(gentle music) >> Welcome to this Cube Conversation, I'm Lisa Martin. Laura Dubois joins me next, VP of product management at Dell Technologies, Laura, welcome back to the program. >> Yeah, thank you so much Lisa, it's just fantastic to be here and talking about data protection now that we're coming out of COVID, it's just wonderful to be here, thank you so much. >> Isn't it so refreshing. So, you're going to provide some updates on Dell's data protection software, some of the innovation, how you're working with customers and prospects. So let's go ahead and dig right in, let's talk about some of the innovation and the enhancements that Dell is making to its data protection suite of software and also how customers are influencing that. >> Yeah, so it's a great question Lisa and you're right. We have driven a lot of innovation and enhancements in our data protection suite. And let me just level a second. So data protection suite, is a solution that is deployed by really tens of thousands of customers. And we continue to innovate and enhance that data protection suite. Data protection suite is comprised primarily of three main data protection software capabilities. So, longstanding capabilities and customer adoption of Avamar, which continues to be a central capability on our portfolio. The second one is Networker. So Networker is also an enterprise grade, highly scalable and performance data protection solution. And then a couple of years ago, we launched a new data protection capability called power protect data manager. So, all three of these capabilities, really the foundation of our data protection suite. And as I said, enterprises around the world rely on these three sets of capabilities to protect their data, regardless of wherever it resides. And it's really central now more than ever in the face of increasing security, risks and compliance and the need to be able to have an always kind of available environment that customers rely on the capabilities and data protection suite to really make sure their enterprises resilient. >> Absolutely, and make sure that that data is recoverable if anything happens, you mentioned cybersecurity. We'll get into that in a second. But so thousands of Avamar and Networker customers, what are some of the key workloads and data that these customers are protecting with these technologies? >> Yeah, I mean, so, actually tens of thousands. >> Tens of thousands. >> Tens of thousands of customers that rely on data protection suite. And it really, I think the strength and advantage of our portfolio is its breadth, breadth in terms of client operating environments, in terms of applications and databases, in terms of workloads and specifically use cases. So I mean, the breadth that we offer is unparalleled, pretty much whether Windows, Linux, OpenVMS, NetWare, kind of going back in time a long tail of kind of operating environments and then databases, right. So everything from SQL and Oracle and Sybase and DB2 to new types of databases, like the NoSQL or content store and key value store types of NoSQL schemas, if you will. And so, and then lastly is the word they use cases, right? So being able to protect data, whether that be data that's in a data center, out in remote or branch locations or data that's out in the cloud, right. And of course, increasingly customers are placing their data in a variety of locations; on Edge, on core data centers and in cloud environments. And we actually have over six exabytes of capacity under management, across public cloud environments. So pretty extensive deployment of our data protection suite in public clouds, you know, the leading hyperscalers, cloud environments and premises as well. >> So let's talk a little bit about the customer influence 'cause obviously there's a very cooperative relationship that Dell has with its customers that help you achieve things. Like, for example, I saw that according to IDC, Dell Technologies is number one in data protection, appliances, and software, leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for data center backup and recovery for over 20 years now. Talk to us a little bit more about that symbiotic customer, Dell relationship. >> Yeah, so it's a great question. We see our customers as strategic partners, and we really want to understand their business, their requirements. We engage on a quarterly basis with customers and partners in advisory councils. And then of course, we are always engaging with customers outside of those cycles on a kind of a one-on-one basis. And so we are really driving the innovation and the backlogs and the roadmap for data protection suite based upon customer feedback. And approximately 79% of the fortune 100 customers, our Dell data, Dell Technologies data protection customers. Now that's not to say that that's our only customer base. We have customers in commercial accounts, in mid-market in federal agencies, but, you know, we take our customer relationships really, really seriously, and we engage with them on a regular basis, both in a group forum to provide feedback as well as in a one-on-one basis. And we're building our roadmaps and our product release is based on feedback from customers, and again, know large customer base that we take very seriously. >> Right to the customer listening obviously it is critical for Dell. So you talked a little bit about what that cycle looks like in terms of quarterly meetings and then those individual meetings. What are some of the enhancements and advancements that customers have actually influenced? >> Yeah, so we, I mean, we, I think continuing to provide simplicity and ease of use is a key element of our portfolio and our strategy, right? So continuing to modernize and update the software in terms of workflows, in terms of, you know, common experiences also increasingly customers want to automate their data protection process. So really taking an API-first strategy for how we deliver capabilities to customers, continuing to expand our client database, hypervisor environments, continue to extend out our cloud support, you know, things like protection of cloud native applications with increasingly customers containerizing and building scale-out applications. We want to be able to protect Kubernetes environment. So that's kind of an area of focus for us. Another area of focus for us is going deeper with our key strategic partners, whether that'd be a cloud partner or a hypervisor partner. And then of course, customers, in fact, one of the top three things that we consistently hear from these councils that we do is the criticality of security, security and our data protection environment but the criticality of being able to be resilient from, and in the event of a cyber attack to be able to resilient recover from that cyber attack. So that is an area where we continue to make innovations and investments in the data protection suite as well. >> And that's so critical. One of the things that we saw in the last year, 15 months plus Laura, is this massive rise in ransomware. It's now a household word, the Colonial Pipeline for example, the meat packing plant, it's now many businesses knowing it's not, if we get attacked, but it's when. So having the ability to be resilient and recover that data is table stakes for, I imagine a business in any organization. I want to understand a little bit more. So you talked about tens of thousands of customers using Avamar and Networker. So now they have the capability of also expanding and using more of the suite. Talk to me a little bit about that. >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think it starts with the customer environment and what workloads and use cases they have. And because of the breadth of capabilities indeed the data protection suite, we really optimize the solution based upon their needs, right. So if they have a large portfolio of applications that they need to maintain but they're also building applications or systems for the future, we have a solution there. If they have a single hypervisor strategy or a multiple hypervisor strategy, we have a strategy there, if they have data that's on-premise and across a range of public clouds, one large customer we have as a, kind of three-plus one strategy around cloud. So they're leveraging three different public cloud, IS environments, and then they're also have their on-premise cloud environment. So, you know, we, it really starts with the customer workload and the data, and where it lives; whether that's be out in an Edge location in a remote or branch office, on an end point somewhere, they need to protect whether it be in a core data center or multiple data centers, or rather be in the cloud. That's how we think about optimizing the solution for the customers. >> Curious if you can give me any examples of customers maybe by industry that were, have been with Dell for a long time with Avamar and Networker for a long time and how they've expanded, being able to pick, as you say, as their, or as their environment grows and we've got, now this blur of right. It's now worked from anywhere, data centers, Edge. Talk to me about some customers examples that you think really articulate the value of what Dell is delivering. >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think one customer in the financial services sector comes to mind. They have a large amount of unstructured data that they need to protect, you know, petabytes, petabytes and petabytes of data they need to protect. And so I think that's one customer that comes to mind is someone we've been with for a long time, been partnering with for a long time. Another customer I mentioned in the, it was a kind of a three-letter software company that is a really strategic partner for us with on-premise, in the cloud. You know, healthcare is a big and important sector for Dell. We have integrations into kind of leading healthcare applications. So that's another big, whether they be a healthcare provider or a healthcare insurance company, and had a fourth example, but it's escaping my mind right now, but, I would say going back to the cyber discussion, I mean, one thing that we, where we see really customers looking for guidance from us around cyber recovery and cyber resilience is in what the, you know, of course president Biden just released this executive board on his mandate for ensuring that the federal agencies but also companies in the millisecond sector, sectors be able to ensure resilience from cyber attacks. So that's companies in financial services, that's companies in healthcare, energy, oil, and gas transportation, right. Obviously in companies and industries that are critical to our economy and our infrastructure. And so that has been an area where we've seen, recently in the last, I would say 12 months increased in engagement, you mentioned Colonial Pipeline, for example. So those are some high salient highlights I think of in terms of, you know, kind of key customers. But pretty much every sector. I mean, the U.S. government, all of the the agencies, whether they be civilian, or DOD or key kind of engagement partners of ours. >> Yeah, and as you said in the last year, what a year it's been. But really a business in every industry has got to be able to be resilient and recover when something happens. Can you talk a little bit about some of the specific enhancements that you guys have made to the suite? >> Yeah, sure. So, you know, we continue to enhance our hypervisor capabilities. So we continue to enhance not only the core VMware or hyperbaric capabilities but we continue to enhance some of the extensions or plugins that we have for those. So whether that be things like our VRealized plugin or a vCloud director plugin for say, VMware. So that's kind of a big focus for us. Continuing to enhance capabilities around leveraging the cloud for long-term retention. So that's another kind of enhancement area for us. But cloud in general is an ara where we continue to drive more and more enhancement. Improving performance in cloud environments for a variety of use cases, whether that be DR to the cloud, backup or replications of the cloud or backing up workloads that are already in the cloud. There's a key use cases for us, as well as the archive to cloud use cases. So there's just some examples or areas where we've driven enhancements and you can expect to see more, you know we have a six month release cadence for Avamar and Networker, and we continue with that momentum. And at the end of this month, we have the next major release of our data protection suite. And then six months later, we'll have the next update and so on and so forth. And we've been doing that actually for the last three to four years. This is a six month release cadence for data protection suite. We continue with that momentum. And like I said, simplicity and modernity, APIs and automation, extending our workloads and hypervisors and use cases. And then cloud is a big focusing area as well, as well as security and cyber resilience. >> Right, and so a lot of flexibility in choice for Avamar and Networker customers. As things change the world continues to pivot and we know it's absolutely essential to be able to recover that data. You mentioned 70, I think 79% of the Fortune 100 are using Dell technologies for data protection software. That's probably something that's only going to continue to grow. Lots of stuff coming up. As you mention, what are some of the things that you're personally excited about as the world starts to open up and you get to actually go out and engage with customers? >> I'm in just looking forward to like in-person meetings. I mean, I just loved going and trying to understand what problems the customers are trying to solve and how we can help address those. I think, you know, what I see customers sort of struggling with is how do they kind of manage their current environment while they're building for the future? So there's a lot of interest in questions around, how do they protect some of these new types of workloads, whether they're deployed on premise or in the public cloud. So that continues to be an area where we continue to engage with customers. I'm also really personally excited about the extensions that we're doing in our cyber recovery capabilities so as you can expect to hear more about some of those in the next 12 months, because we're really seeing that as a key driver to kind of increased policies around and implementations around data protection is because of these, you know, the needs to be able to be resilient from cyber attacks. I would say we're also doing some very interesting integrations with VMware. We're going to have some first and only announcements around VMware and managing protection for VMware, you know, VM environments. So you can look forward to hearing more about that. And we have customers that have deployed our data protection solutions at scale. One customer has 150,000 clients who they're protecting with our data protection offerings, 150,000. And so we're continuing to improve the, and enhance the products to meet those kinds of scale requirements. And I'm excited by the fact that we've had this long standing relationship with this one particular customer and continue to help in flowing up where their needs go. >> And that's something that even a great job of talking about is just not just a longstanding relationships but really that dedication that Dell has to innovating with its customers. Laura, thank you for sharing some of the updates of what's new, what you're continuing to do with customers, and what you're looking forward to in the future. It sounds like we might hear some news around the VMworld timeframe. >> Yes, I think so. >> All right, Laura, thank you so much for joining me today. Appreciate your time. >> Yeah, it's been great to be here. Thanks so much. >> Excellent from Laura Dubois and Lisa Martin, you're watching this Cube Conversation. (soft music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and intel along with its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCube live in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin and we are coming to you from AWS re:Invent 19. I'm with Stu Miniman. This is our second day of two sets of theCube coverage. And we are pleased to welcome a couple of guests from Citrix. To my left is Matt Lull Managing Director of Global Strategic Alliances and we have Marissa Schmidt, Senior Director of Product Management. Guys, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >> Thank you. >> So here we are with 65,000 or so of our close friends with AWS. Matt you have been managing the AWS Citrix relationship, I think you said for about 10 years. >> I have. >> Give our audience an overview of what Citrix and AWS are doing and the evolution of this partnership. >> Well 10 years ago when we started Cloud was brand new, Amazon's re:Invent conference hadn't even started yet and nothing Citrix made worked on Amazon. And now we are pleased to say that everything Citrix makes works on Amazon. And we actually have hundreds of customers and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of users using Citrix on AWS everyday. And the pace of innovation in that last decade has accelerated. We've done more net new product innovation in the last 10 years than in the previous 20 before that. It's been a fast-paced environment. >> Well and a strong and growing partnership. I remember the first year I came to the show it was 2013 and I think Citrix had one of the largest booths at the conference there. You keep adding to that. Marissa, let's not bury the lead any further. There is some hard news dropped today. Help understand, help us share the new news today. >> Marissa: Yeah, absolutely. There are many announcements. It started yesterday actually at the keynote with the Outpost announcement. The we have the ADC validation with Outpost and the only ADC in that validation. And then we also have the ingress routing that also was announced yesterday and our solution integration into that. Both blogs went out yesterday. And then we had a press release this morning that talked about our quick starts with AWS quick start for Citrix ADC as well as the rest of the instant site that now we support. >> Okay, so I'd love to dig in a little bit on the Outpost if we can. >> Yes, sure. >> My background is networking too. So people have been geeking out trying to understand this. You know, some of the key, you know, the secret sauce inside of Outpost is that nitro chip from Annapurna help really extend what AWS is doing in the public Cloud to a customer's data center. Reminds me a little bit of what NetWorker has been doing for customer applications for quite a long time. So how do those pieces fit together? >> So for AWS right, the focus is for some of the customers that has more applications-centric that is on-prem, that has regulatory compliance requirements and for those customers that really want to do that hybrid with on-prem and Cloud, this is the best approach for them that they can use the on-prem solution with Outpost but put the VPX, the NetScaler ADC VPX on Outpost and provide that solution for hybrid customers that want to have the enterprise grade solutions on-prem and Cloud. >> I look at Outpost as more strategic than just a conversation or on a new piece of hardware and some new nitro hyper visors, right? This is Amazon's first move into hybrid Cloud which we've been doing since the beginning. And when you look at where Citrix ADC is already deployed, it is a leading piece of technology in the corporate data center in the DMZ, protecting the corporate assets. So now we have a situation where we've been helping Amazon with hybrid for a long time. Now they're moving their infrastructure onto premise and we're starting to combine our on-premise footprint with their on-premise footprint and its really actually an interesting time and place to be working not just with Citrix ADC, which is first, but in the future with things like Citrix SD-WAN, which is the other major piece of our networking portfolio. >> So when theCube was at Citrix energy, I think that was back in, I'm going to guess April, in the Spring. So many Cube shows, I lose track. We, Keith Jones and I were there for several days, got to talk with a lot of your customers, your leaders all about how ultimately the workforce, five generations in the workforce today, which kind of surprised me, but how everybody is distributed and that's how people need to work. Similar with how organizations are now hybrid multicloud. There's all of these technologies that need to work together in order to enable the worker to deliver what that business needs to drive differentiation. Talk to us a little bit about some of the parallels there in terms of what Citrix delivers to the workspace and how what you're doing with Amazon is going to allow businesses, whether its a retail organization or a bank to enable, ultimately, at the end of the day those workers to get stuff done wherever they are, so they can access applications whether they're on-prem or in the Cloud. >> So the workspace conversation is an interesting one and you used a word, hybrid multicloud, which you don't necessarily hear in Amazon circles a lot, they are the largest of the Clouds, right. But that said, our job is to deliver every application known to mankind, and that is those that are built on-premise by IT and those that are running as SaaS from any provider and there are companies that make important applications that also have Clouds. We tie all that together, right. So with the Citrix networking, the ability to terminate the end user's SSL session, we can see all the traffic, regardless of where it originated. We can tell what that user is doing in real time and we can apply new and innovative solutions like things that Amazon is a leader in around machine learning and artificial intelligence at the user level to say, is what this user is doing today normal for that particular user. Not for some other user, normal for you, and are you behaving unusually, cause if you're behaving unusually maybe there's something we need to click down in on. So we're looking really, really closely at how the world is evolving to move to where SaaS is happening. IT is losing control of the application servers and they're moving out into SaaS land. Many of them are on Amazon, some of them are elsewhere, and all of them have to be governed. And that's where we're really investing heavily and redefining what is Citrix for the future. >> Now so Matt, it's always interesting when people look at this space they're like, oh Cloud is changing everything, you know, Amazon is taking over the world. So I mentioned Citrix had the biggest booth back in 2013. There was a little product called AWS WorkSpaces that was announced and everybody was like, well, it was nice that Citrix had a long relationship with Amazon. I guess we won't be seeing them next year. Well, here we are 2019, strong partnership. Help us understand how that dynamic works out and how, you know, you worked through some of these coopetition environments. >> That's a fun one. So we run into coopetition across the board. We have some in the networking arena with core load-balancing services that exist in all the Cloud platforms. And we have a variety of startups in the Daas land. And when I look at WorkSpaces, it's a quality product for a simple user that needs it now and needs a small quantity. Some of the larger enterprises are looking at it for simplicity but when I look at what it's capable of doing and what it's total costs are versus what happens when we can deploy the 30-year mature solution from Citrix on Amazon, we still find a large percentage of the customers needs what Citrix delivers. So we have actually probably more Citrix WorkSpaces users on Amazon than on any other Cloud. It's depending on how you meter it. It's a little hard to say with total accuracy but it's been supported on Amazon for longer than anywhere else. And we know customers appreciate the combination of the two and we look at what AWS is able to provide from a platform perspective, you know, with a built-in high availability, built-in global reach, built-in global performance. Those things are all valuable to our customers and they deliver a great platform at a reasonable price. So we support that. At the same time, we're moving out of that market, that pixel remote presentation market, well, we're not moving out of it, we're moving beyond it. It is still a core part of our portfolio but our investments going forward are in delivering those applications into the intelligent workspace regardless of where they originate. Many of those user sessions won't actually be virtualized at all. They'll be controlled, governed, and secured with Citrix Workspace and Citrix networking technology but won't be dependent on things like DaaS, which is what you get out of those services like AWS WorkSpaces. >> Marissa, when I talk to customers, one of the biggest challenges they have is, you know, the changing portfolio of applications that they're dealing with. It's getting more complicated. It's gone from monolith to microservices, everything is distributed, you know, it's not just my data that's in the public Cloud, Edge now becomes a larger piece of the discussion. These are the types of solutions that Citrix has been helping a long time. What is different now about the application landscape and how Citrix is working with customers than it might have been a few years ago. >> What's different now is definitely the more modernization of the apps, right? The digital transformation was talked about in all the different keynotes yesterday and today. And as we do that we need to help our customers adapt with the applications that they do have whether it's the legacy apps or the more adaptable, flexible apps that can go to the Cloud with Kubernetes and that container environment but with Citrix solutions you can actually do that with Citrix ADC being in a container environment so we can provide that east west traffic with Citrix CPX while we also have the north south traffic for the legacy 3-tier web apps that's always going to be there for the majority of the customers, right. But what makes Citrix unique is that we do have single code base for Citrix ADC that can run in the traditional apps as well as now the east west traffic for all more modernized applications which is critical. And for Citrix overall, it's 3 pillars, right? One is the end user experience that's always got to be stellar. And number two is giving the customer a choice of which environment they want to work with. And lastly, it's providing security. And with the Citrix overall solution where Workspace from an end user perspective and the apps closer to the applications with the Citrix ADC together provides that end-to-end solution for our customers. >> Marissa, can you give us an example of, I presume as the Senior Director of Product Management you're in the field a lot, you talk with customers. Some of the things that AWS showed yesterday on stage, we saw Cerner talking about their healthcare transformation, we saw Goldman Sachs CEO go from D.J. to talking about how they have completely transformed their consumer finance business. What's an example that you think, when you're out in the field, really articulates the value that Citrix delivers enabling a business to truly transform to that? Regardless of the application infrastructure they're able to harness the data, extract insight from it and use it as a business differentiator. >> Yeah, so for our customers it really resonates, the Cerner one and Goldman Sachs because they're, you know, we deal with a lot of our customers that way, Especially in the healthcare industry. Whether they decide to go some of it in the Cloud, you still want to, what's important for them is that compliance, that security, that data protection. It still matters whether it's on-prem or in the Cloud environment. And so in that case, this is where our Citrix solution, as they decide to take some work loads on-prem or on the Clouds, they can still use this same feature-rich capabilities that Citrix ADC or the Workspace have to connect all their applications in one place and still get the initiatives that they need for their company to get the best our-wide as well as not having to do the day-to-day data center changes. Now they can be flexible by putting that in the Cloud. >> So if you look at how customers have been coming across Citrix and which portion of the customer organizations we've historically spoken to, you know, 20 years ago we talked to the desktop team and we were a solution by getting client server applications on the desktops, which was a big problem 20 years ago. It's not as much of a problem today but even as you move to browser-based environments, security and governance are more important than ever, right? We see it every day. Another company got hacked. Another situation happened. There was another consumer privacy breach. We see the rules and regulations coming out in a number of countries about how data has to be protected and companies become liable if there's problems. So, increasingly we're seeing companies come to Citrix and saying we need help with governance compliance and security. And increasingly we're marrying the unique networking capabilities that we have with the unique workspace or application desktop virtualization capabilities to create new and improved solutions that really kind of change the game for how end users get access to applications, remove the need to know passwords, which limits the ability to actually lose them, and simplify the process of making sure your data is where you believe it should be. >> Matt, you know, such a deep partnership, I'm curious, there's so many announcements that Amazon talked about, is there anything that's either jumped out at you or places beyond? We talked about some of the Outpost specific things but I think about machine learning is exciting a lot of people. People want to be able to plug into these environments either natively or through hybrid environments. Where does that play into your discussions with customers? >> So when we look at how Citrix is transforming what we do there's a lot of things that go on behind the scenes, we are a substantial Amazon customer. We are one of their largest. So, you can take for granted that we're consuming a lot of their cutting edge capabilities as we build our cutting edge capabilities. We're not necessarily directly exposing something like Amazon machine learning as a button in our environment but when you look at what they're doing with end user computing applications, they're moving into a world where, they mentioned in the keynote yesterday that one of their fastest growing services is Amazon Connect. One of our best use cases is for task workers and call centers. You might imagine that there's going to be a future there that we should be looking at. And so I do see the things that they're innovating becoming relevant to us in ways that are more than just about the infrastructure as a way to power servers, storage, and networking for Citrix environments but also becoming content, rich content, both Amazon-owned rich content and their SaaS ecosystem that's built on Amazon, all those startups they talked about this morning, all of them running in our Citrix Workspace. It requires us to have the right networking solutions in place, the right identify trust solutions in place and make it really easy for customers to consume as a service instead of a pile of bits that they get to construct themselves. >> Well Matt and Marissa, we thank you for joining us on theCUBE today at re:Invent telling us what's new with Citrix and what's new with the evolution of the partnership. Thanks for your time. >> It's a pleasure to be here. >> Thank you. >> For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from AWS re:Invest 19. We'll be right back.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Voiceover: Live from New Orleans. It's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back, Mario Angers is here. He's the senior manager of systems at the University of British Columbia. Welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you, thank you. >> So how's VeeamON going? >> So far, so good. It's fabulous, actually. I love the event, cause it's not so big that you can't talk to a lot of people, and it's small enough that you get to know a lot of different folks. >> Yeah, it feels bigger, they're saying the number's 3,000. It feels bigger than that to me, but at the same time it is kind of intimate. >> Yeah no, I went to their first event, so certainly this is very different than what it was like. I think their first event was 2014? So, yeah, that's very good. >> So, tell us what's going on up at British Columbia. What's hot these days? >> Well, I spoke to this a little bit yesterday during the partner session, right? So, British Columbia's in a bit of unique position, because we have laws that prevent us from storing data outside Canada, right? So up until recently, we didn't have any of the large service providers, so we had to basically, to some degree, reinvent the wheel. So if wanted to provide or consume cloud, we had to basically build it, which is what the University of British Columbia did a few years ago. And, because we're the largest in BC, we were doing it at scale already, so we were approached by an organization inside British Columbia called BCNET, which basically services all the other higher ed, and they asked us if we wanted to provide cloud services to the community, and we've been doing this for almost three years now. >> Dave: As a partner to BCED? >> Yeah, to BCNET, yeah. >> Dave: BCNET, yeah. >> So we're basically the service operator, they're the service provider, right, but we do everything, we take care of the marketing, the communication. >> And Mark, could you walk us through, what's that stack look like? I did an interview with the OpenStack Summit with a Massachusetts higher ed cloud that they built that used OpenStack as the underlying piece. What's yours built on? >> So we went with, we're a VMware shop. So we went with the cloud directory as the front end basically, but the back end is a combination of Cisco servers, HP servers, net op storage, HP storage, data domain for our backup. Of course we use Veeam for our backup software, and then it's VMware stack end-to-end. >> Okay, it was funny, the gentlemen that I interviewed, actually, was the one who created VCD, when he was at VMware, so I'm just curious to see your viewpoint. One of the things we use to say is, cloud is not virtualization plus, but if you build a stack, if you can have kind of the orchestration and management pieces... So you feel you have a cloud, what differentiates what you have today, versus what you could have built five years ago? >> Well, I think five years ago, it would have been really challenging to provide the services in a self service capability to our end users. So today we can do that. The only involvement we have is we provision a virtual data center for our end user, and then it's self service from there, for them. We also use NSX, which is also a VMware product, so it's self service end-to-end. >> And how has your availability become better with what you have today versus what you had before? >> Veeam is a significant partner of ours, so we've been a Veeam customer for probably five or six years now, on the backup and restore side, probably about four years, and I would say it's made our jobs a lot easier. So historically our legacy backup system was just a bear and a monster to manage. So it required a huge amount of time to not just manage, but understand how it was done. With Veeam, they've really simplified that process, and we have a very large environment, and we basically have one guy managing backup. >> So it used to be, well that's pretty good productivity. So it used to be the conversation around, "Well, we're meeting our backup within the window." That was sort of the challenge. >> Mario: Yep. >> And now increasingly, it's, we want to get as close as RPO zero as possible for certain apps, not everything, as it's too expensive, and we want a much faster recovery time objective. So can you talk to us, first of all, do you converse in those terms with your line of business, and have you been able to affect those metrics? >> So, we're not quite there yet, from a sophistication, or a maturity perspective, We still have a bit of a ways to go to get there. However, can we now guarantee to our folks that we'll be able to bring workloads back within the service level that we have with our customers? Absolutely. So we can provide peace of mind now, knowing that if we lose something we can bring it back very quickly, as it's actually being restored to the production environment. >> So where do you want to go from here? It sounds like you've got the productivity thing nailed. You got one person managing all this, and you're able to meet those SLAs. What's next? >> I would say next for us is, so today we provide what I'll call a managed service around backup. So basically, the team that I manage is looking after backup for all the clients within the service, so our next step is really to provide them the ability to manage that themselves. So we're looking to do that over the summer. Once we do that, then we want to start partnering with Veeam as well and start looking at their Cloud Connect product. We've been in discussions for some time now about how we're going to do that, and that's the evolution of that. And then building on that, we're being also asked to add to the portfolio of services that we provide, and one of those services is disaster recovery as a service. So that's becoming very, very critical to the province. Vancouver is basically like San Francisco or Los Angeles. We live in one of the biggest fault zones in the world, so at one point it will happen. So now we've basically provisioned a data center in the middle of the province where it's outside your quake zone, so now we can start providing those services to our community. >> Could you speak to the relationship with Veeam with the storage arrays that you have? What's the interaction there? >> So when we went to Veeam it was really important that the full integration is there with the storage vendors that we have. So originally we were primarily in that app shop. So in that, integration was in place. So when we started looking at moving off of tape and moving onto disk for backup, we basically narrowed the list down to vendors that also fully integrated with Veeam. So we chose Data Domain, an EMC product. We've been very happy. And just recently we went to RFPing, we basically selected a new vendor for virtualization storage. And the same rules apply. Full integration needs to be in place. We need to be able to know that we're going to be able to read the data off of the storage arrays, and then move it to the backup. Without that integration, there's no guarantees that we can do that successfully. >> So a data demand customer, happy with that as the backup appliance, fast, great data reduction... Didn't EMC get you in a headlock and say, "You got to buy Networker and Avamar," and really push hard? >> Mario: Oh they tried. >> Of course, they did try. >> Okay, so what led to your decision to go with Veeam? >> The complexity of those solutions. So we're not going to reinvent how we're structured or how we're architected just to put a backup solution in place. And if you look at a lot of the other really big vendors in the marketplace today, that's basically the expectation, is okay well, you're built out like this, now you're going to have to do this in order to consume our solution. That just wasn't an option for us. >> And some people would say, "Well I get one thrown to choke and that simplifies things," but you don't buy that. >> Mario: No, not at all. I think it keeps vendors honest if you have more than one. It gives you some leverage to be able to negotiate. And to be quite honest with you, I've yet to find another vendor that provides the level of quality and support that Veeam does. And they're growing as a company, and I expect that things will change to some degree, because that's part of growing. However, so far, the experience that we've had is the same we had four years ago when they were a relatively small company. >> Can you give an example of what resonates with you as customer in terms of that service experience? >> I think as a bunch of IT guys, we think we know everything, right? So when we originally acquired Veeam, we thought, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we get what you're telling us, but we know better than you do." So we went ahead and implemented based on what we felt was right. It wasn't right. So they didn't come over and say, "Told you so," or "We're not going to help you now, cause you decided to go this way." No, they provided us with all the support we needed in order to actually change what we had done, and there was never any finger pointing or any... It was basically, "You're a partner, we're going to help you be successful." And that's very rare, I think, in the industry today. >> Yeah, really, respecting sort of that you wanted to do it a certain way, and now I learned. >> Yeah, they did try to talk us out of it, but we decided to move in that direction anyway. To me it's like, yeah, it's a fantastic relationship. >> Anything that you've seen here today, or this week, the announcements, that was really interesting and exciting to you? >> Yeah, I think a lot of the things that are coming in Version 10 are going to allow us to expand on the things that we provide to our customers. For example, all the stuff they talk about around availability, primarily disaster recovery stuff, which is such a big thing for us. So I think this is going to add significant value. >> Mario, anything either Veeam or your vendor ecosystem that you're looking for that would make your life easier? You seem to have a pretty opinionated view of what you need. >> So to me is, we're it the business of solving problems. So as a vendor, you're not going to help me solve my problem unless you understand what my problem is. In my experience, I'm not going to say with all vendors, but with a lot of vendors in the past couple of years, is basically the caliber of the sales people I feel have changed. So it used to be that the sales folks used to be pretty knowledgeable about what they sold. Now it feels like all they're trying to do is make their quarter. And as a customer it's becoming frustrating, because I don't want to be sold to. I want someone that's going to help me solve problems, and deliver solutions to my customers. >> You must get a lot of different storage infrastructures, but NetApp is a primary supplier, of course. >> Mario: Yep, it's still very big in our environment. >> We just had NetApp on with Veeam, and they were talking about their relationship. As a customer, how do you find the relationship between Veeam and NetApp? Is there tangible value that you see in that working relationship? How do you interact with those two different companies? >> Oh of course there's tangible value. So we're an enterprise customer, right? And as we scaled within our environment, we came into a bottleneck between Veeam and NetApp. And all we had to do was expose it to both companies, and they worked together to resolve the issue. And I believe it was Version Nine that they released a fix for it. But that's been the experience, is the work that happens behind the scenes, we're not exposed to that, it always creates a positive experience for us in the end. >> We had Dave Russell on earlier from Gartner, and he was talking about pricing, and licensing, and specifically socket-based pricing, and said that that had a big impact on the marketplace. From a customer standpoint, what can you share with us about licensing, pricing, strategies that you employ, and maybe advice for other customers? >> So I think a lot of vendors are starting to try to simplify their licensing. Because if you look, I'm not going to pick on anyone specific, but they had, "Okay well we're going to sell you a number of VMs and then the storage on top of that." And it's like, okay that doesn't make sense. I don't want a PhD in math to be able to calculate how much I'm going to spend for licensing. So give me a model that is easy to manage, and I'm going to know exactly what my cost is, and have a very predictable cost going forward. And I understand Veeam has a couple different model, but they're still very simple. So you're either subscription or you're socket. So to me, just keep it simple. >> Dave: What's your preference? >> Right now it's socket. However, I'm not opposed to looking at something different. If it makes sense for my clients, I'm perfect fine with it. >> When you go subscription, does that have an effect? Does your CFO like that? Switching to a radical model? >> Well, we're just basically turning our capital into operational. And as long as my base cost doesn't change, I think it's perfectly fine. >> Dave: So from a capital budget standpoint, it's got to be neutral and go from there. >> Excellent, alright Mario, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great insights. >> Thank you for having me. >> Dave: You're very welcome. Keep it right there, everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you buy Dell EMC. >> Welcome back here live in Las Vegas on The Cube at Dell EMC 2017. We are live from The Venetian continuing our Day One coverage here on the show along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. Did you have a good lunch? >> I'm ready to go, John. >> Excellent, excellent. It's all about data protection right now and with us to talk about that is Beth Phalen, who is the President of the Data Protection Division at Dell EMC and Jim Clancy, the SVP of Sales in Data Protection as well. Jim, good to see you, sir. >> Thanks for having us, guys. >> Alright, so big news for you today. Led off with a couple of key announcements. Beth, take us through those, what was the news that you were making from the stage? >> Absolutely, two big announcements today. First, is the Integrated Data Protection Appliance which is an end-to-end appliance that gives you box to backup in less than three hours. While the customers are looking for simplicity but they still need the fantastic dedup, up to 55:1, the performance, the scales they get with our Data Protection Suite, our data protection portfolio, so now we're bringing it to them as an integrated appliance. Couldn't be happier about it. >> Great, so big news there, and announcement number two. >> We had a second one, too, which was cloud data protection. With a special focus on cloud Disaster Recovery, our customers want to leverage the cloud to have the DR site in a cloud, a public cloud, or perhaps a separate private cloud. They also want to be able to run Data Domain in the cloud environment. So as of today, you can run Data Domain Virtual Edition on AWS Or Azure and soon you'll be able to run it in Virtustream. >> So Jim, put that into practice for me now. If I'm one of your partners and I know that I've got some extra layers or extra opportunities, now what does that mean to me? >> Well firstly, we start with our partners. I think we've had such an incredible journey together supporting our customers' requirements. Well those continue to change and they struggle with things like the amount of information that they need to recover from, they need to back up, they need to store. For us, we're giving them that next conversation with their customers. So the new challenges are being met by data protection from Dell Technologies and our partners are going to benefit from that because they have the trusted advisors in their accounts. They want to be able to go and work with their customers and the new challenges and deliver. So Beth and her team have delivered from a technology to allow us to go and capture that mind share with our customers working together with our partners. >> So Jim, backup appliance, very high market. A lot of investments and a lot of startups in that market. What differentiates this solution over those competitors? >> Well first off, we're in the number one position in this market for a reason. It really comes down to our technology. So our customers have been pushing us saying, We need it to be simple, make it simple, make it simple. Because then they're running out of time every day on what they can do. I think we're taking our industry-leading technology and bundling it together as a simple, high-performance solution is the first thing. The second thing is the total experience that Dell brings to the marketplace. Our customers always are counting on us that if there ever is a challenge, who's going to be there to help us, right? If I ever need that next application comes on the line and how am I going to protect it? Who can come in a design that? That's what we deliver. So the things that we deliver are the experience vs. a point product. And by the way, from a point product, with our new announcement we're going to be able to take on any competitor in this marketplace. But it's the full experience that separates us from anybody in this marketplace today which is why we're number one and we're going to continue that leadership. >> So Beth mentioned the second announcement, cloud, which is a huge part of our new hybrid portfolios. What cloud services are we compatible with out the gate with your new solution? >> The cloud services that we're developing at the end of the gate, is that what you said? So first of all, if we take a step back the cloud is really multi-steps for customers to take advantage of it. Some customers are extending to the cloud. So they may have a full on-prem Data center that they want to leverage the cloud for perhaps long-term retention. That's one thing you can do. The second is a lift and shift. When they may choose to move some of their applications to the cloud. Now for that, they can run DD VE with NetWorker and CloudBoost and still have that same operations for the data protection that they did from on-prem. So the first is extent of the cloud. The second is lift and shift to the cloud. The third is something that you'll hear us talk more about. It's beginning to refactor their applications to be more cloud-native. Which is another area that we're very engaged and working on. >> So for a lift and shift scenario one of the things that we're concerned about on the customer side, is cost. When we're backing up to the cloud, it doesn't cost must to get it there but getting it back. Do you guys help with that scenario? >> We do, because first of all, all of the data is going to be deduped before it gets sent out to the cloud so it's a small amount of data that needs to come back. And second, with this most recent announcement if you're using the cloud DR capabilities you can bring that application back up in the cloud itself without having to bring the data back. So the data is stored and it's sort of format on the cloud is certainly the best value. Then you could actually bring that application up in AWS, as an example. >> So let's talk too from a staff retention, or staff training rather, what do my staff have to learn new of these solutions, if anything? >> It's a great question. Because of the things we pride ourselves on is making them seamless extensions of the products that we already sell. So that you don't have to introduce a brand new product to your environment. You can manage from NetWorker from Data Protection Suite to initiate the launch and retention or the Cloud DR. >> So the look and feel is what they're using today. What we've done is we've just extended the use cases that our customers are coming to us on, saying, I need to move data to the cloud, I want to make sure that I can leverage my existing technology and get that done. That's a big advantage to us because our customers are comfortable, understand the tools that they leverage today, and if they can just extend it instead of bringing something new in and learning something new, because every one of our customers does not have time to learn new tools, new products-- >> Well they really don't want that. >> Yeah, they don't want that. >> That's the last thing they want, right. >> Yeah, and I wanted to add on to what Beth said. We've been selling in the cloud for well over a year now. So this is just another few use cases that we're adding to our customers' requirements. So we have hundreds of petabytes that are being protected in the cloud today, whether it's some of the ones that Beth mentioned or Virtustream, so we're already in the cloud. This is just a more thought leadership. This is more of a technology leadership that we're announcing today. So we're extending our leadership as we extend our customers to the cloud. >> So what are the big picture stuff? We're talking about people moving more work. You've got tons of data, right? We have so much more. How is all this coming together in terms of where your section of the business is going, how you're responding to those kinds of trends, and what do you see coming down the road? >> It's a great question. So one of the things we talk about is people moving away from data centers to centers of data. When you look at with IOT, with all the distribution of where data is stored or coming from right now, it becomes more and more of a challenge to make sure A) You know where all your data is and B) That you're confident that it's protected. So given the capabilities and more and more distributive services giving people the ability to see where all of the data resides and the protection state, is one thing. I think the term data fog is beginning to start coming into the conversation. People have been mentioning it. It makes a point, right? It's not in one place anymore, it's not a lake. It's all over the place. Think about the challenge for CIOs to have the confidence that it's still protected and that they could get it back. >> So with all this distributed data one of the challenges that we have is the metadata around that data. Knowing what's where, analytics around that. Do you guys help solve that challenge? >> We do, in a few different ways. >> One thing in particular is, as of last year, we have a SaaS offering which is ECDA, Enterprise Copy Dating Analytics. That lets you have a global view of where your data is and it's really moving into more machine learning. So it's not just reporting. It's allowing the customer to get smarter and smarter about where his or her data is maybe not as protected as it could be and where they might want to take some actions to increase their levels of protection. >> We're pretty exited about it because we've gotten an overwhelming response from our partners and our customers that this is where we need to go. So everything we're talking about has been things that we've been going through with our customers for years saying, Okay we need to get here, we need to get here. and how do you help us get to that path vs. doing these individual things? There's a strategy behind all of this but it really comes back from our customers and our partners saying, This is what we need, we know you're going to get us here but let's try to get there sooner than later. I think Beth and team have delivered on that again. >> So this is a transformation. Again, big theme of this show. Help us with the big picture. How does this copy data, secondary data market that you guys are helping us with solve that support that digital transformation? >> We heard Michael talk about it on stage today, right? The ability of what we can do having a greater amount of leverage around the data that we all have right now is mind blowing in terms of accelerating medical diagnosis, driving more capability around awareness, around risks and sometimes of security. There's a level of knowledge that we've become more adept at mining the data that we have and then leveraging, machine learning, to analyze it. It's going to give us leaps and bounds of acceleration in whatever business objective we're looking out to achieve. >> If you had to pick a use case you're most proud of when it comes to your new solution set, give us the best one. >> I'll let you go first. >> I love the new things that we've done with the cloud data protection. Giving people the ability to be able to extend seamlessly is something that they've been asking for and to have it now and be able to offer it is really fantastic. >> I'd have to agree. Our customers want data protection everywhere. They don't care where that data sits. They don't want to be handcuffed on where they can actually protect their data or recover from that data. So they're working really strongly and tightly with us because we are the leader in this market and we just proved it again that we're going to keep up that leadership. Data protection everywhere is important and I think the cloud extension and leadership is what puts us in that position. We're really excited about that. >> It's an asset no matter where it is, right? So you have to protect it. >> That's right. >> Data fog, though, I think I live my life in data fog. (laughter) >> I like that, that's cool. >> Beth and Jim, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time on The Cube and best of luck. >> Thank you. >> Nice talking to you. >> We'll continue live here from Las Vegas with Dell EMC World 2017 and you're watching The Cube.