>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2019 brought to you by Veeam! >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. We're here at the Fontainebleau Hotel. VeeamON day one of two-day coverage of the Veeam conference, very swaggy hotel. Dave Russell is here. He's the Vice President of NFI Strategy at Veeam. David, good to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> Thanks so much for coming onto theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks for having me again. >> You're very welcome. So let's see, you're well over, let's see, a year out, just about a year out of Gartner. Right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> And so okay you've been injected with the Kool-Aid fully, I presume, right? >> There you go, in the green, yes. >> But we're still going to talk a little bit about the magic water, but before we get into that, talk about your first year here. >> Yeah. >> Your impressions. Do they meet, exceed your expectations? >> It exceeded my expectations, but I can honestly say I'm not doing what I thought I was going to be doing here, but it actually turned out to be better. The other thing I will honestly tell you is I'm now on Pacific Coast time at the moment. Arizona, we're too unsophisticated for Daylights Saving, right so I'm either Mountain or Pacific but I'm Pacific now. But by 10 a.m. my time, I pretty much what I thought I was going to do that day is out the window and I'm doing something else and it's fun though. I mean now especially with the investment that we had earlier in the year and the cash reserves we ended last year with, looking at a lot of partnership capabilities, looking at ecosystem activities, certainly involved with customer activity. We're redoing our marketing and how we're focusing our go-to-market so it's a whole variety of things that sort of change hourly. >> So on the, I think we just talked about the M&A side. You've always been a dot connector in your, right? Because you talk to all the vendors, you talk to all the customers and you could see the picture. You have a huge observation space so part of your job on strategy is to try to what? Figure out where the gaps are. >> Yeah. >> And then drive strategy around do we build, do we buy? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah and it really does net down to what you said. It's a build/buy decision. It's an acceleration to market kind of decision and then the hard part is what are you willing to trade off and of course the real answer is as little as humanly possible. But you have to decide, just because you can do it, just 'cause you have the money doesn't necessarily mean you should pull the trigger. So if anything, it's curious because people like myself and a couple of my colleagues, we almost are more discerning. So we look at, okay, the technology, is it really viable? Do our due diligence, right? But then we also look at well, does this fit culturally? Is the integration point really there? Is the customer value really going to be significantly improved and if you cannot answer that very favorably, then keep the money. >> So you worked at IBM for a number of years, you worked at Gartner for a number of years. Now you're back working for a vendor. >> Yeah. >> Compare and contrast those roles. I mean Gartner, you do a lot of writing, you do a lot of traveling, you talk to a zillion people. I'm sure you talk to a lot of people here too, but you're coming at it from a very biased perspective whereas Gartner of course you're unbiased. You're serving the end customer. So talk about the difference in those two roles. >> So I approach it a little uniquely in that I'm biased. I mean I'm paid by a vendor, right? And so there's a certain inherent bias in there, but I go into a customer conversation and say "Maybe you shouldn't be using Veeam for certain things." So I'll give you an example. We have Unix capabilities with Solaris AIX. There are other vendors that do that even better than we do. They have rich application integration. If someone says that's my number one problem, honestly we're not your best choice. Now the reality is most of the world is moving towards more physical and virtual Windows and Linux. So I'll come in, say, a large enterprise and I'll say, "Okay, if you're like most shops," and I'll always undersell it. "Like probably 85% of your workload "is physical virtual Windows Linux." and they always interrupt me and go, "No, no, no, it's 92%." Like, "Okay, well we can help with that 92%." >> Yeah, yeah. >> The other 7%, I'm honestly going to tell you, we're not best of breed. >> Yeah that's a safe balance view that the AIX Solaris piece. >> Series. (Dave laughs) There's certain things. >> Yeah. >> We want to stick to our swim lane. We think it's a pretty wide lane, but there's no reason to come out of it. >> So your role as strategy, talk a little bit about how you're turning that strategy into action and specifics at Veeam. >> Yeah a big part of it has to do with cloud. >> I know that's the word that we've been talking about for a long, long time. So there's the aspirational aspect of Cloud and the operational. The aspirational is I want to be able to move in and out. I want mobility, I want the ability to exit. The operational is I want to be able to do this efficiently, meaning I want to be able to either send data to the cloud, my on-prem backup or I want to be able to protect SAAS-based workloads or infrastructure as a service workload so cloud-native workloads and then over time, I might want to be able to leverage that for something other than availability. So how can you rapidly make the data and only the portion of data that I need available to me when I need it? >> I was taking some notes during the key notes and I was just doing like a little, not really a tag cloud, but I was trying to identify as I heard them and grabbed them, the attributes of cloud data protection. I want to throw some out to you. You tell me. We'll play kind of word association, I guess. So I have fast recovery, API-based, open, simple, transparent, data-oriented, automated, cloud pricing, federated to accomodate the edge. Are these some of the attributes that we should associate with cloud data protection, maybe some of the things that I'm missing. How do you look at the attributes of a company and its products providing cloud data protection? >> Yeah so a big part of it, I actually like the phrase hybrid cloud even better than people say multi-cloud. The reason I like that is because hybrid presumes that you can have on premises as well. So like if it was the Dave and Dave company tomorrow, we'd probably be born in the cloud. Everything would be software as a service. We'd get some public cloud space. Now if we'd been in business for 20 years, we've got investments that we've made and we don't want to get rid of that any sooner than we have to. So hybrid cloud I like, but I think you nailed it in that what do every one of those attributes have in common? It's trying to get your most precious resource to you in a way that you want to consume it with as least amount of friction as possible. We want to reduce the aggravation associated with being able to access that rapidly. >> When you think about the customer conversations that you've had at Veeam and even going back to your Gartner days, I've always felt this notion of not hybrid, I see hybrid and multi-cloud as different. I've always looked at multi-cloud as multi-vendor. >> Yeah. >> Yeah I've got line of business, I've got shadow IT, I've got different IT projects and I've got multiple clouds and it's just, to me it was always less of a strategy than sort of this is where we are and now people need to put together a hybrid strategy. So IT's been asked to come clean up this mess as it always is. What's your take on the hybrid landscape and how we got here but more specifically, customer strategies when you consult with your customers? >> Yeah you're right that there's a lot of departmental buying, there's a lot of, in some cases, it's best of breed so I'm very willing to go look at multiple providers because I didn't sign up to go deploy the third best solution. Everyone wants what they think will be the most appropriate tool for them and rightfully so. So I think that's how we got, to your point, we didn't have a strategy that said I want 10 vendors. We arrived at an implementation choice that resulted in 10 vendors being deployed and then to your point further, then we had to layer on something on top of that. That's really where we come in and simple as it sounds, we really want to promote choice, choice of infrastructure, choice of cloud, choice of hypervisor, choice of operating system. >> So great discussion vector is the best of breed versus sort of integration. >> Yeah. >> And my question is that's been a decades-long. >> Yeah. >> Sort of trade-off that people have made. You see it in the software business, the hardware business and all through the industry. Is the API economy changing that. Can you be both, I mean Veeam, let's agree. Veeam is a best-of-breed provider. While your portfolio's growing, you're a billion-dollar company, you take a company like Dell who's got this ridiculously large portfolio. They can come into a customer and say well even with services or at IBM, we can wrap the big blue blanket around you and integrate everything. With the API economy, does that change the game on that argument of best of breed versus integration and convenience? >> It's a nuanced answer. The answer is a little yes and a little no. >> It depends, right? >> Let me decompose that because that's a cop-out, but the "it depends" aspect is really, APIs are wonderful to create an ecosystem and other integration points. If that's about offering your expandability to do something, that's a positive. If that really means that well because I can't deliver what you need, you got to go and write it yourself, that is a negative. So if the API is leveraging something for even greater value but beyond what the tools are originally designed to do, I think that's net positive, but if you have to exploit the API to just to get the product to work, why did I buy your product when I have to go hire someone to write code to work on your product? That's, you don't want that business. >> Okay so the last Gartner Magic Quadrant that came out was one that you sort of spearheaded back in 2017. It was like this perfect storm of backup analysts leaving Gartner and so there's been a little bit of delay in terms of the new one coming out which is coming our shortly as I understand it, but one of the observations that you can make if you look at the 2016-2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant is that Veeam moved from lower right to upper right which is rare. Can you explain that a little bit? You were saying that it usually goes in a different pattern. Elucidate, please. >> Yeah. Yeah so the magic in the Magic Quadrant is if you could actually jump from one quadrant to straight to leaders and that would be a very atypical progression. Usually it's a backwards Z. You come into the lower left, probably get over to the lower right, fall back, but go up to the upper left and then maybe you get to leaders in the upper right. The magic part in Veeam, the thing that they were able to do is go from visionary lower right to leader upper right. >> Okay and why do you think they were able to do that? I mean there are numerous attributes, but presumably 350,000 I think is the number of customers helped and so you've got a lot of references and proof points, the technology itself, but it's rare. Why do you think Veeam has been able to succeed in that regard? >> I think it's because Veeam has been good about getting answers to the most pressing problems. Again Veeam doesn't do everything. It doesn't support every single operating system, but the vast majority of the concentration of where customer issues are and where customer environments are getting deployed at, we can address very well and actually this weekend, I got here Friday night. So all day Saturday, all day Sunday and yesterday 'til 5 p.m. I took our SE training and so I've deployed Veeam, worked with active directories, all kinds of things for 72 hours basically and it was really that easy to use. In fact, my most difficult thing is I stayed in class until 6:30 at night because I'd never done active directory. I've never been an exchange admin before so I had to kind of come up to speed on those tools a little bit, but once I got that, the product was incredibly powerful, but also very intuitive. So you still have a little bit of that independent analyst DNA in you so I'm going to ask you to try to put that independent hat on. When you think about Veeam's traditional base of SMB, they're very successful there, obviously superglued itself to the virtualization trend. The last couple of years, Veeam has tried to move up-market, develop some relationships with some large players and has had some success there. Is the product well-suited for that larger enterprise and where do you see that going in terms of the up-market progression? >> Yeah so in theory, that's what I'm here to drive, the enterprise word is in my title, but in reality I focus more broadly than that. But if I just think about enterprise, I ran the numbers last week and company inception to date, we've actually derived over $2 billion of software-only revenue from the enterprise market and that's been accelerating. Now in 2017-18 and the first quarter of this year, almost $1 billion. So we're moving and we're moving fast. We had our sales kick off like most companies do. January, go to sales kick off and Ratmir says, "Hey don't chase just the big deals, the $2 million deals. "We've never sold a $2 million "without having a $200,000 deal first." The very next week, we got a $2 million deal on the first paper so he shot low. He should've said five million, but the interesting thing about Veeam and to answer your question, I think we resonate with the kind of challenges a large enterprise has. We allow them to move at their own scale if they want to move in a very large fashion, they can with Veeam. I would honestly tell them move as appropriate for you. As assets age, as you're willing to take on the change in an environment, do so, but I think Veeam is interesting. It's the same piece of software that I installed on my laptop this weekend that can also go to a Fortune 100 company. The same piece of software that manages 50,000 agents, we have at one shop, 50,000 Windows agents. We can do that with same code base and the only thing that's different is we just horizontally scale out how we deploy the capacity and then how we deploy the mover agents. >> I tweeted out this morning, Ratmir was standing in front of a chart with all these features and over the time and that's been part of the hallmark of Veeam is not checkbox features but real substantive features and you've had a consistent progression. Even Ratmir said, we don't have a big long-term roadmap that we share with our customers even internally. Yeah we have a direction and a vision, but very focused, almost like a bit of an Agile development methodology but the point is that, and you see that some companies are really good at this, some companies, not so good at this, but just consistently delivering features that are in-demand, that customers want, listening to their customers and just nailing it and that seems to be the hallmark of Veeam and as they say, some companies just don't have that in their DNA. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah I think what it really comes down to is at the end of the day, every developer thinks like a customer and they do that because they spend a lot of time on our Veeam forums and I'll be honest, when I was a mainframe backup developer, I didn't talk to that many customers. I was just writing code and I didn't know how people were actually putting the product to use in production. I didn't always know what feature might be most helpful for them. >> You were guessing. >> I was trying to think of the art of the possible, hopefully an educated guess, but I was really just trying to say what might be good, what might be of resonance versus actually having someone goes on a forum and says Veeam, what I would like you to do is X. That's one of the reasons why we do have, to your point, we don't have a 10-year roadmap where we say this feature is coming in 12 months, this feature is coming in 24 months. It's fluid and in some cases, we actually moved up delivering our physical agent management by a year because we started selling more and more of those and people said I need that feature functionality faster. We're willing to trade-off some of our other feature functionality. So if we can be, as long as we can continue to respond to the market, I think we're well-positioned. >> How does a capability like that surface itself? Obviously by talking to customers, but how does it get into the development pipeline so quickly? >> Yeah well in some cases, we've got a huge amount of not just, our part of R&D. It's the research, it's experimentation, it's incubation of new things. So when we find that sweet intersection point, then we can quickly operationalize that. In other cases, we just have to be nimble. We have to react fast. >> Is it a command and control culture though where somebody says okay this is what we're doing or is it more sort of the team gets together and says oh this really makes sense based on what the customers are telling us, let's go. How does that decision get made? >> Yeah well ultimately it is a command and control in the sense that our co-founder, one of our co-founders runs sales and marketing. Our other co-founders runs R&D and they ultimately get sign-off on their respective areas, but it is collaborative in the sense of we do bring forward, here's what we see in market, here's what see in our customer forums. Here's what our ecosystem of partners are telling us, here's our view of the top five things we ought to go do. >> I was struck by the other slide that Ratmir had. It was the $15 billion slide and it was probably, backup and recover was maybe I don't know seven out of the 15 if I remember, but there were all these other segments. It was sort of analytics and disaster recovery and data management, all new pockets of opportunity. $15 billion today, obviously growing with especially the cloud. How do you see that landscape and how does that affect the way you look at strategy? >> Yeah so I actually put that bubble chart together. >> Oh, I like it. >> The rationale between the bubbles, we have core, we put backup in the middle because that's what we do but also that's how we ingest data and now we can do other things around it. So the reason for those bubbles and they were of varying sizes and the bubbles were sort of in and out of to varying degrees the main backup bubble according to how much intersection we thought as a company we could have with that. Where we thought we could add value, where we thought there was an ecosystem potential. So for example, analytics. We're not going to become the next best analytics company tomorrow, not even years from now. We could partner and we can provide data and we get better access to data to be able to do that. So we'd want to facilitate that. In other cases, maybe we really do want to go own and acquire. >> Well and so to your earlier comments there, I didn't use the term, the phrase land and expand, but that's clearly what you guys are doing starting with the $200,000 sale and growing it to a $2 million sale. So those bubbles are potentially cohort sales. >> Yes. >> That you can sell sort of like bananas in bunches I like to say, right? >> Yeah. And part of that is who do you sell that to. And so if you're able to go and address some of those ancillary bubbles or markets, now you've got a different entree point into the organization. If you're already involved with an organization, now you can offer more value because you can get more out of your data that you've already protected. So it opens up new conversations for us to have. It opens up entirely new buying centers for us too. >> Well how is the role of whom you sell to changing? I mean it was backup admin historically, right or maybe a Veeamware admin. Veeam admin. How is that changing? >> So greatest example I would tell you are events. So we acquired a company last January or a year ago January called N2W Software. So they're predominantly at Amazon re:Invent conferences. You go to Amazon re:Invent and no one's heard of Veeam and if anyone's heard of either of the two companies, it's definitely N2WS and someone's seen it in the marketplace. That demographic tends to be totally different from the demographic if you go to the on-premises data center type of conference where they have heard of Veeam and it's a very different sort of mindset. To your point, they grew up in a very different landscape. Now instead of someone who's well-steeped in server storage and networking and maybe majored in one, possibly two of those things, now you've got a generalist where he or she is probably in their 20s, has a very different point of view of what it should take to get something working and has a very different view of how they want to be sold to, how you can go and reach them. >> So at the cloud show, there might be a development persona. >> Yes. >> That you're selling to. Obviously VMWare, VMWorld, we know what that is. It's IT guys, right, is the predominant and how do you see cloud changing that? Is it cloud architects or sort of cloud leaders? CTOs increasingly? Data Protection becomes more and more important to digital business. So how are you seeing that role change due to cloud? >> So right now we have to basically have more touchpoints. Our typical legacy fan of our customer, our customer base, our product's sweet spot still remains and it's in some cases will pull us into the cloud. In other cases, we have to go talk to someone that's entirely different. But again, that's more of an administrative view. But to your point, going up the stack now, if you go to the not even Vice President of Infrastructure, you go to the CIO, he or she says, "I am tired of thinking about boxes. "I am tired of thinking about where this resides. "I want to think business outcome." So for us that's actually a great conversation because it all comes back to data. That's what we're in the business of doing. We capture, protect and move data. >> So that brings it back to strategy. We got to run, but summarize in your words, just sort of the strategy of Veeam and where you see this whole thing going. >> Yeah I will simplistically say it's more of the same. We want to continue to offer what we think is a best of breed solution for on-prem and increasingly cloud availability, but also we want to offer real customer value in terms of now being able to leverage that data, get more value out of that whether that's DevOps, running analytics against that, security test patch, whatever it may be, we want to be able to give you just the data you need, so have granularity, and offer speed and ease of use to do that. >> So as data becomes more and more important, you're seeing companies go beyond backup, trying to get more out of there, their backup, moving to data protection, data management, not just an insurance policy anymore. Dave Russell, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with Peter Burris as my cohost. We're at VeeamON Live from Miami. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat 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. >> And welcome back here on the Sands as we're at the AWS re:Invent day one of our coverage here. We're here Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday live here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage from the show. We're Hall D again, if you're in the area, come on by, say hi to Justin Warren and myself. Along with Justin, I'm John Walls. We're joined by Andy Langsam, who's the COO of N2WS. Say Andy, good to see you today. >> Good to see you too. >> Thanks for being here. And Danny Allan, who's the Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam Software. Danny, good afternoon to you. >> Thank you very much. >> Now we could talk about a lot of things, Canadian citizenship, fractional ownership, a lot of great conversation. So let's talk about data. And of course, the paramount need these days, right? Everybody's got to know I'm alright, I'm secure, I've got this big warm blanket around me. What are the two of you doing to give people with those kind of concerns the ability to sleep at night peacefully, knowing their data's safe? >> Well, you know N2W was founded on the premise of not to worry, that was the founder's vision. And if you could convince somebody that was doing the backup in disaster recovery not to worry, that was a great way to get started. But we're excited today, we've announced N2WS Version 2.4 and it's focused on taking your EC2 snapshots and putting them into S3's storage to lower your cost by up to 40% and 50% and so that's one of the things that we're talking about today. >> Danny. >> Yeah and so if you expand on that, so this is data protection for the cloud and one of the things historically we've focused on as well is data protection in the data center. So that brings the two together and gives you data protection holistically, across wherever your environment happens to be, and goes beyond that, not just data protection but how can I take the data and do more with it? And so we're excited and it seems to be resonating with customers. We have, what, 189% year over year growth on the cloud side. It's just huge, it's a booming business. >> I would assume that you don't have any problem getting people's attention these days, I would assume. >> No we don't, you know, at the booth, it's just amazing, you know, eight, nine thousand sign up batch scans and people all wanting demos and wanting trials of the software. You know, any time you can talk about cost reduction from five cents a gig on EC2's storage to two cents on S3, it's a tremendous savings for our customer base and so they're very excited. We did a survey recently and over 50% of our customers spent over $10,000 a month on storage cost in AWS. So if you think about that and if they can save 40% on that, that's real savings, more than the cost of the software alone. >> Sure. >> Yeah. >> One thing about cloud that often sort of went past people because they were used to the data center and they were used to how they protected their data in the data center. And cloud kind of changed the way that you had to do that and you have think about them in a slightly different way. So clearly N2WS is part of the solution to that. But when you have people who have a bit of data in both of those systems, how do you help them understand which techniques they should use for data which is in the cloud compared to data that's in their data center? Or am I able to just use the same techniques and just go, "You know what? "I'll take care of you and we'll just "turn it on and it'll magically work for you"? >> It's not the same techniques but it's the same platform. And the reason I say that is in the cloud, here in AWS for example, you don't have access to the hypervisor so you can't do a snapshot of the hypervisor, you have to call an API and say, "Gimme a copy of the data." If you're in your own data center, you say, "Take a snapshot of the storage "level or at the hypervisor level." So there's different techniques but at the end of the day, it's still data protection, and with a single platform, that's what's so exciting about this release, Backup and Recovery 2.4, is you have a single platform that you can manage data protection both on and off premises so that you can leverage where is the best place, location, for this workload, and I can protect it across no matter where it chooses to live. >> Yeah, that is something that we've been hearing all day today here at theCUBE is that people are talking about putting their data wherever they want it to live. It could be in the cloud, it could be on their own data site, it could be out at the edge. So whatta you see as the vision, like, where are customers going with this, where do we want to put data? We heard for a long time that we should migrate all of our applications into the cloud. Clearly there are a lot of organizations who are doing that. There are some who have put some things into the cloud and they're actually taking them back out again. >> Sure. >> Where are you seeing customers moving their data around? >> Well, the answer to that, of course, is it depends. There's no single answer for everything. What I say is the cloud is excellent for certain things like variable based workloads or you need a mass amount of compute for a certain amount of time. What people have tried to do sometimes is just lift and shift, take what's on premises and move it to the cloud, and sometimes what ends up happening is they put it back on premises 'cause they realize hey, the cloud's not a charity, they're actually putting in margin there for that brick load. >> They're good. >> So there's use cases for all of this. I think actually what gets exciting is as people design for the cloud, use Lambda and serverless-type functionality, that will become a lot more sticky and so our focus is wherever the customer chooses to run the workload, we're not going to dictate it one way or the other. In fact, one of the great things that we enabled is portability. If you choose to be in point A today, you can move it to point B and back again, so we give that portability that ultimately allows the customer to solve what their business need is. >> You mentioned the customer growth, I think it was like 189% you were saying, is that net new customers to Veeam completely, is that Veeam customers who are growing into using this new product and putting their data in the cloud, where is growth coming from? >> So that growth, that growth has been since we've been acquired by Veeam back in December, it's almost been a year now we were acquired by Veeam and we've been, being acquired has allowed us to focus on the customer and innovation versus going out and raising money from investors as a small company, right? And so we've had 189% growth in our business in terms of revenue since we've been acquired. And it's really accelerating both on the growth side in all sizes of customers. We've got customers recently like Notre Dame and Cardinal Health. And then we have people getting into the cloud, you know, for the very first time and they go to the Amazon Marketplace, they search through the catalog, they find the N2W products, they download it and, well, they provision it and onward they go. >> Yeah, you mentioned Cardinal Health. >> Yep. >> Let's talk about the sector in general. I mean, very unique concerns, obviously, when it comes to whether it's protecting imaging or patient information or whatever it might be. What have you seen in terms of addressing the needs of that sector because obviously this is an area that's growing, there's more capability than ever, and yet our concerns in it are growing with that. So I mean, what do you guys see in that space? >> Yeah so I think, you know, in the health care sector in general, I think what they're really concerned about is the compliance requirements. It's not just backing up the data but it's the requirement that you have a back up and can restore and you can recover from a disaster or from internal hacking or from whatever, an outage, whatever it might be, and if they don't do it, the repercussions are very, very high. And I think that the whole world with GDPRS and things like that are all coming together to dramatically raise the requirement to be more secure than ever and your backup and disaster recovery strategy is paramount to them. They won't be talking about, "We're going to do this." Some customers say, "We're going to do this ourselves, "we'll write our own code." We won't see that in the health care space or the financial space. >> So I see kind of three interesting areas. One is, they typically will have very specific applications like APEC and Meditech that they need you to protect that are aware of that type of application, so that's one part of it. The second is, there's a lot of certifications required to deliver health care services, so you HIPAA and HITECH and, you know, BAA certifications and all these things, and that certainly comes into play when you're talking about the cloud, so you need to have that conversation. And then lastly, ransomware comes up a lot because there's been a lot of ransomware attacks and malware attacks specifically directed at the healthcare industry. So those are the three kind of areas that we have probably the most conversations about. >> Right, yeah malware has been the best advertisement for backup and recovery, ever. It's kind of fabulous, in a way, in a scary way and we don't actually want to encourage this kind of behavior, but for those of us who have lived and breathed backup for awhile, it's like, "Finally, "people can take this seriously." So that's something that people have realized that, okay, I need to have this. What are they looking at next? Where are customers looking to Veeam and to N2WS, what are they looking for you to add next? >> So I'd say the next kind of big step, so to date we've been very much reactive as an industry, right? "Help me protect my data." "Let me get it back" when they recover to the cloud or move from one cloud to another cloud. Now we're getting customers saying, "You have all this data, you understand the context of everything that I own, help me get smarter in my business so that I can drive the business to make decisions more quickly." So, "Give developers a copy of the data "so that they can iterate on it more quickly." "Give a copy of the data to my GDPR experts 'cause "they need to analyze the data and do something with it." And so we're moving away from just being reactive to business needs to being proactive and driving the business forward. And I think where it gets really interesting, as we go down the road and now this is buzz words, I admit, but around machine learning and artificial intelligence, we're actually, we leveraged a lot of the algorithms that are existing in clouds like AWS to help analyze the data and make decisions that they don't even know that they need to make. And that decision could be, "Hey, you need to "run this analysis at two in the morning "'cause the instances are cheaper." That type of predictive analysis helps the customer reduce cost but also drives the business forward. >> Yeah, so how do you move into that kind of advisory space from a more traditional that we'll protect your data. How do, do customers come to you and say, "Actually, you have our data anyway, "why don't you do this for us?" or are you going to customers proactively and saying, "Hey, we can do this for you, "we have access to this data and we can tell you that, "we can provide these insights to you, "would you like some more of this?" Which way does that conversation tend to go? >> It's a bit of a mix, what I'd say is that the data protection face or the storage, you know, the traditional IT person becomes kind of the help desk and then because they've enabled self service recovery, file level recovery, item level recovery, these other areas of the business come in and say, "Hey, can I use that self service to do X and Y?" So it's a new buyer, it's a new constituent, but they're actually looking to IT to enable them to do more stuff with the data. >> Okay, so it's basically, "I want to interact with you "in a similar way that I'm already doing it, "and you've proven your work in this area, "maybe you could do it over here as well." >> Exactly. >> Sounds like a great opportunity for growth. >> And not just on legacy, I mean, one of the interesting things with the N2W software is we enabled, for example, data protection on DynamoDB. So people think of databases and they think SQL Server and Oracle but we can do this, even in cloud RDS-type workloads with DynamoDB, to help them drive cloud hosted workloads faster for the business as well. >> Well, you mentioned Notre Dame, can we have any connections on the playoff ticket situation, can we -- (laughter) >> I wish. >> Just want to make sure. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us and let's get back in maybe three or four weeks, we'll talk about that, okay? >> It'll be great, yeah, it'll be interesting to see who the final four are going to be. >> That's for certain. Thank you both -- >> Thank you. >> Find the information, really enjoyed the conversation. Back with more here from AWS re:Invent, we are live in Las Vegas, Nevada. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE! Covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back in the windy city, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman this is our second day of covering VeeamOn 2018, second year of theCUBE at VeeamOn Danny Allan is here, he's the Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam. Welcome back to theCUBE, it's good to see you again. >> Thank you, very excited to be here! >> Loved the keynote yesterday, gave a lot of detail. The bumper sticker, the summary on your product strategy, how would you summarize your product strategy? >> It is to be the most comprehensive intelligent data management platform that meets the demands of the enterprise. >> So, when you say intelligent data management, people hear that, and they don't--certainly don't go immediately to backup and data protection, so you've expanded that notion of what you guys do, there's a TAM expansion there as well, which is great. What do you guys mean by intelligent data management? >> So, believe it's a journey first of all, right? And it starts with backup in our application, I know that there are vendors that are saying hey this is a new world, completely different. You know what, the cornerstone of this, is still backup in our application so that is the first stage in this journey. We believe that, right now, especially the customers I'm talking to, they're deploying things on the public Cloud, they're deploying things SAS Clouds, it's all over the place, it's growing, it's sprawling, they're trying to get their hands around it. So they have to do that first, is the next step, and then it's an evolution beyond that to okay, now we understand it, now let me do something with it, let me actually drive the business to better outcomes. >> So, some things we know, or we believe anyway, that data protection and orchestration are moving up on the list of priorities for CXOs. That's I think very clear, you would agree. But there's a dichotomy that exists between the perception from the business side, as to, what can be done in terms of data protection, particularly with regard to the degrees of automation and what IT today can deliver. So there's tension there, and there's, frankly lots of opportunity for churn. When you talk to people about, okay, are you going to switch data protection vendors as you go to this digitalization, multi-Cloud? Or you went to them, and they go no we're totally open, we have an open mind. So that's good news for you guys. So thinking about those trends, how do you take advantage, from a product standpoint? >> Well Veeam has been known, I always talk about three words, it just works, people love us because the software works and it's reliable. So that's the starting point in all of this, the opportunity I believe is in that, it just works. And so if we take them through this journey, towards intelligent data management, every step has to be about it just works. In some ways, the step from stage one to stage two, which is aggregating data, is at an infrastructure level, as you get to the later stages of three, four, five, it's it just works at a business level, and so our focus is still going to be on that simplicity, reliability, making sure the platform works. >> So I want to follow up on that, because, it just works obviously is going to resonate with the IT pro, who's got to deal with failed backups, with poor reporting, with lousy recovery, blah, you know, slow, etc, etc, etc, gettin' pounded because they're losing data, we all know that thankless world. But in terms of the business side, there's billions of dollars being left on the table by businesses in the fortune one thousand because they have inadequate data protection, processes, procedures, architectures. Not, I mean there's becoming aware of it, but what's the above-the-line message? So, it just works, how do you crack through that billions of dollars of opportunity and get CFOs to open up the wallet? That is the great opportunity for you guys, I think. >> It is, so they have challenges in a number of areas, right compliance, security, regulatory, we don't talk to executives at the C level and hear them say oh I need backup, I need replication, they're saying reduce my costs. Well if you can leverage it just works, and deploy this in a way that requires less FTEs, that makes it simpler to do it, that can give them attestation, proof, that hey, I can fail over to the public Cloud, I can burst up to the public Cloud or a manage Cloud, if I can give that fluidity, that's an it just works at an ROI perspective. Or, we talked about intelligent data management, sometimes, I'll be honest, I roll my eyes when I hear artificial intelligence. And that's not because it's not real, it's because what we haven't done is taken it just works and applied it to the business. So an example of this, forget artificial intelligence for a moment, one of the examples I give is, if you see malware crossing the network, that is a really good time to do something, let's leverage that intelligence to provide an outcome. And that's an it just works at the business level rather than at the infrastructure level. >> Alright, so Danny, above the message it's, any data, any app, across any Cloud. We have these pesky little things called like, physics, and data gravity, and the like. So protecting, getting access to my data in the public cloud versus the edge with, where we're going to see 90+% of the data in the future versus my traditional data centers where it's providing the stats. It's a complicated world, how do you make it that simple? >> So let me expand our benefits into a third area, so Veeam took off, in that it was easy to use, it was reliable, but the second one is the portability and the agnosticism of the platform, you didn't need media servers, it was all self-describing backup things, VBKs or vibs, without trying to get too technical here, that self-describing capability allows us to move between infrastructures. In some ways what VMware did, at the hardware level, they decouple the workload from a physical server, we're decoupling the workload from the infrastructure on which it sits because it's this self-describing, very portable format, that enables fluidity of movement. >> I haven't heard much about Edge yet, is that a place that you expect to begin to have a play? >> Yes, and I expect we have to do that, and the reason is because a lot of the computing now is happening at the edge and you want to make you actions out of the edge. There's this concept in the US Air Force called the OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, and act, and you would try to act out on the edge, but my belief is that data protection systems will do some of that protection out on the edge, but sometimes they won't know what to do, and so the information will be sent back to the Cloud, or sent back to the core to make a better business decision on what should we do with this data. >> You think about your platform, we were talking to Peter McKay about, you've kind of gone from a product company to a platform company. We talked about that a little bit, but I wonder if we can dig into it more from a standpoint of your role as head of product strategy. What does platform mean, where do you see that platform going, can you share a little roadmap with us? >> Platform to me has kind of three connotations to it, one is that you have the capabilities within the platform that are very broad, and we believe we have that, we can cover physical/virtual Cloud, we have orchestration, we have reporting, we have all of those capabilities. The second, though, is comprehensive APIs, you need to have the extensibility in a platform that you can actually talk to the ecosystem of partners. And that's actually the third area, it's being able to work with your Ciscos and your NetApps, and your HPEs and all of our partners to deliver these better outcomes. >> Yeah, I mean, it's funny, last year, Stu, when you saw Veeam, and you took the introduction of those capabilities. I noted, I remember the ascendancy of EMC back in the day, they did a really good job of connecting to everything that was out there. I mean, it sounds so simple, but it's integration work, they just went in and rolled up their sleeves and did the dirty work. >> A lot of work Dave, I've got the scars, living in interrupt lab, so. (laughing) >> And you guys do that dirty work, and every time you do that it expands your total available market. I don't want to say it's unique in the business, but you seem to have an aptitude to do it without it appearing to be such a heavy lift to the marketplace. Why is that? >> Well it's, frankly it's a scalability thing, we're an almost one billion dollar company, this year we should cross a billion dollars in bookings, and if you want to scale, to add more and more partners, you take our storage integrations for example we were doing maybe one a year for a few years, and we recognized all these vendors knocking on our door saying hey, give us that capability. And so we've added, just in the last six months, IBM, Lenovo, Infinit App, Pure. The only way you can do that, is to have a consistent API framework that people can plug into. It's the way we scale. >> Again, I look at a company like VMware, we saw all the sort of integration challenges that they went through, and the limited resources they had, you remember it, and the Cartel got the SDKs first, and it took forever to get the integrations done a year later you might see some function. It just seems like you guys have some sort of good process internally to actually make this stuff work. >> We're the largest small company you've ever met, we're really agile internally. It helps us to respond to the customer requests, they come to us and say hey I want this, I want this. If we can't respond to that quickly we'll never be successful. >> Danny, I just wonder if you can expand a little bit on the Cloud opportunity. Should we be looking to see more Cloud services out of Veeam kind of layer on what's happening, you have the acquisition a year ago, and-- >> Unquestionably, so I'd say 2017 was the year of agents, we added support for physical and for Cloud, but through agents. I tell everyone that 2018 is really the year of the Cloud for us, we started the year by acquiring N2W software, but last week for example, it's not even making huge PR announcements, we just release version two of backup for Office 365, which adds OneDrive and Sharepoint support. And you'll see in the next release of our product, Anton has a break-in session on this today, another huge capability around, not just integrating with the cloud but actually integrating in a way that provides business value. I'm a big believer in, you don't just put a check-box in, I support Cloud, I can send things to the Cloud, it's how do I actually use the Cloud in a way that delivers business outcome. So this year actually, 2018 is about Cloud for Veeam. >> I want to follow up on that because as an observer of this industry for a long time there seems to be sort of two philosophies, and you just laid out yours, you're not a big believer in check-boxes, and I've seen it, you're an old company. We got every feature, and they would take the salesperson, we have this they don't. Grr, headlock, buy it! (Danny laughing) So you're not trying to do the check-box game, you're trying to map business value, or your features and capabilities to business value for the customer, that's how you sell, and emphasize in your sales motions? >> Yeah, so, this is somewhat of a controversial statement, but we sometimes say we won't be first to market with a feature, we'll be first to market with a solution. So you can come out with, for example, sending things to object storage in the Cloud, and if you're sending up a one gigabyte object, that is a totally--you're not going to leverage that in the real world. But if you deliver that in a way that is actually effective, then you can leverage the Cloud as a tool, because the Cloud is not a destination for most of these enterprises, it's a tool in their toolbox that they use to solve a problem. So we're all about solving those problems. >> Excellent. Alright, Danny, thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE, we'll give you last word on VeeamOn 2018, and maybe give us a little preview of what we can expect? >> Well, we're really excited to be here, the most exciting thing to me is, is the recognition, the conversation with customers about this journey towards intelligent data management, as you said, most customers are in stage one, stage two, but for us this is a partnership, this isn't us just giving software, this is talking to customers, talking to partners, making them successful. >> Alright well hey, congratulations on a great show, and all the success. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, happy to be here! >> Alright keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. From Chicago, theCUBE, VeeamOn 2018. We'll be right back. (light music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois. It's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by, Veeam. >> We're back at VeeamON 2018 in Chicago. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Paul Madison is here he's the vice president of global cloud business at Veeam. Cloud, is where all the action is. Paul, thanks for coming back on theCUBE. >> No, Dave good to see you again, Stu good to see you. >> So you guys have made, you know, a major push obviously into the Cloud. We talked about, with Peter, that you know Veeam used to be product company. Now you're a platform company. Platforms beat products as we know and Cloud is a key part of that. It's a distribution channel, it's a technology, it's a disruptive force. What's your take on what's happening in Cloud? >> So, we're loving what's going on in the Cloud market space. I think, and I've talked with you guys about this before, the pace of innovation that's happening is absolutely remarkable. And it's all about delivering value for the customer. I heard Danny talk about business outcomes in the Cloud. We see this again and again, the Cloud is emerging as the platform or series of platforms that customers can drive innovation, can drive business agility. And we're excited about that because as the customers are moving there now we are evolving our platform to allow them to know that no matter what infrastructure, what platform they use they've got an answer in Veeam. Right? From a data protection, intelligent data management perspective... Veeam's got an answer. So, we see incredible market opportunity, we see accelerate in innovation and we see our platform evolving to take advantage of all that. >> So as the head of Cloud at Veeam, how does it work? Do you have product requirements, obviously you've got channel relationships to get building how do you spend your time architecting, I mean, how did you architect sort of the Cloud plan for Veeam? >> Yeah, it's still a work in process obviously. We are constantly evolving it as the market changes, we have to continue to evolve our strategy. But I have a lot of internal partners, you know, I partner really closely with Danny's organization from a product strategy. I partner very closely with Anton Gostev on product management, I partner really closely with Carey Stanton on our alliance partners. Because as you can imagine all of them are moving towards the Cloud or have a Cloud strategy. I work with people on pricing, licensing, sales, and marketing. And it's just this great, wonderful ecosystem that we have internally. Where we assess where we want to be, we assess where the platform has to go and we try to evolve all those things together. It's not trivial, there's a lot of work. Especially as we transition from a product company, to a platform company, to a solution company. But those are the kinds of problems that we like to solve, that's exciting stuff for us. >> Paul, wonder if you could speak a little bit to that partner ecosystem. So, you know, we went through years of public cloud is the enemy or public cloud said everything is going here to, you know, the Cloud service providers. And even the traditional vars and integrators, many of them worked with Microsoft for years. Lots of them now working with Amazon in some way or another. >> Paul: Right. >> Walk through a little bit that dynamic of what you are seeing, of course you play it across all of them so you've got a great vantage point. >> Yeah, sure. It's a great question, and it has, Stu, it's evolved in the last I'd say 18 to 24 months. It used to be, when I first started at Veeam, I went to a partner conference and I was six weeks into my tenure at Veeam and I came from Microsoft Azure And the looks on the peoples faces was, oh my God, you know, Veeam is going 100% asual. As the Azure guy here public cloud was bad, right? And so it lit people up and I tried to, and continue to rapidly assure them, no, that's not the enemy, that's not where we're going. We see an evolution now where we do see some Cloud service providers saying, we have to understand that customers want to go there, so I need to be a part of that market. That's why we're making the choices that we're making in terms of how we engineer the platform is that it's about customers having choice. And so, it's not the easiest dynamic to manage, as you might be aware of. But there is value, you see firms that will, now are starting to say, okay I can differentiate based on maybe a vertical orientation that I have. I'm going to specialize by going after the enterprise or by going after health care, financial services. And they're saying alright, those big players are here to stay. I better, I should figure out how to get along with them and how I can add value on top of them. Because from my perspective, and those big hyper scale or public clouds. Sometimes I call them a canvas, you can paint on them. But cloud and service providers can really help bring another level of intimacy to those platforms for their customer and drive value for their customer. So co-opting those large platforms is a good strategy. >> Yeah, alright, so Microsoft background. One of the things that caught our eye is, I believe, it was 2500 downloads already of the Veeam solution. >> Yes. >> For Azure. >> Yes. >> Broad reduction and betaWS, give some color on what's happening with public now. >> Yeah, sure, so we are super excited about what's happening with our Cloud partners. We've had tremendous growth in our VCSP business. We have over 19,000 of them now, globally, which is a huge ecosystem of partners. We've seen 58% year over year growth there. Fantastic growth in the number of machines that are protected by Veeam and Veeam powered services. The AWS marketplace has been, the AWS market is one that we've now, you know, jumped into with our acquisition of N2WS. We've seen terrific, I don't know if you're talking with Ezra or anybody from the N2W side. But they've seen 153% year over year growth since coming on board with Veeam. We have Office365 now, Danny talked a little bit about the new version of that, that we're in private beta of right now. That market is taking off tremendously. We've seen 29,000 downloads of that, 29,000 different customers that have downloaded that. We're currently protecting around three million mailboxes of Office365, so there's just a lot that's, our work with the IBM Cloud, is terrific. They are here, they're our sponsor. Great things going on there, 1,000% growth in the VM's that are deployed using it, on the IBM Cloud. Now their resiliency services practice is building up around Veeam. So there's just this tremendous momentum across all the dynamics of our Cloud business right now. >> Well, customers have to place bets. We love sports analogies in theCUBE. Kentucky Derby just went down, we have the Preakness coming up. And customers I feel like they're placing bets on what's called the under card, right. You've got the big race is the Kentucky Derby, well there's a bunch of races leading up to that, they call that the under card. People warm up, they make little bets here, little bets there. But then when it comes to the big race that's when they put down their big money. And I feel like the Cloud bets have largely been on the under card to date. When you talk to customers, well first of all do you agree with that, and are they asking you, okay, you know, which Cloud should I use where? What bets should I place? Having, you know, run the Azure group, you've got a perspective on this. What do you see customers doing and how do you advise them? >> Yeah, so, that's a great question, what we... So let me take you back a little bit. We did see early on customers that sort of nibbled around the edges, around the under card, and made small bets on it and then for whatever reason made the decision to dive in big. And I think a number of them that didn't work out quite well because as they were going through the under card and managing through that they didn't learn as much as they needed to or the platforms evolved so that they ended up saying, wait a minute, hold on, we maybe shouldn't have made that bet. Alright? So, customers now are, I think they're taking a little more of a smart approach towards it because they realize that, hey, going 100% in with one provider is going to be a challenge, right? They are worried about the old vendor lock in and portability across clouds. We obviously will talk to customers about multi-cloud world, 81% that we surveyed said, I'm not going to have a single Cloud provider. I'm going to try to figure out which work loads to put where. And we're going to continue to help advise them and help figure out how they do that. How those different cloud infrastructures factor into their data protection and availability strategies. >> Yeah, so when you get to the database, the middleware on up and you take that approach. Then, obviously there's substantial skillsets that you're going to need whether you're using, you know, Amazon's databases or Oracle's or IBM's, et cetera. At the infrastructure level, however, and I think this is part of your strategy, you can potentially standardize, you know, you guys want to be the standard for the data protection platform. But you've got to earn their trust and the right to do that. >> Paul: Absolutely. >> But if we're understanding that right, that is the strategy, right? To sort of take that stress away from them, let them worry about which database, which SaaS application. But from an infrastructure stand point, you can rely on Veeam to be that data protection platform. >> That's exactly right. And I think when you were talking with Danny earlier is any app, any data, any cloud. Regardless of where you want to go, bet on us, we've got the answer for you. >> Okay so then follow-up question. Why you guys? You've got system vendors, you've got storage vendors, you know, to a certain extent you got quasi security players. Big established companies, start-ups. Why Veeam? >> Well, I think because of a couple of reasons. First of all the platform is extensive and continuing to grow. And we, I'm thrilled that we are, you know, we've got the platform elements of it. I think you said earlier, platforms always trump products. I'm a firm believer in that. I love platforms. I think the second reason is we're a partner driven and customer driven organization. I know that sort of, that can sound like sort of mom and apple pie but the reality is we are 100% channel focused. We don't compete with those channel partners, we don't compete with cloud service providers. We can enable all of them. And so you've got a great platform, with a great organization that knows how to partner and wants to partner. Those two things come together and make us a great choice. >> How do you, I haven't asked anybody this, I wonder if you'll give us your perspective. Because you're pure channel, how do you, and at the same time customer driven, how do you get that feedback? Obviously you go in with channel partners but how do you ensure that you're getting the high fidelity feedback from the customers? >> So, get with the customer. (laughing) You know, we're 100% channel driven but we are arm in arm with our channel partners. It's not, you know, in some areas of the business, yes there's a lot that goes on that Veeam folks don't get involved with. But when it matters, when it counts, we're arm in arm with our channel partners. We go and visit together, we spend that time, we invest that time. We do partner advisory councils, we do customer advisory boards. You know, we're not... It's not diffused through the channels, I guess is what I want to say. It's very much a true partnership where we are engaged fully. >> Okay, let's get into it. You're a Philly fan, your boss is a Patriots fan. >> Paul: I've heard that, yes. >> You got, I mean. Listen, as a long time Philly fan it's like one of the best feelings in the world when your team wins the Super Bowl. First of all, having your team in the Super Bowl for two weeks having that hype lead up is just the greatest thing in the world, even though you just can't wait for kick-off. But I got to say congratulations. >> Thank you. >> I know you've got to feel good about that. >> Thank you, we feel great about it. It took us a couple of days to catch our breath after the game and quite frankly even during the game. Hey, listen, Tom Brady, two minutes ago has the ball, we were all getting ready to leave the party because we said, hey, we've seen this movie before, we know what's going to happen. Go down the field, touchdown. We're out. >> You can't watch. >> Can't watch it, can't watch it. I really didn't watch the last 30 seconds of the game 'cause I just had my (laughs). No we were super happy about it, I will be honest and say it's been a source of on-going rivalry inside of Veeam. Because we have quite the Boston contingent. But, we've got the trophy. >> Well, pretty amazing that, well 'cause Philly had the really outstanding defense >> Yeah. >> Which everybody tries to predict before the game, right, and then Brady shreds the Philly defense. Who would have known that Nick Fowles is going to score every single time he had the ball except the one fluke interception. >> Paul: Yeah. >> It was really an unbelievable game. I mean, as a Pats fan, we were heartbroken, but wow what a game. >> We loved it and, honestly, the guys have been great about it and almost, I don't know if Peter falls in this category, but almost everyone has said, yeah well Philly was the better team. We lost a great game to a better team, there's been no, oh well, one of our guys tried to say, hey, that whole Philly special play should have been called an illegal formation. But then I gave him a list of all the violations that the Patriots have had in the past five years and he's like, okay. >> Yeah you don't want to sound like the raving fan, right? You know, calling the ineligible, eligible. >> Paul: Right. >> Look, Brady, they made that great call. Brady couldn't make the catch, he couldn't make the catch. Nick Fowles made the catch. Okay then when it came down to execution they stared, you know, into the abyss and they didn't blink. I mean, ya got to give em' credit. And Villanova, I mean, that was awesome. >> They were just a machine. >> Sixers, what happened? Big favorite. I think young team. >> Young team, look, they're going to be good for a while. >> Dave: Should be a good rivalry. >> I think Ben Simmons, you know, he's going to come up. Joel Embiid is an absolute beast but I got to hand it to your team and your coach, I mean, I think in some ways we got out-coached a little bit. >> Dave: When Larry Bird came up and Dr. J was, you know, didn't want to relinquish that mantle. That was some of the best rivalries in the early 80's. With the Sixers and the Celtics so hopefully that will get better. >> Paul: Hopefully we'll get that going again. That'll be awesome. >> We love talking sports and we love talking sports with guys in tech that love sports. Paul, thanks very much for coming back. >> Hey, my pleasure man, thanks for having me, really appreciate it, thanks, guys. >> Alright, keep it right there, everybody, we'll be right back with our next guest right after this short break.