from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hi everybody welcome to the cubes Palo Alto studios my name is Dave Volante and digital transformation is the big buzzword today and everybody's trying to become a digital business what does that mean well digital business means that you're using data in new ways to drive business value but protecting that data has become increasingly important it's not just about backing that data up anymore it's really about managing that data through a full lifecycle and finding new use cases for all those assets that you have ramaa Kalapana is here he is vice president of product management at Dell EMC data protection division Rama great to see you welcome to the cube thank you good to good to see you again so relatively new to Dell EMC talk about your role as a head of product management and what what lured you to Dell EMC absolutely it's been a few months here I run the data protection division for appliances in product management right and one of the things as you know data protection is one of the hot areas and I've been in this space for a while and one of the things I was looking for us to continue to be in this space and there's a lot of innovation happening you know there's almost a billion dollar in private capital the frustration in this space and I was looking for a place where a company is doing a couple of things one is a lot of investment in R&D and as you know with a lot of announcement that's happening we've been investing a lot and secondly innovation right new technologies new areas both from the software and appliances point of view so I was saying up front you know talking about digital business people use the term data capital we were joking a lot we hear that your phrase data is the new oil and we say no data is actually more valuable than oil you can either put oil in your car you can put in your house we can't put them both data you can use in so many different ways so data capital people are becoming more aware of the value of data and then obviously we're gonna talk about protecting it but you guys use that term data capital what does it mean to you we use it a lot in customers actually use it even more often right essentially a lot of the customers and most of the organization in in general they're actually considered themselves like as technology companies and they differentiate among themselves and if it is a retail customer or if it is any other segment with the type of data that they have right and the kind of differentiation they offer is like what value can they derive out of it and how can they differentiate for that data so the data capital is is very important I mean it's it's not about backup anymore right once you have your secondary data customers expect that they want to use that for multiple use cases so that's what the data capital plays a very important role in in many many areas so ever since I've been in the business customers have problems and your job is technology suppliers to solve those problems so talk about why data protection is so difficult from a customer standpoint what are their challenges specifically as it relates to data protection see when I've been talking to customers for many years especially on the data protection context right as you know the complexity of the customer environment is changing quite a bit and it's a very dynamic environment what I mean by that is it's it's then it's whether they want to actually manage the data or protect the data on Prem in the cloud hybrid etc the type of workloads has become pretty complex as well in the sense that it used to be traditional databases and of course the VMware workloads etc now it is all the no sequel my sequel and different type of workloads a a IML workloads so that has become quite complex as well secondly it's also about the data growth and I've seen companies and customers basically with 50 to 80 percent data growth in one year right that's incredible a lot of data and finally it's also about any major events like for example ransomware attacks or any downturn down time that happens so what customers are looking for is a solution that can actually help them with that right like a very a gap solution for cyber recovery type solutions etc in the impact of losing data is is much higher I mean it just seems to get worse and worse if we here right as data becomes more important to our business having whether it's a breach or a loss of data or any outage really it's just more costly than it's ever been I've totally agree I mean that's where the more customers I mean when we talk to customers it's not about the backup admins anymore and that is the users were actually using that database admins we actually talked to see is the security officers especially when we are dealing with some of the ransomware type use cases etc right so that's getting very interesting as we move forward you know your bromide back up is one thing recovery is is everything and now recovery it has a much much wider meaning you're recovering from a lot of different places is there's a lot more complexity in sort of the data stores you know the edge is starting to become more prominent people are using the term data management more often and data management can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people the database people have one view of what data management is but what is data management - - Dell EMC and in what is the shift going on from the data protection to data management it's I'm glad you asked that because the market is already shifted in that direction right you should be data protection is an insurance copy you should be able to restore it and you should be good that right but customers actually are looking for they already are protecting the data I mean it's a secondary copy they expect that they use that copy for multiple use cases I've seen a lot of customers you know it's been spinning up a copy for devtest use cases whether it's on Prem or in the cloud for dr use cases so you can actually reduce the infrastructure cost and running analytics around on it search and providing you know insights within the data set if you go right so tons of use cases so that is the shift that we are seeing and especially here del e MC we are investing a quite a bit on the data management part of it and new technologies play a critical role in there with a IML use cases I have to use cases blockchain use case and so on so forth right so that shift has already happened to me remember - it's about leveraging that that asset I mean you talked about analytics before we you know you talk about ransomware you can use analytics to identify anomalous behavior I mean even air gaps people can get through them so you're not you're never safe and so you need to be vigilant and and and being able to apply these data management techniques becomes increasingly important for digital businesses absolutely we actually look for especially from enterprise customers we look for a few attributes right for data management which are primarily scale performance reliability and a whole bunch of use cases from a usability point of view cloud use cases and so on so forth well let's let's dig into that a little bit so what are the important aspects and attributes of a data management solution from Delhi MCS point of view see for example if you look at performance right we have actually built in flash within our dispatched appliance for catering use case to the use cases like instant access instant recovery for databases we also support random i/o you know I observe about 40k with a very minimal almost like a 20 millisecond latency etc right so performance is key secondly scale right customers are looking for scale for example within the appliances portfolio customers can start small and they can actually replace the controller grow from you know a six series domain appliance to all the way to nine series scale up to a petabyte and if you have d dupe of say 50 to one that's almost like a 50 petabyte of data in active tier we actually support two x in cloud which means that it's 150 petabyte of data that's scale right and and the third part is the reliability part right we use a very robust architecture dia based data invulnerability architecture that actually is very important for customers because that this is the last resort for them there's the copy as part of data protection right and customers rely on Dell EMC for that and finally some of the capabilities as I mentioned right cloud use cases we support multi cloud and multi cloud is very important for customers now multiple use cases and then usability we track some of the metrics like from box to backup that's important we look at some of the manageability upgrade ability and serviceability use cases very critical so those are kind of the key attributes I would highlight in terms of what we do and what we focus on and pretty much aligned with what customers are looking for so talk a little bit more about the product portfolio daily MC has always been on a cadence of product people buy product I like that you know Rd turns into product and it generates revenue solves customer problems how should we think about the the portfolio how its evolving so as I said earlier right what was intriguing really interesting for me is the investment they're putting in R&D right and from a portfolio point of view especially for appliances we have the whole nine Series and the six series for the high-end deer domain right as a target appliance we have the of course the the three series and for the low end and we have the mid market as well so we segment it as your target appliance and then we have the integrated appliance and as you might have actually talked to a bunch of my colleagues last year we announced a DB 4400 primarily on the mid market lower lower end of it right and then we also have the eighth season five series for the higher end so overall we have from a portfolio point of view we have the integrated appliance we have the target appliance in the PBA market and we have the data friction suite from a software point of view where all of our multiple use cases that we cater to for customers all right so we've talked about some of the challenges the customers are facing you know kind of why it's so difficult some of the trends and in data protection the portfolio what the customers view as success how do they measure success what are the outcomes that you're trying to achieve with customers see from customers if customer I mean we are successful if customers are successful right and primarily what we are looking for and from we've heard from customers is that we provide solution that will help with lowering the TCO right and what they do with that is essentially invest in new technologies like you know data in data science AI ml IOT blockchain as I talked about right apps we've seen customers take that dollar and invest in their business and that's how they can actually be successful right and finally customers are also looking for one solution that can actually cater to many needs it's not just your data protection but be able to use the secondary data to you know solve many of these use cases whether it's your dr or dev test and so on and so forth I mean that's to me a really an important point that you're making is it's not just about okay I'm gonna do a backup your one myopic to the use case I can get more asset leveraged again if we talk about the analytics before I think that's a key key part of it last question Dell technology's world is coming up into April early May this is our tenth year were doing the cube the first cube we ever did was at the predecessor of Dell technologies world of EMC world 2010 we're excited the cube will be there again typically one of our biggest shows of the year what can you tell us what to expect some of you some of the innovations you're talking about show a little leg DTW I'll talk about this gonna be a lot of exciting news both from the appliances and software side just have to wait to hear it it's just one month away and we are super excited to announce a lot of innovative innovation ramaa thanks very much for coming of the Q thank you Dave you're very welcome all right thanks for watching everybody this is Dave vallarte and the cube from our Palo Alto office we'll see you next time [Music] you [Music]

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you be Veritas. (light music) >> Welcome back to the Aria Hotel and Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stewart Miniman. Rama Kolappan is here, he's the Vice, worldwide Vice President of Product Management and Global Alliances. Rama, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. So, 360 is a big topic of conversation. It's a fundamental, strategic evolution for Veritas. Why is 360 Data Management needed? >> So, 360 Data Management is an integrated set of products and solutions, if you will, that helps you with data protection, also with copy data management use cases. If you want to move the data and workload for some of the resiliency services as well, and if you, if a customer is also looking for any of the data visibility, which is a very important part of the 360 Data Management. So, we can offer all of it as part of one platform. So it is a very powerful integrated solution set, if you will. >> So we should think of it as a platform, not a product. Everybody talks about platforms today, the API Economy, Platforms beat Products is sort of the mantra, right? Is that the right way to think about it? >> Correct. And, also, we make sure that the different solutions, which is part of 360 Data Management Suite, works with each other, right? For example, if you actually back up your data, you should be able to use the same copy to do a DevTest. So we have a solution called Velocity that is part of our copy data management solution. It should be used, you should be able to use the backup data to do your disaster recovery if you can, right. >> So how does that resonate with customers? I mean, I get the platform perspective, certainly from a vendor view, you got to have the platform. Do the customers see it the same way? Or do they just want to buy products? >> No, so it is a suite, right? And what customers want, especially enterprise customers, they're looking for, to partner with a vendor, like, for example, us. One is for data protection, primarily, in many cases. Once you protect your data, they're looking for instead of finding the products to use, I can use the same data and how can I get value out of it? So I need to have the visibility about the data itself, so we have our InfoMap solution as part of 360 DM suite, to give you the visibility of what that data is with all the metadata information through that, and once they back up the data, they also have other things to do with respect to moving your data, moving your workload, and especially with the cloud adoption, many of them are going through the transformation. There are some pre-consolidation cloud adoption, and so on, so forth, and they need to move their data and workload, say, from on-prem to cloud, and you can also do it from cloud to cloud also, which is coming soon. So, some of those challenges are very critical, and they are looking for someone like Veritas who can offer that solution for them, which is essentially protect it, move your data, workload, be able to do copy data management on it for DevTest use cases, be able to provide visibility, and the digital compliance is a big factor, which I haven't even gone deeper into. There are lot of solutions to offer for the customers. >> Rama, take us inside how 360 Data Management fulfills the vision that was laid out a year ago. I think back to early in my career it was, like, it was the hardware, you know, you follow the Tick-tock of Intel. Today, software, we can usually talk a little bit further about the roadmap but, you know, customers are going to hold you well, "Can I use it now?" Do you have all those pieces, you know? What kind of pieces have been filled in this week, and, you know, where are the pieces where it's more aspirational than where we are today? >> I'm surprised you remembered the Tick-tock Model, which is essentially go through the process and architecture change, alternating with Intel, right? That's the model, I was there for like nine years or so. >> Marching to the cadence of Moore's law, that's what we used to do as an industry. >> Exactly. So, for 360 Data Management, we announced it last year at Vision and at that point, we are putting in the solutions and the use cases together. And what we did, we worked really hard the past one year to make sure that we put these solutions together. One, they should work with each other. Two, we have a tighter integration. And three, we should be also adding more solutions together and we made it also easier for a customer to buy, it's one SKU, right? So, you don't need to have multiple SKUs to do 10 different things. It's much easier to buy. It'll do all the things that an enterprise customer want with all the stuff that I talked about earlier, and from there on, they should be also, we should be able to also cater to some of the newer problems that customers have, which is, essentially, we launched CloudPoint, for example, which does a snapshot management, and we're adding more capabilities to it, and going forward, you will see that the 360 Data Management will evolve to cater to the customer needs. We always place customer in the forefront and make sure that their needs are met first, and that's the stuff that will design the solution, based on their needs. >> We spoke to Mike Palmer this morning and one of the things he said that kind of matured a little bit is, "That interaction with the cloud, when you get down into it, it's nice to talk about public clouds and people use many clouds but they're all a little bit different." So, maybe take us inside, there's a couple announcements you made, maybe give us a little bit of color on that and, you know, come on, tell us how is it working with all these big players? >> So, I run the technology alliances team here as well, so my team works with the various cloud vendors, which is essentially Azure through IBM to Google, AWS, and so on, so forth, right? So we are already working with AWS on multiple product integration, deeper integration. With Azure we are making sure that from some of the roadmap, like when recently we launched EnterpriseWorld, to make sure that it supports Azure, and then also we launched the VIP release that happened very recently. Support for Azure, as well. And we make sure that the other products that I talked about have the cloud as a significant piece of it, part of the roadmap. We have other vendors that are, we have partners that we are working with like IBM, Google, et cetera. They have their own strengths and we are initially going to go, we already sell on a backup as part of our, with IBM. We've been doing that business with them for more than 10 years, right? So there's a lot of moving parts in the sense that they are coming up with a lot of innovation. We are coming up with a lot of innovation and we make sure that we deliver what the customers want with those cloud vendors. And a very simple example is that if you want to do a data and workload migration on-prem to cloud, we can help with that very critical use case for anyone who's going through, looking at cloud transformation and journey to cloud. And, likewise, basic use cases also like backup to cloud, backup in cloud, disaster recovery, migration, DevTest, and these use cases is what we target, and it is part of the 360 Data Management suite itself. >> Can I ask you, it's kind of a wonky question, but it's something I'm curious about, and we talked to Mike Palmer a little bit about it, the challenge of integrating to various cloud services, in the non-trivial nature that, his answer was actually quite interesting. He said, "Listen, it was a lot harder "when we had a gazillion OS's, a lot easier now." But I want to understand that better. So, when you look at, and I am going to pick AWS only because I know it a little bit better and their services, but when you look at the myriad of data, sort of services that they have, are you just targeting the data stores? Like, an S3 or an EBS or a Glacier, or do you have to also think about integrating with other data types, DynamoDB, Kinesis, RedShift, Aurora, et cetera, et cetera. How far do you have to go, and what are the complexities of doing that? >> It's a very interesting time, right. There are various cloud service providers who are there, and each of them have their own services and their own storage, right? So, there's no one standard. S3 has been a standard for last one or two years or so. What we are doing is that we're looking at the portfolio, and we look at the use cases for what we are trying to solve for the customers in the cloud and based on that, we actually have some basic use cases which you don't need a full integration. You need some integration with some of those services, which is where we have people that are doing a lot of closer integration with AWS, and other service providers as well. Going forward, we will be using some of those, you mentioned about many DynamoDB, and other services that they have, machine learning services that they have. >> Stu: Sure. >> And different cloud providers have their own strengths and where they, what they offer. So, we will be looking to integrate with our existing portfolio with some of those services so that it is beneficial for customer. For example, if a customer wants to use only AWS, we are tightly integrated so that they get the best experience in AWS, same thing with Azure, same thing with Google cloud, same thing with IBM cloud, same thing with Oracle public cloud. So, that's our direction. First things first, get all of these basic use cases catered to for the customer. Going forward, have a tighter integration with their services. >> And your value in that chain is visibility and management. It's not so much optimization of that service, is it? >> So, I wouldn't call it as optimization of services. We focus a lot on the data visibility. I think in the keynote, and in my keynote, you might have heard also, is that some of the things that customers, we talk with customers a lot and we find that many of the, many times, they don't know what they have it. Everyone knows that it's called dark data, right. We provide the visibility so that they know what data they have before they do any migration. They know what needs to be migrated. And, as you all know, there are different storage tiers in cloud, like your S3, S3IA. You have your Glacier and it is expensive to bring data back from, say, Glacier to any other storage tier all on-prem. So, you need to have the visibility before you send the data out, right? So, we helped with that as well. So, visibility plays a very critical role in so many areas, not even just cloud but also on-prem as well. >> Rama, 360 Data Management's vision was laid out a year ago. A lot of the pieces are in place now. How are you tracking success, you know? Can you give us how many customers you're doing or just kind of growth, adoption, and how should we be looking forward to kind of measure and say how good this is doing? >> So, we actually launched 360 Data Management not too long ago. In the sense we put the package together, program together, and, as part of it, we saw extremely a lot of good traction not just from one geo, we actually saw a lot of traction in Asia Pacific, in MER, in Americas as well. A lot of the customers are looking for, I mean, there are three tiers to it, as well. We have bronze, gold, silver, right? And we see equal traction across the board. And, right now, I can't give you the numbers numbers, but, having said that, we see a lot of traction from customers on adoption and we have a huge pipeline where customers are very interested. These are backup customers who are looking to do many other things like resiliency services, like copy data management, and so on, so forth. So, the 360 Data Management really solves the problem, what they're looking for. >> Yeah. Can you give us a little color to that packaging and pricing? It's a subscription model to my understanding. >> It is a subscription model but-- >> Which is a little different than if you have a traditional and, you know, what are you seeing, what's the feedback been from customers? >> So, it is a subscription model when we went to market. We are going to be offering as a perpetual as well. So there is a gold, silver bronze tier, I had mentioned it. We have a Backup, InfoMap, and also EBFile as part of the bronze. And then you have, we have P as part of the silver plus bronze together and then in the gold, we have Access, also, as part of the solution. So, they can pick what they want and from our... Going forward, we do hear feedback from customers that they want perpetual as well. So, we already, we heard them. We'll make it happen. >> How about the small, midsize business, what are you, what are you doing for them? And can you talk about that a little bit? >> I'm glad you asked that because a lot of the 360 Data Management is centered around net backup, right? And with net backup, adark, all the good releases. There are also a lot of SMB and mid-market customers, and we have a solution called BackupExec, and I'm sure most of you are aware of BackupExec, it's been there for many years. So, BackupExec solves their problem and within BackupExec, we make sure that there are a lot of SMB customers who have like three or four backup products. And we want to make sure that there's one product that can protect the physical, virtual, and cloud environments. So, BackupExec does that. >> Last question. So, the ecosystem, it's evolving. You guys have great ambitions. Microsoft was here, had a big, big presence. Maybe just general thoughts on the ecosystem and, specifically, your relationship with Microsoft and other cloud suppliers. >> So, we work very closely from a strategic level with the CSPs. We call them the Cloud Service Providers. With Microsoft, we are doing a lot of, not just product integration for Azure, we'll also be supporting many things for AzureStack going forward. We're working with them on that. Also, I mentioned about BackupExec, we're also going to market. We are spending a significant amount of money to define the goal, to go to market with them, with their partners, and so on, so forth. Not just for BackupExec but across for all other products. That said, we also have other partners from the Cloud Service Provider point of view. There is a lot of effort happening from product integration, defining goal market, and as we define that, we're also engaging with their channel partners, who are also our channel partners, to help with the goal market. >> Cool, alright. Well, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, Rama. Really great to meet you and great to talk to you. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back. (light music)