>> 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)

>> 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)