringing you all the coverage here from re:Invent. Stay with us for more after this short break. (futuristic beep) (futuristic electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube! Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, everybody. We are covering Veritas Vision 2017, and this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, with Stu Miniman and Mike Palmer is here, he's the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Veritas. Mike, thanks for coming to The Cube. >> Thank you for having me here. >> Great keynote, yesterday. We see hundreds, if not thousands of these discussions, and talking head presentations, and yours was hilarious. Let's set up for the people who didn't see it, yesterday. Mike gets up there, and he's talking about the, there's a video that's playing about the end of the world. And the basic theme is that you didn't take care of your data, and now the world's coming to an end. Las Vegas was in shambles, and there were waterfalls running through the hotels, drones attacking people, and then you picked it up from there and then took it into, just a really funny soliloquy. But, where'd you come up with that idea? And, how do you think, I thought it went great, but how did you feel afterwards? >> Well, I can take only partial credit. I have an amazing creative team, and when you work at a company that's been doing, you know, large-scale enterprise data-center stuff, we know that part of our obligation for our audience is kind of making it more palpable for them, making it feel a little bit more, bringing the emotion to it. So we want to have a little bit of excitement in there. But at the same time, we have a real message, you know, and hopefully that came across, too. >> It did, and then, you know, but again, a lot of good humor, the megabytes, gigabytes, you know, up to zetabytes, yadabytes, Mike Tyson-bytes, on and on and on. (laughing) Very clever, so congratulations on that... >> Mike: Oh, thanks! >> We really enjoyed it. Mixed things up a little bit. So, and again, very transparent. We talked about the UX, not the best. You're not happy with it. >> Mike: Right. >> And again, very transparent about that, I think that's a theme of many successful companies, today. But, so, let's start with, sort of, what does it take as the Chief Product Officer, to transform a company from somebody who's been around since 1983, into a modern, you know, cloud-like, hyper-scale, you know, set of service and software offerings. >> That's a big question, but I can tell you the first thing that it takes, the most important thing that it takes, is the best engineering team in the world. You can do a lot of things around the outside, we need to fix our UX, we know that, often considered that to be the kitchens and bathrooms of our house remodel. But if your foundation's broken, if your framing isn't there, you really don't have much of an asset to put on the market. We have a great engineering team, we are releasing products at a velocity that is incomparable in the enterprise ISV space, and we're super proud of that. So I think that's the number one thing. I think number two is the other thing, that we're the envy of the industry, for, and that is, an amazing install-base of customers. Very hard to name a fortune 2000 company that isn't a significant customer of Veritas, so we have a great basis to collaborate and innovate. You know, the rest, we know we have some work to do as we bring it into the modern age. You know, we talked a lot about the fact that workloads are changing in data centers, architectures are changing, we're establishing new partnerships with some of the sponsors that you see here today, like Microsoft, like Google, like IBM, and Oracle, and others. And, you know, it takes a village and they're helping us move into the next 10 years. >> Stu: You know, Mike, talk a little bit about the transition from, you know, software that lived on servers, to now, well, cloud is just isn't somebody else's servers, I think, is the word for that. >> Mike: Right. >> You know, it definitely, we've talked many times this week, you know, Veritas was software-defined before there was such a thing, used to be the FUD from the traditional players, that it was like, oh, you can't trust stuff like that, and now, of course, they're all software-defined and, you know, talking about that, too, so, what does that mean, going to kind of, being completely agnostic, for where things lived, and some of the intricacies of trying to work with, you know, some of the big and small cloud-players? >> A lot of questions in there, and I think David Noy, who I know you guys are going to talk to later, is going to talk a bit more specifically about this, but one of the first things you have to keep in mind, is if you're building software to be software-defined, then you have to build it without considering the hardware platform that you may deliver it on. And I think that's where some of our competitors get it wrong, they can say that they're software-defined, but the litmus test is, can I really pick up this software without modification, and go run it in one of those hyper-scalers? Or put it on one of the white boxes that I went into the market and procured and integrated myself? Veritas has been doing that for a long time. In fact, if you really look at Veritas's core, we're an integrator. We've been an integrator of applications, through the protection space, in our file-system and our info-scale technologies, we are integrators of operating systems, when you look at hyper-scalers, they're just the next operating system. Someone else's hardware, as you said. So we look to protect our customers in terms of their choices, make flexibility a real part of the multi-cloud architecture they're putting together, still doing the things we do well with protection, and ultimately layer on that last little bit when we're talking software-defined and that is not just focus on the infrastructure, but really aspire to this, how do I better manage data and get value from data? >> You know, Mike, I want to dig one level deeper on that. So, the cloud providers, it's all well and good to say, yeah, I'm agnostic, but each of them have their own little nuances. It's, at least today, it's not like, oh, I choose today to wake up and this one has cheaper prices, and it's not a commodity, it's not a utility, and each one of them have services that they want you to integrate with, have to have deeper, how do you balance that, you know, integration, how much work's done, where the customers are pulling you, how does that product portfolio get put together? >> That's an excellent question and I will be fully honest, that a year ago we thought about the answer to that question very differently than we do today. You know, a year ago, I think we were somewhat naive, and thought, hey, we're going to throw a thin layer of capability on top of the clouds, and in effect commoditize them ourselves, and hope our customers just move around as if there were no underlying services. And obviously if you're a cloud-provider, that is not an approach that you're a big fan of. (laughing) And frankly, it's a disservice to the customers, because they are building some really valuable services, and they are differentiating themselves. Our approach has changed, our approach today is a very deep-level integration with each cloud provider, and the specialization they're bringing to the market, without sacrificing the portability, without sacrificing the built-in protections that the cloud providers aren't putting on their platforms and don't want to put on their platforms. And again going back to this idea of data, ultimately, if it's someone else's hardware, in effect, in some cases, someone else's application, it's always your data, and how we are servicing that data is really the key. >> So, that's really hard work. In a lot of cases, you have to interface with very low-level, primitive APIs from the cloud service providers. How do you, sort of, balance your resources, or a portion of your resources, between doing that, because you guys, I call it the compatibility matrix, all kinds of data stores, all kinds of clouds, every one of those is engineering resources. And it seems that's a key part of your strategy, but you got to be sacrificing something, which is maybe, you know, the next widget on your existing products. How do you think about proportioning those? >> You know, at Veritas, in a way, the emergence of the cloud ecosystem actually improves that situation for us. We're carrying 30 years of operating systems that have come and gone, that have incremented versions, and our customers often strand or isolate single examples of those boxes, from 20 years ago that they expect us to test all of our software against, on their behalf. (laughing) For example, right, and so when you look at where we are today, there are five or 10 cloud providers, versus hundreds of operating system versions, and application, we have no problem supporting the proliferation in cloud, we actually welcome the ability to support those... >> Stu: You're much happier with the one version of AJUR, as opposed to the old Patch Monday. >> Exactly right, and you know, they upgrade the whole thing at once... >> Yeah. >> They issue a couple new services, and we adapt 'em, no problem. >> Am I thinking about it the wrong way? Because, while that's true, and I understand that, but within an individual cloud, you could have 15 data services. I think about AWS data services, their data pipeline is increasingly complex, so. Doesn't that complexity scale in a different direction? >> Mike: It scales differently for sure, but I would give a lot of credit to the cloud providers, because they're taking a lot of the regression testing that we used to have to do, for example, with application providers and operating system providers who didn't think about us when they were building their products. The cloud providers take accountability for regression testing all of the things that they release to their customers. So when we adopt an API, we're fully confident that that API works in the context of that cloud environment. So that's off our plate. It really isolates the need for us to simply test that API against our environment. >> Dave: OK, so much more stable and predictable environment for you. I want to ask you, I've heard the term modern data protection a lot, what is modern data protection? Everyone wants to be next-gen, how do you define modern data protection? >> Mike: And this is something we're super passionate about, because our industry has been around for quite a long time, and you get terms thrown out there, like legacy or modern, and everyone's fighting for brand recognition, and kind of, end of the growth spaces in the market. For us, it actually is very simple. We recognize that there are a lot of different techniques to protect data, we think of these protection schemes like lots of different insurance policies, and lots of different tools in your toolbox. Where Veritas is going to win, and continues to win, is that we can offer our customers all of those techniques. We're not trying to convince them that one technique is so much more special than another one, that they need to diversify and create complexity in their environment, so we talk about modern data protection as the ability to choose snapshots, or back-ups, or copy data management, or workload migration, in the future there will be other ways to do this: continuous data protection, or scale-out platforms for cloud providers. These are just techniques inside of a Veritas portfolio, as opposed to stand-alone companies that create complexity for our customers. So, modernization is choice. >> Dave: OK, so you have this awesome install-base. Bill Coleman said to us yesterday, in response to a similar but related question, that it's ours to lose. And the question that we have is, as you look at that install base, you got to get them onto this modern data platform. How do you do that? Do you write some abstraction layer? You talked about that thin layer in the cloud, you must have thought about doing that. Is that what you're doing? How is that going? What does that journey look like? >> Mike: You know, that is one of the most fundamental strategy questions for Veritas. And one of the things we recognized early on, is that while we do have an amazing install base of customers, and those customers are hyper-scaled themselves, you're talking about customers with tens of thousands of servers running our software, both on the storage and the protection site, so the thing that we cannot ask them to do is continuously upgrade their environment to take advantage of new features. We will put out one-to-two major releases of our software, particularly on a protection side, annually. But we're innovating at a far greater pace than that, so we've made some conscious choices to create new architectures for our customer that are workload-specific, so Cloud Point, being a great example, coming out in July, our Object Store announcements, underpinning our next generation protection solutions. So they have modern storage capabilities, our second example. But pulling them together is where only Veritas can offer a customer a complete catalog of that data. So, combining your net back-up catalog with Cloud Point, for example, with your storage, with what you've put into cloud, provides a customer, for the first time, kind of a complete view of the secondary estate. And so, as long as we get that right, we don't have to upgrade, we don't have to seed, what we have to do is enable our customers, through simple adoption of new tools, provide that visibility over the top, and I think that they'll be good to go. >> So that's kind of like a, I think of a term, backward compatibility, is essentially what you're providing for your install base, is that right? >> Mike: That's exactly right. Providing, and this is where API-based infrastructure and service-driven architectures help us a lot. We don't have to fully instantiate a code-base every time that we want to offer a service to a customer. >> Dave: There aren't many independent, in fact there aren't any independent, is one, two-and-a-half billion dollar software companies in your space, but there are many emerging guys, who are getting a lot of attention, well-funded, some, you know, hitting that kind of, 100 million dollar revenue mark, at least it appears that way. How do you look at those guys? What do you learn from them? You know, Branson said today, you know, you learn by listening and watching, in this case. You're watching the market, obviously, what are you seeing there, it's the hottest space in the infrastructure market right now, is your space and security. Are the two, you know, smoking hot spaces. What are you observing, and what are you learning? >> And I think the direct answer to your question is probably the user. You know, and I think that's the lesson of the industry even over the last 15 years, is that when a new workload arises, it's creating a new user inside the enterprise IT department. And that user often gets to determine all of the services that they need to make themselves successful. If that is a cloud workload, and they need availability services, or they need protection services, they want that to integrate in the same place that they buy in provision their cloud workload. If it's a container workload it's the same. We saw the rise of some of our competitors that got to multi-hundred million dollar revenue streams, by focusing on a single user, and a single type of transaction, with a single type of interface. And Veritas kind of lost its way, I think, a little bit, back in that time. So what we are watching today, is who are our users? What workloads are emerging? What sort of interfaces do we need to develop for those users? Which is why we made our UX statements as strongly as we did. We're committed to those. That is going to be the future of Veritas, it's serving the broadening user-base inside of enterprise. >> Dave: You're seeing a lot of discussion in the industry around design thinking, I know we're out of time, here, but, you know, you see companies, like, for instance, Charles Phillips's company, Infor, bought a company called Hook and Loop, and they're all about design, and, how is design thinking fitting into your, sort of, UX/UI plans? >> I mean, the parlance that we use internally is jobs to be done. Right, we clearly want to create a very consistent user experience, and look and feel, we want our customers to be proud to be Veritas customers. But we have to be super cognizant of, what is the job they're trying to get accomplished? And allow the system to be designed around accommodating that. If that is, I want three workflows in three steps or less, can I do that? It could be, I have a very complicated job and I want the ability to control very granular things, do I have an interface to do that? So, if we know the user and the job to be done, we can create a consistent look and feel, I think that we are, we're going to not only ride the wave, of change inside of our particular industry, but I think we're going to wind up in a consolidation space where we're a big winner. >> All right, last question, the bumper sticker on Vision 2017, as the trucks are pulling away from the area, what's the bumper sticker? >> Mike: Secondary data is your most under-utilized asset, and a platform provider is what you need to take advantage of it. >> Dave: All right, Mike, thanks very much for coming to The Cube. Congratulations, and good luck. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, you're welcome, keep right there, buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. The Cube, live we're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision, 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. This is Veritas Vision, 2017, #Vtas at theCUBE. We like to go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stuart Miniman, my cohost for the week. Alex Sakaguchi is here, he's a senior director of global Cloud solutions marketing at Veritas, and he's joined by Ian Wood who's the head of business practices and media for Veritas. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> So Ian, I noticed a number of EMEA badges here at the event. It's quite a presence, come a long way. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think we have a great customer base out in EMEA. EMEA for us is Europe, Middle East, and Africa. I know some people get a bit confused with the acronym. We've got a great deal of customers from Europe, the Middle East, and in fact a whole bunch of customers that made it all the way from South Africa and that's one heck of a flight. So showing some good commitment to come out here to our vision conference. We're excited. >> Yeah, that's excellent. What's the narrative like in Europe and how does it compare to the U.S.? Is it equivalent? Is it different? Maybe more of a focus on GDPR, maybe you could summarize. >> Absolutely. Similarities about multi-Cloud is pretty much the same but multi-Cloud or Cloud means different things to different countries. There's a ton of diversity so you can go into Germany, multi-Cloud means something different out in the Middle East as opposed to the U.K. There's a lot of diversity in multi-Cloud but multi-Cloud as a concept is resonating. Customers are understanding that they need a multi-Cloud strategy and that's bubbling up. For them it's not going to be necessarily the big multi-Cloud service providers, they'll have more local Cloud providers that they're looking to include. Spices it up. Then, as you mentioned GDPR is just taking off. It's one of the number one topics on any CIO's agenda right now is GDPR. What do I do? How do I get compliant? How do I make sure by the 25th of May next year I'm ready for GDPR? >> Alright Alex, so what is a multi-Cloud solution? What is it to you guys? >> I think before you get to solution it really takes some understanding and some discussion around what multi-Cloud is. I think we do a lot of ABCs at headquarters, having customers come in and we're kind of on the forefront of that whole multi-Cloud discussion. But many of these customers, many enterprise customers, have multi-Cloud environments meaning that they have lots of different Cloud players: private Cloud, public Cloud, open stack Clouds. Lots of different types of Clouds but they don't have strategies yet. They're in this situation where they've gotten here by virtue of circumstance. The fact that their dev team decides to deploy their resources somewhere. Some other business unit somewhere else or some other engineering team decides to spin up some resources somewhere else and they find themselves in this situation where they have multiple Clouds. Now they're trying to figure out what to do. How do I make a wrapper over that? How do I get some organization? How do I simplify the operations? How do I take a lot of this to production environments from your test dev labs? It's really about enabling those customers, no matter the mix of infrastructure they have, no matter the mix of Cloud providers they decide to employ, giving them the data management capabilities they need to stay in control. The same exact challenges have existed since the beginning of the data center. It's the same problems. >> Alex, you bring up some great points because multi-Cloud for a lot of customers it wasn't the strategy, it's where they are because they just kind of ended up there. Too often in IT it was like I have an application let's spin something up. Then, I spin something else up and I have my temples of excellence for each of them. Things like that and, unfortunately, we've ended up with a lot of that in Cloud. One of the messages I've really liked hearing this week is Veritas is helping customers kind of get their arms around it, not only how do I manage pieces but how do I understand what I have, how do I manage that visibility into a lot of that. >> I think it actually goes back to one step before that because what you're actually talking about is how do I take care of these challenges. That assumes the customer even knows that they have challenges to take care of. What we've found through research, through customer meetings there are many common misconceptions about what a customer's responsibility is from a data management standpoint and what the Cloud provider's responsibility is from an infrastructure as a service provider. That disconnect is where things can go wrong, where they're at increased risk. They think the Cloud provider is offering them some service or some protection or some level of compliance when really, they're not. Part of it is educating the customer. >> And I'd go even further not just infrastructure service but SASS. A lot of customers are like I don't need to worry about back up or security when I'm doing SASS right? That's all taken care of by the platform. >> I had a CIO once come to me it was a fantastic saying he said what I'm doing now is paying the bill for what shadow IT have created. Therefore, there's a shift that shadow IT went rogue deploying Cloud like crazy. IT are now trying to gain control and trying to sort out quite a mess that shadow IT created. >> We've been doing this Cube since 2010 and we started one of the key Cloud shows was the M world. That's where we started. I want to lay out a timeline and you guys, I'm sure I won't get it exactly right but fill in the holes. My argument is we're entering the fifth phase of Cloud. That's how fast things are moving. Phase one was like kick the tires, in 2006, 2007. During the economic downturn, it was a cap-ex to op-x thing. Then, we came out of that and it was like speed. Shadow IT go, go, go, go. Spend, spend, spend. We've got to get to market fast. It was like there was a couple years there 2013, 14, maybe 15 where it was like wow. IT said this is real, we've got to get control. Now there's still a lot of that going on, to your point Ian, but it seems like the next phase that we're about to enter is a deeper level of business integration. Where Cloud is a strategic capability and a platform for these organizations. In seven years, that many phases and they seem to be somewhat distinct. What do you guys think about that? Is that a reasonable timeline? How would you adjust that? >> I would agree generally speaking. The one difference is I think there are many organizations that haven't even gone through stage one. There are other organizations that have gone through that same set of stages multiple times. Think of especially our core set of customers these are large enterprise customers. Many of them grow by acquisition. They inherit the IT environments of whatever company they've acquired. That creates a whole new set of challenges. They might be using different platforms, different Clouds, etc. So really, they kind of go through that process over and over again. What I think is unique is in many cases I think you articulated this in phase one but also in the latter stages, many have looked at, at least in terms of the public Cloud, they've looked at the public Cloud as a way to offset cost, as a low cost alternative. I think what many people find is, it's not. That's not where the value ends. That's not to the extent that they should be looking for value there either. It's really about data agility. It's really about agility of their organizations. It's really about how they can get more from their environments, be more agile, meet their customers' needs better and as they look to accomplish those types of goals then they also realize that hey we need a different set, a different way to manage the resources, manage the applications that sit on those platforms, manage the data that's involved. I think in many cases the cycle repeats itself. I think in many cases they're starting to realize that they need to go beyond even what was typically just sort of a cost argument. I don't know what you're seeing with customers. I know you meet a lot with them. >> Yeah, I think what you mentioned made sense in the phases. I would actually rather look at it as evolution. I think what happens is in the beginning, do I buy or do I rent was the Cloud argument. What happened with that is that's now incremental to I want to drive agility or more security which is incremental to which workload should I go put to the Cloud. I see it as an evolution and I think they're gaining traction and gaining value as you go along. Giving more option and more choice, rather than distinct phases that sort of start end and reboot themselves to something else. It's definitely incremental. >> To that point though, in the earlier stages there was all this fear about the Cloud not being secure. I think we're largely past that. In many cases organizations realize that at least in terms of even SASS players but even public Cloud providers they're way more secure than you can possibly even build your own data center to. They meet all the regulations that you don't have time spin up and manage and adhere to on your own. Having said that, even a lot of the research that we see, security still comes up as the number one concern. Even though people recognize that the Cloud is much more secure than in many cases what they could do on their own. I think we're largely past that for the most part but some of the other areas maybe not so much so. >> Part of that too is this realization that and we've talked about this Stu a lot not necessarily here but on other shows. CIOs realize that they can't just reshape and reform their business and stick it in the public Cloud. Rather, they have to bring the Cloud model to their data. As a result, it creates discontinuities in security practices. I mean, Amazon, it's like here's our security and it's good but it may not be like your private Cloud security so you have to figure that out. That's a challenge for customers. Do you see that? >> Yeah, but it doesn't stop at security. It's really consistency across everything. >> All the edicts of the organization, absolutely. >> For us especially, things like service level agreements. When you're managing SLAs and as an IT organization you're expected to meet certain SLAs but yet your architecture, your environment is one that's distributed. Where you have different pieces of that environment that sit in different platforms, in different Clouds, on prev different technologies. The level of SLA consistency across that is like gone. So how do you ensure things like your business service up time like those SLAs are being met or that you're able to service that or adhere to when you have such a distributed environment and those are challenges that Veritas aims to solve. >> We talked to Mike Palmer earlier and he said a year ago we thought maybe we could just kind of put a thin layer on top and make all the Clouds look the same and when you get into it. Nope. That's not what's going to happen. There's very different reasons and different services. Some of those things, absolutely. It's heterogeneous. How do we focus on the data? How do we help customers through to get the best of why they're buying all these pieces yet get their arms around all of it? >> Yeah, it could be a world of maturity where customers look at a I would say horses for courses. It's an English statement. So look this Cloud provider is going to be just as cheap as anything. Let's go there. That Cloud provider going to be fantastic in analytics like we know who could be pretty good in analytics. That Cloud provider could be good in front office or back office applications. So it's going to be selecting the Cloud providers that provide the best service. That really I think will be the multi-Cloud world. >> So we only have a few minutes left and I want to get into the why Veritas because multi-Cloud is like there's a land grab going on. There's a big opportunity for the vendor community. It's complicated. People are trying to figure out why Veritas. >> A number of reasons. Especially in the enterprise, these are environments that, quite frankly, are too large for many of our closest competitors to even hope to address. These are very, very heterogeneous environments. Lots and lots and lots of data. Multiple types of platforms and Veritas has always been sort of that middle, that heterogeneous layer software defined, software driven provider that enables that sort of layer over all of that stuff basically that sort of disparity and sort of up-level it up to a more simple management capability. That's one. The second thing is and probably this is equally, if not more important is the fact that we're proven to do that. Not just in the multi-Cloud world that we're talking about now but where the customers have come from. What's happening is we're not seeing the customers eliminate the rest of their architecture. They're not eliminating the data centers. They're just adding to it. You can't just provide a solution that only addresses the new, forgets about the old. You have to provide a solution that covers the entirety of the customer's environment. There's not many organizations that can do that and Veritas is one of them that can and that we've built up a level of trust with these enterprise organizations. We're having done that for many, many years. >> Okay. So you just knocked off the upstarts. Well done. Check. But now you're head-to-head with guys like IBM, HPE, Dell, EMC. What's your advantage relative to those guys? Because they're big enough. They can get money, they get breadth. Why you over them? >> I don't know if the appropriate question is Why you over them? Because all of them are here at this conference and there our partners. IBM's a strategic partner for us. >> Dave: Cloud guys though. But there's other parts, okay? >> Certainly, but I think we love these partners. We compete with them in many cases. They also use our technology in other cases. They also partner with us to deliver combined value to our customers. I think it's really not about why us over them. They certainly see the value that we bring to the table and we inevitably... >> Customers have choices, right? How about the evil machine? >> Alex: You're going to press this aren't you? >> I am. I am I've got to press it. No, because people ask us all the time Why Veritas over a company with this large portfolio? I know you don't want to name them but I mean I have an answer but I would... >> I think we look at it as data management, right? Ultimately, multi-Cloud data management's where we sit. That's sort of the category I think we focus in on solving for customer problems and then you go into perhaps the key competitors. I think if I look at the breadth and scale of what we deliver, you narrow it down to a small scale of organizations that compete with us. All of them, especially the EMCs of the world, they have a hardware agenda. Ultimately, at the end of the day, their business is backed on selling hardware and they're going to struggle to get away from that whereas Veritas what we've always sold for is a true software defined or a data management layer which is really what we're going to look at which is Clouding the pages. >> My analysis I would add to that, that you wake up every day thinking about this problem. That's what your company is, old Scott McNeilly, all the wood behind one arrow. They got not only a hardware agenda, they've got a financial agenda, a got to pay off the debt service agenda, a VM ware agenda, a lot of different agendas. They're like the government. Now there's some strengths on the positive side of the ledger but it seems to me in this multi-Cloud world that the focus that you guys have is an advantage because you're designing for that. >> I think we're actually being helped in many regards. Interesting conversation I had a while back about IT. We know information technology, what IT stands for and what has become and evolved over many, many years to be almost like infrastructure technology. I think what we're seeing now is a revert back to the information first. Use any infrastructure you want, it's going to be a combination of a bunch of different things. Who's going to help me get the value out of the information? To your point, that's where Veritas is focused. >> The other thing I'd add is not only do you not have a hardware agenda but you don't have a Cloud agenda. >> Alex: No, yeah. >> Whereas, okay IBM's a partner. They've got a Cloud so that's cool. Take Delhi MC, they don't have a Cloud, a clear agenda even though they won't say it is to keep stuff on prim. You don't care. >> Yeah. >> That is a clear message that I'm hearing here. Again, I see a number of advantages. At the end of the day, it's who's got the better product, who can execute, who can service and deliver. That's what's fun about our industry and you guys have demonstrated that you can do that over a long period of time. Excellent. Good. Thanks for getting into it with me. Guys I'll give you the last word on Vision 2017, each of you a bumper sticker as the trucks are pulling away. >> Vision 2017 has been a fantastic event. It's been true that we've demonstrated that we can exercise in the multi-Cloud world and look at all the Cloud partners that are part of the Veritas world that we're in, in the Vision conference right here. >> I think last thing is you've seen a ton of innovation and product capabilities, technology announced at this conference. What you should probably look forward to in the next six to 12 months before we get to our next Vision conference is the complete maniacal focus and attention given towards a positive and an improved user experience. Across all the products, across all the 360 data management technologies, you're really going to see the UX, and in particular the UIs, improve. >> I love the fact that you guys are transparent about that and you know Mike Palmer. You guys got a spring in your step. The old Veritas mojo looks like it's coming back so congratulations. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Keep right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. It's theCUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Veritas Vision, #VtasVision. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and this is our second day of Veritas Vision 2017. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman, my cohost, Jim Livingston is here. Here's the world-wide Vice President of Global Services at Veritas. Good to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Ah, I appreciate the opportunity. >> So we love talking services. We've been talking off camera, and to me it's where the value is when you talk to customers. It's really, I mean, yeah, product is great, features are great, but it's services, at the end of the day are what keeps 'em coming back, keeps 'em happy, solves their problem. It's where the rubber meets the road. So, tell us about-- >> So Dave, I need you to be one of my top sales reps. >> Dave: Right, I mean, you know! >> That's outstanding. >> Well, because you know, services doesn't get the attention I think it deserves. It's sort of undervalued, certainly, in the trade press. I mean, I'm sure you'd agree with that. But when you talk to a customer and say okay, you have 100 points to allocate, how much would you place on service? It's oftentimes well over 50%. Is that what you've seen? >> Eh, so I'd say it varies by solution. You know, I will tell you that from my perspective, running a services business inside a product company is a little bit different. I, first and foremost, I believe my charter is really to ensure that our customers get the most value from the products. They're able to explore and utilize any of the features and functions that really are applicable to the objectives they're trying to solve, the outcomes they're trying to drive towards. And that's a critical piece. And then we just want to make sure they have a great experience. So from my perspective, what I really want to focus on is making sure that we really drive that. What's interesting, though, is I will tell you one of the challenges with that is if you look at, as we ramped up our innovation engine which is phenomenal, all the product launches, all the new products, a lot of which we talked about this week at the conference, is then coming on me to make sure that we've done all the things to continue to refine and redevelop and retrain our people to make sure that they're aligned to those. But also aligned to not just the skills and the new products, and skills necessary to extract the value from those products, but all the things associated with the new environmental aspects, all the cloud platform attributes, container-based complications or things like that. So, it's been phenomenal to build and align to that journey. >> So, we spoke to Bill Coleman yesterday, and he talked about putting in the leadership to help drive not only the innovation, but kind of the culture, the vision, and where you're driving it. What do you see as the opportunity, and how much change needs to happen inside the services organization compared to when it was a piece of Symantec? >> So I think the very first thing we have to do is we have to continue to recalibrate around thinking outcomes. It's a very simple thing to say. It's a very difficult thing to do. It really, what it requires first and foremost is trying to engage earlier in that lifecycle, earlier in that process of engaging and talking to customers and trying to identify, ultimately, what are the objectives they're trying to solve for, what are the outcomes that they're looking for, what's their imperatives? And so for me that's a large piece of this is to engage early. And then focus all those discussions around outcomes versus, fundamentally, that's the basic difference between a product sales motion and a solution sales motion, is really aligning to those outcomes. So it's a cultural shift, no doubt. >> And there's a lot of emerging tech that we're talking about this week. How much is consulting, how much is services, what's kind of the makeup of your organization look like in your engagement with customers? >> So I'd say right now, it's about 50-50. Where about 50% of those services we're trying to engage, and I'm trying to move that to more and more earlier in the process. You know, if I think about, as we develop skills not just around our platform but around the things that are ancillary, cloud, containers, all the different things that are adjacent or add complexity to our world, and most importantly to the customer's world. For me, the earlier we can bring those in so that we can align and ensure that we start their journey, we align to the things that they want, the things that they need in terms of their environment, of serving their customers, aligning to their strategy. So that's a big piece of it, is shifting earlier and driving much more of a consulting base versus just the traditional deployment services. >> So people, process, and technology. We always talk about that on theCUBE. Technology execs always tell us, the practitioners, generally we got that covered. You've been around long enough to know, see different evolutions of technology, and how that technology's applied. The industry's getting so much more complex, things are happening much, much faster. But in thinking about not the technology, but the people and process pieces that have evolved, I wonder if you could comment on what you've seen over your years. Describe kind of where we are today, and where you see it all going? >> Great question. So the rate of change, has been phenomenal. And, it absolutely, it creates challenges every day, which are actually, typically every challenge is an opportunity from my perspective. For me personally, what we really try to focus on is first and foremost develop the skills that are closest, in closest relation to us, so that we can apply those skills and the knowledge and expertise of our engineering team, our consulting team, is ultimately aligned to the customer's. So if you think about things that are happening, for example, without a doubt the one that's happening to virtually all of our customers is a proliferation of cloud. What it really means to them is their information fabric, where their information lies, their charter as an IT organization, our traditional customer, their charter's become much more complex. Just the challenge to identify where all the information assets are is a big opportunity for us to come in and assist them in that process. And then ultimately, to be able to take their strategies around data protection, business continuity or disaster recovery, whatever it is around how they protect and secure that data, to be able to take that into something that has proliferated into so many different areas, both in the infrastructure base and then driven by applications and other cloud deployment methods, so. >> So you guys were both at EMC, where Tucci was always famous for saying we're a products company, not a services company. Veritas, obviously, great engineering team, product company. Talk about services inside of a products company? >> So I'll go back to what I said first and foremost. I believe service is the first charter, although it doesn't have to be the only charter. The first charter that you have to do well is that you have to ensure that you have the skills and capability to guarantee a great customer experience. That for me is the very first piece. So typically that doesn't rise to the occasion of saying it's a services company. It really rises to the occasion of we have a great customer experience, we have a loyal customer base, and we have a customer base that ultimately is so rewarded with the capabilities of the product because they're enjoying them, it's well-integrated in their environment, et cetera, it becomes a sticking customer as well. And that's, I believe that's our first charter. Go ahead? >> Just take us inside some of those customers. What are the real, some of the maintain points you're seeing what are the areas that you find that your team is able to help them the most? >> That's great. Multiple areas. You know, you get started with the very basics, what I would consider very infrastructure-oriented, and very basic around storage. You know, customers are constantly, as clouds are proliferating, so is their storage base. And all of them are ultimately looking for ways that they can lower their costs and still maintain access to the information that they need and protect in the same manner. So, going in and design or architect a solution that allows them to leverage commodity storage, cloud-based storage, et cetera, and still have a lot of the functionality that they're used to, it aligns right into their existing data protection strategy, is one good piece. Monster ROIs on that. Then you get into more complex things around compliance. You know, most notably GDPR being six, seven, eight months out, and it's driving a lot of interest and demand, but in reality if you go around the globe, the vast majority of the countries are driving some level of increased focus on regulations that drive a level of protection of privacy, personal data privacy, et cetera. And again, having the technology is one thing, and Mike does a phenomenal job of building the products that the customers need to be able to locate, classify, protect, et cetera. My job and my charter is to make sure the customers can actually take that technology and use it in that manner, so we're doing, to your question, I'm seeing a huge uptick in that just in the short time I've been here. Tremendous amount of interest, and customers wanting to engage and leverage in that fashion. >> Talk about where Veritas picks up and leaves off relative to some of the SI partners that you have. What's that relationship like? >> So, I'd say we tend to stay fairly focused on our technology, and how we work and partner and align to those types of partners. As a matter of fact, compliance and regulatory activities are a great example of that. If you really think about a typical customer's concerns around how they protect their customer data, their employee data, their supplier data, et cetera. We provide a lot technology and the infrastructure behind that. The overarching process and the business process go much wider. And that's where alignment with systems integrators and things like that that have a much more robust, in terms of breadth and lots of business units, et cetera, becomes an important partnership on our part. We can focus on our piece, really create a solution that's beneficial first and foremost to the customer, and helps complete their solution. >> One of the things Stu and I have been talking about this week is you've got this massive Veritas install base. You're moving towards this vision of modern data protection and information management. Service is going to be key there. How do you get the customer from Point A to Point B, Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." that means pressure's on your organization to make it happen. So what's the conversation like, what's the journey you're taking customers through there? >> A lot of those, what we try and start those journeys first and foremost with assessments or things that are really driven around identifying what the transformational event is. That's all about engaging, bringing the breadth of knowledge around not just the products, but how the products are used and how they can be deployed early in the process. >> And that's a for-pay service? >> That's a for-pay service. But it's something that we really focus on the deliverable, so it's a for-pay service that says hey, we're going to come out with a roadmap, a specific solution, et cetera. >> But that's important, because the customer has skin in the game. >> Jim: They do. >> You know, if it's a freebie, that's nice, but then a lot of times they don't show up for the meeting. >> And that's so true, Dave, and that's a big piece, honestly. And in some cases, candidly, the challenge or the opportunity in terms of for-pay, is to ensure there is skin in the game. I think further down, further into the journey, around what I consider things around driving operational efficiency or optimizing the customer's environment, that actually becomes another great point of entry. And sometimes you go in and just want to ensure that the customers are getting maximum value for their product, that they're continuing to have a great experience, et cetera. But in all cases, ultimately, there's always changes in the environment around, not just environmental changes, changes within the customer around new priorities, new objectives, new imperatives for next year, the following year. And to the extent that we can take that opportunity through assessments and health checks and things like that to identify those, map them up to their business imperatives, and ultimately go in and be sure that they continue down that journey with our solutions is a big piece. >> Jim, one of the things we're also looking at, you sell point products. And then it was kind of a suite, and now we've been talking a little bit about a platform. What's the impact on the services for moving to that integrated platform? >> So it's actually, I'd say, twofold. The first piece is really, first and foremost we want to make sure the customer's are getting maximum value for the solution. And I'd say that's probably charter number one. The other piece is, in many cases, a little bit going to the transformational or the assessment-type services, or more traditional consulting services. In many cases, you buy a platform and you engage and you have three or four pieces of functionality and you're really looking for three. And we just gave you four. One of the opportunities from my perspective is how do we actually ensure that the customer understands the value that they have on that fourth, and then we can deploy it in a manner that they get the most value for it, and it becomes a benefit for us and most importantly a benefit for our customers. >> Feedback from the customers at the event? What have you been hearing? I mean you guys are a year into this 360. What are they telling you? >> It's been phenomenal. Both from customers and partners. I've spent time really probably equally with both. It's been a lot of excitement around the product launches, a lot of excitement around the innovation, not just of the launches for this week, but really the innovation, the changes that have taken place over the last year, even before I joined. I'd say one of the ones that actually has resonated and I've heard most often is when people talk about modernizing data protection. Mike Palmer in yesterday's general session used this slide, it was actually the first time I had seen it as well, and like I got to get a copy of that, because it actually just, it shows with any customer of ours the breadth of change that's taken place in their environment from cloud and hybrid and all the different things. Which is a challenge, and the opportunity for me, to go in and ensure that we continually align to those and we ensure that they're aligned. >> Jim, Veritas has a long history working on lots of different solutions. From a services standpoint, though, I got to think cloud's a little bit different. We've talked to customers. If you're a big customer, you probably get good support. Some smaller ones, well, you're a little bit more on your own. What's your experiences, how is it to work with those hyper-scale partners? >> Uh, so from, one of the things I'd like to do, is I like to ensure that, candidly, we can establish an environment that we can improve and level out the consistency, in some cases, of some of the cloud experiences our customers have. And by the way, I'm also a big fan, and we're really putting a lot of our focus around automation. Which actually takes the burden off of the customers, in many cases. And we'll have a lot of focus in the second half of our fiscal year in the next six months, really around driving automation so that as cloud touches any type of deployment, or interaction with our products, there's all the work, obviously, that Mike and the product teams are driving themselves. There's areas that really fall below that that are really much more aligned to the business process that the customers perform, where I can actually, I believe I can do a lot to improve their service across all the platforms. Whether it's Amazon, Azure, IBM, Google, et cetera. >> We'll give you last thoughts. You talked a little bit about some of the feedback, but Veritas Vision 2017, what's your takeaway? >> Exciting event, great opportunity for me personally to meet a lot of customers in one location. I think a great demonstration of the excitement around the company, where we're at in terms of our evolution as a company, most importantly, where we're at with regards to our product roadmap. >> All right, Jim, we'll leave it there. Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE! >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Thank you, good luck. All right, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Right back. (rippling music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube! Covering Veritas Vision, 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage and we're here covering, wall-to-wall coverage of Veritas Vision 2017, hashtag: VtasVision. I'm Dave Vellante, with Stu Miniman. Lynn Lucas is here. She's the CMO of Veritas; welcome to The Cube. >> I am so excited to be on The Cube for the first time. Thank you for joining us. >> Well, thank you for having us. We're really excited to have you. We were talking off camera and this morning, in our open, about Richard Branson, the keynote. Very inspiring, so interesting, and then you got an opportunity to interview him and it was really substantive. So what was that like, what was it like meeting him, what was he like backstage? Share it with our audience. >> Absolutely. So, first, I, it really was an honor. The man has, when you do the research on him, the number of businesses he's created and disrupted is really amazing when you go back and look at it. The record industry, phone industry, airline industry. I mean, it goes on and on and he's still doing it. What I was most struck with, though, is that he's really humble and approachable. So we spent about 20 minutes with him in the backstage, and he was just a very genuine person. Very concerned, as you and your listeners may have heard, in the keynote, about the impact of the hurricanes. Really committed to philanthropy now, and what I loved is that he really understood what Veritas is doing with data, and he was able to really quickly connect that with how it might help on important issues that he's concerned about, namely climate change, making communities part of businesses, and so forth. It was fantastic. >> Well, I thought he did a really good job, and you guys did a really good job, because he's like, wow, Richard Branson, big name. But why is he at Veritas Vision? And he came, he talked about his agenda, he talked about the hurricane, he connected it to data, to climate change, and he very, like I said off camera, in a non-self-promoting way, let us know very quietly that yeah, of course the fee that I'm getting here I'm donating to the cause, and you should donate too. Right, and it was just really, congratulations on such a good get. >> Well, we were thrilled to have him and really honored to have him, and I truly felt that he understands the importance technology is playing. He actually told us that they were without cell phone and any kind of internet connection right after the hurricane for about, I think what he said was about seven days, and he said it was a very weird, disconnected feeling, because it's become so prevalent in our lives, and then when they all left and got on his plane to go back to London to mobilize aid for the British Virgin Islands, he said that he looked back in the plane, and he said every single person is on their phone like this. And it's such an interesting and powerful tool though, for generating interest in, unfortunately, the very horrible events that have happened, and so the social media, the connectivity that we all experience and getting that word out, I think he really connected with what we do as technologists here, and he had a really fascinating conversation with us about his interest in flying cars, so he's seeing potential for flying cars in the next few years and as a way to perhaps help us reduce carbon emissions and he's excited about technology. So I think he had a lot of fun. >> And we should mention, I think, Bill Coleman and Veritas is matching contributions and then you have extended that through his non-profit? >> Correct, so Bill Coleman also is a great philanthropist like Richard is, and ever since he's arrived here at Veritas he's been very lean-forward with making sure that Veritas is giving back. It was part of the culture, but I really feel that Bill has augmented that, and so for these recent set of disasters, hurricane Harvey, hurricane Irma, Veritas has set up a funding, and then we are doing double matching, and what we did after the unfortunate hurricane Irma came through is Virgin Unite is donating to the BBI's. We've added that to the list of charities and double matching that, as well. >> So people can go to Virgin Unite and donate, or they can donate through your website as well? >> They should go to Virgin Unite and donate, they should go to the, there's also the American Red Cross in the Houston area and the Miami area that are doing donations. Donate, you know, direct through them. >> So please, take a moment, if you can. Donate often, you know, every little bit helps for sure. Okay, so let's get into it. Quite a show, second year of Veritas. It's the rebirth of Veritas, and Veritas, in our view, how do you feel, give us the sort of rundown on the show. >> Oh, I, ah, fantastic. The feedback from the customers, which is what I'm really most concerned about here has been, this year, last year was a great coming out, but this Veritas is much more innovative than we ever thought you could be. We heard the predictions around 360 Data Management last year, but wow, you've delivered. You've got a new set of exciting announcements around what we're doing to move to the cloud. Clearly, the partnership with Microsoft is a huge part of that. New innovations in SDS. And so we've seen a great rise in attendance this year, in terms of our customers, and we've had a fabulous new set of sponsors, which I'm just thrilled to have here. Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, which I think shows the strength of what we're doing to help customers as they move to the cloud, and they really are transforming their datacenter environment. >> So, talk a little bit about digital, as a marketing pro. Every customer we talked to is going through, if you talk to the C-level, they're going through digital transformations; it's real. As a CMO, you're living in a digital transformation. What does it mean from a marketing perspective? How are you addressing, you know, these trends and taking advantage of them? >> It's crucial. I spend most of my time with my staff thinking about: how do we advance our own digital expertise and take advantage of the data that we too have. Really, CMOs are in command of so much data around customers, or should be in command of so much data around customers, in a good way, to provide more content that is directed at what their problems are. I think we've all experienced the uncomfortable feeling where maybe you Google something and suddenly you're getting ad after ad after ad from a company, and it might have been an accidental Google search, right? So we can use it for good in that way, understanding our customers. We're on a real digitization journey. It's a big word, but what it means for me in marketing at Veritas is really advancing and investing in our marketing infrastructure. One of the new things that we've just done is a complete underpinning reboot of Veritas.com, which the audience can see has gone live right here, for Vision. Making the site more personalized and more relevant to those that are visiting it. >> Yeah, Lynn, one of the things we've been digging into a little bit is you have a lot of existing customers with, you know, a very strong legacy. There's all these new trends, and you threw out lots of, you know, really interesting data. You know, the IOT with 269 times greater data than the datacenter, ah, how do you balance, kind of, helping customers, you know, get more out of what they have but bringing them along, showing them the vision, you know, helping them along that path to the future? Because, you know, change is difficult. >> It is, but you know, I have to say, and I think Mike Palmer said this as well, at one point, actually, when I've visited customers, I've been in, this year, I've been to Australia, I've been to France, been to Germany, London, Singapore, all over in the US, and talking to a lot of our existing customers, and what they're telling us is really that: we want your help in moving forward. So, we really embrace our existing customers. We're not in the business of trying to go around them. But they're our best advocates, and I think as a marketer, it's really key to understand that, is your existing customers are your best advocates. So we're helping them understand what we're doing for them today and also helping them learn how they can be advocates and heroes maybe to other parts of the business with some of these new technologies. >> Yeah, that's a great point. I'd love for you to expand on, you know, in IT it was always: up, the admin for my product is kind of where I'm selling, and how do I get up to the C-suite? Conversations we've been having this week, there's a lot of the, you know, cloud strategy, the GDPR, you know, digitization. It's, you know, the person who might have boughten that backup is pulling in other members of the team. Talk to us a little bit about, you know, the dynamics inside the company, where Veritas is having those conversations. >> Yeah, I think actually you brought up GDPR, and that's a perfect example. So GDPR is a regulation that is going to impact any company that is holding data about a European Union citizen, and it's an area that Veritas can really solve problems in, but we didn't know a lot of the legal and compliance buyers, which often are the ones making the purchase decisions in this case. We have been so thrilled to see that our existing advocates in the backup space have been bringing us into conversations and in Europe, what we've done so successfully now is actually bring the two groups together in roundtables and have our current customers bring us into conversations with legal and compliance. And it's creating, for them, stronger connections within the business, and that makes them more relevant to their bosses and those other lines of business, and there's a lot of proactive or positive feedback around that, that I think is what marketers and sales should be thinking about. It's not about how to go around, it's about how do I bring you with me. >> So, as you go around the world, I wonder if, again, another marketing, marketing to me, is very challenging; you've got a hard job. Marketers, I don't have the marketing DNA. But you want to maintain your relevance. You're a 30-plus year old company. Take something like GDPR. How do you think about the content that you serve up your audience? You can scare 'em to death, you know? That's what a lot of people are doing. You can educate them, but it's kind of deep and wonky. How are you thinking about that transfer of knowledge, you know, for the benefit of customers and obviously, ultimately, for the benefit of Veritas? >> So the way I think about that is B to H. Business to Human. So at the end of the day, you know, we talk about B to B marketing or B to C marketing. It's B to H, now, and what I mean by that is: at the end of the day, we're all human, individuals, we have a lot coming at us, as you've pointed out, with information and data, so what we've done is definitely not a scare tactic. Yes, GDPR is coming. But I think that in marketing, my philosophy is: let's work on how we can help you in the positive. I don't believe in the fear, uncertainty and doubt. And what we've done is approach it as we would hope to be approached, which is: let's give you some practical information simply, in amounts that you can absorb. And let's face it, I think Josie was the one that said this, our attention span is about that of a goldfish. I can't remember if it was plus or minus one second. And so, what we've actually gotten great feedback on is that we've broken the GDPR regulation down into very simple parts, and we've said: hey, here are the five parts. Here's how we're relevant and can help you. And we've done that in pieces that are as simple as a one-page infographic. We can obviously go a lot more complex, but at the beginning, when you're researching a topic, you're not looking for the 40-page white paper anymore. You're looking for what we call "snackable" pieces of content that get you interested. >> Yeah, that was good. I remember that infographic from the session yesterday. It was sort of, you know, discover and then four other steps and then, you know, made it sound simple. Even though we know it's more complicated, but at least it allows a customer to frame it. Okay, I think I can now get my arms around these. I understand there's a lot of depth beneath each of them, but it helps me at least begin to clock it. Another topic we want to talk about is women in tech. We had a great conversation with Alicia Johnson from Accenture about WAVE, which is Women and Veritas Empowered. Right? Talk about, again, the relevance of those programs generally and I want to ask you some follow-up questions. >> Sure, so I'm a big believer in those types of programs. We want to sponsor those here and bring together our own Veritas female engineering community, but also our customers that are here. I think that while we would all like it to be a world where we were at a neutral, bias-free, we're not quite there yet. And I think programs that bring people together, whether it's gender or any other dimension, are important to get people to connect in a community, share with each other, learn from each other, and so, I do hope one day for my daughter, who's 11, perhaps that this is a non-topic, but until it isn't, I think the power of sharing is important, and so I'm really pleased to have WAVE. It's our second year having WAVE. It was a bigger program with Accenture sponsoring it. And we look forward to continuing to do that. Veritas also will have a big presence at the Anita Borg Institute, which is coming up next month, as well. >> Yeah, and The Cube will be there, of course. It'll be our, what, fourth year there, Stu? So it's a big show for us and we're obviously big supporters of the topic; we tend to talk about it a lot. And I think, you know, Lynn, your point is right. Hopefully by the time our daughters are grown up, we won't be talking about it, but I think it's important to talk about now. >> Lynn: It is. >> And one of the things that Accenture laid out is that, by 2025, their objective is to have 50 percent, you know, women on staff, and I think it was 25 percent women in leadership positions. I was impressed and struck, and I wonder if you can comment as a C-level executive, struck by the emphasis on P&L management, which, you know, tends to be a man's world. But, thoughts on that and you, as a C-level executive, you know, women in that position? >> Yeah, and again, it's one of these things where I'll have to say it's a little both uncomfortable, but obviously I feel that it is still important to talk about because I wish we were at a place where we didn't have to. I'm really proud of Veritas, because we have myself and Michelle Vanderhar on Bill's staff. So Bill has been a promoter of having diversity on his own direct staff, and I think that top down approach is super important in Silicon Valley and any business that there's real support for that. And Michelle Vanderhar is our chief council, which has, in many cases, not been a position where you would have seen a lady leading that. So we work on that at Veritas, and I personally believe it and I think Mr. Branson said that, as well, in his keynote as well this morning. When we have diversity, we have a breadth of ideas that makes it just a better place to work, and frankly, I think, leads to better innovation in whatever field that you're in. >> Lynn, last question I wanted to ask you, the tagline of the conference is: the truth in information. So much gets talked about, you know, what's real news? You know, what's fake? What do you want people, as the takeaway for Veritas and the show? The truth in information is our rallying cry, and you're right, I think it couldn't be more timely. We're not here to take a particular political stance, but what we find is in the business world, the companies are struggling with: where do I find what's really relevant? Let me give you a story. I was in France earlier this year, sitting with a CIO of one of the very largest oil and gas companies in France. Happens to be a lady who was formerly the chief data officer and she'd moved from that position into the CIO position. And when we talk about the truth in information, the example that she gave us which was so striking is that they've been doing the scans of the Earth, and actually the streets of Paris, for 50, 60 years, to understand the infrastructure, what they may have, and so forth, and at this point, with all of that data, they literally are having a hard time understanding what, out of all of these pieces of information, these topographical scans that they have, is relevant anymore. And this is the same story that I've heard in pharmaceutical companies that are doing drug tests. This is the same story that you would hear in, frankly, media companies that are doing filming, and are trying and all of this is digitized. So, when we talk about that with our customers, it really resonates, is that with so much coming at us, it's hard, in business as well as it is in our consumer lives, to really know: what do I have that's relevant? And I think the opportunity Veritas has is to help customers with a single data management platform, start to get a handle on that and be able to be much more efficient and productive. >> Alright, Lynn Lucas, we have to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on The Cube. We really appreciate it. >> Thank you! I really enjoyed my first time. I can't wait to be back on again, and hope to have you guys here next year, Vision 2018. >> We'd love to be here. Alright, bringing you the truth, from Veritas Vision, this is The Cube. We'll be right back. (uptempo musical theme)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you be Veritas. (light music) >> Welcome back to the Aria Hotel and Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stewart Miniman. Rama Kolappan is here, he's the Vice, worldwide Vice President of Product Management and Global Alliances. Rama, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. So, 360 is a big topic of conversation. It's a fundamental, strategic evolution for Veritas. Why is 360 Data Management needed? >> So, 360 Data Management is an integrated set of products and solutions, if you will, that helps you with data protection, also with copy data management use cases. If you want to move the data and workload for some of the resiliency services as well, and if you, if a customer is also looking for any of the data visibility, which is a very important part of the 360 Data Management. So, we can offer all of it as part of one platform. So it is a very powerful integrated solution set, if you will. >> So we should think of it as a platform, not a product. Everybody talks about platforms today, the API Economy, Platforms beat Products is sort of the mantra, right? Is that the right way to think about it? >> Correct. And, also, we make sure that the different solutions, which is part of 360 Data Management Suite, works with each other, right? For example, if you actually back up your data, you should be able to use the same copy to do a DevTest. So we have a solution called Velocity that is part of our copy data management solution. It should be used, you should be able to use the backup data to do your disaster recovery if you can, right. >> So how does that resonate with customers? I mean, I get the platform perspective, certainly from a vendor view, you got to have the platform. Do the customers see it the same way? Or do they just want to buy products? >> No, so it is a suite, right? And what customers want, especially enterprise customers, they're looking for, to partner with a vendor, like, for example, us. One is for data protection, primarily, in many cases. Once you protect your data, they're looking for instead of finding the products to use, I can use the same data and how can I get value out of it? So I need to have the visibility about the data itself, so we have our InfoMap solution as part of 360 DM suite, to give you the visibility of what that data is with all the metadata information through that, and once they back up the data, they also have other things to do with respect to moving your data, moving your workload, and especially with the cloud adoption, many of them are going through the transformation. There are some pre-consolidation cloud adoption, and so on, so forth, and they need to move their data and workload, say, from on-prem to cloud, and you can also do it from cloud to cloud also, which is coming soon. So, some of those challenges are very critical, and they are looking for someone like Veritas who can offer that solution for them, which is essentially protect it, move your data, workload, be able to do copy data management on it for DevTest use cases, be able to provide visibility, and the digital compliance is a big factor, which I haven't even gone deeper into. There are lot of solutions to offer for the customers. >> Rama, take us inside how 360 Data Management fulfills the vision that was laid out a year ago. I think back to early in my career it was, like, it was the hardware, you know, you follow the Tick-tock of Intel. Today, software, we can usually talk a little bit further about the roadmap but, you know, customers are going to hold you well, "Can I use it now?" Do you have all those pieces, you know? What kind of pieces have been filled in this week, and, you know, where are the pieces where it's more aspirational than where we are today? >> I'm surprised you remembered the Tick-tock Model, which is essentially go through the process and architecture change, alternating with Intel, right? That's the model, I was there for like nine years or so. >> Marching to the cadence of Moore's law, that's what we used to do as an industry. >> Exactly. So, for 360 Data Management, we announced it last year at Vision and at that point, we are putting in the solutions and the use cases together. And what we did, we worked really hard the past one year to make sure that we put these solutions together. One, they should work with each other. Two, we have a tighter integration. And three, we should be also adding more solutions together and we made it also easier for a customer to buy, it's one SKU, right? So, you don't need to have multiple SKUs to do 10 different things. It's much easier to buy. It'll do all the things that an enterprise customer want with all the stuff that I talked about earlier, and from there on, they should be also, we should be able to also cater to some of the newer problems that customers have, which is, essentially, we launched CloudPoint, for example, which does a snapshot management, and we're adding more capabilities to it, and going forward, you will see that the 360 Data Management will evolve to cater to the customer needs. We always place customer in the forefront and make sure that their needs are met first, and that's the stuff that will design the solution, based on their needs. >> We spoke to Mike Palmer this morning and one of the things he said that kind of matured a little bit is, "That interaction with the cloud, when you get down into it, it's nice to talk about public clouds and people use many clouds but they're all a little bit different." So, maybe take us inside, there's a couple announcements you made, maybe give us a little bit of color on that and, you know, come on, tell us how is it working with all these big players? >> So, I run the technology alliances team here as well, so my team works with the various cloud vendors, which is essentially Azure through IBM to Google, AWS, and so on, so forth, right? So we are already working with AWS on multiple product integration, deeper integration. With Azure we are making sure that from some of the roadmap, like when recently we launched EnterpriseWorld, to make sure that it supports Azure, and then also we launched the VIP release that happened very recently. Support for Azure, as well. And we make sure that the other products that I talked about have the cloud as a significant piece of it, part of the roadmap. We have other vendors that are, we have partners that we are working with like IBM, Google, et cetera. They have their own strengths and we are initially going to go, we already sell on a backup as part of our, with IBM. We've been doing that business with them for more than 10 years, right? So there's a lot of moving parts in the sense that they are coming up with a lot of innovation. We are coming up with a lot of innovation and we make sure that we deliver what the customers want with those cloud vendors. And a very simple example is that if you want to do a data and workload migration on-prem to cloud, we can help with that very critical use case for anyone who's going through, looking at cloud transformation and journey to cloud. And, likewise, basic use cases also like backup to cloud, backup in cloud, disaster recovery, migration, DevTest, and these use cases is what we target, and it is part of the 360 Data Management suite itself. >> Can I ask you, it's kind of a wonky question, but it's something I'm curious about, and we talked to Mike Palmer a little bit about it, the challenge of integrating to various cloud services, in the non-trivial nature that, his answer was actually quite interesting. He said, "Listen, it was a lot harder "when we had a gazillion OS's, a lot easier now." But I want to understand that better. So, when you look at, and I am going to pick AWS only because I know it a little bit better and their services, but when you look at the myriad of data, sort of services that they have, are you just targeting the data stores? Like, an S3 or an EBS or a Glacier, or do you have to also think about integrating with other data types, DynamoDB, Kinesis, RedShift, Aurora, et cetera, et cetera. How far do you have to go, and what are the complexities of doing that? >> It's a very interesting time, right. There are various cloud service providers who are there, and each of them have their own services and their own storage, right? So, there's no one standard. S3 has been a standard for last one or two years or so. What we are doing is that we're looking at the portfolio, and we look at the use cases for what we are trying to solve for the customers in the cloud and based on that, we actually have some basic use cases which you don't need a full integration. You need some integration with some of those services, which is where we have people that are doing a lot of closer integration with AWS, and other service providers as well. Going forward, we will be using some of those, you mentioned about many DynamoDB, and other services that they have, machine learning services that they have. >> Stu: Sure. >> And different cloud providers have their own strengths and where they, what they offer. So, we will be looking to integrate with our existing portfolio with some of those services so that it is beneficial for customer. For example, if a customer wants to use only AWS, we are tightly integrated so that they get the best experience in AWS, same thing with Azure, same thing with Google cloud, same thing with IBM cloud, same thing with Oracle public cloud. So, that's our direction. First things first, get all of these basic use cases catered to for the customer. Going forward, have a tighter integration with their services. >> And your value in that chain is visibility and management. It's not so much optimization of that service, is it? >> So, I wouldn't call it as optimization of services. We focus a lot on the data visibility. I think in the keynote, and in my keynote, you might have heard also, is that some of the things that customers, we talk with customers a lot and we find that many of the, many times, they don't know what they have it. Everyone knows that it's called dark data, right. We provide the visibility so that they know what data they have before they do any migration. They know what needs to be migrated. And, as you all know, there are different storage tiers in cloud, like your S3, S3IA. You have your Glacier and it is expensive to bring data back from, say, Glacier to any other storage tier all on-prem. So, you need to have the visibility before you send the data out, right? So, we helped with that as well. So, visibility plays a very critical role in so many areas, not even just cloud but also on-prem as well. >> Rama, 360 Data Management's vision was laid out a year ago. A lot of the pieces are in place now. How are you tracking success, you know? Can you give us how many customers you're doing or just kind of growth, adoption, and how should we be looking forward to kind of measure and say how good this is doing? >> So, we actually launched 360 Data Management not too long ago. In the sense we put the package together, program together, and, as part of it, we saw extremely a lot of good traction not just from one geo, we actually saw a lot of traction in Asia Pacific, in MER, in Americas as well. A lot of the customers are looking for, I mean, there are three tiers to it, as well. We have bronze, gold, silver, right? And we see equal traction across the board. And, right now, I can't give you the numbers numbers, but, having said that, we see a lot of traction from customers on adoption and we have a huge pipeline where customers are very interested. These are backup customers who are looking to do many other things like resiliency services, like copy data management, and so on, so forth. So, the 360 Data Management really solves the problem, what they're looking for. >> Yeah. Can you give us a little color to that packaging and pricing? It's a subscription model to my understanding. >> It is a subscription model but-- >> Which is a little different than if you have a traditional and, you know, what are you seeing, what's the feedback been from customers? >> So, it is a subscription model when we went to market. We are going to be offering as a perpetual as well. So there is a gold, silver bronze tier, I had mentioned it. We have a Backup, InfoMap, and also EBFile as part of the bronze. And then you have, we have P as part of the silver plus bronze together and then in the gold, we have Access, also, as part of the solution. So, they can pick what they want and from our... Going forward, we do hear feedback from customers that they want perpetual as well. So, we already, we heard them. We'll make it happen. >> How about the small, midsize business, what are you, what are you doing for them? And can you talk about that a little bit? >> I'm glad you asked that because a lot of the 360 Data Management is centered around net backup, right? And with net backup, adark, all the good releases. There are also a lot of SMB and mid-market customers, and we have a solution called BackupExec, and I'm sure most of you are aware of BackupExec, it's been there for many years. So, BackupExec solves their problem and within BackupExec, we make sure that there are a lot of SMB customers who have like three or four backup products. And we want to make sure that there's one product that can protect the physical, virtual, and cloud environments. So, BackupExec does that. >> Last question. So, the ecosystem, it's evolving. You guys have great ambitions. Microsoft was here, had a big, big presence. Maybe just general thoughts on the ecosystem and, specifically, your relationship with Microsoft and other cloud suppliers. >> So, we work very closely from a strategic level with the CSPs. We call them the Cloud Service Providers. With Microsoft, we are doing a lot of, not just product integration for Azure, we'll also be supporting many things for AzureStack going forward. We're working with them on that. Also, I mentioned about BackupExec, we're also going to market. We are spending a significant amount of money to define the goal, to go to market with them, with their partners, and so on, so forth. Not just for BackupExec but across for all other products. That said, we also have other partners from the Cloud Service Provider point of view. There is a lot of effort happening from product integration, defining goal market, and as we define that, we're also engaging with their channel partners, who are also our channel partners, to help with the goal market. >> Cool, alright. Well, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, Rama. Really great to meet you and great to talk to you. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back. (light music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's The Cube covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We are here covering Veritas Vision 2017, the hashtag is VtasVision. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman my cohost David Noy is here, he's the vice president of product management at Vertias. David, thanks for coming to The Cube. >> Thanks for having me, pretty excited. >> Yes, we enjoyed your keynote today taking us through the new product announcements. Let's unpack it, you're at the center of it all. Actually, let's start with the way you started your keynote is you recently left EMC, came here, why, why was that? >> I talk to lots and lots of customers, hundreds, thousands of customers. They're enterprise customers, they're all trying to solve the same kind of problems, reducing infrastructure costs, moving to commodity based architectures, moving to the cloud, in fact they did move to the cloud in Angara. If you look at the NAS market in 2016 it had been on a nice two percent incline until about the second half of 2016 it basically dove 12% and a big part of that was enterprises who were kicking the tires finally saying we're going to move to cloud and actually doing it as opposed to just talking about it. At EMC and a lot of the other big iron vendors they have a strategy that they discuss around helping customers move to cloud, helping them adopt commodity, but the reality is they make their money, their big margin points, on selling branded boxes, right? And as much as it's lip service, it's really hard to fulfill that promise when that's where you're making your revenue, you have revenue margin targets. Veritas on the other hand, it's a software company. We're here to sell software, we're able to make your data more manageable to understand that it's a truth in information, I don't need to own every bit, and I thought that the company that can basically A, provide the real promise of what software define offers is going to be a software company. Number two is that you can't buck the trend of the cloud it's going to happen, and either you're in the critical path and trying to provide friction, in which case you're going to become irrelevant pretty soon or you enable it and figure out how to partner with the cloud vendors in a nonthreatening way. I found that Veritas, because of its heterogeneity background, hey you want AIX, you want Linux, you want Solaris, great, we'll help you with all those. We can do the same thing with the cloud, and the cloud vendors will partner up with us because they love us for that reason. >> Before we get into the products, let's unpack that a little bit. Why is it that as Veritas you can participate in profit from that cloud migration? We know why you can't as a hardware vendor because ultimately the cloud vendor is going to be providing the box. >> Well, the answer is that, a couple things. One is, we believe and even the cloud vendors believe that you're going to be in a hybrid environment. If you project out for the next ten years, it's likely that a lot of data and applications and workloads will move to cloud, but not all of them will. And you probably end up in about a 50/50 shift. The vendor who can provide the management and intelligence and compliance capabilities, and the data protection capabilities across both your on-prem, and your off-premise state as a single unified product set is going to win, in my opinion, that's number one. Number two is that the cloud vendors are all great, but they specialize in different things. Some are specialized in machine learning, some are really good with visual image recognition, some are really good with mobile applications, and people are, in my opinion, going to go to two, three, four different clouds, just like I would go to contracting agencies, some might be good at giving me engineers, I might go to dice.com for engineers, I might go to something completely different for finance people, and you're going to use the best of breed clouds for specific applications. Being able to actually aggregate what you have in your universe of multicloud, and your hybrid environment and allowing you, as an administrator to be aware of all my assets, is something that as a non-branded box pusher, as a software vendor I can go do with credibility. >> You're a recovering box pusher. >> I'm a recovering box pusher, I'm one month into recovery, so thank you very much. >> And David, one of the things we're trying to understand a little bit, you've got products that live in lots of these environments, why do you have visibility into the data? Is it because they're backup customers, is it other pieces? Help us understand in that multicloud world, what I need to be to get that full. >> That's a great question and I'll bridge into some of the new products too. Number one is that Veritas has a huge amount of data that's basically trapped in repositories because we do provide backup, we're the largest backup vendor. So we have all this data that's essentially sitting inactive you know, Mike talks about it, Mike Palmer our CPO, talks about it as kind of like the Uber, you know, what do you do with your car when it's not being used, or Air BnB if you will, what do you do with your home when it's not being used, is you potentially rent it out. You make it available for other purposes. With all this trapped data, there's tons of information that we can glean that enterprises have been grabbing for years and years and years. So that's number one, we're in a great position 'cause we hold a lot of that data. Now, we have products that have the capabilities through classification engines, through engines that are extending machine learning capabilities, to open that data up and actually figure out what's inside. Now we can do it with the backup products, but let's face it, data is stored in a number of different other modaliites, right? So there's blocked data that is sitting at the bottom of containerized private clouds, there are tons and tons of unstructured data sitting in NAS repositories, and growing off-prem, but actually on prem this object storage technology for the set it and forget it long term retention. All of that data has hidden information, all of it can be extracted for more value with our same classification engines that we can run against the net backup estate, we can basically take that and extend that into these new modalities, and actually have compelling products that are not just offering infrastructure, but that are actually offering infrastructure with the promise of making that data more valuable. Make sense? >> It does, I mean it's the holy grail of backup. For years it's been insurance, and insurance is a good business, don't get me wrong, but even when you think about information governance, through sarbanes-oxley and FRCP et cetera, it was always that desire to turn that corpus of data into something more valuable than just insurance, it feels like, like you're saying with automated classification and the machine learning AI, we're sort of at the cusp of that, but we've been disappointed so many times what gives you confidence that this time it'll stick? >> Look, there's some very straightforward things that are happening that you just cannot ignore. GDPR is one, there's a specific timeline, specific rules, specific regulatory requirements that have to be met. That one's a no brainer, and that will drive people to understand that, hey when they apply our policies against the data that they have they'll be able to extract value. That'll be one of many, but that's an extreme proof-point because there's no getting around it, there's no interpretation of that, and the date is a hard date. What we'll do is we'll look quickly at other verticals, we'll look at vertical specific data, whether its in data surveillance, or germain sequencing or what have you, and we'll look at what we can extract there, and we'll partner with ISVs, is a strategy that I learned in my past life, in order to actually bring to market systems or solutions that can categorize specific, vertical industry data to provide value back to the end users. If we just try to provide a blanket, hey, I'm just going to provide data categorization, it's a swiss army knife solution. If we get hyper-focused around specific use cases, workloads and industries now we can be very targeted to what the end users care about. >> If I heard right, it's not just for backup, it's primary and secondary data that you're helping to solve and leverage and put intelligence into these products. >> That's right, initially we have an enormous trapped pool of secondary data, so that's great, we want to turn that trapped pool from just basically a stagnant pool into something that you can actually get value out of. >> That Walking Dead analogy you used. >> The Walking Dead, yeah. We also say that there's a lot of data that sits in primary storage, in fact there's a huge category of archive, which we call active archive, it's not really archive, still wanted on spinning disk or flash. You still want to use it for some purpose but what happens when that data goes out into the environment? I talked to customers in automotive, for example, automotive design manufacturers, they do simulations, and they're consuming storage and capacity all the time, they've got all of these runs, and they're overrunning their budget for storage and they have no idea which of those runs they can actually delete, so they create policies like "well, if it hasn't been touched "in 90 days, I'll delete it," Well, just because it hasn't been touched in 90 days doesn't mean there wasn't good information to be gleaned out of that particular simulation run, right? >> Alright, so I want to get back to the object, but before we go deeper there, block and file, there's market leaders out there that seems that, it's a bit entrenched, if you will, what between the hyperscale product and Veritas access, what's the opportunity that you see that Veritas has there, what differentiates you? >> Sure, well, let's start with block. The one big differentiator we'll have in block storage is that it's not just about providing storage to containerized applications. We want to be able to provide machine learning capabilities to where we can actually optimize the IO path for quality of service. Then, we also want to be able to through machine learning determine whether, if it's how you decide to run your business, you want a burst workloads actually out into the cloud. So we're partnered with the cloud vendors, who are happy to partner with us for the reasons that I described earlier, is that we're very vendor agnostic, we're very heterogeneous. To actually move workloads on-prem and off-prem that's a very differentiated capability. You see with a few of the vendors that are out there, I think Nutanix for example, can do that, but it's not something that everyone's going after, because they want to keep their workloads in their environments, they want to check controls. >> And if I can, that high speed data mover is your IP? >> That's right, that's our IP. Now, on the file system side... >> Just one thing, cloud bursting's one of those things, moving real-time is difficult, physics is still a challenge for us. Any specifics you can give, kind of a customer use case where they're doing that? A lot of times I want this piece of the application here, I want to store the data there, but real time, doing things, I can't move massive amounts of data just 'cause, speed of light. >> If you break it down, I don't think that we're going to solve the use case of, "I'm going to snap my finger "and move the workload immediately offline." Essentially what we'll do is we'll sync the data in the background, once it has been synced we'll actually be able to move the application offline and that'll all come down to one of two things: Either user cases that exceed the capabilities of the current infrastructure and I want to be able to continue to grow without building them into my data center, or I have an end of the month processing. A great case is I have a media entertainment company that I used to work with that was working on a film, and it came close to the release date of that film, and they were asked to go back and recut and reedit that film for specific reasons, a pretty interesting reason actually, it had to do with government pressure. And when they went to go back and edit that film they essentially had a point where like, oh my gosh, all of the servers that were dedicated to render for this film have been moved off to another project. What do we do now, right? The answer is, you got to burst. And if you had cloud burst capabilities you could actually use whatever application and then containerize whether you're running on-prem or off-prem, it doesn't matter, it's containeraized, if we can get the data out there into the cloud through fast pipes then basically you can now finish that job without having to take all those servers back, or repurchase that much infrastructure. So that's a pretty cool use case, that's things that people have been talking about doing but nobody's every successfully done. We're staring to prove that out with some vendors and some partners that potentially even want to embed this in their own solutions, larger technology partners. Now, you wanted to talk about file as well, right, and what makes file different. I spent five years with one of the most successful scale-up file systems, you probably know who they are. But the thing about them was that extracting that file system out of the box and making it available as a software solution that you could layer on any hardware is really hard, because you become so addicted to the way that the behavior of the underlying infrastructure, the behavior of the drives, down to the smart errors that come off the drives, you're so tied into that, which is great because you build a very high performance available product when you do that, but the moment you try to go to any sort of commodity hardware, suddenly things start to fall apart. We can do that, and in fact with our file system we're not saying "hey, you've got to go it on "commodity servers and with DAS drives in them." You could layer it on top of your existing net app, your Isolon, your whatever, you name it, your BNX, encapsulate it, and create policies to move data back and forth between those systems, or potentially even provision them out say, "okay, you know what, this is my gold tier, "my silver tier, my bronze tier." We can even encapsulate, for example, a directory on one file service, like a one file system array, and we can actually migrate that data into an object service, whether its on-prem or off-prem, and then provide the same NFS or SMB connectivity back into that data, for example a home directory migration use case, moving off of a NAS filer onto an object storer, on premise or off premise and to the end user, they don't know that things have actually moved. We think that kind of capability is really critical, because we love to sell boxes, if that's what the customer wants to buy from us, and appliance form factor, but we're not pushing the box as the ultimate end point. The ultimate end point is that software layer on top, and that's where the Veritas DNA really shines. >> That's interesting, the traditional use cases for block certainly, and maybe to a lesser extent file, historically fairly well known an understood. So to your point, you could tune an array specifically for those use cases, but in this day and age the processes, and the new business models that are emerging in the digital economy, very unpredictable in terms of the infrastructure requirements. So your argument is a true software defined capability is going to allow you to adapt much more freely and quickly. >> We've also built and we've demoed at Vision this week machine learning capabilities to actually go in and look at your workloads that are running against those underlying infrastructure and tell you are they correctly positioned or not. Oh, guess what, we really don't think this workload should belong on this particular tier that you've chosen, maybe you ought to consider moving it over here. That's something that historically has been the responsibility of the admin, to go in and figure out where those policies are, and try to make some intelligent decisions. But usually those decisions are not super intelligent, they're just like, is it old, is it not old, do I think it's going to be fast? But I don't really know until runtime, based on actual access patterns whether it's going to be high performance or not. Whether it's going to require moving or aging or not. By using machine learning type of algorithms we can actually look at the data, the access patterns over time, and help the administrators make that decision. >> Okay, we're out of time, but just to summarize, hyperscales, the block, access is the scale out, NAS piece, cloud object... >> Veritas cloud storage we call it. Veritas cloud storage, very similar to the access product is for object storage, but again it's not trying to own the entire object bits, if you will, we'll happily be the broker and the asset manager for those objects, classify them and maintain the metadata catalog, because we think it's the metadata around the data that's critical, whether it lives off-prem, on-prem, or in our own appliance. >> You had a nice X/Y graph, dollars on the vertical axis, high frequency of access to the left part of the horizontal axis, lower SLAs to the right, and you had sort of block, file, object as the way to look at the world. Then you talked about the intelligence you bring to the object world. Last question, and then let's end there. Thoughts on object, Stu and I were talking off camera, it's taken a long time, obviously S3 and the cloud guys have been there, you've seen some take outs of object storage companies. But it really hasn't exploded, but it feels like we're on the cusp. What's your observation about object? >> I think object is absolutely on the cusp. Look, people have put it on the cloud, because traditionally object has been used for keeping deep, and because performance doesn't matter, and the deeper you get, the less expensive it gets. So a cloud provider's great, because they're going to aggrigate capacity across 1,000 or 20,000 or a million customers. They can get as deep as possible, and they can slice it off to you. As a single enterprise, I can never get as deep as a cloud service provider. >> The volume, right? >> But what ends up happening is that more and more workloads are not expecting to hold a connection open to their data source. They're actually looking at packetize, get-put type semantics that you can see in genomic sequencing, you see it in a number of different workloads where that kind of semantic, even in hydoop analytic workloads, where that kind of get-put semantic makes sense, not holding that connection open, and object's perfect for that, but it hasn't traditionally had the performance to be able to do that really well. We think that by providing a high performance object system that also has the intelligence to do that data classification, ties into our data protection products, provides the actionable information and metadata, and also makes it possible to use on-prem infrastructure as well as push to cloud or multicloud, and maintain that single pane of glass for that asset management for the objects is really critical, and again, it's the software that matters, the intelligence we build into it that matters. And I think that the primary workloads in a number of different industries in verticals or in adopting object more and more, and that's going to drive more on premise growth of object. By the way, if you look at the NAS market and the object market, you see the NAS market kind of doing this, and you see the object market kind of doing this, it's left pocket right pocket. >> And that get-put framework is a simplifying factor for organizations so, excellent. David, thank you very much for coming on The Cube. We appreciate it. >> Appreciate it, thanks for having me. >> You're welcome, alright, bringing you the truth from Veritas Visions, this is The Cube. We'll be right back, right after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Veritas Vision, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is Day One wrap of the Veritas Vision conference. Veritas, as we said earlier, is a company that has gone through a number of changes, Stu. I mean, I remember when the company launched in 1983. It was sort of, you know, it was focused on backup. It was Veritas and Legato. And they kind of grew through the PC era and the client server era, really started to take off. And then they exploded in the internet era. Their evaluation went through the roof. They ended up buying C8's backup business. They really drove that and then got purchased by Symantec for a big number. I mean, I think the number was 15 billion. I mean, it was in the teens as I recall. Really never did much under Symantec, or, Symantec never did much with Veritas. I think they had a vision of information management and that never really panned out. Spun the company back out, devested it, sale to Carlyle and some other investors for, I thought the number was 8 billion, somebody told me 7 billion today. That must be net of cash. 2.3 billion dollars in revenue. My understanding from sources is that valuation is way, way up, nearly double from 2015. Now, maybe that's an inflated number, but I'm not surprised. The market's been booming. So that's sort of the inside organizational issues. We're here at The Aria, what do you say, Stu, a couple thousand people, 2500? >> Yeah, it's about 2000, Dave, and it's interesting, I talked to some people that had gone to the old Veritas Vision, years ago, and gotten up to about 4000 or 5000 people. But, grown since last year, good energy at the show. We got to talk to the Vox community people. They've got 10,000 people online contributing to their forums, participating, launched the VIP program for some of the super users they have here. Definitely good crowd in the keynote. Good people clapping and participating, getting excited. It surprised me a little bit the number one topic of conversation is GDPR. As you said in our last interview, we're going down the deep abyss of how you're going to get litigated out of all of your money if you don't follow this. It's like way worse than Y2K, ah, some stuff's going to break and maybe turn off for a bit. >> Well, you know what I liked about the GDPR discussions though, they had answers. >> Yeah. >> Other events where I've gone to GDPR, it's been scary, scary, scary, scare you, scare you, scare you, and then call us. >> Yeah. >> And we'll give you some services. What I liked about, what I'm hearing from Veritas is, they've got at least a quasi-prescription as to what to do. So that's good. But the more interesting part to me Stu is you've got this enterprise backup legacy, I'll say it, legacy backup install base, enormous. A leader, they've mentioned many times, 15 years in a row leader in the magic quadrant. And I believe it, you talk to customers, what are you running, NetBackup, everybody's running NetBackup. But how they're transitioning into this vision of multi-cloud, data protection resilience across the Enterprise, across clouds, hyper scale. What I'm not fully clear on yet is how they get customers from point A to point B. And we heard from the keynotes this morning and Bill Campbell. We invested a bunch of dough in R&D, we're writing stuff that's cloud-native, container-based, micro services. So sort of all the right application development buzzwords and I believe that they're developing there. But I don't understand how they migrate that install base. Is there some kind of abstraction layer? Is there some kind of new UI? We heard them jokingly say today in the keynotes that, we hear you, customers, we know our UI sucked, we're working on that. I didn't see any announcements on that, but, that's something that, presumably, is a promise they're putting forth. But, I wasn't clear, maybe you could help clear it up, on how you get from point A of legacy install backup software to this nirvana of multi-cloud hyper scale micro services. >> Yeah, I mean, Dave, when we talked to Bill Coleman, his three Vs, value, vision, and that values of the company itself, clearly has got a compelling vision. He said not only ten years from now, but probably five years from now, every product I'm selling is going to be obsolete. And it's an interesting thing to hear because 15 years of experience, we're trusted, but we know that every product that you bought from Veritas in the past is going to be replaced by new things. And, right, how do we get, say okay, I've been buying that backup for a decade, do I get this visualization product, and if I'm looking at AWS, is Veritas the company I turn to? So really it gets down to, Dave, that blocking and tackling. Talked about the consultants, the partners, both on the go to market side as well as the technology side. Can Veritas get in there, can they have compelling differentiated products that solve a need in the market? We've talked to a number of companies this last year where I've looked at is this hybrid multi-cloud world. If you're software, how do you play in this market? Because isn't Microsoft, Google, Amazon, aren't they going to just do this? Information governance invisibility, absolutely. Amazon has a solution for you. Google has a solution for you. Microsoft has solutions. But, if I'm going to be across those environments, we haven't had a solution that goes across all of those environments. So, there's a hole in the ecosystem, and Veritas, along with many other companies, are trying to put that big elephant on the table and eat pieces out of it, so, it's interesting. >> And Coleman's background, from BEA, started at BEA, I think he took the thing up to half a billion dollars, sold it to Oracle for a big number. But you look at what BEA did, they were sort of the application integration glue. And that's a lot of, you hear a lot of similar messaging modernized around multi-cloud, around hyper scale, around micro services and the like. So, Coleman obviously has experience doing that. I thought he's a very clear thinker. I had not met him before. Furrier knows him pretty well, from his VC days. But I thought he laid out a pretty clear direction. So he's got street cred on this. SEEP com, done it before, I think this company has a decent balance sheet. They seem to have some patient capital in Carlyle. It doesn't appear that Carlyle's trying to suck all the money out. They don't have the 90-day shot clock. He basically, Bill Coleman basically said, look, we're fine shrinking to grow. We're shifting from a upfront license model, perpetual license model, to a ratable model. We could never do that as a public company. So it's going to be very interesting to see if and when they emerge as a public company, what that looks like and where they come from. >> Yeah, and Dave, one of the things I've been poking at is where do they sell to? If this was the backup administrator, that's not somebody that's going to help them with the transformation. It's digital transformation, it's my cloud strategy. It's things like GDPR where I'm going to need to get up the stack to the CIO, to the C-suite, prove the value that Veritas has, and therefore they can then get all these new products in where everything, the 360 data management, really at the core of what they're doing, and whole lots of other products. I mean, Dave, we didn't even dig into some of the object and file storage pieces that are in here. I know we've got their chief product officer on the Cube tomorrow. But a lot of products, pretty broad software suite. And for an infrastructure company, it's always interesting to hear them say, really, infrastructure doesn't matter. The no hardware agenda, but it's your data that matters, and we've got a vision here at Veritas Vision to bring you forward and lots of plays on the name of the company. Veritas, the show is the truth in information. >> Yeah, so, let's talk about the lineup tomorrow. A lot of product stuff tomorrow. Mike Palmer's coming on, he gave a great keynote this morning. Very funny, he gave a scenario of the world ending because basically people didn't have their data act together. They had these images of Las Vegas hotels in chaos and waterfalls running through the hotels and drones attacking and just total chaos. So we're going to get into a lot of the portfolio stuff and I think try to answer, Stu, some of those questions that I raised about how do you get customers from point A, where they are today, to point B. Are you going to, how are you going to transition them. Are there financial incentives? Is there some kind of abstraction layer that you're developing? What is that framework that brings us to that nirvana? So, give you the last word here, Stu. >> Yeah, so looking forward to digging in more with some of the customers, some of the partners. Good energy at the show. It's exciting to be here for the first time. And looking forward to Day Two. >> All right, good, good wrap, Stu. Thank you, and thank you for watching. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news. We saw some Oracle news today. Hitachi changed its name or Pentaho changed its name, we're not really sure about that. But all the news on siliconangle.com, go to wikibon.com for all the research. And of course, thecube.net to see this show, replays, youtube.com/siliconangle is where we archive all this stuff. Lot of websites. >> Yeah, and make sure to subscribe on our YouTube channel. >> Yeah, please do subscribe on that YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter, @thecube, @stuminiman, @dvellante. That's a wrap Day One, this is The Cube, we'll see you tomorrow from Veritas Vision from Vegas, take care. (techno music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Aria in Las Vegas everybody. This is the CUBE, the leader is live tech coverage. And we're here covering Veritas Vision, #VtasVision. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Bill Coleman is here. He's the CEO of Veritas. Bill, thanks for coming on the CUBE, good to see you. >> My pleasure, thank you for hosting us. >> Well, you're very welcome. And so, hot off the keynote, how do you feel, how's the show going for you so far? >> Well, I'll tell you what. I feel verit-awesome! >> (laughs) Verit-awesome is the watchword here. Get the crowd talk of Verit-awesome. I love that you started out with a little retrospective from last year. You used the term digital twin. We love that term, and you said it's sort of grown up now. I like to think the digital twins are sort of in their adolescent or even teenage years. The data is sort of out of control. We're not hearing today a message of legacy backup. We're hearing a vision of the future. Talk about that and what that vision looks like. >> Our customers obviously need data protection. They need resiliency. They need everything they've needed in the past. But that's not what they're interested in. That's assumed, that has to work. What they're interested in is the power of information. We like to say that our mission is to harness the power of information. And it's what's called digital transformation. Being able to use all that data out on the internet with all of their data, to change how they do business. To change what their products are. To change their supply chain. It's all about machine learning, predictive analytics, and the power of information. >> So I started in this business the same year that Veritas was born. And so I saw the ascendancy of Veritas and the many different forms that the company had taken. But I used to use Veritas as an example. You want to be like Veritas, with no hardware agenda. You want to be the glue that brings things together. And I saw in the conversation today a little bit of BEA-like thinking. The binder, if you will. Binding clouds together. My term, you guys didn't use that term, but to us, that's a critical value-add, and it's all around the data. You guys talked about digital business. To us, digital business means data, and it seems like we sort of share that common belief. >> Absolutely. You know, we've called this the information age for 50 years? But it's not been about information, it's been about technology. We finally have the ability to address that information, and do it over the internet, everywhere and everything. That's really what our vision is. You know, at BEA, we saw the internet emerging. And the world had to distribute, and take advantage of all that power across the whole world. And we invented that. But the key was, when I came up with the first concept of BEA in '93, I said, "You know, by the year 2000, "the network is going to be the computer." The network needs an operating system to make it all work. Well the concept here, and the reason that I actually took this job, is looking ahead ten years. Everything's going to be about information. No organization's going to be able to exist without leveraging the power of that information. Because that's the only way they'll bring their customer the value they need. That's the only way they compete, and without it, their business is just going to go down. >> Yeah, Bill, how are customers going to leverage data? You mentioned it's about the information, it's not about the technology. But you know, I look at customers. They've had storage people, they have network people. You know, "Oh, I'm excited about containers." We spent the last 15 years focused on virtualization. Is it Chief Data Officer? Or is it some other structure that customers, how are some of the leading customers that are going to be able to adopt this, how are they changing to be able to leverage that data and information? >> Well first, you have to understand, the technology has been complex, hard to use, hard to manage. As we saw earlier in the keynotes, it's like building a Rube Goldberg device. They had 27 different software products, and 14 different hardware products to sort of work together. Well, that's all disappearing. With cloud and the internet, it's becoming like a utility. You just subscribe to it. So that goes away. Now what you have to do, what we have to do, is we have to give them the tools that they can easily, visually look at that data, determine what's in that data, be maneuvering it, move it around, like in the movie, uh-- >> Stu: Minority Report? >> Minority Report. And literally, the things we talked about today, the demos we showed can lead to that. With machine learning predictive analytics, our biggest customers are already investing billions of dollars to do that. 'Cause they know if they don't jump ahead, their competition's going to do it. It's the power of information. >> So one of the things I might take away today was not only is Veritas hardware agnostic, but in many respects, you're workload agnostic. In other words, what I mean by that is, a lot of the events that Stu and I and the CUBE goes to, the enterprise companies are talking about on prem and that's where their business is, and much of your business, of course, is on prem. But we heard a message today of, "We really don't care where it lives. "We want to be the innovator "to help you get value out of your data "no matter where it lives." Now a lot of people will say that, but you really don't care where it lives. Is that true? >> And we can't. Look at, data's not just in an enterprise's data centers anymore. They're using clouds. We've surveyed our customers. Our average enterprise customer is using three public clouds already. And they have dozens of SASS applications like Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow. Their data's in there too. That's really complex. What we've done is we've take and build the products that run in the cloud, across the cloud, to and from the cloud all by one policy orchestration. So you don't have to think about any of that. You can discover the data, categorize the data, manage the data and analyze the data all from one interface, end to end. >> So the obvious hard question follow-up is that what give you confidence that the cloud guys, once they get that workload, aren't going to just sort of usurp that agenda? What do you have to do to maintain that customer delight? >> Well, the first thing is the cloud, the public cloud providers, are our very close partners. You know, the first month we started this, Bill Voss, who heads storage for AWS, and I worked with him and Sun, came down to us and said, "Look, our customers need backup." You know, snapshots are great, but if somebody deletes a snapshot, it's gone. Your data's gone. How are you going to protect that? How are you going to analyze that data? When we want to partner with you? So we partnered with them. But the other thing he said was, "And if we do it exclusively, "the enterprises aren't going to use us." I had the CIO of one of the top five banks in the world tell me right after I started this, "We've got to be using three clouds simultaneously. "We never want to be stuck in the cloud." So the cloud service providers know that the enterprise customers want and demand that portability. And we become their, we're the premier partner for Amazon, for Microsoft, for Google, and for IBM. >> So, it's relationships. >> Right. >> But it's also innovation. >> Absolutely. >> So talk about where you are with R & D. You're purchased by a private equity company. You might have heard the narrative beforehand. A lot of the old private equity model is to suck all the cash out. Kind of the new private equity model is to invest, grow the valuation of the company. I think that's where I see you guys going. But talk about how you're able to innovate. Talk about the R & D mojo that you guys have. >> You had several questions there. >> Yeah (laughs). >> But let me start with that, with the last one. When we carved this company out 19 months ago, it became apparent that we weren't a real player in the cloud. We weren't in some of the more modern workloads. And we had to change rapidly. So, we created a strategy that led to this whole 360 data management integrated platform, software-defined storage. Integrating it with a restful API interface. And then in one year, we built seven new products from scratch that operate in the cloud, on prem, or across cloud. Automated that entire thing. We literally took the startup mentality. Now I've been a startup guy most of my life. I spent the last five and a half years before this funding early-stage startups, and the thing is being agile, and moving fast. We can move faster than anyone around now. We're a big company. Let's take Cloudpoint. We just introduced our Cloud Snapshot. That was a thought in somebody's eye in February. We defined what we needed to do, working with our customers. We put together the team. We built a micro-service end to end archistructure, and we shipped it, supporting the major, all the major cloud snapshot capability in five months, end to end. Totally new product. Now that is a startup mentality. >> Yeah, Bill, can you explain to us a little bit some of the internal plumbing of how you've managed that. On the one hand, Veritas, trusted company, strong engineering culture, product like NetBackup, you know. 15 years, leader in it's space, versus brand new stuff, whole new spaces. What staying the same, what's changing? How do you manage some of those transitions? Because you know, typical company, it's like, "We've got 7500 employees." It's like, "Well, I've got revenue streams "and product lines that I know how to do "and can keep chugging, but I've got the new stuff too." So how do you manage that internally? >> I've have a very simple philosophy of what it takes to lead a major company. You got to have a direction to go in, you have to draw higher-grade people, and you have to organize around the first two. But the key is where are you going? Where's the puck going to be in five to 10 years? And I call that the three V's. WHat's the vision of where the market's going to be? And number two, what's the value that brings to customer? The value that will justify their switching costs. And the third is, what are the values that you build your company on, that customers and partners will be able to trust and count on. So, when you start with that, we created the vision. It has to be a compelling and urgent vision. Ten years from now, all of our products are going to be obsolete. They're going to mostly be obsolete in five years. All of our traditional products. It's all going to be a microservice. Change on the fly, customers never have to upgrade kind of environment, right? There's an urgency there. And customers want to transform. There's an urgency there. The key is, based on your values, you have to develop a culture that embodies the norms to execute your strategy. And then you keep those things and balances. The cultural change has been the most profound and the most important thing we've done in this company. And this company now has a startup, win-in-the-marketplace, customer-first culture. >> So you laid out the vision. In terms of the value to customers you said, when you talk to your CIO customers and other customers, three things came out. Cut costs, deal with governance and compliance, and then help us with the digital transformation. Help us become a digital business, essentially. >> Yeah. >> So those two are pretty clear. Talk about the values that you espouse. What are they? >> So, when you start with values have to be built around what you're providing to a customer. And there's sort of three aspects of that. I'm going to give them the best possible products. I'm going to give them the lowers possible price, or I'm going to give them the best possible service that they can count on. I'm asking our customers to bet their future. So it has to be the third. So it starts with, we produce customer value, right? Then the next aspect of it is, they have to believe that what you're doing is going to be there for them, that it's going to really work. So our next one is, we're going to do that by inventing the future, to bring them the customer value. We're not going to look back and try to add features and functions where we are. We need to help them jump ahead to where they need to be. The third part of that, the pyramid there is customers are going to rely on you. So trust, accountability, ethics, integrity. Those three things come together. Then, we're all about employees, right? So, how do you empower employees to succeed, grow, and be accountable. And you put these values together, and the values will never change. The culture will evolve as strategy moves, and keeping in balance means you're going to have to reorganize on a continual basis around where you are in your strategy. I told this company, we're going to be reorganizing continuously, at least once a year. We're about to do a pretty fundamental reorganization in parts of our company. And this is second time in six months. But you have, you know, you have to be an agile organization. >> Bill, the venture community thinks that this is a hot space. There's a whole number of startups, highly focused. Obviously they're smaller than you, don't have the breadth of products. How do you look at the marketplace? What do you say about that aspect? >> Well, as I said, I spent five and a half years in early-stage venture. >> Yeah. >> We had the highest return fund for our first fund of multiple of any venture capital company. I really love that world. Venture capital is the the center of invention, the center of innovation in this country, in the world. You know, back in the 40s, 50s and 60s, you used to have these big corporate labs. You know, Bell Labs, Sarnoff Labs, et cetera. They don't exist anymore. It's all done by these. So they're inventing the future. Now the difference between the pre-dot-com era and after is, the vast majority of startups are, well, the the vast majority have failed. >> Will fail. (laughs) The vast majority of what's left are acquired, and a few go public, right? So to me, number one, they are the laboratory. They are in the areas that we that are merging, and that we don't necessarily have a core competence, we want to look on how to do that. In BEA, in six years, I did 24 acquisitions to build the company. I never acquired anything that came to us. It was all, here's part of our strategy, we need this competency, we need this time to market. How do we make it work, right? Matter of fact, there was a joke. BEA stood for Built Entirely on Acquisitions. (hosts laugh) >> Well, people used to, Larry Elison himself used to denegrate people for writing checks, not code. And then, of course, he changed the software business with (laughs) some big checks. Well, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the team. So when you took over here at Veritas, you mentioned off camera, you started with the team. How did you go about that? Maybe describe, add some color to the team. >> You know, like I said, one of the three pillars of my management is hire great people. And if you're going to transform a company, if you're going to do a turnaround, it has to start with the leadership team. Period, you can't start anywhere else. But you have to have a leadership team that shares the vision, shares the drive, knows how to work hard together. And when they walk in that room, there's not one thought about my organization or my career, or my compensation. Because they all know, if we make this work, all the rest can take care of itself. Now, when you're doing these sort of things, there are certain times in certain organizations, that people's skills are optimal. You know, the group that was managing this as part of Semantec, they weren't necessarily the best people to manage it as a change in culture, change in strategy. So I had to go out, and I brought in a couple of folks that I've worked with before. We brought in some real amazing people. Mike Palmer is just unbelievable at all dimensions of product development. Scott Genereux, he knows sales back, forward. He knows every customer out there by name, and he knows how to really motivate a sales force. Well, every member of my leadership team except Todd Hauschildt, the CIO, has come in with the same vision, the same, and of course that works down the organization as you're building. And that's how you change the culture. With that, here's the vision of where we're going. Here's the values, what we are going to do. This is how we're going to lead it. >> So major objectives. Obviously you want to keep moving fast. >> I presume you're going to, >> Yeah. >> You're reorganizing frequently to support that. But what are the main objectives that we should be looking for as outside observers over the next six, nine, 12, 18 months? We are changing the agenda of the information management industry. The first place is, for digital transformation, corporations have to switch. They have to get off what they're doing today ultimately and go to something new. And in an enterprise, that can only be one platform. You can't have two platforms deleting, moving data asynchronously. So, its going to be a major transformation. Now that has to be a platform. We've put the stake in the ground. We have that platform. Now, this is our battle to lose, because the incumbents in a transformation get to win if they're good enough. You know, in the disruption, only a startup can win. That's how I won at BEA, how we won at Sun. But this isn't disruption. Nobody's going to throw away all their data centers and jump into somebody before who said, "Oh, I've managed 100 terabytes. "Give me your 50 pedabytes." (Dave laughs) You know? And no customer is going to trust them. So this is our battle to win. We're changing the entire agenda with 360 data management. What we, our number one challenge is, we have to change the positioning in our own customers' minds, because they know us as the 30 years of that legacy, backup, recovery and archiving company. And it's really working. But that's number one. That's my number one objective. 'Cause the rest will take care of itself. >> And as a private company, do you feel like you're in a more advantageous position to do that, and why? >> Well, I don't think I could do this as other than a private company. Because it changes the economics dramatically. Also, at the same time, we're switching from mostly licensed revenue, to mostly rateable avenues, we move to subscription. In a public company, that's a, "Oh, our revenue's going to go down for awhile, "and so is our profits, but trust me." >> Hang with us. (laughs) >> Yeah, hang with us. There are companies like adobe that did that flawlessly, but it's not an easy thing to do. >> Yeah, it's not easy. >> And I'll tell you, I have the best partner in the world. When I, when we started this whole carveout, and I figured out, "Whoa, we don't have the right products. "We got to build this whole thing." I went to Carlisle with the strategy and the vision of what we needed to do. And I said, "Look, because pricing pressure is so high, "We're not going to be able to grow based on your plan." How you invested. "But if you want me to do that, "I can do it, and you need to invest this much more. "But I recommend that we invest as fast as we can "to get to digital transformation." They chose the third. They chose to, we're spending 99 million more dollars in R & D and go-to-market this year than was in the original plan. I wouldn't be able to do that in the public markets. >> Yeah. >> You know? But they are the perfect partner. They build for growth. They stay in two to four years after an IPO. Their return is based on multiples of growth, and that's what, so our goals are totally aligned, and aligned with what the customers are going to need. >> Bill, great story, I know you're super busy. A lot of customers to meet. So thanks very much for taking time out and joining us on the CUBE. >> Bill: This has been a pleasure. Thank you, >> You're welcome. >> Bill: you got me all stimulated. >> All right, good deal. All right, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is the CUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. We'll be right back. (electronic rhythmic music)