from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host Stu minimun hi I'm Stu minimun and this is a special cube conversation from our Boston area studio following up from the Cronus global cyber summit it happened recently down in Miami Beach Florida John Fourier was a host there you can always go to the cube net to get all of the content here happy to welcome to the program first I've got Pat Hurley who's the vice president and general manager of Americas for a Cronus and joining him as one of his partners Jason Nolan who's the vice president of business development at S Castle both you locally-based thank you so much for joining us great to be here thanks for having us - all right so Pat why don't we start with you we talked a little bit earlier with William tall about some of the announcements give us some of the things and that specifically might be it'd be important to to the partners like Jason well first of all was a fantastic event was our inaugural cyber summit we had great attendance from our partners and getting a lot of feedback about the content that was there actually Jason was one of our panel speakers we got a lot of very positive feedback there as well fantastic event for us the the food was even great so we enjoyed that it was on Miami Beach fantastic location so from our side we thought was a very successful event now the biggest challenge we will have is making even that much better next year yeah did you get the stone crab while you were down there Jason who is unbelievable huh yeah so you were out the show you got to sit on some panels you know you were feeling the energy it was great to interact for the audience and kind of hear the questions that they had and the excitement and the energy around the messaging was really really powerful all right so bring us a little bit into the solutions how are they benefiting you know all of your partners absolutely so for those of you guys who don't know really who Acronis does a lot of people know us really as a backup company from back in the day maybe consumer backup maybe small medium-sized business on-premise backup solutions we've completely transformed the company over the last few years and how we talk about cyber protection which is the combination of cybersecurity and and and data protection we frame that in some tenants that we call sabes so safety accessibility privacy authenticity and security we take those solutions delivering the partners like as cast so that they can then wrap additional services around their customer base to increase the ARPU that they're getting there increase the margin that they're collecting from their customers and obviously deliver an end-to-end complete cyber protection solution all right so Jason you're here is the voice of the customer so as Castle what are your customers telling you and how does that resonate with them so for our customers data protection has always been important they've had to address the number one rule is never lose the data and with the cyber threats today always changing they're not sure what to do so they turn to us as their service provider to help guide them through you know to make sure that they're not one of the next companies on the news and it's nice as a service provider to be able to combine those those services and products with a vendor like a Cronus so that we can provide more value we can strengthen relationships and not have 300 vendors that we have to work with all right my understanding you spend a lot of time with the financial institutions absolutely they don't want to be the next one you know on the front page of the paper in the news on the radio and the like so anything specifically for them that that's worth calling out so I think with the financial services companies having the ability to protect their data their portfolio that they hold you know so important to their business they don't want anyone to have access to that and if any of their so they have to meet the requirements of the investors they have to meet the requirements of the financial institutions and make sure that they're following all of the different guidelines and depending on which markets are in what countries are in they all have different data sovereignty rules they have to deal with gdpr and so there's a lot of different areas that they need to navigate and so they as castle as a service provider we help them understand you know and kind of build that in as a standard and that's what we've done with the Cronus is we've built in the data protection strategy and now we can look at adding in the cybersecurity components to our portfolio to help give them that comprehensive suite and then I you can imagine how it takes a lot of different solutions to pack those together to provide an end band solution for their customers I think one of the beauties of recurrence is that we allow you to provide multiple services in a single pane of glass so you get a lot of very smart people on your team that have to manage multiple solutions what we try to provide is that single opportunity that single solution they learn one thing where they can be backup disaster recovery secure files things are all in one platform allow them to kind of minimize the number of solutions they need to be experts on to provide their customers the highest level service all right Jason security is a very much a multi-faceted you know ever-growing landscape out there tell us how is castle partners with the Cronus and how it fits into your your overall services so our partnership with the Cronus first started with data protection it was one of the first solutions that we were able to find that was able to fit every use case so as a platform as a service provider we're supporting on-premise legacy equipment our hosted VMware cloud infrastructure multi-tenant and infrastructure as your every flavor of cloud services you could imagine because we want the customer to have the solution that fits their needs the best and what we were looking for and a Cronus was able to provide for us was one platform of data protection that was able to be universal across all the different use cases so that's where it starts as a foundation always protecting the data always having a backup in multiple locations and all of our data centers worldwide and now to be able to layer on top of that some of the cybersecurity components in one single pane of glass is only going to allow us to give a better level of service to our customers and Panna I expect that a lot of stuff that we talked about with the financial services translate to many other industries yeah I mean the of the day data's data right and you could talk about different verticals how they use that data the other day it's all about protecting the data making sure your data is secure making sure you have an authentic copy of your data making sure that everything is secure so for us you know we we are known as a backup company but backup is kind of going away you need a more complete solution so one of the things that all these guide bad bad doers out they're doing is they're really trying to go after your backups and trying to lock them down because they understand that that's a first place you're gonna go to try to recover from a ransomware attack our solutions are based on artificial intelligence allowing the machine learning capabilities within our solutions to detect those from from the beginning from to prevent our customers from a zero-day attack so that you're not relying on that one backup to make sure your infrastructure can get back up and running you know and Jason maybe just frame for us the relationship between you and your customers and security you hear everything from you know certain cloud providers are like you know well you know we're like your landlord you know you made her lock your doors and take care of all that stuff and others are more you know hey we're gonna you know really go belly to belly with you and make sure that we've done everything bulletproof with you but what do you hear these days and what we're hearing from the customers is that they're looking to everyone is looking to migrate either start their cloud strategy if they haven't if they've been you know behind the curve if they've had a cloud strategy they were looking to increase we've actually had some customers want to maybe come out of the hyperscale as already so there's a lot of different use cases a lot of different journeys that the customers run and I think helping them navigate so what we've been able to do is as part of our services is wrap around the different cloud services a layer of security at each component so there's that perimeter network the you know there's all of the firewalls next-gen firewalls are now are a requirement they're no longer optional mobile devices endpoint protection network security fishing spearfishing user education there's so many different things that that their own employees need to be aware of that they never had to worry about before and it's it's almost you know like 20 years ago when disaster recovery emerged on the market cybersecurity now is front and center and if you're not paying attention to it at some point it's gonna come up and bite them so we're working with our customers to make sure they never have to deal with that yeah and I think an important part of that it's no longer just the data center right it's all those edge devices right we live in a very connect world data is transferred across multiple devices every day so there's different points where there's a vulnerability that could be identified and you can't just rely on an end user to make sure that they're protecting me well and especially if I know when I was having the earlier conversation with William we're talking about the smbs you know you know if the enterprise I've got my C so and I've got my team and I'm gonna work on that if I'm the SMB well it might be a generalist that security is under the bucket of all the other things that they need to do and therefore they're going to need to turn to their platforms and their partners to help them with a lot of this I mean to say they go to the IT guy right who say well he resolves everything at the end of the day enterprises have big budgets to spend on the stuff I heard something for the analysts reports that you know they're talking about high-level guy at Bank America so what's your budget for cybersecurity I have a budget that ever needs to be spent we're gonna spend on that to make sure that our customers data is secure what we really try to do is package lot of that stuff together to make it affordable complete secure for any customers no I absolutely think most of your customers don't have the billions of dollars to be able to say that they've at least done what they needed to do to make sure that they've they've done all they can so Jason I'll give you the final word first and Pat for you know things that you took away from the show and bring in to your customers so a in the panel discussion we had at the show we were asked to talk about different experiences as a service provider and one of the things that was really important for us that came from the audience was you know what does it take to switch how do you select your vendors and I think what's often overlooked by service riders is the cost of choosing a vendor and what we mean by that is if we were to choose the wrong vendor there is a huge cost of operations to switch from one vendor to the other where you're taking a very limited resource pool of the people on the operations team that are usually focused on on boarding new customers servicing the existing customer base generating revenue who now have to go to non revenue operations just to make that heavy-lift of a transition so picking the partnership with the Kronus was really important to us we made that change and it's been the best decision we've ever made yeah just to piggyback off of that we're not someone that our partners right so we considered as Castle be very strong channel partner of ours they give us reach into that mm custer community the other day they're really the experts we're providing some technology they can rely upon upon to provide a secure complete solution for their customers but that was really the key takeaway for me as you're able to interact face-to-face with your partners directly you're able to hear some of the pain points that they deal with on a daily basis it's not over email so I don't know phone calling on a zoom or WebEx you know you're talking face-to-face these guys understand those real-time problems and working toward solutions together at one big event so that's been fantastic we hope to double attendance for the next event and bring even more partners into the fold pen Jason thank you so much for sharing your takeaways from the Acronis global cybersecurity summit I'm Stu Mittleman and thanks as always for watching the cute

>>From Miami beach, Florida. It's the cube covering a Cronus global cyber summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >>So Ron, welcome back to the keeps coverage of kronas cyber global cyber summit 2019. I'm John furrier here in Miami beach. Our next guest is Pat Hurley, vice president, general manager of the Americas in sales and customer relationships. Get Debbie Juan. Hey, thanks for having me. Welcome to Miami beach. Lovely place to have an event. So I hear ya. You got a lot of competition going on between the U S America's in the AMIA teens and it's very competitive group. >> The European team is very confident. I think we'll show them tomorrow what we're made of. We've been recruited very hard for some players that are Latin American. I think we'll show them a finger too. You've got a big soccer story there. We do. Yeah. We've, uh, we've got a few sports partnerships that we have across the globe. Uh, some of the first partnerships we had were actually within formula one. >>And we really try to correlate the story of the importance of, uh, data protection and cyber protection in the sporting industry because a lot of people don't think about the amount of data that's actually being generated in the space. A formula one car generates between, you know, two and three terabyte through three gigabytes of data on every lap, tons of telemetry devices that are kicked, collecting information from the car, from the road service, from the, the general environment. They're taking that data and then sending it back to the headquarter, analyzing it and making very small improvements to the car to make sure that they can qualify faster, run a faster lap, make the right type of angle into a turn, uh, which can really differentiate them from being, you know, first, second, third, 10th in a qualifying session. On the soccer side. We do have some partnerships with uh, arsenal, Manchester city, inter Milan, and we just signed a partnership as well with Liverpool. >>So we are very popping in that space here in the U S we have some other sports that we're big fans of. I'm personally a big Boston red Sox fan, being a Boston native and we do have a sports partnership with the red Sox, which has been an unbelievable partnership with them. And learning more about the use cases that they solve and using our technology has been really cool. >> You know, Patty, you bring up the sports thing and we were kidding before we on camera around the trading, you know how people do sports deals and they trade, you know, merchandise for consumer benefit or customer benefits. But really what is happening is sports teams encapsulate really the digital transformation in a nutshell because most sports franchises are, have been traditionally behind. But now with the consumerization of it and digital can go back to 2007 since the mobile phone. >>Really, I mean it's iPhone. Yeah. Since that time, sports and capsulates every aspect of it, consumer business fan experience. And it really has every, every, almost every element of what we see now as a global IOT problem opportunity. So it really encapsulates the use case of an integrated and and needed solution. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about the amount of data that's, that's out there today and the fast way that it's growing, you know, the explosion of, uh, of data in the, in the world today, sports have different unique challenges. So obviously they have large fan bases that need to be able to access the data and understand what's going on with their favorite sports teams. Um, for us it's really, you know, these technology partnerships that we have with these guys, it runs through all these different areas of, you know, in many cases we didn't really understand that they were using it for. >>So, you know, the red Sox for example, they've got Fenway park and iconic stadium, you know, the Mecca of baseball. If you haven't been there yet, I suggest all your viewers that they go and check it out, give me a call, we'll try and get you set up there. But, um, you know, the, the, the experience that the fans have there is all around their data experienced there. Right? And it's not just baseball games. It could be hockey games that Fenway park, it could be a concert that they're having. A phone buys a lot of different events. These stadiums are open year round and the ability to move, share access, protect the data in that stadium is really important to how they're functioning as an organization. We talked to their I-Team quite regularly about how they're using our solutions. They're talking about uh, different aspects of artificial intelligence, different ways they can use our products and machine learning. >>Obviously with the new solutions that we have in the market today around cybersecurity or helping them to address other challenges that they face. Um, as an organization, these are realtime challenges in their physical locations, national security issues, terrorist attacks could happen. There are venues, there are public gathering places too. Absolutely. We announced our partnership with them back in may and I was shocked to hear them on the main stage announcing that they had this great partnership with the Kronos was talking about their unique cyber security needs. They started talking about drone technology and I'm thinking, all right, a drone flies in the stadium. Maybe at breaks and it falls on a player and we're paying $20 million for one of these pitchers to be out there on the Hill or an interest, a fan or maybe they're collecting some video data to then share it out. >>And that's red Sox IP. No, they're talking about cybersecurity threats in the sense that a drone, a remotely controlled device could come in and lightened incendiary device in the, in the stadium and that to them as a real security server. And that's frontline for the it guys. That's what keeps them up at night. Yeah. And that's really an attack take time. Oh yeah, absolutely. What are the use cases that are coming out of some of your customers, cause you guys have a unique integrated solution with a platform as an end to end component too. You have a holistic view on data, which is interesting and unique. People are kind of figuring this out, but you guys are ahead of the game. What are some of the use cases that you've seen in the field with customers that highlight the benefits of taking a holistic view of the data? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we look at it as kind of backups dead, right? We have, we've combined the old world of backup and disaster recovery with the new world of cybersecurity and we combine that to a term we're calling cyber protection because it really requires an end to end solution and a lot of different things need to be working properly to prevent these attacks from happening. Uh, you need to be very proactive in how you're going about that. We address it with what we call 'em, the Kronos cyber platform. And what this is, is a unique, multi-tiered multi-tenant offering that's designed specifically for service providers. We have just under 6,000 servers, providers actively selling our cyber protection solutions today and they use this for are for a multiple different aspects. And usually the beachhead has something like backup. Every company needs backup. It's more of a commodity type solutions, a lot of different players in the game out there, but they take it a step further, use that same backup technology to then do disaster recovery. >>They can do files, they can share, they can do monitoring. We have notary solutions based on blockchain technologies. Now, this whole suite of cybersecurity solutions, all of this is with a single pane of glass, one platform that of a service provider can go in and work with their customers and make sure that their data is protected, make sure that their physical machines are virtual machines, they're PCs, their Macs are all protected, that data's protected, it's secure, but it's also accessible, which is an important part of you can take your data wrapping a nice bow buried a hundred feet underground, but then you can't use it, right? So you want to be able to make sure that you can actually, uh, leverage the technology there. Um, we've seen explosive growth, especially in, in my market. I think the numbers are pretty crazy. It's something like 90% of the market today in the U S has served in some capacity by a service provider. >>And this could be a small to medium size business that's served by local service fire to those really big guys that are out there. Let's on with how large your target audience, you mentioned search probably multiple times when you're out selling your target persona, your target audience, and you're trying to reach into, so we touch, everybody know, you equate it to kind of what we do with the red Sox, right? You walk into that city and the 38,000 people that, well, some of those people are just, you know, regular Joe's, right? They, they go to work every day. They have a computer at home, they have a mobile device. They probably have multiple mobile devices. We protect that for them. We call them a consumer. Slash. Prosumers. We work at a lot of very large retail organizations. If you walk into some of those shops today, you'll be able to see our software on a shelf there. >>You work with one of those tech squads where they're starting to attach services to it and you get more of a complete offering there. We then scale up a little bit further to some OEM providers. You work with companies like Honeywell and Emerson that are manufacturing devices that embed our software on there. They white label it and deliver it out. These are connected devices. You think about the, you know the, the explosion of IOT devices in the market today. We're protecting that stuff as well. We work with very large enterprises, so some of the, the major players that you see in the manufacturing space are standing up standardizing on Acronis process control process automation vendors are using our Chronis and we can deliver the solution because of the way it's so flexible in a very consumable way for them. Those enterprises can actually act as a service provider for their employees so we can actually take our technology, deploy the layer in their infrastructure where they have complete control. >>They might not want to be in an Uber cloud, they might not want to work with Chrome OS data center. They want to have and hold that data. They want to make sure it's on site. We enable that type of functionality and then the fastest growing area for us is what I hit on earlier within the service provider community. We're recruiting hundreds of service providers every quarter. We've got some great partners here. Give you an example of a service provider. You mentioned the red size, I'm assuming is that a vendor that might be working within that organization, but still it sounds like that's a supplier to the red Sox. How, how broad is that definition? It gives us many points. Yeah, it's a really good point. So we work with hosting providers. Look, can be regional hosting providers to multinational hosting providers. Some of the very big names that you've, you're probably familiar with. >>We work with, uh, we work with, uh, telco providers who work with ISV providers or sorry, ISP providers, um, kind of regional telco providers that provide a myriad of different services all the way down to your kind of local mom and pop type service providers where you've got a small business, maybe they've got 30 to 50 employees, they're servicing probably 200 to 300 customers and they want to provide a very secure, safe, easy to use complete solution to their customers. Uh, those could be focused on certain verticals so they could be focused on healthcare, financial services, construction, et cetera. Um, we have some that are very niche within like dental services or chiropractice offices, small regional doctor's offices. Uh, and the, the beauty of that, and I was getting the partners earlier, is we have partnerships with companies like ConnectWise where those are tools that service providers are using on a very daily basis. >>So essentially the platform gives you that range and that's the typical typical platform. So you have that broad horizontally scalable capability and the domain expertise either be what solution from you guys or can ISV or someone within your ecosystem is that they get that. Right? Absolutely. And that's what really differentiates us is our ability to integrate into that plat, into our platform, into their platform and make those connections. So you don't need to learn 12, 14, 15 different technologies. You've got a small suite of offerings in a single pane of glass, very easy to use, very intuitive. Um, the integrations that we have with these partners like ConnectWise, like Ingram micro, really differentiate us because what they do is they provide open API capabilities. They provide software development kits where these partners can go ahead and build it the way they want to sell it. >>You know, it's interesting when the cloud came out and as on premise has changed to a much more agile dev ops kind of mindset that forced it to think like a service provider. I think like an operating system, it's an operating environment basically. So that service provides an interesting angle and I want to get your thoughts on this because I think this is where you guys have such a unique opportunity to just integrate solution because you could get into anything and you got ISV to back that up. So I guess the question I would have is for that enterprise that's out there that's looking to refactor and replatform their entire operation, or it could be a large enterprise, it has a huge IOT opportunity or challenge or a service provider is looking at having a solution. What's the pitch that you would give me if I'm the one of those customers? >>Say, Hey Pat, what's the pitch? So you need a, you need a trusted provider that's been in the business for a number of years that understands the data protection and security markets that Kronos has that brand. We've been doing this for about 16 years. We were founded in Singapore, we're headquartered out of Switzerland and we've got a lot of really smart guys in the back room. Was building good technologies that our partners were able to use. Um, we look at it a lot of different ways. I mentioned our go to market across a lot of different verticals and a lot of different um, kind of routes for those. The way we deliver our solution. It provides the flexibility for an enterprise to a classic reseller to um, you know, a VAR or a service, right? It's delivering services. It can be delivered to those guys how they want to consume it. >>So as an example, we may work with a smaller service provider that doesn't have any colo capabilities. We provide data centers so they could have a very quick turnkey solution, allows them to get up and running with their business, selling backup within minutes to their customers. We can also work with very large enterprises where we can deliver the complete platform to them and then they have complete control over it. We sprinkle in some professional services to make sure that we're giving them the support that they need and then they're running the service for themselves. What we've really seen in terms of a trend is that a lot of these VARs, we have about 4,500 of them in North America and they're starting to look at their businesses differently. Say, I gotta adapt or die here. I gotta figure out what my next business model is. >>How am I going to be the next one that's in the news flash that says, Hey, they've been acquired, or Hey Thoma Bravo made a big investment in me. Right? They need to convert to this services business or Kronos enables that transformation to happen. I mean, I can see you guys really making money for channel partners because they want solutions. They want to touch the customer, they want to maybe add something they could bring into it or have high service gross profits around services. Absolutely. So, yeah, our solution is unique in the sense that allows partners to sell multiple offerings to, you're getting an additional layer of stickiness providing multiple solutions to a customer. You're using the same technology, so your it team is very familiar with what they're using on a daily basis. Um, you're reducing the amount of churn for your customers because you're selling so much additional there that they're really stuck with you. >>That's a good thing. Uh, and beyond that, your increasing ARPU, average revenue per user is a key metric that all of our partners are looking at. And these guys are owner operators, right? They're business owners. They're looking at the bottom line. I mean, it's interesting the operating leverage around the consistent platform just lowers, it gives them software economic model. They can get more profit over time as they make that investment look at at the end of the day, channel partners care about a couple things, money, profit and customer happiness. Absolutely. And it helps to have them want to have a lot of one offs and a lot of, you know, training, you know, anything complicated, anything confusing, anything that requires a lot of resources, they're not going to like a, it's also great to have events like this where you're able to, to press the flesh with these guys and, and being face to face and understand their real world challenges that they're dealing with on a daily basis. >>How has the sport's a solution set that you've been involved in? How has that changed the culture of Acronis? Is that, has that, has that changed as, you know, sports is fun. People love sports, they have real problems. It's a really great use case as well. How's that change the culture? It's been amazing. I, so one from a branding perspective, we are a lot more recognized, right? Um, the most important thing about these partnerships for us is that they're actually using the technology. So, you know, we've got the red Sox here with us today. We've got arsenal represented, we've got Williams, we've got Roush racing, we've got a NASCAR car back here. Um, they use our technology on a daily basis and for each one of them we solve different types of use cases. Whether it's sending them large amount of video data from an essence studio over to Fenway park, or if it's a scout out in the field that needs to send information back and their laptop crashes, how do they recover? >>A lot of these different use cases, you can call them right back to a small business owner. You don't have to be a multibillion dollar sports organization with the same challenge. Well, I'm smiling because we've been called the ESPN of tech to they bring our set. We do let the game day thing. We certainly could love to come join you in all these marquee events that you have. We'd love to have it. Yeah, so if you follow us on social, we're out there and that, that's a big part of it. You mentioned one of ours looking for what our partners looking for. They want a personal relationship too. A lot of that goes away with technology nowadays and being able to really generate that type of a, of a personal relationship. These partnerships enable that to happen and they're very anything, I don't know anything about cars. >>We started partnering with formula one. All of a sudden I know everything about 41 I go to these races. I tell everybody I don't know anything about cars and I ended up being the, the subject matter export for him over over the weekend. So we'd love to have you guys join us. We'd love all of our partners. They get more engaged in the sports aspect of it because for us, it really is something that, um, again, they're using us in real life scenarios. We're not paying to put a sticker on a car that's going 300 miles. It's not traveling as a real partnership. Exactly. Pat, congratulations on your success and good luck on people owning away the numbers. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Just the cube coverage here at the Chronis global cyber summit 2019 I'm John furry. More coverage after this short break.