>> CUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018 brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBe's Ecosystem Partners. (techno music) >> Welcome back. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage. Wait, we're surrounded by green. I've got two gentlemen from Veeam here. No, but we're not at VeeamON. We're at Cisco Live 2018 here in Orlando, happy to welcome back to the program Carey Stanton and Rob Emsley. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Ace too. >> All right, yeah, so I was with you guys not too long ago at the VeeamON conference. I had a lot of fun in Chicago, brought back some of the famous popcorn for my family, but we're here in Orlando, so way bigger convention center, 26,000 people. We're all walking a lot, talking a lot about networking in Multi-Cloud and everything there. Tell us a little bit about your experience here at the show and what you've taken. >> Yeah, it's great, thanks, Stu. We have as you may know a tier-one partnership with Cisco. We're a platinum sponsor at this event and we're here all around our relationships with them on their data protection with their hyper-flex and their 32-60 and S2-40 relationships and we continue to see rapid growth in the channel and we have a direct-dedicated team selling with them on a global basis, so here making a lot of new connections across their other business units. >> Rob, I see the Green Veeam booth at almost every show I go to. >> Absolutely. >> How's Cisco different from some of the other ones that we go to? >> Well, one of the the things that Chuck Robins talked about in his keynote yesterday was how they summarize the focus of the company, and there's two specific areas that Veeam works very closely with Cisco on. One is the powering the Multi-Cloud, and unlocking the power of data. Those are two big focuses for us. You remember in Chicago, we're all about Multi-Cloud, On-Premises, Manage Cloud, Software as a Service, the Public Cloud; that's the reality of where data lives, so we're very much in lock-step with Cisco. We've been working with Cisco for several years. We last year became available through their global price list, so we're actually finding that Cisco in the data sensor, especially when you think about conversion infrastructure and hyper-conversion infrastructure, it's an area where we can really compliment what they're doing with their opportunities. >> Yeah, Carey, it's interesting because we go a lot of shows and we're hearing a lot of similar themes. Even I think the last time I'd come to the Cisco Live US show was 2009. Applications and data, it's like, oh, come on, those are just bits running through our pipes. It's not really a big deal. Well, we're here in the DevNet zone. We're talking about how Cisco's been moving up the stacks, how they're enabling companies to build new application, do cool things with wireless and SD-WAN and everything like that. I'm sure you must be seeing big change in a lot of your infrastructure partners that fits, as Rob said, that power of data and where that fits. >> Yeah, we're seeing it across the board and what we like about the relationship we have with Cisco is they look to us as their data availability experts, right? That we go into the data center conversation and they bring us in as their subject-matter experts, and that's where I think they want to expand their footprint in their TEM with their product lines, and whether it's UCS or hyper-flex, and they're bringing us into those discussions because we solve a unique problem that they otherwise wouldn't be able to solve. >> Yeah, Rob, you saw the keynote yesterday. I think we were a little surprised. Diane Green comes walking out there. Cisco of course, big push in Cloud. I've actually interviewed a number of Cisco executives of things like AWS Reinvent and the like. Does the Veeam partnership with Cisco, do you touch on some of the Public Cloud pieces as well as? >> Yeah, very much so. One of the things that Cisco is very focused on is their SOS provider right to market, so that's an area where we've been very focused over the last probably three to four years, building out and enabling often our resellers to become managers providers themselves, but the reality is that you're starting to look at that Public Cloud tie-in, whether it be Microsoft Azure, whether it be AWS or IBM Cloud, so these are really all areas where we can provide an on-ramp to connect any Cisco data center environment and provide a relationship with the Public Cloud, provide that data management level layer. >> Yeah, I think back. Cisco really helped a lot of the channel community mature their market. Went from being the silo network to building data center businesses back eight years ago when we started talking about conversion infrastructure. Today, this week I've interviewed Presidio and WWT. They're talking a lot about how they're helping customers, enabling that Cloud. I'd love to hear your perspectives on the maturation of the channel and how they fit in this multi-cloud world. >> Yeah, I mean, if you look at Veeam, where there are 55,000 channel partners our brand promises to remain a 100% channel-driven company, but having these relationships that are primary Cisco-predominant partners, like WWT, Presidio, ePlus, I think it's just opening up discussions that we otherwise wouldn't have had, and we're seeing 50% of the opportunities that we're closing in the field are Cisco-led opportunities that are being driven from these new channel partners, and so again, I think this is the one plus one equals three story that we talk a lot about, that we're bringing a lot to the table and 50% of the opportunities for them and vice versa for us. >> Yeah, one of the things that we really like about Cisco is their focus on their partner community is extremely high, both from the enablement perspective and the educational perspective. They have a fully resourced partner marketing team, and we've been doing a lot of work with them. One of the things that Cisco has been transitioning to, it sort of fits into your space, is the whole move to marketing in a digital world and the whole need to change the type of content, and this type of content you can think about the video sort of assets becomes so much more important, so we've been working very closely with them to do joint digital marketing. It's very easy sometimes to do joint event-based marketing, but when you start getting into digital, you really have to think outside the box about how you bring two companies together to meet in the digital world, so we've been really doing that to drive joint opportunities, and that's been something that we've really got some some success with from our relationship with Cisco. >> In fact, you were just in Barcelona. >> Yeah, every year they run a marketing summit for their channel partners and ecosystem partners, and we actually won the Cisco marketing innovation award for a digital marketing always on campaign slope, just full of assets for joint digital, for joint Cisco and Veeam customers. >> Congratulations, I did see some of that on some of the social media. Yeah, it's interesting to look at how marketing changes in this new digital world. I ask every CMO I talk to these days is to, "How is digital changing the way things happen?" >> Yeah, and you mentioned our other infrastructure partners and there's no other partner that we've worked with at the size of Cisco that embraced it day one, so they look to Veeam as, "Okay, we're going "to work with Veeam, we're going to go deeper, "we're going to bring them on our global prices," and day one they were, "How can we get intertwined "into what Veeam does extremely well as our digital marketing machine?" And just from the get-go they've just continued to accelerate through that process. >> Yeah, one of the things I know every partner loves when they come to an event like this, there's a lot of customers here. Give us a little insight if you can, either specific examples or give us some of the themes you're hearing from customers at the show. What's top of mind? What're some of the biggest challenges that they're facing today? >> Yeah, I mean, I think what they're looking at doing is from a refresh of legacy backup solutions and replication solutions into modernizing their data center, and so they're looking to Cisco as their experts through the last decade plus, and now that Veeam is tied directly in with Cisco in some of those relationships, so it's from a refresh standpoint, from a modernizing their data center to the hybrid Cloud strategies that it's intertwined. We fit very well into those discussions, and we're seeing our customers come to us in these large ELAs, where Cisco is bringing us in as part of those discussions, so again, where otherwise we would have had a hard time getting into it, their customers are coming and saying, "What is the relevancy? "Should I really be looking at this," and Cisco's backing up those discussions. >> Certainly, to tap down on the data sensor, conversion infrastructure and hyper-conversion infrastructure is top of mind for a lot of the customers that come in by the booth. Certainly, which works well for us, because some of our relationships with our other storage alliance partners, whether it be Pure or NetOut, big partners of Cisco, so rather than one plus one equals three, it's one plus one plus one equals five quite often. We're going together as a group in order to go after opportunities, so that's definitely an area. If you think about conversion, IP Converge, it's always highly virtualized, so that plays very well to where we've built the company from: a big focus on virtual machine availability, but we're just more moving that now to the whole concept of data management across a Multi-Cloud world. >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things we talk at all the shows is the pace of change and how receptive are customers to making changes. What are you hearing from the customers here? The storage market has long been it's sticky, it's a little bit entrenched, making changes, and networking we used to measure in decades as to you roll this out and then I'll wait for the next major speed bump before we'll do that, and you'll roll that out over years. Today, we think things are moving faster, but we'd love to hear points or counterpoints that you're hearing. >> Well, I think that the customers are looking to Cisco, indirectly to Veeam from removing complexity, and I think what they've seen in the past is they've deployed solutions that have bogged down their process. They look to the Cloud as an agile environment and they look back with their Legacy systems that they know they can't continue, and so from my standpoint, the customers that we talk to consistently is, "Are you gonna be the platform that's gonna allow me "to embrace a hybrid Cloud and to remove the complexity "that I have and to be agile," and so that's constantly what the Veeam messaging is solving, right? Mission critical backup and recovery workloads and doing it at a fraction of the cost and accelerating that Veeam speed. >> Yeah, I mean, if you just take the Legacy backup market, Legacy back up installed base, it seems that the openness to change is greater now than I've ever seen it, and you know I've been playing around in this space for quite a few years, but certainly recently we've found the openness to people to look for something new. Our friends that gotten it always used to say the three things that people worry about, the three Cs: Cost, complexity, and capabilities, and those are still very much top of mind around what causes a customer to say, "Hey, what I've been doing for the last several years "hasn't quite been getting it done for me." I think the big change is that backup as an insurance policy is no longer good enough. I think the ability to leverage your backup infrastructure and the data contained within it is really driving people to think about, that's more of a value to me than simply having an insurance policy. >> Absolutely, backup was never enough. We do backup, I need to restore, but it's about that data. Want to give you the opportunity. Veeam is I think we said kind of a tweener. You're not what I would consider an old company. You've always been a software company, born in the virtualization age, but there's a bunch of newer developer focused and Cloud-native. How does Veeam stay and fight and compete against some of the new ones coming after this multi-billion dollar market? >> Want to take that? >> Yeah, well, I think that we pride ourselves on innovation. We pride ourselves on iterating very quickly, and we pride ourselves on adhering to our NPS score of 73, where there at 300,000 customers, and what we are gonna continue on our path, on what's made us successful, and we know that there's always competition. There's lots of VC money out there, and it's not that we're looking away from what the competition is doing. It's that we believe with our 4000 customers a month, our 133 customers that we close on a daily basis across all segments of SNB, commercial, and enterprise is indicative that our strategy is working. We're not going to stray away. We're just going to look to partners like Cisco and others to expand our target market, but stay true to the solution that we've provided in that virtualization environment. You were at VeeamON. You saw the announcements that we're making to support additional workloads and additional environments in the days to come. >> Yeah, I think our ability to evolve and adapt is second to none, and some of that is just based upon the structure of the company. We're still private, we're still pretty much driving our own growth, and I think that allows us to make decisions quickly and very strategically to allow us to go into the areas that I think people instinctively know what is needed to evolve in this space around supporting multi-Cloud, supporting data as an asset, leveraging it as an asset, and I think that's where we've been fueling, both in an engineering perspective, in a capacity to meet with customers and grow, and that's certainly what's going to I think sustain us as we keep going forward. >> All right, gentlemen, I want to give you a final word as to key takeaways you see here from Cisco Live 2018. >> That we will be here for the duration of the time, and our relationship with Cisco will continue to expand, and that we look forward to meeting everyone at the Veeam booth and walking through our product solutions and meeting the Veeam team and answering any questions they may have, but we're thrilled to be part of the Cisco family, and hopefully, again, in the years to come that we'll just continue to expand our relationship. >> And I'll leave you with an African proverb. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. >> Absolutely. Rob Emsley, Carey Stanton, always a pleasure to catch up with you. I'll leave with the final aphorism of my own, which is, never confuse activity with progress. Ben Franklin, so I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)