>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stuart Miniman and welcome to this episode of CUBE conversations. I'm here from our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program, Doug Matthews. He's the vice president of product management with Veritas coming to us from Atlanta. Doug, thanks so much for joining us. Nice to see you. >> Hey, great to see you Stuart and thanks for having me today. >> Yeah, so Doug obviously, 2020, there's a lot of change going on, globally, a lot of things happening financially, but one of the ongoing changes that we've been watching and has had huge ripple effects, is of course the impact on cloud. So why don't you bring us in a little bit. Tell us, what you work on, and how cloud has been impacting, what's happening with the data protection or resiliency in your world? >> Sure, so, Veritas Technologies is a long brand of focus on data protection. And we are highly focused on protecting data regardless of where it lives, whether it lives on a customer's premise or whether it lives in a cloud, public cloud architecture, or even in a cloud application. So, for us, this has been a transformational change as more and more people begin to adopt cloud services as the work from home trend starts and we're seeing them much higher emergence of ransomware. >> Yeah, so cloud of course, it is a unevenly distributed if you look at, if look at a countries, if you look at industries, >> Right. >> I'm wondering what you're hearing from customers, what's kind of the 2020 snapshot of where we are with the overall cloud wave. >> Sure, yeah. What we're seeing is a much more rapid adoption of cloud services as businesses and organizations begin to wrestle with the fact that they can't bring people into the office. So the work from home trend, the access to resources needs to be delivered through the cloud applications, even data centers. We're now beginning to see you some supply chain hiccups that are causing the supply chain fulfillment of server orders beginning to slow down. So customers are beginning to think more broadly about cloud gives you agility, operational ability to react to change. So people are accelerating their adoption of cloud resources because they're almost being forced to. >> Yeah, is there anything specific you're seeing are you getting any data maybe with coronavirus as to what service is in the cloud and what impact that's having on your customers? >> Yeah, so dramatic change, right. So for example, Azure Cloud Services are up something like 775%, which is just astounding number, VDI, Virtual Desktops up over 300%, and just massive of these cloud resources is just a continuing component trim. >> Yeah, and how about from a data protection standpoint and security. Obviously, we've seen that the malicious attacks have increased, unfortunately, and when you have more people outside of the enterprise walls itself, there's more things we need to make sure that our data is secure. >> Yeah, absolutely. And we have without a doubt seen a rise in ransomware attacks and malware attacks. What's interesting to note is increasingly the consumer is placing the blame for these attacks, less on the perpetrators and more on the organization and business leaders. For example, over 40% of consumers actually hold the business leader responsible where ransomware attack that their business suffers And (indistinct) percent would actually say that they would stop buying from an organization that suffers from a malware or has been a victim of an attack. So the mindset here is no longer place blame on the perpetrators, but on the business leader and owner that didn't protect their data in such a way that kept the user from being exposed. >> Yeah, Doug, why don't you bring us inside and explain how Veritas is helping in these environments to protect our data? >> Yeah, so I think the first thing is as a business leader begins to think about their cloud contract, they need to understand their SLAs and how that maps to what that cloud provider is going to provide for them. We actually found, recently, we produced a report called the "Truth in Cloud Report" and in that report, we talked to cloud architects and business leaders over 1600 of them that respond, and one of the things that we found pretty interesting is that 85% of the respondents said that the cloud service provider is responsible for protecting their data, but that's completely disconnected from the actual fact that over 53% or so of those that responded actually had an SLA that was higher than their cloud service provider would provide. So they believe it's supposed to be done by the cloud provider, but it isn't being done by the cloud provider to meet their needs. So people really need to think about and analyze who's protecting their data and how they're protected when they move into that cloud architecture. >> Yeah, I have to say I'm a little surprised to hear those results, the drum beat that I've heard from the security industry for the last couple of years has been about the shared responsibility model, there have been some rather public and highly visible failures where say somebody made a false assumption that was something would be turned on and the cloud service providers have come back and said, "Hey, you all, if there's these things you need to do and just because there's a lock on the door, if you don't lock it, we're not responsible for it". It is kind of the analogy I use. Shouldn't we, by 2020 now, where cloud is not new. I would have thought that we would have gotten through some of these rather basic understanding of who's responsible for what and ultimately who needs to answer for these things. >> Yeah, I think we're still in that adoption life cycle and I think there was the... We mapped this as a hype cycle of our own... We're people right in the adoption of cloud and we believe that classically cloud architects, probably 20 to 25% of organizations, have actually fully adopted cloud at this point and are aggressively adopting cloud, but there is such a rush now to get in from these business leaders and architects, who haven't really you've taken the time to frame and understand things that they're now being pulled along in this journey and rediscovering this thing. So we have to keep that drum beat up as some of the cloud laggers or more mainstream technology adopters are beginning to adopt cloud 'cause they haven't stayed aware. I completely agree with you. We've been talking about the shared responsibility model for a long time, but these survey results showed that it's still a problem. >> Doug, you make a great point. You talk about companies have had to compress their cycles and while normally they would have been able to really plan things, walk through what they were going to do, they're often rushing into things a little bit more. So what advice would you give other companies that are now been dipping their toe, but jumping into cloud or they need to accelerate what they're doing, what advice would you make sure that people don't get in a little over their skis or do something that they're going to regret? >> Sure, so the first thing I would say is, have a recovery plan and make sure you rehearse it. Again, back to the blame here is falling on business leaders, so don't get caught by it, make sure that you understand your recovery plan, make sure that you rehearse it and that it works. The second thing is, I would absolutely read that fine print of your contract and make sure that your required SLAs match up with what your cloud services provider provides, or you need to adapt technology that helps you to adjust to make sure that you achieve that SLA. And then the final thing as you're doing all this, so many people look at cloud for cost optimization as an outcome, make sure you don't overpay because the there are various levels of cloud storage, cloud storage is extremely expensive, cloud resources are expensive. Typically people think about the actual host itself or the instance itself, make sure that you think about the storage as well. So use things like deduplication or lower tiers of storage to optimize your cost efficiency. >> All right, so Doug as we mentioned earlier in the discussion Veritas has been around for awhile really well understood how you help customers, help connect us as to what you're doing for the cloud specifically. >> Sure, so specifically for cloud, let's focus on an upcoming release. I think most people that are probably watching this are familiar with our product called NetBackup, it's the enterprise leader in data protection. NetBackup is designed to solve the data protection challenges across all infrastructure whether it's your typical on premise infrastructure or new cloud architectures. So in these new cloud architectures, we've done things to make sure that you efficiently utilize cloud storage. So we do things like deduplication, we also control network bandwidth and make sure that you minimize rather your impact on network bandwidth. So you've minimize your overall cost requirements associated with cloud or data protection. The other thing that we're doing in this next release, which I think is really exciting is, we're going to take our cloud point solution and our resiliency platform solution, these solutions are designed to help customers, efficiently recover in cloud as well as do it in a very quick and automated fashion. And we're going to bake those into our NetBackup product. So the NetBackup consumer will automatically have access to these two new technologies that we've been developing for the last several years. So that's really exciting for us to be including those with our NetBackup product. >> All right, and Doug, when we talk about cloud, is this supported across any cloud or there are specific integrations that we should understand or just where does this fit in the entire, on a multicloud ecosystem? >> Yeah, so the one other thing, again, about NetBackup being a platform, it support over 1400 different data sources, over 800 different data targets, and that includes over 60 cloud providers, so it supports us this broad ecosystem of cloud architecture but where that makes sense, we always go deep. So we go deep with your traditional cloud providers, like AWS or Azure and provide that deeper level capability for those those cloud providers. >> All right, great. What else should we know about what's new from Veratis's cloud offering? >> Yeah, I think when we build our cloud solutions, we focus on a four stage lifecycle of a customer. For example, we realized that customer wants to migrate the cloud, they want to protect their resources in cloud, they want to be able to recover when the time comes and then optimize their cloud footprint. So we tend to focus in those four pillars to achieve success for our customers. >> Yeah, a question on that, I think about moving to the cloud, there's a lot of discussion about how do I modernize my environment and often it's I move to the cloud, but then how do I really become cloud native, if you will. So I'm making updates and I'm making changes. If I think about backup traditionally, it was, let me get something, let me put it in place and I'm going to run it that way for years. So how does Veritas make sure that as I'm modernizing as I'm making changes that my data is still going to be protected no matter where I am along that journey. >> Sure, so I think as customers are migrating to and adopting cloud, their first stage on the train or their first station that they come to on the train is that lift and shift approach. We're going to take everything from on premise and we're going to move it to the cloud. So we have technologies that will help our customer do that with automated failback, so they can set up the replication solution, push a button now they're up and running in cloud, hey, it didn't work, push the button and they're back down in their on premise environment, adjust and do it when it makes sense and they're ready to make it make it work. So we have a fairly robust set of technologies that can help in that lift and shift process, lift and shift process. The other thing that we provide is for those infrastructure as code guys, the guys that are further out that are thinking, how do I natively build cloud based solutions? We have a very full suite of APIs so that the customer can implement their infrastructure as code requirements right there through that Swagger interface that you would expect and deploy infrastructure as code environments in cloud, utilizing our enterprise class API. So we're purpose built to be able to help customers get the cloud, and then also support those cloud applications that are built there natively. >> Yeah, Doug, I'm wondering, do you have either a customer example, maybe anonymized you can share, or just any general cloud learnings about where your customers are and how Veritas is helping them? >> Sure, so one of the first things that we see customers try to accomplish is the move of their backup storage infrastructure into a longterm storage in cloud. So they might use it as a replacement for tape, they might use it as a replacement for disk, and they want to live in the cloud environment. So we have a capability, we call it CloudCatalyst that moves data very efficiently from on prem into the cloud, keeps it deduplicated, optimizes it for wide area network transmit, and really efficiently moves that data in the cloud, and then really what's important is once it gets in the cloud, it doesn't touch that data. So we have a large customer who's got over a couple of petabytes of data in Europe that wanted to make that migration to cloud, they were using another provider at the time, so we came in and we were actually able to save them over 98% of their overall operational cost associated with moving and migrating that data just based on this one capability. So that's a key element, right. As people are moving that data to cloud, make sure that it stays efficient, optimized, deduplicated in stored efficient. >> All right, Doug, I'll give you the final word. >> Yeah, I think my warning for customers is to make sure that they are well-protected with their data state in cloud. Understand what your cloud service provider provides, make sure that your SLOs, your service level objectives are going to be met by the technologies that you deploy in order to solve your cloud problems. And then think about things holistically, think about it first from the migration, then how you protect it, then once you get there, what do you do to recover, make you test that. And then once you've got everything kind of thought through and ready to implement, make sure that you've optimized it to be efficient in it's cost utilization and in it's operations. >> All right, well, Doug Matthews, thank you so much for the updates, we really appreciate you sharing us some important tips for customers as they go along their cloud journey. >> Thank you so much, Stuart. >> All right, I'm Stuart Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>>LA Las Vegas. It's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Good morning from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with Summa and Amanda, we are coming to you live from AWS reinvent 19. This is the QSA second full day of coverage and Stu and I are pleased to welcome one of our cube alum back to the program. We have Greg Hughes, the CEO of bear toss. Greg, welcome back. Good morning. >>Be here. Thank you. Yeah, >>this, this is 10, 10, 15 in the morning and this is already jam pack. Lots of buzz. Lots of, lots of news yesterday. I think that's kind of an understatement. Give us a little, a bit of an overview of their and AWS, what you guys got going on. >>It's, it's an amazing show, first of all. And uh, I was, the keynote yesterday was pretty incredible. Three hours long. I mean that, that stamina involved in a three hour keynote. I got to get hats off to Andy Jassy for doing that. Uh, one of the big announcements that was in that, uh, keynote was that outpost has been, is now generally available. And, uh, Amazon outpost is basically the Amazon web services that you can put within your data center. Okay. So we talk a lot about this hybrid cloud model on-prem in your data center and private cloud all the way to the public cloud. And so that is the outpost announcement and we're really excited to say that we are a partner with AWS on Amazon, uh, outpost and we have a designed and tested and validated solution on AWS outpost. So if you move your applications of customer moves, their applications on to outpost, they have the peace of mind knowing that their data is protected by Veritas. >>So we're really excited. Yeah. So, so Greg, everybody absolutely is very interested in outposts. Uh, I've just spent a couple of days in meetings trying to dig in. Uh, it is the building block, Amazon juicing for things like AWS, local zones, uh, AWS wavelength for 5g. One of the questions I really have for the ecosystem, cause I've seen a lot of announcement is this is yes it's the nitro chip and hardware and a subset of services that you would get from AWS. And from a management standpoint it looks like you've just put in a Z in your data center. But talk to us a little bit about what does it mean to actually integrate there. Cause Veritas has been an AWS partner for a number of years. I understand what it means to use Veritas in the public cloud. Walk us through some of the nuance and detail of what new we, well we have a very, very close partnership with AWS. >>Our engineers work very closely together and we did proceeding this announcement. And basically in this specific case, it means if you have an application or data on Alpos, it will be automatically backed up to the cloud, to a S3 through Veritas NetBackup. And so you can manage your outposts through Amazon, you're Veritas to state through our NetBackup console. And though things work seamlessly together. Yeah. So, so just one, when I looked at it, it's a, there, there's things like a, you know, ECS and EMR and RDS are in there. Yes. Three is not yet a service available on outpost, not available on outposts, but we can button connect it as three in the back. So that's what I'm trying to understand is where does my data live and how do I protect it without posts? Well you can, you can manage that through a essentially. So that's primarily the use case is for backing up to make sure your data is protected when it's on outpost. We see customers that want to experiment with outposts, they want to try cloud services. They have certain applications and certain workloads that are low latency and need low latency. And so they're going to run those in their data centers and those applications, those workloads can be protected through Veritas just like everything else is protected by Veritas. That's the idea. >>So for customers who have been with Veritas for a long time and they've got a cloud strategy that they're working on, walk us through maybe a, I don't want to use the word migration, but maybe an evolution. If they're saying, all right, there's workloads that we want to move to public cloud, what would that process be like for an existing customer? We spend >>a lot of time working with AWS on what that journey looks like and, uh, we developed a set of what we call well architected reviewed solutions that, that Amazon reviews and that we've invested in so that, uh, our customers can depend on this. These solutions working well together usually starts with backing up to the cloud. Okay. Instead of using secondary storage or tape backing up to the cloud. And so, uh, we have a customer put to furrow grope. It's a financial services firm that was able to leverage our appliances for on-prem rapid restore, but tear off the data to S three. So that's usually the start. Uh, the second step is using the cloud as a dr site. A lot of companies as you know, invest in data center capacity just for disaster recovery. It's not used all that often. And so that's an obvious thing. >>You can move to the cloud and have a data center on demand, so to speak. So we have a customer China Marine that is using our, our product Veritas resiliency platform to do that with AWS. And then finally it's moving your whole application stack to the cloud in migrating your data to the cloud. It still needs to be protected, right? Uh, it's still a customer's responsibility to protect that data in the cloud. And in that case, the Veritas products work really well in AWS. We can protect the workloads in the cloud. We have a environmental services firm, they, uh, that has moved their applications cloud still using Veritas for data protection. So that's really how we think about it. So Greg Veritas, what one of your strengths do you have? A very large install base and therefore I expect you to have a good visibility into what your customers are doing. >>Bring us on site a little bit when we talk about, you know, leveraging the cloud, it's agility and a modernizing my applications. We know, you know, changing my application stack is a longterm challenging thing to do. But do you have any kind of business outcomes, any proof points as to, you know, what your customers, you know, what do they get as they're uh, maturing their, their, their cloud journey. And evolution has a Veritas, so we work with, you know, our customers are 86% of the fortune 500. We work with the largest institutions on the planet the most. So I like to say the largest, most complicated, most highly regulated enterprises on the, on in the world, 10 of the top 10 financial services, 10 of the top 10 telco healthcare. Those are all our customers and they're all moving towards a hybrid world to leverage the cloud, but also have on prem data centers in a hybrid environment. >>And one of these they really want to leverage is that cheap and deep storage in the cloud. So, and we're seeing a very easy thing for our customers to do is to migrate from backing up to disk and tape for long term retention to backing up to the cloud, leveraging S3 glacier deep archive. Andy talked about it yesterday. It's lower than the price to tape our cus. Many of our customers still using tape for longterm retention. And it's just very simple step to data protection modernization, leveraging the cloud to replace though that secondary storage and tape with, with the cloud and the storage in the cloud. So for an organization that has thousands of endpoints, servers, virtual environments, SAS applications, can they manage all of that in the cloud through like a, a single bear toss dashboard? How do you allow that, like comprehensive data protection? >>That's our journey essentially. And you know, weight and, and our value proposition is that end to end data management. Uh, we, we kind of think of ourselves as the Switzerland of the storage and data protection world. We work with everything. Uh, we work with a 500 different workload types. We back up to 150 different, uh, storage targets, including many of the cloud service providers. So that's really our whole value proposition is that ability to give you that abstraction across all the complex storage silos you have. We can take care of availability, protection and insights. That's what we do. So a few years ago, uh, we, we saw a little bit of a bit flip when we talk about security and the cloud. It used to be, you know, for, for the early days of the cloud it was, I can't do cloud because I'm worried about the security. And now many thought security is an opportunity, uh, when I go to the cloud the last year or two, it's a very nuanced discussion. >>Uh, and the relationship between my data, my cloud providers, my information and data protection, uh, is something that we've been digging into a lot. Uh, at the 80 most reinforced show inaugural show this year. Uh, we had a lot of great conversations. CSOs, um, have a challenge. It's a board level discussion. Uh, what are you hearing from your customers and what's their tosses role? And a straight question. Uh, look, uh, security is a board level conversation and when I go talk, I spend about 30 to 50% of my time talking to customers and the cyber threat is real in particular ransomware. What are, what the enterprise is worried about is uh, that their data gets completely encrypted through a ransomware attack and they're dead in the water. You know, they can't ship product, they can't bill, they can't run payroll. And the challenge is that the malware is going to get in spearfishing works. >>When you get those emails that say click on this link, you know, in many cases people still click on the link and the bad stuff gets in. So what you need is you need a resilient infrastructure and at the foundation of that is to make sure you've got a protected copy of your data that you can depend on and roll back to that, you know, is good. And that's really driven a lot of our business in the last few years is making sure we have, we can help our customers have that resilient data. It's true, whether in the public cloud or on prem, same, same challenge, right? From a ransomware perspective to help reduce spread is data protection in the cloud and an enabler of mitigating the rest that ransomware provides in terms of data not traversing through a customer's network. If it's protected in the cloud, ransomware attack can occur too in your cloud or on prem. >>It really doesn't matter. It's a. They don't really care. The bad guys don't care. Uh, but what you need ultimately is your copy of your data that you can go back to and you can restore everything else you can. Uh, you know, you, you can create, but that data, that state of your business, that's really the crown jewels and if they've corrupted that, you know, you're in trouble. So related to the security governance of course, has been a big discussion. Uh, last year, uh, every single show I went to was talking about GDPR. This year we're all waiting for the California law to roll out and we expect more of this to happen. Uh, you know, what are the discussions you're having with your customers there? And, uh, what, what, what's the, the regulatory environment is really moving fast. A lot more regulations around data. I was taught, it's funny, I was talking to a customer in st Louis and they said the California data privacy act was going to be the death of them. >>Yeah. You don't think about that for a customer in st Louis, a big customer. Uh, I was talking to a customer in Australia and she said she has to deal with 27 different regulatory regimes. So how do you do that when the dirty secret is you don't know where all your data is, you don't know what's important, what's not. Uh, you know, most of our customers have very difficult time assessing that. So where Veritas comes in is we have some solutions that provide insight into that to allow you to understand where is your data, what can be deleted, what's really important, what's pie, what's protected, what's not protected. To really give you some insight in that across all the different silos that Andy was talking about. Yes. >>Showing them really where some of the vulnerabilities are that they might be completely blind to >>say the risks and vulnerabilities that they have that they don't know and that's now becoming a board level topic. So we're getting pulled in. I was actually in Europe a couple of weeks ago and one of our customers said, look, I need to present to the board they insights that Veritas is providing me on my infrastructure is safe so that they're aware, >>let's push them for you. Yesterday when everything kicked off and you're right, it was a marathon. A three hour keynote is very impressive. There's a lot of news packed in there. One of the biggest themes is transformation. It's a word that we talk about transformation, right? We talk about security, transformation, digital transformation, workforce transformation. It's used commonly, but yesterday was really sort of like this, this sort of reinvention of of AWS, but this transformation that Andy was saying, and it sounds like something that you're hearing that this has to come from senior, the senior level of really understanding transformation. Not just do we go to the cloud, how, when, what? But also ultimately it's about data and if you can't access the data, if you can't restore data quickly, if there is, whether it's a human error or some sort of catastrophic event, you can't get to what you need, the business suffers. Right. And there's going to be another competitor whose objects are close to the Napier in the mirror. Right. Who are ready to come in and take over that business. Give me a little bit of a, of a kind of an overview as we wrap up here about their tosses transformation as customers are having to pivot really quickly to use data as a competitive advantage. Yes. >>Well look, we think about, uh, you know, our, our role in digital transformation is in the data transformation part of that. Uh, you can't have digital transformation without transforming your data. Uh, we've talk a lot here about data has gravity. It can distance to stick where it is. We're trying to make that data mobile flexible, protected, available and visible. And that's really our role is in, in digital transformation to give you the freedom to use your data wherever you want to. >>That's what we do. One last question actually on the data has gravity. We talk about that a lot. Your last thoughts on Amazon and moving towards where that gravity is with post for an example, this is another example of I think yesterday and John furrier even uncovered this and his exclusive with Andy Jassy. It's AWS everywhere, which is just like Amazon. >>I can actually just to to build on that, uh, John furrier and I to Andy Jassy like three years ago said the next flywheel for Amazon is data. You stayed, absolutely. Data's come up over and over again. I think, you know, we're working very closely together with AWS to help make this journey easy for our customers. We're both very customer obsessed, you know, that came up a lot. We are customer obsessed as well. We're innovating step-by-step. We were the first launch launch partner with a glacier deep archive. So we attend to be at the forefront of allowing our customers to leverage AWS and know that they're protected by their AtoZ. >>Yeah, those demanding customers. Right. Well, Greg, thank you for joining Stu and me on the program sharing what's new with their toss and AWS and the transformation that you're both undergoing. We appreciate it. Take care of our student, man. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from day two of our coverage of AWS reinvent 19 thanks for watching.

(upbeat instrumental music) >> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, Celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. (upbeat instrumental music) Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back everyone. theCUBE's Live coverage here in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, VMworld 2019 coverage. Dave, 10 years of Cube coverage, Yip! we started out 10 years ago. VMworld is the last show standing. Our next guest is Todd Forsythe, CMO of Veritas. Great to see you, first time on theCUBE. Thanks Todd. It is inaugural. (John laughs) Aafter 25 years in the industry, it's crazy. With your talent, I think we're going to have a good segment here. I'm sure we will. Very entertaining. No, seriously we've known each other, we were on an advisory board together. You're a prolific marketer, you do a lot of great things. You're progressive, you try new things with startups, but also you got to run a big operation. >> Todd: That's right. MarTech stacks, you like to look at platforms. This is a re-platforming of the internet we're seeing with Cloud 2.0, and I want to get your thoughts on this, because you got a unique perspective at Veritas, you know, an older brand modernized in real time. That's right. New products refresh in a massively changing growth, still growth market. It's a data business. Absolutely. That's right, a 100%. So what's your take on this? As you look at the landscape, you've got the modern brand, you got to take it out there, new products. You know it's interesting, I had a really fascinating conversation yesterday with a customer, and the customer said, "You know, I was walking through the expo hall, "and I saw Amazon, I saw Microsoft, "I saw IBM, I saw Dell Technologies, "I saw Kubernetes, I saw Pure, I saw Nutanix, "I thought I was in my own data center." And it's interesting, I think about our business, and in our business, data doesn't care. Like you know data doesn't care if you're running a modern architecture. Data doesn't care if you're running Legacy. So what we're really focused on is helping companies manage data in highly complex, and extremely demanding environments regardless of their infrastructure. And Cloud 2.0 speaks to the complexity of that, because you know, these, and we were talking earlier with VMware about these categories that used to exist, these Gartner Magic Quadrants. You know, you can't put something that's not a silo in a silo, you're horizontally disrupting. And data does that, data has to move around and it's got to move everywhere. So there's no more silo boxes of categories. A 100% agree, you know it's interesting, we launched Enterprise Data Services earlier this year, and that was the precise reason why, because we've relooked at what data protection is. Data protection is no longer backing up your data from a cloud to a cloud from your on Prime, it's a much broader category. It covers how your data becomes available, how resilient you are, understanding where your data is, how it's categorized so you can respond to ransomware attacks, manage regulations around the world. So our view of data protection is a platform that is horizontal and cuts across. Well you guys, I mean the heritage of Veritas is the original data management company, right? Yeah. With no hardware agenda, and so my question for you, Todd, is what attracted you to Veritas? Softball question, so the most amazing customers any company could possibly imagine, Global 2000, the top telecommunications companies, the top banks, top stock exchanges. Secondly a product strategy that's really zoned in, back to your point about this, a platform that cuts across all of these diverse technologies and solves problems for customers that abstracts them from the complex environments that they're in so they could focus on outcomes, and Greg has done an amazing job recruiting a top notch leadership team. So it was really great product, good leaders. Okay now, follow up is you guys, you know, number one, top anyway, right and with Gartner Magic Quadrant, everybody wants a piece of your hide, (chuckles) the whole industry is coming at you. So, what's the sort of messaging strategy to keep top spot from both outward facing and also product development? Sure, sure. So we look at two types of competitors. Competitors that are offering point solutions, predominately playing in the mid-market, and when you're a large financial institution, and you have a highly complex environment, you're in a multi-cloud world, and you can't afford to have a siloed backup data. So you need to understand how your data is classified, where it's stored. So if you're responding to ransomware, and that ransomware attack is targeted to a specific server, you need to know if you have PII there, or if you have cat pictures there. If you have cat pictures there, then, (chuckles). >> John: Let 'em have it. Let 'em have it, exactly. (John laughs) So our platform cuts across protection, availability, and insights, which categorizes your data. So the data gets categorized in NetBackup, extends to the analytics platform, so you know where your data is, and you could take action on your data. The hard question of the day, instead of a softball I'll give you a hard one, you got to refresh the brand of Veritas has got a lot of pros and cons. The pros are, you know, well-known, a lot of customers, I got a customer question later, but the brand is important, because you have the new modern platform products, platform and products. Yeah, yeah. You got to get the name, Veritas has old meaning. You have a lot of older customers, you have legacy customers. How are you going to go out there and refresh? Is there any new plans there? We have a ton of plans. You know, we have the product, we have the customers. The product, the platform product is amazing. We are a quiet company, so we need to be noisier in the marketplace, and we need to insert ourselves into relevant conversations that are top of mind with CEOs and CIOs, whether it's ransomware. If you look at all of the ransomware attacks, It's a huge opportunity I read like two weeks ago in the State of Texas there were 10, 15 municipalities that were attacked. At the same time. At the same time! and we have a solution that can help customers recover from ransomware, so we have to insert ourselves in those dialogues because we have a very, very specific point of view that can help customers. Well but to John's point, right? Everybody that you compete with will say, we have a solution that, you know, helps solve ransomware. So, how do you separate from the pack? Like I said, everybody's trying to take pick you off. You know, we want a piece of that install base, right? 'Cause you got to keep the install base, and you got to keep growing, right? I'll lay down the gauntlet. I would love any competitor to showcase how they can support 500 workloads, a 150 storage targets, 60 cloud providers, at enterprise scale with a high degree of reliability. Our differentiator is we can cut across these very complex, very demanding IT environments, at scale. I want to get your thoughts on the customer journey question, because I think, you know, you mentioned the customer base, we've been following what you guys do. I mean I ran, I was in Bahrain for a regional Amazon event I was covering in the Middle East, and in the exhibit was this Veritas, and they recognized, hey, there's theCUBE guy. I was like, hey, thanks for watching. But seriously, you guys are everywhere. You got huge customers, but you probably have a lot of customers that are trying to go from here to there, VMware was talking almost specifically around, you know, you got the enterprise scale world, and they want that cloud Nirvana, and then there's that missing middle in between. So, you probably have a lot of transformational stories. What is the patterns of customer profile that you see? Some of them making the journey? Some of them are having a hard time? What's the state of the mind of the customer that you guys have? Well, we are definitely seeing a hybrid, multi-cloud world as you've heard here this week. 52% Of our customers are running in a hybrid cloud environment, and we have a core relationship with their legacy infrastructure, and our customers are asking our help to extend their data protection, and their NetBackup environment into the cloud, to backup the cloud, and across new modern workloads. So our customers are pulling us into their environments to do more. And that's cloud and hybrid basically. Cloud and hybrid. Public cloud and on premises. And our customers are also realizing that they're responsible for backing up their own data in the cloud. There's this misperception in the industry that if I move to a cloud provider, the cloud provider will manage my data, when in actuality you are still responsible for your data. You know, Amazon with security has a shared responsibility model. They say, okay, we protect the EC2, the infrastructure for S3, et cetera. You're responsible for pretty much everything else. And I think that you could draft off that message. Yeah, yeah! You guys too, a couple of years ago, had a great event call Veritas Vision where everybody came in, and then you changed that. Now you sort of go to where the customers are, and I'm wondering, how's that working out? It predated you. Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! So I won't ask you why that decision was made, but you know, how's it working out? I mean, a company like yours, there was like four, 5,000 people there, it was a really good event. So, a great question, and a highly relevant question, because we're just about to launch our series. So, you know, having run large, large, large user conferences, and you look at distribution of your customers and, you know, you typically find that 80% of your customers are coming from the US. You look at our customer base, global international customers. We have a high percentage of customers that are outside of the U.S. So, our strategy is let's take our user conference, let's take our message, let's take our value proposition to the customer. So, we are kicking off next month an entire series around the world, Germany, Paris, Rome, Seoul, Bali, Singapore, Melbourne, our vision series, where it's our anti-user conference. We're taking content directly to our customers. Is this regional or are those cities based? How is that segment? City based. So it's like an Amazon Summit kind of thing you go to? Yeah, yep. Okay so as a follow-up. So, as a seasoned pro in this space, why either, or, why not do both? I mean there's a budget obviously is one thing, it's expensive to run these events, I get it, but. I would prefer to put more money to where the customer is at. The field, kind of. Yeah, into the fields, you know, one of the life lessons of being a marketer is go to where the customer is. Don't try to get the customer to come to you. Well, your head of sales will love that message, you're going well. (Todd laughs) So our strategy is to go where the customer is. Yeah, and that does help sales actually. So, while you're on that point, you're a very progressive marketer, for the folks that don't know you, I'll share with them that, you know, you like to try things, and you love start-ups, and you love to promote new things. The marketing stack, I've said on theCUBE, and we'd love to have you challenge us if you want, love to debate it, I said, the MarTech Stack just didn't pan out. I mean, it worked? No, no, it didn't, no! Did it work? Is it evolving? Is it siloed? Is the cloud changing the MarTech Stack? So again, pretty aggressive statement, but my point is, email marketing was great for that generation, still is. There's new organic flows, maybe I'm biased, but I'd love to get your thoughts. How is the marketing tech world evolving with cloud computing? So, I'm going to say something provocative. >> John: Okay, all right, here we go. I think the CRM industry has gotten B2B marketing wrong. What I mean by that is you look at most CRM capabilities in B2B and they're focused on an individual. They're focused on a lead, they're focused on nurturing an individual, but if you look at our customers and enterprise, individuals don't buy, buying groups, committees, and accounts buy. So where we're focused is looking at accounts, and understanding account company based behavior that shows buying intent and triggers, which then initiate our marketing. So it's not built around a lead, it's built around-- >> John: So account based marketing? Account based marketing, but account based insight and intelligence around, is there a project or buying opportunity? And you know our good friends at Manigo, that's what they do, which is AI driven, trigger-based marketing. And that's where I think the industry is going. And what's your thoughts on organic marketing, because one of the things that's hot, is we live this world with theCUBE, and we've been kind of pioneering this model where co-creating content together and pushing it out into these digital streams is an organic process. It's technically earned media and PR parlance, but we're seeing the evolution of the CMO-like action around storytelling, right? And so, like community based storytelling, it's an organic function, it's hard to control. You can't just buy it, it's got to be kind of nurtured or enabled. That's right. What's your view on that? Because this is an emerging trend we're seeing, VM were just reorganizing a whole storytelling integrated group of PR pros, that are acting like the marketing, in their marketing. Well you know, one of the most active, customer segments we have is our VOX Community, and if you think to your point about co-creation of content in collaboration, our VOX Community collaborates on solving problems that customers have, they call that-- >> John: Can you take a minute to explain, what is VOX Community to us? VOX is a community of our technical users, where they help each other share best practices and solve problems. >> Dave: A lot of how-to? A lot of how-to-- Not Vox Media. Not Vox Media, correct. Just need to make sure to get that out there. Forums, there's videos. Is this your community, or is it third-party? Veritas. Okay, Veritas. It's a Veritas community, yeah. And then to your other point, John, the marketing world has changed. We've quickly moved into a world where we now have an anonymous relationship with our customer, with email, with direct mail. Yeah, we're always driving to registration to capture a name, that world is long gone. A Facebook show that's been weaponized, so you know. Yeah, that's right. It's the data business, at the end of the day. The user experience is horrible, right? Everybody hates that, and so yeah, there are other ways now you can use data, you can infer. Yeah, that's right, exactly. You can read the tea leaves, and probably make a pretty high prediction, or highly accurate prediction. What is the most under reported trend that you think marketers should look at in terms of capabilities that are working out in the field for you? I would say the ability to leverage predicative analytics, call it AI or machine learning, understand what's happening at an account, and whether there's a buying trigger. I think accessing that information, learning from that information in terms of how should you initiate a selling motion, and then enabling the sales force with that intelligence, I think is a wide open territory. All right, we got a-- So a couple of other things. If I can? Yeah! Just to get it in. So you guys made a big platform enhancements a couple of years ago, and then a big eight dot, whatever it was, eight dot something, two, three, five. I think it was 8.2. Customer momentum, can you update us on that? Maybe even customer examples, and then I've got a partner question for you. Yeah, so I talked about the value of the platform, and we'll take Renault as an example. So Renault, a NetBackup customer, Renault wanted to make their virtualized SAP environment highly available, and they looked at a variety of different solutions, and they looked at some solutions that were homegrown and others, and they realized just extending the Veritas platform was faster time to market, 60% cost savings. So, there's a perfect example of a customer leveraging our platform play. And a couple partner questions. So, you know, we're here at VMworld, so your VMware partnership obviously pretty important, and then we're at Pure Accelerate next month, you guys are there, you got a big presence there, I know you got a tight partnership with them. That's right. Give us the partner update. Partner update, so we have very solid relationships with Amazon, Microsoft, VMware, Google, Nutanix, Pure, and that's where we're really doubling down in terms of technology integration, joint go-to-market. >> Dave: Great. And the community site is vox.veritas.com, I just was checking it out. Thank you for the plug. There's a church one, there's a religious one, not to be confused with Vox Media, so just want to make sure everyone got that URL. We think community is super important. Thanks for coming on theCUBE Excellent! and sharing your insights. Thank you gentlemen. Thank you. Todd Forsythe, CMO of Veritas. More live coverage of VMworld after this short break. (upbeat dance music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody. This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this CUBE conversation. I've been following trends in backup and recovery and data protection for decades and I'll tell you right now is one of the most exciting eras that I've ever seen and with me here to talk about some of the trends and some hard news is Beth Phalen. She's the president and general manager of Dell EMCs data protection division. Beth it's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> It's great to be here Dave. It's always good to talk to you. >> So, there's been a subtle change in IT. Even when you go to sort of the downturn in 2008 where IT was largely a support function. It's really now becoming a fundamental enabler. Are you seeing that with your customers? >> Absolutely. The vision of IT being some back office that is segregated from the rest of the company is no longer true. What we find is customers want their application owners to be able to drive data protection and then have that compared with the central oversight so they can still have that global overview. >> The other change is, for years data has been this problem that we have to manage. I got so much data. I got to back it up or protect it, move it. It's now become a source of value. Everybody talks about digital transformation. It's all about how you get value from data. >> Yeah. And it's so interesting because it was there all the time. Right? And suddenly people have realized, yes, this is an asset that has a huge impact on our business on our customers and again makes it even more important that they can rely on getting access to that data because they're building their business on it. >> So as the head of the data protection division, it's interesting. Even the palance has changed. It used to be, when it was just tape it was backup and now it's data protection. So the mindset is shifting. >> It is and it's continuing to shift with new threats like cyber recovery and other challenges that are out there, protecting data becomes the core of what we are offering our customers. >> So let's talk a little bit more about the catalysts for that change. You got tons of data, you are able to apply now machine intelligence like you never have before and you got cloud which brings scale. So this is changing the needs of customers in the way in which they protect data. >> As customers data becomes more and more distributed across multiple cloud providers, multiple locations, it's even more important that they can answer the question, where is my data and is it protected? And that they can recover it as quickly as possible. >> And you're seeing things like DevOps, data protection strategies and data management strategies, and so supporting DevOps and analytics applications. You also have new threats like ransomware. So it's a more fundamental component of cyber. >> Yeah and you will hear us talking a little bit about cyber recovery, the new product that we introduced last year. We can't just think about data protection as backup. We have to think about it as the comprehensive way that customers can get access to their data even if they're attacked. >> So much has changed. Everything has changed. >> The level of innovation that we've been doing has been keeping up with that change. And that's one of the things that I'm most excited about as the president of this division. We've been investing in enhancing the customer experience, and cyber recovery as I mentioned and expanding into new markets into driving a new level of reliability and resiliency, building on the duration that we have. And of course expanding into the cloud. So one of the things that hasn't changed is the fundamentals of I need to get my data back, I need to be trusted. Why is it, you guys make a big deal out of being number one. You're number one in all the Gartner Magic Quadrants and so forth. Why is leadership so important to customers and what are those fundamentals that haven't changed? >> So two questions there. First, leadership is so important because we have more experience protecting data around the globe than anybody else. And that means all environments right from the multi-petabyte, major corporations to the shops have maybe a terabyte. So 24 terabytes. We're involved in it all. So that experience is important. And then those fundamentals you talked about, lowest cost to protect, fastest performance, fastest backups and resiliency, those fundamentals have to be part of any data protection product. >> The way you guys are organized, you are in chare of R&D as well, you talked about innovation before. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how your R&D investments are translating into customer value in terms of price performance. So resiliency, speed, cost. What's going on there? >> The biggest thing that I wanna talk about and highlight here is how much our investment in cloud is enabling our customers to continue to have confidence that they can get the same level of digital trust that they've had with us on prem but now as they expand into the cloud for cloud disaster recovery, long-term retention, data protection in the cloud that that confidence comes with them. And we're doing it in a way that allows them to seamlessly expand into the cloud without having to introduce additional gateways, additional hardware. It becomes an extension of their data protection infrastructure. >> So the cloud operating model is very important here. What are you guys doing for instance, admins, application owners, in terms of enabling self-service for example. >> We have the broadest application support of any company. And what we're doing is we're integrating directly with those applications. Whether it be Oracle, SAP. You can go down the list. And then of course directly integrating with VMware for the VM admins. That's not enough though because if we just did that you wouldn't be able to have one view of how your data protection policies are working. And so we pair that with centralized governance to make sure that the person in charge of the data protection for that company still could have confidence that all the right things are happening. >> So what does the data protection portfolio look like? How should we think about that? >> Three simple things, Data Domain, our new integrated appliances and data protection suite. >> Okay. Follow up question on that is, how do you, for customers, obstruct the complexity? How are you simplifying their world especially in this cloud operating module. >> Simplifying comes in multiple stages. You have to simplify the first box to backup experience. We've cut that down to an hour and a half, two hours in max. From there, you have to make sure the day-to-day tasks are simple. So things like two clicks to do cloud failover, three clicks to failback. Things like a single step to restore a file in a VMware environment and then live movement of that VM to another primary storage array. That kind of targeted customer use case simple process is core to what we've been doing to enhance the customer experience. >> Now, you guys aren't really a public cloud provider so you gotta support multiple clouds. What are you doing there in terms of both cloud support and what are you seeing in multi-cloud. >> Most customers have more than one cloud provider that they're working with. So what we do is we allow the customers specific example right from within the data domain interface to select which cloud they wanna tier to and then they can also select other cloud providers through the same interface. So, it's not a separate experience. They can focus on the Data Domain but then interact with multiple clouds. >> Awesome. Beth, thanks for taking some time here to set this up. We're gonna hear about some hard news that you guys have today. We've got some perspectives from IDC on this but right now lets take a look at what the customer says. Keep it right there. (chilled piano music) >> Phoenix Children's is a healthcare organization for kids. Everything that we do is about the kids. So we wanna make sure that all our critical data that a doctor or a nurse needs on the floors to be able to take care of a sick kid, we need to make sure it's available at any time. The data protection software that we're using from Dell EMC with Data Domain give us that protection. Our critical data are well kept and we can easily recover them. Before we moved to Data Domain we were using Veritas NetBackup and some older technology. Our backup windows were taking upwards of 20 to 24 hours. Moving to Data Domain with de-duplication we can finish our full backups in less than seven hours. The user deployment for data protection software and Data Domain was very easy for us. Our engineers, they have never worked with data protection software or Data Domain before. They were able to do some research, walk a little bit with some Dell engineers and we were able to implement the technology within a month, a month and a half. ECS for Phoenix Children's Hospital is a great technology. Simple to use, easy to manage. The benefits from a user perspective are tremendous. From an IT perspective, I can extract terabytes of data in less than an hour. When we get into a critical situation, we can rely 100% on ECS that we will get the information that the doctor or the nurse needs to take care of the kid. The data protection software and the Data Domain benefits for Phoenix Children's Hospital are great. There is a solution that works seamlessly together. I have no worries that my backups will not run. I have no worries I will not be able to recover critical applications. (chilled piano music) >> We're back with Ruya Barrett who's the vice president of marketing for Dell EMC's Data Protection division. We got some hard news to get into. Ruya, let's get right into it. What are you guys announcing today? >> We are announcing a basically tremendous push with our data protection family both in Data Domain and Integrated Data Protection appliances and the software that basically makes those two rock. >> So, you've got a few capabilities that you're announcing. Cloud performance. Take us through sort of at a high level. What are the three areas that you're focused on this announcement? >> Exactly. You nailed it Dave. So three areas of announcement, exciting cloud capabilities and cloud expansion. We've been investing in cloud over the last three years and this announcement is just a furthering of those capabilities. Tremendous push around performance for an additional use cases and services that customers want. The last one but not least is basically expanded coverage and push into the mid-market space with our Data Domain 3300 and IDPA 4400. >> And this comes in the form of software that I can install on my existing appliances? >> It's all software value that really enables our appliances to do what they do best, to drive efficiency, performance but it's really the software layer that makes it sane. >> And if I'm a customer I get that software, no additional charges? >> If you have the capabilities, today you'll be able to get the expanding capabilities. No charge. >> Okay. So one of the important areas is cloud. Let's get into some of the cloud use cases. You're focused on a few of those. What are they? >> Cloud has become a really prevalent destination. So when we look at cloud and what customers wanna do with regards to data protection in the cloud, it's really a lot of use cases. The three we're gonna touch on today is really cloud tiering. Our capabilities are in cloud tiering with long time archival. So they're really trying to leverage cloud as a long time archival. The second one is really around cloud disaster recovery. To and from the cloud. So that's really important use case. That's becoming really important to our customers. And not, God forbid, for a disaster but just being able to test our disaster recovery capabilities and resiliency. And the last one is really in-cloud data protection. So those are the three use cases and we have enhancements across all three. >> Let's go deeper into those. So cloud tiering. We think of tiering. Often times you remember the big days of tiering, inbox tiering, hot data, cold data. What are you doing in cloud tiering? >> Well, cloud tiering is our way of really supporting object storage both on premises and in the cloud. And we introduced it about two years ago. And what we're really doing now is expanding that coverage, making it more efficient, giving customers the tools to be able to understand what the costs are gonna be. So one of the announcements is actually a free space estimator tool for our customers that really enables them to understand the impact of taking an application and using long-term retention using cloud tier both for their on-premise data protection capacity as well as what they need in the cloud and the cost associated. So that's a big question before customers wanna move data. Second is really broadest coverage. I mean, right now in addition to the usual suspects of AWS, Azure, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, we now support Ceph, we support Alibaba, we support Google Cloud. So really, how do you build out that multi-cloud deployment that we see our customers wanting to do with regards to their long-term archival needs? So really expanding that reach. So we now have the broadest coverage with regards to archiving in the cloud and using cloud for long-term retention. >> Great. Okay. Let's talk about disaster recovery. I'm really interested in this topic because the customers that we talk to they wanna incorporate disaster recovery and backup as part of a holistic strategy. You also mentioned testing. Not enough customers are able to test their DR. It's too risky, it's too hard, it's too complicated. What are you guys doing in the DR space. >> So one of the things that's I think huge and very differentiated with regards to how we approach, whether it's archive or whether it's DR or in-cloud is the fact that from an appliance standpoint you need no additional hardware or gateway to be able to leverage the capabilities. One of the things that we introduced, again cloud DR over a year ago, and we introduced it across our Data Domain appliances as well as our first entry to the mid-sized companies with IDPA DP 4400. And now what we're doing is making it available across all our models, all our appliances. And all of our appliances now have the ability to do fully orchestrated disaster recovery either for test use cases or actual disasters, God forbid, but what they are able to do. The three click failovers and the two click failbacks from the cloud. So both for failback from the cloud or in the cloud. So it's really big and important use cases for our customers right now. Again, with that, we're expanding use case coverage to now, we used to support AWS only, now we also support Azure. >> Great. Okay. The third use case you talked about was in-cloud data protection. What do you mean by that and what are you doing there? >> So one of, again, the really interesting things about our portfolio is our ability to run it as an integrated hardware-software platform or in the form of a software only deployment. So our data domain virtual addition is exactly that. You can run our Data Domain software in virtual machines. And what that allows our customers to do is whether they're running a software defined data center on prem or whether they want in-cloud capabilities and all that goodness they have been getting from Data Domain in the cloud, they now can do that very easily. And what we've done in that space with this announcement is expanded our capacity coverage. So now Data Domain Virtual Edition can cover 96 terabytes of in-cloud capability and capacity. And we've also, again, with that use case, expanded our coverage to include Google Cloud, AWS, Azure. So really expanded our coverage. >> Great. I'm interested in performance as well because everybody wants more performance but are we talking about backup performance, restore performance? What are you doing in that area? >> Perfect. And one of the things, when we talk about performance, one of the big use cases we're seeing that's driving performance is that customers wanna make their backup copies do more. They wanna use it for application test and development, they wanna use it for instant access to their VMs, instant access and restores for their VMs. So performance is being fueled by some additional services that customers wanna see on their backup copies. So basically one of the things that we've done with this announcement is improved our performance across all of these use cases. So for application test of test of development, you can have access to instant VMs. Up to 32 instant access and restore capabilities with VMs. We have improved our cash utilization. So now you can basically support a lot more IOPS, leveraging our cash, enhanced cash, four times as many IOPS as we were doing before. So up to 40,000 IOPS with almost no latency. So tremendous, again, improvement in use cases. Restores. Customers are always wanting to do restores faster and faster. So file restores is no exception to that. So with multi-streaming capability, we now have the opportunity and the capabilities to do file restores two times faster on premise and four times faster from cloud. So again, cloud is a big, everything we do, there's a cloud component to it. And that performance is no exception to that. >> The last thing I wanna touch on is mid-market. So you guys made an announcement this past summer. And so it sounds like you're doubling down on that space. Give us the update. >> Sure. So we introduced the Data Domain 3300 and our customers have been asking for a new capacity point. So one of the things we're introducing with this release is an eight terabyte version of Data Domain 3300 that goes and scales up to 32 terabytes. In addition to that, we're supporting faster networking with 10 gig E support as well as virtual tape libraries over Fiber Channels. So virtual tape libraries are also back and we're supporting with Data Domain 3300. So again, tremendous improvements and capabilities that we've introduced for mid-market in the form of Data Domain 3300 as well as the DP4400 which is our integrated appliance. So, again, how do we bring all that enterprise goodness to a much broader segment of the market in the right form factor and right capacity points. >> Love it. You guys are on a nice cadence. Last summer, we had this announcement, we got Dell Technologies World coming up in May, actually end of April, now May. So looking forward to seeing you there. Thanks so much for taking us through these announcements. >> Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. Now, let's go Phil Goodwin. Phil Goodwin was an analyst at IDC. And IDC has done a ton of research on the economic impact of moving to sort of modern data protection environment, they've interviewed about a thousand customers and they had deep dive interviews with about a dozen. So let's hear from Phil Goodwin in IDC and we'll be right back. (chilled music) >> IDC research shows that 60% of organizations will be executing on a digital transformaion strategy by 2020, barely a year away. The purpose of digital transformation is to make the organization more competitive with faster, more accurate information and timely information driving driving business decisions. If any digital transformation effort is to be successful, data availability must be a foundational part in the effort. Our research also shows that 48.5% or nearly half of all digital transformation projects involve improvements to the organizations data protection efforts. Purpose-built backup appliances or PBBAs have been the cornerstone for many data protection efforts. PBBAs provide faster, more reliable backup with fewer job failures than traditional tape infrastructure. More importantly, they support faster data restoration in the event of loss. Because they have very high data de-duplication rates, sometimes 40 to one or more, organizations can retain data onsite longer at a lower overall cost thereby improving data availability and TCO. PBBAs may be configured as a target device or disk-based appliance that can be used by any backup software as a backup target or as integrated appliances that include all hardware and software needed for fast efficient backups. The main customer advantages are rapid deployment, simple management and flexible growth options. The Dell EMC line of PBBAs is a broad portfolio that includes Data Domain appliances and the recently introduced Integrated Data Protection Appliances. Dell EMC Data Domain appliances have been in the PBBA market for more than 15 years. According to IDC market tracker data as of December 20th, 2018, Dell EMC with Data Domain and IDPA currently holds a 57.5% market share of PBBA appliances for both target and integrated devices. Dell EMC PBBAs have support for cloud data protection including cloud long term retention, cloud disaster recovery and protection for workloads running in the cloud. Recently IDC conducted a business value study among Dell EMC data protection customers. Our business value studies seek to identify and quantify real world customer experiences and financial impact of specific products. This study surveyed more than 1000 medium-sized organizations worldwide as well as provided in-depth interviews with a number of them. We found several highlights in the study including a 225% five-year ROI. In numerical terms, this translated to $218,928 of ROI per 100 terabytes of data per year. We also found a 50% lower cost of operating a data protection environment, a 71% faster data recovery window, 33% more frequent backups and 45% more efficient data protection staff. To learn more about IDC's business value study of Dell EMC data protection and measurable customer impact, we invite you to download the IDC white paper titled, The Business Value of Data Protection in IT Transformation sponsored by Dell EMC. (bouncy techno music) >> We're back with Beth Phalen. Beth, thanks again for helping us with this session and taking us through the news. We've heard about, from a customer, their perspective, some of the problems and challenges that they face, we heard about the hard news from Ruya. Phil Goodwin at IDC gave us a great overview of the customer research that they've done. So, lets bring it home. What are the key takeaways of today? >> First and foremost, this market is hot. It is important and it is changing rapidly. So that's number one. Data protection is a very dynamic and exciting market. Number two is, at Dell EMC, we've been modernizing our portfolio over the past three years and now we're at this exciting point where customers can take advantage of all of our strenth put in multi-cloud environment, in a commercial environment, for cyber recovery. So we've expanded where people can take the value from our portfolio. And I would just want people to know that if they haven't taken a look at the Dell EMC data protection portfolio recently, it's time to take another look. We appreciate all of our customers and what they do for us. We have such a great relationship with our customer base. We wanna make sure that they know what's coming, what's here today and how we're gonna work with them in the future. >> Alright. Well, great. Congratulations on the announcement. You guys have been hard at work. It is a hot space. A lot of action going on. Where can people find more information? >> Go back to dellemc.com, it's all there. >> Great. Well, thank you very much Beth. >> Thank you Dave. >> And thank you for watching. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante from theCUBE. (chilled music)

>> From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. (robotic music) >> We're back in the heart of Central Park. We're here at Tavern on the Green. Beautiful location for the Veritas Vision Day. You're watching theCUBE, my name is Dave Vellante. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we got the CEO of Veritas here, Greg Hughes, newly minted, nine months in. Greg, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> It's great to be here Dave, thank you. >> So let's talk about your nine. What was your agenda your first nine months? You know they talk about the 100 day plan. What was your nine month plan? >> Yeah, well look, I've been here for nine months, but I'm a boomerang. So I was here from 2003 to 2010. I ran all of global services, during that time and became the chief strategy officer after that. Was here during the merger by Semantic. And then ran the Enterprise Product Group. So I had all the products and all the engineering teams for all the Enterprise products. And really my starting point is the customer. I really like to hear directly from the customer. So I've spent probably 50% of my time out and about, meeting with customers. And at this point, I've met with a 100 different accounts all around the world. And what I'm hearing, makes me even more excited to be here. Digital transformation is real. These customers are investing a lot in digitizing their companies. And that's driving an explosion of data. That data all needs to be available and recoverable and that's where we step in. We're the best at that. >> Okay, so that was sort of alluring to you. You're right, everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. It changes the whole data protection equation. It kind of reminds me, in a much bigger scale, of virtualization. You remember, everybody had to rethink their backup strategies because you now have less physical resources. This is a whole different set of pressures, isn't it? It's like you can't go down, you have to always have access to data. Data is-- >> 24 by seven. >> Increasingly valuable. >> Yup. >> So talk a little bit more about the importance of data, the role of data, and where Veritas fits in. >> Well, our customers are using new, they're driving new applications throughout the enterprise. So machine learning, AI, big data, internet of things. And that's all driving the use of new data management technologies. Cassandra, Hadoop, Open Sequel, MongoDB. You've heard all of these, right? And then that's driving the use of new platforms. Hyper-converged, virtual machines, the cloud. So all this data is popping up in all these different areas. And without Veritas, it can exist, it'll just be in silos. And that becomes very hard to manage and protect it. All that data needs to be protected. We're there to protect everything. And that's really how we think about it. >> The big message we heard today was you got a lot of different clouds, you don't want to have a different data protection strategy for each cloud. So you've got to simplify that for people. Sounds easy, but from an R&D perspective, you've got a large install base, you've been around for a long, long time. So you've got to put investments to actually see that through. Talk about your R&D and investment strategy. >> Well, our investment strategy's very simple. We are the market share leader in data protection and software-defined storage. And that scale, gives us a tremendous advantage. We can use that scale to invest more aggressively than anybody else, in those areas. So we can cover all the workloads, we can cover wherever our customers are putting their data, and we can help them standardize on one provider of data protection, and that's us. So they don't have to have the complexity of point products in their infrastructure. >> So I wonder if we could talk, just a little veer here, and talk about the private equity play. You guys are the private equity exit. And you're seeing a lot of high profile PE companies. It used to be where companies would go to die, and now it's becoming a way for the PE guys to actually get step-ups, and make a lot of money by investing in companies, and building communities, investing in R&D. Some of the stuff we've covered. We've followed Syncsort, BMC, Infor, a really interesting company, what's kind of an exit from PE, right? Dell, the biggest one of all. Riverbed, and of course Veritas. So, there's like a new private equity playbook. It's something you know well from your Silver Lake days. Describe what that dynamic is like, and how it's changed. >> Oh look, private equity's been involved in software for 10 or 15 years. It's been a very important area of investment in private equity. I've worked for private equity firms, worked for software companies, so I know it very well. And the basic idea is, continue the investment. Continue in the investment in the core products and the core customers, to make sure that there is continued enhancement and innovation, of the core products. With that, there'll be continuity in customer relationships, and those customer relationships are very valuable. That's really the secret, if you will, of the private equity playbook. >> Well and public markets are very fickle. I mean, they want growth now. They don't care about profits. I see you've got a very nice cash flow, you and some of the brethren that I mentioned. So that could be very attractive, particularly when, you know, public markets they ebb and flow. The key is value for customers, and that's going to drive value for shareholders. >> That's absolutely right. >> So talk about the TAM. Part of a CEOs job, is to continually find new ways, you're a strategy guy, so TAM expansion is part of the role. How do you look at the market? Where are the growth opportunities? >> We see our TAM, or our total addressable market, at being around $17 billion, cutting across all of our areas. Probably growing into high single digits, 8%. That's kind of a big picture view of it. When I like to think about it, I like to think about it from the themes I'm hearing from customers. What are our customers doing? They're trying to leverage the cloud. Most of our customers, which are large enterprises. We work with the blue-chip enterprises on the planet. They're going to move to a hybrid approach. They're going to on-premise infrastructure and multiple cloud providers. So that's really what they're doing. The second thing our customers are worried about is ransomware, and ransomware attacks. Spearfishing works, the bad guys are going to get in. They're going to put some bad malware in your environment. The key is to be resilient and to be able to restore at scale. That's another area of significant investment. The third, they're trying to automate. They're trying to make investments in automation, to take out manual labor, to reduce error rate. In this whole world, tape should go away. So one of the things our customers are doing, is trying to get rid of tape backup in their environment. Tape is a long-term retention strategy. And then finally, if you get rid of tape, and you have all your secondary data on disc or in the cloud, what becomes really cool, is you can analyze all that data. Out of bound, from the primary storage. That's one of the bigger changes I've seen since I've returned back to Veritas. >> So $17 billion, obviously, that transcends backup. Frankly, we go back to the early days of Veritas, I always thought of it as a data management company and sort of returned to those roots. >> Backup, software defined storage, compliance, all those areas are key to what we do. >> You mentioned automation. When you think about cloud and digital transformation, automation is fundamental, we had NBCUniversal on earlier, and the customer was talking about scripts and how scripts are fragile and they need to be maintained and it doesn't scale. So he wants to drive automation into his processes as much as possible, using a platform, a sort of API based, modern, microservices, containers. Kind of using all those terms. What does that mean for you guys in terms of your R&D roadmap, in terms of the investments that you're making in those types of software innovations? >> Well actually one of the things we're talking about today is our latest release of NetBackup 812, which had a significant investment in APIs and that allow our customers to use the product and automate processes, tie it together with their infrastructure, like ServiceNow, or whatever they have. And we're going to continue full throttle on APIs. Just having lunch with some customers just today, they want us to go even further in our APIs. So that's really core to what we're doing. >> So you guys are a little bit like the New England Patriots. You're the leader, and everybody wants to take you down. So you always start-- >> Nobody's confused me for Tom Brady. Although my wife looks... I'll stack her up against Giselle anytime, but I'm no Tom Brady. >> So okay, how do you maintain your leadership and your relevance for customers? A lot of VC money coming into the marketplace. Like I said, everybody wants to take the leader down. How do you maintain your leadership? >> We've been around for 25 years. We're very honored to have 95% of the Fortune 100, are our customers. If you go to any large country in the world it's very much like that. We work with the bluest of blue-chips, the biggest companies, the most complex, the most demanding (chuckling), the most highly regulated. Those are our customers. We steer the ship based on their input, and that's why we're relevant. We're listening to them. Our customer's extremely relevant. We're going to help them protect, classify, archive their data, wherever it is. >> So the first nine months was all about hearing from customers. So what's the next 12 to 18 months about for you? >> We're continuing to invest, delighted to talk about partnerships, and where those are going, as well. I think that's going to be a major emphasis of us to continue to drive our partnerships. We can't do this alone. Our customers use products from a variety of other players. Today we had Henry Axelrod, from Amazon Web Services, here talking about how we're working closely with Amazon. We announced a really cool partnership with Pure Storage. Our customers that use Pure Storage's all-flash arrays, they know their data's backed up and protected with Veritas and with NetBackup. It's continually make sure that across this ecosystem of partners, we are the one player that can help our large customers. >> Great, thank you for mentioning that ecosystem is a key part of it. The channel, that's how you continue to grow. You get a lot of leverage out of that. Well Greg, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on your-- >> Dave, thank you. >> On the new role. We are super excited for you guys, and we'll be watching. >> I enjoyed it, thank you. >> All right. Keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante, we're here in Central Park. Be right back, Veritas Vision, be right back. (robotic music)

>> From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Hi everybody, welcome back to Tavern on the Green. We're in the heart of Central Park in New York City, the Big Apple. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at the Veritas Solution Day #VtasVision. Veritas used to have a big main tent day where they brought in all the customers. Now they're going out, belly-to-belly, 20 cities. Dave Raffo is here, he's the editorial director for TechTarget Storage. Somebody who follows this space very closely. David good to see you, welcome to theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's great to be on theCUBE. I always hear and watch you guys but never been on before. >> Well you're now an alum, I got to get him a sticker. So, we were talking about VMworld just now, and that show, last two years, one of the hottest topics anyway, was cloud, multi-cloud, Kubernetes of course was a hot topic. But, data protection was right up there. Why, in your view, is data protection such a hot topic right now? >> Well there's a lot of changes going on. First of all, couple years ago it was backup, nobody calls it backup anymore right. The whole market is changing. Data protection, you have newer guys like Cohesity and Ruberik, would come out with a, you know, architecture. They're basically, from scratch, they built scale-out and that's changing the way people look at data protection. You have all of the data protection guys, the Dell EMC, CommVault, Veeam, they're all kind of changing a little. And Veritas, the old guys, have been doing it forever. And now they're changing the way that they're reacting to the competition. The cloud is becoming a major force in where data lives, and you have to protect that. So there's a lot of changes going on in the market. >> Yeah I was talking to a Gartner analyst recently, he said they're data suggested about 2/3 of the customers that they talk to, within the next, I think, 18 months, are going to change they're backup approach or reconsider how they do backup or data protection as it were, as you just said. What do you think is driving that? I mean, people cite digital transformation they cite cloud, they cite big data, all the buzz words. You know, where there's smoke, there's fire, I guess. But what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, it's a little bit of all of those things, because the IT infrastructure is changing, virtualization containers, everything, every architectural change changes the way you protect and manage your data, right. So, we're seeing a lot of those changes, and now people are reacting to it and everybody's figuring out still how to use the cloud and where the data is going to live. So then, you know, how do you protect that data? >> And of course, when you listen to vendors talk, data protection, backup, recovery, it's very sexy when you talk to the customers they're just, oftentimes, drinking from the fire hose, right. Just trying to solve the next problem that they have. But what are you hearing from the customers? TechTarget obviously has a big community. You guys do a lot of events. You talk personally to a lot of customers, particularly when there are new announcements. And what does the landscape look like to you? >> So they're all, you know like I said, everybody's looking at the cloud. They're looking at all these, how they're going to use these things. They're not sure yet, but they want data protection, data management that will kind of fit in no matter which direction they go. It's kind of, you know, we know we're looking at where we're going to be in five years and now we want to know how we're going to protect, how we're going to manage our data, how we're going to use it, move it from cloud to cloud. So, you know, it's kind of like, it's a lot of positioning going on now. A lot of planing for the future. And they're trying to figure out what's the best way they're going to be able to do all this stuff. >> Yeah, so, you know the hot thing, it used to be, like you said, backup. And then of course, people said backup is one thing, recovery is everything. You know, so it was the old bromide, my friend Fred Moore, I think coined that term, back in the old storage tech days. But when you think about cloud, and you think about the different cloud suppliers, they've all got different approaches, they're different walled gardens, essentially. And they've got different processes for at least replicating, backing up data. Where do you see customers, in terms of having that sort of single abstraction layer, the single data protection philosophy or strategy and set of products for multi-cloud? >> Well, where they are is they're not there, and they're, you know, far from it, but that's where they want to be. So, that's where a lot of the vendor positioning is going. A lot of the customers are looking to do that. But another thing that's changing it is, you know, people aren't using Oracle, SQL databases all the time anymore either. They're using the NoSQL MongoDB. So that change, you know, you need different products for that too. So, the whole, almost every type of product, hyper-converged is changing backup. So, you know, all these technologies are changing the way people actually are going to protect their data. >> So you look at the guys with the big install base, obviously Veritas is one, guys like IBM, certainly CommVault and there are others that have large install bases. And the new guys, the upstarts, they're licking their chops to go after them. What do you see as, let's take Veritas as an example, the vulnerabilities and the strengths of a company like that? >> So the vulnerabilities of an old company that's been around forever is that, the newer guys are coming with a clean sheet of paper and coming up and developing their products around technologies that didn't exist when NetBackup was created, right. So the strength is that, for Veritas, they have huge install base. They have all the products, technology they need. They have a lot of engineers so they can get to the board, drawing board, and figure it out and add stuff. And what they're trying to do is build around NetBackup saying all these companies are using NetBackup, so let's expand that, let's build archiving in, let's build, you know, copy data protect, copy data management into that. Let's build encryption, all of that, into NetBackup. You know, appliances, they're going farther, farther and farther into appliances. Seems like nobody wants to just buy backup software, and backup hardware as separate, which they were forever. So you know, we're seeing the integration there. >> Well that brings up another good point, is you know, for years, backup's been kind of one size fits all. So that meant you were either over protected, or under protected. It was maybe an after thought, a bolt-on, you put in applications, put it in a server, an application on top of it. You know, install Linux, maybe some Oracle databases. All of the a sudden, oh, we got to back this thing up. And increasingly, people are saying, hey, I don't want to just pay for insurance, I'd like to get more value. And so, you're hearing a lot of talk about governance, certainly security, ransomware is now a big topic, analytics. What are you seeing, in terms of, some of those additional value, those value adds beyond that, is it still just insurance, or are we seeing incremental value to customers? >> Yeah, well I think everybody wants incremental value. They have the data, now it's not just, like you said, insurance. It's like how is this going to, how am I going to use this data? How's it going to help my business? So, the analytics is a big thing that everybody's trying to get in. You know, primary and secondary storage everybody's adding analytics. AI, how we use AI, machine learning. You know, how we're going to back up data from the edge into and out of thing. What are we going to do with all this data? How are we going to collect it, centralize it, and then use it for our business purposes? So there's, you know, it's a wide open field. Remember it used to be, people would say backup, nobody ever changes their backup, nobody wants to change backup. Now surveys are saying within the next two years or so, more than 50% of people are looking to either add a backup product, or just change out their whole backup infrastructure. >> Well that was the interesting about when, you know, the ascendancy of Data Domain, as you recall, you were following the company back then. The beauty of that architecture was, you don't have to change your backup processes. And now, that's maybe a challenge for a company like that. Where people are, because of digital, because of cloud, they're actually looking to change their backup processes. Not unlike, although there are differences, but a similar wave, remember the early days of virtualization, you had, you're loosing physical resources, so you had to rethink backup. Are you seeing similar trends today, with cloud, and digital? >> Yeah, the cloud, containers, microservices, things like that, you know, how do you protect that data? You know people, some people are still struggling with virtualization, you know, like, there's so many more VMs being created so quickly, and that you know, a lot of the backup products still haven't caught up to that. So, I mean Veeam has made an awful great business around dealing with VM backup, right? >> Right. >> Where was everybody else before that? Nobody else could do it. >> We storage guys, we're like the cockroaches of the industry. We're just this, storage just doesn't seem to die. You know the joke is, there's a hundred people in storage and 99 seats. But you've been following it for a long time. Yeah, you see all the hot topics like cloud and multi-cloud and digital transformation. Are you surprised at the amount of venture capital over the last, you know, four or five years, that has flooded in to storage, that continues to flood in to storage? And you see some notable successes, sure some failures, but even those failures, you're seeing the CEOs come out and sell to new companies and you're seeing the rise of a lot of these startups and a lot of these unicorns. Does it surprise you, or is that kind of your expectation? >> Well, I mean, like you said, that's the way it's always been in storage. When you look at storage compared to networking and compute, how many startups are there in those other areas. Very few, but storage keeps getting funded. A couple of years ago, I used to joke, if you said I do Flash, people would just throw hundreds of millions of dollars at you, then it was cloud. There always seem to be like a hot topic, a hot spot, that you can get money from VCs. And there's always four or five, at least, storage vendors who are in that space. >> Yeah, the cloud, the storage cloud AI blockchain company is really the next unicorn right? >> Right, yeah, if you know the right buzz words you can get money. And there's never just one right, there's always a couple in that same area and then one or two make it. >> Yeah, or, and or, if you've done before, right, you're seeing that a lot. I mean, you see what the guys like, for instance at Datrium are doing. Brian Biles he did it a Data Domain, and now he's, they just did a giant raise. >> Qumulo. >> Yeah, you know, Qumulo, for sure. Obviously the Cohesity are sort of well known, in terms of how they've done giant raises. So there's massive amount of capital now pouring in, much of which will go into innovation. It's kind of, it's engineering and it's you know, go to market and marketing. So, you know, no doubt, that that innovation curve will continue. I guess you can't bet against data growth. >> Right, you know, yeah, right, everybody knows data is going to grow. They're saying it's the new oil, right. Data is the big thing. The interesting thing with the funding stuff now is the, not the new companies, but the companies that have been around a little bit, and it's now time for them to start showing revenue. And where in the past it was easier for them to get money, now it seems a little tougher for those guys. So, you know, we could see more companies go away without getting bought up or go public but-- >> Okay, great. Dave, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Alright. >> It was great to have you. >> Thanks for having me on. >> Alright keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from Veritas Vision in Central Park. We'll be right back. (theCUBE theme music)

>> From Tavern On The Green, in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Hello everybody welcome back to the Tavern On The Green. We're here in the heart of Central Park in New York City you're watching theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, big events, small events. We're here at the Veritas Solution Days, #VtasVision. Veritas Vision used to be a very large, big tent conference. They've changed the format now and they go out, they're going out to 20 cities this year belly to belly with the customers and we've got one here. Vishal Kadakia who is the data protection manager at NBC Universal. Vishal thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> No problem thank you for having me. >> So as I say we love to get the customer perspectives, but let me start with this event. Why, you're a busy person, you're managing a lot of data, why do you take time out to come to event like this? What do you learn? >> You always get to learn new stuff, new products that you don't necessarily get to learn, 'cause you're always just zoned into your day-to-day work that you're doing so you don't always get to see what the new features may be or you miss it. These type of events are generally good to come see that. >> So what's the day in the life like these days for data protection manager and really I'm interested in how it's changed over the last five or six years, as you see things like, the buzzwords, digital transformation, big data, cloud, multi cloud, all the vendor buzzwords, but you actually have to live that. So how has that changed the role of data protection and data protection managers specifically? >> It's definitely a lot more complicated. Before you were just backing up om prem, you had tape, pretty much made it simple. Now you have all these different workloads, you're sending out to clouds, multi tenant as they keep calling it, the hybrid, which is another buzzword. Trying to manage the different workloads is a lot more complex than it was five years ago. You have various cloud vendors, you have various storage vendors, so managing all of that, obviously the data growth from the smaller backups to now, big data which could be terabytes, petabytes, to try to back that up has been a bit of a challenge. >> But that's a challenge for someone like you who's, you know, RPO and RTO is not getting relaxed. >> Right. >> Right. And you know people always talk about getting my weekends back so, but now you have to keep up with all of these other technologies so what is it? Is it a lot of reading, is it just going to sessions like this, having vendors come in, how do you keep up with it all? >> I think it's a big mix of both. It's going out to these events, but also having vendors come to you. Doing your own research, so it's a combination of just constantly keeping up. So, I would say it's a combination of all. >> One of the things that I would be concerned about in your roll is to have just more stove pipes. Are you able to just conceptually, not technical, deep technical anyway, I love tech, but are you to create, let's call it a abstraction layer for your data protection. Is that kind of your vision or where you're headed, so that you don't have to have 10 different formats and methodologies and processes around data protection? >> Yeah, I think that's the goal that I think every company's trying to go to, is consolidate, simplify. Whether that's vendor, whether that's hardware. I think that's really the goal of any organization now. And that's kind of where we're headed also. >> So if it's a baseball game analogy, and you're nine inning game, where are you in terms of that journey? Is it early days, kind of first inning, are you kind of warmin' up in the bullpen, are you sort of well into the game? >> I think we're well into the game. We're probably into the middle innings I would say. >> Okay. So you can see sort of that vision becoming a reality. And what are the priorities then in terms of getting to that point? Is it skill sets, is it technology, is it people? >> I would say it's technology. I would say that consolidation is probably the big word. We're all trying to consolidate while trying back up the large data sets. And I think that's where we are right now. That's where we're starting to get to, and see the plan forming, seeing where our methodologies, our strategies on how we're going to go forward. >> As you move toward the cloud, Vishal, whether or not it's even pushing data to the cloud, a lot of times you just can't. But it seems like that cloud operating model is something that's alluring to folks. Simplifying, agility, self service, are those initiatives that you guys have enacted? >> In terms of that, yeah we're I think in that phase, I think we're in our beginning to form that plan, because once you get to a cloud, you have to really have a good plan. Otherwise, your data is going to be all over the place. You're not going to know where it is, and managing that's just going to become that much harder. So I think in terms of that, we're trying to really come out with a good plan of how you migrate to the cloud. 'Cause once you get to the cloud, there's a whole different set of complexities that you have in managing it. >> Like what? Maybe tick off a few, so we can paint a picture. >> So once you get to the cloud, migrating, so you've formulated your plan how to get to, what cloud to use, what vendor you're using. How do you migrate from your on prem to the cloud is I think one of the big complexities, which I think kind of stumps a lot of people. You know you want to go to the cloud, just don't know how to get there. >> Is that just because the volume of data and you got to move data and it just takes so long? I mean to back up your iPhone takes forever and it fails left and right. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So okay. It's the amount of data and the time it takes? >> Right, and you also have legacy applications, which may not be cloud ready and how do you deal with that? So you have that hybrid model you still want to keep some stuff om prem but you want to go the cloud. What goes to the cloud, which cloud do you go to? All of that is where I think we're really at and I don't think it's any different than any other organization, so that's kind of where. >> And how about this notion of multi cloud? I mean is that something that is real in your business? >> Yeah, I think it definitely is. I think our end users are trying to take advantage of where to go best? Some places Azure might work best. Some places AWS might work. There's also Google now that's coming up, so I think you have to kind of consider where the workload would be best to go to. >> Is Shadow sort of IT and cloud creep problematic for you and in other words, you know, lines of businesses saying, it's easy, I can swipe a credit card and I'm up and running in minutes. And then, oh I got to protect this data, it's got to be compliant. Has that been a challenge for you, do you feel like you have that under control? >> No, that has definitely been a challenge area. Different groups that have kind of tried to do their own thing and then found out, oh wait, this is way harder than we thought. Let us go back to our central team. But by then it's kind of all over the place, right so that's definitely been interesting. >> Yeah it's hard, because thinking about that you probably might have done it differently. You might have put in processes and procedures in place and now you've got to clean up the mess so to speak. But okay, so I want to get into Veritas, and you're a Veritas customer? >> I am. >> So how does Veritas help you with all these solutions? I mean a lot of the things I've just asked you, I think are part of either their road map or they're making claims that they can currently help solve some of these problems. Can they, what do you do with Veritas, and how legitimate is their ability in terms of being able to solve some of these problems? >> So we've been able to use Veritas to kind of, as a central location, management of everything. One of their tools as such is CloudPoint. So our biggest thing is if you don't have a central management tool like CloudPoint, which can manage your various cloud backups, then you're left with managing each cloud on its own. So as an operations standpoint, that's like a nightmare. So having a tool such as CloudPoint, right, and then that getting integrated back into NetBackup, which now gives us a central location for all my backups, for reporting, for audit purposes, any of that has been great. And I've been using Veritas since 3.1 so I've been a Veritas customer for a long time. I've seen the evolution of when it was 3.1, a lot of it was manually operated, a lot of scripts, where now a lot of it is automated. So that's helped a lot. We're automating VM policies, we're automating SQL backup policies, all of that has been great. >> Where are you today in terms of these. >> I'm sorry? >> Where are you at today in terms of the release? >> We're, I know they just released eight one two, we're on eight one one. >> Okay so close to current. Yeah I've seen some videos on eight one two. It looks like they've really put a lot of time and effort in to refreshing it. It looks like a microservices architecture, they're talking about containers and certainly you know, saying all the right things. From your perspective have you dug into it yet or is it still early? >> It's still early. I did deploy it on a test environment. Haven't fully played around with it but some of the cool concepts obviously are, you're going away from that Java console eventually, getting to that web based, able to access it from anywhere, the manageability, like a central tool to manage all of that. That I think they're finally gearing towards that and. >> And you guys are a VMware shop? >> We are a VMware shop. >> So when we were at VM World last August, this past year, and even the year before. Data protection was one of the hottest topics, you know, on the show floor. Were you there, I don't know if you were there. >> I was not there. >> I mean it was really a lot of buzz there, sort of a lot of new entrance in that space, and would I imagine a lot of people coming after you for your business, because that's a very large install base. So when you look at the vendor landscape, how do you look at it? Where do you position Veritas, relative to some of the other upstarts? Your thoughts on the competitive landscape, why Veritas? >> Well, my point of view has always been, if it's not broke you don't fix it. There may be other that may be doing something better, but at the end of the day if it's not drastically different, it's a lot of work to move away from one product to another. They'll always come to you and say, hey, we do this better, we do this better. But then when you compare it, to me, Veritas is that all encompassing. It doesn't only do virtual, it does physical well also. It doesn't only do big data, it does all the traditional databases as well. They're always constantly evolving and adding new workloads that it can also be compatible with. >> Yeah so, I would imagine it would be a little difficult to go to your CFO and try to justify a huge migration project given the other priorities that you have. Give me some insight there. I mean what kinds of things do you want to focus on, I mean obviously nobody wants to migrate anything, it's like moving a house. >> Yeah. >> You really don't want to do it, I mean sometimes you get a bigger house or a nicer house or a smaller house, but it's, moving is always a pain. So you'd rather put your effort in your shop somewhere else. Where are you putting that effort? What are some of the priorities that you have either personally or professionally? >> I would say in this sense I think it's I don't want to work the weekends, right. So how do we automate? How do we make operations easier for everybody, the engineering, the solution, the operations. I want to make it simple. I think Veritas allows us to do that 'cause they're an open source, they work with many vendors which makes it nice. So you can, such as VMware, it works with vRealize. All those plugins with VMware and you can eventually just automate and make it simple. >> And kind of get rid of a lot of the scripts which tend to be fragile, they take a lot of maintenance, they tend to be error prone, so if you can through a set of APIs automate programmatically move towards sort of infrastructurous code or a DevOps environment. I'm sure you guys do that internally. And what a difference it makes, from the sort of classic waterfall in terms of speed, agility, quality. I presume that you're seeing that in your shop? >> Yeah, we definitely are and something like a flex appliance would allow us to move towards that. It simplifies, gets us to where we are, but also helps us with our goals of simplifying, reducing our footprint, but still being able to be agile enough to go to cloud, to keep a hybrid model. So something like that is I think where we're seeing. >> Well Vishal, we love the customer perspective, Thank you for coming on. We like to hear the truth, Vertias, truth in Latin, of course. And really appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome. All right keep it right there everybody. We're here at Vtas Vision, #VtasVision, Veritas Vision Days in New York City, Central Park, Tavern on the Green, beautiful location. My name's Dave Vallante. We'll be right back, right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware. And, it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas. Third day, some of us, our voices are a little bit rough. But, we've still got a lot of stuff to do, and summit people are still looking quite good. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host, Justin Warren. Now talking about our current guest who, you know, came in looking great, good energy, Jyothi Swaroop, welcome back to the program. You're the vice president of Global Marketing with Veritas. >> Thanks Stu, thanks for those kind words. I mean, I'm just joining the party here, in terms of good-looking guys. So it's, it's not unique to me at all. >> Yeah, you know, didn't have as much, you know, time to spend on our hair this morning. >> (laughs) Hey I wake up this way. >> That's odd, alright. >> So do I. (everybody laughs) >> Alright, so Jyothi, first of all, VMworld, you know this ecosystem. There's a good energy at the show, what's been your impression so far? >> Look, I mean, haven't been on the other side, right? I've actually having worked for Dell EMC in the past, and, you know, being part of organizing an event like this It's great to see the VMworld, the diaspora expanding with every year, and how they've reinvented themselves. In every three to four years people were like, "Oh, VMworld's going away, VMworld is not relevant anymore." But it's been amazing to see the evolution of VMware, and how they've reinvented themselves, what they're doing with AWS et cetera. And at Veritas, we're trying to map to that strategy we're going where the buck's going right? So, we're literally map into everything VMworld's doing with their customers, which tends to be a lot of our customers. There's a significant overlap between Veritas' customers and VMware install base. >> Yeah, I absolutely, I mean, we talk about things like software to find these days, and especially like in the storage world, I mean, Veritas were like, was the original in that space. When you, oh how do I get software out of hardware? It's like Veritas was the no-hardware-agenda company. So at this show, the last few years, you know, data, you know, data protection, multi-cloud, and how that impacts data, have been, big themes. Tell us how that ties in to what you're hearing from customers, and what you do at Veritas. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the two words that come out are data management, right? So, increasingly yes, we are in a multi-cloud world. Everybody will tell you that there are at least, four to four and a half clouds on average, that most of our enterprise customers use. And when I say that, it doesn't mean public clouds only, obviously right? There are SAS portals that people access, there are actual Infrastructure as a Service public clouds that people access. So, it's a combination of those. At Veritas, what we want to do is we want to focus on the one of the most important elements of managing data, which is protected. Right? Look, recently, you know, there have been news about you know, large transportation companies, I won't say which type, but, transportation companies, you know, being grounded. Because their clouds were not up. Or, you know, data wasn't protected enough. Not because the planes or the trains weren't working well, they were working fantastically well. It's just because their systems were not up, they weren't protected, they weren't backed-up. They just trusted their cloud vendors, or, whoever else to manage it for them. Doesn't work that way, right? You are responsible, if you actually read through some of the contracts that are out there from multi-cloud vendors or cloud vendors, it will clearly say, "You, Mr. Customer are responsible for your own data protection." So that's where Veritas comes in. So, we help customers protect their data where it's at. Whether it's in a public cloud environment, whether it's virtualized through VMware, or with some physical servers, right? And we've been doing this for 30 years. >> Yeah. And I've used NetBackup for many many years, I have a long heritage and even before that, Veritas was pretty much the standard for the way that we did all kinds of storage and data management, as to your point there. So, give us a bit, some examples of, of what customers are doing with Veritas in this new year of cloud, and data could be anywhere. >> Absolutely. So I think the first step to all of this, is visibility. A lot of people don't talk about data visibility enough. Why don't they talk about it enough? Is because most of the management and visibility tools that companies have these days or vendors have, are limited to their own infrastructures. So they're basically IT ops tools, right? To help manage their particular software-defined infrastructure, or a hardware box, et cetera. They're not really trying to be Switzerland for everybody. At Veritas we have this unique honor almost of being the Switzerland. Everybody wants to work with us, has worked with us for the last 30 years. We don't really come out there and say, "We're competing against every infrastructure company out there.", no. We're very good at data protection, we've extended our leadership from data protection to software-defined storage, as two talked about earlier on, we launched our portfolio three years ago, and Gartner has published the fact that we're number one in software-defined storage market share, already, in three years. Because, it's in our DNA. We build the first software-defined product, and we used that, back in the Veritas Oracle Sun Microsystem days, VOS, as it was called. And we've used that DNA to build this out and extend our data-protection into storage. And that's why I said it's visibility, protection, and then storage. And that storage could be anywhere. >> Yeah, Jyothi, one of the challenges that we have in the industry is you say, NetBackup has, you know, a long history, decades out there. People be like, "Oh well, you know, I was using it for a while but then something changed, then you know, I haven't looked at it in five years, ten years." So tell us why, you know, the NetBackup of the day isn't you know, our father's NetBackup. >> Oh great question, I love that question, right? So, it's not your father's net back up, clearly. Look, NetBackups has been great for your what we call traditional workloads, for the last, what, 25 years. Oracle, you know, SQL, we've done phenomenal with that. But the world has moved on. The world's move to NoSQL. The world's moved to Hadoop. The world's moved to a lot of unstructured data-related infrastructure. >> We're talking about RDS at this show, so... >> Exactly. You know, and NetBackup has had to evolve as well. Look, I'm an engineer. I know how difficult it is to take a product that's 20, 25 years old. And to kind of make it relevant to today's workloads. And we did take our time. So until our last week's launch of NetBackup, the latest version, you know, we didn't go out there and market ourselves as the modern workloads' data protector. We did market ourselves as, "Hey listen, your mission critical workloads that still run on Oracle et cetera, yes then backup is the product for you. But we do have other data management technologies that will support you." But today, I'm very happy to announce that we've not only, kind of, we protect most modern workloads, but we've simplified the UX as well. So, I'll make a comment on the market. Before I get into NetBackup again. So, if you notice there's a lot of money being raised in the data protection space. A lot of new vendors that have come out there right? And what's the message they use? The messages of, that of simplicity. Because they can't come out to gate and say, "We're the most reliable, scalable, product that's being used by the, by 86% of the Fortune 500." They can't say that throughout the gates. So what do they use, they say, "We're simpler to use. We're not about job security, we're going to cater to you Mr. Customer, three clicks to Nirvana.", right? That's literally what the message is. So what we try to do with NetBackup is, look, we are the king of scale. We're the king of reliability. We know that. So we've completely modernized, Killian was here at theCUBE yesterday and she's the Head of User Experience. So we created an entire team for user experience alone, and we've simplified all of the operations on NetBackup. So if you're a VMware admin or a backup admin, or a storage admin, it doesn't really matter. Looks, feels the same, and you get three clicks to value. Right, even if you don't reach Nirvana, you get three clicks to value. With everything you do. So we've really simplified the operations, we continue to be the king of scale, we continue to be deployed at multi-terabyte scale, and that innovation's going to roll on. >> That's a really encouraging thing to hear, because, I mean, all of the new vendors as, a good point that you make there is it, they can't reduplicate that idea. We have 10 years of history, or 25 years of history. So, we've been doing this for a long time. And that means that you can trust us with your data. If anything, that you need from a data-protection vendor is, the ability to trust them, that when I go to try to recover my data, it'll be there and it will work. You've fixed that. You've been doing that for such a long time. So now you're just, updating the software to be able to make it easy to use, doing some of the new things, well of course anyone needs to be able to adapt and do some of the new things. So the fact that you're adding some of these features, so maybe you could give us a bit of a flavor of some of the changes that people would notice in, from, if you've experienced that backup before, what does it actually look like now? >> So, for those NetBackup admins that have been using NetBackup for decades now, right? They will, cannot be used to the Windows interfaces where it's a file structure and things have to be dragged and dropped and things like that. But if they go to the new interface now, it's available for download of our website, it's literally just all tiles and buttons and clicks. The new user experience that you expect from an iPhone, that's exactly what we put into NetBackup 812. Now the other thing I want to talk about is, we spoke to about, I think I've personally spoken about 15 customers at this show. Day one and day two. They said, "While the simplification is great Jyothi, we're actually looking ahead already. We're looking ahead to machine learning and AI where, I want your software, tell me when jobs are going to fail." I don't want an alert when the job has fail, and then I have to do something about it. Yeah, it's cool that I can pull my phone up or my iPad up and take actions right away, and make sure data is protected. But I really would love for, you know, your software to predict when something's going to fail. Help me, warn me to take action in advance. If not, take action yourself, for the simple job failures that you can take action on, based on policy driven actions, right? So that's essentially what our customers are asking for and that's what we've been incorporated into 812. >> Yeah, Jyothi, great stuff. What I want to step up level for a second here, and what you're hearing from customers about kind of the challenges and opportunities with data, and maybe start with, we spent the last year, or year and a half, hearing a lot about the impending GDPR, it doesn't feel like it ended up being like the Y2K, you know, scramble at the last minute, couple of lawsuits against like Google and Facebook. But other than that, I haven't heard nearly as much since we passed, you know, that deadline earlier this year. Start there as the update and tell me what else is facing customers into kind of their challenges. >> Sure. Look, if I have to use a loose analogy here, I considered GDPR as, filing your taxes. Most people wait 'til the last day, right, and they get extensions, if things are not right, et cetera. But having said that, filing taxes is one of the most important things you do, right? So, as a corporation this is very similar. Most corporations, you know, want to wait to see if there are others that will take missed steps, and they can learn from that. There's nothing wrong with that. But a lot of the Fortune 500 customers that we deal with, take GDPR extremely seriously. Yes, you mentioned a couple of companies that have been fined, or are being investigated, et cetera. Nobody wants to be in that book, right? You know, a large company can take a little, a fine of some magnitude, but a smaller to medium business company, that could be you know-- >> That could end the business. >> That could end the business for them. And they don't want that. So a lot of these customers are taking GDPR seriously, but what is different to what we expected, not just as Veritas but as an industry is they're taking a consultative approach to this GDPR. It's not a product-based approach. There's no magic bullet, like, I buy three products and stitch them together and I'm GDPR compliant. They're taking a very consultative approach looking at their data, especially companies that have existed for many years, it's really hard for them to go back. The data sitting on some archaic systems, they really don't know, you know, how do I delete? I mean, if Stu was a European citizen for example, and he said, "Hey listen, X, Y and Z company, I want you to delete everything you have on me." It's sitting on some mainframe or bunch of tape, et cetera. There's no way for them to get that out, and Stu's able to sue them if they're not able to take action by X number of months or years. So, you know, it's an interesting but a very important challenge for companies. >> We're experiencing some of those challenges here in Australia as well, which is not actually subject to GDPR, but there's certainly a lot of a, a lot of legislators and a lot of other organizations looking at it, particularly if they're global organizations, they do need to be compliant. It applies to EU citizens, so, if we have EU citizens and you have systems in another country, then you need to actually deal with GDPR issues even though you're not part of the EU. So a lot of organizations are grappling with that. So, maybe you could give us a bit more of an indication of how Veritas is helping those customers to grapple with that situation. >> Yeah, absolutely you're right. So, as long as you have a connection to the EU, whether through a customer or through some sort of a transaction, you're already part of the GDPR compliance initiative. Right, that's what customers need to realize if they haven't already, that's number one. Number two is going back to my original point about visibility. Compliance has been a thing for a long time. GDPR's yet another new thing that are on compliance. So if you don't have end to end visibility into your infrastructure, and if your data is not classified, and it's not classified on ingest going forward. Look, yes I made a big deal about the fact that over the third, last 30 years we've created on our data, and we put it away in archaic systems, but if you consider that as a percentage of the amount of data that we have today, it's very small. What they should be most worried about as customers is, what they're going to create in the future. So the classification of the data has to happen on ingest. As soon as it comes from a Hadoop system, et cetera, needs to be classified, this is ROT data, right? This is redundant, obsolete, et cetera, I need it classified this data has PII information, so I need to put it separately. I can't just ship everything off for the cloud. So that's what we help with Veritas. Our products help you classify the data on ingest. Right, so you can actually tier this data to the right, you know, storage mechanisms, and have visibility, end to end visibility of that data. Globally. And then you can actually take actions when you have that visibility, you can actually say, "You know what, I don't need six petabytes of browsing history, of the 100,000 employees that I have. They've literally gone Amazon and bought diapers for their babies or whatever. I don't really need to store that stuff. I can just delete it, boop and it's gone right?" Customers don't have that confidence today 'coz they don't have that visibility. >> Jyothi last thing I want to have you help us cover is, we know Veritas has a long history. Learned a lot I think being inside Symantec, now coming out. Bring us up to speed as to kind of Veritas today, position in the marketplace, what the customers are coming to you at this show and outside this show for specifically. >> Absolutely. So, Veritas continues to be the leader in data-protection. That's not going away, that is still at the heart of everything we do, right? Whether it's NetBackup, or other products that we put out to market, it will still be at the core of everything we do. We protect the customer's most valuable data. From the Fortune 500 all the way down to the SMB level, right? That's number one. Number two, we're extending that leadership into new areas like software-defined storage. We're already number one in market share for that. We're going to continue to work on our archiving business, we're number one in there as well, according to Gartner. Right? So the three key areas that we're already in, we're number one. The next area we're going into is, you know, paper over rocks. We want to get into the data management business because we realized, we are the true Switzerland of infrastructure. There are very few companies that, you know, would say, "Okay, I'm competing head-to-head with Veritas and a lot of thing, I don't want to work with them." Right, unless you're a core data protection vendor. Everybody else wants to work with it. We have partnerships with all the major public cloud vendors, to VMware, to you know, on-prem traditional vendors, who you might even consider as competition. They all want to work with us because we sit on top of the most number of exabytes of data in the world. We protect the most number of exabytes of data. So there's a lot we can do with that data. Protection is not enough. Our next step in this journey is to make management, visibility, and compliance on top of that data, a lot easier for our customers. >> Alright, so if you're to sum it up in one word, is this still Veritasome? >> It's Veritasome. It's very very Veritasome. >> Alright, well we've been having an awesome week here at VMworld. Jyothi Swaroop, thank you for the update with Veritas for Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. We hope you've had an awesome time watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Live, from Los Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Vmworld 2018. Brought to you by Vmware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to our wall-to-wall coverage, here in theCUBE, of Vmworld 2018. We've been here for quite some time. We've got a lot to go, over 90 thought leaders are going to be working with us. I'm Peter Burris, I'm the head of research at Wikibon, and we got a great guest today. Killian Evers is the vice president of CX and UX >> You got it. >> Customer experience, user experience at Veritas. Welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. >> You know, there's so much that you could talk about, when you start talkin' about CX and UX, and a lot of technology people are starting to understand what these things are. A lot of users are startin' to recognize that adoption doesn't happen if you don't make it easy for the user. What's the difference, though, between CX and UX? >> I love that you ask this question. User experience, as you know, it's everything that goes on in terms of a human engaging with technology. Now, when you think about how you engage with your phone, for example, that's a great example of a good user experience. Now, when we apply that user experience, we move beyond it, to customer experience. We are really looking at the customer's entire journey. How do you engage with Veritas? How do you find us, how do you engage with our sales, understand our marketing, buy a product, get support for a product, and upgrade a product, that entire life cycle with all of the best learnings from our user experience? That is customer experience. >> So, if I can kind of encapsulate that, we might think of user experience as the interaction or the quality of the experience you have with the device, or a piece of software, or a machine. Whereas customer experience is the experience you have with the brand that's ultimately delivering that. Is a sales person, is the sales engagement good? Is the support engagement good? It's the whole immersive-- >> Right. >> the degree to which the brand is immersive in how the business operates. So, great, obviously this is an important set of things, but what does the VP of UX/CX do, are you evangelizing this? How is this working out? >> You know, it is a bit of an evangelization role, but more importantly, I think of my job as the customer's advocate. I look at everything with a really critical eye, to make sure that our customers are getting the best experience in everything that Veritas supplies. Everything that we provide is to that mark, that really makes their experience fantastic. That's really my job at the end of the day. So I can be designing, I can be doing research, applying these great principles, redefining products experiences, pushing support, pushing sales. All with an eye to deliver the best for our customers. >> Now, as an analyst, someone who spends her time with large users, helping to make decisions and getting value, one of the biggest challenges, especially as these technologies are more embedded within the business, is how can I encourage everyone in my organization that should adopt a new solution or a new way of doing things, to actually adopt it. And that's much more than the quality of the interface and the software. Is that what you mean? >> Yeah. >> You want to facilitate the process by which your customers-- >> Absolutely. >> Let's talk about that. >> Yeah, let's talk about that, because, you know, the thing is I could make you use something, but that's not going to give you that level of adoption if you want to use something. So it's about getting to that want. Getting to what you, what's your motivation, what's your desire? It's about building that community so that you create that virtuous cycle of wanting to use the software, liking to use the software, continuing to use the product- >> Advocating for using the software. >> Advocating for using that. >> You know, I'll tell you something. I've actually seen a lot of examples where the product was the right product for the solution, the IT organization did a good job of implementing and rolling it out, but ultimately, because they didn't think about that journey process, within their own business-- >> That's right. >> Their customers, their users, ultimately abandoned ... >> Right. >> And so what you're trying to do is making sure that they don't abandon ... >> We don't have that. That's exactly right. >> But Veritas also is very deeply embedded within a whole lot of activities within a business by virtue of what you provide. So how does Veritas' customer experience provide a grow to other Veritas partners that are embedded within the business? >> I love it, and that actually speaks to a couple of different ways. So, one, we have a phenomenal program that we work with our customers, our partners, our end users, to understand what they're facing on a day-to-day basis, understand what's goin' on in their company world, to be able to create that integration. The other thing that might surprise you, considering that you had been talking about customer experience and design ... Let's go to the other end of the spectrum, API First. How do you create those customer interactions? How do you create great experiences? You create great interactions, great engagements, integrations. We have an API First methodology and perspective that we bring to be able to say it's not just about the screen, but it's about how you can integrate with that experience. Between the two of those things, we can create those great experiences from end to end. So, as an advocate for the customer, you're not just talking to the people who are building the product, you're talking to people who are engaging to talk about the sale, to conduct the sale, throughout the entire journey. >> Exactly. >> Give us a couple of examples of how Veritas has become a better partner to customers as a consequence of taking on this challenge. >> Wow, I have to talk about NetBackup, and specifically our new release of NetBackup 8.1.2. This is our flagship product; we have redesigned this from the ground up. It has the API First methodology. It has all of the integrations. It has a phenomenal experience. We have simplified the ability to create backups. We have simplified the creation process of our protection plans so that everything is seamless. One, two steps; that's it. We have worked through our programs to build this, and to create this overall experience by building it together. We have worked with our customers, with our end users, and partnered with them to create this experience. So that's just one example. And this is the first product coming out of the gate that has this incredible experience. And we're not going to stop there, we're continuing onward. We are thinking about upgrade; we are thinking about sales, marketing, all of those aspects together. >> So the notion of user experience and customer experience, it's interesting, it started in the technology world, when people started talking about personas as the user. >> That's right. >> And then, when we started digitizing marketing through the web, it moved into the marketing world-- >> That's absolutely right. >> And you're started thinking about broader notions of customer engagement. At Veritas, how is that notion of design, design thinking, informing the process of building products that are easy to use, easy to adopt, great time to value, and are going to stick and stay inside a customer organization? >> And that's really part of my internal evangelization. I have really transformed the overall organization at Veritas. We now have a dedicated, centralized customer experience and user experience organization. We work directly and deeply with our engineering, our sales, our marketing partners, our product managers, to infuse design thinking. We've done workshops, we teach on-the-go, to be able to teach that perspective. It's actually something that everyone's hungry for, because once you see it, then you start to know, aha, this is actually better, right? An engineer sees this is a better experience. Everybody wants to provide the best for our customers, so it's somewhat of an easy job, to do the evangelization, because folks are readily adopting it, because it's natural, it's intuitive. >> And look, there's some big, big IT organizations out there that are adopting some of these principles as well. >> Yeah. >> You start talking about Home Depot, and others, very, very successful efforts, their failure rates have gone down dramatically from an adoption standpoint, as they have adopted some of these practices. So, when you think about, ultimately, the impact that it's going to have on Veritas' relationship with its customers, where do you want Veritas to be in three years, as a brand, known for superior user and customer experience? Where do you think it's going to be? How will people reflect that back on Veritas? >> Yeah, so, if I can put on my prediction hats, we are already the number one in NetBackup. We are already the number one backup provider. We're going to be the number one experience provider. That is my goal. >> For? >> For everything that we do. >> Not bad. So, one more question as we think about where this is going. You've been here at Vmworld for at least some period of time. Pat Gelsinger talked significantly about bridging, and the new communities that have to be served, and the role that technology's going to play as we move forward. >> Yep. >> Obviously, for technology to become a bigger feature of people's lives, it's got to be easier, it's got to be more tied into, ultimately, how people live their lives. >> That's right. >> So, when you think about Veritas, you know, Silicon Valley company, been around for a long time, number one in a lot of markets, as you said, how does that end up translating into better community engagement, better customer trust, all these other things that are really, really important? Is this going to create capital that you guys can use to introduce faster products; introduce more functionality; better, richer partnerships? >> Absolutely, so I have to talk to you about our design strategy, because it's really the three pillars that we are building all of our new experiences on. It has to be simple; it has to be easy for everyone to understand, and this is what we were talking about earlier in the day. It has to be intuitive; it has to be based in human interactions, because that just feels intuitive. Technology is not scary; it's not hard. If it's simple, and if it's intuitive, you're going to be able to use it, the adoption rates are going to increase. And finally, it has to be integrated, because if it's not integrated, if it's siloed, the adoption rates are going to go down. No one's going to want to continue to use it. You're not going to build that community. You're not going to build that market share. So, really, my design strategy is based exactly in what you're talking about. It's simple, it's intuitive, and it's integrated. That makes great product. >> And it gets customers excited. >> You got it. >> And it makes them trust the solution so they themselves, there's something in the adoption world called reinvent. >> You got it. >> You want your customers to reinvent on Veritas, and constantly push the envelope of how they're getting value, because that makes you a better company. >> Exactly. >> Alright. Killian Evers, Vice President CX/UX-- >> You got it. >> Veritas. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> And this is Peter Burris, once again, Chief Research Officer at Wikibon theCUBE. I want to thank you very, very much. This is our last shot of the day. We're going to be doing wall-to-wall coverage tomorrow. Stay here, with theCUBE, more about what's going on in Vmworld. We'll talk to you again. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. It's the live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2018, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We got two sets. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Adam Rasner, who is Vice-President of Technology Operation of AutoNation. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. >> Yeah thanks for having me. >> So you guys are a customer of all this virtualization stuff. What's going on in your company? Tell us what's happening at AutoNation. What are you guys at now with IT operations? Where you guys going? How you guys building into the Cloud? What's the strategy? >> Sure, so AutoNation is exploding. We have 280 new car dealerships. We have 80 collision centers. We just launched our own precision parts line. We're also looking at other technologies to automate the car buying experience. So we want to make like an Amazon-like car buying experience online, so that requires a lot new technology and digitalization. >> Yeah, talk a little bit about that. 'Cause I know, I've looked at cars in the last couple of years and now you know, I do so much of it online. I feel like I could do the whole experience from my phone if I wanted. So how much are you a technology company? And how much of that's cloud? And what are those dynamics that you've been going through the last couple of years? >> Yeah I think the millennials this day, they're willing to go online and do the whole car buying experience end-to-end, from the buying of the car to the financing of the car all online. And we can roll a flat-bed up to their house, and deliver a car, and they sign on an iPad, and they're good to go. And I think that's where things are going. So to do all that requires a lot of technology on the back-end. So we have a lot of on-prem infrastructure. I'd say we're still 90% on-prem, 10% in an Azure, AWS infrastructure. But that's going to change in time as a lot of these new applications are written. >> As you guys are doing the digital transformation, and it sounds like there's a lot of action going on, new things happening, you're in the app business. You got to build apps for user experience. So you've got to make the infrastructure work for you, and make it be failover, fall-tolerant, all that good stuff, recovery, how do you look at that? How do you run at the speed you need to run at? What are some of they key things you guys have to do to keep on that treadmill, but yet not drop the ball in delivering apps to the users that drive the business? >> I think there's a few things. I think one is, we have to be able to keep the lights on with our existing infrastructure, our existing apps while we build these next generation of applications. We have to be able to scale up as needed and scale down, be able to support some of the new mobile platforms that we're going to be working on. So there's a lot of work going on and DR is a big part of this too. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. Because data is at the core here. So, can you tell us that role of data, and then you say data protection. How is that changing, what was it like before you went through this transformation? Then we'll of course get into what you're using. >> Sure, so we actually, were using an old Microsoft data protection manager product and just didn't scale the way we needed to, we were having some performance issues. And so, data protection, while not very sexy, it's something you have to do. It's table stakes in IT. It doesn't innovate, it doesn't make me sell more cars, it doesn't help the business sell more cars, but it's something we have to do. So we looked out there at what I call the legacy players and also the nextgen players and went through a full proof of concept with several of them. >> All right, and what were you looking for? What was kind of the key objective you said? Data protection doesn't make you money, or didn't make you money. We've talked to some customers, that's like, wait, might do some cool snapshotting, I can leverage that data, I can do some more things with my developers, and everything. So what was the goal of this transformation and then what was the criteria that you went through to make a decision? >> Yeah, so the data protection was the initial piece and we just needed a rock solid backup and recovery solution. And we started off with just a simple, hey, we wanted an integrated hardware software solution, we wanted something that could scale infinitely, we wanted a predictive cost model. And so a lot of those older legacy players don't play well in that space, they're expensive to support, eventually you hit a wall on hardware limitations and you have to use forklift upgrades. So we wanted something that was a little bit more nimble and then down the road, as we got into it, once the backup and recovery piece was kind of under control we started using our new solution for other things and secondary storage which was an added bonus. >> So you haven't mentioned, what is the solution that you chose and what were the key things that led to that? >> Yeah, so after going through several POCs with you know, NetBackup, Rubric and Cohesity, we ultimately chose Cohesity for performance, cost, ease of implementation, ease of the user interface, ease of management. >> And what was the comparison, on the floor here you see Rubric and Cohesity next in the huge booths. What's the difference between those two? >> Yeah, so we actually put them side by side in our data center, full blown POCs, and there was some performance differences, there were some technical challenges that we had with some of the other products. And ultimately the team, our engineering team felt most comfortable with Cohesity after spending six or eight months in a really in-depth POC. >> Big bake-off. I love the bake-offs. It's the only way to have the answer like that. So when you look at the solutions, are you guys mostly interested in the software side of the business that they had? What was they key piece of it? >> I think we're interested in the whole thing. I had been at other places where we had done the NetBackup and data domain story and you know, you're having a problem at three o'clock in the morning and you got the finger pointing, is it a software issue, is it a hardware issue? We wanted the one throat to choke kind of solution, and so, you know, that was a requirement right off the bat. Whatever we chose was going to be an integrated hardware software platform. >> Adam, walk us through from the deployment to the day two action. How did it go? What surprised you? What, you know, thrilled you? You know, what challenges did you have? >> Yeah, we've been a customer for- I think we were very early customer, probably almost about two years now. So, there's a lot we didn't know. There was a lot of things in the product that actually weren't fully mature when we first started the POC. And so we went through a full, a full blown bake-off, and one of the things we noticed it was much easier to implement, we didn't require any professional services to get it up and running and the technical support we were super impressed with. So I think, you know, the team, after going through the motions, really felt like this was the product for us. And again, really mainly around backup and recovery, but ultimately decided that we were going to use it for other things too. >> Adam, I was walking through the hallways yesterday, Stu and I were both checking out the booths. And I hear a lot of conversations and it comes up around the Cohesity, Rubric, all these different cloud solutions. Some are rinsed and repeat old models that just have, you know, not mostly those guys are, but the customers are concerned about I don't want the old way, I want the new way, I want to be cloud native, I want to work with cloud, One choke to throw, I need software, I need to have agility, and I need to have auto, you know, healing, all this kind of stuff. How do you sort through that? I know you've been through the POC but your peers that are out here at VMworld, they're squinting through the noise going okay, I got to really dig in here. What's your advice to those guys and gals? >> I think it's really challenging for the people that are, you know, neck deep in some of these other legacy products because it's a little bit hard to move. You know, it's costly, it's expensive, and it's a significant effort. I was in a rare position where I was able to start net new, and so that made it a little bit easier. But I think you start with a slow migration, start setting up your new infrastructure on a nextgen platform and then slowly migrate off. These next, these legacy players are very expensive, and they don't scale very well. That's probably one of our biggest challenges. >> One of the things you said, you started with a couple of use cases but you're now doing a bunch more. Talk about that, what more, what are the new things you're doing and what's the road map look forward at AutoNation? >> Sure. So we had a, a lot of apps, that we're probably not needing. Tier one, NetApp, all SSD, high performance SAN. I call it my Cadillac of storage, you know. It's our highest performance applications and we were having some apps that the hardware was starting to, you know, just go bad. And so the only place I could put it was either on my NetApp, or I didn't have any place else. So the story changed over time. Cohesity became not only our backup and recovery data protection appliance, we started landing some of our tier two storage on Cohesity. So moving things that we would normally put on NetApp, putting it on Cohesity for 40 percent of the cost and it's a win-win. >> All right, so, Adam, I couldn't help noticing you've got the Drive Pink pin on. >> Yes. >> So, maybe tell our audience a little bit about the, you know, AutoNation Drive Pink initiative and you know, do you have relationships with the suppliers here? Pat Gelsinger this morning talked about you know, we need to be as a technology community more doing good. It's foundational to what we're doing. >> Autonation, it's one of our core charities is cancer awareness. I think we've donated almost 30 million dollars. Every car that you buy, we try to put the Drive Pink license plate. And I think not only for business, I think in IT we also have to have a lens to some of these charities and some of these things that need our help. >> Issue driven businesses are doing well now, people expect that. Not just for profit, but the people involved. >> Yeah. >> Anyone can work anywhere these days, talent, it's also good. I mean, it's one of those things. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> All right, so, takeaway from this show, so far, your impression as a practitioner in the IT footprint space, looking at a cloud on the horizon, we just had Andy Bechtolsheim just on, been part of the early days. Cloud's coming fast, networking's got to get better, you got to, you know, seeing what solutions, integrating well together. How do you make sense of all this content coming out of VMworld? >> Yeah, I think what I get out of this and kind of AWS, all of these conferences, is that everything we buy has to be extendable to the cloud. You know, we still have a lot of on-premise infrastructure but everything we implement has to be cloudable, it has to be able to be used in our future use cases. >> I would love, we're talking a lot here in the keynote this morning it's like, right, this move, we know it's going to take time and Amazon's doing some things, VMware's doing some things, how's the industry doing, how do you see the progression, what would you like to see them do more better if we come back in a year, if I kind of give you that magic wand? >> Yeah. You know, I always leave a lot of these conferences and I feel like I'm behind the eight ball, in our cloud migration, but, companies like us that have a lot of legacy apps, they're slow to move. And so, I leave the conference, I feel like I'm behind the eight ball, but I get back and I talk to my peers and many of them are in the same situation I am. They're still maturing, but I think, yes, I think the net new generation apps that we're going to build are going to be in the cloud because the capabilities to autoscale and so I think that anything we buy, anything we implement we have to have a lens to that going forward. >> Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE, we really appreciate, sounds like you're happy with Cohesity? >> They've done a great job, we're really happy customers. >> How long was that bake-off by the way, that you ran that? >> We did it about six months. >> That's pretty good and long. >> Yeah, we actually had some, again we were very early to the game so there were features in the product that we needed that they didn't have yet and our agreement was we'll proceed after you can meet these requirements and they did. >> Yeah. And Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy on the stage, one of the things Andy Jassy, who's been on theCUBE talks about all the time is listening to customers. Sounds like they're listening to you guys. >> Absolutely, absolutely. You have to, it's such a competitive environment now. You know, if you can't meet the customer's minimal requirements, there's somebody else that can. >> You got to be cloud compatible. AutoNation breaking it down here, here at Vmworld bringing the practitioner perspective, the customer perspective, all of these suppliers try to bring cloud and on-premises together. It's theCUBE bringing you all the action here at Vmworld 2018. I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.

>> Announcer: From Nice, France, it's theCUBE! Covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Nice, France. Happy to welcome to the program Peter Grimmond, who is the EMEA CTO at Veritas. Peter, thanks so much for joining us. >> You're welcome. It's great to be here. >> All right, so, we had theCUBE at Veritas Vision earlier this year. My co-CEO Dave Vellante and I did a whole bunch of interviews, really re-introducing to a lot of people. I remember Veritas from back in the day, but through the Symantec acquisition, now, back out, you know, a lot of interesting things coming. Obviously a company that's always been a software company at its core, as opposed to, in the infrastructure world, a company like Nutanix. It's like, wait, wait, do you sell appliances or use software? What's your mix, there? Veritas, you're a software company. Why don't you start off with just a little bit about your role, how long you've been at Veritas, and what brings you here to this show. >> Yeah, by all means. I've been at Veritas forever. I actually started with the company in 1994, believe it or not, so, yeah, been here a long time. Spent a lot of time in consulting, working with our customers, installing, configuring backup solutions and delivering consulting around the data center, and then most recently moved into leading teams and acting as the CTO for the business here in ME. >> Wow, yeah. '94, that's many lifetimes in the tech world. Everybody thinks of Veritas back in the day, it was net backups, is what people know. What products are you involved with, when you're meeting with customers, what are the key things you're focused on? >> Our portfolio's grown substantially over those years, and most especially, actually, in the last year or so. We've actually launched seven new offerings in the last year, really expanding our reach to cover enterprise data management very broadly, and extending also out from the data center to really cover the multi-cloud. We can now provide pretty much end-to-end data management capability across the multi-cloud. >> Okay, great. And when you say multi-cloud, you're working with the public cloud providers, well, many of the infrastructure providers. Give us a little bit of the scope, what you do and don't do when it comes to multi-cloud. >> When I talk to my customers about what they're doing with cloud, almost all of them have what we describe as a multi-cloud approach. That means multiple public clouds, plus their own private cloud, and in some cases, more than one private cloud that they're working with as well. Our mission to deliver enterprise data management services to those customers has to also have that reach. We're working with a number of the large cloud service providers, such as Amazon and Google and Microsoft, IBM as well, and, indeed, Oracle, as well as working with private cloud providers such as Nutanix. >> Excellent. Let's connect to Nutanix, there. Nutanix talks about enterprise cloud. Most of their solutions today deployed in customers' data center. It's talking about edge deployments, talking about how they extend public clouds, like, for example, partnerships with Google, support with Microsoft they've always had. Tell us how Veritas and Nutanix, what's the boundaries, how do they connect? >> Ultimately, as customers move their workloads onto hyper-converged platforms, and a lot of our customers are doing that, they need to find ways to protect that data. Now, for those customers who are using a hypervisor such as VMware or Nutanix, we've been able to back up that data for them for a while, and we can back up data that's been on the Acropolis hypervisor in-guest. But what we've done with Nutanix recently is to integrate net backup with AHV, so we can now back up the VVMware level from Nutanix. >> Peter, take us in that, because it's been a discussion with a lot of the ecosystem, and it's like, okay, how much work is it to certify AHV, is this a Nutanix push or is it a customer pull? Take us inside a little bit as to what led to this work. How easy or hard was it, and what's the customer demand for it? >> The customer demand is high. Customers are looking, those that have had Nutanix deployed for some time are now interested in moving to AHV. They want to use that as a platform. There are some good benefits to them in doing that. One of the things that's potentially been stopping them from doing that is the ability to protect their data properly in those environments. Having the ability to do those backups in AHV is important to them, so they've certainly been asking us for that. I believe they've been asking Nutanix for it as well, and that's why we're partnering together. In terms of how complex it is, in the world of RESTful APIs, it actually becomes relatively straightforward. You know, NetBackup is a RESTful API which allows you to back up parallel workloads. Nutanix has a RESTful API that allows you to access their backup API, and we put those two together and get a solution reasonably quickly, actually. >> Awesome. I would assume most of your customers, they're doing multiple hypervisors, though. Veritas, you play well in that environment? If I've got Veritas and AHV, or-- >> We've had support for hypervisors such as Vmware and Hyper-V for some time. AHV's one that we haven't supported, and so, this integration was overdue, and we've now done it. Customers can protect their data, whichever hypervisor they use. >> I guess the question was, if the customer has a multi-hypervisor environment, are there any complications, or it doesn't matter how many of the hypervisors they support? If you support 'em all, it's pretty straightforward. >> Yep. That's the case. We can deploy backup solutions across all of them, and manage all of those from a central management point, so it helps to take the complexity out of it. >> Okay. Want to switch a little bit to hear about customers. I know at Veritas Vision, and especially here at a European show, GDPR is a hot topic of conversation. I've heard some of the Veritas, does Veritas and Nutanix, is there a play jointly on there, or is that more of a separate initiative? >> Look, I think we're both hearing the same thing from our customers, right? Which is that GDPR is something that's exercising them. I've just come from the executive track, actually, where that was a topic of conversation. I think customers are definitely at different stages of maturity on that. When we talk to our customers, there are a lot of them at very early stages in thinking about GDPR, and there are those that have already appointed a data privacy officer and are working for a program to get that done. It's at different stages, but I think, generally speaking, enterprises are still looking for help to get that problem solved. >> Okay. What else are you hearing from customers, you know, big pain points, or areas where they're looking to modernize that Veritas can help? >> I think the big thing that we're hearing from customers is this move to the Cloud, and the thing that's really driving that move to the Cloud is digital transformation. All enterprises are looking to leverage a more digital model. They see cloud as a way of accelerating that, and so they are looking to move aggressively to the Cloud. One of the things that potentially makes that harder than it might otherwise be is assuring the proper management of your data, making sure it's secure and protected and available and performant, and that's where Veritas comes in. We're helping, we believe, to make it easier for customers to adopt a multi-cloud approach by giving them access to their data wherever they need it, by protecting that data, and giving them good visibility into that data wherever it sits, whether that be in Azure or in Office 365 or on-premise. >> Peter, now that Veritas is supporting AHV, what should we look for, really, for the next year? Certain go-to-market initiatives or other integration and engineering work that we should be looking for? >> As you probably heard, when we were at Vision together, our approach around data management is what we call 360 Data Management, which is a suite of tools that we've put together to solve the data management problem. Our aim, certainly, is to extend the 360 Data Management approach to Nutanix, so rather than just covering data protection, we're also covering other areas of data management, such as data access, disaster recovery, data visibility, those kind of areas. >> Okay, great. Peter, I want to give you the final word. At Veritas' show, we talked about the truth in information. What have you been hearing from customers here? What would you want them to take away from the Nutanix show, from a Veritas standpoint? >> I think the key message is that customers get great value from Nutanix HDI platform. Many of those same customers get great value from Veritas. Now they've got that value combined. >> Well, Peter Grimmond, really appreciate you joining us. We'll be back with more coverage here from the Nutanix .NEXT conference in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE. (fast techno music) >> This is Robin Matlock, CMO of VMware.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back the the Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman. Angelo Sciascia is here, big Tom Brady fan, Senior Vice President of NetX Information Systems, from Brooklyn, New York, I don't think so. >> Not a Tom Brady fan. >> Thanks for coming on theCUBE do you think it matters, how much it airs at a football. >> No, not at all, Tom Brady doesn't care about that. >> No, well, listen, thanks for coming on. We have a great conversation, we love talking sports on the Cube. So welcome, how's the show going for you? >> Ah, it's fantastic, you know, lots of great material Veritas has been talking about. 360 Data Management, obviously we all know the benefits of that by now. So we have a lot of customers here so I'm glad they they got to see it from a senior leadership perspective, rather than our sales guys and sales engineers going in there and talking to them, and seeing Veritas executives really getting behind what we're talking about. So it backs up our story and, you know, our customers are pretty excited about it, actually. >> What's the nature of your relationship with Veritas. I know you have a relationship, and maybe still do, with Symantec. How's that all, how did it all evolve? >> Yeah, so we are a Veritas Platinum Partner, we would be, what we consider, a solution-provider type partner. A lot of our business today is either directly or indirectly tied to Veritas, which was kind of funny because we started as a security company, so our roots are systems management, you know. That's where we were in 2005 when I joined NetX, that's where we were for many, many years after Symantec acquired a company called Altiris. We just stayed in that vein, you know, managing endpoints, securing endpoints, encrypting data. And then, somewhere in 2013, we said hey, you know, let's try to diversify the portfolio a little bit. And we used to manufacture an endpoint management appliance for Altiris so we said hey, Symantec's got these things called NetBackup Appliances, let's check it out. It's a formed fact that we know how to sell and, shoot, four years later it's been a great partnership for us, great partnership, I'm sure, for Veritas, and for our customers and that's a lot of our business today. >> So, I mean, it's hot market, you know. Data protection is exploding, and security. I mean, you're in two of the sweet spots in the market right now. So how do you approach the business with customers? Do you, are you a specialist around data protection? You deliver services around them. Maybe you can explain it on the model? >> Yeah, you know, that's actually a good question, because it's evolved quite a bit, right? So, you know, when you had a limited portfolio of just one or two products that you can sell to a customer, you're really doing a product sale, right, which, I would say that was probably the most difficult transition from the split from Symantec to Veritas, because at Symantec we had thousands of products in the portfolio, or hundreds of products in the portfolio that we could actually talk to. And for a little while, really we had a handful, you know, we had NetBackup Appliances, Enterprise Vault and ancillary things to bulk on to that, like Clearwell. I think one of the most exciting things for us, as a reseller, is to now be able to go have a discussion with our customers that we were never able to have before. And rather than sit there and try to sell them a backup product or a storage solution, we could sell them a platform that solves many problems for them, right? Rather than sitting there and trying to sell one-off. So, our conversations are significantly more strategic now then they've ever been, and frankly I speak for myself and my whole team, I know everyone enjoys the conversation more now that we have a portfolio to talk about, than just a handful of products. >> Angelo, you've got an interesting viewpoint on this split off of Aritas from Symantec. What have your customers said about it? What's been your interaction with the organization? What can you tell us about kind of the inside going on? >> Yeah, look, I've lived firsthand on a Symantec acquisition of a company, okay. I was, we were not a Symantec partner when they acquired Veritas. Funny enough, I was actually doing Veritas consulting, you know, on my own on the side prior to Symantec purchasing Veritas. So I really, I'd made my career on two products; Veritas for backup and Altiris for systems management. Symantec bought Veritas and I was like okay, you know, I'm just going to stay with Altiris. Symantec bought Altiris and here we are now, so we can talk about all of them. The thing I noticed was Symantec was always going to be a security company, right, and they weren't going to change that no matter how much they try to integrate it. It's two radically different stories. You know, and for many, many years, things that we look at as new products today were kind of already there in the Symantec portfolio, but buried underneath other products that really never saw the light of day because when you have hundreds or thousands of products, like I said earlier, you know, the ones that are going to move the most are the ones that are going to get the attention. So I think the benefit of the split is that it really allowed Veritas to focus on what they do well, which is managing data, and Symantec to do what they do well, which is securing your infrastructure and securing your data. From my perspective, our customers really appreciated that. Sure, a couple of them were a little annoyed that they had to now split contracts and deal with that kind of stuff, but I think that was a momentary blip and for the most part, it's been well-received from everyone we've spoken to. >> Angelo, you said you're having, your conversations are evolving. Who are you talking to? And maybe take us inside some of those conversations. What are the big challenges they're having? >> Yeah, a year ago, a year and a half ago I was talking to either somebody who was on the messaging side and needed to archive emails or IMs, or on the backup side and they just wanted to be able to meet their backup windows and maybe to get some better d dub rates, right. Fun conversation to have, bit mundane. It's not really solving problems as much as backing up data or archiving data. Today, we're having overarching conversations at a C-level, or a senior VP level, or a director level, and talking about dramatic changes to the way they do business, and how we can do business with them. Six months ago, NetX, we weren't doing anything in the Cloud, you know. We were selling to some customers' Vdub space to the Cloud, and that's about it. We weren't talking Cloud strategy with them. Today we're talking to our customers about moving workloads to the Cloud, doing it in a way that's predictable for them, and doing it with Veritas. >> That's a really interesting point. I have to imagine that changed who you're talking with inside the company. Can you walk us through kind of a typical customer's, you know, and how you kind of move up into a more strategic discussion for Cloud strategy? >> You know, so for full transparency, that whole thing's still evolving, right. 360 Data Management is still fairly new. So what we're seeing, the conversations turned, it would start, again we're talking to somebody that we've been talking to historically in the backup side or architecture side, and we talk to them about wanting to do better things than what their backup is, and start to talk about, hey this is what 360 Data Management is. What's relevant to that person he's going to want to talk about but then there's going to be things in there that are not relevant to him. So he'll make that introduction and he'll get other stakeholders in the boat with him. And that's something we've really appreciated because the people you used to talk to are now bringing in stakeholders to offset their own desires and their own budgets, so want to bring in other technology. And typically, when we get to that point when we're starting to talk about strategic pricing, is when you're getting that C-level person to really have that aha moment, and say wow, we're offsetting costs here, we're doing things like truly getting rid of tape, or moving to the Cloud and things like that, and it's a conversation that really evolves and it's still starts at the bottom. But we're figuring out ways to start it at a higher point. >> Well, those strategies are still evolving for most customers; the roles of those people that might have had one role definitely are changing. I'm curious, one of the big transition points, especially for a company like Veritas, is going from licenses to some kind of more of a subscription model. Any commentary you have on your customers; their embrace, or like, dislike of some of those transitions? >> I think the one thing the Cloud has done is it's opened up a different avenue of how people consume IT, right. Cloud is very much consumption-based billing, and while that can complicate our lives from a reseller perspective in terms of how to collect and track monthly billing and things like that, they like it because they feel like, and it's the truth, they're only paying for what they're truly using, rather than paying for products or infrastructure that they're only using part of the day, or software that they're only using for a particular project. A lot of our healthcare systems might have a research project that their going on, and they might like to scale up for some backup licensing and scale back down once that project is done. Consumption licensing allows that, versus having to go to them and saying, hey, well now you got to buy 200 terabytes of perpetual licensing, and justify that capital expense, rather than having an operational expense on just that one particular workload that you have to back up for that one period of time. >> Angelo, Stu and I are always interested in the human capital management aspects of things, and you talked about, you went from sort of talking about having a conversation around email archiving or backup, to one about the Cloud, Cloud strategies. From your internal organization perspective, how did you manage that? Are you rescaling, are you retraining? Is it just you got really supersmart people that can adapt? >> We definitely have supersmart people, because they're all over there, that's right. But I definitely have supersmart people. But, you know, it's a little bit of both. It's a little bit of, you know, you take one of our data protection projects; see Christian Muma, you know, he's been in the data center for god knows how many years, he has seen technology evolve. It was a natural fit to look at Cloud infrastructure. Started taking some classes, consumed it, all the information he could, and now we're out there actively selling it. In some other respects, we had to hire from outside and bring in some services ourselves to actually use, maybe some third party partnerships to help us better understand how we price out Cloud for our customers. So it's a little bit of everything, and I think that that's what's exciting about it, because I think for the first time in a long time, everyone's learning something new at the same time, because, I don't care what anyone said about the Cloud years ago; it's different today, it's going to be different in six months, it's going to be different in nine months. And I think that that's exciting, and I've been in this industry since 1996. I've seen a lot of really cool things come and go. I just think that there's still infancy in the Cloud and I think it's exciting because everyone's still learning. And any time you can still learn, I think that's, I think an important part of your job. >> So when you think about your, sort of, near-term and midterm and long-term plan for the company, how do you sort of describe that? Where do you want to take this thing? >> Near-term, I want to have a solid end of the quarter. >> Business is good, right, I mean market's booming right now. >> Business is very good. Veritas will tell me it's not good enough but they're just never happy. No, business is, business is very good. I think, near-term for us, you said hey, how do we get our head around it? Near-term for us is, as we're absorbing all this information, is start to really figure out what our path is going to be. So near-term, I think we still have to identify other ancillary partners that we need to bring to the table. We've got our partnerships with Azure, Microsoft Azure, and our partnerships with AWS. We'll probably have to look at Google and IBM and see what they're doing, and then we have to look at other partnerships that are not related to Veritas but still drive that home. We maybe look at a different colo partnership or partnerships around outsourcing billing, things like that, that we can make where it's easier for our customers to consume the technology. So I think six to nine months from now if we were to have the same conversation, everything that we're doing today is probably going to be somewhat different. But I just think that there's still a lot of planning to do. >> Angelo, any feedback from your customers on what there's still on the to-do list from the vendors? We talked, you know, the strategy, Cloud's changing a lot, you know. What are some of the pinpoints that they said hey, if we could get this into the offering from Veritas or some of the others it would make our lives a lot easier. >> I mean, that's a tough question, because we're going to them now and changing the conversation already. You know, obviously they're always asking for different features, but I don't like to get into a feature conversation with the customers. I try to solve the problem. >> Dave: You're leading that conversation, is what you're saying. >> Yeah, I don't want to get into the weeds of talking about well, this widget does it at 50% and you do it at 48%. You know, I try to sit a little bit more macro. I think that one of the things our customers have asked us to do a better job at is figure out better ways to make it easier to consume the technology from budget perspective. So we're trying to figure that out now; 360 Data Management is a subscription, Veritas would like them sold in three years, we're trying to figure out ways to get creative with our customers on that. What's the right bundle, what's not the right bundle. One thing that I've noticed, and Veritas have been great at it, is we have to have some flexibility in terms of adding things in and make it seem like it's all part of that bundle. There's been some flexibility and I think that, because of that, we haven't hit that roadblock yet where, well, we really want this product in the bundle. Reality is that we'll work through that and try to add it in there, some way, shape or form, even if behind the scenes. >> The customers see you as the experts, and what we often see is that technology is the technology; it's pretty much understood. What's not understood by the customers is how to apply it to their business, and their business is changing so fast that it seems like they're looking to organizations like yours saying okay, here's our business challenge. How can you help me? You tell me, and then the best answer is somebody he'll be able to work with. Is that a valid, sort of, premise? >> Yeah, it is, it certainly is and I think we're really uniquely positioned in the fact that, here we've got, we've got our partnership with Veritas and we're 100% focused to everything in the Veritas portfolio so we don't compete from within. That's the same thing that we could say, basically, on Symantec and some of our traditional storage partners as well. That'll change most likely, on our storage partners, especially because of what Veritas have been releasing with Access and some of the other software providing storage technology. When we're brought in, we're brought in as the experts in that finite area, so we're not brought in as a generalist-type of reseller. We're brought in as, hey, I've got a data management problem, I've got a data security problem, or I'm trying to do some high-performance workloads on storage. So yeah, we are the experts, but at the same time we're being brought in for those handfuls of things, so we're not having these, hey, can you maximize my span on anti-virus software because I want to sell you commoditized software. It's just not us, it's not our thing. We're not adding any value to the customers, or the poor owners for that matter. >> Angelo, curious that there's a lot of startups in the data protection space. What do you here, your customers asking you about them? You know, what's your thoughts there? >> I guess I got to be nice, right? Because I'm being streamed everywhere. >> Stu: They're not listening, go ahead, be a New Yorker. >> Listen, I challenge Rubrik at any point of time, you know, those guys, Rubrik, Cohesity, those guys, they're new, they're the shiny new toy. The problem, the problem is they have their messaging out there, and the problem we have is that they're the shiny new toy. But when the rubber hits the road and when it's time to actually go and prove out what the technology can do, we'll win all the time. We will win ten out of ten times if we get the seat at the table, right. The problem is is because we were a limited portfolio, a limited product, limited integration type of company before, we weren't getting that seat at the table. I think they see it now, I think they're starting to get a little concerned about, hey, you know what, if this 360 Data Management is what it's going to be, and we all know it is, I think they're going to be concerned. They're new, and they're going to get attention. My honest opinion: I'm glad they came out, I'm glad that Rubrik and Cohesity and all these guys came out and did all this different ways to go to market, because I think it really forced all of us to say hey, we got some real tough decisions to make here, the competition has caught up, in certain ways. Let's change the game, and 360 Data Management does that. I think they should take as much business as they can right now, because it's going to be short-lived. >> You said it makes you rethink your strengths, and like you said, change the game. >> Yeah, it changes the game. >> Yeah. Uh, okay, predictions on the MLB? Yankees won their getaway game today to put the pressure on the Red Sox, two and a half to two and a half games back. You know, the Indians are looking good, my man, Terry Francona. What's your prediction for it? >> The Sox fan's outnumbered two to one here, so go ahead. >> You know, so I shouldn't say that the Yankees are going to win the World Series? >> No, he's a Yankees fan. >> I'm a Yankee fan, too. >> Honestly, as a Yankee fan, I think we all know that they weren't supposed to be this team, so I think this is, that's the team to look out for. >> Dave: Maybe this is their year. >> I think this is the year that they're going to challenge people, I mean, are they going to win? It's Cleveland, do you really think Cleveland's going to win anything? They won one thing in the last, what, 30 years. >> That's what they used to say about us in Boston. Angelo, thanks so much coming on, really appreciate it. Keep right there, buddy, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live from-- (electronic music)

>> Announcer: 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 this is our second day of Veritas Vision in 2017. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Jason Buffington is here, good friend of the Cube, Senior Analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group, otherwise known as ESG. Jason, good to see you again. >> Thanks for having me back. >> We've been bumping into each other a lot lately, a lot of storage stuff going on and you you gave a panel discussion today. You had, you know, three of the four big Cloud guys up there, no Amazon, Stu. They weren't up on the panel, but that was good, you had an interview with those guys. >> Jason: Yeah. >> So, congratulations on that and welcome again. >> Yeah, everyone wants to talk about data protection, right? So, there's... >> Dave: Hottest topic, isn't it? >> It is, every time you go to a show, the last show that I was at, it seemed like over half the booths were talking about data protection. So, to come here, you know, Veritas kind of owns that as a name. And so it's been fun to just be part of the participants. >> Yeah, Jason, you know, you cover this base, and you know Veritas well. There are people I talked to getting ready for this, and they said, "We remember Veritas back in its hay day." You know, back pre-acquisition. During the virtualization era, it kind of got quiet. I mean, they got acquired by Semantic, things went down, but now they're an independent company, and one of the shows that, you know, we've been at VMWorld, absolutely. Data protection is super hot, you know, product of the year was one of those companies, whole lot of startups there, a lot of investment. What's your take on kind of the new Veritas, you know, where they fit in that ecosystem with all those startups and everybody else? >> No, that's a good read, so let's talk about the market first, and then I'll put Veritas in it, right? So, I think you're spot on that when the virtualization wave came through, most of the really big established data protection vendors were not first market, right? And in fact, every time that we see this, I've been doing this for 28 years, I've been backing stuff up, right? And for most of it, every time the platform shifts, the traditional dominant data protection vendors are not the first ones to jump on that new gear, right? Windows versus NetWare, now we're into virtualization. So, we saw Veeam, and PHD and vRanger, and a few others that barely get an honorable mention in that line, right? We're in a really interesting time, though, this time around because every time, in the past, when you moved off of the old platform, the presumption was, you turned it off, right? This time around, we're on the, here's a fancy word, we're on the precipice of a new shift again because we're looking at Cloud as the new platform to move to. But here's the fun part. We're not leaving the old stuff behind, right? We're not turning off all the virtual servers and the physical servers are on their way out the door as we go to Cloud. We're embracing Multicloud as the new destination, not this mid-step along the way. And I think that's really interesting because, just like in every time past, it means we're going to get a reset of the leader board when it comes to data protection. And, just like in times past, the secret sauce that made you dominant on the last platform, doesn't necessarily give you an edge technology-wise on the next platform. All it really does is give you momentum, right? So, yeah, there's a few other folks that we could list that they've got some momentum going for one reason or another along the way, but for the marketplace, if physical and virtual and Cloud are all going to be together, Veritas has been doing some of those for 20 some odd years. They've made some announcements around the rest of the suites. I think they're in a good place here. The thing I'm excited about from Veritas, and I do, I'm a fan, you want to root for them, right? I mean, 25 years on the bench, you want to see them keep going. I think the opportunity is that, since the divestiture from Semantic, they have a lot more focus, right? You know, it's really hard to tell a story that's everything from Malware and cyber security, all the way through to a breadth of data protection. But if you look at how they're talking about things now, and I really like the 360 narrative that kind of pulls it all together. Every part of their portfolio kind of pulls the other parts together, right? It doesn't matter, in data management, whether you want to start with backup, or you want to start with storage, or you want to start with availability, anywhere you look on that circle, it's going to pull the rest of the line in, and these are all the things that folks are asking for from a customer base. So, I like the tech that they've got. I like where the market is headed, and I think they've got a real shot to be one of those top three dominant names that we talk about moving forward. >> Yeah, so, I mean it's a 30 plus year history. >> Jason: Yeah. >> And pretty amazing, I mean this is an amazing story, this company. I mean, they came out, kind of a small company, and then there was that relationship which they bought Seagate. You know, Seagate's backup business. Seagate actually had a piece of the company for a while. >> Jason: Yeah. >> You know, Al Shugart, when he sold that stock, basically saved Seagate cause of the cash infusion. So, it was a long history, and then they kind of went dormant... >> Jason: Yeah. >> For a while under the Symantec Governance. And now, so the big question is, can Veritas get its mojo back in the space and become that super hot company again? >> So, by the way, sidebar, you talked about Seagate. I actually have a copy of Seagate Backup Exec sitting on a shelf in my office. (Dave laughing) And one of these days, I will open up the data protection museum, cause I think I've got most of the pieces and parts laying around. So, can Veritas get is mojo back? The thing that Veritas has to consistently remind people, one, we are not your daddy's or your granddaddy's backup company anymore, right? So, they're working on things like, they announced this week a new UI coming for NetBackup 8.1, and I thought they were going to crowd mob out of affirmation for that. People were so excited for, you know, finally we're going to get a contemporary UI that doesn't look like 1995 coming in, in that backup. So, certainly, some of the cosmetics, the sterilization of that UI going across as many of those products as possible in order to provide more of a contemporary feel. That's an easy place to dig on, right? But I think what Veritas really needs to think about is, they need to remind folks that, while they are not the stodgy presumption of what people might think, this is not their first rodeo in any of these areas, right? We had new announcements on software to find storage this week. Things like storage foundation and VCS, they've been doing that for 25 years, right? I mean, they've been doing to software to find storage before it was a thing, right? Availability, right? So, we talk about, I like the VRP product. I think it's a cool architecture, and something certainly that powers a lot of the Cloud mobility type capabilities that are there. And the idea of a heterogeneous platform to enable higher levels of availability, I think the market is just now growing into that, right? So, the trick is, we're not the old folks, but, oh by the way, we have reams of experience like you can't imagine. Let's put those things together and have an enterprise level conversation. >> So, let's lay the horses out on the track here. I mean, we were all at VMWorld, and we saw the, it was the hottest... That and security, backup and security are the two hottest spaces in the business right now. We saw the startups, the Cohesity's, the Rubrik's, the Zerto's, and sort of, the upshots. The Veeams, you know, a lot of action at their booths. Obviously, Veritas getting its mojo back. Where's Commvault in all this, so how do you lay out the horses on the track, what's the competitive landscape look like? Paint a picture for us. >> Yeah, so, first and foremost, I always go back to what ESG calls the data protection spectrum, right? So, the behaviors of archive, backup, snapshot, replication, availability. They are not interchangeable mechanisms. We call it a spectrum as a rainbow kind of feel. You know, when is the last time you went outside, saw a rainbow in the sky, and one of the colors was missing? You know, these colors do not replace each other. Snapshots and replications, etc. When you look at where the market's going, imagine a capital Y. In fact, if you go look up on your favorite blog site, I have a blog on, why does data protection have to evolve? This is the answer to your question. The base of that Y is just backup. Can you make copies of all of your stuff? And even that, I think a lot of folks have a challenge with. The next step up is that idea of data protection. So, backup plus snapshots plus replications, single set of policies. Where the market's going, and how it kind of lays out the horses, is now we're at that fork in the road in the capital Y, right? And some of the folks are moving down the availability path. And think about that word for a second, you can remember the vendors who like to go that direction. We're going from reactive recovery to proactive assured productivity, right? Because all the backup folks are just as down until somebody hits the restore button. That's the thing that no one really wants to talk about, as opposed to, if you have monitoring, if you have orchestration, if you have failover and rapid recovery mechanisms. Now, you really do have an availability story that comes out of that. And not all the vendors that you mentioned have that. >> Dave: Well, who are the leaders? >> Yeah, so, certainly, from a momentum and brand perspective, Veeam is definitely on the front line of that, you know, I think car racing is more easier... >> Dave: Cause they've got growth and... >> Yeah, they have momentum, they have, certainly virtualization is still a sweet spot for the data centers... >> Obviously, Veritas is... >> Veritas is absolutely... >> They said 15 years in a row in the Gartner Upper Right... >> Yeah. >> Okay, check. >> Dell EMC, broad portfolio there. Those are kind of the biggest three from, who has all the checked boxes they need to make sure they have a dialogue for the next conversation. >> And Commvault, you wouldn't put in that? >> So, well, I always think of three, you know, bronze, silver, gold, not in that order. >> Yeah, it's like baseball playoffs. Who's going to get in, who's the wild card, you know. >> So, Commvault checks all the right boxes, right? They have all the right narratives along the way. I think the challenge is, organizationally, they're a little siloed in how they tell the stories, and so sometimes it's hard to remember that they're actually the only ones who have a single code base. The ones that, you know, one set of tech that can check all the boxes. Everyone else actually has some myriad of pieces and parts that have to be assembled along the way. >> Dave: So, that's both a strength and a weakness... >> Yeah. >> Dave: For Commvault, right? >> Yeah, the opportunity is there to increase the marketing to tell one narrative. >> Kind of Tivoli, same thing, right? >> Yes, same kind of idea there. And by the way, I don't count, let's call them Spectrum Protect now, but I don't count them out. So, Spectrum Protect took a facelift a couple years ago and really got virtualization savvy. They took the, they had the same gap that everyone else that you mentioned had, and, what is it, six, four, a couple years back, they finally got around to that. And then they just announced Spectrum Protect Plus, which is really built for that V-Admin role. So, certainly we've got a good lens there. On the other side, just like in every other generation, you've got some upstarts that are looking pretty good. >> Well funded, some of them paid 100 million. >> Yeah, well funded, some of them I think have kind of a little bit of a puffer fish, right? They feel bigger than they are for the moment, and yet, the tech looks really good. They want to have a dialogue that says, don't start with backup and try to grow forward. Start over, right? Reimagine what storage might look like in the broader range of things. And by the way, data protection is one of the outcomes for that. And so, you put the Actifio, Cohesity, Rubrik, kind of mix, along the lines for that. You also get the... Catalogic stuff that goes into, that's OEM by IBM, kind of gets on the other side. I think that's going to be probably the coolest thing to watch in 2018. So, you hear the buzz words of copy data management. Everybody wants to talk about some version of those three words. We think that the market's going to go either evolution versus revolution. So, evolution is, start with the data protection folks that you know, and those technologies are going to grow into data management type folks. Here at the show, right, so we saw Veritas Velocity. It's their first foray into that. Cloud Point starts to come into that mix as well. So, the idea of keeping all you need, getting rid of it when you don't, and enabling, and here's the fun part, enabling those secondary use cases so that you can get more value out of that otherwise dormant data. Mike talked about that during the day one keynote. I thought he was spot on for that. So, that's the evolution approach. Revolution, start over, better storage, gets you the same results. Those other guys are old anyway... >> So, Bill Coleman's saying, "It's ours to lose." He said that to us on the Cube. They're obviously an evolution play. >> Jason: Yep. >> I've also heard, they've got, they've made the claim, "We've got the best engineering team in the business." Comments? >> So... >> Dave: It's a very competitive market. >> Yeah, it's hard to say best. I never like ultimate superlatives, but here's what I will say. I meet an amazing number of engineers at Veritas who have been doing this 15, 20, 25 years. There's a lot of wonderful institutional knowledge that comes out of that, that you don't get when you're three, five years, even if you come from multiple vendors, and you kind of pop along the way. There are folks that their initials are still in the source code of NetBackup, and I think that gives them an edge from that perspective if they have a vision from an architecture and from a message perspective on carrying it forward and growing beyond just backup. >> Yeah, Jason, want to get your commentary on the customers. So, one of the things we're trying to reconcile here is, they've got a lot of NetBackup customers. >> Jason: Yeah. >> And then they're pitching this new Cloud hyper-scale, distributed architecture world. Are the customers ready for that? Are they, you know, Bill Coleman told us, five years, ten years, maybe five years from now, every single product that's selling today will be obsolete. So, are the Veritas customers today ready to make that move? What are you hearing? Or are they just going to, you know, go to Microsoft and Amazon and, you know, come in that way? How does this, you know, it goes that kind of revolutionary, evolutionary, discussion you were having. >> Good read, so working backwards, I don't think the answer for better backup for the enterprise is clouding. Cloud managed, absolutely. Disaster recovery as a service, as a secondary tier for the people who don't want to have dormant data centers, yeah probably. But we're still going to have a significant majority of infrastructure on-prem that's going to demand for current SLAs to have recoverability on-prem as well. So, I don't think it starts from a Cloud angle. What I do think, from the Veritas customer perspective is, certainly, you know, Veritas is, their homies are the NetBack of admins. That role is evolving. Or maybe I should say it's devolving. You know, you're not going to have backup admins in the same way. Honestly, more and more, we see that data protection should be part of a broader system's management platform management conversation, right? Cause if I'm an IT generalist, that means I don't have a Ph.D. in backup, and I don't want one. I'm an IT generalist, and I'm the one who's responsible for provisioning servers, and patching servers, and providing access to servers. When those green lights turn red, I want to be able to be part of that process and not wait on somebody else. And if I want to be part of the recovery process, it means I better be part of the protection process as well. So, certainly, Veritas is going to have to grow into some new personas of who they're going to be adding value to. IT ops is the big one, right? So, the backup admin is starting to decline a little bit, the V-Admin for the virtualization role is starting to decline a little bit. That IT operations role is really taking a much more dominant share. That said, Veritas's best route to market is to go through the backup admin, and not in spite of because you can turn that backup admin into a hero by saying, "Look, you have a certain set of problems." "Your adjacent peers have a wider set of problems, "and aren't you going to be the smart one "to walk in somebody who can fix "the rest of the problems while we're at it." And that's that 360 story... >> Well, to your point, evolve or devolve, that role. So, we're out of time, but how about a plug for some recent research, what's hot, what's new, anything that you've worked on that you want to share with the audience. >> Yeah, so ESG, we just finished research on real world SLAs and availabilities. So, how are people doing that proactive lens, as opposed to just reactive? Today, earlier today, I kicked off research with the research team on copy data management, so all that evolution/revolution, we're in that right now. And then the next two projects we're working on, GDPR readiness and data protection drivers in Western Europe. Appliance form factors for data protection, so turnkey versus dedupe, is kind of the next one. And then we're going to refresh our Cloud Strategy Data Protection intersection, so BaaS, DRaaS, STaaS, IaaS, and SaaS, and how the protection traction moves. >> Awesome, sounds like a good lineup. I'd be interested to see that GDPR readiness. We'll have to forecast that and... >> That'll be fun. >> And then hit you up after that comes out cause there's going to be some big gaps going on there. >> Yeah. >> Hey, thanks very much for coming back in the Cube, good job. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, you're welcome. Okay, keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back. This is day two, Veritas Vision. You're watching the Cube.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (peppy digital music) >> Veritas Vision 2017 everybody. We're here at The Aria Hotel. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Vtas, #VtasVision, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman who is my cohost for the week. Stu, we heard Richard Branson this morning. The world-renowned entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson came up from the British Virgin Islands where he lives. He lives in the Caribbean. And evidently he was holed out during the hurricane in his wine cellar, but he was able to make it up here for the keynote. We saw on Twitter, so, great keynote, we'll talk about that a little bit. We saw on Twitter that he actually stopped by the Hitachi event, Hitachi NEXT for women in tech, a little mini event that they had over there. So, pretty cool guy. Some of the takeaways: he talked a lot about- well, first of all, welcome to day two. >> Thanks, Dave. Yeah, and people are pretty excited that sometimes they bring in those marquee guests, someone that's going to get everybody to say, "Okay, wait, it's day two. "I want to get up early, get in the groove." Some really interesting topics, I mean talking about, thinking about the community at large, one of the things I loved he talked about. I've got all of these, I've got hotels, I've got different things. We draw a circle around it. Think about the community, think about the schools that are there, think about if there's people that don't have homes. All these things to, giving back to the community, he says we can all do our piece there, and talking about sustainable business. >> As far as, I mean we do a lot of these, as you know, and as far as the keynote speakers go, I thought he was one of the better ones. Certainly one of the bigger names. Some of the ones that we've seen in the past that I think are comparable, Bill Clinton at Dell World 2012 was pretty happening. >> There's a reason that Bill Clinton is known as the orator that he is. >> Yeah, so he was quite good. And then Robert Gates, both at ServiceNow and Nutanics, Condi Rice at Nutanics, both very impressive. Malcolm Gladwell, who's been on theCUBE and Nate Silver, who's also been on theCUBE, again, very impressive. Thomas Friedman we've seen at the IBM shows. The author, the guy who wrote the Jobs book was very very strong, come on, help me. >> Oh, yeah, Walter Isaacson. >> Walter Isaacson was at Tableau, so you've seen some- >> Yeah, I've seen Elon Musk also at the Dell show. >> Oh, I didn't see Elon, okay. >> Yeah, I think that was the year you didn't come. >> So I say Branson, from the ones I've seen, I don't know how he compared to Musk, was probably the best I think I've ever seen. Very inspirational, talking about the disaster. They had really well-thought-out and well-produced videos that he sort of laid in. The first one was sort of a commercial for Richard Branson and who he was and how he's, his passion for changing the world, which is so genuine. And then a lot of stuff on the disaster in the British Virgin Islands, the total devastation. And then he sort of went into his passion for entrepreneurs, and what he sees as an entrepreneur is he sort of defined it as somebody who wants to make the world a better place, innovations, disruptive innovations to make the world a better place. And then had a sort of interesting Q&A session with Lynn Lucas. >> Yeah, and one of the lines he said, people, you don't go out with the idea that, "I'm going to be a businessman." It's, "I want to go out, I want to build something, "I want to create something." I love one of the early anecdotes that he said when he was in school, and he had, what was it, a newsletter or something he was writing against the Vietnam War, and the school said, "Well, you can either stay in school, "or you can keep doing your thing." He said, "Well, that choice is easy, buh-bye." And when he was leaving, they said, "Well, you're either going to be, end up in jail or be a millionaire, we're not sure." And he said, "Well, what do ya know, I ended up doing both." (both laughing) >> So he is quite a character, and just very understated, but he's got this aura that allows him to be understated and still appear as this sort of mega-personality. He talked about, actually some of the interesting things he said about rebuilding after Irma, obviously you got to build stronger homes, and he really sort of pounded the reducing the reliance on fossil fuels, and can't be the same old, same old, basically calling for a Marshall Plan for the Caribbean. One of the things that struck me, and it's a tech audience, generally a more liberal audience, he got some fond applause for that, but he said, "You guys are about data, you don't just ignore data." And one of the data points that he threw out was that the Atlantic Ocean at some points during Irma was 86 degrees, which is quite astounding. So, he's basically saying, "Time to make a commitment "to not retreat from the Paris Agreement." And then he also talked about, from an entrepreneurial standpoint and building a company that taking note of the little things, he said, makes a big difference. And talking about open cultures, letting people work from home, letting people take unpaid sabbaticals, he did say unpaid. And then he touted his new book, Finding My Virginity, which is the sequel to Losing My Virginity. So it was all very good. Some of the things to be successful: you need to learn to learn, you need to listen, sort of an age-old bromide, but somehow it seemed to have more impact coming from Branson. And then, actually then Lucas asked one of the questions that I put forth, was what's his relationship with Musk and Bezos? And he said he actually is very quite friendly with Elon, and of course they are sort of birds of a feather, all three of them, with the rocket ships. And he said, "We don't talk much about that, "we just sort of-" specifically in reference to Bezos. But overall, I thought it was very strong. >> Yeah Dave, what was the line I think he said? "You want to be friends with your competitors "but fight hard against them all day, "go drinking with them at night." >> Right, fight like crazy during the day, right. So, that was sort of the setup, and again, I thought Lynn Lucas did a very good job. He's, I guess in one respect he's an easy interview 'cause he's such a- we interview these dynamic figures, they just sort of talk and they're good. But she kept the conversation going and asked some good questions and wasn't intimidated, which you can be sometimes by those big personalities. So I thought that was all good. And then we turned into- which I was also surprised and appreciative that they put Branson on first. A lot of companies would've held him to the end. >> Stu: Right. >> Said, "Alright, let's get everybody in the room "and we'll force them to listen to our product stuff, "and then we can get the highlight, the headliner." Veritas chose to do it differently. Now, maybe it was a scheduling thing, I don't know. But that was kind of cool. Go right to where the action is. You're not coming here to watch 60 Minutes, you want to see the headline show right away, and that's what they did, so from a content standpoint I was appreciative of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, they brought on David Noy, who we're going to have on in a little while, and went through, really, the updates. So really it's the expansion, Dave, of their software-defined storage, the family of products called InfoScale. Yesterday we talked a bit about the Veritas HyperScale, so that is, they've got the HyperScale for OpenStack, they've got the HyperScale for containers, and then filling out the product line is the Veritas Access, which is really their scale-out NAS solution, including, they did one of the classic unveils of Veritas Software Company. It was a little odd for me to be like, "Here's an appliance "for Veritas Bezel." >> Here's a box! >> Partnership with Seagate. So they said very clearly, "Look, if you really want it simple, "and you want it to come just from us, "and that's what you'd like, great. "Here's an appliance, trusted supplier, "we've put the whole thing together, "but that's not going to be our primary business, "that's not the main way we want to do things. "We want to offer the software, "and you can choose your hardware piece." Once again, knocking on some of those integrated hardware suppliers with the 70 point margin. And then the last one, one of the bigger announcements of the show, is the Veritas Cloud Storage, which they're calling is object storage with brains. And one thing we want to dig into: those brains, what is that functionality, 'cause object storage from day one always had a little bit more intelligence than the traditional storage. Metadata is usually built in, so where is the artificial intelligence, machine learning, what is that knowledge that's kind of built into it, because I find, Dave, on the consumer side, I'm amazed these days as how much extra metadata and knowledge gets built into things. So, on my phone, I'll start searching for things, and it'll just have things appear. I know you're not fond of the automated assistants, but I've got a couple of them in my house, so I can ask them questions, and they are getting smarter and smarter over time, and they already know everything we're doing anyway. >> You know, I like the automated assistants. We have, well, my kid has an Echo, but what concerns me, Stu, is when I am speaking to those automated assistants about, "Hey, maybe we should take a trip "to this place or that place," and then all of a sudden the next day on my laptop I start to see ads for trips to that place. I start to think about, wow, this is strange. I worry about the privacy of those systems. They're going to, they already know more about me than I know about me. But I want to come back to those three announcements we're going to have David Noy on: HyperScale, Access, and Cloud Object. So some of the things we want to ask that we don't really know is the HyperScale: is it Block, is it File, it's OpenStack specific, but it's general. >> Right, but the two flavors: one's for OpenStack, and of course OpenStack has a number of projects, so I would think you could be able to do Block and File but would definitely love that clarification. And then they have a different one for containers. >> Okay, so I kind of don't understand that, right? 'Cause is it OpenStack containers, or is it Linux containers, or is it- >> Well, containers are always going to be on Linux, and containers can fit with OpenStack, but we've got their Chief Product Officer, and we've got David Noy. >> Dave: So we'll attack some of that. >> So we'll dig into all of those. >> And then, the Access piece, you know, after the apocalypse, there are going to be three things left in this world: cockroaches, mainframes, and Dot Hill RAID arrays. When Seagate was up on stage, Seagate bought this company called Dot Hill, which has been around longer than I have, and so, like you said, that was kind of strange seeing an appliance unveil from the software company. But hey, they need boxes to run on this stuff. It was interesting, too, the engineer Abhijit came out, and they talked about software-defined, and we've been doing software-defined, is what he said, way before the term ever came out. It's true, Veritas was, if not the first, one of the first software-defined storage companies. >> Stu: Oh yeah. >> And the problem back then was there were always scaling issues, there were performance issues, and now, with the advancements in microprocessor, in DRAM, and flash technologies, software-defined has plenty of horsepower underneath it. >> Oh yeah, well, Dave, 15 years ago, the FUD from every storage company was, "You can't trust storage functionality "just on some generic server." Reminds me back, I go back 20 years, it was like, "Oh, you wouldn't run some "mission-critical thing on Windows." It's always, "That's not ready for prime time, "it's not enterprise-grade." And now, of course, everybody's on the software-defined bandwagon. >> Well, and of course when you talk to the hardware companies, and you call them hardware companies, specifically HPE and Dell EMC as examples, and Lenovo, etc. Lenovo not so much, the Chinese sort of embraced hardware. >> And even Hitachi's trying to rebrand themselves; they're very much a hardware company, but they've got software assets. >> So when you worked at EMC, and you know when you sat down and talked to the guys like Brian Gallagher, he would stress, "Oh, all my guys, all my engineers "are software engineers. We're not a hardware company." So there's a nuance there, it's sort of more the delivery and the culture and the ethos, which I think defines the software culture, and of course the gross margins. And then of course the Cloud Object piece; we want to understand what's different from, you know, object storage embeds metadata in the data and obviously is a lower cost sort of option. Think of S3 as the sort of poster child for cloud object storage. So Veritas is an arms dealer that's putting their hat in the ring kind of late, right? There's a lot of object going on out there, but it's not really taking off, other than with the cloud guys. So you got a few object guys around there. Cleversafe got bought out by IBM, Scality's still around doing some stuff with HPE. So really, it hasn't even taken off yet, so maybe the timing's not so bad. >> Absolutely, and love to hear some of the use cases, what their customers are doing. Yeah, Dave, if we have but one critique, saw a lot of partners up on stage but not as many customers. Usually expect a few more customers to be out there. Part of it is they're launching some new products, not talking about very much the products they've had in there. I know in the breakouts there are a lot of customers here, but would have liked to see a few more early customers front and center. >> Well, I think that's the key issue for this company, Stu, is that, we talked about this at the close yesterday, is how do they transition that legacy install base to the new platform. Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." And I think that's right, and so the answer for a company like that in the playbook is clear: go private so you don't have to get exposed to the 90 day shock lock, invest, build out a modern platform. He talked about microservices and modern development platform. And create products that people want, and migrate people over. You're in a position to do that. But you're right, when you talk to the customers here, they're NetBackup customers, that's really what they're doing, and they're here to sort of learn, learn about best practice and see where they're going. NetBackup, I think, 8.1 was announced this week, so people are glomming onto that, but the vast majority of the revenue of this company is from their existing legacy enterprise business. That's a transition that has to take place. Luckily it doesn't have to take place in the public eye from a financial standpoint. So they can have some patient capital and work through it. Alright Stu, lineup today: a lot of product stuff. We got Jason Buffington coming on for getting the analyst perspective. So we'll be here all day. Last word? >> Yeah, and end of the day with Foreigner, it feels like the first time we're here. Veritas feels hot-blooded. We'll keep rolling. >> Alright, luckily we're not seeing double vision. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Vertias Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (peppy digital music)

>> 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)