>> Announcer: From Nice, France, it's theCUBE! Covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Nice, France. Happy to welcome to the program Peter Grimmond, who is the EMEA CTO at Veritas. Peter, thanks so much for joining us. >> You're welcome. It's great to be here. >> All right, so, we had theCUBE at Veritas Vision earlier this year. My co-CEO Dave Vellante and I did a whole bunch of interviews, really re-introducing to a lot of people. I remember Veritas from back in the day, but through the Symantec acquisition, now, back out, you know, a lot of interesting things coming. Obviously a company that's always been a software company at its core, as opposed to, in the infrastructure world, a company like Nutanix. It's like, wait, wait, do you sell appliances or use software? What's your mix, there? Veritas, you're a software company. Why don't you start off with just a little bit about your role, how long you've been at Veritas, and what brings you here to this show. >> Yeah, by all means. I've been at Veritas forever. I actually started with the company in 1994, believe it or not, so, yeah, been here a long time. Spent a lot of time in consulting, working with our customers, installing, configuring backup solutions and delivering consulting around the data center, and then most recently moved into leading teams and acting as the CTO for the business here in ME. >> Wow, yeah. '94, that's many lifetimes in the tech world. Everybody thinks of Veritas back in the day, it was net backups, is what people know. What products are you involved with, when you're meeting with customers, what are the key things you're focused on? >> Our portfolio's grown substantially over those years, and most especially, actually, in the last year or so. We've actually launched seven new offerings in the last year, really expanding our reach to cover enterprise data management very broadly, and extending also out from the data center to really cover the multi-cloud. We can now provide pretty much end-to-end data management capability across the multi-cloud. >> Okay, great. And when you say multi-cloud, you're working with the public cloud providers, well, many of the infrastructure providers. Give us a little bit of the scope, what you do and don't do when it comes to multi-cloud. >> When I talk to my customers about what they're doing with cloud, almost all of them have what we describe as a multi-cloud approach. That means multiple public clouds, plus their own private cloud, and in some cases, more than one private cloud that they're working with as well. Our mission to deliver enterprise data management services to those customers has to also have that reach. We're working with a number of the large cloud service providers, such as Amazon and Google and Microsoft, IBM as well, and, indeed, Oracle, as well as working with private cloud providers such as Nutanix. >> Excellent. Let's connect to Nutanix, there. Nutanix talks about enterprise cloud. Most of their solutions today deployed in customers' data center. It's talking about edge deployments, talking about how they extend public clouds, like, for example, partnerships with Google, support with Microsoft they've always had. Tell us how Veritas and Nutanix, what's the boundaries, how do they connect? >> Ultimately, as customers move their workloads onto hyper-converged platforms, and a lot of our customers are doing that, they need to find ways to protect that data. Now, for those customers who are using a hypervisor such as VMware or Nutanix, we've been able to back up that data for them for a while, and we can back up data that's been on the Acropolis hypervisor in-guest. But what we've done with Nutanix recently is to integrate net backup with AHV, so we can now back up the VVMware level from Nutanix. >> Peter, take us in that, because it's been a discussion with a lot of the ecosystem, and it's like, okay, how much work is it to certify AHV, is this a Nutanix push or is it a customer pull? Take us inside a little bit as to what led to this work. How easy or hard was it, and what's the customer demand for it? >> The customer demand is high. Customers are looking, those that have had Nutanix deployed for some time are now interested in moving to AHV. They want to use that as a platform. There are some good benefits to them in doing that. One of the things that's potentially been stopping them from doing that is the ability to protect their data properly in those environments. Having the ability to do those backups in AHV is important to them, so they've certainly been asking us for that. I believe they've been asking Nutanix for it as well, and that's why we're partnering together. In terms of how complex it is, in the world of RESTful APIs, it actually becomes relatively straightforward. You know, NetBackup is a RESTful API which allows you to back up parallel workloads. Nutanix has a RESTful API that allows you to access their backup API, and we put those two together and get a solution reasonably quickly, actually. >> Awesome. I would assume most of your customers, they're doing multiple hypervisors, though. Veritas, you play well in that environment? If I've got Veritas and AHV, or-- >> We've had support for hypervisors such as Vmware and Hyper-V for some time. AHV's one that we haven't supported, and so, this integration was overdue, and we've now done it. Customers can protect their data, whichever hypervisor they use. >> I guess the question was, if the customer has a multi-hypervisor environment, are there any complications, or it doesn't matter how many of the hypervisors they support? If you support 'em all, it's pretty straightforward. >> Yep. That's the case. We can deploy backup solutions across all of them, and manage all of those from a central management point, so it helps to take the complexity out of it. >> Okay. Want to switch a little bit to hear about customers. I know at Veritas Vision, and especially here at a European show, GDPR is a hot topic of conversation. I've heard some of the Veritas, does Veritas and Nutanix, is there a play jointly on there, or is that more of a separate initiative? >> Look, I think we're both hearing the same thing from our customers, right? Which is that GDPR is something that's exercising them. I've just come from the executive track, actually, where that was a topic of conversation. I think customers are definitely at different stages of maturity on that. When we talk to our customers, there are a lot of them at very early stages in thinking about GDPR, and there are those that have already appointed a data privacy officer and are working for a program to get that done. It's at different stages, but I think, generally speaking, enterprises are still looking for help to get that problem solved. >> Okay. What else are you hearing from customers, you know, big pain points, or areas where they're looking to modernize that Veritas can help? >> I think the big thing that we're hearing from customers is this move to the Cloud, and the thing that's really driving that move to the Cloud is digital transformation. All enterprises are looking to leverage a more digital model. They see cloud as a way of accelerating that, and so they are looking to move aggressively to the Cloud. One of the things that potentially makes that harder than it might otherwise be is assuring the proper management of your data, making sure it's secure and protected and available and performant, and that's where Veritas comes in. We're helping, we believe, to make it easier for customers to adopt a multi-cloud approach by giving them access to their data wherever they need it, by protecting that data, and giving them good visibility into that data wherever it sits, whether that be in Azure or in Office 365 or on-premise. >> Peter, now that Veritas is supporting AHV, what should we look for, really, for the next year? Certain go-to-market initiatives or other integration and engineering work that we should be looking for? >> As you probably heard, when we were at Vision together, our approach around data management is what we call 360 Data Management, which is a suite of tools that we've put together to solve the data management problem. Our aim, certainly, is to extend the 360 Data Management approach to Nutanix, so rather than just covering data protection, we're also covering other areas of data management, such as data access, disaster recovery, data visibility, those kind of areas. >> Okay, great. Peter, I want to give you the final word. At Veritas' show, we talked about the truth in information. What have you been hearing from customers here? What would you want them to take away from the Nutanix show, from a Veritas standpoint? >> I think the key message is that customers get great value from Nutanix HDI platform. Many of those same customers get great value from Veritas. Now they've got that value combined. >> Well, Peter Grimmond, really appreciate you joining us. We'll be back with more coverage here from the Nutanix .NEXT conference in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE. (fast techno music) >> This is Robin Matlock, CMO of VMware.