(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone! Welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase. This is season one, episode three with a focus on women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me, Sue Persichetti, the EVP of Global AWS Strategic Alliances at Jefferson Frank. A Tenth Revolution Group company. And Danielle Greshock, one of our own CUBE alumni, joins us, ISV PSA director. Ladies, it's great to have you on the program talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, women in tech. >> Thank you, Lisa! >> Great to be here! >> So let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an understanding of Jefferson Frank, what does the company do, and about the partnership with AWS. >> Sure, so let's just start, Jefferson Frank is a Tenth Revolution Group company. And if you look at it, it's really talent as a service. So Jefferson Frank provides talent solutions all over the world for AWS clients, partners, and users, et cetera. And we have a sister company called Revolent, which is a talent creation company within the AWS ecosystem. So we create talent and put it out in the ecosystem. Usually underrepresented groups, over half of them are women. And then we also have a company called Rebura, which is a delivery model around AWS technology. So all three companies fall under the Tenth Revolution Group organization. >> Got it, Danielle, talk to me a little bit about from AWS' perspective and the focus on hiring more women in technology and about the partnership. >> Yes, this has definitely been a focus ever since I joined eight years ago, but also just especially in the last few years of we've grown exponentially and our customer base has changed. We want to have an organization interacting with them that reflects our customers, right? And we know that we need to keep pace with that even with our growth. And so we've very much focused on early career talent, bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the organization, sponsoring those folks, promoting them, giving them paths to grow inside of the organization. I'm an example of that, of course, I've benefited from it. But also, I try to bring that into my organization as well and it's super important. >> Tell me a little bit about how you benefited from that, Danielle. >> I just think that I've been able to get, a seat at the table. I think that. I feel as though I have folks supporting me very deeply and want to see me succeed. And also they put me forth as a representative to bring more women into the organization as well. They give me a platform in order to do that, like this, but also many other spots as well. And I'm happy to do it because I feel that... you always want to feel that you're making a difference in your job. And that is definitely a place where I get that time and space in order to be that representative. To bring more women into benefiting from having careers in technology, which there's a lot of value there. >> Lot of value. Absolutely. So back over to you, what are some of the trends that you are seeing from a gendered diversity perspective in tech? We know the numbers of women in technical positions. >> Right. There's so much data out there that shows when girls start dropping out, but what are some of the trends that you're seeing? >> So that's a really interesting question. And Lisa, I had a whole bunch of data points that I wanted to share with you but just two weeks ago, I was in San Francisco with AWS at The Summit. And we were talking about this, we were talking about how we can collectively together attract more women, not only to AWS, not only to technology, but to the AWS ecosystem in particular. And it was fascinating because I was talking about the challenges that women have, and how hard to believe but about 5% of women who were in the ecosystem have left in the past few years. Which was really, really something that shocked everyone when we were talking about it, because all of the things that we've been asking for, for instance working from home, better pay, more flexibility, better maternity leave. Seems like those things are happening. So we're getting what we want, but people are leaving. And it seemed like the feedback that we got was that a lot of women still felt very underrepresented. The number one thing was that they couldn't be... you can't be what you can't see. So because they... we feel, collectively women, people who identify as women, just don't see enough women in leadership, they don't see enough mentors. I think I've had great mentors, but just not enough. I'm lucky enough to have the president of our company, Zoe Morris is a woman and she does lead by example. So I'm very lucky for that. And Jefferson Frank really quickly we put out a hiring, a salary, and hiring guide. Career and hiring guide every year. And the data points, and that's about 65 pages long, no one else does it. It gives an abundance of information around everything about the AWS ecosystem that a hiring manager might need to know. What I thought was really unbelievable was that only 7% of the people that responded to it were women. So my goal, being that we have such a very big global platform, is to get more women to respond to that survey. So we can get as much information and take action. So... >> Absolutely only 7%. So a long way to go there. Danielle, talk to me about AWS' focus on women in tech. I was watching, Sue, I saw that you shared on LinkedIn the TED Talk that the CEO and founder of Girls Who Code did. And one of the things that she said was that there was a survey that HP did some years back that showed that 60%... that men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the list of requirements. Whereas with females, it's far, far less. We've all been in that imposter syndrome conundrum before. But Danielle, talk to us about AWS' specific focus here to get these numbers up. >> Well, I think it speaks to what Susan was talking about how I think we're approaching it top and bottom, right? We're looking out at who are the women who are currently in technical positions and how can we make AWS an attractive place for them to work? And that's a lot of the changes that we've had around maternity leave and those types of things. But then also, a more flexible working arrangements. But then also early... how can we actually impact early career women and actually women who are still in school. And our training and certification team is doing amazing things to get more girls exposed to AWS, to technology, and make it a less intimidating place. And have them look at employees from AWS and say like, "Oh, I can see myself in those people". And kind of actually growing the viable pool of candidates. I think we're limited with the viable pool of candidates when you're talking about mid-to-late career. But how can we help retrain women who are coming back into the workplace after having a child, and how can we help with military women who want to... or underrepresented minorities who want to move into AWS? We have a great military program but then also just that early high school career getting them in that trajectory. >> Sue, is that something that Jefferson Frank is also able to help with is getting those younger girls before they start to feel... >> Right. "There's something wrong with me, I don't get this." >> Right. >> Talk to us about how Jefferson Frank can help really drive up that in those younger girls. >> Let me tell you one other thing to refer back to that Summit that we did we had breakout sessions and that was one of the topics. Cause that's the goal, right? To make sure that there are ways to attract them. That's the goal. So some of the things that we talked about was mentoring programs from a very young age, some people said high school. But then we said, even earlier, goes back to you can't be what you can't see. So getting mentoring programs established. We also talked about some of the great ideas was being careful of how we speak to women using the right language to attract them. And so there was a teachable moment for me there actually. It was really wonderful because an African American woman said to me, "Sue". And I was talking about how you can't be what you can't see. And what she said was, "Sue, it's really different for me as an African American woman" Or she identified as non-binary but she was relating to African American women. She said, "You're a white woman. Your journey was very different than my journey". And I thought, "This is how we're going to learn". I wasn't offended by her calling me out at all. It was a teachable moment. And I thought I understood that but those are the things that we need to educate people on. Those moments where we think we're saying and doing the right thing, but we really need to get that bias out there. So here at Jefferson Frank we're trying really hard to get that careers and hiring guide out there. It's on our website to get more women to talk to it, but to make suggestions in partnership with AWS around how we can do this. Mentoring. We have a mentor me program. We go around the country and do things like this. We try to get the education out there in partnership with AWS. We have a women's group, a women's leadership group. So much that we do and we try to do it in partnership with AWS. >> Danielle, can you comment on the impact that AWS has made so far regarding some of the trends and and gender diversity that Sue was talking about? What's the impact that's been made so far with this partnership? >> Well, I think just being able to get more of the data and have awareness of leaders on how... it used to be a couple years back, I would feel like sometimes the solving to bring more women into the organization was kind of something that folks thought, "Oh, this is... Danielle is going to solve this." And I think a lot of folks now realize, "Oh, this is something that we all need to solve for." And a lot of my colleagues, who maybe a couple years ago didn't have any awareness or didn't even have the tools to do what they needed to do in order to improve the statistics on their or in their organizations, now actually have those tools and are able to kind of work with companies like Susan's work with Jefferson Frank in order to actually get the data, and actually make good decisions, and feel as though they often... these are not lived experiences for these folks. So they don't know what they don't know. And by providing data, and providing awareness, and providing tooling, and then setting goals, I think all of those things have really turned things around in a very positive way. >> And so you bring up a great point about from a diversity perspective. What is Jefferson Frank doing to get those data points up to get more women of all, well, really underrepresented minorities to be able to provide that feedback so that you can have the data and gleamy insights from it to help companies like AWS on their strategic objectives? >> Right, so when I go back to that careers and hiring guide, that is my focus today really, because the more data that we have and the data takes... we need people to participate in order to accurately get ahold of that data. So that's why we're asking. We're taking the initiative to really expand our focus. We are a global organization with a very, very massive database all over the world. But if people don't take action then we can't get the right... the data will not be as accurate as we'd like it to be, therefore take better action. So what we're doing is we're asking people all over the world to participate on our website jeffersonfrank.com In the survey so we can learn as much as we can. 7% is such a... Danielle and I we've got to partner on this just to sort of get that message out there, get more data so we can execute. Some of the other things that we're doing, we're partnering, as I mentioned, more of these events. We're doing around the Summits, we're going to be having more EDNI events, and collecting more information from women. Like I said, internally, we do practice what we preach and we have our own programs that are out there, that are within our own company where the women who are talking to candidates and clients every single day are trying to get that message out there. So if I'm speaking to a client or one of our internal people are speaking to a client or a candidate, they're telling them, "Listen, we really are trying to get these numbers up. We want to attract as many people as we can. Would you mind going to this hiring guide and offering your own information?" So we've got to get that 7% up. We've got to keep talking. We've got to keep getting programs out there. One other thing I wanted to Danielle's point, she mentioned women in leadership, the number that we gathered was only 9% of women in leadership within the AWS ecosystem. We've got to get that number up as well, because I know for me, when I see people like Danielle or her peers it inspires me. And I feel like I just want to give back. Make sure I send the elevator back to the first floor and bring more women in to this amazing ecosystem. >> Absolutely, we need- >> Love that metaphor. >> I do too! But to your point to get those numbers up not just at AWS, but everywhere else we need It's a help me help you situation. >> Exactly. >> So ladies, underrepresented minorities, if you're watching go to the Jefferson Frank website, take the survey. Help provide the data so that the women here that are doing this amazing work, have it to help make decisions and have more of females in leadership roles or underrepresented minorities. So we can be what we can see. >> Exactly. >> Ladies, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing what you guys are doing together to partner on this important cause. >> Thank you for having me, Lisa! >> Thank you! Thank you! >> My pleasure! For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBES coverage of the AWS partner showcase. Thanks for your time. (gentle xylophone music)

(inspiring music) >> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022, from the Venetian in Las Vegas, the first Discover since 2019. I really think this is my 14th Discover, when you include HP, when you include Europe. And I got to say this Discover, I think has more energy than any one that I've ever seen, about 8,000 people here. Really excited to have one of HPE's longstanding partners, Veeam CTO, Danny Allen is here, joined by David Harvey, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam. Guys, good to see you again. It was just earlier, let's see, last month, we were together out here. >> Yeah, just a few weeks ago. It's fantastic to be back and what it's telling us, technology industry is coming back. >> And the events business, of course, is coming back, which we love. I think the expectations were cautious. You saw it at VeeamON, a little more than you expected, a lot of great energy. A lot of people, 'cause it was last month, it was their first time out, >> Yes. >> in two years. Here, I think people have started to go out more, but still, an energy that's palpable. >> You can definitely feel it. Last night, I think I went to four consecutive events and everyone's out having those discussions and having conversations, it's good to be back. >> You guys hosted the Storage party last night, which is epic. I left at midnight, I took a picture, it was still packed. I said, okay, time to go, nothing good happens after midnight kids. David, talk about the alliance with HPE, how it's evolved, and where you see it going? >> I appreciate it, and certainly this, as you said, has been a big alliance for us. Over 10 years or so, fantastic integrations across the board. And you touched on 2019 Discover. We launched with GreenLake at that event, we were one of the launch partners, and we've seen fantastic growth. Overall, what we're excited about, is that continuation of the movement of the customer's buying patterns in line with HPE's portfolio and in line with Veeam. We continue to be with all their primary, secondary storage, we continue to be a spearhead position with GreenLake, which we're really excited about. And we're also really excited to hear from HPE, unfortunately under NDA, some of their future stuff they're investing in, which is a really nice invigoration for what they're doing for their portfolio. And we see that being a big deal for us over the next 24 months. >> Your relationship with HPE predates the HP, HPE split. >> Mmm. >> Yes. >> But it was weird, because they had Data Protector, and that was a quasi-competitor, or really not, but it was a competitor, a legacy competitor, of what you guys have, kind of modern data protection I think is the tagline, if I got it right. Post the split, that was an S-curve moment, wasn't it, in terms of the partnership? >> It really was. If you go back 10 years, we did our first integration sending data to StoreOnce and we had some blueprints around that. But now, if you look what we have, we have integrations on the primary side, so, 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, all their top-tier storage, we can manage the snapshots. We have integration on the target side. We integrate with Catalyst in the movement of data and the management of data. And, as David alluded to, we integrate with GreenLake. So, customers who want to take this as a consumption model, we integrate with that. And so it's been, like you said, the strongest relationship that we have on the technology alliance side. >> So, V12, you announced at VeeamON. What does that mean for HPE customers, the relationship? Maybe you guys could both talk about that. >> Technology side, to touch on a few things that we're doing with them, ransomware has been a huge issue. Security's been a big theme, obviously, at the conference, >> Dave: Yeah, you bet. and one of the things we're doing in V12 is adding immutability for both StoreOnce and StoreEver. So, we take the features that our partners have, immutability being big in the security space, and we integrate that fully into the product. So a customer checks a box and says, hey, I want to make sure that the data is secure. >> Yeah, and also, it's another signification about the relationship. Every single release we've done has had HPE at the heart of it, and the same thing is being said with V12. And it shows to our customers, the continual commitment. Relationships come and go. They're hard, and the great news is, 10 years has proven that we get through good times and tricky situations, and we both continue to invest, et cetera. And I think there's a lot of peace of mind and the revenue figures prove that, which is what we're really excited about. >> Yeah I want to come back to that, but just to follow up, Danny, on that immutability, that's a feature that you check? It's service within GreenLake, or within Veeam? How does that all work? >> We have immutability now depending on the target. We introduced the ability to send data, for example, into S3 two years ago, and make it immutable when you send it to an S3 or S3 compatible environment. We added, in Version 11, the ability to take a Linux repository and make it, and harden it, essentially make it immutable. But what we're doing now is taking our partner systems like StoreOnce, like StoreEver, and when we send data there, we take advantage of an API flag or whatever it happens to be, that it makes the data, when it's written to that system, can't be deleted, can't be encrypted. Now, what does that mean for a customer? Well, we do all the hard work in the back end, it's just a check box. They say, I want to make it immutable, and we manage how long it's immutable. Because if you made everything immutable forever, that's hugely expensive, right? So, it's all about, how long is that immutable before you age it out and make sure the new data coming in is immutable. >> Dave: It's like an insurance policy, you have that overlap. >> Yes. >> Right, okay. And then David, you mentioned the revenue, Lou bears that out. I got the IDC guys comin' on later on today. I'll ask 'em about that, if that's their swim lane. But you guys are basically a statistical tie, with Dell for number one? Am I getting that right? And you're growing at a faster rate, I believe, it's hard to tell 'cause I don't think Dell reports on the pace of its growth within data protection. You guys obviously do, but is that right? It's a statistical tie, is it? >> Yeah, hundred percent. >> Yeah, statistical tie for first place, which we're super excited about. When I joined Veeam, I think we were in fifth place, but we've been in the leader's quadrant of the Gartner Magic- >> Cause and effect there or? (panelists laughing) >> No, I don't think so. >> Dave: Ha, I think maybe. >> We've been on a great trajectory. But statistical tie for first place, greatest growth sequentially, and year-over-year, of all of the data protection vendors. And that's a testament not just to the technology that we're doing, but partnerships with HPE, because you never do this, the value of a technology is not that technology alone, it's the value of that technology within the ecosystem. And so that's why we're here at HPE Discover. It's our joint technology solutions that we're delivering. >> What are your thoughts or what are you seeing in the field on As-a-service? Because of course, the messaging is all about As-a-service, you'd think, oh, a hundred percent of everything is going to be As-a-service. A lot of customers, they don't mind CapEx, they got good, balance sheet, and they're like, hey, we'll take care of this, and, we're going to build our own little internal cloud. But, what are you seeing in the market in terms of As-a-service, versus, just traditional licensing models? >> Certainly, there's a mix between the two. What I'd say, is that sources that are already As-a-service, think Microsoft 365, think AWS, Azure, GCP, the cloud providers. There's a natural tendency for the customer to want the data protection As-a-service, as well for those. But if you talk about what's on premises, customers who have big data centers deployed, they're not yet, the pendulum has not shifted for that to be data protection As-a-service. But we were early to this game ourselves. We have 10,000, what we call, Veeam Cloud Service Providers, that are offering data protection As-a-service, whether it be on premises, so they're remotely managing it, or cloud hosted, doing data protection for that. >> So, you don't care. You're providing the technology, and then your customers are actually choosing the delivery model. Is that correct? >> A hundred percent, and if you think about what GreenLake is doing for example, that started off as being a financial model, but now they're getting into that services delivery. And what we want to do is enable them to deliver it, As-a-service, not just the financial model, but the outcome for the customer. And so our technology, it's not just do backup, it's do backup for a multi-tenant, multi-customer environment that does all of the multi-tenancy and billing and charge back as part of that service. >> Okay, so you guys don't report on this, but I'm going to ask the question anyway. You're number one now, let's call you, let's declare number one, 'cause we're well past that last reporting and you're growin' faster. So go another quarter, you're now number one, so you're the largest. Do you spend more on R&D in data protection than any other company? >> Yes, I'm quite certain that we do. Now, we have an unfair advantage because we have 450,000 customers. I don't think there's any other data protection company out there, the size and scope and scale, that we have. But we've been expanding, our largest R&D operation center's in Prague, it's in Czech Republic, but we've been expanding that. Last year it grew 40% year on year in R&D, so big investment in that space. You can see this just through our product space. Five years ago, we did data protection of VMware only, and now we do all the virtual environments, all the physical environments, all the major cloud environments, Kubernetes, Microsoft 365, we're launching Salesforce. We announced that at VeeamON last month and it will be coming out in Q3. All of that is coming from our R&D investments. >> A lot of people expect that when a company like Insight, a PE company, purchases a company like Veeam, that one of the things they'll dial down is R&D. That did not happen in this case. >> No, they very much treat us as a growth company. We had 22% year-over-year growth in 2020, and 25% year-over-year last year. The growth has been tremendous, they continue to give us the freedom. Now, I expect they'll want returns like that continuously, but we have been delivering, they have been investing. >> One of my favorite conversations of the year was our supercloud conversation, which was awesome, thank you for doing that with me. But that's clearly an area of focus, what we call supercloud, and you don't use that term, I know, you do sometimes, but it's not your marketing, I get that. But that is an R&D intensive effort, is it not? To create that common experience. And you see HPE, attempting to do that as well, across all these different estates. >> A hundred percent. We focus on three things, I always say, our differentiators, simplicity, flexibility, and reliability. Making it simple for the customers is not an easy thing to do. Making that checkbox for immutability? We have to do a lot behind the scenes to make it simple. Same thing on flexibility. We don't care if they're using 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, whatever you want to choose as the primary storage, we will take that out of your hands and make it really easy. You mentioned supercloud. We don't care what the cloud infrastructure, it can be on GreenLake, it can be on AWS, can be on Azure, it can be on GCP, it can be on IBM cloud. It is a lot of effort on our part to abstract the cloud infrastructure, but we do that on behalf of our customers to take away that complexity, it's part of our platform. >> Quick follow-up, and then I want to ask a question of David. I like talking to you guys because you don't care where it is, right? You're truly agnostic to it all. I'm trying to figure out this repatriation thing, cause I hear a lot of hey, Dave, you should look into repatriation that's happened all over the place, and I see pockets of it. What are you seeing in terms of repatriation? Have customers over-rotated to the cloud and now they're pullin' back a little bit? Or is it, as I'm claiming, in pockets? What's your visibility on that? >> Three things I see happening. There's the customers who lifted up their data center, moved it into the cloud and they get the first bill. >> (chuckling) Okay. >> And they will repatriate, there's no question. If I talk to those customers who simply lifted up and moved it over because the CIO told them to, they're moving it back on premises. But a second thing that we see is people moving it over, with tweaks. So they'll take their SQL server database and they'll move it into RDS, they'll change some things. And then you have people who are building cloud-native, they're never coming back on premises, they are building it for the cloud environment. So, we see all three of those. We only really see repatriation on that first scenario, when they get that first bill. >> And when you look at the numbers, I think it gets lost, 'cause you see the cloud is growing so fast. So David, what are the conversations like? You had several events last night, The Veeam party, slash Storage party, from HPE. What are you hearing from your alliance partners and the customers at the event. >> I think Danny touched on that point, it's about philosophy of evolution. And I think at the end of the day, whether we're seeing it with our GSI alliances we've got out there, or with the big enterprise conversations we're having with HPE, it's about understanding which workloads they want to move. In our mind, the customers are getting much smarter in making that decision, rather than experimenting. They're really taking a really solid look. And the work we're doing with the GSIs on workplace modernization, data center transformation, they're really having that investment work up front on the workloads, to be able to say, this works for me, for my personality and my company. And so, to the point about movement, it's more about decisive decision at the start, and not feeling like the remit is, I have to do one thing or another, it's about looking at that workflow position. And that's what we've seen with the revenue part as well. We've seen our movement to GreenLake tremendously grow in the last 18 months to two years. And from our GSI work as well, we're seeing the types of conversations really focus on that workload, compared to, hey, I just need a backup solution, and that's really exciting. >> Are you having specific conversations about security, or is it a data protection conversation still, (David chuckles) that's an adjacency to security? >> That's a great question. And I think it's a complex one, because if you come to a company like Veeam, we are there, and you touched on it before, we provide a solution when something has happened with security. We're not doing intrusion detection, we're not doing that barrier position at the end of it, but it's part of an end-to-end assumption. And I don't think that at this particular point, I started in security with RSA and Check Point, it was about layers of protection. Now it's layers of protection, and the inevitability that at some point something will happen, so about the recovery. So the exciting conversations we're having, especially with the big enterprises, is not about the fear factor, it's about, at some point something's going to occur. Speed of recovery is the conversation. And so for us, and your question is, are they talking to us about security, or more, the continuity position? And that's where the synergy's getting a lot simpler, rather than a hard demark between security and backup. >> Yeah, when you look at the stock market, everything's been hit, but security, with the exception of Okta, 'cause it got that weird benign hack, but security, generally, is an area that CIOs have said, hey, we can't really dial that back. We can maybe, some other discretionary stuff, we'll steal and prioritize. But security seems to be, and I think data protection is now part of that discussion. You're not a security company. We've seen some of your competitors actually pivot to become security companies. You're not doing that, but it's very clearly an adjacency, don't you think? >> It's an adjacency, and it's a new conversation that we're having with the Chief Information Security Officer. I had a meeting an hour ago with a customer who was hit by ransomware, and they got the call at 2:00 AM in the morning, after the ransomware they recovered their entire portfolio within 36 hours, from backups. Didn't even contact Veeam, I found out during this meeting. But that is clearly something that the Chief Information Security Officer wants to know about. It's part of his purview, is the recovery of that data. >> And they didn't pay the ransom? >> And they did not pay the ransom, not a penny. >> Ahh, we love those stories. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on all the success. Love when you guys come on, and it was such a fun event at VeeamON. Great event here, and your presence is, was seen. The Veeam green is everywhere, so appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Okay, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and Lisa Martin. We'll be back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2022, from Las Vegas. (inspiring music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Hi, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020, the Virtual Experience. Happy to welcome back to the program, just had him on at VeeamON at theCUBE's coverage there. David Harvey, he is the Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam. David, welcome to our coverage of HPE Discover. >> Thank you. I appreciate the invitation and great to see you again. >> All right, so when I talked to you at VeeamON, of course, you talk about lots of partners and you love all of them, but now we get to hear the truth. HPE, which one of your partners do you love the best? Talk to us a little bit about that HPE relationship. >> Sure, yeah, absolutely and really great to be part of Discover this year. And I think it's a fantastic set up in the way that HPE is running this event. As we've talked about with you guys before as well, HPE's always been a really special relationship for us. It was really the first relationship that we sort of established over eight years ago. And so from our point of view, it's got a long, rich heritage, that level of trust and desire for growth has been fantastic. And in the recent years as well as both of us have really continued to lean in, it's just continued to grow at a fantastic rate. I mean you would've seen some of the recent results there. Veeam's grown over 20% in the second half of 2019 with IBC. I'm really happy to say that the HPE alliance is growing well in excess of that. And so we're really pleased on how things have continued to evolve. >> Well congratulations on that growth. Yeah, boy, eight years so much has changed. So of course, I think about HPE and VMware and one of the earliest partners for server virtualization. But HPE's got a broad portfolio. Bring us through where Veeam sits. You know you got solutions like GreenLake out there, of course, traditional virtualization. So give us a little bit of kind of the breadth and depth of engineering work and partnership that you have. >> Yeah, great question Stu. And I think the interesting part of this is when you look at sort of the ecosystem that's out there now and the evolution HPE's gone through in embracing partners, the focus on the portfolio development and engagement between the two companies has reflected that. There are so many different areas that we could work with HPE on, but when we sat down together and we said where can we really provide the best value to our customers, we focused on a few key parts of the portfolio. Storage, obviously, is key. 3PAR, Primera, Nimble, StorONE, Apollo, areas where we've done really strong work over the years and continue to provide great solutions to the customers. Really pleased with how we've increased into SimpliVity. That's a really big push area for us over the last 12 months. And we're starting to see some great success together with that providing really unique solutions to extend the value of SimpliVity into new use cases, complimenting what they already have. And then obviously at Discover a couple of years ago we did a big push with GreenLake. And we're really pleased with how that's moving forwards as well because that's not really as much as a technology type of play, but that's a philosophy play about how we're satisfying the economic and service needs of the customers. So we're really pleased how that's been moving forwards, and that's another really big push for us this year. >> Well excellent. Maybe it would help to illustrate this. Do you have some customer examples? I understand sometimes, if you can share who the the logo is >> Harvey: Sure. >> that's great, otherwise if it needs to be a little more anonymized, that's fine too. >> No I think that's a great question, and the reason why we like talking about these types of things is we do thousands of orders a year with HPE. It's a really rich partnership on a global basis. If I remember correctly, last time we had over 100 countries where we've done deals together, so it's really nice to see it be appeared as on a global basis. A couple of easy ones that come to mind, certainly is White River Health Services. Big medical system solution serving over half a million customers that are out there. And those guys had a massive growth rate of data, 30% growth year over year, and really needed to make sure that that availability of data was there so that they provided solid solutions to their customers. We partnered up with a solution with StorONE and provided them with a fantastic amount of savings per year on their overall solution but also gave them that business continuity that they were looking at. So I think that's a great example. If we move over to Europe though there's another good market for us where we're seeing really success, great success together. The Metropolitan Thames Valley is a very large housing authorities are a very different virtual but shows the wide applicability of the solution, where they were having trouble looking at the ability to put a full disaster recovery plan into place, And obviously contingencies is a key topic right now. So we worked with HPE and then we've really put in great solution that not only reduced the ability to recover from seven days to less than 30 minutes, but we also managed to be more efficient with the amount rack utilization that was in place for them as well. So economic support, very critical business continuity support, and obviously a unified solution to allow them to be in a scenario where they knew that the IT partners they were working with were fully in unison so there was never any service question if they needed any support. So a couple of really good examples from around the world. >> You know, I wonder if we can touch a little bit on the competitive dynamics here. So eight years ago, HP had its own data protectant. When HP split that piece went over to micro focus so it kind of (murmurs) the swim lanes a little bit. But HP has also been increasing their partnership, so Veeam, you're a good partner but there are other partners out. So how do you help differentiate and how do you make you got clean engagements through HPE's channel and with their field? >> Yeah, that's a really good question, and there's a number of different answers to that, but I think that one of the things that will support what I'm about to touch on is that we're really proud that we just got awarded the Global Technology Partner award again this year. This is the second year running for HPE. Last year was the first time a software application partner was provided and now two years in a row, we've demonstrated that the partnership is really valuable for HPE. And I think to your point, Stuart, it comes down to a couple different areas. The first is just the overall attitude, approach, and relationship. Partnerships work when you can turn your back on each other. They work on the assumption that you really have the same vested interest for success and you can roll through some tough times as well as the good times. With good dialogue, with focus on the objectives you are trying to achieve, but also more importantly that you are excited and you enjoy working together. And so, it's a pleasure to spend hours and hours together to come up with something that satisfies the customer pains that you are solving. Now combined with that attitude because to me that attitude is a core foundation, technology's hugely important but if you can't have a business relationship, you can't actually execute that technology position. Now we're fortunate enough as well that you combine that attitude of partnershipping together with the investments and technology that we've done, and that's why we feel like we continue to differentiate. I think it's great that HPE has such a rich ecosystem. I think it's helpful to get focus on what is a huge topic for customers and frankly, the technology world is a complex ecosystem nowadays. But I think you stand out from the rest by focusing on being the most successful, being the best, having the right attitude, making the right investments together to move forward and that's where we've demonstrated, historically, our engineering commitment and our future roadmap commitment, which we're working on right now together heavily combining with a big marketing and sales investment, so all of the facets and the organization come together in a nice, seamless manner. So, you know, trust, I think it's great that they have the depth of ecosystem that's out there, we're just really proud that we continue to be the preferred partner in this space and we keep getting recognized for the investment that we have with HPE as well. >> Excellent. Yeah, you brought up it is such a complex ecosystem out there. One of the themes that we heard, your show as well as HP Discover, you know, we're talking about customers going through that digital information. You gave us a couple of customer examples, but maybe some big themes, what're you hearing? You know, how do the (murmurs) markets align between Veeam and HPE? >> Yeah, great question. And I think that is another great example where when you use the topic of data transformation, it's a really broad discussion. You know, what we've tried to do is focus on the areas that we provide the most value to customers right now. And I think that focuses us down and data protection powered by intelligence storage, which is a really key topic for a lot of our joint customers that are out there. We really want to make sure we can extend your data management from on-premise to the cloud. That's a really key area we're working with the Simplivity team on. And then finally, the consumption-based data management working very closely with GreenLake. And the (murmurs) of all of those solutions satisfied the plethora of needs that the customers have on storage of data availability. And I think that from that point of view, that's where keeping that focus on what is solving pains today, is why were having such great success together. So I think from that basis, we found that that helps the sales teams identify and satisfy the needs of the customer, It helps us get clarity on execution, and more importantly, keeps us in the scenario where we got really clear bars for success to make sure that this partnership is not just a, I call it a website partnership, but a real partnership that's driving key revenues, key (murmurs) leadership, and frankly, key solutions for the customers. >> Yeah, if you talk about where your data lives and how Veeam could support across multiple environments. There's the technical pieces which Veeam's done a good job on and I think people understand pretty well. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the financial piece of things. How do you make sure, you know, especially with a deep partner like HPE, that you make it seamless as companies are trying to move more towards the SaaS and Opex models, and that it's not getting understanding, full control of what my billing is, and how these things go together. >> Yeah, it's a really good point, and I think there's sort of a capital facet to that. You know, the first part is, on a global basis across all of the segments that we've worked together on, especially if when you look at the success we have at the higher end price together, and the high end commercial. You have to be in a situation where you can support the financial structure that they have as a business. And that's looking at it whether or not it's a traditional Capex employment related to more of the traditional HP solutions, or looking at the flexibility of the Veeam licensing combined with that so they can have the choice that they desire. As well as moving down that path, that if they decide they want to move through a more consumption-based type of position by having that seamless integration with GreenLake as well, you get through a scenario where you can find the right solution for their needs and then the economic structure is really a choice for them, taking away a lot of that pain imposition. Now what we're seeing overall to that point too, which I think is also interesting is customers are going through evolution. If you go back a number of years, every conversation and topic was related to public cloud and it's still a huge area of focus. But, I've also seen a lot of organization especially at the higher end, really start to look at how they can take a lot of their consumption-based economics and bring it on-premise because they want to make sure that the reaction position they got, they're getting their data back is within their premise as well. And so that's why we're really enjoying a lot of success together because we can synergize the flexibility of the HPE offerings with the commercial offerings of (murmurs) Veeam, and be in a scenario where it's almost a perfect fit for most customers. And we try not to force them down a specific path because I think those days are gone, but customers want to look at the economic or the budget constraints they've got today and find the best fit, but they want that best fit without compromising on their overall support they get, and they want the scenario, like we have with HPE where it's fully on their price box, single supplier, single throat to choke, making sure were in unison, and they've got continued investment moving forward in the portfolio (murmurs). >> Excellent. Well final question I have for you is in the general market place, people often get stuck in their head to how they think about a company. Veeam is such a close partner to HPE. (murmurs) has thousands of customers with them. Give our viewers a little bit of how should people be thinking about HPE in 2020, and then also give us the final take away for Veeam and HPE. >> Yeah, great question. I mean, I've been working with HPE now a multitude of, overall over six years now. And the evolution that we're seeing is fantastic. I think that my view on how you should see HPE is, a trusted advisor related to talking about the transformation you're going through your data, and also a clear, solidified portfolio, especially in the storage realm related to the control of the data. Following the data from the origination point of the application all the way through. And so I think from that point of view, there's clarity with portfolio, there's a comprehensive interlock of the portfolio. And so from that point of view, I think there's calmness in the discussion. What I would say is that (murmurs) further and how to look at the HP (murmurs) relationship is. That continued investment on future proofing and hopefully some exciting announcements as we move through the year, will demonstrate that we are constantly making sure that we're differentiating at the frontier (mic cuts) for the customer. And you can see that in the growth of our enterprise business together. You could see that in the growth of high end commercial business together, and you can also see the fact that our customers are growing every single year together. So when we put these solutions in place, they're loving them and they're growing them year over year, and very quickly as well. So we're seeing a very high percentage of our customers reorder within the first year because they're really enjoying the unification of the solution. And so hopefully, the HP customers should look at that, through confidence, through calmness, and be really pleased that the market leader approach will indict protection by Veeam and they're primary (murmurs) leader when it comes to technology with HPE, together provide a really powerful solution, and we're really pleased on the customer satisfaction results we're getting from this work. >> All right. Well, David Harvey, thank you so much for the updates. Looking forward to some of those innovations that you talked about coming later this year. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks so much. I really appreciate the time and enjoying Discover, and I hope everybody's having a great event. >> All right, stay tuned for launch of theCUBE's coverage, HPE Discover 2020, the Virtual Experience. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks as always for watching.

>> 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 music) >> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, This is a Cube Conversation. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California for another Cube Conversation. Where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Michael Segal is the product manager, or Area Vice President of Strategic Alliances in NetScout Systems. Michael, we are sitting here in theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in November of 2019, re:Invent 2019 is right around the corner. NetScout and AWS are looking to do some interesting things. Why don't you give us an update of what's happening. >> Yeah, just very brief introduction of what NetScout actually does. So, NetScout assures service, performance and security for the largest enterprises and service providers in the world. We do it for something we refer to as visibility without borders by providing actionable intelligence necessary to very quickly identify the root cause of either performance or security issues. So with that, NetScout, partnering very closely with AWS. We are an advanced technology partner, which is the highest tier for ISVs of partnership. This enables us to partner with AWS on a wide range of activities including technology alignment with road map and participating in different launch activities of new functionality from AWS. It enables us to have go-to market activities together, focusing on key campaigns that are relevant for both AWS and NetScout. And it enables us also to collaborate on sales initiatives. So, with this wide range of activities, what we can offer is a win-win-win situation for our customers, for AWS, and for NetScout. So, from customers' perspective, beyond the fact that NetScout offering is available in AWS marketplace, now this visibility without borders that I mentioned, helps our customers to navigate through their digital transformation journey and migrate to AWS more effectively. From AWS perspective, the win is their resources are now consumed by the largest enterprises in the world, so it accelerates the consumption of compute, storage, networking, database resources in AWS. And for NetScout, this is strategically important because now NetScout becoming a strategic partner to our large enterprise customers as they navigate their digital transformation journey. So that's why it's really important for us to collaborate very, very efficiently with AWS. It's important to our customers, and it's important to AWS. >> And you're going to be at re:Invent. You're actually going to be speaking, as I understand. What are you going to be talking about? >> So we are going to be talking about best practices of migrating to AWS. NetScout also is a platinum sponsor for the re:Invent show. This demonstrates our commitment to AWS, and the fact that we want to collaborate and partner with them very, very efficiently. And beyond that also, NetScout partnered with AWS on the launch of what is referred to as Amazon VPC traffic mirroring. And, this functionality enables us to acquire traffic data and packet data very efficiently in AWS. And it's part of the technology aligns that we have with AWS and demonstrates how we utilize these technology aligns to extend NetScout visibility without borders to AWS cloud. >> There's no reason to make AWS cloud a border. >> Michael Segal: Exactly. >> Michael Segal, NetScout Systems. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> And, once again we'd like to thank you for joining us for another Cube Conversation. Until next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Our coverage of Cisco Live day three is in full effect. I am Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and we have a couple of guests joining us. We've got Mike Bundy, head of Cisco Strategic Alliances from, guess where? The jacket should give it away, Pure Storage. And Tom Koppelman, the VP of Architecture Sales America for Cisco, hi guys! >> Hi. >> Hi. >> How ya doing? >> Thanks for bringing more brightness to our set. >> Yeah I forgot my sunglasses. >> I know, we're in the buzzy, bright DevNet Zone. We've been here all week. Great event, massive event, my goodness. 28,000 folks or so, Mike let's start with you. Give us a status of the Pure-Cisco relationship, the evolution of that, where you guys are now. What is exciting? >> Sure, so the relationship, it's unbelievable in terms of the amount of synergies and energy we have together. In fact, Tom at Cisco was really involved in the early genesis of this relationship, prior to me joining the company. And, in the last couple years, we've probably doubled in terms of our go-to-market and sell to customers together. So, tremendous growth. Partnership brings a value to us because of the strong heritage that we have from a DevNet tie-in, in terms of all the automation that we have on the platform, so. It's just a tremendous, tremendous, great partnership. >> And Tom, Cisco has a massive partner ecosystem, a lot of choice. What is it about Pure Storage that is providing advantages to Cisco? Where it's helping customers really kind of bridge this gap between hyper-converged, multi-cloud hybrid, all that jazz? >> Right, so Pure was a first mover in terms of flash storage, right. We saw demand from our customers wanting that technology to improve their data center environments. And when we partnered up early, we were able to kind of capture that momentum, right. And, when I think about our go-to-market with Pure, which is really where I kind of focus, there's very little friction in that relationship, right. There's not competitive overlap. There's not things like that. It's technology that the customers want, that they ask for, and a good field go-to-market in leadership on both sides that are willing to invest and get engaged and move the relationship forward. >> So what else are you guys doing besides just the go-to-market partnership because I got a hold of this timeline of Cisco Validated Designs that Pure and Cisco have put out over the last five years, four years. >> Right. >> And there's like 13 milestones on there. So that's roughly three a year. Of course, it started with Pure's IPO. So that's when Cisco said, all right, these guys are real. Start working with them. And in the early days, of course, you started with FlashStack. That was the flagship product. And then VDI, everybody does VDI, analysts are like, yeah, yeah, everybody does VDI. But then it started really accelerating the cadence. So it's more than just go-to-market. What's beneath that go-to-market? >> Yeah, good question. >> You want to? >> You hit the highlights of the CVD's and whatnot. >> I would say that Pure, this is our number one partnership that we have from an alliance perspective. The investment is far exceeding other partnerships we have. So, the amount of product integration that we're doing is tremendous, as you see there. We've focused on ACI and multi data centers the last couple years. We've focusing on AI and machine learning, most recently. And beyond that, we just signed an agreement and have released resell of Cisco SAN switches in the marketplace. It's the resell agreement we've ever done as a company and it just further shows the commitment in resources that we're willing to put into making sure the partnership is successful and continues to grow and evolve. >> And on top of that the investment in Cisco Intersight, in integrating with Cisco Intersight, the management platform, which is very important to us, it just shows commitment of the partnership. >> Let's talk more about that. So, how does that work? What problems is that solving for customers? >> Well, Cisco Intersight is our cloud based management offering for compute and Pure has integrated their storage platform as part of that solution. So allowing customers, whether it's a converged solution, just raw compute, a hyper-converged solution, but allowing them to manage those pools and deliver that via a cloud solution. >> So Pure plugs into the Cisco API. Now you're part of that stack, essentially. So it's transparent to the customer. And, Cisco's management plane takes care of all that. >> That's exactly right, correct, yes. >> Its' a big deal for us because it was the first integration with Intersight from any storage partner that Cisco has, right. So first to market. We want to embrace hyper-convergence, which is a big important priority for Cisco, and also bridging that gap. So as we compete against single vendor stacks, we have the right solution that customers are looking for. And ultimately, that's why it's so important for us. >> Yeah, Pure is big on firsts. First to flash, you just mentioned another first, you were the first with NVMe, before that you were with the evergreen. I mean, you like being first. >> First orange sport coat. >> That's definitely first there. (laughing) >> Let's talk about customer value though. Obviously, that's what it's all about. As we look at, not just the tremendous amount of choice that customer have when it comes to technology partners, but also the amount of data that's being generated, that's growing astronomically. Yet, organizations are getting so little value out of that because they can't extract the insights. What are you guys doing together leveraging the superpowers of AI and machine learning to help customers in any industry search a really, not just monetize that data, but really accelerate their businesses. Tom you're smiling so let's start with you. >> Yeah, so we came out with an AI server, right, our ML 480, and we've integrated that. Pure has invested, we've both invested and done an integration between FlashBlade, and I'll let Mike talk a little about FlashBlade and the value proposition of FlashBlade, but integrated that with our AI server. And our AI server is an Nvidia powered server, so it essentially gives you scale of processing and capabilities to allow you capitalize on all that data so the customers can get the information they need out of that. If you want to take a second on FlashBlade. >> And you know, AI is the buzz. It's the hot two letter acronym in the industry these days. $13 billion infrastructure opportunity, et cetera, et cetera. So, what Pure is really focused on is, data is the new oil of commodities for customers and clients. What we've built is a platform called FlashBlade, an architecture called the Data Hub, that allows you to not have to copy data and move it around and create silos in data warehouses. So, you can much easier execute a data strategy with the Data Hub architecture, using FlashBlade. When you look at machine learning in terms of how you build a data pipeline so that you can then get to quicker results from a business application standpoint with AI. That's what we've built together with Cisco. We're uber, uber, super excited a number of customers already in the last couple months. >> So I'm going to push a little on that, AI server, AI storage, people don't associate storage and server guys with AI. But if I hear you correctly, there's a $13 billion opportunity for workloads. To manage workloads running on your servers and your storage. >> Correct. >> And so you're optimizing them for AI workloads. >> Absolutely, exactly right. >> So you're not necessarily inventing AI. You're providing infrastructure so that people can leverage AI, is that right? >> Yes. >> Yeah, and the same way that we've built APIs together to work with Intersight, we do that in a way that allows our customers to leverage Cafe, other applications that can help build that data pipeline. We build the platform from the infrastructure level, it makes the management easy and we partner with all of the applications at the top end, but also the middleware and that software prepackage layer that connects via APIs to us. So, it's easy, it's agile, it's manageable, it's a cloud-like experience for the customers, right. >> Easy, agile, all awesome but security. Absolutely critical today. What are you guys doing, Tom I'll start with you, how are you guys working together infuse and integrate security into the technology so that from a customer's perspective, those risks dial down. >> So, Cisco is integrating security across all of our product portfolio, right. And, that includes our data center portfolio, all the way through our campus, our WAN, all those portfolios. We continue to look for opportunities to integrate, whether it's dual-factor authentication or things like secure data center where the highly scalable, multi-instance firewall in front of a data center, things like that. So we're definitely looking for areas and angles and opportunities for us to, not only integrate it from a product standpoint, but also ensure that we are talking that story with our customers so that they know they can leverage Cisco for the full architecture from a security standpoint. >> And the same thing on the storage of the data from an encryption perspective, and as the data gets moved or is mobile, that level of security and policy follows it wherever the data is moved. >> So, what should we expect, what's next in the time? What's 14 going to look like? You don't have top give us specifics but are we going to see blockchain CVDs? What should observers think about the partnership going forward? What could we look forward to? >> Yeah, I mean, the adoption of Container capability is tremendous in our customers environment. Cisco has a cloud Container platform available today. We're integrating that into FlashStack in the very near future. Embracing the cloud. Disaster recovery and data protection it's very hot for customers. Improving that experience so that you have faster restoration times, you're able to look at multi-tier strategy that's very easy to manage from a storage perspective, leveraging S3 with Amazon, Azure, et cetera. So, that's a couple things that are on the short term building block together. >> Yeah, I was going to comment on certainly multi cloud and Containers, those would be two of the big ones that I'd hit on, right. And, in the event of multi cloud leveraging, converged and hyper-converged together to better solve a customer's problems. >> So I was going to ask you. So hyper-converged now becomes a bridge to the cloud if, in fact, that's where customers want to go. >> Yes, it can be. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, it can be, yes. >> Absolutely. >> Well guys thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program, sharing with us the momentum that the Pure-Cisco relationship has and what excites you for the future. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank guys. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from Cisco Live San Diego. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to London, England. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, Eup Piscar, and we're going to dig into one of the partnerships that Nutanix have. Joining me, two CUBE alums, Michael Cade, who's a technologist with Veeam. Had you on the program last year in Nice, and welcome back a little closer to home for you, here in London. >> Yeah cheers Stu, Hidey-ho. >> And welcome, six months with Nutanix, someone I've known. CUBE alumni. So, wherever you go, you know, there are CUBE alumnis always. So Jay Chitnis, who's the head of Global Strategic Alliances with Nutanix. Jay, thanks for joining us. >> Stu, thanks for having me. It's great to be here, guys. >> Alright, first of all You know, Michael, what's it mean having the show here in London, and would love your opinion, having kind of, how Nutanix's doing with Europe adoption. >> Yeah, so, obviously being in London means I don't have to go on a plane and travel anywhere, right? So, that's one benefit, but one thing, I was there last year, obviously, we spoke. I think one of the things I can see here is how many people are here. Feel's like its doubled in numbers, doubled in size. Doubled the conversations, obviously with us, with our product coming out in July/August of this year. Only a version one but we're seeing good feedback, good strong feedback and lots of questions around that. >> Yeah absolutely, 3500 is the number I heard here. Jay, we're going to talk about with Veeam, so set the stage for us, data protection, what's going, Nutanix positioning, and what you look to that. >> Yeah, its a vibrant landscape, right? So, just to kind of pick up a little bit on the thread around the European side. We've got over 50 partners here. Over 50 technology partners and a number of channel partners. There's just a vibrant buzz and one of the first things that people always talk about is we're in the the nation of GDPR. If you start to think about just where's this nation, this notion of data and where does it reside, data mobility and that sort of thing. That's one of the first things that we get hit with all the time; we get asked a lot. And so, it's really core to what we do. That's where the relationship really comes in. >> I love the little commentary there at that GDPR. Cause I remember last year, like most of last year, every show that had data protection, everything, we talked about GDPR a lot. To be honest, once we got past May, we didn't talk about it a lot. I mean, we said we knew it's real when there were some lawsuits and that happened rather fast to some of the really large companies, but is this still a major conversation with costumers, where are we and? >> Yeah, yeah, massively so that sovereignty of data, where is resides is something that, speaking to enterprise and mid-market customers over in Europe, there absolutely still top of mind is, why are we keeping that data? Where are we keeping that data? How do we leverage our tool set to understand where that data is? And then actually provide some insight into where it is, and report against things like violations between different locations. And just, We obviously had to go through that process of becoming GDPR compliant ourselves, and obviously as a global company, you have to kind of eat your own dog food. And understand, you have to know your own data, understand what that's doing, why we're keeping that? How it's being stored, and the message we just relay back into content and let our customers then use that. >> So what does that look? Maybe from a technology perspective, if you had to deal with GDPR, from an Nutanix standpoint, from a Veeam standpoint. What does it change, right? What does it change in terms of backing up? What does it change in terms of storing it? In a cloud or on print? Have you seen any majors changes in how that works for customers? >> Yeah, so the good the is that thinking about what that data is and where it's being stored. They know that in Germany that data may not be able to leave Germany or that data may not be able to leave the UK or Ireland and they might have offices in remote locations in various different countries. So, a simple thing that we put in was the ability to put tagging on repositories, on our physical constructs so that we knew the data path and the workflow. And then be able to use then Veeam one to be able to report against that so you understood where that data was going but also flag up any of those violations that may be where a backup job has pushed it to a different location. We need to know about that and we need to fix it as fast as possible. So that's one of the areas that we're talking >> So, I can imagine that this is not only has had an impact from a technology perspective from a vendor's side, but also in the service provider market. I guess a lot of service providers have gone into that phase to be able to help customers with their GDPR issues. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely, so we were already aligned with our VCSP program. 20,000 VCSP partners out there and their model is as a service, so being able to provide, as a service and help them understand what that data is and know where that data is residing, is key to, that those customers that can't necessarily put their workloads into the public cloud but they can put it into a trusted service provider of VCSP. >> Or a trusted, like an enterprise private cloud. Or, one of the things that we're seeing is, when you start to think about data and where it resides, it's not just the cloud. It's not a discussion of is it on prem, is it in the cloud. There's this notion about this distributed cloud, some of this stuff that we talked about earlier this morning around what does that mean when you start to think about where, first of all, the amount of data that's sitting in everything other than what we would consider an enterprise cloud. That's one. The second thing is, how do you protect it? How do you back it up? What do you do at things that at the edge, right? That requires a fundamentally different way of looking at things. Just the size and the volume of the data. >> Yeah, one of the key things that we're seeing is that sprawl of data. Not necessarily, it doesn't really matter where that data resides. Whether it is on premises or whether it's in the public cloud. It's the data and that sprawl of data that can sit on many different platforms. >> Alright, Want to pivot the conversation a little bit lets talk about AHV. So, in the earnings announcement earlier this week, the number I heard was 38% looking at the last four quarters trailing, so strong growth. I actually, when I had asked Dheeraj about two years ago and said, "okay well what's the goal?" He said "Look, we're going to keep building and do it, and customers will have choice." You know, if we get to 50%, that felt about right to him then, when I talked to him he said "This seems right." It's not like we're going to eradicate everybody's other virtualization. That's not the goal. It's to do what makes sense. I remember one of the .NEXT's when Veeam said "We're going to go down the path to adopt AHV". There are actually tears in the audience. So, we know that ecosystem is super important to AHV. So Jim, maybe set the table for us with the guideline as to where we are with the partner eco system. Obviously Veeam's got some good, exciting stuff recently. But overall? >> Look, at the end of the day, the 38% number that you mentioned is critical, right? One of the things that we look at is, this is it's, our philosophy has always been about freedom and, so, some semblance of choice. And it doesn't matter whether you have a preference for a private cloud, a public cloud, a hypervisor. What we really are focused on is, how do we enhance incremental value add, especially in a management staff, right? So it's not necessarily a, we absolutely want to become a Hypervisor company. That's not the goal here. In order to, when you look at our partner landscape, and our partner ecosystem, it kind of fits into a few things. First and foremost, it's about customers who want, when they buy Nutanix, it's because they're buying Nutanix to fit in to a certain environment. Data protection, management, management and orchestration, networking and security. And then there's obviously customers who buy Nutanix for running something on top us, right? An, ISV, and enterprise ISV, big data applications, cloud native applications and things of that nature. One of the cornerstones for that ecosystem is to support AHV and we're starting to see a significant amount of our partners, not only looking at supporting AHV but actually going further and deeper. So, we look at things in terms of the breadth of the ecosystem, which is great, we want to grow that, but we also look as the depth. And someone like Veeam, who said, "Hey look, we were partnering with you on the breadth, where we were doing some stuff around supporting ESX." But really, the game changer was AHV. AHV support which was what, August? >> Yeah, yeah, beginning of August. I think the same premise as to what you were just saying Jay, so bring that simplicity model, we don't really care about what that is sitting on top. With a management layer, we're offering this hardware up as a service, or this layer of abstraction. From a Veeam, obviously, form a Veeam perspective, it's all about the ease of use, the reliability, but also the flexibility. And that's something that we kind of have that synergistic approach. >> I think that's a very shared common vision, right? It's making sure that you provide a seamless experience. One click sort of experience. But, being able to do so in a more cohesive manner. >> Michael, I want you to bring us inside. I remember back when Veeam supported Microsoft Hyper-V. It was a big deal. There's a lot of engineering work that goes into it. And a move, Veeam was more than just a virtualization company. Today Veeam is multi-cloud, they can play in lots of environment. Give us a little insight as to what happened and what's special has been done for the interface and the technology to fully support AHV with Veeam. >> Yeah, I think, so 12 years ago, Veeam started out protecting those virtual workloads. Virtualization first, Vmware first, then Hyper-V. And then the physical agents came and really that platform started to get broadened. What then happened is the AHV adoption rate from you guys was obviously rising so saw that and went in, and, but we took a different approach in terms of, okay, just because of what we've done in a Vmware and Hyper_V world, doesn't necessarily mean that that will fit our Nutanix AHV customers. So we went out, we seeded the market, understood what that looked like, how it looked from both a Nutanix point of view and also existing AHV customers. And then built the new AHV platform that we have to be able to protect them. But we still wanted to keep that agentless approach. But from a management perspective, we offer out a web interface that allows us to look very similar to the prism interface, the management layout. So that, an admin doesn't have to shift his command stature, his knowledge of working in management into that mind set. So, version one, and again, there's a considerable amount of effort gone into that has a pretty, pretty full-on feature list of features in that version one and that's going to continue to roll out over 2019 and beyond. >> So looking at this from a customers perspective, you know, back when I built an IS platform based on Nutanix, based on VH, one of the things that was high on my list was a AVH support. Simply because AVH over hypervisor, it became a commodity. I, even as a service provider, even as an IS provider, I didn't really care what hypervisor I ran. And so, support from VM to actually be able to back up VM's on AHV, and that was top priority for me. And seeing you guys use that different UI, even though it was a little bit over shot, because you know, we've been using VM for maybe a decade already. We're used to it. A little bit of a culture shock to start using it, but when you do, it becomes a totally different experience because it is aligned with Nutanix. So maybe tell us about why you've taken that approach of using the way of integrating with the Nutanix UI instead of staying at your old UI? >> Yeah, and so exactly, so mostly around Nutanix admins and their feedback around, if we could just have another tab that looks and feels exactly how our management plane looks like. Then that would be of more of a benefit. Now, obviously we didn't feedback on replication. There's still visibility of those jobs, there's no configuration, lettered out, that's one of the biggest asks that we're getting in the forums, in the public forums, is when can we have exactly what you're asking for there. Is it around how can we bring that central management back into VBR because they may have Nutanix clusters running different hypervisors and that's all supported from us but then, but, then, now we've got to go outside of that single management interface into the prism-like management for that, so, I kind of see that from that perspective. But, so that was really the main key for version one is, get something out that's the same as what our Nutanix administrators are used to. >> So, if we're talking about future, right, so what's next for VM and Nutanix? Real short question, short answer maybe. >> Yeah, without being fired, I'm but... (Jay laughs) So, version two, update one, so 1.1. That will be out in the next few, let's say weeks, months. And that really doesn't bring any major features or changes. That's the generic bug fixes, there's a few things that needed to be ironed out in the interface but also as the process. So that will be relatively soon. Then, the good thing around the ability to develop against what we're doing with AHV, is that because it's so separate from the VBR piece. It allows us to hopefully keep that much more frequent cadence of release. So we'll be starting to see more news about version two as we get into early 2019. >> Just a last thing, wondering what you could say about adoption so far? How much pent up demand was there? You know, I'd like to hear first from the Veeam standpoint. How many customers, if you can share anything about that? And then, Jay, what this means for AHV adoption? >> So, I don't know specific numbers, up to date numbers, but I have seen the sales force numbers grow from an opportunity perspective, and that's specifically where Veeam availability and Nutanix AHV is included in that sales force opportunity. So one of the things, though, is that we're seeing, if you're familiar with the Veeam forums, that, in particular, forum thread is growing and growing because people are understanding that we can help shape what we do here, we want those customers that are using it on a daily business to give us that feedback. >> Do you expect there to be new Veeam customers due to this offering? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> Yeah, I think we absolutely expect new Veeam customers. I think at the end of the day, going back your question around AVH, having a healthy ecosystem is really what's going to drive AHV adoption. So partners like Veeam who've done that is really what is providing some choice back. So you're question around what do we expect in the next few months, quarters, what we're seeing is a lot demand on, what's the right way, We're seeing a lot more demand on additional functionality that people customers would like to add into their grate. So AHV is just the beginning of the platform. It's not the end state and then, we're starting to see is a lot of customers, partners who are taking on things like, "Oh, well that's interesting, now I can do something with files, or buckets, or add on top of it where now all of a sudden, I can derive even more value. So AHV is just step one if you will, right? >> Yeah, I think that's important as well. So we've got update four coming out early next year that's going to bring the ability to leverage the Nutanix buckets that we've heard about this week. There's also other cloud mobility, but for the option of being able to convert those machines and send the up into Azure or AWS to be able to run tests and development up there. But, that whole cloud mobility about movement of data and making it seamless using the same tool set. One of the key differentiators is the VBK format. So those who know Veeam, they use the VBK format and that's exactly the same format that the Nutanix AHV product uses as well. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, congratulations. Really looked at, as I said, this is really opening the door to start the journey as to where your customers are going. I've been hearing feedback from customers that have been waiting for this for a while and excited to see how this matures as things go forward. So, Jay, Michael, thanks so much for joining us and stay with us, full day of coverage here at Nutanix .NEXT 2018 in London. Thanks of watching theCUBE. (electronic beat)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are in Orlando in the NetApp booth at SAP Sapphire 2018. We are joined by a new person to theCube, Amit Sinha, the Founder and Chief Customer Officer at WorkSpan. Amit, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, excited to be here. >> So I'm really excited to understand more about WorkSpan, what you guys do. Tell us a little about that, what opportunity you saw in the market with respect to alliances that you went, "Ah why is it no one's doing that." You have this great idea. >> Yeah, absolutely, we had this ah-ha moment, in this day and age of connectedness around the world, there is not a single company that goes to market alone. Right, when the reality's that we all serve the same demanding end-customers. We got to align our marketing. We got to align our messages, We need to align our innovation. I mean just altogether in order to be more. Easier said then done, right. So that's we saw the opportunity, that what if there was a network of alliances that are connected with one another, and if they can truly define a joint innovation, a joint solution, take it to market, co-market it. When they co-market they can get twice the audience at half the cost, and then co-sell. That way they can improve their vendors, and we are truly seeing that, so that's the opportunity that we saw, to really make the life of the alliance manager, the alliance leader, simpler, and easier to do in this connected day and age. >> Well, essential because also on your website, 60 to 75 percent of announced alliances fail. That's enormous, so talk to us about some of the successes that you have had, talking with companies, as you say, that, you know, nobody goes to market alone these days, did they have those ah-ha moments as well when you came knocking on there and say, hey look what we're developing. >> Absolutely, so look at this large event here. Sapphire is one of the biggest enterprise events out here. Over 100 strategic alliances are here from SAP, and they will all make key announcements here about joint products, big golden markets, but can you imagine, three months down the line, 70 percent of them will be actually catching dust on the road. They won't even watch the people, the business cases will be the winner. And that's such a wasted opportunity. The amount of due diligence that goes into kind of creating an alliance, thinking about the business case, people putting together solutions. But then once they announce the keynote, that's where the decline really happens. There's no operational support behind, how do you take this to market. That's where WorkSpan comes in. People wanting to join sales plan, the joint marketing plan, the joint solution plan, to really operationalize that people coming together across the platform. In India we say that a marriage is between families, and that's very true. So really, an alliance is between companies, deep in the companies, not just the alliance manager working with another alliance manager. It's really marketeers, sales folks, alliance people. So, it's a family of two companies coming together. And that's where WorkSpan, why it's the foundation, the consistent process logic, and a data driven argument around it. So you can dig decisions on the base of data, to say, okay where is my alliance working, and where does it need help? You don't do post mortems after that, you can fix as you're going along. >> So let's talk about that process and data driven nature of alliances. Alliances are complex setups, just starting at the very beginning of saying, you know what, I'm, we're two companies, we overlap in areas of competition, but there's these outliers where we really can partner together to make that happy. You look on a show floor, you see brands that are obvious, you know, we're in the NetApp booth and we've talked SAP Hanna a lot, and right across the way is the Oracle booth, and they're talking heavily SAP on Oracle, so there's this opportunity to cooperate, and there's this area of competition. A lot of that is data driven, how do you capture that data and help create the process logic to help companies identify alliances and then execute upon, and manage those alliances going forward. >> Well I think that's an excellent question, so when you are living in a network in this interdependent work, you will partner in some areas and you will compete in some places. So for this network world, we need a new security model, so that only people who are allowed to see something are able to see that thing. We call this Attribute Base Access Control. Compare that to traditional applications which do role based access control, just because you're higher up in the organization, you get to see everything. But this new module of security, Attribute Based Access Control model, allows the right people to get into the right plans, so that they, and they alone, can see it. So you might be working for SAP on, let's say the Google relationship, or the Apple relationships, or the Oracle relationship, or the NetApp relationship, only those right people have those accesses. And the owners of those programs can control and secure that data. So what it allows a company to then do is, it's even more secure in this day and age. We can argue that in this day and age with GDPR and all those compliance efforts, that WorkSpan is far more secure, than sending spreadsheets out, which is the current mode of collaboration. So you can enforce a corporate policy around, what is your shared data, what's your private data. So in the same opportunity you can have private data for your own company, employees to see that as them as sort of partners. So that translucency, not transparency, but translucency is really really important when you do alliances, and that we understand is model of WorkSpan. >> So how do you help, like, for alliances marketing for example, and say there's a joint campaign, NetApp with one of their partners for example, and they wanted to do some lead generation activities, events, webinars, lunch and learns, digital campaigns, and they're gonna get leads that come in from that, and they might say, ah, okay, well I don't want to give you all of that. How do you help with some of that, I mean it kind of goes to the "coopertition" theme a little bit, but from a marketing standpoint, I'm just curious, how do you help either reduce or mitigate concerns that companies, alliance partners would have in that space, or do you come in and sort of help them from a strategic area to normalize some of these concerns? >> Yeah, so what we do is we partner with the company's marketing automation systems, so let's say NetApp is working with AP Cloud for customer. So at this event we announce the integration between WorkSpan and this AP Cloud for customer. Similarly other customers may have other marketing optimations, and you should see in a low quarter market, or a salesfirst.com, so we integrate with those systems. So what happens is marketeers can continue their contact database and their lead machine in those systems, and we get aggregate results in WorkSpan to really see which alliances are doing well. So we don't get into what marketing automation systems do, we partner and we integrate with them. So that, what happens in that, we are extending an investment the company already has made in their marketing automations tech, and we come across as a partner or alliance automations tech, so that really the alliances knew one another. And why is this important. This is important because if you're like an Intel or a NetApp, you may be working with a whole ecosystem of providers, and they themselves have their own marketing automation systems. So you imagine if you are at an intel or you're a NetApp or you're an SAP, you can get all this data back, because there's WorkSpan in the middle. So as a network, you may have just one percent of the data, but your overall network is far more intelligent than all the data you've been collecting. >> So again, whenever we get a topic like this, we have to invoke John Forrier's name and get some block chain conversation going on, from an ideal of, you know, basically there's just, you guys have become an authority of authentication, there's reputation, there's all these fundamental infrastructure things that you have to determine. And you think through, you scale this out beyond just, you know, alliances, and honestly technology is one area. There's all the attributes in manufacturing, in other companies, how does this align with, or a more aggressive question, how does this sort plant like, the ideas of smart contracts with the lies of block chain? >> Yeah, absolutely. So BlockShare is a really good implementation of what we really have done in WorkSpan. So, in WorkSpan, if you think about it, it's a network. There are transactions, they're like, flowing across different parties. And these transactions are trusted, right, across different parties. Let's say an Intel or a NetApp stays approved on our platform, the process extends to the partner and they get a contract, that simple. So in some ways, in living in a connected world, we need to have these kinds of smart contracts and trust in data source that is not just your own. We're living in a shared data world, right? So one of the key partners at Bolt, well NetApp works with this Bolt Intel as well as SAP, right. So, because SAP program funds the SAP marketing campaigns here, and they're both Intels, and they both come from trusted parties, NetApp is able to trust that data, trust that transaction that makes it too. So we provide that trans-foundation based on the qualities that.. >> Sorry, Amit, but that's kind of the trust foundation, as sort of aligns to what Bill Madridment said in his keynote this morning, about, you know, trust being this new currency. You guys have been attaining a lot of momentum in the Fortune 500 space. Tell us a little bit about how you're doing that, and then if there's a customer example that you, that's one of your favorites that you think really articulates your brand values, share that too. >> Absolutely, so we've been very fortunate that we've been trusted by a lot of Fortune 500 companies to come on the platform. Really want to orchestrate their platform and their ecosystem. And we are seeing this need that the head of alliances seen, they're going to be very strategic at the board, where they want to be data driven and numbers driven. They're no longer saying, I'm okay by saying that my alliance with such and such partner is going well. They want to be quantified, they wanna say it's going well by this much. So this is where the main value prop is, we have had companies on our platform that have generated 58 percent more leads, that have reduced their marketing cost by 50 percent. Intel and SAP specifically, this is their third year on our platform, and year on year they have collaborated more number of campaigns, deeper in the regions, where their marketeers are working with intel marketeers, for example. So they got a 24X internal marketing investment, [Lisa] Wow. where as they were expecting an eight to 10x marketing investment, so dramatically increased. For SAP, that meant 100 million dollars more than double at lower marketing cost, just because the two companies can unleash their shared potential with the shared customers across the world. Now this happened, this was not an overnight success, this is a three year success in the making, where there's deep partnership and collaboration at the regional level, at the marketeer level, and all rolling it up at the head of alliances. So Intel is one company, we have SAP of course as a marketing account. We not only work with hardware alliances like NetApp and Intel, but also their SI alliances are on WorkSpan, so large, as many as size you see here, those programs are coming at WorkSpan as well. People at Novel were invited on WorkSpan, HPE is on WorkSpan, so that's a great example as well of a Fortune 500 company. >> Wow, lot of momentum. You know, it's for companies like SAP, like WorkSpan, where you've got software and you've got something under the hood that a lot of people won't know what's happening, or further jobs don't have to know or care, it's always challenging for a brand to go, how do we show the value of our product and service is when it's not something we can touch, or see, or feel. And it's really through the validation, the best you can get, is through the voice of your customer. And the stats that you shared, you must be sort of salivating, with we can actually help you increase Legion by 58 percent, or increase revenue opportunities by 40 percent. I mean, you've got some really substantial data driven facts to show how you're transforming a business. That's got to be, that's gotta make doing business a little bit easier, that you know you've got such salitity. >> Actually when you think of the world, it's really diverse, right, but you can see patterns from this all. So when you work with a lot of partners and you're orchestrating them on your ecosystem, you're running different kinds of marketing campaigns or different sales opportunities. They have different traction depending on how you actually executed them, right. But when you step back and you say, hey, webinars don't really work well in Japan, late evening events work better in Japan. But in the US, one of the best course, it seems like webinars work better. Or such and such partner does a really good job of hiring clients in events, but this other partner I spent a lot of money with, it all seems to go in search or non advertising that I don't see a lot of benefit of, right. So you can make these data driven arguments by partner, by channel, by investment, by, you know by any metric that you want now. So now the head of alliance, this is exactly where the value profit for spenders. Now you can be totally data driven and say, this works, that doesn't work, so I should do more of this and spend less there. >> Fantastic, well Amit I wish we had more time to keep chatting, but thanks so much for stopping by and sharing not only who WorkSpan is and what you do, but some of the significant impact that you can deliver to your customers. >> Thank you so much for the opportunity, loved talking to you both. >> Likewise. We want to thank you for watching theCube, I am Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, from SAP Sapphire 2018, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018. (upbeat electronic music) Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, in the NetApp booth, at Sapphire Now 2018. We are in Orlando, this is an enormous event, there's more than 20,000 people here, and there's about a million people that SAP is expecting to engage online, that's a lot. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Klara Young, the director of Strategic Alliances from AppBuddy and Steven Cox, the head of Global Sales Tools at NetApp, hi, guys. >> Howdy. >> Hello. >> Hi, Lisa. >> Thanks for having us. >> Absolutely, so Klara tell me about AppBuddy. Who are you guys and what do you do? >> So AppBuddy is a provider of a user experience layer that can sit on top of core systems like SAP Sales Cloud or SAP Service Cloud and that really allows the administrators to configure a dream workspace where you can get all the data that you need to work with in one place, and then, the users can interact with that very easily. And so, it's all very user friendly and it allows us to enable sales processes, I want to manage my pipelines, or my accounts, my contacts, all with a very easy to use interface right in the middle of the core system. >> So your target audience would be customers that are already using SAP or customers that are maybe in the transition from, say Oracle to SAP, or something like that? >> So any users that are planning to use SAP or are already using SAP and then want to enhance that user experience, want to give them a faster way to interact with the data, more intuitive, more functionality, right in the same core interface. So those would be good clients for us to enhance that experience, absolutely. >> And what about customers by industry know SAP really kind of being very, very strong in a lot of industries but manufacturing, digital supply chain, but if you look at their customers that are here at Sapphire and there's a million of them, they span so many industries. >> Yeah. >> I think yesterday they were saying HANA is installed in 23,000 customers across 60 industries. Does AppBuddy have a particular suite of industries where you really add even more value, or is it fairly horizontal? >> Oh, that's a real good question. Actually what's the beauty, I think, of AppBuddy's product, is that it is completely agnostic of which process or which industry that you're deploying it in. So you decide what objects, what information I want to put on that. It's not a purpose-built application specifically for one process or one industry. So we serve clients in all sorts of industries. We have a lot in high tech, or in the health care industry, manufacturing, as well but we're not specific to one industry. So really welcoming any use case and we'd love to hear from customers, hey, can I do this? With AppBuddy, could I put this object and that object together and build a process basically, almost in your own app. And we're very looking forward to those feedback from customers and wanting to build those use cases with them. >> And that's been such a huge theme or really an undertone at SAP Sapphire the last few days is how much SAP listens to their customers and really involves them and especially strategic accounts like in a collaborative way and yesterday, Steven, we spoke with your CIO Bill Miller. We talked to him about NetApp and SAP have been partners for 17 years. NetApp is 26 years young now and has undergone a big transformation. Bill talked about some of that yesterday, but you guys also did a big transformation that you were leading within your sales processes and your CRM move into SAP, talk to us about that. What were some of the reasons for that transformation? >> Yeah, it's working with Bill and his team I'm represent the business side and we're looking as NetApp is transforming from a traditional storage company to more a cloud. It's a change in the way we go to market. In the past we shipped boxes to people and they install them or we install them. And in the future, we're looking to more services and cloud-oriented things. And so the kind of infrastructure that we built up to support our large sales force doesn't work as well in the new world. And so we about two years ago, started a pretty big transformation journey to move from this more old-school hardware to more new cloud and through that process, we needed to change our systems. Changing out our CRM became an important component of that 'cause we need more flexibility and we needed to sort of be more contemporary and we worked with AppBuddy and our old system, we used to have Salesforce, and the field was pretty used to using that kind of interface. And when you build stuff like this, you don't always know how important it is to the field. You know, you have guesses at it, and as we looked at things that we had to do to prepare to move this was always something on our list that we felt like was important but we weren't able to do it immediately. It took us an extra release to get it out, so an extra few months. And through those few months, we learned the hard way that the field really wanted it. It was really impacting them. And we had guessed that we thought it was somewhere around 25% improvement in their overall productivity. And what we found was that it's at least that, if not more. >> Wow. >> Because they came back and said, "We can't do our jobs "without this, you guys gotta get it for us." >> So they said either AppBuddy or the highway? >> Yeah, pretty much. (laughs) Pretty much, AppBuddy or they're not happy. They're not happy all the time anyway but I feel like they-- >> Salespeople. >> That by getting that to 'em we were enabling them to go faster in a few things. And it's simple, it's hard to understand, I think, for everybody, it's a simple layer. Whenever you build a CRM or any kinda system, your job is to collect information and then display it back, make it easy to change. And the way CRMs typically work today is, you have a list for you of stuff, opportunities, or new registrations, quotes and you just have to look at that list and then pick one you wanna edit and then go to this details screen and look at it and then go to the edit screen and then edit it and then go back, back, back. And what AppBuddy provides, is it takes all that noise and makes it into one screen so that you can just simply make and change the data, the way you would expect to on a spreadsheet, in a simple experience. And once you give it to the reps, they sorta expect that as the tablestakes, and it's a gap if you look at most CRMs they don't have this kind of in-line edit capability out of the box. And so this is a great, SAP is really excited about this 'cause it gives them a way to solve this problem without having to build it themselves and that's the beauty of these kind of infrastructures where you can add capabilities by just plugging something in. >> Right. >> And it speaks using the APIs to the tool. And so all the rules that we build around the data about who should access it, what should happen when they change stuff, should we protect data. All that is followed, because AppBuddy works right through our APIs, through the SAP provides. And so it doesn't require a lot extra coding or anything. In fact. >> That's right. >> IT guys are standing over there somewhere. They don't like it 'cause I do it myself. I'll actually build experiences for the field really quickly 'cause that I can make a quick custom business process to support something that's needed. >> So, on the AppBuddy website, Klara, I saw, I love stats, and you guys said, we can save time and improve enterprise productivity by 5X to 10X. >> That's right. >> Those are big numbers. >> That's right. >> And you were saying there's been a massive improvement in employment productivity and I imagine in terms of the speed is essential. You know, we were talking, one of the underlying themes here at Sapphire, this year, is the intelligent enterprise, which demands the integration and the embedding of advanced emerging technologies, AI, for example, to make these enterprises truly intelligent, connecting supply chain and demand chain and it's essential, its table stakes these days. >> Yep. >> To be able to drive things faster, right? So that you guys can get what your customers need faster. >> Yep. >> So, you mentioned that huge productivity boost there but also that you were familiar with AppBuddy before your sales guys and gals were like, hey we need to have something that we're familiar with to be able to make our jobs better, so you're also doing, it sounds like a pretty good job of listening to your customers. >> Yeah, I try >> Who are probably very vocal. >> I try, I try, I mean, it's a hard job because you're sort of channeling the sales guys and in our world they're very different. In Europe, they sell very different than they sell in the US and APAC is different. And even within different sections of Europe or in the US, they act differently, and our goal is to try to streamline that so that they can act as much the same as they can across that and we can deploy sort of one experience without having to customize it totally. But tools like AppBuddy give us the ability to be much more targeted and flexible. A simple example I've been given pretty commonly is we have our sales kick-off this week also in Las Vegas and all of our sales guys are going there to learn about how to sell better, how to sell our new products and solutions and leverage some of our improved selling processes and before they go there, we wanted to have them identify a few key opportunities they're working on to say hey, these are the one's that I'm gonna use as my work case as I'm learning these new things, and in theory as we go through and finish our sales kick-off they go back and start the selling process those opportunities should sell at a higher rate then the other opportunities. And so to make that work, I configured a grid, or an AppBuddy list view, and all I put on it was the list of opportunities in one field that says, this is appropriate for our kick-off and so, instead of putting it in the middle of a very complex world, I sent 'em an email, they had a list and they just had to say this guy, this guy, and that guy, and that's all they had to do. And so our response rate on something, which if you sent a list of things to do for the field, they're not gonna respond. They're busy, they're makin' money. But in this case, because it was tied to the new learning and they felt value in it, 80% of 'em responded within 10 days. >> Yeah, wow. >> And you know, you just don't see that kind of response. But it works because it's a simple experience, right? The only thing they could do with that, they get an email that says, do this, they open it, they see the list, they click, yes, yes, yes, and it's done. And that's a whole business process that in the old days could take months to prepare for and create fields and deploy new code and do all the things you have to do. And in this case, I can create the fields in a day, create the grid in five minutes, and then I put it in an email, and done, you know? So this is where you take things to the next level and make it easier for the sales reps to do the things they need to do help us all be successful. >> Did it also sort of abstract, I can imagine, the fundamental challenges that go along with replacing an entire new CRM, going from Salesforce to SAP. >> Yeah. >> Has that been able to help kind of abstract some of the inner machinations of that so that the sales people can just focus on we know this same interface? >> It totally does, because the list views that we create are only the things they have to have. In any system like this you have a bunch of other fields that are specialized for, say, we have a professional services group and they really want to know blah blah but most sales reps, they don't deal with that at all. But you need it on the page, I need to build that. In these views, I can build it for a sales rep view that is perfect for them, right? Meaning there's no extra fields on that list. It's what you need to get your job done. And so it's like a laser focus, and then I can build a separate one for a different kind of role and give that one to them. So without changing the tool, I'm just creating a focused experience. It all uses the same things. You need sorting, you need filtering, you need a simple edit and that's all available and once they learn that core capability then the rest just kind of falls in. >> And then from your perspective it's probably business outcomes that, George, your CEO, is going to be really excited about, cost savings, employee productivity. >> Yep. >> I'm wondering though, we're talking about it in the context of what you're doing within your sales processes and your CRM. Klara, so obviously working with SAP, are there other businesses processes that AppBuddy can sit on top of and help to streamline the interface with? >> Yeah, great question, and actually thank you for asking 'cause I was gonna say, we talked a lot about sales but we could be enabling any other processes as well and services, for example, is a big one. I've got a list, a queue of cases, I want to make quick updates to that. I want to change things or I'm doing some forecasting, some account planning, but our vision, ultimately is to be able to bring from lead to cache all processes and again tailor it for each user, role specifically for them and we're not giving the solution, the customers are defining what do they need for each one of those processes and that's the power, I think, of this configurability and agility that you get. It's not built and hard coded. It's really you who puts it together. But again, we really have that vision of not only linking the CRM data but ultimately we would love to be able to get more use cases of, hey the CRM data together maybe with your ERP data, I want to see my opportunities but I also want to see the orders and I want to see the invoices so get really this 360 view of your customers that I think we've talked a lot about, even Bill McDermott was talking about it. It's so essential and critical to be customer focused is to have that visibility and with this application where you can basically pull data from wherever you need it for that specific view, you give your users that full visibility and therefore much faster answer questions, be in contexts, not lose critical information of a customer. >> Right, you're right, Bill McDermott did mention yesterday in the keynote about really what, SAP's been pretty vocal about for a while, they want to be one of the top 10 global brands. >> Mm-hmm. >> Right. >> Most valuable brands, and they want to be up there with Apple and Google. >> Right. >> And Coca-Cola, and that's for a software company that sells invisible technology, they're on their way. They're now ranked number 17, but he talked about this. >> Yeah. >> Kind of unique position that SAP's in to link and synchronize >> That's right. >> The demand chain with the supply chain >> That's right. >> Which is pretty revolutionary but ultimately, it's not about just having a 360 view of sales automation, it's of the entire customer process. >> Correct, yeah. >> So Steven, sounds like you are a rockstar in that app, with your sales guys going, hey, we need this AppBuddy technology to make our lives easier, our jobs easier. Do you foresee rolling the AppBuddy technology out to include other business processes? >> All the time, yeah, it's all about the data. And change management or getting the field to act in the same way is really hard and it doesn't sound like it should be but, (Lisa laughs) it's like having 1,000 cats on the table and getting them all to look one direction, it just doesn't happen, right? So my job is to make that and if I can have it with a single user experience, right, without having different flavors of screens and extra fields and narrow it down to what they need, bringing whatever data they need to flow from end to end it makes life easier and I've got 'em all trained. You know, we had very high usage in our previous platform and we're building now from that but they all know how to use it now so I don't have to train the cats to look in the same direction, they all know where to go. All I gotta do is add the data, right? And if you look at NetApp's transformation, from a storage company to a data company my job is really data, it's not about the tools as much. It's about how do we facilitate the salespeople to do more with what they have, right? How do I do a cross-sell, up-sell, how do I get them enabled so they can move faster so that's innate and built into what they do? >> Yeah. >> And in that you have to build, and we were just at another panel talking with SAP about, you have to give back to the sales reps and to the people doing the data 'cause CRM's not fun, I mean, it's not like, hey, I'm gonna go play my CRM tonight. (laughs) It's a different deal. CRM requires work and so you need to give them stuff back. Do machine learning, do things that provide scoring, show the probability of close, help them be more successful at their job and bring the data together in one spot. >> You know, I think yesterday one of the themes also was data and trust, the new currency, right? If you can't access it and extract valuable insights immediately and act on them then you risk being usurped by your competition. So being able to enable the data to be accessible, insights gleaned as quickly as possible, you must be the king. >> Well, I don't know about that. >> The data king. (laughs) >> Yeah, it's definitely our job. >> But as we wrap here in the last few seconds, digital transformation and every company has to go through it or you're not relevant but that requires a cultural transformation as well. >> It does. >> And it sounds like what you guys are doing together is helping that at least from the sales force's perspective of where change has to happen. >> Yep. >> Not only is it improving the efficiency of your SAP environment, your CRM environment, but it's also helping, sounds like, from a cultural perspective, as, hey, we've got to go through this transformation, let's make it where we can simplify, let's do that. >> Very much so. Just like I was talking about the cat problem. You've got the reps that are used to doing something the way and you're saying hey, we're gonna evolve and do something different and that change is rough and people don't feel like it's the right thing at times. The great news with this change and the timing of it is that when you're moving from one platform to the other, it's the one time in the life cycle of these products where you can make significant change, drop whole business process and they won't even notice it. I dropped three quarters of the stuff that we had before and just didn't build it. And I don't have people coming to me going, hey, I really miss doing that, and that's good news, we're helping drive the change. >> Yeah. >> Well, thank so much you guys for stopping by theCUBE and Klara telling us about AppBuddy, what you guys do, how you're working together with NetApp and SAP. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for the opportunity, Lisa, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin at SAP Sapphire 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, and we are in Orlando at SAP Sapphire Now 2018. We're very proud to be in the NetApp booth. NetApp has a very long standing partnership with SAP and we're joined by Roland Wartenburg, the Senior Director of Global Strategic Alliances at NetApp. Roland, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So NetApp and SAP have been partners for 17 years, very strategic. Let's talk about the role of NetApp in the SAP ecosystem. >> Yeah, happy to do that. So as I said it goes back to I think 2001 when the official partner contract was signed. Actually my role is, I would say it was special because I used to work for SAP, and the first time I worked with NetApp was in 1999. It was actually back then when the whole thing started, it's more than 21 years now, oh time is flying. And NetApp was always and is still a global technology partner. So when you look back at that time over the last 15 years was really about running SAP solutions on top of our technologies, started with F3, went over to SAP Enterprise Suite with Netweaver but now these days when you look at the whole SAP portfolio, there are so many new things. Not only SAP Hana, there is the whole SAP cloud movement with the cloud software service solutions with Hypres, Eribar, Conqueror, you name it, Feedclass, there's so many solutions out there which run now, either operated by SAP or done by SAP with one of their partners in the public cloud space like Google, Microsoft, AWS, for example. In addition you have the new areas with Leonardo covering IOT, Blockchain, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the nice thing is your assio from NetApp is really moving forward from the traditional role as a pure storage provider into so many new ways covering this with entry and data management so that we can offer our joint customers the solutions to cover actually, oh let's say offer solutions to solve the customer's problems in these areas. And IOT, for example, is a really interesting power because you have so many devices in the IOT space, everyone is talking about Etch computing or far computing and when you see how important it is to have data really transferred in a secure way, for example, in healthcare, no question about it, then it's clearly visible that a partner like NetApp offering service in this area for entry and data management, there's no better partner than us to do this with SAP. >> So can we talk about some of the larger ecosystems, NetApp, big partner with SAP, NetApp, big partner with Microsoft. You guys have your NFS service running in Microsoft. Can you talk about how NetApp has moved into a data driven company now. You're in all the major clouds. How important is that to the SAP relationship? >> Oh that's actually my daily business to, to not only cover the so called multi-partner strategies, but also to drive forward because when you look at the SAP, NetApp strategy in general what we do in the Cloud, what we do with Hybrid Cloud scenarios for example, driven by topics like GDPR. That went just live a couple of days ago. Data privacy protection really really important so then you look now at SAP customers where still the big majority runs systems on premises, no question about it, you saw the numbers Bill McDermott showed in the keynote, how many Es Vahana customs they have now. You see that there's a movement from on premises to the Cloud, but not completely. I would say it's also a Hybrid Cloud scenario, specifically what I just said, the whole GDPR topic for example, that customers really want to make sure they're still, have their own data under control either in the Cloud or on premises and this makes not only the challenge for us as a partner but it's also the very interesting part too as a partner to work now with more and more partners which were, before when you looked back at the last five, 10, 15 years, were not part of the SAP ecosystem at all. And that is really, for me in alignment with my daily business to extend this ecosystem in a way that we can offer customers in, almost like a metric you know we have all these partners and you say okay for this specific use case we work together with partner A, in SAP, here with partner B and whatever your name put in there, Microsoft, Skuli, etc. And then have this portfolio offered to the customer in a very comprehensive way. >> SAP has such a wide range of customers from Coca Cola to McLaren Formula One to NetApp as a customer and and Bill McDermott said during his keynote 390 thousand customers in 25 plus industries. They have this lofty goal of becoming one of the top ten most valuable brands globally with an Apple, a Google. They are now 17 on that list and one of the things that struck me yesterday outside of the convention center was seeing a bus that said ERP that you can talk to and hear from. And as they have this ambition to be up there with the Apples that have products and technologies that we interact with and, you know, now they're wanting ERP to become something that you can talk to, how does that help, kind of, lift NetApp? Does it open doors for you guys in new industries where SAP has this almost household brand name? What's the influence there on NetApp? >> Oh definitely, I would say when you look at the role of SAP in this industry it's growing growing. From a branding point of view, from how important you are, not only for Enterprise customers, also for normal end users like you and me and the interesting part is that SAP being the backbone of all these Enterprise business processes sometimes they're not so very known for the normal end users though, if I would ask my daughter hey, you know, of course she knows SAP, no question about it, but do you know any application SAP offers? She probably said no, not really. If I ask her do you know any applications Apple is offering, Microsoft, she would say yes of course so because these big partners with their solutions are actually more at the end user of the consumer user so but when you look now at what SAP is doing you just have to look at a show floor and which areas are SAP getting active in multimedia analytics, etc. You see a lot more branding of rareness all over the place. And as Bill McDermott said that that they really want to increase that and that's the great opportunity for us because when you linked us now from the solution business process level to an area where we are actually the leader in the space of data management. Data is everywhere, everyone knows that and data is created at such enormous speeds that you have to have customers, and end users have to have solutions in place either on a, in an Enterprise environment maybe on the desktop on the tablet or the normal end user on a mobile device to have the opportunity to manage this data. When I look, take my daughter as an example again. Of course she is on Instagram etc., all these things. And whenever you make a picture that's data created >> Right >> And stored somewhere, and it has to be handled. And of course you can talk about security, the different protocols, I think there is a really big need for a partner like NetApp to work together with the key to offer these entry and data management solutions. No question about it. >> So I'd like to hear your thoughts on as we look at all these challenges, whether it's data privacy, smart contracts, the ability to enable supply chain tracking, you know, the formulation of a medicine from the formulation to the manufacturing to getting it on the shelf to being injected, one of the big parts of that conversation is to become Blockchain. SAP announced that their part of a Blockchain initiative How do you view technology like Blockchain in the relationship of NetApp, which is a a data driven company with data storage products, data management products, security concerns and enabling these types of technologies or capabilities through something like Blockchain in your relationship with SAP. >> Blockchain is a really interesting topic for me because when you look at the history of Blockchain go back 20 years ago, it was actually developed for data management in a way, then someone figured out oh this can be used for financial services and the Bitcoin thingy started, and well everyone when you talk about to people what is Blockchain, everyone will think this is financial services, for banking, etc. But now SAP actually invited us last, um October, November last year to join the SAP, Blockchain co-innovation program because, you mentioned that when you use Blockchain now in supply chain management, specifically for smart contracts in manufacturing, automotive, shipment, wherever you have different partners working together in such a chain, and that's the word already, you have different blocks you put together because imagine we three would create a Blockchain, it probably wouldn't be that secure because three pieces can attract right flat away. But in a moment if you have a really more complex, longer chain of ecosystem partners working together like, for example, render producing some products having supplies, shipping that, up to the end user and you want to put this in a smart contract environment so that you as an end user could say oh today I want to have this part of the product enabled. Tomorrow I want to have this part, but not this one anymore. And so it goes back to the original vendor to enable a disfuntion almost like with cell phone technology. You can imagine that the data flow in such Blockchain environment is really really essential because you as a end user, you're gonna have to secure because at the end of the day you pay for it and you want to pay only for that featured function you ordered, so data management and Blockchain goes hand in hand here. So that's why we actually decided okay we want to work here together with SAP. It's a fairly new topic for many many customers so I see this coming for next years more and more and more the customers really see where this can help them to advance from a business point of view but yeah, we are part of that ecosystem. >> So as customers keep their eye on futuristic technologies such as Blockchain, they need these types of capabilities today. Like they still need to be able to do great supply train management. They still need to do data management. What are some of the highlights from a customer's perspective, between the relationship between NetApp technology, and SAP capability as it pertains to digital transformation? We had the NetApp CIO on theCUBE yesterday where he talked about the ability to have empower George, the CEO of NetApp with data driven decisions through that relationship. Are there relationships that you're seeing specifically between the alliances you work with that your like, you know what, no other company could do this other than NetApp and SAP? >> Of course, as I've said we have really the perfect partner for this new world because when you look at the history of NetApp there's a lot going on in terms of digital transformation. We're working much more now with the Cloud service providers We have a Cloud strategy. So we have this and now comes the word, the end to end data management strategy and that's really important for SAP and customers because the customers, they, when you look at SAP customers who've been with SAP for many many many years, they went through this history of free, Enterprise free, now to the Cloud, they still have to manage all the system and you have to make sure that the data is consistent wherever it sits has to call secured, it has to be manageable, it has to be archived, so all this functionality of this features with data you have to have in place and for us is then to report to offer the state of measurement really from the back end on premise over Hybrid Cloud scenarios to the Cloud up to the device the HTY's up to your mobile devices so that we have this whole, and it comes to it again, the chain enabled and that's, I think that is really our competitive advantage here in this partnership with NetApp of SAP for NetApp to offer really this complete entry and data management. >> I think the NetApp marketing team likes to call that the data fabric, the ability to create, whether it's ONTAP or Hybrid Cloud solutions, cloud value, etc., having that underlying technology. >> Exactly, and that's my responsibility the alliance media to look at the complete NetApp portfolio, every product and to make a decision together with other partners with product management, with marketing where it fits in the SAP product portfolio because I don't know if you've ever had the chance to look at the complete SAP portfolio. It's quite large. >> Extensive. >> Yesterday's numbers they have 330 solution, 2300 class of product, and of course in alliance media we can't do all the things, that would be crazy. So as an alliance media we usually have to make clear decisions where are the best opportunities to create business with SAP? What are your customers asking for? So looking at our complete product portfolio with ONTAP, ONTAP Select, the AllFlash technology, ACI, the whole Cloud services, Cloud volume, to make decision where this fits in this SAP world. And that's actually the nice thing that, over the time as I explained it, SAP portfolio increased so much from a portfolio functionality point of view that there is almost everywhere a place where the NetApp product will fit. But again, we have to make a decision where is the place to start because you don't want to boil the ocean but that's what we're working on at SAP to play this overall portfolio for the data frapping and entry and data management. >> One of the things Hasso Plattner talked about in his keynote this morning is that they were hearing, you've mentioned that the sheer volume of products that SAP alone had. You can imagine customers going, where do I start? And he was talking about, you know, hearing from customers who are sort of confused, if you look at the SAP Cloud platform all the different integrations, they talked about, kind of, working to sort of simplify, even naming conventions so the customers can understand better. How does that help NetApp be able to, as you said, kind of make the right decisions on you can do so many different things with SAP? Where do you focus the business and also make sure the customer really can clearly understand the different choices that they have from NetApp to work in SAP environments? >> Oh great question, because a short story, when I look back, as I've told you I was working long time for SAP and when you're an employee of a company you always look at your portfolio, your... And the moment when you leave, and I did this in 2010. I was then six years with Citrix. The first, I remember the first Monday when I was, I was sitting at the Citrix desk, the first time ever I looked at the complete SAP portfolio and I said wow, okay this would be a lot of work. And Hasso was totally right because there's so many solutions for different industries and then they have also different solutions for N Class Enterprises for the SAP, down to, for example with SAP Business One, down to the small chaperone to call on, maybe with 10 employees, and when you look at this whole solution package you wonder, okay, how we fit in there? And this whole run simple, make it simpler this really helps us a lot because at the end of the day we have to make sure that we can tell the customer where the NetApp product fits to the over as a people solution. If that piece appears already difficult to understand it won't be easy if we fit to that more or less in a meshful environment so the easier the SAP colleagues from SAP marketing and product management, the easier they make it for their customers to understand how this whole solution would flow to work, the easier for us to explain how our products fit in the same picture, no questions about it. >> So we are at a massive location. The size of this convention center is 16 American football fields. Huge, tons of partners, tons of customers. As this conference comes to a close in the next day, what are some of the things that you are most energized about, that you've heard from SAP with some of the big announcements in terms of, you know the NetApp, SAP relationship continuing? What are some of the things that you just went, yeah? >> I would say, I come now to Sapphire since 2003. Time is flying. But this one is, as we especially, just enormous as you mentioned, enormous space of the show floor and the number of customers be here. The number of partners, if you come to Sapphire for a long time you go to show floor and see right away ah that's a large one, we have more partners. This year it's unbelievable. It's really large, and the nice thing for us here to be part of this ecosystem is that SAP bring all these customers to Sapphire and inviting us to be part of this ecosystem will enable us also to win more customers, no question about it, this is what we really want to do together with SAP here, go into new business areas, winning new customers for new environment, especially in new world of the whole IOT space, Hybrid Cloud scenarios, when in the past when you look at new ways like automotive, IOT space essuvitive, when you look at what we did in the past and then I was not as active in areas as SAP I so that's a great opportunity for us and when you look at whatever SAP announced here at Sapphire it really, everything fits in this strategy so really excited to be here with you too. >> Well Roland we thank you so much for being part of enabling theCUBE to be in the NetApp booth here at Sapphire and we thank you for stopping by and sharing some of the things that you're working on. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP Sapphire Now 2018. Thanks for watching.

>> From Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE, covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018. Brought to you by Netapp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are in Orlando in the Netapp booth at SAP Sapphire 2018. We are joined by a new person to theCUBE, Amit Sinha, the Founder and Chief Customer Officer at WorkSpan. Amit, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, excited to be here. >> So I'm really excited to understand more about WorkSpan, what you guys do. Tell us a little bit about that and what opportunity you saw in the market with respect to alliances that you went, ah, why is it no one's doing that, and you have this great idea. >> Yeah, absolutely, we had this ah-ha moment. In this day and age of connectedness around the world, there is not a single company that goes to market alone. Right, when the reality's that we all serve the same demanding end customers. We've got to align our marketing, we've got to align our messages. We need to align our innovation, and we need to sell together in order to earn more. Easier said than done, right? So that's where we saw the opportunity. That what if there was a network of alliances that are connected with one another, and if they can truly define a joint innovation, a joint solution, take it to market, co-market it. When they co-market they can get twice the audience at half the cost, and then co-sell. That way they can improve their vend rates, and we are truly seeing that. So that's the opportunity we saw, to really make the life of the alliance manager, the alliance leader, simpler and easier to do in this connected day and age. >> Well, essential because also on your website, 60 to 75% of announced alliances fail. That's enormous. So talk to us about some of the successes that you have had talking with companies, as you say that nobody goes to market alone these days. Did they have those ah-ha moments as well when you came knocking on there and said, hey look what we're developing. >> Absolutely, so look at this large event here. Sapphire is one of the biggest enterprise events out here. Over a hundred strategic alliances are here from SAP and they will all make key announcements here about joint products, big golden markets, but can you imagine three months down the line, 70% of them will be actually catching dust on the ground. They won't be even worth the paper the business cases were building on, and that's such a wasted opportunity. The amount of due diligence that goes into creating an alliance, thinking about the business case, people putting together solutions. But then once they announce it in the key note, that's where the decline really happens. There's no operational support behind, how do you take this to market? That's where WorkSpan comes in. We provide the joint sales plan, the joint marketing plan, the joint solution plan, to really operationalize the people coming together across the partnership. In India we say that a marriage is between families and that's very true. Some brilliant alliances between companies, deep in the company, it's not just the alliance manager working with another alliance manager. It's really marketers, sales force, alliance people. So it's a family of two companies coming together. That's where WorkSpan provides the foundation, the consistent process logic, and a data driven argument around it. So you can take decisions on the base of data to say, okay where is my alliance working and where does it need help? You don't do postmortems after that. You can fix as you're going along. >> So let's talk about that process and, data driven nature of alliances. Alliances are complex setups just starting at the very beginning of saying, you know what, we're two companies. We overlap in areas of competition, but there's these outliers where we really can partner together to make that happen. You look on a show floor, you see brands that are obvious. You know, we're in the NetApp booth for, and we've talked SAP Hana an awful lot and right across the way is the Oracle booth and they're talking heavily SAP on Oracle. So there's this opportunity to cooperate, and there's this area of competition. A lot of that is data driven. >> Yep. >> How do you capture that data and help create the process logic to help companies identify alliances and then execute upon and manage those alliances going forward? >> By the way, that's an excellent question. So when you are living in a network in this interdependent world, you will partner somewhere and you will compete with some places. So for this network world, we need a new security mark. So that only people who are allowed to see something are able to see that thing. We call this Attribute-based Access Control. I compare that to traditional applications which do Role-based Access Control. Just because you're higher up in the organization you get to see everything. But this new model of security, Attribute-based Access Control Mark, allows the right people to get into the right plans, so that they and they alone can see it. So you might be working for SAP on let's say the Google relationship or the Apple relationship, or the Oracle relationship, or the Netapp relationship, only those right people have those accesses, and the owners of those programs can control and secure that data. So what it allows a company to then do is it's even more secure in this day and age. We can argue that in this day and age with GDPR and all those compliance efforts that WorkSpan is far more secure than sending spreadsheets out, which is the current mode of collaboration. So you can enforce a corporate policy around what is your shared data, what is your private data. So in the same opportunity, you can have private data for your own company employees to see that is never shown to partners. So that translucency, not transparency, that translucency is really, really important when you do alliances, and then we understand this model of WorkSpan. >> So how do you help like, for alliances marketing for example, and say there's a joint campaign, Netapp with one of their partners for example, and they wanna do some lead generation activities, events, webinars, lunch and learns, digital campaigns and they're gonna get leads that come in from that and they might say, okay, well, I don't wanna give you all of that. How do help with some of that? I mean, it kinda goes to the competition theme a little bit, from a marketing standpoint, I'm just curious how do you help either reduce or mitigate concerns that companies, alliance partners would have in that space, or do you come in and sort of help them from a strategic area to normalize some of these concerns? >> Yeah, so what we do is we partner with the companies marketing automation systems. So let's say Netapp is working with SAP cloud for Customer. So at this event we announce an integration between WorkSpan and SAP cloud for customer. Similarly other customers may have other marketing automations solutions. Let's say (mumbles) or a salesforce.com. So we integrate with those systems. What happens is marketers can continue their contact database and and delete machine in those systems and figure aggregate result on WorkSpan, to really see which alliances are doing well. So we don't get in to what marketing automation systems do we partner and we to get with them. So that way what happens is we are extending the investment that a company already has made in their marketing automation stack, and we come across as the partner or alliance automation stack. So that way alliances with one another. And why is this important? This is important because if you're like an Intel or a Netapp you may be working with a who ecosystem of povides, and they themselves have their own marketing automation systems. So imagine if you're an Intel or if you're a Netapp or you're an SAP, you can get all this data back because there's WorkSpan in the middle. So as a network you may have just 1% of the data but your overall network is far more intelligent with all the data hat you can collect. >> So again, whenever we get a topic like this, we have to involve John Furrior's name, and get some Blockchain conversation goin' on. (laughing) From a ideal, you know, basically there's just you guys become an authority of authentication, you, there's the reputation, there's all these fundamental infrastructure things that you have to determine. That you think through it, you scale this out beyond just you know, alliances and auto (mumbles) technology in one area. There's all the attributes and manufacturing and other companies. How does this align with, or a more aggressive question, how does this plant like the ideas of smart contracts, with the likes of Blockchain? >> Yeah, absolutely. So Blockchain is a really good implementation of what we really have done in WorkSpan. So in WorkSpan, if you think about it, it's a network. Their transactions are like flowing across different parties and these transactions are trusted, right? Across different parties when let's say an Intel or Netapp sees a proven now platform. The process extends to the partner that they get a contract that's approved. So in some ways, in a living in a connected world you need to have these kinds of smart contracts and trusting data source that is not just your own. We're living in a shared data world, right? So one of the key partners that put, that Netapp works with is both Intel as well as SAP, right. So because SAP program funds an SAP marketing campaigns right here, and so is Intel's and they both come from (mumbles) parties. Netapp is able to trust that data, trust that transaction, execute. So we provide that trust foundation based on technologies on data. >> Sorry Amit, that's kind of the trust foundation, it sort of aligns to what Bill McDermott said in his keynote this morning about you know, trust being this new currency. You gus have been attaining a lot of momentum in the Fortune 500 space. >> Yes. >> Tell us a little bit about how you're doing that and ten if there's a customer example that you, that's one of your favorites that you think really articulates your brand value, share that too. >> Absolutely. So we've been very fortunate that we've been trusted by a lot of Fortune 500 companies to come on the platform. Really want to orchestrate their platform and their ecosystem, and we are seeing this need that the head of alliances is seeing they ought to be very strategic at the board where they want to be data to run and numbers to them. They're no longer saying I'm okay by saying that my alliance with such and such partner is going well. They wanna be quantified, they want to say it's going well by this much. So this is where the mean value prop is, we have had companies on our platform that have genetic for 8% mornings that have reduced their marketing cost by 50%. Intel and SAP specifically, this is their 12 year on our platform, and year on year they have collaborated a more number of campaigns deeper in the regions where their marketers are working with Intel marketers for example. So they are a 24x auto marketing investment. >> Wow. >> Where as they were expecting an 8 to 10x in a total marketing investment. So dramatically increased. For SAP, that meant $100,000,000 more in revenue at your marketing cost. Just because the two companies can unleash their shared potential with shared customers across the world. Now this happened, this is not an overnight success, this is a three year success in the making. Where there's deep partnership and collaboration at the regional level, at the marketing (mumbles) level and all will and up at the head of alliance (mumbles). So Intel's one company, we have SAP of course is a marketing account, they've normally worked with hardware alliances like Netapp and Intel but also their assigned alliance out of WorkSpan so a large, as many a size that you see here, those programs are coming on WorkSpan as well. We have the norm one bite on WorkSpan as well. HPE is on WorkSpan so that's a great example as well for Fortune 500 companies working on platform. >> Wow, a lot of momentum. You know it's for companies lik SAP, like WorkSpan, where you've got software, you've got something under the hood that a lot of people won't know what's happening or for their jobs have, to know or care. It's always challenging for a brand to go how we show a value of our product services when it's not something that we can touch or see or feel. And it's really through the validation, the best you can get is through the voice of your customer. And the stats that you've shared, you must be sort of salivating with, we can actually help you increase legion of 58% or increase revenue opportunities by 40%. I mean, you've got some really substantial data driven >> Yep. >> facts to show how you're transforming a business. That's got to be, that's gonna make you know, doing business a little bit easier that you know >> Yeah. >> you've got such solidity. >> Actually, when you think of the word it's really diverse right. Where you can see patterns from this type. So when you work with a lot of partners and you're orchestrating them on your ecosystem, you're running different kinds of marketing campaigns or different sales, a portion of these. They have different traction depending on how you actually execute it then right? But when you step back and you say, hey webinars don't really work well in Japan. Late evening events work better in Japan but in the U.S. on the West Coast, it seems like webinars work better or such and such partner does a really good job of hiring clients when events. But that this other partner I spent a lot of money with it all seems to go in search or plan advertising that I don't see a lot of benefit of, right. So you can make these data driven arguments by partner, by channel, by investment, by you know, by any metric that you want now. So now the head of alliance, and we, this is exactly where divided platform will expand this, now you can be totally data driven and say this works, that doesn't work, so I should do more of this and spend less there. >> Fantastic. Well Amit, I wish we had more time to keep chatting but thank you so much for stopping by and sharing not only who WorkSpan is and what you do but some of the significant impact that yo can deliver to your customers. >> Thank you so much for the opportunity. Love talking to you about. >> Ah, likewise. We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from SAP Sapphire in 2018, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to VeeamON 2018. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. #VeeamON, our second year of VeeamON coverage, this is day one. Carey Stanton this year is the Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam. We're having a great conversation about it. Hockey, Cape Cod. >> Golden Retrievers. Golden Retrievers. >> Oh, I love dogs. >> Dave, how many times do we travel the world and talk to a local? (laughs) >> Boston area guy. >> So welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> And welcome to Boston. >> A year and a half in Boston, right downtown empty nesters. My two children are back doing university in Canada. I've got a sophomore and a junior so my wife and I are living in Boston empty nesters, it's awesome. >> That's great, you've got to love it. And I love the fact that you're from Ottawa, but you're a Bruins fan. >> Yes, I've basically turned into a Bruins fan. I'm a Red Sox fan and a Patriots fan and the Celtics are in the playoffs. >> Yes, love this guy. >> You'd better be if you're working for Peter MacKay. >> Yeah, you have to. It's like you have to sign in. And I've worked for Peter for 17 years, three different companies. >> Okay, so you were at VMware. >> I was at Vmware, I was at Desktone, and then we did IBM and part of that was Watchfire which we sold to IBM. So, a long journey. >> So give us the update, what's happening in alliances. >> Yeah, so it's great. As you know we have our global reseller agreement that we announced most recently with NetApp just in March. We're now on their GPL. We went live on Cisco, we announced Cisco back in August but we went live on November 15th and we have HPE and all three of them are just exceeding expectations as far as the demand and the interest we're getting from our sellers. As you've seen from Peter and Veeam, we're targeted to the enterprise. We have our messaging our own hyper-availability. So these partners bring us a huge opportunity by working into their customer base, but we close 133 customers a day, right you heard Peter mention that. But we're bringing them into our customer base which is traditionally SMB and commercial and we're working with them on their enterprise. But an exciting stat for that one is that we say no naked Veeam. When you sell with an alliance partner it's six to eight times larger than if we sell standalone. So it's working, the messaging and the enabling we have with our field and we're 100% channel. So that's working very well on just the enablement with Jeff Giannetti, Sean, and Olivia, and Ameya. >> Well the other thing that you guys seem to have done is figured out how to take a long view, a strategic view with these partners. Many organizations, they look for the tactical. Okay, how much money >> Yes, yeah. are we going to make this year? You're looking at the lifetime value of a customer. >> Correct. >> It's frankly quite unique in this business. >> Well, the interesting thing we're doing which is not just on the global resellers which is on all of our partners is that we look and say what's a good partnership look like or what's the great partnership look like. And what we have is the investment that we are because we're private is we'll do the front-end investing up front. We'll do a joint business plan, have shared metrics across the table. So whether that's with Pure Storage or with Nutanix, with our VMware, Microsoft, we front-load all of those investments. To your point, is that we're not just waiting to see did we have success year one and then we'll invest year two. We take that three year business case view up front and do the front-end load investment. So, what does that mean? That's a dedicated business development team. We have 25 people working and go to market with HPE or 12 working with Cisco and we take that from technical architects, field marketing, product marketing and to make that in clot entire plot. >> Yeah, Carey, I wonder if you can give us a little bit of a compare and contrast. VMware built one of the best ecosystems out there. We already talked once today. For every dollar you spend on VMware you did 15, 20 dollars with the ecosystem, Veeam's nice vibrant ecosystem >> Yes. getting deeper with some of those partners. Give us a little compare from your previous life. >> Yeah, sure, so at VMware no question that they had that solution so we take that here as well and we call it the Veeam Currency. So when you're going in and selling Veeam, if you're selling an average selling price of $10,000, we're working with our partners where they're seeing that that deal is going to turn into a $50,000 traditional with an alliance partner sale in conjunction with their hard work. So they're managing the entire software process so they're seeing their up leveling the messaging so no longer just pinpointing at a hardware solution. And they're increasing their average selling price by 10x, so Cisco is at a great set. 10x, again I'll repeat 10x with Veeam on doing those deals. First it's just trying to go in and sell HyperFlex Standalone. >> It's just a really critical time in the industry right now. Our research shows that there's a gap between what the business expects in terms of the degrees of automation, the level of quality of services and what IT is actually delivering. So that says that customer base is really ripe for churn in a lot of accounts. And so you guys being aggressive with partnerships in regard to making that investment as a private company, the timing frankly couldn't be better. Especially as you go from what was a virtualized world where you guys did very, very well to now this cloud, multi-cloud digital, you know throw in whatever buzzword you want. But, we are at an inflection point. >> Yeah, we sure are. I think that what we're seeing with our partners especially on HPE and Cisco and Nutanix is they're all near hyper converged and so they're going in a whole different sales motion. We're seeing it on our hybrid cloud, we're a number one close sell partner with Microsoft. So we have our backup, native backup to Azure and so we're seeing this destructive market in the market place and we're also seeing a lot of our partners have competitive takeouts of Dell Avamar, right and their data domain. So we're going in and taking out Dell Avamar and they're going in and data domain so we have a lot of synergy and so as these traditional vendors such as Avamar, Veritas, Commvault, and the IBM Tivoli Solution is that we have those sales motions going with our partners that are going after those hardware solutions. So, again, it's very synergistic with our tier one partnerships. >> Well you see a huge drive towards simplicity. I mean, another thing you guys do really well is, and it sounds so simple, but you're compatible with a lot of different clouds, for example. So more work loads, more environments increases your TAM and your friendliness to partners. It sounds simple, but execution is not. >> Yeah, we're a Swiss based company, we remain. The Switzerland is that we work with all partners in all routes and so we've seen a lot of success in that way. We see a lot of demand coming from our customers, our partners wanting to work with us in these multi-cloud solutions that we have with Microsoft. >> Biggest challenges, is it a channel conflict? Dealing with deal registration, I mean, what are some of the challenges you guys are facing? >> I think that challenge is just enabling our sales teams on how to work with these partners and to understand the sales motion. And some of our sales execs are 20 year veterans that have come in and worked in a traditional place where when you went out to tackle an enterprise deal, you did that standalone. And we realize that we don't take any deals direct. So just getting them in the sales motion with our partners is a challenge, but one that is easily adapting to success that we're having in the field. >> Alright, Carey I know you're super tight on time. We promised to get you out >> Yes, sir. of here. We've got to leave it there, but thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. We really enjoyed having you. >> Okay, thank you very much. >> Alright, keep right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from VeeamON 2018. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> We're back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here in the DEVNET Zone at Cisco Live 2018, beautiful Barcelona. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Mike Bundy who is the head of Global Strategic Alliances with Pure Storage, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> As a first time guest, give us a little bit about your background, you're relatively new to Pure, but you know this ecosystem quite well. >> Absolutely, so, relatively new with Pure. Spent 21 years at Cisco leading various technology groups in the company. Most recently from there led the Global Enterprise Data Center sales force, so a lot of background, experience around cloud, virtualization, automation in the data center space, so very excited to be at Pure. >> When you talk about Pure, here at the Cisco show, I know it's FlashStack, but give us a little bit of the kind of the breadth and the depth of the relationship there. You hear a lot of themes talked about at this show, everything from IoT, just the future of where all these technologies are going, so where is the intersections? >> Yeah, so FlashStack is a partnership that Cisco and Pure have to deliver converged infrastructure in the marketplace. What differentiates us is really our ability to derive high, high performance. You'll definitely see value as you deploy just about any database application. It drives a much more economical, valuable solution to the customer base as a result of that. And we're poised to capture new trends in the marketplace with explosion of IoT, intelligence, whether it's deep learning, neural networks, or business intelligence, with the likes of SAP or various other applications deployed on Hadoop infrastructure. >> Want to unpack some of those, because you said a lot there. Our research from Wikibon coming into 2018, data's at the center of it all. I mean, talk to Cisco, data, majorly important. Not just moving it things, but how do I get value out of the data. Start with IoT, you mentioned in there, how does a company, I think a pure storage company, how does Pure have an impact in relationship on the IoT discussion. >> Right, so, IoT in itself is driving a huge explosion in terms of the amount of data. In two years, according to IDC, it'll be 20 times the amount of capacity on the internet will be the amount of data that's created, so for us, deploying a platform that allows you to really take data and look at it as a platform and how you use it is really one of our strengths of the company. Our software set is called Pure1 and it really takes a look and helps you handle and manage that data very differently than any of the other traditional storage solutions that have been in the marketplace. But it was all built on the foundation of Flash, so you get the scale and you get the performance that Flash brings at the same time. Very, very powerful, and we're glad to see trends driven by IoT to drive that explosion for us. >> FlashStack, talk a little bit about it. What is interesting to customers these days? The trend of converged infrastructure now has gone on for over eight years. There's the buzz of hyperconverge, there's cloud is kind of front and center, why is converged infrastructure in general, and FlashStack specifically so important today? >> If you break down the market in terms of where converged infrastructure fits, it's both in the hybrid cloud and the private cloud side of things. There's still tremendous growth in the private cloud world where we see a lot of deployments there. If you look at the solution, it's very cohesive with what Cisco has, from a UCS standpoint. It's a stateless platform, it's very simple to manage, it's very scalable, you can get 10 times the rack density from a storage and compute perspective with a FlashStack than you can the competitors'. So it's really an innovative, modernized, converged infrastructure stack. As you said, CI's been around for eight years, this FlashStack's been in the marketplace about two years and has had tremendous growth in that timeframe as a result. We continue to try to drive simplification, automation, a different consumption model, how you maintain it, from a cost perspective is different, so it has a very unique value proposition compared to other CIs in the marketplace. >> One of the founders of Wikibon, David Floyer, when the Flash wave started he said to companies, it's database, database, database, there's so much opportunity to really transform both the economics as well as the business productivity. It wasn't the first-use case that happened in converged infrastructure, but definitely somewhere Pure's focus has been. Talk about what are some of the results, what did customers see when they moved to CI for business-critical applications like database. >> If you look at the timing that it takes to develop an application, a lot of that is how easy are you able to grab the data, create a usable format of that, do your development test cases, and then move it back into production. So the way that the FlashStack and the Pure Flash arrays allow you to take that data, you don't have to necessarily copy it and create replicas, it's very fast and easy and we've seen developers cut down 25-30% of the development time on an SAP database or an Oracle database, right? So it's drastically different than what they've been used to in the past. >> Mike, you lived for years on the Cisco side of the equation and now you're partners. What's it like to be a Cisco partner these days? They've got dozens of partnerships on the storage side, so how do they make Pure feel special yet understand kind of the cooperative nature of our industry. >> I think what we're trying to make sure we do here is focus on the customer outcome, right? So we are really working day-in and day-out to make sure that whatever we do drives business value to the customer. And that is what separates the partnership from others. When you take a look at that, it's given us the ability to grow the amount of resources that Cisco and Pure can contribute into the marketplace. It also has allowed us to help develop new lines of business for some of our other partners in the ecosystem. It's very competitive, as you call out, but there's still a great partnership here and Cisco's been very supportive of our growth. >> It's been a few years since I've attended a Cisco Live myself, but feels that the attendees and the focus of the show has gone through a bit of a transformation. We're sitting here in the DEVNET Zone, lots of people here coding. I walked through the World of Solutions, it's not just networking, you know, networking's a big piece. What have you seen changing over the few years? How does that impact Pure and just personally, what do you look at this ecosystem? >> Going back to what I said earlier, it's all about driving value for the outcome of the customer. What is the business challenge you're solving, what is the opportunity they're seizing and how can we develop a more agile platform that allows their software teams to really take advantage of that. So really that's what we're focused on, is what can we build horizontally that makes the platform more cloud-friendly, more automated, and then you can drive down to specific vertical value propositions within that, whether it's automotive industry, airline industry, healthcare industry, et cetera. That's really where I've seen a transition from, it's not as much about speeds and feeds of the infrastructure, it's about the higher-level outcome for the customer business. >> When it comes to Pure's business in general, and FlashStacks specifically, any differences here in the European geographies compared to the United States that you could comment on? >> Not really. I think from a Flash adoption period, the adoption rate has been higher for all Flash arrays in the United States. As you move to Europe, we're seeing an acceleration of that here. What we saw, probably about two years ago in the United States, so there's actually a ton of excitement here now, in terms of the opportunity for the FlashStack and what Flash can do for that. >> It's interesting you mention for Flash, and even for converged infrastructure, there's still a large percentage of the market that hasn't kind of dove in. >> Correct. >> Any commentary as to what's holding people back or you know, some "aha" moments that you've had customers that, those that haven't gone for the simplicity of converged or hyperconverged, that they should get on board? >> I think if you look at Flash in general, it was focused on high IOPS, input/output performance requirements initially, virtualization, virtual desktops were very big, and then your higher-performance applications now. Now that you've seen what we've been able to drive in terms of full functionality across the platform, it's not just about Flash and performance, it actually is about a storage platform now. And the economics of the entire support are making it more palatable now to move other workloads. I think you'll continue to see this expansion, I think Gartner and IDC talk about the next three to five years, you'll see a much greater greater density of applications moving onto Flash versus what it was in the past. We're actually releasing very soon and we'll be integrating into FlashStack other platforms that we have around FlashBlade, which is real focused on unstructured data. Things that wasn't necessarily rows and columns from a block storage perspective. And I think you'll see that help drive some of this disruption and transition in that space. >> Mike, as we look into 2018, what should customers look to find from the Pure and Cisco partnership? >> Absolutely. We'll continue to drive more tools with FlashStack that allow you to more easily and rapidly deploy the system itself. We will also be looking toward new-use cases that are very relevant in this space. To capture the demands of the customer, so things around business intelligence, things around artificial intelligence, we'll scale that out. And you'll also look at seeing us drive toward more scalable, foundational elements of a storage platform. So those are some of the things that you'll definitely see from us moving forward. >> All right, well Mike Bundy, really appreciate all the updates on Pure, on FlashStack, and your partnership with Cisco. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live Europe 2018 in Barcelona, I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. (bright poppy music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for SiliconANGLE Media's, theCUBE's exclusive coverage for three days for HPE Discover 2017. We're on day three, down to the wire here. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE with my co-host Dave Vellante, my partner in crime with Wikibon. Our next guest, Ric Lewis. Software Defined Cloud Senior Vice President, President and GM of HPE, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And Kate Swanborg, Senior Vice-President Tech Communications and Strategic Alliances, DreamWorks Animation. Welcome back as well. >> Thank you. >> John: Great to have you guys back. >> It's good to be here. >> So obviously DreamWorks, you guys are a big customer, Ric you are now leading up the team for Software Defined infrastructure, as we call it programmable infrastructure, a lot of great things. >> Ric: Yeah. >> Synergy we talked heavily about last year. >> Ric: Yeah. >> I kind of was geeking out with you on that in terms of all that programming ability and automation. Meg story this week was simplifying hybrid IT, which is the key part of where Software's coming in. >> That's exactly right. >> And so we got DreamWorks here, what's your vision in how that's going to happen? How do you take that simple message and put it into practice? >> Yeah so, we're completely about making hybrid IT simple, and we have three primary vectors that we're driving in order to make that happen. The first is our hyperconverged appliances that we deliver, and the second is HPE Synergy, our composable, and the third is our hybrid IT management stacked software that we have. And we've got momentum across all of those. In Hyper Converged, you guys know we acquired SimpliVity, it closed in February. Got a lot of customers on that. We had Red Bull on-stage here at Discover talking about their use case of that in their racing. It was a packed house, people completely interested in all the things we're doing in hybrid IT. That's SimpliVity. Synergy, we now have almost 400 customers that have adopted Synergy. We started shipping in volume in December, and DreamWorks Animation is one of those customers, and real excited for you to hear a little bit about how they're using it, but we had, I think we had around 10 customers from Synergy across all kinds of verticals and use cases, including service providers that were on-stage here. And the final thing is our hybrid IT management stack, a program that we introduced here at Discover called Project New Stack. So, that's what's going on in Software Defined & Cloud, it's a lot right now. >> And we had a SimpliVity customer on by the way, they were really glowing. >> Yeah. >> Great to see that happen. >> That was a great story. >> Great story, Kate, so DreamWorks, you guys have a business, you've got to put a product out there and so you got to look at technology, make it work for you, and sometimes you got to get in the weeds, there's pieces and pieces, at the end of the day you got a product to deliver. How are you guys taking some of the things that are coming out at HPE and putting them into action? What are some of the things you're doing? >> Well, I think one of the things that is often surprising to people is just how much technology we consume to make a CG feature animated film. These films take 80 million compute hours to render the images, petabytes of storage and we're typically working on five or six active films in production because they take us four or five years to make. And so we want to be able to have the capability of releasing two or three films a year, we must have simultaneous production. But of course, not all of the productions are exactly the same, and we've also got other media opportunities, whether it's television or theme park. And so, what's critical to us is that we're actually able to provision the right amount of digital resource to the right project quickly and easily so that as those creative inspirations are growing and burgeoning at the studio, we've got the resource behind it in an effortless fashion. >> And how are you making that happen with the Synergy for example, because last year we were looking at thinking well this has got a lot of potential. I mean you can do it through the orchestration, making the management work kind of takes that, abstracts away a lot of the complexity. How are you guys dealing with that, I mean how have you put that into action? >> Well, we've been working within a hybrid environment for years now, so the idea of a hybrid environment isn't new to us. The key however, is that it's labor intensive. It's time-consuming. In order to get all of the right configurations of the networking and the storage, the compute to actually work in a realtime environment for our artists, that has taken us an enormous amount of effort over the years. What we're looking for in the Synergy deployment is to reduce those weeks down to days and those days down to hours. Once we're able to do that, our engineers can go off and focus on the niche technology solutions that actually matter to the artists. And that's where we want to get the business benefit. >> And with Synergy, compute, storage and fabric all managed under the same management domain. >> That's right. >> Single API that you can get access to all those resources, so it makes it super easy. It's the world's easiest way to do infrastructure as a service, it's built into the platform natively. >> That's right, and one of the things that's been so impressive to us is that we've been working with the Pointnext team to come in and actually configure this for our environment. Everybody uses a high-performance compute environment, but nobody's is exactly the same. The configure ability of this and the customability of this to our environment has been critical, and we've seen incredible benefits from that. >> So Ric, we kind of pushed you in theCUBE last year, cause you were saying "there's nothing like this in the marketplace". We said, okay define what's different. (John laughs) One of the things you touched on was the fluid pools of infrastructure. >> Yes. >> And Kate, what you just described is bringing technology to different digital teams. >> The dynamicism if you will. >> Absolutely. >> Being able to dynamically configure the thing, yes. >> So, let's test it. I mean, it sounds like that's exactly what you're doing, and how is this different than the infrastructure that you used to have? >> So, the reason that it's different is that we've got, we've got a simply said, a single infrastructure. We've got a compute farm, we've got storage, and historically what we had to do was actually partition off certain pieces of that for certain productions in order to protect their resources. The problem with that is that any given day, particularly in a creative environment, maybe they're using all of it, maybe they need more, maybe they need less. The challenge is is that historically if they needed less we can't reprovision that to another production in order to take advantage of their inspiration and their business motivations. Now we can. Now we have the opportunity to actually have the infrastructure be as dynamic as our creative environment, and that's saying a lot. >> And you can reconfigure those resources three clicks, five minutes, you literally can deprovision -- >> Kate: That's it. >> So the old way they're like bitchin and moanin, where's the servers? >> Absolutely. >> Right. >> And running around scrambling. >> They're on order. (all laugh) >> Six weeks. No this what we're talking about. >> Yeah. >> This is about speed, right? I mean this is -- >> It absolutely is. >> Alright, so I want to ask you a question about the HPE event. You mentioned you're here. So, a lot of people go to these events and they try and extract all the action. You've heard a lot of firsts, last year was Synergy first, big claim there. We're hearing some security stuff with servers here. >> Ric: Yeah. >> As a practitioner that comes to these shows, what's your strategy when you come to an event like HPE Discover, and obviously the schmooze is going on and getting wined and dined by HP, a big customer, but like when you go in there, what are you looking for, how do you connect the dots, what tea leaves do you read, what's your strategy? >> Well, I'll tell you, one of the things that really interests me about Discover is we've got a deep partnership with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. We're talking to Hewlett-Packard Enterprise all the time. So we might actually think that we know what's going on. It's not true, there's so much innovation happening that when we bring our team to this show, we learn things that could really help our business. I'll give you a great example, so we learned this week about SimpliVity. Now, we had sort of heard about it, but we had not taken our time out of our schedules to really understand how that could help our VM environment. Our team's sitting in one of the panels this week, and he's texting other engineers on our team going "We have got to look at this next week at DreamWorks Animation". That's the kind of environment this is. I'll tell you something else, New Stack, we're going to lean heavy into New Stack because we believe that the innovation that we're seeing in that space is really, finally going to deliver on this promise of cloud that's been out there. >> What specifically about New Stack do you like? I want to just double down on that. Is it the rule of your own, is it the flexibility, what's the big thing there? >> Well, again this is one of those things where our team today is actually writing code and creating architectures that are sort of New Stack-like, but we're having to do it, we're having to invest our own time. It's trial and error, some of the things work some of the things don't, and that time is not being spent focused on our animation productions. The fact of the matter is, here's Hewlett-Packard actually doubling down and making sure that there is going to be a robust solution that works, that we can bring into our environment. >> We're in enterprises across the world every day. We're having these conversations, and most enterprises are doing kind of a roll-your-own cloud kind've thing. >> That's right. >> They're playing with OpenStack, they're playing with Kubernetes, they're playing with all these tools, they got a bunch of custom code, but we're really what we're trying to do with New Stack is take the best of what they're all trying to do, constrain that down, take our standard Software Defined infrastructure as the base, put a stack on top of that that they can count on to do a private cloud with bridge-to-hybrid capabilities, that's standard, that ships, that delivers and has updates, so that they're not messing around with it. Their developers don't want to spend time doing that, they just want to have a private cloud installation that has hybrid capabilites and have it installed. >> This is super relevant, this is super relevant, and we call you a tech athlete because you want to go out there and deliver value to your group and actually build products, right? >> That's right. >> The film. But Dave's team just put out the True Private Cloud Report which shows on PRAM, cloud-like environment, $260 billion dollar TAM, but the notable thing is that the labor costs were non-differentiated spend is going up by a $150 billion shifting in 10 years. >> Yeah. >> That's exactly the point here that you're talking about, is my guy's aren't working on the product that they need to be building. They're doing the R&D, so the OpenStack and all these things you're talking about, they're doing the R&D. Here, you're doing the R&D, delivering the product to the customer. >> Well and when we deliver that, we're still going to leverage all of those technologies. OpenStack is a key part of New Stack. Kubernetes is a key part of New Stack, but what we're doing is pulling that together so that they don't have to curate their own private cloud. >> Kate: That's right. >> We create that, deliver it in a way that's an appliance-like way, just like we deliver Hyper Converged today, in a controlled plane that manages that hybrid IT estate and gives them visibility into public cloud uses and private cloud, and it's really going to help them a lot, and it's going to help a whole lot of other customers cause we're making it standard and easily deployable. >> Well, we've seen this story unfold over this decade, where the corner office has said I don't want to spend money on that caching and provisioning. Okay, so go to the cloud. And then IT said, well, eh, we can't do that. (laughs) Okay, and so they get in with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and others say what's the answer? Okay, but what you've described is this horizontal infrastructure capability that you can throw any workload at. >> That's right. >> And so my question is, what does it mean for the business? Does it mean you can do things faster, you have happier animators, you can do more movies, what does it mean? >> I think it means a couple of things. First of all, opportunity cost. In our business, a new opportunity for a creative endeavor, that comes up all the time, and the key is is that you want to be able to explore that as quickly as possible. Creative ideas work out sometimes, sometimes they don't, but they key is is that if takes you time and effort and money to just explore it, you've got an opportunity cost you don't want. >> Yeah, yep. >> Something like Synergy will allow us to provision resources to new ideas and new potentials quickly enough, easily enough, and at a cost-effective measure, so that we can actually determine which creative endeavors are going to work more quickly in our environment. That's a huge deal. >> So you were missing opportunities because of the infrastructure limitations, is that right? >> That's -- >> The mockups and everything have to get done. >> That's right! >> All the CG work. >> Again, when our filmmakers have a new idea for a new sequence, a new character, those types of characters, they take tremendous amounts of resources. I often talk about the dragon in Shrek. Back in 2001 we released Shrek, and it had this beautiful, huge pink dragon in it. And she was fantastic, but frankly she was so complex and so computationally heavy, we actually had to cut her out of parts of the film because we couldn't produce the shots she was in. Fast forward a few years, and we decide to make a movie called How to Train Your Dragon that's nothing but dragons. The key is is that we never want to be in a position again where we're tabling a great creative idea because we can't resource for it. And solutions like SimpliVity and Synergy and particularly where we're going with New Stack and the ability to actually harness the cloud without having to do all the work ourselves, that's going to bring that potential to reality. >> John: And then you know, your application in this opportunity cost is for your business. Other companies have apps, right? So their opportunity costs are very similar. >> That's right. >> John: This is the classic how shadow IT was born. >> Oh, yes! >> And people want to experiment, show proof of concept. Not a PowerPoint, an actual demo of real working product. It may not have the scale there, but you get to that point of where it's workable. >> Look, every business is facing some element of this right now, and I will tell you the other reason of the two reasons that I think that this is going to make a difference. It's future-proofing our environment. >> Ric: Yeah. >> The world is so dynamic right now, things are changing so quickly. Even in our environment with media and entertainment, the world of what people want to consume and how they want to consume it and the nature of how we're looking at innovation in both filmmaking techniques, as well as new media opportunities, the key in all of that is is that we have to be dynamic in order to be future-proofed. These types of solutions give us the confidence that we're actually putting the money in the right place. It's an investment in our future. >> Earlier you mentioned Pointnext services, and the narrative from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is my inference is it's more cloud-like. Do different types of business models. Are you seeing that? I mean, is it more than just a new name, a new brand, are you starting to see an evolution of the way in which you engage with Hewlett-Packard services? >> We absolutely are, and it's one thing to talk about strategy, but at the end of the day, you don't call up your technology and have a conversation with it, you call up people. And what we're seeing is that Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is investing in a level of expertise within the Pointnext services organization that is unparalleled. That is a massive change over the course of the last five, six, 10 years. These folks are coming into our environment now and we're finding that we are inspired by their strategies. We're not having to teach them about our business, they're actually coming in with all of these other learnings that they've gotten from all of these corporations and they're looking at our ambitions and going hey, we think we've got some ideas here. I'll tell you, our engineers are hard to impress. >> That's the truth. >> They are used to, what was your phrase, rolling it on their own. >> Yeah. >> They are used to being responsible, and they have very little tolerance for actually giving other people time within our organization. Pointnext has blown them away. We could not be doing the work that we're doing on Synergy as quickly and as effectively, installation and strategy around that without the Pointnext team. >> Well, that's the proof, that is the proof in the pudding in my opinion when your people who are, I won't say cocky, but they're kind of, sounds like they're pretty cocky. (laughs) >> Ric: Confident. >> But that you're in a, you're in media entertainment. It is one of the most disruptive, being disrupted markets right now. Smart Cities, IoT, media entertainment it's, you're the leading trend in IT right now, media entertainment. >> And in our team, there's simply no tolerance at DreamWorks Animation for technology getting in the way of the business. The fact of the matter is technology always has to be enabling the storytellers, enabling the filmmakers, enabling the business and ambition. And the key is is that our engineering team, they feel responsible to that. One of the things that we're finding with the new Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, the Pointnext team, Ric's team with the Synergy deployments, is that we actually feel like we've got a partner that can up our own game. >> John: Good. >> And we do deep beta programs with them on everything that we're doing to make sure that we're meeting that next generation of what they need. It's a fantastic partnership. >> Well Ric, congratulations on the success, and Kate thanks for sharing all the great stories and your experience DreamWorks Animation. Great to see that trend, again media entertainment, you guys are doing great stuff. We're doing our share with digital TV here, we're not a, we live on the edge of the network with theCUBE here at HP Discover. With DreamWorks Animation, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, stay with us for more day three coverage here in Las Vegas at HP Discover. We'll be right back. (tech music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody, I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech-coverage. This is day one of our continuous coverage of VeeamON, continuous coverage of continuous data protection. Big theme here today. Maria Olson is here, she's the vice president of Global & Strategic Alliances at NetApp. Andy Vandeveld is back, he's the vice president of Global Alliances at Veeam. Folks, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Thank you, nice to be here. >> Thank you. >> So, first of all, let's start with Maria. So VeeamON, big show, a lot of action. How's it going? >> You know, the energy here is amazing here. I remember being at VeeamON years before, and what I see here in terms of the number of customers and partners, and starting to see the big growth in the enterprise market. And all the announcements and innovation that they've made today is fantastic. >> There's like a groundswell right? We've been following NetApp for years. You guys have the best snapshot technology in the marketplace, customers love it and very efficient, and have always had an interesting take on data protection. And data fabric obviously is a big theme of NetApp these days, so explain that to us and we can get into how you guys partner. >> Sure absolutely, so most companies think of us as a storage company, but we really have evolved from a storage company to a data management company. We have a full portfolio of products, including all of our All Flash FAS offerings. We did an acquisition, which was our largest acquisition with SolidFire as well. We also have back up to Cloud offerings with our AltaVault offering that backs up to Azure and Amazon. We have StorageGRID Webscale. We have a very full, large portfolio. What all this allows customers to do, and where NetApp is heading is in terms of being able to manage and move the date, regardless of where it's at. So I call this, the gold opportunity. I just came back from SAPPHIRE, you talk to Bill McDermott, he talks about how data's gold. You heard the same thing here with Peter McKay as well. And to me the whole thing, it doesn't matter if the gold's there, you got to be able to manage it, and monetize, and do something with it. And that's what NetApp helps provide. >> So Andy, that sounds very consistent with the strategy that Veeam is putting forth. >> Yes. >> That we heard certainly this morning, and throughout this conference. So what's the partnership? Where do you pick up and NetApp leave off, or vice versa? >> Well, so in the date protection space, it's the ability to manage the data, to make sure that it's getting into a form that can be stored and accessed and available as quickly as possible, is really what we're focusing on. And to do that, we need partners like NetApp, who have the infrastructure assets that we can leverage. Particularly as we move more and more into the enterprise business with enterprise customers. Those customer's are spitting off a lot of data. They need their data to be available as quickly as possible in the case of an outage or some other disruption to their business. And to do that, Veeam needs infrastructure partners that have robust portfolios that can handle that sort of requirement, and that's where the relationship with NetApp comes into play. And it's been very good for us over the years. >> I like this notion of data fabric, has a connotation of fluidity, and it sort of reminds me of the Veeam Waves here a little bit. So explain more Maria, if you will, the data fabric, what is that concept, how are customers actually getting value out of it? >> Absolutely, so data fabric was more of a framework, right? We don't have a SKU that you just go buy data fabric. It's really a framework and a portfolio of products, integrated with our ecosystem of partners like Veeam, to be able to manage and move the data. Regardless if it's on PRIM, or where they want to go as part of their digital transformation. So customers are all at different phases in terms of where they want to go, in terms of becoming more of a digitally-oriented business. And we help get them there through the journey, because of the strength that we have on the on premise side, as well as the integrations that we've done with our partner ecosystem, specifically with Veeam and others. So we can help move them in that direction. >> So take that a little bit further, in terms of, so the customer sees this vast portfolio. Andy you were talking before about NetApps infrastructure. It's pretty vast, it's a leader in it's space. What are they asking you guys for? What are they challenging you to do? Specifically in the context of data protection. >> So customers are asking us, number one, make sure that it's simple. And that's one of the big value props that Veeam makes, number one. >> And NetApp over the years. >> And NetApp too. That it's always on and available. That there is no disaster that occurs, that the data is there, that we know where it is, that we can manage it, we can back it up. Those are the big things. The third things customers are asking for, is help us in terms of, how do we digitally transform our business? It's the business outcome that they're looking for. Of which, the products that NetApp and Veeam does, is a subset of that, that helps them on that journey. So they can actually digitally migrate, and become more of a digitally-oriented business, with our offerings helping in the whole backup and recovery and whole data management space. >> Yeah and I would just sort of tag onto that, customer's consumption models are changing. So they're on PRIM, they're in a private Cloud, they're in a public Cloud. The way that they consume is changing, and it's different. And no two look the same. And I think what customers are telling us is, let us decide how we're going to consume. You just be able to accommodate that consumption. And that's really what we've been focusing on. So if it's in an on PRIM environment, great. If it's in a public Cloud, fantastic. If it's some hybrid model, that's great too. We can accommodate that, and that's really what customers are asking us. As well as making sure that we accommodate the various business models that exist. So whether it's purchasing licenses, or some subscription-based models or whatever, they want that flexibility and that's what they're asking us to provide. >> Maria, I'm wondering if you have any joint customers that you're highlighting here at the show, or any specific examples you might be able to walk us through. >> So we have several joint customers, as a matter of fact, you heard Peter McKay talk about 210,000 customers. Of those, 30% are NetApp, so it's a very big area. And now, in terms of some of the announcements they've made, in terms of supporting NaaS, in terms of physical environment. NetApp is the leader in that space, so it's even going to become broader. So you saw today, in terms of Peter McKay talking about the Denver Broncos, that's a big NetApp customer in terms of the solutions that they have there. Also, Telefónica was announced there. Very large service provider. It's another very big NetApp customer. So there's a lot of customers in the enterprise space. Veeam's more known in terms of the s and v space, but when you start to look at the momentum they've had in going up the stack, there's a lot of enterprise customers that we actually are jointly engaging with. >> I would just say that the more that we penetrate the enterprise market and the service provider market, the more that we're going to need partnerships like we have with NetApp. To become stronger, because they're the trusted advisors, the ones that the customers are listening to. It's easier for us just to ride on their coattails into these opportunities than to try to create these relationships all ourselves. That's what makes this such a great partnership for us. >> The Cloud service customer channel base has come up a couple times today. But we haven't really explored some of the fundamental assumptions behind it. And what I want to ask you guys is, everybody sees the ascendancy of Amazon. Very impressive, amazing growth. Yet at the same time, your respective Cloud service provider businesses are also growing very rapidly. >> Maria: Very much. >> So you've got the disruption to the traditional legacy enterprise business we all have covered that very well. But there's not much been discussed about what's going to happen within the Cloud business. There's maybe some camp that says, okay everything's going to go to Amazon and I think many people believe that. But what's happening within the Cloud service provider base? It seems to be quite fragmented, which is a good thing for you guys. It seems to be local in nature, very specialized services, and ability to compete with Amazon and Azure, because they're not competing necessarily with scale volume, they're competing in other ways. So I wonder if you could help us unpack that a little bit. As to what's happening in your respective bases there. >> Yeah, so we're seeing a lot of momentum in the service provider space. So we've sold a lot of storage and data management over to what the large new service providers of the world. The IBM SoftLayers, the Azures, Google Cloud Platform. All of them as well as the existing ones, the AT&Ts and the Verizons and Telefónicas of the world. And so we continue to see a fragmentation there. You kind of have the new world service providers, and the old world service providers. And they're all trying to figure out the business model, so they can make sure that they're all going to be there over the next 20, 25 years to see how this whole game evolves. But we have a big footprint in both of those camps. And as a matter of fact, one of the things I love about the relationship between NetApp an Veeam, is we're companies that are embracing Cloud. We're not fighting Cloud, we're really trying to embrace it. So we have multiple offerings in terms of NetApp across our storage and date management, across all the new emerging Cloud players, and the existing one. And Veeam also has pretty deep relationships. They just announced today in offerings with AWS, and with Microsoft Azure as well. >> Dave: Anything you'd add Andy? >> Yeah, I think you're right about the market being a little bit more fragmented. There are smaller, more specialized Cloud providers. And there's a set of customers that want that. So I think it kind of gets back to the point that I was making earlier, which is the consumption models are changing. And who they consume from, in terms of Cloud, is not 100% consistent, and so we need to be able to deliver the technology that can accommodate whatever that decision is that the customer makes. >> From a partnership perspective, how does something like this start? And what do you, I mean obviously you say, let's go to market together. That's a logical starting point, but then there's maybe some other integration that has to take place. What do you guys sort of set out to accomplish? What are the milestones, the metrics, that you try to, how do you measure success on a partnership like this? How do you know when it's going to work, and is working? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Number one, you first have to have alignment in terms of what solutions you're going to go out there and build. And I think part of the secret of the success of the relationship, if you think back in terms of, NetApp made a big bet in virtualized environments. In doing big differentiated offerings with VMware. Even though their owned by EMC. And we we're extremely successful, 50,000 joint customers. You look at Veeam, they made a big bet with VMware, so our installed basis and the co-nih-va-tion and development that we've done already there, is already paid off there in spades. So number one, you got to have the co-nih-va-tion and the solution that you're building. The second thing is an aligned go-to-market, in terms of what is our go-to-market plan, how are we doing that through the channel? Is it a comprehensive program? What does that look like? And then it comes down to people at the end of the day, and the culture. Do the companies have really good cultures and people that really want to go at, and execute those plans? >> Yeah, and we have strong alignment at the executive levels as well, which helps. Because you need to have that sort of strategic vision, you're looking out 18 months, 24 months. Are we in alignment? And I think that helps. I would say another strong metric for Veeam is our Net Promoter Score, we're 73, it's off the charts, it's fantastic. That doesn't happen if you're not delivering the right solutions with the right set of partners. And to us, that's just another metric of, how successful are these partnerships? Particularly the one that we have with NetApp. >> And actually, I looked at NetApps Net Promoter Score, and we're 64, so we're way up there as well. So that's another area that we're very aligned as well. >> You know NPS is interesting. If you're, you're not really a one-product company, but you're smaller, and so it's easier to have a high NPS when you're smaller. Now, of course you've got on-tap. >> I wanted to be on that graph up there on the key note. >> That's pretty good. (group laughing) I was at ServiceNow last week, and they have a very happy customer base, and they were touting their, I think 53 NPS. And that's, so 60's for a company the size of NetApp. And you guys, like you say, off the charts. So that's impressive, go ahead Stu. >> Yeah just the last piece you talked about, some of the announcements that were made that impact, including in v 10, there's going to be NaaS. We look forward, anything that we should be looking to measure success of the partnerships, and anything that your companies are working on together that you can speak to. >> Well I think at the end of the day, it's customers and revenue. Ensuring that that continues to grow. Veeam's on fire, they've got 210,000 customers, they're growing at 450-- >> 245,000 at the end of-- >> 45, and every day they're adding 200 customers a day. >> Peter corrected me. (group laughing) >> Right, yeah exactly, so I really think we measure it by customers and revenue, in terms of how we're driving. And then new solution areas, like I said, with Cloud we're very aligned in both companies, embracing Cloud. Big opportunity to go after some of these service provider areas. >> Yeah, I think we're going to continue to focus on delivering joint solutions. That's really kind of, if I had to put my finger on one thing, watch this space. It's joint solutions we want to put out to the marketplace that are going to benefit our customers. >> All right, we have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to see you. >> All right, thank you. >> Thank you. Appreciate it. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back, rockin' New Orleans with theCube VeeamON 2017. (upbeat techno music) (keyboard typing)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering InterConnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for Day Three coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. This is the Cube's exclusive coverage of IBM's Cloud Show and their Watson Data, IoT and more. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next two guests are Matt Kalmenson, VP of North American Sales and Cloud Service Providers at Veeam and Andy Vandeveld, VP of Global Strategic Alliances at Veeam. Guys, welcome to the Cube. >> Andy: Thank you. >> Matt: Thank you for having us. >> Andy, I want you to just set the table. We are familiar with Veeam. We're going to do your event. You've got a big event coming up in New Orleans. The Cube will be there. We've been watching you guys for many, many years. The Cube is on its eighth season. I think Season One, 2010 at VMworld. You've been very, very successful. But you're not a public company, but yet you guys act like a public company. You release your revenue and earnings. Set the table about what Veeam is, where you guys are at, and the current status. >> Sure. We're a company that's been around for 10 years, founded by our founders, Andrei Baronov and Ratmir Timashev. The company has grown significantly in the data availability space over the 10 years. We just announced our earnings, or our revenue, for the first time just last quarter. Last year we did $607 million in total revenue. And that's at a 28% growth. So we're a very high-growth company, even though we're at significant run rate of revenue. We've got 2,500 employees worldwide. We'll grow that substantially this year. We've got 240,000 customers worldwide. We're growing 4,000 new customers a month. So we're really a growth company. But we're a privately-held company. We like it that way. It allows us to do things that public companies might not be able to do because of their quarterly reporting requirements. We can make investments where we think investments need to be made for the future, as opposed to having to always watch the profitability. >> Yeah, the 30-day shot clock, as they say, or the quarterly shot clock, 90-day shot clock I mean. So you guys are very successful. Congratulations. And that's, by the way, a great story that you guys kind of act like a public company without being public. So it's like the best of both worlds. You guys are doing well. Congratulations. What's the secret sauce for you guys? Just for the sound bite. We'll get into some of the questions. We have some specific questions about IBM InterConnect. But why is Veeam winning? What's happening? Because you guys are really moving the needle. Quickly explain the secret formula of why Veeam is so successful. >> Well, I think it cuts across a couple of different dimensions. One is, we have a really great culture within the company. And so we have a culture of innovation. People feel like they're invested in the success of the company. And everybody is joining in that. And I think that really helps. We have great technology. We used to have an "It Just Works" tagline. Customers love that, particularly when we talk about their backup and data-protection solutions. They don't want to have to have people monitoring it on a regular basis. It just works. So I think customers love the technology. We have a great employee base, great executive team, and we have great partnerships, like the one here with IBM. And I think those are all key to the success. >> So I want to go back a little bit and sort of set the table on some of the big mega-trends that led to Veeam's ascendancy. When you go back to the early days of virtualization, you had this situation where you had underutilized servers. And then VMware essentially allowed us to consolidate those servers and dramatically increase the utilization, 'cause applications running on these servers, the servers were highly underutilized. The one application that needed all that sort of dedicated server power was backup. So when virtualization went from nothing to whatever, 60, 70% of the market, backup got choked. And it needed an answer. And one of those answers was Veeam. And it shot up and exploded as a company. You've done very, very well. There's more to it than that, distribution channels and so forth. Now we enter the Cloud era. And people now talk beyond backup, about availability. So what can we learn from the virtualization era? What's similar, what's different now? And why is the discussion shifting from one of backup to one of sort of always-on availability? >> So, it's a really good question. And if you think about the trends that we've seen, we've gone through this trend to a completely virtualized world. Yet when we still talk to CIOs, and Veeam's gone out and done studies where we've talked to CIOs, and when we talk to them, we hear that they still have the same challenges that they've had in the past. And that is, over 90% of them are still saying that their most critical needs are application uptime and their access to data. So when we go out and talk to hundreds and thousands of CIOs, they say, "We still have these needs: "access to our applications and access to data." Yet when we talk to them about how those needs are being met, over 80% of them say there's this gap. There's this gap, and while they still have those needs, those needs are not being met. And we call that the availability gap. And Andy and I were talking this morning over a cup of coffee, and he said, "You know what the availability gap is? He said, "Think about it like this." Think about when you're using your cell phone, and that cell phone is going down to 10%, 9%, 8% and 1%. And you get that feeling inside that "I'm about to lose service." And we all know that feeling when you lose connectivity on your cell phone. Now think about that as the CIO or someone who's relying upon that data. That's the availability gap that we see in the marketplace. And that's the gap that Veeam bridges. We bridge that availability gap. So we've addressed that from a virtualization perspective and, now, moving into the physical world too. But now as we move forward, we're seeing another dynamic change in the marketplace, of course. And that's Cloud. Now consumers want to think about different ways to consume technology. They want it on-prem. They want a managed solution. They want in a public cloud. They want it in a private cloud. And the way Veeam addresses that solution is essentially by saying, "However you want to consume your technology, "that's okay by us." If you want to consume your virtualized environment and have it backed up on premises, fantastic. If you want it backed up and managed by a managed service provider, that's okay too. If you want to have that data and information and back it up in a public cloud, great. Or in a private cloud. Or move it between those environments. We'll have the solutions to meet those needs. So we're going to meet this need of having uptime of applications, uptime of data, and availability of data, minimizing that availability gap that these CIOs are facing and allow them to manage and run data and applications and have it available to them no matter what scenario or platform they're running it in. So that's a vision that's more than just selling backup insurance. >> Matt: Absolutely. >> I mean, you just kind of answered it, but I'll ask it generally. How do you guys communicate your vision to CIOs? >> Well, I think we communicate it just like Matt said. When you talk about backup, that is sort of a yesterday story. It's really about making sure that those customers can get access to their data and that they can keep their applications, and, frankly, their businesses up and running. So when we go in and have a conversation with a CIO, we can delineate for them the specific business impacts of not having a robust availability platform. And that takes on different dimensions from a product perspective. So it's not just backup and recovery anymore. It's backup and recovery, but it's availability. It's, how do you orchestrate data across platforms? These are the source of new issues that Veeam has been addressing for the past few years. And I think it's what gives us an advantage in the data protection space. >> Now, it's a very competitive market. A lot of legacy vendors, of which IBM is one of them. But yet you're here at InterConnect as a major IBM partner. Help us understand what the relationship is with IBM, where it fits in the organization. Is it just Cloud? Is it across the entire organization? Fill us in. >> Yeah, so it is a strategic partnership for us. It's not just a single business-unit partnership. We're across the business units inside of IBM. And sure, there's IBM Spectrum Protect, which is a competitive product. But there are so many more opportunities for Veeam and IBM to win together that we're not going to worry about the few areas where there's some overlap. We just announced a few months ago that we're integrating, doing snapshot integration, for IBM Storwize and SAN Volume Controller, which we'll provide in our next version, version 10. It's coming out later this year. And that's a big thing. We don't do storage integration, snapshot integration, with all storage vendors. So when we can make a commitment like that, it's a meaningful commitment to the partnership. And so we have this great relationship on the storage side and other parts, but the genesis of the partnership actually started in the Cloud area with Matt's team and some guys on Matt's team that really drove hard to get a foothold in the relationship. So I'll let Matt talk about the Cloud relationship. >> Thanks Andy, and it's been a great relationship, because, while Andy focuses on the global alliances, I have a little bit more of a narrow focus around the Cloud, which really isn't so narrow. So we tend to team up together very well. And what really got our relationship kicked off was having the VMware Cloud Foundation, which runs on the IBM Cloud, where Veeam is the essential backup product that runs the management components of that platform. So, anything on the VMware Cloud Foundation, which sits on the IBM Cloud platform, is backed up and managed by Veeam. So that's now available. And that was really the genesis of the relationship from a Cloud perspective, so that was very, very exciting. >> And Bluemix, they're in the mix? >> Bluemix is in the mix. And that VMware Cloud Foundation actually leverages the Bluemix platform. And then there's several layers of the Bluemix Cloud platform. And now we're going to be in the Bluemix catalog, what is called the IMS catalog, which will be for everyone who's looking to provision a cloud service, can go ahead and pull down and choose to provision VMware and some infrastructure and other services and have it backed up by Veeam. >> So that deal between IBM and VMware was a real catalyst for your relationship? >> Matt: A real catalyst for us. >> Now, of course, VMware's done other deals. They just did one with Amazon recently. But my understanding is the IBM relationship-- >> Well, Pat's been clear. It's a multi-cloud world. So the thing that's clear from this show is, multicloud is what's happening. So that's-- >> Well, what this has given us the ability to do is say, no matter what your customer looks like, there's an opportunity for us to partner and work together. So if you think about the VCF, the VMware Cloud Foundation, might be some organizations that are enterprise in scope, that have a large, on-premises type of deployment. So we're looking for large automation platforms that are looking to automate moving to the Cloud or maybe move back from the Cloud to on-prem, but nevertheless have these very high-end availability needs and business continuity needs. Now, if you think about the IMS platform in Bluemix, which might be a traditional hit-the-keyboard and looking for some infrastructure that you might spin up in a born-in-the-cloud company, from day one, we'll have some services available there for you as well. So you can go from a small SMB company that might be born in the Cloud to a legacy Fortune 100 company that has some kind of cloud foundation needs. And between the partnerships of our organizations we have solutions to meet those needs. >> One of the interesting things to me about Veeam is when you started out, when you were in your eating glass mode, you were going to VMUGs and doing all that sort of hard work with the hardcore VMware practitioners. Now you're on your way to a billion dollars. And you're striking partnerships with companies like IBM. How have the conversations changed in terms of who you sell to, who you're interacting with. Obviously more CIOs are probably paying attention to the investments that they're making. How has that changed? >> Well, just from the Veeam perspective, these partnerships are extremely important. Companies like IBM have relationships with enterprises that go back decades. And, for us, that's an opportunity for us to leverage their trusted advisor status with those decision makers in the enterprise. Our business started, and we have a very robust small and medium-size business. We have a strong and growing enterprise business. And we're looking for the enterprise as our growth vehicle to get to a billion dollars. So partnering with enterprise-class partners like IBM is really a key force. >> I mean, you guys can bring your value proposition pretty much to any environment. To your cell phone analogy about the battery power, which we've all seen. But, you know, Dave's on Verizon. I'm on AT&T. So this is the same dynamic in the Cloud. This is where you guys are looking for the growth. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, I think that's a pretty good analogy. And the way I kind of think of it is, we have the best solutions in the marketplace for availability needs, regardless of the size of the organization, the end-user needs, regardless of the go-to-market strategy and regardless of the platform. So by building, and as we continue to move up market and aggressively build partnerships like the ones with IBM, it allows to address the business needs no matter what those business needs are. And partnerships like the ones with IBM allow us to scale to great lengths. >> Matt and Andy, I want to ask you a question for the folks watching, 'cause here at IBM InterConnect, the IBM relationship that you guys outlined, what's the major to-do for Veeam this year? I mean, in terms of, as you accelerate. You've got 600 million in revenue. What's the core message that you're sending the marketplace in terms of where that growth's going to come from? And what's the tag, what's the bumper sticker for Veeam right now? >> I think it's around the Cloud. I think that's an area where we're putting a heavy investment. We're hiring great people. And for us, we see that data protection is going to have to span the Cloud environment. Now, it's going to be on-prem, it's going to be in the Cloud, it's going to be a hybrid. But from our perspective >> Matt: It's everywhere. >> Yeah, becoming much more robust in the Cloud is really going to be a focus area for us this year. >> Yeah, I would agree. I would tack onto that continuing to scale into the enterprises very aggressively. We've built out a large enterprise organization strictly focused on the enterprise. We've had the technology to address the enterprise needs, but now we've dedicated sales teams and organizational structures just to address the enterprise. And continuing to bring out our Cloud sales organizations and make sure that everyone within our organizations also has a benefit by not only understanding the Cloud business, but our sales teams are compensated to sell Cloud solutions. So it's not like we have a stovepipe organization that just goes sell Cloud, and then somebody else who goes out and sells an on-prem solution. We have teams that are focused on compensation that works together so that our teams can go out and send the message of, "consumption's your decision". We want to help you make the right business decision. We want to help make the right technological decisions. But how you consume, that's up to you. And we're here to help you coach, here to help guide, here to help show some maps on how you can do that. We know we have the right availability solution no matter what needs or what consumption model of what path you want to go down. >> And the enterprise has certainly changed. And you guys understand the enterprise readiness. And you've got product leadership. So that seems to me to be the magic. >> And also the relationship with an organization like IBM because that helps us bridge those gaps. >> Well, congratulations guys, for great success and a good relationship with IBM. Great story. Love the story of being private with this kind of transparency. It's rare, and so congratulations Andy, Matt. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for joining the Cube. More live coverage. Stay with us all day, Day Three of exclusive coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us. More after this short break.