(shimmering corporate music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to our conversation with Hitachi Vantara. Lisa Martin here with Russell Skingsley, the CTO and Global VP of Technical Sales at Hitachi Vantara. Russell, welcome to the program. >> Hiya, Lisa! Nice to be here! >> Yeah, great to have you. So, here we are, at the end of calendar year 2022. What are some of the things that you're hearing out in the field in terms of customers' priorities for 2023? >> Yeah, good one. Just to set the scene here, we tend to deal with enterprises that have mission-critical IT environments and this has been been in our heritage and continues to be our major strength. So, just to set the scene here, that's the type of customers predominantly I'd be hearing from and so, that's what you're going to hear about here. Now, in terms of 2023, one of the macro concerns that's hitting almost all of our customers right now, as you can probably appreciate, is power consumption and closely related to that is the whole area of ESG and de-carbonization and all of that sort of thing, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that one because that would be a whole session in itself really, but sufficient to say, it is a priority for us and we are very active in that area. So, aside from that one, that big one, there's also a couple that are pretty much in common for most of our customers and we're in areas that we can help. One of those is in an exponential growth of the amount of data. It's predicted that the world's data is going to triple by 2025 as opposed to where it was in 2020 and I think everyone's contributing to that, including a lot of our customers. So, just the act of managing that amount of data is a challenge in itself and I think closely related to that, a desire to use that data better to be able to gain more business insights and potentially create new business outcomes and business ideas is another one of those big challenges. In that sense, I think a lot of our customers are in what I would kind of call, I affectionately call, the Post-Facebook Awakening Era, and what I mean by that is our traditional businesses, you know, when Facebook came along, they kind of illustrated, hey, I can actually make some use out of what is seemingly an enormous amount of useless data, which is exactly what Facebook did. They took a whole lot of people's, yeah, the minutiae of people's lives, and turned it into, you know, advertising revenue by gaining insights from those, you know, sort of seemingly useless bits of data. >> Right. >> Yeah, right, and I think this actually gave rise to a lot of digital business at that time. You know, this whole idea of all you really need to be successful and disrupt the business is a great idea, you know, an app and a whole bunch of data to power it and I think that a lot of our traditional customers are looking at this and wondering how do they get into the act because they've been collecting data for decades, an enormous amount of data. Right. >> Yeah, every company these days has to be a data company, but to your point, it's got to be able to extract those insights, monetize it, and create real value, new opportunities for the business, at record speed. >> Yes, that's exactly right, and so, being able to wield that data somehow, it kind of turns out our customer's attentions to the type of infrastructure they've got as well. I mean, if you think about those companies that have been really successful in leveraging that data or a lot of them have, especially in the early days, leverage the Cloud to be able to build out their capabilities and the reason why the Cloud became such a pivotal part of that is because it offered self-service IT and, you know, easy development platforms to those people that had these great ideas. All they needed was access to, you know, the provider's website and a credit card and now, all of a sudden, they could start to build a business from that and I think a lot of our traditional IT customers are looking at this and thinking, now, how do I build a similar sort of infrastructure? How do I provide that kind of self-service capability to the owners of business inside my company rather than the IT company sort of being a gatekeeper to a selected set of software packages? How now do I provide this development platform for those internal users? And I think this is why, really, Hybrid Cloud has become the defacto IT sort of architectural standard even for quite traditional, you know, IT companies. >> So, when it comes to Hybrid Cloud, what are some of the challenges the customers are facing? And then, I know Hitachi has a great partner ecosystem. How are partners helping Hitachi Vantara and its customers to eliminate or solve some of those Hybrid Cloud challenges? >> Yeah, it's a great question and, you know, it's not 1975 anymore. It's not like you're going to get all of your IT needs from one vendor. Hybrid by, sort of, its, you know, by definition, is going to involve multiple pieces and so, there basically is no hybrid at all without a partner ecosystem. You really can't get everything at a one-stop shop like you used to, but even if you think about the biggest public Cloud provider on the planet, AWS, even it has a marketplace for partner solutions. So, even they see, even for customers that might consider themselves to be all in on Public Cloud, they are still going to need other pieces, which is where their marketplace comes in. Now, for us, you know, we're a company that, we've been in the IT business for over 60 years, one of the few that could claim that sort of heritage, and, you know, we've seen a lot of this type of change ourselves, this change of attitude from being able to provide everything yourself to being someone who contributes to an overall ecosystem. So, partners are absolutely essential, and so now, we kind of have a partner-first philosophy when it comes to our routes to market on, you know, not just our own products in terms of, you know, a resale channel or whatever, but also making sure that we are working with some of the biggest players in Hybrid infrastructure and determining where we can add value to that in our own solutions and so, you know, when it comes to those partner ecosystems, we're always looking for the spaces where we can best add our own capability to those prevailing IT architectures that are successful in the marketplace and, you know, I think that it's probably fair to say, you know, for us, first and foremost, we have a reputation for having the biggest, most reliable storage infrastructure available on the planet and we make no apologies for the fact that we tout our speeds and feeds and uptime supremacy. You know, a lot of our competitors would suggest that, hey, speeds and feeds don't matter, but, you know, that's kind of what you say when you're not the fastest or not the most reliable. You know, of course they matter and for us, the way that we look at this is we say, let's look at who's providing the best possible Hybrid solutions and let's partner with them to make those solutions even better. That's the way we look at it. >> Can you peel the onion a little bit on the technology underpinning the solutions? Give me a glimpse into that and then maybe add some color in terms of how partners are enhancing that. >> Yeah, let me do that with a few examples here and maybe what I can do is I can sort of share some insight about the way we think with partnering with particular people and why it's a good blend or why we see that technologically it's a good blend. So, for example, the work we do with VMware, which we consider to be one of our most important Hybrid Cloud partners and in fact, it's my belief they have one of the strongest Hybrid Cloud stories in the industry. It resonates really strongly with our customers as well, but, you know, we think it's made so much better with the robust underpinnings that we provide. We're one of the few storage vendors that provides a 100% data availability guarantee. So, we take that sort of level of reliability and we add other aspects like life cycle management of the underpinning infrastructure. We combine that with what VMware's doing and then, when you look at our converged, or hyper-converged, solutions with them, it's a 'better together' story where you now have what is one of the best Hybrid Cloud stories in the industry with VMware, but now, for the on-premise part especially, you've now added 100% data availability guarantee, and you've made managing the underlying infrastructure so much easier through the tools that we provide that go down to that level, a level underneath, where VMware are, and so, that's VMware, and I've got a couple more examples just to sort of fill that out a bit. >> Sure. >> Cisco is another part, a very strong partner of ours, a key partner, and, I mean, you look at Cisco, they're a $50,000,000,000 IT provider, and they don't have a dedicated storage infrastructure of their own, so they're going to partner with someone. From our perspective, we look at Cisco's customers and we look at them and think, they're very similar to our own in terms of they're known to appreciate performance and reliability and a bit of premium in quality and we think we match with them quite well. They're already buying what we believe are the best converged platforms in the industry from Cisco, so it makes sense that those customers would want to compliment that investment with the best arrays, best storage arrays, they can get, and so, we think we are helping Cisco's customers make the most of their decision to be UCS customers. Final one for you, Lisa, by way of example. We have a relationship with Equinix and, you know, Equinix is the world's sort of leading Colo provider and the way I think they like to think of themselves, and I too tend to agree with them, is they're one of the most compelling high-speed interconnect networks in the world. They're connected to all of the significant Cloud providers in most of the locations around the world. We have a relationship with them where we find we have customers in common who really love the idea of compute from the Cloud. Compute from the Cloud is great because compute is something that you are doing for a set period of time and then it's over. You, like, you have a task, you do some compute, it's done. Cloud is beautiful for that. Storage on the other hand is very long-lived. Storage doesn't tend to operate in that same sort of way. It sort of just becomes a bigger and bigger blob over time and so, the cost model around Public Cloud and storage is not as compelling as it is for compute, and so, with our relationship with Equinix, we help our customers to be able to create, let's call it a data anchor point, where they put our arrays into an Equinix location and then they utilize Equinix as high-speeding, interconnects to the Cloud providers to take the compute from them. So, they take the compute from the Cloud providers and they own their own storage, and in this way, they feel like, we've now got the best of all worlds. >> Right. >> What I hope that illustrates Lisa is, with those three examples, is we are always looking for ways to find our key advantages with any given, you know, alliance partner's advantages. >> Right. What are, when you're in customer conversations, in our final few minutes here I want to get, what are some of the key differentiators that you talk about when you're in customer conversations and then how does the partner ecosystem fit into Hitachi Vantara as a service business? We'll start with differentiators and then let's move into the as-a-service business so we can round out with that. >> Okay, let's just start with the differentiators. You know, firstly, and hopefully, I've kind of, I've hit this point hard enough. We do believe that we have the fastest and most reliable storage infrastructure on the planet. This is kind of what we are known for and customers that are working with us already sort of have an appreciation for that and so, they're looking for, okay, you've got that. Now, how can you make my Hybrid Cloud aspirations better? So, we do have that as a fundamental, right? So, but secondly, I'd say, I think it's also because we go beyond just storage management and into the areas of data management. >> Okay. >> You know, we've got solutions that are not just about storing the bits. We do think that we do that very well, but we also have solutions that move into the areas of enrichment of the data, cataloging of the data, classification of the data, and most importantly, analytics. So, you know, we think it's, some of our competitors just stop at storing stuff and some of our competitors are in the analytics space, but we feel that we can bridge that and we think that that's a competitive advantage for us. >> Right. >> One of the other areas that I think is key for us as well is, as I said, we're one of the few vendors who've been in the marketplace for 60 years and we think this gives us a more nuanced perspective about things. There are many things in the industry, trends that have happened over time, where we feel we've seen this kind of thing before and I think we will see it again, but you only really get that perspective if you are long-lived in the industry and so, we believe that our conversations with our customers bear a little bit more sophistication. It's not just about what's the latest and greatest trends. >> Right. We've got about one minute left. Can you round us out with how the partner ecosystem is playing a role in the as-a-service business? >> They're absolutely pivotal in that, you know? We ourselves don't own data centers, right? So, we don't provide our own Cloud services out. So, we are 100% partner-focused when it comes to that aspect. Our formula is to help partners build their Cloud services with our solutions and then on-sell them to their customers as a service. You know, and by quick way of example, VMware, for example, they've got nearly 5,000 partners selling VMware Cloud services. 5,000 blows me away and many of them are our partners too. So, we kind of see this as a virtuous cycle. We've got product, we've got an an alliance with VMware, and we work together with partners in common for the delivery of an as-a-service business. >> Got it. So, as you said, the partner ecosystem, it's absolutely pivotal. Russell, it's been a pleasure having you on the program talking about all things Hybrid Cloud challenges and how Hitachi Vantara is working with its partner ecosystems to really help customers across industries solve those big problems. We really appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you very much, Lisa! >> Thanks, Russell. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage!

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage here at re:MARS. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. It's the event where it's part of the "re:" series: re:MARS, re:Inforce, re:Invent. MARS stands for machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. And a lot of conversation is all about AI machine learning. This one's about AI and business transformation. We've got Stepan Pushkarev CTO, CEO, Co-Founder of Provectus. Welcome to theCUBE. And Russ Lamb, eCommerce Retail Data Engineering Lead at PepsiCo, customer story. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to be here, John. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> I love the practical customer stories because it brings everything to life. This show is about the future, but it's got all the things we want, we love: machine learning, robotics, automation. If you're in DevOps, or you're in data engineering, this is the world of automation. So what's the relationship? You guys, you're a customer. Talk about the relationship between you guys. >> Sure, sure. Provectus as a whole is a professional services firm, premier, a AWS partner, specializing in machine learning, data, DevOps. PepsiCo is our customer, our marquee customer, lovely customer. So happy to jointly present at this re:Invent, sorry, re:MARS. Anyway, Russ... >> I made that mistake earlier, by the way, 'cause re:Invent's always on the tip of my tongue and re:MARS is just, I'm not used to it yet, but I'm getting there. Talk about what are you guys working together on? >> Well, I mean, we work with Provectus in a lot of ways. They really helped us get started within our e-commerce division with AWS, provided a lot of expertise in that regard and, you know, just hands-on experience. >> We were talking before we came on camera, you guys just had another talk and how it's all future and kind of get back to reality, Earth. >> Russ: Get back to Earth. >> If we're on earth still. We're not on Mars yet, or the moon. You know, AI's kind of got a future, but it does give a tell sign to what's coming, industrial change, full transformation, 'cause cloud does the back office. You got data centers. Now you've got cloud going to the edge with industrial spaces, the ultimate poster child of edge and automation safety. But at the end of the day, we're still in the real world. Now people got to run businesses. And I think, you know, having you here is interesting. So I have to ask you, you know, as you look at the technology, you got to see AI everywhere. And the theme here, to me, that I see is the inflection point driving all this future robotics change, that everyone's been waiting for by the way, but it's like been in movies and in novels, is the machine learning and AI as the tipping point. This is key. And now you're here integrating AI into your company. Tell us your story. >> Well, I think that every enterprise is going to need more machine learning, more, you know, AI or data science. And that's the journey that we're on right now. And we've come a long way in the past six years, particularly with our e-commerce division, it's a really data rich environment. So, you know, going from brick and mortar, you know, delivering to restaurants, vending machines and stuff, it's a whole different world when you're, people are ordering on Amazon every couple minutes, or seconds even, our products. But they, being able to track all that... >> Can you scope the problem statement and the opportunity? Because if I just kind of just, again, I'm not, you're in, it's your company, you're in the weeds, you're at the data, you're everything, But it just seems me, the world's now more integration, more different data sources. You've got suppliers, they have their different IT back ends. Some are in the cloud, some aren't in the cloud. This is, like, a hard problem when you want to bring data together. I mean, API certainly help, but can you scope the problem, and, like, what we're talking about here? >> Well, we've got so many different sources of data now, right? So we used to be relying on a couple of aggregators who would pull all this data for us and hand us an aggregated view of things. But now we're able to partner with different retailers and get detail, granular information about transactions, orders. And it's just changed the game, changed the landscape from just, like, getting a rough view, to seeing the nuts and bolts and, like, all the moving parts. >> Yeah, and you see in data engineering much more tied into like cloud scale. Then you got the data scientists, more the democratization application and enablement. So I got to ask, how did you guys connect? What was the problem statement? How did you guys, did you have smoke and fire? You came in solved the problem? Was it a growth thing? How did this, how did you guys connect as a customer with Provectus? >> Yeah, I can elaborate on that. So we were in the very beginning of that journey when there was, like, just a few people in this new startup, let's call it startup within PepsiCo. >> John: Yeah. >> Calling like a, it's not only e-commerce, it was a huge belief from the top management that it's going to bring tremendous value to the enterprise. So there was no single use case, "Hey, do this and you're going to get that." So it's a huge belief that e-commerce is the future. Some industry trends like from brand-centric to consumer-centric. So brand, product-centric. Amazon has the mission to build the most customer-centric customer company. And I believe that success, it gets a lot of enterprises are being influenced by that success. So I remember that time, PepsiCo had a huge belief. We started building just from scratch, figuring out what does the business need? What are the business use cases? We have not started with the IT. We have not started with this very complicated migrations, modernizations. >> John: So clean sheet of paper. >> Yeah. >> From scratch. >> From scratch. >> And so you got the green light. >> Yeah. >> And the leadership threw the holy water on that and said, "Hey, we'll do this."? >> That's exactly what happened. It was from the top down. The CEO kind of set aside the e-commerce vision as kind of being able to, in a rapidly evolving business place like e-commerce, it's a growing field. Not everybody's figured it out yet, but to be able to change quickly, right? The business needs to change quickly. The technology needs to change quickly. And that's what we're doing here. >> So this is interesting. A lot of companies don't have that, actually, luxury. I mean, it's still more fun because the tools are available now that all the hyper scales built on their own. I mean, back in the day, 10 years ago, they had to build it all, Facebook. You didn't know, I had people on here from Pinterest and other companies. They had to build all of that from scratch. Now cloud's here. So how did you guys do this? What was the playbook? Take us through the AI because it sounds like the AI is core, you know, belief principle of the whole entire system. What did you guys do? Take me through the journey there. >> Yeah. Beyond management decisions, strategic decisions that has been made as a separate startup, whatever- >> John: That's great. >> So some practical, tactical. So it may sound like a cliche, but it's a huge thing because I work with many enterprises and this, like, "center of excellence" that does a nice technology stuff and then looks for the budget on the different business units. It just doesn't go anywhere. It could take you forever to modernize. >> We call that the Game of Thrones environment. >> Yes. >> Yeah. Nothing ever gets done 'till it blows up at the end. >> Here, these guys, and I have to admit, I don't want to steal their thunder. I just want to emphasize it as an external person. These guys just made it so differently. >> John: Yeah. >> They even physically sat in a different office in a WeWork co-working and built that business from scratch. >> That's what Andy Jackson talked about two years ago. And if you look at some of the big successes on AWS, Capital One, all the big, Goldman Sachs. The leadership, real commitment, not like BS, like total commitment says, "Go." But enough rope to give you some room, right? >> Yeah. I think that's the thing is, there was always an IT presence, right, overseeing what we were doing within e-commerce, but we had a lot of freedoms to make design choices, technology choices, and really accelerate the business, focus on those use cases where we could make a big impact with a technology choice. >> Take me through the stages of the AI transformation. What are some of the use cases and specific tactics you guys executed on? >> Well, I think that the supply chain, which I think is a hot topic right now, but that was one use case where we're using, like, data real time, real time data to inform our sales projections and delivery logistics. But also our marketing return on investment, I feel like that was a really interesting, complex problem to solve using machine learning, Because there's so much data that we needed to process in terms of countries, territories, products, like where do you spend your limited marketing budget when you have so many choices, and, using machine learning, boil that all down to, you know, this is the optimal choice, right now. >> What were some of the challenges and how did you overcome them in the early days to get things set up, 'cause it takes a lot of energy to get it going, to get the models. What were some of the challenges and how did you overcome them? >> Well, I think some of it was expertise, right? Like having a partner like Provectus and Stepan really helped because they could guide us, Stepan could guide us, give his expertise and what he knows in terms of what he's seen to our budding and growing business. >> And what were the things that you guys saw that you contributed on? And was there anything new that you had to do together? >> Yeah, so yeah. First of all, just a very practical tip. Yes, start with the use cases. Clearly talk to the business and say, "Hey, these are the list of the use cases" and prioritize them. So not with IT, not with technology, not with the migration thing. Don't touch anything on legacy systems. Second, get data in. So you may have your legacy systems or some other third party systems that you work with. There's no AI without data. Get all the pipelines, get data. Quickly boat strap the data lake house. Put all the pipelines, all the governance in place. And yeah, literally took us three months to get up and running. And we started delivering first analytical reports. It's just to have something back to business and keep going. >> By the way, that's huge, speed. I mean, this is speed. You go back and had that baggage of IT and the old antiquated systems, you'd be dragging probably months. Right? >> It's years, years. Imagine you should migrate SAP to the cloud first. No, you don't do don't need to do that. >> Pipeline. >> Just get data. I need data. >> Stream that data. All right, where are we now? When did you guys start? I want to get just going to timeline my head 'cause I heard three months. Where are we now? You guys threw it. Now you have impact. You have, you have results. >> Yeah. I mean that for our marketing ROI engine, we've built it and it's developed within e-commerce, but we've started to spread it throughout the organization now. So it's not just about the digital and the e-commerce space. We're deploying it to, you know, regionally to other, to Europe, to Latin America, other divisions within PepsiCo. And it's just grown exponentially. >> So you have scale to it right now? >> Yeah. Well- >> How far are you in now? What, how many years, months, days? >> E-commerce, the division was created six years ago, which is, so we've had some time to develop this, our machine learning capabilities and this use case particular, but it's increasingly relevant and expansion is happening as we speak. >> What are you most proud of? You look back at the impact. What are you most proud of? >> I think the relationship we built with the people, you know, who use our technology, right. Just seeing the impact is what makes me proud. >> Can you give an example without revealing any confidential information? >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was an example from my talk about, I was approached recently by our sales team. They were having difficulty with supply chain, monitoring our fill rate of our top brands with these retailers. And they come up to me, they have this problem. They're like, "How do we solve it?" So we work together to find a data source, just start getting that data in the hands of people who can use it within days. You know, not talking like a long time. Bring that data into our data warehouse, and then surface the data in a tool they can use, you know, within a matter of a week or two. >> I mean, the transformation is just incredible. In fact, we were talking on theCUBE earlier today around, you know, data warehouses in the cloud, data meshes of different pros and cons. And the theme that came out of that conversation was data's a product now. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> And what you're kind of describing is, just gimme the product or find it. >> Russ: Right. >> And bring it in with everything else. And there's some, you know, cleaning and stuff people do if they have issues with that. But, if not, it's just bring it in, right? It's a product. >> Well, especially with the data exchanges now. AWS has a data exchange and this, I think, is the future of data and what's possible with data because you don't have to start from, okay, I've got this Excel file somebody's been working with on their desktop. This is a, someone's taken that file, put it into a warehouse or a data model, and then they can share it with you. >> John: So are you happy with these guys? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> You're actually telling the story. What was the biggest impact that they did? Was it partnering? Was it writing code, bringing development in, counseling, all the above, managed services? What? >> I think the biggest impact was the idea, you know, like being able to bring ideas to the table and not just, you know, ask us what we want, right? Like I think Provectus is a true partner and was able to share that sort of expertise with us. >> You know, Andy Jackson, whenever I interview on theCUBE, he's now in charge of all Amazon. But when he was at (inaudible). He always had to use their learnings, get the learnings out. What was the learnings you look back now and say, Hey, those were tough times. We overcome them. We stopped, we started, we iterated, we kept moving forward. What was the big learning as you look back, some of the key success points, maybe some failures that you overcome. What was the big learnings that you could share with folks out there now that are in the same situation where they're saying, "Hey, I'd rather start from scratch and do a reset." >> Yeah. So with that in particular, yes, we started this like sort of startup within the enterprise, but now we've got to integrate, right? It's been six years and e-commerce is now sharing our data with the rest of the organization. How do we do that, right? There's an enterprise solution, and we've got this scrappy or, I mean, not scrappy anymore, but we've got our own, you know, way of doing. >> Kind of boot strap. I mean, you were kind of given charter. It's a start up within a big company, I mean- >> But our data platform now is robust, and it's one of the best I've seen. But how do we now get those systems to talk? And I think Provectus has came to us with, "Here, there's this idea called data mesh, where you can, you know, have these two independent platforms, but share the data in a centralized way. >> So you guys are obviously have a data mesh in place, big part of the architecture? >> So it is in progress, but we know the next step. So we know the next step. We know the next two steps, what we're going to do, what we need to do to make it really, to have that common method, data layer. between different data products within organization, different locations, different business units. So they can start talking to each other through the data and have specific escalates on the data. And yeah. >> It's smart because I think one of the things that people, I think, I'd love to get your reaction to this is that we've been telling the story for many, many years, you have horizontally scalable cloud and vertically specialized domain solutions, you need machine learning that's smart, but you need a lot of data to help it. And that's not, a new architecture, that's a data plane, it's control plane, but now everyone goes, "Okay, let's do silos." And they forget the scale side. And then they go, "Wait a minute." You know, "I'm not going to share it." And so you have this new debate of, and I want to own my own data. So the data layer becomes an interesting conversation. >> Yeah, yes. Meta data. >> Yeah. So what, how do you guys see that? Because this becomes a super important kind of decision point architecturally. >> I mean, my take is that there has to be some, there will always be domains, right? Everyone, like there's only so much that you can find commonality across, like in industry, for example. But there will always be a data owner. And, you know, kind of like what happened with rush to APIs, how that enabled microservices within applications and being sharing in a standardized way, I think something like that has to happen in the data space. So it's not a monolithic data warehouse, it's- >> You know, the other thing I want to ask you guys both, if you don't mind commenting while I got you here, 'cause you're both experts. >> We just did a showcase on data programmability. Kind of a radical idea, but like data as code, we called it. >> Oh yeah. >> And so if data's a product and you're acting on, you've got an architecture and system set up, you got to might code it's programmable. You need you're coding with data. Data becomes like a part of the development process. What do you guys think of when you hear data as code and data being programmable? >> Yeah, it's a interesting, so yeah, first of all, I think Russ can elaborate on that, Data engineering is also software engineering. Machine learning engineering is a software. At the end of the day, it's all product. So we can use different terms and buzz words for that but this is what we have at the end of the day. So having the data, well I will use another buzz word, but in terms of the headless architecture- >> Yes. >> When you have a nice SDK, nice API, but you can manipulate with the data as your programming object to build reach applications for your users, and give it, and share not as just a table in Redshift or a bunch of CSV files in S3 bucket, but share it as a programmable thing that you can work with. >> Data as code. >> Yeah. This is- >> Infrastructure code was a revolution for DevOps, but it's not AI Ops so it's something different. It's really it's data engineering. It's programming. >> Yeah. This is the way to deliver data to your consumers. So there are different ways you can show it on a dashboard. You can show it, you can expose it as an API, or you can give it as an object, programmable interface. >> So now you're set up with a data architecture that's extensible 'cause that's the goal. You don't want to foreclose. You must think about that must keep you up at night. What's going to foreclose that benefit? 'Cause there's more coming. Right? >> Absolutely. There's always more coming. And I think that's why it's important to have that robust data platform to work from. And yeah, as Stepan mentioned, I'm a big believer in data engineering as software engineering. It's not some like it's not completely separate. You have to follow the best practices software engineers practice. And, you know, really think about maintainability and scalability. >> You know, we were riffing about how cloud had the SRE managing all those servers. One person, data engineering has a many, a one to many relationships too. You got a lot going on. It's not managing a database. It's millions of data points and data opportunity. So gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. And thanks for telling the story of Pepsi. >> Of course, >> And great conversation. Congratulations on this great customer. And thanks for >> coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks, thank you. Thanks, Russ, would you like to wrap it up with the pantry shops story? >> Oh, yeah! I think it will just be a super relevant evidence of the agility and speed and some real world applicable >> Let's go. Close us out. >> So when, when the pandemic happened and there were lockdowns everywhere, people started buying things online. And we noticed this and got a challenge from our direct to consumer team saying, "Look, we need a storefront to be able to sell to our consumers, and we've got 30 days to do it." We need to be able to work fast. And so we built not just a website, but like everything that behind it, the logistics of supply chain aspects, the data platform. And we didn't just build one. We built two. We got pantry shop.com and snacks.com, within 30 days. >> Good domains! >> The domain broker was happy on that one. Well continue the story. >> Yeah, yeah. So I feel like that the agility that's required for that kind of thing and the like the planning to be able to scale from just, you know, an idea to something that people can use every day. And, and that's, I think.- >> And you know, that's a great point too, that shows if you're in the cloud, you're doing the work you're prepared for anything. The pandemic was the true test for who was ready because it was unforeseen force majeure. It was just like here it comes and the people who were in the cloud had that set up, could move quickly. The ones that couldn't. >> Exactly. >> We know what happened. >> And I would like to echo this. So they have built not just a website, they have built the whole business line within, and launched that successfully to production. That includes sales, marketing, supply chain, e-commerce, aside within 30 days. And that's just a role model that could be used by other enterprises. >> Yeah. And it was not possible without, first of all, right culture. And second, without cloud Amazon elasticity and all the tools that we have in place. >> Well, the right architecture allows for scale. That's the whole, I mean, you did everything right at the architecture that's scale. I mean, you're scaling. >> And we empower our engineers to make those choices, right. We're not, like, super bureaucratic where every decision has to be approved by the manager or the managers manager. The engineers have the power to just make good decisions, and that's how we move fast. >> That's exactly the future right there. And this is what it's all about. Reliability, scale agility, the ability to react and have applications roll out on top of it without long timeframes. Congratulations. Thanks for being on theCUBE. Appreciate it. All right. >> Thank you. >> Okay, you're watching theCUBE here at re:MARS 2020, I'm John Furrier. Stay tuned. We've got more coverage coming after this short break. (upbeat music)

>>The cube is back at Vemo 2022. I was happy to be live. Dave ante, Dave Nicholson and Dave Russell three Daves. Dave is the vice president of enterprise strategy at Veeam. Great to see you again, my friend. Thanks for coming >>On. Uh, it's always a pleasure. And Dave, I can remember your name. I can't remember >>Your name as well. <laugh> so wow. How many years has it been now? I mean, add on COVID is four years now. >>Yeah, well, three, three solid three. Yeah, Fallon blue. Uh, last year, Miami little secret. We're gonna go there again next year. >>Okay, so you joined Veeam >>Three. Oh, me four. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. Four is four, right? Okay. Wow. >>Um, time flies, man. >>Interesting. What your background, former analyst analyze your time at Veeam and the market and the changes in the customer base. What, what have you seen? What are the big takeaways? Learnings? >>Yeah. You know, what's amazing to me is we've done a lot more research now, ourselves, right? So things that we intuitively thought, things that we experienced by talking to customers, and of course our partners, we can now actually prove. So what I love is that we take the exact same product and we go down market up market. We go across geographies, we go different verticals and we can sell that same exact product to all constituencies because the differences between them are not that great. If it was the three Dave company or the 3m company, what you're looking for is reliable recovery, ease of use those things just transcend. And I think there used to be a time when we thought enterprise means something very different than mid-market than does SMB. And certainly your go to market plans are that way, but not the product plans. >>So the ransomware study, we had Jay buff on earlier, we were talking about it and we just barely scratched the surface. But how were you able to get people to converse with you in such detail? Was it, are you using phone surveys? Are you, are, are you doing web surveys? Are you doing a combination? Deep >>Dives? Yeah. So it was web based and it was anonymous on both ends, meaning no one knew VE was asking the questions. And also we made the promise that none of your data is ever gonna get out, not even to say a large petroleum company, right. Everything is completely anonymized. And we were able to screen people out very effectively, a lot of screener questions to make sure we're dealing with the right person. And then we do some data integrity checking on the back end. But it's amazing if you give people an opportunity, they're actually very willing to tell you about their experience as long as there's no sort of ramification about putting the company or themselves at risk. >>So when I was at IDC, we did a lot of surveys, tons of surveys. I'm sure you did a lot of surveys at Gartner. And we would look at vendor surveys like, eh, well, this kind of the questions are rigged or it's really self-serving. I don't sense that in your surveys, you you've, you've always, you've still got that independent analyst gene. Is that, I mean, it's gotta be, is it by design? Is it just happen that ransomware is a topic that just sort of lends itself to that. Maybe you could talk about your philosophy there. >>Yeah. Well, two part answer really, because it's definitely by design. We, we really want the information. I mean, we're using this to fuel or inform our understanding of the market, what we should build next, what we should message next. So we really want the right data. So we gotta ask the right questions. So Jason, our colleague, Julie, myself, we work really hard on trying to make sure we're not leading the witness down a certain path. We're not trying to prove our own thesis. We're trying to understand what the market really is thinking. And when it comes to ransomware, we wanna know what we don't know, meaning we found a few surprises along the way. A lot of it was confirmational, but that's okay too. As long as you can back that up, cuz then it's not just Avenger's opinion. Of course, a vendor that says that they can help you do something has data that says, they think you uni have a problem with this, but now we can actually point to it and have a more interesting kind of partnership conversation about if you are like 1000 other enterprises globally, this may be what you're seeing. >>And there are no wrong answers there. Meaning even if they say that is absolutely not what we're seeing. Great. Let's have that conversation that's specific to you. But if you're not sure where to start, we've got a whole pool of data to help guide that conversation. >>Yeah. Shout out to Julie Webb does a great job. She's a real pro and yes. And, and really makes sure that, like you say, you want the real, real answers. So what were some of the things that you were excited about or to learn about? Um, in the survey again, we, we touched just barely touched on it in 15 minutes with Jason, but what, what's your take? Well, >>Two that I'd love to point out. I mean, unfortunately Jason probably mentioned this one, you know, only 19% answered when we said, did you pay the ransom? And only 19% said, no, I didn't pay the ransom. And I was a hundred percent successful in my recovery. You know, we're in Vegas, one out of five odds. That's not good. Right? That's a go out of business spot. That's not the kind of 80 20 you want to hear. That's not exactly exactly. Now more concerning to me is 5% said no ransom was asked for. And you know, my phrase on that is that's, that's an arson event. It's not an extortion event. Right. I just came to do harm. That's really troubling. Now there's a huge percentage there that said we paid the ransom about 24% said we paid the ransom and we still couldn't restore the data. So if you add up that 24 in that five, that 29%, that was really scary to me. >>Yeah. So you had the 19%. Okay. That's scary enough. But then you had the wrecking ball, right? Ah, we're just gonna, it's like the mayhem commercial. Yes. Yeah. See ya. Right. Okay. So <laugh>, that's, that's wild. So we've heard a lot about, um, ransomware. The thing that interests me is, and we've had a big dose of ransomware as analysts in these last, you know, 12, 18 months and more. But, but, but it's really escalated. Yeah. Seems like, and by the way, you're sharing this data, which is amazing. Right. So I actually want to dig in and steal some of the, the data. I think that's cool. Right? Definitely. You gave us a URL this morning. Um, so, but you, your philosophy is to share the data. So everybody sees it, your customers, your prospects, your competitors, but your philosophy is to why, why are you sharing that data? Why don't you just keep it to yourself and do it quietly with customers? >>Yeah. You know, I think this is such a significant event. No one vendor's gonna solve it all. Realistically, we may be tied for number one in market share statistically speaking, but we have 12.5%. Right. So we're not gonna be able to do greater good if we're keeping that to ourselves. And it's really a notion of this awareness level, just having the conversation and having that more open, even if it's not us, I think is gonna be beneficial. It speaks to the value of backup and why backup is still relevant this day and age. >>I dunno if you're comfortable answering this, but I'll ask anyway, when you were a Gartner analyst, did you get asked about ransomware a lot? >>No. >>Very rarely or never. >>Almost never. Yeah. And that was four years ago. Literally. Like it >>Was a thing back then, right? I mean it wasn't of course prominent, but it was, it was, I guess it wasn't that >>20 16, 20 17, you know, it's, it's interesting because at a couple of levels you have the, um, the willingness of participants to share their stories, which is a classic example of people coming together to fight a common fo. Yeah, yeah. Right. In the best of times, that's what happens. And now you're sharing that information out. One of the reasons why some would argue we've gotten to this place is because day zero exploits have been stockpiled and they haven't been shared. So you go to, you know, you go, you go through the lineage that gets you to not pet cat as an example. Yes. And where did it come from? Hey, it was something that we knew about. Uh, but we didn't share it. Right. We waited until it happened because maybe we thought we could use it in, in some way. It's, it's an, it's an interesting philosophical question. I, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know where, if that's, uh, the third, it's the one, the third rail you don't want to touch, but basically we're, we are, I guess we're just left to sort through whatever, whatever we have to sort through in that regard. But it is interesting left to industry's own devices. It's sharing an openness. >>Yeah. You know, it's, I almost think it's like open source code. Right? I mean, the promise there is together, we can all do something better. And I think that's true with this ransomware research and the rest of the research we do too. We we've freely put it out there. I mean, you can download the link, no problem. Right. And go see the report. We're fine with that. You know, we think it actually is very beneficial. I remember a long time ago, it was actually Sam Adams that said, uh, you know, Hey, there's a lot of craft brewers out there now, you know, is, are you as a craft brewery now? Successful? Are you worried about that? No. We want every craft brewery to be successful because it creates a better awareness. Well, an availability market, it's still Boston reference. >>What did another Boston reference? Yes. Thank you, >>Boston. And what <laugh>. >>Yeah. So, you know, I, I, I feel like we've seen these milestone, you know, watershed events in, in security. I mean, stucks net sort of yeah. Informed us what's possible with nation states, even though it's highly likely that us and Israel were, were behind that, uh, the, the solar winds hack people are still worried about. Yes. Okay. What's next. Even, even something now. And so everybody's now on high alert even, I don't know how close you guys followed it, but the, the, uh, the Okta, uh, uh, breach, which was a fairly benign incident. And technically it was, was very, very limited and very narrow in scope. But CISOs that I talked to were like, we are really paranoid that there's another shoe to drop. What do we do? So the, the awareness is way, way off the charts. It begs the question. What's next. Can you, can you envision, can you stay ahead? It's so hard to stay ahead of the bad guys, but, but how are you thinking about that? What this isn't the end of it from your standpoint? >>No, it's not. And unfortunately it's because there's money to be made, right? And the barrier to entry is relatively low. It's like hiring a Hitman. You know, you don't actually have to even carry out the bad act yourself and get your own hands dirty. And so it's not gonna end, but it it's really security is everyone's responsibility. Veeam is not really a full time security company, but we play a role in that whole ecosystem. And even if you're not in the data center as an employee of a company, you have a role to play in security. You know, don't click that link, lock the door behind you, that type of thing. So how do you stay ahead of it? I think you just continually keep putting a focus on it. It's like performance. You're never gonna be done. There's always something to tune and to work on, but that can be overwhelming. So the positive I try to tell someone is to your point, Dave, look, a lot of these vulnerabilities were known for quite some time. If you were just current on your patch levels, this could have been prevented, right? You could have closed that window. So the thing that I often say is if you can't do everything and probably none of us can do something and then repeat, do it again, try to get a little bit better every period of time. Whether that's every day, every quarter, what case may be, do what you can. >>Yeah. So ransomware obviously very lucrative. So your job is to increase the denominator. So the ROI is lower, right? And that's a, that's a constant game, right? >>Absolutely. It is a crime of opportunity. It's indiscriminate. And oftentimes non-targeted now there are state sponsored events to your point, but largely it's like the fishermen casting the net out into the ocean. No idea with certainty, what's gonna come back. So I'm just gonna keep trying and trying and trying our goal is to basically you wanna be the house on the neighborhood that looks the least inviting. >>We've talked about this. I mean, any, anyone can be a, a, a ransomware as to go in the dark web, ransomware's a service. Oh, I gotta, I can put a stick into a server and a way I go and I get some Bitcoin right. For it. So, so that's, so, so organizations really have to take this seriously. I think they are. Um, well you tell me, I mean, in your discussions with, with, with customers, >>It's changed. Yeah. You know, I would say 18 months ago, there was a subset of customers out there saying vendors, crying Wolf, you know, you're trying to scare us into making a purchase decision or move off of something that we're working with. Now. I think that's almost inverted. Now what we see is people are saying, look, my boss or my boss's boss's boss, and the security team are knocking on my door asking, what are we gonna do? What's our response? You know, how prepared are we? What kind of things do we have in place? What does our backup practice do to support ransomware? The good news though, going back to the awareness side is I feel like we're evangelizing this a little less as an industry. Meaning the security team is well aware of the role that proper backup and availability can play. That was not true. A handful of years ago. >>Well, that's the other thing too, is that your study showed the closer the practitioner was to the problem. Yes. The more problems there were, that's an awareness thing. Yes. That's not a, that's not, oh, just those guys had visibility. I wanna ask you cuz you've You understand from an application view, right. There's only so much Veeam can do. Um, and then the customer has to have processes in place that go beyond just the, the backup and recovery technology. So, so from an application perspective, what are you advising customers where you leave off and they really have to take over this notion of shared responsibility is really extending beyond cloud security. >>Yeah. Uh, the model that I like is interestingly enough, what we see with Caston in the Kubernetes space. Mm-hmm <affirmative> is there, we're selling into two different constituencies, potentially. It's the infrastructure team that they're worried about disaster recovery. They're worried about backup, but it's the app dev DevOps team. Hey, we're worried about creating the application. So we're spending a lot of focus with the casting group to say, great, go after that shift, left crowd, talk to them about a data availability, disaster recovery, by the way you get data movement or migration for free with that. So migration, maybe what you're first interested in on day one. But by doing that, by having this kind of capability, you're actually protecting yourself from day two issues as well. >>Yeah. So Let's see. Um, what haven't we hit on in this study? There was so much data in there. Uh, is that URL, is that some, a private thing that you guys shared >>Or is it no. Absolutely. >>Can, can you share the >>URL? Yeah, absolutely. It's V E E so V two E period am so V with the period between the E and the a forward slash RW 22. So ransomware 22 is the research project. >>So go there, you download the zip file, you get all the graphics. Um, I I'm gonna dig into it, uh, maybe as early as this, this Friday or this weekend, like to sort of expose that, uh it's you guys obviously want this, I think you're right. It's it's it's awareness needs to go up to solve this problem. You know, I don't know if it's ever solvable, but the only approach is to collaborate. Right. So I, I dunno if you're gonna collaborate with your head-to-head competitors, but you're certainly happy to share the data I've seen Dave, some competitors have pivoted from data protection or even data management to security. Yes. I see. I wonder if I could run a premise by, I see that as an adjacency to your business, but not sort of throwing you into the security bucket. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah. You know, certainly respect everything other competitors are doing, you know, and some are getting very, you know, making some good noise and getting picked up on that. However, we're unapologetically a backup company. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, we're a backup company. First. We're worried about security. We're worried about, you know, data reuse and supporting shift, left types of things, but we're not gonna apologize for being in the backup availability business, not, not at all. However, there's a role that we can play. Having said that that we're a role. We're a component. If you're in the secondary storage market, like backup or archiving. And you're trying to imply that you're going to help prevent or even head off issues on the primary storage side. That might be a little bit of a stretch. Now, hopefully that can happen that we can go get better as an industry on that. >>But fundamentally we're about ensuring that you're recoverable with reliability and speed when you need it. Whether we're no matter what the issue is, because we like to say ransomware is a disaster. Unfortunately there's other kind of disasters that happen as well. Power failures still happen. Natural issues still occur, et cetera. So all these things have to be accounted for. You know, one of our survey, um, data points basically said all the things that take down a server that you didn't plan on. It's basically humans at the top human error, someone accidentally deleted something and then malicious humans, someone actually came after you, but there's a dozen other things that happened too. So you've gotta prepare for all of that. So I guess what I would end up with saying is you remember back in the centralized data centers, especially the mainframe days, people would say, we're worried about the smoking hole or the smoking crater event. Yeah. Yeah. The probability of a plane crashing into your data bunker was relatively low. That was when it got all the discussion though, what was happening every single day is somebody accidentally deleted a file. And so you need to account on both ends of the spectrum. So we don't wanna over rotate. And we also, we don't want to signal to 450,000 beam customers around the world that we're abandoning you that were not about backup. That's still our core >>Effort. No, it's pretty straightforward. You're just telling people to back up in a way that gives them a certain amount of mitigation yes. Or protection in the event that something happens. And no, I don't remember anything about mainframe. He does though though, much older than me >>EF SMS. So I even know what it stands for. Count key data don't even get me started. So, and, and it wasn't thank you for that answer. I didn't mean to sort of a set up question, but it was more of a strategy question and I wish wish I could put on your analyst hat because I, I feel, I'll just say it. I feel as though it's a move to try to get a tailwind. Maybe it's a valuation play. I don't know. But I, I, it resonated with me three years ago when everybody was talking data management and nobody knew what that meant. Data management. I'm like Oracle. >>Right. >>And now it's starting to become a little bit more clear. Um, but Danny Allen stuff and said, it's all about the backup. I think that was one of his keynote messages. So that really resonated with me cuz he said, yeah, it starts with backup and recovery. And that's what, what matters most to these customers. So really was a strategy question. Now maybe it does have valuation impact. Maybe there's a big market there that can be consolidated. You know, uh, we, this morning in the analyst session, we heard about your new CEO's objectives of, you know, grabbing more market share. So, and that's, that's an adjacency. So it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out far too many security vendors. As, as we know, the backup and recovery space is getting more crowded and that is maybe causing people to sort of shift. I don't know, whatever right. Or left, I guess, shift. Right. I'm not sure, but um, it's gonna be really interesting to watch because this has now become a really hot space after, you know, it's been some really interesting momentum in certain pockets, but now it's everywhere it's coming ubiquitous. So I'll give you the last word Dave on, uh, day one, VEON 20, 22. >>Yeah. Well boy, so many things I could say to kind of land the plane on, but we're just glad to be back in person. It's been three years since we've had a live event in those three years, we've gone from 300,000 customers to 450,000 customers. The release cadence, even in the pandemic has been the greatest in the company's history in 2020, 2021, there's only about three dozen software only companies that have hit a billion dollars and we're one of them. And that, you know, that mission is why hasn't changed and that's why we wanna stay consistent. One of the things Danny always likes to say is, you know, we keep telling the same story because we're not wanting to deviate off of that story and there's more work to be done. And to honors point, you know, Hey, if you have ambitious goals, you're gonna have to look at spreading your wings out a little bit wider, but we're never gonna abandon being a backup. Well, >>It's, it's clear to me, Dave on was not brought in to keep you steady at a billion. I think he's got a site set on five and then who knows what's next? Dave Russell, thanks so much for coming back in the cube. Great to >>See always a pleasure. Thank you. >>All right. That's a wrap for Dave one. Dave ante and Dave Nicholson will be backed tomorrow with a full day of coverage. Check out Silicon angle.com for all the news, uh, youtube.com/silicon angle. You can get these videos. They're all, you know, flying up Wiki bond.com for some of the research in this space. We'll see you tomorrow.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Welcome to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. The digital version I'm Lisa Martin and I have a couple of Cuba alumni joining me from Wien. We've got Danny Allen. It's C T O and S VP of product strategy And Dave Russell, VP of Enterprise Strategy, is here as well. Danny and a Welcome back to the Cube. >>Hi, Lisa. Great to be here. >>Hey, Lisa. Great to be here. Love talking with this audience >>It and thankfully, because of technologies like this in the zoom, were still able to engage with that audience, even though we would all be gearing up to be Go spending five days in Vegas with what 47,000 of our closest friends across, you know, and walking a lot. But I wanted Thio. Danny, start with you and you guys had them on virtually this summer. That's an event known for its energy. Talk to me about some of the things that you guys announced there. And how are your customers doing with this rapid change toe? work from home and this massive amount of uncertainty. >>Well, certainly no one would have predicted this the beginning of the year. There has been such transformation. There was a statement made earlier this year that we've gone through two years of transformation in just two months, and I would say that is definitely true. If you look both internally and bean our workforce, we have 4400 employees all of a sudden, 3000 of them that had been going into the office or working from home. And that is true of our customer base as well. There's a lot of remote, uh, remote employ, mental remote working, and so that has. You would think it would have impact on the digital systems. But what it's done is it's accelerated the transformation that organizations were going through, and that's been good in a number of different aspects. One certainly cloud adoption of clouds picked up things like Microsoft teams and collaboration software is certainly picked up, so it's certainly been a challenging year on many fronts. But on the on the other hand, it's also been very beneficial for us as well. >>Yeah, I've talked to so many folks in the last few months. There's silver linings everywhere. There's opportunity everywhere. But give our audience standing an overview of who them is, what you do and how you help customers secure their data. >>Sure, so VM has been in the backup businesses. What I'll say We started right around when virtualization was taking off a little before AWS and you see two left computing services on DWI would do back up a virtual environments. You know, over the last decade, we have grown into a $1 billion company doing backup solutions that enable cloud data management. What do you mean by that? Is we do backup of all kinds of different infrastructures, from virtual to cloud based Assad's based to physical systems, You name it. And then when we ingest that data, what we do is we begin to manage it. So an example of this is we have 400,000 customers, they're going back up on premises. And one of the things that we've seen this year is this massive push of that backup data into S three into the public cloud and s. So this is something that we help our customers with as they go through this transformation. >>And so you've got a team for a ws Cloud native solution. Talk to me a little bit about that. And how does that allow business is to get that centralized view of virtual physical SAS applications? >>Yeah, I think it all starts with architecture er and fundamentally beams, architectures. ER is based upon having a portable data format that self describing. So what >>does >>that mean? That means it reduces the friction from moving data that might have been born on premises to later being Stan Shih ated in, say, the AWS cloud. Or you can also imagine now new workloads being born in the cloud, especially towards the middle and end of this year. A lot of us we couldn't get into our data center. We had to do everything remotely. So we had to try to keep those lights on operationally. But we also had to begin to lift and shift and accelerate your point about silver linings. You know, if there is a silver lining, the very prepared really benefited. And I think those that were maybe a little more laggards they caught up pretty quickly. >>Well, that's good to hear stick big sticking with you. I'd love to get your perspectives on I t challenges in the last nine months in particular, what things have changed, what remains the same. And where is back up as a priority for the the I T folks and really the business folks, too? >>Yeah, I almost want to start with that last piece. Where? Where's backup? So back up? Obviously well understood as a concept, it's well funded. I mean, almost everybody in their right mind has a backup product, especially for critical data. But yet that all sounds very much the same. What's very, very different, though? Where are those workloads? Where do they need to be going forward? What are the service level agreements? Meaning that access times required for those workloads? And while we're arguably transitioning from certain types of applications to new applications, the vast majority of us are dead in the middle of that. So we've got to be able to embrace the new while also anchoring back to the past. >>Yeah, I'm not so easily sudden, done professionally or personally, Danny, I'd love to get your perspective on how your customer conversations have changed. You know, we're executives like you, both of you are so used to getting on planes and flying around and being able Thio, engage with your customers, especially events like Vermont, and reinvent What's the change been like? And from a business perspective, are you having more conversations at that business? Little as the end of the day. If you can't recover the data, that's the whole point, right? >>Yeah, it is. I would say the conversations really have four sentiments to them. The first is always starts with the pandemic and the impact of the pandemic on the business. The second from there is it talks about resource. We talked about resource management. That's resource management, both from a cost perspective. Customers trying to shift the costs from Capex models typically on premises into Op X cloud consumption models and also resource management as well. There's the shift from customers who are used to doing business one way, and they're trying to shift the resources to make it effective in a new and better way. I'd say the third conversation actually pivots from there to things like security and governance. One of the interesting things this year we've seen a lot of is ransomware and malware and attacks, especially because the attack surface has increased with people working from home. There is more opportunity for organizations to be challenged, and then, lastly, always pivots where it ends up his digital transformation. How do I get from where I used to be to where I want to be? >>Yeah, the ransomware increase has been quite substantial. I've seen a number of big. Of course you never want to be. The brand garment was head Carnival Cruise Line. I think canon cameras as well and you're talking about you know you're right, Danny. The attacks are toe surfaces, expanding. Um, you know, with unprotected cloud databases. I think that was the Facebook Tic Tac Instagram pack. And so it's and also is getting more personal, which we have more people from home, more distractions. And that's a big challenge that organizations need to be prepared for, because, really, it's not a matter of are we going to get a hit? But it's It's when, and we need to make sure that we have that resiliency. They've talked to us about how them enables customers toe have that resiliency. >>Yeah, you know, it's a multilayered approach like you know, any good defensive mechanism. It's not one thing it's trying to do all of the right things in advance, meaning passwords and perimeter security and, ideally, virtual private networks. But to your point, some of those things can fail, especially as we're all working remotely, and there's more dependence on now. Suddenly, perhaps not so. I t sophisticated people, too. Now do the right things on a daily basis and your point about how personal is getting. If we're all getting emails about, click on this for helpful information on the pandemic, you know there's the likelihood of this goes up. So in addition to try and do good things ahead of time, we've got some early warning detection capabilities. We can alert that something looks suspicious or a novelist, and bare bears out better investigation to confirm that. But ultimately, the couple of things that we do, they're very interesting and unique to beam are we can lock down copy of the backup data so that even internal employees, even somewhat at Amazon, can't go. If it's marked immutable and destroy it, remove it, alter it in any way before it's due to be modified or deleted, erased in any way. But one of the ones I'm most excited about is we can actually recover from an old backup and now introduce updated virus signatures to ensure we don't reintroduced Day zero threats into production environment. >>Is it across all workloads, physical virtual things like, you know, Microsoft or 65 slack talked about those collaboration tools that immune ability, >>so immune ability. We're expanding out into multiple platforms today. We've got it on on premises object storage through a variety of different partners. Actually, a couple dozen different partners now, and we have something very unique with AWS s three object lock that we you can really lock down that data and ensure that can't be compromised. >>That's excellent, Danny, over to you in terms of cloud adoption, you both talked about this acceleration of digital business transformation that we've all seen. I think everyone has whiplash from that and that this adoption of cloud has increased. We've seen a lot of that is being a facilitator like, are you working with clients who are sort of, you know, maybe Dave at that point you talked about in the beginning, like kind of on that on that. Bring in the beginning and we've got to transform. We've got to go to the cloud. How do you kind of help? Maybe facilitate their adoption of public health services like AWS with the technologies that the off first? >>Yeah, I'd say it's really two things everyone wants to say, Hey, we're disrupting the market. We're changing everything about the world around us. You should come with us. Being actually is a very different approach to this one is we provide stability through the disruption around you. So as your business is changing and evolving and you're going through digital transformation, we can give you the stability through that and not only the stability through that change, but we can help in that change. And what I mean by that is if you have a customer who's been on premises and running the workloads on premises for a long while, and maybe they've been sending their backups and deaths three and flagging that impute ability. But maybe now they want to actually migrate the workloads into E. C to weaken. Do that. It's a It's a three step three clicks and workflow to hit a button and say send it up into Easy to. And then once it's in AWS, we can protect the workload when it's there. So we don't just give the stability in this changing environment around us. But we actually help customers go through that transformation and help them move the workloads to the most appropriate business location for them. >>And how does that Danny contending with you from a cost optimization perspective? Of course, we always talk about cost as a factor. Um, I'm going to the cloud. How does that a facilitator of, like, being able to move some of those workloads like attitude that you talked about? Is that a facilitator of cost optimization? Lower tco? I would imagine at some point Yes, >>Yes, it is. So I have this saying the cloud is not a charity right there later in margin, and often people don't understand necessarily what it's going to cost them. So one of the fundamental things that we've had in being back up for a W s since the very beginning since version one is we give cost forecasting and it's not just a rudimentary cost forecasting. We look at the storage we looked compute. We looked at the networking. We look at what all of the different factors that go into a policy, and we will tell them in advance what it's going to cost. That way you don't end up in a position where you're paying a lot more than you expected to pay. And so giving that transparency, giving the the visibility into what the costs of the cloud migration and adoption are going to be is a critical motivator for customers actually to use our software. >>Awesome. And Dave, I'm curious if we look at some of the things trends wise that have gone on, what are you seeing? I t folks in terms of work from home, the remote workers, but I am imagine they're getting their hands on this. But do you expect that a good amount of certain types of folks from industries won't go back into the office because I ts realizing, like more cost optimization? Zor Hey, we don't need to be on site because we can leverage cloud capabilities. >>Yeah, I think it works, actually, in both directions least, I think we'll see employees continue to work remotely, so the notion of skyscrapers being filled with tens of thousands of people, you know, knowledge workers, as they were once called back in the day. That may not come to pass at least any time soon. But conversely to your point everybody getting back into the data center, you know, from a business perspective, the vast majorities of CEO so they don't wanna be in the real estate business. They don't wanna be in the brick and mortar and the power cooling the facilities business. So >>that was >>a trend that was already directionally happening. And just as an accelerant, I think 2000 and 20 and probably 2021 at least the first half just continues that trend. >>Yeah, Silicon Valley is a bit lonely. The freeways there certainly emptier, which is one thing. But it is. It's one of those things that you think you could be now granted folks that worked from home regardless of the functions they were in before. It's not the same. I think we all know that it's not the same working from home during a pandemic when there's just so much more going on. But at the same time, I think businesses are realizing where they can actually get more cost optimization. Since you point not wanting to manage real estate, big data centers, things like that, that may be a ah, positive spin on what this situation has demonstrated. Daddy Last question to you. I always loved it to hear about successful customers. Talk to me about one of your favorite reference customers that really just articulates beams value, especially in this time of helping customers with so many pivots. >>Well, the whole concept of digital transformation is clearly coming to the forefront with the pandemic. And so one of my favorite customers, for example, ducks unlimited up in Canada. They have i ot sensors where they're collecting data about about climate information. They put it into a repository and they keep it for 60 years. Why 60 years? Because who knows? Over the next 60 years, when these sensors in the data they're collecting may be able to solve problems like climate change. But if you >>look at it >>a broader sense, take that same concept of collection of data. I think we're in a fantastic period right now where things like Callum medicine. Um, in the past, >>it was >>kind of in a slow roll remote education and training was on kind of a slow roll. Climate change. Slow roll. Um, but now the pandemics accelerating. Ah, lot of that. Another customer, Royal Dutch Shell, for example. Traditionally in the oil and petrochemical industry, their now taking the data that they have, they're going through this transformation faster than ever before and saying, How do I move to sustainable energy? And so a lot of people look at 2020 and say, I want how does this year? Or, you know, this is not the transformation I want. I actually take the reverse of that. The customers that we have right now are taking the data sets that they have, and they're actually optimizing for a more sustainable future, a better future for us and for our Children. And I think that's a fantastic thing, and being obviously helps in that transformation. >>That's excellent. And I agree with you, Danny, you know, the necessity is the mother of invention. And sometimes when all of these challenges air exposed, it's hard right away to see what are the what are the positives right? What are the opportunities? But from a business perspective is you guys were talking about the beginning of our segment, you know, in the beginning was keeping the lights on. Well, now we've got to get from keeping the lights on, too. Surviving to pivoting well to thriving. So that hopefully 2021 this is good as everybody hopes it's going to be. Right, Dave? >>Yeah, absolutely. It's all data driven and you're right. We have to move from keep the lights up on going the operational aspect to growing the business in new ways and ideally transforming the business in new ways. And you can see we hit on digital transformation a number of times. Why? Because its data driven, Why do we intercept that with being well? Because if it's important to you, it's probably backed up and held for long term safekeeping. So we want to be able to better leverage the data like Danny mentioned with Ducks Unlimited. >>And of course, as we know, data volumes are only growing. So next time you're on day, you have to play us out with one of your guitars. Deal >>definitely, definitely will. >>Excellent for Dave Russell and Danny Allen. I'm Lisa Martin. Guys, thank you so much for joining. You're watching the Cube

>> Narrator: From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is The CUBE Conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to the special CUBE Conversation here. In the CUBES Palo Alto studios, I'm John Furrier, your host with a great story here to tell and a great story with Bob Russell, the CEO of the CTA group, also known as the Community Technology Alliance. Great story, very relevant in this time and has to involve data and technologies for good. So, Bob, thanks for spending the time to join me today. Thanks for remote dialing in or internetting in thank you. >> My pleasure, great to be with you. >> You guys have a really great mission with the Community Technology Alliance. Also known as the CTA group, which is you guys go by, take a minute to explain the firm and what you guys do coz I think this is a high impact story for this community just in general, but now more than ever, it's great story. Can you take a minute to explain? >> Thank you. We're a San Jose based nonprofit and we were founded in 1991 to provide the technology needed to support the work to end homelessness in a number of California communities and counties, primarily by providing data collection and reporting tools for agencies that were receiving federal funding to house the homeless. Several years ago, as we were looking at the data, we realized that we needed to expand our focus to not only include the homeless, but to include what's called homeless prevention. And homeless prevention is providing services to those who are not homeless, but who are at risk of becoming homeless, or those that are living in poverty and do not have enough money to pay the mortgage or pay their rent and so they too are at risk of becoming homeless. Because what the data is showing is that once you become homeless, it can be difficult, it can be time consuming, and it can take a long time for you to secure new housing. So if you can help people who are on the cusp of becoming homeless, that is, that's a wonderful thing. Keeping people from becoming homeless in the first place is one of the most effective tools in fighting homelessness in the Bay Area and throughout the United States. That expanded focus meant we really, we needed to rethink how best to leverage technology in order to help agencies communities, both in homelessness and homeless prevention. And so we focused on three different components or three tools. The first one was creating data integration tool, so that agencies that are using multiple systems, can integrate their data into a single source of truth, they can quickly communicate and exchange data with one another in order to identify how best to help people in need in their communities. The second thing that we did was we created a mobile app so that you could collect data out of your closed or your proprietary system, upload that data later to your system, or to this, to a central data warehouse. And then also, you could use this data that once we pulled your data in from multiple data systems and created a single source of truth, you could actually view that unified data. And the third tool we developed was a reporting and analytics tool, so that you could quickly visualize your data, look at overall trends and determine what measures are most effective in helping people to remain housed or to help people who are homeless to secure housing as quickly as possible. So that's our story in a nutshell, John. >> Yeah, one of the famous CUBE alumni Jeff Hammerbacher, founder of Cloudera, one said in the CUBE. This is 10 years ago, and he came from Facebook and then he said, our bright minds in the industry are working on data science so that people click on and add. And that really kind of became a rallying point in the computer science industry, because this is really a data driven strategy, you guys are taking this proactive, it's not reactive, which is still got it's own challenges. So, you know, using data for good, there's some reality there. It's like collective intelligence or predictive analytics or a recommendation engine for services to be delivered. So Love it. Love this story, I think is super important. It's not going to go away it's only going to get stronger and better. But I got to ask you with that, what are some of the challenges with the current environment for social services? Because, you mentioned legacy, legacy systems. Well, this legacy a process too. I can only imagine the challenges, what are some of those challenges in the current environment? >> Yes, yeah, there are many challenges, but I'd like to focus in on two. The first is agencies aren't network, their systems are not network. And so agency A cannot exchange and communicate with agency B. And so what happens in most communities is that if someone's in need, whether it's an individual or a family, odds are they're going to multiple agencies to secure all the different services that they need. And because agencies are not networked, it can be very difficult to secure services. If you're a need, you can end up spending a lot of time going from agency to agency, asking what's available, and seeing that if you're eligible for services. So one of the challenges that we were asked to overcome by, you know, talking to various agencies and communities is can you allow us to continue to use our current systems, but can you figure out a way for our systems to communicate and exchange critical data with one another, and the second reason or challenge is tied to first, most agencies have multiple funding sources in order to provide the services that they provide. And many of those funding sources will say to an agency in exchange for us giving you funding, you must use this system to collect data and to report out. And so what happens is a single agency can have multiple data systems that either, that just simply cannot communicate with one another. And so this creates inefficiencies. And this means that resources that would be going to a client, a family and an individual has to be redirected to doing multiple data entry and administering multiple systems. And so before we built any of our tools, we spent a good chunk of time talking to these various stakeholders in the homeless and poverty arena going, what are your primary pain points? These were the two that stood out for us. In how we could use technology to help these agencies get a more unified view of what's going on in their community and what works. >> How has any of the systematic changes affected you coz the networking piece is huge. When we see this play out in data driven businesses, obvious ones are cybersecurity, the more data the better, coz you got a machine learning is a lot of things there. The other problem I want to get your thoughts on is just the idea of not just not being networked, but the data silos. So the data silos are out there, and sometimes they're not talking to each other, even if they are connected. >> So if you're homeless or at risk of becoming homeless, odds are you're going to need multiple services to help you. It's very rare that an agency has all the services that you need so that you end up being helped by multiple services. Each one of those service, each one of those agencies, ends up being a data silo. And so you do not get a complete picture of in your community of how what are the various services that you are providing this client, and which services are most rapidly helping that client move either into housing or into self sufficiency. So agencies are very much aware that they have data silos out there, but they simply do not have the expertise or the time or the resources to manually take all of that data and try to come up with a single spreadsheet that tells 'em everything. >> On the role of data, I've seen you mentioned the users, you mentioned an app, can you just share some anecdotal examples of kind of where it's working and challenges and opportunities you guys are doubling down on because, I mean, this is a really important point, because if you look at our society at large today, the ability to deliver services, whether it's education, homelessness, poverty, it's all kind of interconnected, all has the same almost systematic kind of functional role, right you got to, identify services, needs, match them to funding and or people and move in real time or as contextually relevant as possible. If you do that, right, you're on the front end, not the back end of reacting to it. Can you give some examples? >> Yeah, I'm thinking of a young woman. I mean, this is, for me, this has been a powerful story for our organization in helping us to understand the human impact that data silos can have. So this is, in one of our communities there was a young woman with, who was recently divorced with a young son who became sick. And so she went to the hospital to secure treatment for her child, the hospital, the clinic was able to help her. But when she asked about are there agencies out there are there services out there that can help me with financial assistance can help me with getting food and finding a stable housing? They told her no, we can't help you we're clinic, but we can point you to a shelter. Well, by the time she got to that shelter, they were full for the night. So she had no place for her and her son to stay. And so what happens is she ended up spending the night out on the street. And then she spent the next week looking for, you know food bank, so she'd get food. Going to various agencies to find out, you know do you have any available housing, do you have any financial assistance and she was coming up against, you know obstacle, one obstacle over another. So if you're homeless and you don't have a car, and you know, think about anyone in the Bay Area, how difficult it is to get around if you don't have a vehicle or someone who can provide you with it, with a transportation. Her life changed and I yeah, her life changed when she ended up at a homeless encampment. And a what's called an outreach worker, went to that outreach, that encampment with our tools, with our mobile app. And this outreach worker met up with this young woman and said, how can I help you? And she, this woman explained, look, I need a place to stay for the night. I need food for my child, can you helped me? But what she did was she took her tablet open, opened up our mobile app and found yes, there is a nearby shelter that has space available. Let me get you into that shelter as soon as possible. She also alerted the case managers at that shelter that this is what the woman needs. Can you provide that assistance to her as soon as we get her to the shelter? And so what happened was instead of wandering around the community, trying to find help, because of this timely encounter between this young woman and his outreach worker, this outreach worker was able to get this woman and her child into a temporary shelter an emergency shelter for the night. And then over time, helped her secure her own apartment with financial assistance, and also the other services that she needed. And for me, that is the essence of what we're trying to do here is simply remove the barriers for you to.. The essence, what happened here was this woman was able to quickly determine through the help of an agency, what's currently available, and then connect her to those appropriate agencies to get the services that she needed. And so I have told this story many times it still gets me that it's, this is the beauty of technology. This is how you can leverage technology and help someone in need. For me it's just amazing what you can do with the right. Yes, with the right technology. >> It's such a powerful story coz it also not only illustrates the personal needs that they were met. But it also illustrates the scale of how data and the contextually relevant need at that time having the right thing happen at the right time, when it needs to happen, can scale. So it's not, it's not a one off. This is how technology can work. So I think this is a great indicator of things to come. And I think this is going to be playing out more and that is the role of data and people. This has been a fundamental dynamics, not just about machines anymore. It's the human and the data interaction. This is becoming a huge thing. Can you share your thoughts on the role of people because audiences want to get involved you seeing a much more mission driven, culture evolving quickly. People want to have an impact. >> Right. Oh, yeah, data plays a fundamental role. Best way, what helps me to understand just how fundamental that role is that what data does is it creates a narrative on the past and current experiences of people in need. In other words, data tells a story. And whether that person is homeless or at risk of becoming homeless or living in poverty, that narrative becomes a powerful tool for agencies. And it, when you take that narrative because you've been able to harness technology, create that narrative. What you can do with that narrative, is you can coordinate available services to those in need. And as, you know the story of this young woman, you can also rightly reduce the wait times and the time that someone says I have this need until you connect them with that available service. That narrative also helps you to improve your programs and services. You can look at what's working, what's not working, and make the necessary changes so that you can end up helping more people. It improves access to programs and services, instead of someone going by bus, or however I'm trying to go from one end of town to the other. Imagine if you could go to a public library, for example. And as a person in need, you could log in and go, you could tell your story, interesting data and say, help me to find the services that I need. >> Yeah. >> The other thing is that it reduces inefficiencies. Many agencies are spending considerable amount of time in duplicate data entry in order to make sure that they're collecting the data and all the different systems that they need. And then I think another key thing that data plays a fundamental role is that you can take your data as an agency, as a community and you can tell your story to policy leaders and to funders and say look, if there is how you can support us in order to provide effective homeless and poverty alleviation solutions, so again the idea that-- >> Yeah that's a key point right there, that's I mean, the key point is, you look at people process technology, which is like the, overused cliche of digital transformation very relevant by the way, the process piece is kind of taking that same track as you saw the internet technologies, change marketing and advertising, performance based, show me the clicks. If you think about what you just said, that's really what's going on here is you can actually have performance based programs with specific deliverables, if I can do this, would you do more? And the answer is you can measure it with data. This is really the magic of this. It's a new way of doing things. And again, this is not going to go away. And I think stakeholders can hold people's feet to the fire for performance based results, because the data is there if you strive to do a good mission. If the systems are in place, you can measure it. >> Thanks for that question John. Three (background noise drowns out other sounds) come to mind. First, many organizations now financially match the donations made by their employees that they make to nonprofit. So I would say that check with your HR department and see if they have a matching program. And if they do, what happens then is that for every dollar that you give to that agency, your organization, the company that you work for, will match that, and so your money will go further. These same pro... These same Corporate Social Responsibility programs, not only will match your donations, but the other thing that they will do is they will sometime arrange, sometimes workout opportunities to volunteer at very various nonprofits. And so you can also check with your organization to see if they do that. A second possibility is that you connect with groups such as the Full Circle Fund. There are other groups out there, but I'm most familiar with the Full Circle Fund. And it is a San Francisco based nonprofit that leverages your time and your resources and intellectual capital to help out with nonprofits throughout the Bay Area. So whether it is that you're looking to volunteer coding or development skills, or you're looking for some way to find out what's going on in the Bay Community, and how can I help. Full Circle Fund would be a great resource. And again, there are other nonprofits like them out there as well. The third thing is, if you know of an agency in your area, a goodwill, united way, a habitat for humanity, give them a call or check on their website to see what volunteer, positions they have available or what they're looking for. And if it looks like a good match, give them a call and have that conversation. Those are three things that immediately came to mind for me John about if he wanted to help out, how could you? >> Well, certainly it's important mission. I really appreciate, Bob, what you're doing and your team, Bob Russell, the CEO of CTA group, also known as the Community Technology Alliance. Really putting technology into practice, to help the services get to the folks that matter, the homelessness and the folks in poverty, on the edge of poverty. It really is an example of how you can solve some of these systematic problems with performance base. If you follow the data, follow the money, follow the services, it all can work in real time. And that's a good example. So thank you so much for what you do. And great mission. Thank you for your time. >> Thank you, and thank you for having me. >> Okay I'm the CUBE. I'm John Furrier, covering all the stories here while we're still programming here in the CUBE studios with our quarantine crew. Bob Russell, the CEO of CTA group, out with a great story. Check it out and get involved. I'm John Furrier, The CUBE. Thanks for watching (bright upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM on 2020. Brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back. I'm Stew Minimum. And and this is the Cube's coverage of VM on 2020 online this year. We've done the event for many years and being able to reach the team executives, some of their partners and the like where they are around the globe really excited to be able to dig in. And we're gonna talk some numbers, the analysis and to help me do that. I've got to VM Cube alumni. We've had them on the Cube before. They were being always excited to get the talk of them and dig into the numbers with them now that they are at VM. Dave Russell is the vice president of enterprise strategy, and Jason Buffington is the vice president of solution strategy. Both with beam. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>All right. First, I guess you know, let me ask how you guys doing? You know, we're having a little bit of ah, discussion before we came on here. As Do you know, everyone is now inundated with data and numbers and the like with this global pandemic. You know, Dave, how things doing in your neck of the woods, and, uh, and then we'll go to Jason. >>Yeah, well, you know, literally cannot complain. Personally, VM itself is doing incredibly well as an organization will double click on that here. But, you know, in terms of data, particularly as it relates to this space that we're in backup and recovery availability Cloud data management. The recent data for first half 2020 is actually fascinating. We're gonna double click on that a little bit more, right, Jason, >>we are now as far as how we're doing. You know, I've been at every team on that. We've had the 1st 3 is an analyst. Last two is a VP. I've never gotten to do one in my pajama bottoms, though, so that's kind of a nice changes to kind of mix it up a little bit. Um, but yeah, the other thing, which has been kind of fun is is that because we haven't been traveling, it really gave Dave and I had a chance to kind of get back to our roots a little bit and really dig into research. And how do you apply research to product direction and go to market? And so it's been a fun project that were culminating with was the motto >>Yeah, Jason, please don't be given out secrets. I'm not saying if you look up Dave Volante, Twitter, handle that. You'll find the suit on the top shorts on the bottom. Look, what I refer to is cube casual for some of these remote events. But, you know, you do have a breakout that you're doing really looking at digital transformation and I t. Modernization, you know, digital transformation. I'm sure you know you, both of you, from the analyst standpoint. For a while, it was a bit of a buzz word. You know, today, when you just with the backdrop of the global pandemic, it's like, Well, if you have had the the chance to go through the digital transformation, hopefully, you know, you get things put to the test, you're relying on data, you should be more agile, and those are all things that I think the remote workforce and what they're doing. But if you hadn't finish that or either started or in the middle of that journey, you know, big question is, you know, what are you doing? Will this accelerate it? Will it slow it down? So excited to dig into your CEO research? Why don't you give us a little bit of the background? How long is this going on? Who you're talking to is as part of this. This research. >>Sure. Well, as far as the research itself goes. So the team went to an outside panel and said, Hey, don't tell anybody who is from when you interview these kinds of personas in these kinds of folks. We did 1550 enterprises and by that definition, meaning 1000 users or not across 18 different countries around the world. And then we even ask some questions around. Not only what country are you in, but in what countries do you influence? Data protection, strategy and architecture? Everyone from I T architects all the way through csos were part of that survey. And we've got some great data back not only from an executive perspective of what are the expectations of i t, but also from the i t implementer anti architect's perspective on what are their real world challenges today and That's some of things that we were at being really keen to understand more, to make sure that we're building the right things and saying the right things for our customers and our prospects. >>Excellent. And maybe give us a little bit of a backdrop. You know, when I think about enterprise is, you know, we always talk about these mega waves. You know, The things that I talked about is you know, when I talk to the CSO suite, it's not that they have Well, you know, I've got a multi cloud strategy, you know, I'm figuring out how cloud changes what I'm doing. Digital transformation is one of those things that brings together, you know, the business and the I t. And hopefully you know something I know we've all been talking about for quite a long time. I t just can't be a separate thing. Or so you know, a cost center but needs to really respond to the business. What's that Backdrop of digital transformation and, you know, bring us inside a little bit what your learnings >>were. Yeah, to me. I think I like the notion of digital transformation because it's very specific to every business, maybe even every business unit, meaning it's not a case of a vendor saying, Here's what your project should be. Rather, it's more of a notion of whatever initiative you have to try to increase customer intimacy, to be able to contain costs, expand your reach. That's really what digital transformations here to support. >>Excellent. And Jason give us a little bit of color as you know, some of the finding. >>Yeah, so I mean, I think the big ones that we looked at were, you know, what were the major I t challenges you had overall, and maybe not so much of a surprise, but staffing and legacy infrastructure. We're still some of the biggest things that we're holding back i t organizations, which I think is especially interesting in the landscape, the world right now, right, Because your staff can't be in the places where they used to be and from a legacy perspectives to I know you love data as much as we do. Um, the you know, if if organizations are spending between 68 82% of their money and their dollars on the status quo, that doesn't leave a whole lot left for the things that you'd like to do, like improving customer experience like accelerating the employees of your business. So things like digital transformation tend to get hindered by the same stuff that tenders I t. Modernization and just hear the buzz words just trying to do better in I t. For the sake of the business. But really, those have been kind of big gaps. >>Yeah, I think Jason hit a key point. There's two of you know the issue right now is a lot of us are just trying to run the business like, literally keep the lights on. You and Jason mentioned the stats of high sixties low seventies just trying to keep status quo. The digital transformation, in my mind is about obviously trying to run the business while you're seeking to grow the business and aspirational, hoping to transform your business to really improve customer intimacy and success of end customers as well as partners. So if done right, pursuing digital transformation can help you with tactical needs as well. A strategic outcome? >>Yeah, you know, it's it's it's a little sad, I think, from an industry standpoint, you talk about how much money in time is spent on keeping the lights on. I feel like 10. 15 years ago, it was, you know, the 80 85%. If you're saying, you know, we've whittled away a little bit now in the low seventies, some really good companies, it's getting, but we haven't things yet. Um, I'm curious. You know, you have this position, they don't know that it was sponsored by VM. So how do cloud as a general technology and then, you know, data protection and availability specifically, you know, fit into the overall priorities for that that I t modernization. >>So there were There were two questions that we really focused on that they're my two favorite slides in the in the whole deck. The 1st 1 that I thought was really interesting is when we asked organizations, What does modern data protection look like? Or innovative? And I think we use a few different buzzwords along the way, and we asked them, check all of these capabilities that might apply, and then which one is the most definitive? And we actually got two different sets of answers depending on how you pivot that data. If you ask, uh, most common responses, Modern data protection looks cloudy, and what I mean by that is the top choices scored were the ability to do D. R as a service. The ability to integrate on premise and cloud based is part of your data protection architecture. And then the ability to move data from one cloud to another would certainly reinforces the fact that we are not only in a hybrid world but in a multi hybrid world as well. So if you're looking for most common answers, modern data protection looks cloudy. But if you flip it over and you say what is the most definitive feature, you actually get something very different. You find out that the ability to leverage orchestration and workflow, the ability to manage via AP eyes and systems management the ability to be part of a cyber security strategy. So what you see is that modern data protection in general has to be cloudy. But more importantly, backup should not sit on an island of its own. It should be a cohesive part of a broader I T experience that's managed by something broader that's part of provisioning a systems framework. So those two answers kind of Tell us what should we not only making sure that we continue to build on, but also making sure that we're communicating as far as you know, does being meet the bar for what organizations are looking for in a modern or innovative data protection strategy? >>Yeah, that's really interesting. You know, I guess one of the big things I've seen over the last 12 to 18 months is maturation of things like, you know, a really hybrid strategy. So if I look at the team, you know the most critical partnerships, of course, our VM ware from a historical standpoint and things like Microsoft going Ford in both of them have made big strides over the last couple of years as you not just, you know, on premises versus Public Cloud. But how do all these things work together? The discussions that we've been having about cloud is not necessarily a destination, but it's more of an operating model. And as people build out their architectures, the all the things you mentioned there, it's not a place or a destination, But it's more of that architect view and can live across lots of different environment. Does that make sense. Yeah, >>yeah, it's across. It's a horizontal play, really, It's not moving from Point A to point B. It's really embracing expanded choices. So you know what we found when we did? This survey is directionally where organizations are at the day with on Prem physical virtual going towards cloud and then how they responded their intention two years later. There weren't major surprises there, meaning the shift was increasingly more towards cloud. But it also wasn't a case that on Prem physical goes to zero. So any more than it's a case of an organization goes 100% all in on one hyper scaler, all the cloud provider. So it's really about supporting a mixed, and it's about offering choice because every business or maybe more specifically, every workload within a business might have their own natural migration associated with what they need to do what's appropriate, given their business realities and their desires. So if we double click on what's really important from backup, the number one thing that came back from our global survey which a little incriminating on the state of the industry was the number one thing that would make us want to change our backup provider so that application would back up. That is an amazing, the shocking statement. That's like saying so. If you change cars, automobiles, what would you look for? First and foremost, and your response is an automobile that started. >>It was really scary right in 2020. So Dave and I have each been in backup almost exclusively for 30 years each, right and still you using label spell backup for almost the same length of time. And we've been doing this for a really long time. And in 2020 when I T pros were asked what would get them to change, it's they'd like it to work the way they thought it would when they bought it. I mean, that's just a really damning statement. And then beyond that, when the next drivers certainly economics came into play. So the number two answers were reducing hardware and software costs and improving. TCO nor I were two and three and then capabilities around, improving our P o rto SL A's and then ease of use. That kind of rounds out the top five with cloud coming in right behind that. So not a whole lot of surprise there, but what a terrible statement for the industry that we just like it to work. >>All right, how about some good news? What? What recommendations or guidance? Is there anything that you got out of it that you know, best practices or leaders in the space or what peers would recommend team to each other. >>So I think the two things that I took away that I thought was really interesting from a best practices and moving forward data reuse scored really, really high. So the interest in leveraging and the survey actually asked several different scenarios for what folks were either doing or aspiring to do around data use. And you can call it copy data management. You can call it secondary storage use cases. You whatever marketing buzz where you want. But the bottom line is, don't just put your data in the backup repository and wait for bad things happen. Do something with that data. Dev Ops Acceleration patch testing risk mitigation, quarantine for forensics for cyber. But there was a lot of of yes, we're starting to do. And also yes, we're aspiring. Over the next 12 months, I think data reuse was a really big thing that I was so glad that folks were getting along the way and then also the recognition that with the intolerance of downtime and the intolerance of data loss that was measured in the survey, it was really obvious that a lot more organizations understand they have to be combining not only backups but also snapshots and replication in a consistent way. Because you can't meet the SL is that most organizations have today. If the only thing you're doing is just nightly backup now the team, we would say, Great, you got to do snapshots you out of the replication. You ought to do backup. Please don't use three different tools times each one of those times, each workload. It's not economically or operationally viable. So certainly in that's good news for us, because we manage all three. But those were kind of two big drivers I was most excited about. >>And if I take what we got from the data protection report and then couple that with recent industry analysis reports from like I, D. C. And Gartner, I merge that together, I think one of the reasons why IBM has been very successful you know, literally knock on wood, but VM is up as a company 10% year over year, October 2 October arm Sorry, April. April and that's been true for all 12 years. That being has been shipping back of product, so in a tough time, actually doing extremely well. Still, hiring still expanding Gartner has beam for calendar year 2019 moving from number four in market globally. Toe number three i. D. C. Maintains beam is number one and market in Europe, one of the top five vendors. Three of the five, where negative year over year VM was the highest sequentially positive year over year positive. And I think the reasons why not going back to the survey in my mind was due to the software defined nature of the solution and what I mean by that in particular, why that has customer value, especially now in a current pandemic. Situation is you can leverage the existing infrastructure that you've got. We we've been around and remember the macroeconomic issue of 2000 and eight organizations held on to their assets much, much longer. Refresh cycles slowed down, so the ability to leverage the infrastructure that you have to scale out horizontally to be able to ingest more data to have a horizontal management playing. To be able to have a service repository that could include cloud and object storage just allows you to better leverage the investments you've made but deflects appropriately for workloads and to be able to expand into things like public cloud and object storage as you see fit. >>Well, David Jason, thank you so much for the update. Real pleasure to catch up with you Always. Always great big data with both. >>Thank you. So you could just be >>alright. Stay tuned for more coverage from VM on 2020 Online on stew minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> live from Miami Beach, Florida It's the que covering demon 2019. Brought to you, by the way. >> Welcome back to Miami. Everybody watching the Cube, The leader in live tech coverage. This is Day two of the mon 2019 3 cubes. Third year at V mon, We did New Orleans. We did Chicago last year. Course here at the Fountain Blue in Miami. Great venue for an event like this. I'm Dave a lot. It was my co host, Peter Burroughs. Abba Dabbas. Eye is Adi is here. He's the head of a Charles Russell speech. Liza London based law firm. How about great. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thankyou. So you tell us about this judge. Interesting name. Charles Russell. Speech lease. It was a merger of two firms, Right. Tell us how it all came about. >> Back in 2,014 Charles, loss of species performed for a merger between two different companies. Charles docile and speaks Lee Burcham from a 90 perspective. That was very interesting for the two departments coming together s So we have a limited time period where we had to merge these two companies Two different systems different data centers, different data sets. So it was formed by emerging back in 2,014 for five years on way here today >> that we see this a lot, you know, Emanate goes down. The acquiring company of this sounds like it was a merger. You know, they sort of battle. Okay, who's going toe? Really? Which framework is going to win? Because I'm sure had that conversation. But so to take us through that merger, what it entailed what? What the scenario looked like and how you plan for it. Sure. >> So I was part of the Charles. Also legacy Charles Russell team on, then obviously speaks about. Some had their own team as well. So initially, when we first found out about the merger, it was essential for the two teams to get together to work out. Okay, What systems? You have free mail. What systems you have for document management system playing trump cards. Which is who's got the best system and which way do we wantto move forward? A little. >> Ah, >> so but being a law firm, most law firms around the world and in the UK especially used the same types of software so essentially that from that perspective it was It was it was quite simple. But then way had to work out. How do we How do we go forward with this? Because two different headquarters in the London area. Which office do we move into? Sort of logistics around that. Can we fit in pre merger? It was six. Charles Lawson had sickle. Roughly 600 people, especially birds, had roughly 500 people. So pretty comparable. Yeah, yeah. So working out space logistics was was an issues >> making that even even more complicated, right? Yeah. >> One of the things that's interesting about a law firm, like versus a traditional manufacturer or AW financial services firm that has a lot of very fast right writing systems and have to scale on those lines is a law firms feature very complex dogs, very complex in from out of files, a lot of files that are written. But at the same time, you have to be repurposed to a lot of different work flows very sensitive to external contingent regulatory change. And so you have all of that happening, especially, I mean, two years ago from now on MySpace steak, and it was you're getting into brexit stuff, too, so that also had to be a source of uncertainty. So how has it been combining external regulatory issues the way that technology is being used in law firms and some of the new work clothes that you guys trying to support? And then adding, On top of that, the complexity of bringing these two firm GPR >> GPO itself was It was a year old project for us on. Obviously, we've got offices. The Middle East, but obviously is in the Far East on DH in Central Europe has well, so data logistics or where it sits, is an issue for us as well. So GDP, ours being a big project for us in terms of the merger itself. It was it was very, very difficult for the two I T departments to come together on actually work out. How how do we go to one unified systems? Essentially one doctor man, just in one email system. All of that took a lot of plan in law project management on essentially within the legal press itself. We got doubted in the time frames that we had that we can achieve it on within. I think It was 18 month period. We had merged order, different systems and various offices because speech the Bertram and Time is what I had. Offices in Zurich and Geneva were to merge with different offices together as well. So it was. It was a big, big task for the i T department on the firm itself. >> They're very tight migration deadlines. And and as you started to approach those deadlines you had to worry about, Okay, When we're going to cut over, how do we avoid downtime? How do we make sure that we don't? You know, I have bad data, data, corruption and the like. So how did you plan for that? And how did it go? >> So wait, we're here. C'mon on DH. Veen was It was it was a big part of our migration process. So where we had two different parts of the business Different storage systems, Different actualization system's way used to mean a CZ. The middleman basically, to my great data, from one day to center to another, using swink it. So where there was a large amount of terabytes and terabytes, amount of data way had swing kit available to us using team were able to be to be essentially a love the environments into the swing care and then bring them over to the other side of the business. And vain was essentially part on on top of that, making sure that the data that we were coming that will bring in a cross is true and not corrupt on DH, that using some of their technology is sure backups and stuff like that really, really was essential to, you know, do migration going well >> And was was Wien installed and both organizations at the time? Or was that something that you had to sort of redeploy? >> And yeah, So Legacy Charles also had way was actually myself going back probably eight years ago. Version For a time, I think team had 20,000 customers. So to here >> there were version 10 now 33 150 >> 1,001,000, 4,000 month. >> That makes me proud that we invested in vain when we did good car. So yeah, it was It was a good call from us, and essentially three other side of the business did not have. But then we just wait. Expanded our Venus State to look at both sides and then bring him across on. And then, ever since then, we've grown our vamos state across the world, across all of officers. So >> So how did you do that? So that was that was another migration that had to occur. And did you? You kind of do those simultaneously. Did you do the theme of migration first, and then bring the two systems together? >> Do you seem to do Stouffer special sauce in the migration? >> Yeah. So Veen was essentially a tool that we used to my great data sensors from one data center to another using their backup technology using their replication technology, we were able to replicate all of one side's virtual machines to the other. And then that gave us that gave us the flexibility as well. When when we had the limited down time periods that we've had, they give us the flexibility to actually Circe the business is during these particular ours. We're not gonna be able to You're not gonna have access to these systems because we're going to bring up systems from point A to point B. So veen was essential to them if >> you had to do it over again. If he had a mulligan, what would you have done differently? What what advice might you give to somebody who's trying to go through a similar migration? >> I would say Give your partners and lawyers more realistic time. Pray the time frame that we would get. >> Or don't let them give you an unrealistic time for him. >> Exactly. Yeah, so says ensured that the amount of work it's it's not just day to itself. You know, we're talking network and we're talking security. We're talking, you know, to to similar sized companies coming together. We were very, very limited time frame, consolidating all of their systems into one which is essential for the two parts of the business to collaborate together because, you know, way could have taken our time. We could have got to take this free four years a CE, far as we're concerned. But the fact that we did do it in such a quick time for him and that business to parts of the business from Day one can collaborate much better with each other. So >> we talked a lot about digital business transformation and you know, our approach or our observations on the digital business transformations, the process by which you altar and change your firm to re institutionalize the work. Change your game. Tomato Grover. All governments model as you use data as an asset, so that's affecting every firm everywhere. How's it affecting a law firm and you know your law from specifically on? How is that going to change your stance in your approach to data protection >> Data is incredibly important to unlawful. A zit is to most most organizations, but in terms of, you know, one of one of the things that's quite important in terms of law firms. We work with the financial institutions, so we held information by that. We hold personal data way hold all times of information. Charles Oscar speech leads works with Aware is of law apart from Kunal. So the areas of law that they worked with his vast in terms of the amount of data that we hold and essentially I mean, for us data is the most important thing that runs the firm and having visibility tow our data. How do we How do we work that data? How do we then market based on the data that we have? How do we market ourselves from that data. You know, there might be one area the business that's dealing with a family issue, family law. But then, you know that that could correspond with the litigation issue. You know, how do we work that data? To be to be an advancing to our businesses is extremely important. For >> what? What do you think of the announcements this week? I'm kind of curious. I was liketo ask the practitioners of what they think about. You know what was announced. You had, uh, well, you had the ve made $1,000,000,000. That's kind of fun and cool, but But you had the with the program, which was kind of interesting. The whole ap I look the beam availability orchestrator, where they're really talking about recovering from backups as a host that needed to recover from, you know, a replicated instance. You know, some of the automated testing stuff was kind of interesting. They talked about dynamic documentation, things you saw this week that you'll actually go back and say, Hey, I can apply that to solve a problem. Sure. >> So, essentially, I think I've been a really good question is very relevant to us many of not just ourselves law firm but many of the other law firms around the world are now looking at cloud based services now for us. I mean, this was a big thing five years ago way you know, everyone was talking about public clouds. Us. We're now we're now looking clouds and where basically, we've bean pushed by the vendors themselves to go towards cloudlike Citrix, for example. Their licensing model was based around their services. So is Microsoft in Mike's off? You don't you don't really have, you know, exchange anymore. Within premises you have off 365 A lot of the SAS applications are moving toward the cloud on DH. What wrote me? I had to say doing the keynote in regards to act, too. And how team are trying to be the visionaries in terms of look at that cloud is their next big thing for the next 10 years, offering often a crucial and for businesses like ours who have limited exposure to cloud technologies limited understanding, essentially having a tool that could migrate from one cloud to another. It's fantastic, you know, we've offered, you know I've spoken to, obviously are United directors around the other law firms where I wanted to have gone to the public cloud. But they don't know how to come back in and having a tall that essentially gives you that flexibility to bring it back in house to go form a ws to zoo. Or if there's a particular assess application, for example, that piers better with a W s. But you've got your other application that piers with that particular application is your Why would you want to have in the door? You'll probably want to move into a W eso for us, I think. What? The message coming out of'em on this year has bean really, really helpful for us. >> So So when you started with theme, they had it said 20,000 custom You like the 20001st customer on DIT was coincided with the virtual ization, you know, craze. Do you feel like the team knowing what you know about them, you have a lot of experience with them Consort of Replicate that success in this town intendant and in Act two, >> I think when I first looked at them, Wow, this is really, really simple. It's a bit like an iPhone. You know you given iPhone to your grandmother or to your children, and they have to play with it. And I see the beam as an intuitive piece of software that easy fighting professionals to get on with it, as their slogan said a few years ago. It just works. It does just work. Wear were great advocates of him. It's worked wonders for us. We've acquired smaller businesses using we've managed companies using and when I see you know, when you go to the sessions and you see the intelligence behind their thinking, I think going back to your question I think Wei si oui, si, vamos a strategic partner for us when we see their vision and we believe in their vision, and I think what they're doing in terms of what they working on next few years, I think we're well favor there, and I think, you know, essentially, that's where the most of their business is going to come from, >> where you sit down with, you know, rat mayor over over vodka and he says, Tell me the one thing I could do to make your life you know, easier, better you can't say cut prices s a hellhole. But what would you advise him to >> make my life better >> other than Jim instead of >> yeah, eyes that >> would make you crazy. >> So in terms of a zoo, a technology, >> your business relationship or something, she'd like to see them do that would. I >> think in terms of mergers and acquiring companies, seen license rentals will be a good thing. I know, I know. They give you a valuation license keys, and that's something that you can use. So, for example, if we were to acquire a company that has hundreds of servers and PM's having license rentals for a period of time, able >> to spin it up and spin it down actually allowed >> Exactly. Yeah, that would be an advantage. I think in terms of what you know what they're doing in the marketplace, and a lot of law firms use him. I feel I can't do any more than they are doing now. And in all the years that we've used to be my fingers on eight years now, but we've only had one serious problem, and the way they got that problem, you know the way, the way they communicated to reverse the way they a lot of different teams across the the Europe and the US go involved. I think, you know, in terms of service, in terms of software, in terms of what they what they do for us. I don't think there's anything more to add. Teoh. Right? Maia's vision. >> That's great for their custom of it. Well, thanks so much for coming on. The Cube is not heavy. Really? Thank you very much. You're welcome to keep it right there, buddy Peter, and I'll be back with our next guests right after this short break. We're live from Miami at the front of Blue Hotel. You're watching the Cube from Vienna on 2019 right back.

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2019 brought to you by Veeam! >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. We're here at the Fontainebleau Hotel. VeeamON day one of two-day coverage of the Veeam conference, very swaggy hotel. Dave Russell is here. He's the Vice President of NFI Strategy at Veeam. David, good to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> Thanks so much for coming onto theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks for having me again. >> You're very welcome. So let's see, you're well over, let's see, a year out, just about a year out of Gartner. Right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> And so okay you've been injected with the Kool-Aid fully, I presume, right? >> There you go, in the green, yes. >> But we're still going to talk a little bit about the magic water, but before we get into that, talk about your first year here. >> Yeah. >> Your impressions. Do they meet, exceed your expectations? >> It exceeded my expectations, but I can honestly say I'm not doing what I thought I was going to be doing here, but it actually turned out to be better. The other thing I will honestly tell you is I'm now on Pacific Coast time at the moment. Arizona, we're too unsophisticated for Daylights Saving, right so I'm either Mountain or Pacific but I'm Pacific now. But by 10 a.m. my time, I pretty much what I thought I was going to do that day is out the window and I'm doing something else and it's fun though. I mean now especially with the investment that we had earlier in the year and the cash reserves we ended last year with, looking at a lot of partnership capabilities, looking at ecosystem activities, certainly involved with customer activity. We're redoing our marketing and how we're focusing our go-to-market so it's a whole variety of things that sort of change hourly. >> So on the, I think we just talked about the M&A side. You've always been a dot connector in your, right? Because you talk to all the vendors, you talk to all the customers and you could see the picture. You have a huge observation space so part of your job on strategy is to try to what? Figure out where the gaps are. >> Yeah. >> And then drive strategy around do we build, do we buy? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah and it really does net down to what you said. It's a build/buy decision. It's an acceleration to market kind of decision and then the hard part is what are you willing to trade off and of course the real answer is as little as humanly possible. But you have to decide, just because you can do it, just 'cause you have the money doesn't necessarily mean you should pull the trigger. So if anything, it's curious because people like myself and a couple of my colleagues, we almost are more discerning. So we look at, okay, the technology, is it really viable? Do our due diligence, right? But then we also look at well, does this fit culturally? Is the integration point really there? Is the customer value really going to be significantly improved and if you cannot answer that very favorably, then keep the money. >> So you worked at IBM for a number of years, you worked at Gartner for a number of years. Now you're back working for a vendor. >> Yeah. >> Compare and contrast those roles. I mean Gartner, you do a lot of writing, you do a lot of traveling, you talk to a zillion people. I'm sure you talk to a lot of people here too, but you're coming at it from a very biased perspective whereas Gartner of course you're unbiased. You're serving the end customer. So talk about the difference in those two roles. >> So I approach it a little uniquely in that I'm biased. I mean I'm paid by a vendor, right? And so there's a certain inherent bias in there, but I go into a customer conversation and say "Maybe you shouldn't be using Veeam for certain things." So I'll give you an example. We have Unix capabilities with Solaris AIX. There are other vendors that do that even better than we do. They have rich application integration. If someone says that's my number one problem, honestly we're not your best choice. Now the reality is most of the world is moving towards more physical and virtual Windows and Linux. So I'll come in, say, a large enterprise and I'll say, "Okay, if you're like most shops," and I'll always undersell it. "Like probably 85% of your workload "is physical virtual Windows Linux." and they always interrupt me and go, "No, no, no, it's 92%." Like, "Okay, well we can help with that 92%." >> Yeah, yeah. >> The other 7%, I'm honestly going to tell you, we're not best of breed. >> Yeah that's a safe balance view that the AIX Solaris piece. >> Series. (Dave laughs) There's certain things. >> Yeah. >> We want to stick to our swim lane. We think it's a pretty wide lane, but there's no reason to come out of it. >> So your role as strategy, talk a little bit about how you're turning that strategy into action and specifics at Veeam. >> Yeah a big part of it has to do with cloud. >> I know that's the word that we've been talking about for a long, long time. So there's the aspirational aspect of Cloud and the operational. The aspirational is I want to be able to move in and out. I want mobility, I want the ability to exit. The operational is I want to be able to do this efficiently, meaning I want to be able to either send data to the cloud, my on-prem backup or I want to be able to protect SAAS-based workloads or infrastructure as a service workload so cloud-native workloads and then over time, I might want to be able to leverage that for something other than availability. So how can you rapidly make the data and only the portion of data that I need available to me when I need it? >> I was taking some notes during the key notes and I was just doing like a little, not really a tag cloud, but I was trying to identify as I heard them and grabbed them, the attributes of cloud data protection. I want to throw some out to you. You tell me. We'll play kind of word association, I guess. So I have fast recovery, API-based, open, simple, transparent, data-oriented, automated, cloud pricing, federated to accomodate the edge. Are these some of the attributes that we should associate with cloud data protection, maybe some of the things that I'm missing. How do you look at the attributes of a company and its products providing cloud data protection? >> Yeah so a big part of it, I actually like the phrase hybrid cloud even better than people say multi-cloud. The reason I like that is because hybrid presumes that you can have on premises as well. So like if it was the Dave and Dave company tomorrow, we'd probably be born in the cloud. Everything would be software as a service. We'd get some public cloud space. Now if we'd been in business for 20 years, we've got investments that we've made and we don't want to get rid of that any sooner than we have to. So hybrid cloud I like, but I think you nailed it in that what do every one of those attributes have in common? It's trying to get your most precious resource to you in a way that you want to consume it with as least amount of friction as possible. We want to reduce the aggravation associated with being able to access that rapidly. >> When you think about the customer conversations that you've had at Veeam and even going back to your Gartner days, I've always felt this notion of not hybrid, I see hybrid and multi-cloud as different. I've always looked at multi-cloud as multi-vendor. >> Yeah. >> Yeah I've got line of business, I've got shadow IT, I've got different IT projects and I've got multiple clouds and it's just, to me it was always less of a strategy than sort of this is where we are and now people need to put together a hybrid strategy. So IT's been asked to come clean up this mess as it always is. What's your take on the hybrid landscape and how we got here but more specifically, customer strategies when you consult with your customers? >> Yeah you're right that there's a lot of departmental buying, there's a lot of, in some cases, it's best of breed so I'm very willing to go look at multiple providers because I didn't sign up to go deploy the third best solution. Everyone wants what they think will be the most appropriate tool for them and rightfully so. So I think that's how we got, to your point, we didn't have a strategy that said I want 10 vendors. We arrived at an implementation choice that resulted in 10 vendors being deployed and then to your point further, then we had to layer on something on top of that. That's really where we come in and simple as it sounds, we really want to promote choice, choice of infrastructure, choice of cloud, choice of hypervisor, choice of operating system. >> So great discussion vector is the best of breed versus sort of integration. >> Yeah. >> And my question is that's been a decades-long. >> Yeah. >> Sort of trade-off that people have made. You see it in the software business, the hardware business and all through the industry. Is the API economy changing that. Can you be both, I mean Veeam, let's agree. Veeam is a best-of-breed provider. While your portfolio's growing, you're a billion-dollar company, you take a company like Dell who's got this ridiculously large portfolio. They can come into a customer and say well even with services or at IBM, we can wrap the big blue blanket around you and integrate everything. With the API economy, does that change the game on that argument of best of breed versus integration and convenience? >> It's a nuanced answer. The answer is a little yes and a little no. >> It depends, right? >> Let me decompose that because that's a cop-out, but the "it depends" aspect is really, APIs are wonderful to create an ecosystem and other integration points. If that's about offering your expandability to do something, that's a positive. If that really means that well because I can't deliver what you need, you got to go and write it yourself, that is a negative. So if the API is leveraging something for even greater value but beyond what the tools are originally designed to do, I think that's net positive, but if you have to exploit the API to just to get the product to work, why did I buy your product when I have to go hire someone to write code to work on your product? That's, you don't want that business. >> Okay so the last Gartner Magic Quadrant that came out was one that you sort of spearheaded back in 2017. It was like this perfect storm of backup analysts leaving Gartner and so there's been a little bit of delay in terms of the new one coming out which is coming our shortly as I understand it, but one of the observations that you can make if you look at the 2016-2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant is that Veeam moved from lower right to upper right which is rare. Can you explain that a little bit? You were saying that it usually goes in a different pattern. Elucidate, please. >> Yeah. Yeah so the magic in the Magic Quadrant is if you could actually jump from one quadrant to straight to leaders and that would be a very atypical progression. Usually it's a backwards Z. You come into the lower left, probably get over to the lower right, fall back, but go up to the upper left and then maybe you get to leaders in the upper right. The magic part in Veeam, the thing that they were able to do is go from visionary lower right to leader upper right. >> Okay and why do you think they were able to do that? I mean there are numerous attributes, but presumably 350,000 I think is the number of customers helped and so you've got a lot of references and proof points, the technology itself, but it's rare. Why do you think Veeam has been able to succeed in that regard? >> I think it's because Veeam has been good about getting answers to the most pressing problems. Again Veeam doesn't do everything. It doesn't support every single operating system, but the vast majority of the concentration of where customer issues are and where customer environments are getting deployed at, we can address very well and actually this weekend, I got here Friday night. So all day Saturday, all day Sunday and yesterday 'til 5 p.m. I took our SE training and so I've deployed Veeam, worked with active directories, all kinds of things for 72 hours basically and it was really that easy to use. In fact, my most difficult thing is I stayed in class until 6:30 at night because I'd never done active directory. I've never been an exchange admin before so I had to kind of come up to speed on those tools a little bit, but once I got that, the product was incredibly powerful, but also very intuitive. So you still have a little bit of that independent analyst DNA in you so I'm going to ask you to try to put that independent hat on. When you think about Veeam's traditional base of SMB, they're very successful there, obviously superglued itself to the virtualization trend. The last couple of years, Veeam has tried to move up-market, develop some relationships with some large players and has had some success there. Is the product well-suited for that larger enterprise and where do you see that going in terms of the up-market progression? >> Yeah so in theory, that's what I'm here to drive, the enterprise word is in my title, but in reality I focus more broadly than that. But if I just think about enterprise, I ran the numbers last week and company inception to date, we've actually derived over $2 billion of software-only revenue from the enterprise market and that's been accelerating. Now in 2017-18 and the first quarter of this year, almost $1 billion. So we're moving and we're moving fast. We had our sales kick off like most companies do. January, go to sales kick off and Ratmir says, "Hey don't chase just the big deals, the $2 million deals. "We've never sold a $2 million "without having a $200,000 deal first." The very next week, we got a $2 million deal on the first paper so he shot low. He should've said five million, but the interesting thing about Veeam and to answer your question, I think we resonate with the kind of challenges a large enterprise has. We allow them to move at their own scale if they want to move in a very large fashion, they can with Veeam. I would honestly tell them move as appropriate for you. As assets age, as you're willing to take on the change in an environment, do so, but I think Veeam is interesting. It's the same piece of software that I installed on my laptop this weekend that can also go to a Fortune 100 company. The same piece of software that manages 50,000 agents, we have at one shop, 50,000 Windows agents. We can do that with same code base and the only thing that's different is we just horizontally scale out how we deploy the capacity and then how we deploy the mover agents. >> I tweeted out this morning, Ratmir was standing in front of a chart with all these features and over the time and that's been part of the hallmark of Veeam is not checkbox features but real substantive features and you've had a consistent progression. Even Ratmir said, we don't have a big long-term roadmap that we share with our customers even internally. Yeah we have a direction and a vision, but very focused, almost like a bit of an Agile development methodology but the point is that, and you see that some companies are really good at this, some companies, not so good at this, but just consistently delivering features that are in-demand, that customers want, listening to their customers and just nailing it and that seems to be the hallmark of Veeam and as they say, some companies just don't have that in their DNA. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah I think what it really comes down to is at the end of the day, every developer thinks like a customer and they do that because they spend a lot of time on our Veeam forums and I'll be honest, when I was a mainframe backup developer, I didn't talk to that many customers. I was just writing code and I didn't know how people were actually putting the product to use in production. I didn't always know what feature might be most helpful for them. >> You were guessing. >> I was trying to think of the art of the possible, hopefully an educated guess, but I was really just trying to say what might be good, what might be of resonance versus actually having someone goes on a forum and says Veeam, what I would like you to do is X. That's one of the reasons why we do have, to your point, we don't have a 10-year roadmap where we say this feature is coming in 12 months, this feature is coming in 24 months. It's fluid and in some cases, we actually moved up delivering our physical agent management by a year because we started selling more and more of those and people said I need that feature functionality faster. We're willing to trade-off some of our other feature functionality. So if we can be, as long as we can continue to respond to the market, I think we're well-positioned. >> How does a capability like that surface itself? Obviously by talking to customers, but how does it get into the development pipeline so quickly? >> Yeah well in some cases, we've got a huge amount of not just, our part of R&D. It's the research, it's experimentation, it's incubation of new things. So when we find that sweet intersection point, then we can quickly operationalize that. In other cases, we just have to be nimble. We have to react fast. >> Is it a command and control culture though where somebody says okay this is what we're doing or is it more sort of the team gets together and says oh this really makes sense based on what the customers are telling us, let's go. How does that decision get made? >> Yeah well ultimately it is a command and control in the sense that our co-founder, one of our co-founders runs sales and marketing. Our other co-founders runs R&D and they ultimately get sign-off on their respective areas, but it is collaborative in the sense of we do bring forward, here's what we see in market, here's what see in our customer forums. Here's what our ecosystem of partners are telling us, here's our view of the top five things we ought to go do. >> I was struck by the other slide that Ratmir had. It was the $15 billion slide and it was probably, backup and recover was maybe I don't know seven out of the 15 if I remember, but there were all these other segments. It was sort of analytics and disaster recovery and data management, all new pockets of opportunity. $15 billion today, obviously growing with especially the cloud. How do you see that landscape and how does that affect the way you look at strategy? >> Yeah so I actually put that bubble chart together. >> Oh, I like it. >> The rationale between the bubbles, we have core, we put backup in the middle because that's what we do but also that's how we ingest data and now we can do other things around it. So the reason for those bubbles and they were of varying sizes and the bubbles were sort of in and out of to varying degrees the main backup bubble according to how much intersection we thought as a company we could have with that. Where we thought we could add value, where we thought there was an ecosystem potential. So for example, analytics. We're not going to become the next best analytics company tomorrow, not even years from now. We could partner and we can provide data and we get better access to data to be able to do that. So we'd want to facilitate that. In other cases, maybe we really do want to go own and acquire. >> Well and so to your earlier comments there, I didn't use the term, the phrase land and expand, but that's clearly what you guys are doing starting with the $200,000 sale and growing it to a $2 million sale. So those bubbles are potentially cohort sales. >> Yes. >> That you can sell sort of like bananas in bunches I like to say, right? >> Yeah. And part of that is who do you sell that to. And so if you're able to go and address some of those ancillary bubbles or markets, now you've got a different entree point into the organization. If you're already involved with an organization, now you can offer more value because you can get more out of your data that you've already protected. So it opens up new conversations for us to have. It opens up entirely new buying centers for us too. >> Well how is the role of whom you sell to changing? I mean it was backup admin historically, right or maybe a Veeamware admin. Veeam admin. How is that changing? >> So greatest example I would tell you are events. So we acquired a company last January or a year ago January called N2W Software. So they're predominantly at Amazon re:Invent conferences. You go to Amazon re:Invent and no one's heard of Veeam and if anyone's heard of either of the two companies, it's definitely N2WS and someone's seen it in the marketplace. That demographic tends to be totally different from the demographic if you go to the on-premises data center type of conference where they have heard of Veeam and it's a very different sort of mindset. To your point, they grew up in a very different landscape. Now instead of someone who's well-steeped in server storage and networking and maybe majored in one, possibly two of those things, now you've got a generalist where he or she is probably in their 20s, has a very different point of view of what it should take to get something working and has a very different view of how they want to be sold to, how you can go and reach them. >> So at the cloud show, there might be a development persona. >> Yes. >> That you're selling to. Obviously VMWare, VMWorld, we know what that is. It's IT guys, right, is the predominant and how do you see cloud changing that? Is it cloud architects or sort of cloud leaders? CTOs increasingly? Data Protection becomes more and more important to digital business. So how are you seeing that role change due to cloud? >> So right now we have to basically have more touchpoints. Our typical legacy fan of our customer, our customer base, our product's sweet spot still remains and it's in some cases will pull us into the cloud. In other cases, we have to go talk to someone that's entirely different. But again, that's more of an administrative view. But to your point, going up the stack now, if you go to the not even Vice President of Infrastructure, you go to the CIO, he or she says, "I am tired of thinking about boxes. "I am tired of thinking about where this resides. "I want to think business outcome." So for us that's actually a great conversation because it all comes back to data. That's what we're in the business of doing. We capture, protect and move data. >> So that brings it back to strategy. We got to run, but summarize in your words, just sort of the strategy of Veeam and where you see this whole thing going. >> Yeah I will simplistically say it's more of the same. We want to continue to offer what we think is a best of breed solution for on-prem and increasingly cloud availability, but also we want to offer real customer value in terms of now being able to leverage that data, get more value out of that whether that's DevOps, running analytics against that, security test patch, whatever it may be, we want to be able to give you just the data you need, so have granularity, and offer speed and ease of use to do that. >> So as data becomes more and more important, you're seeing companies go beyond backup, trying to get more out of there, their backup, moving to data protection, data management, not just an insurance policy anymore. Dave Russell, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with Peter Burris as my cohost. We're at VeeamON Live from Miami. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> fly from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering Google Club next nineteen, right Tio by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. You watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here at the new improved Mosconi Center covering Google next twenty nineteen. I'm Dave along with my co hosts. Two minutes to get to see you. Russell Warming is here. He's the head of infrastructure at AutoTrader UK. Russell, Thanks for coming on the Cube. You very welcome. AUTOTRADER uk not to be confused with the U. S. Not a lot of you guys. They're separate cos >> yet completely separate. So way operate the largest automotive marketplace in the UK something like the sixteenth busiest website in the UK around fifty five million cross platform visits each month on average. Probably about five hundred thousand vehicles that were advertising out. Tio consumers >> are traitors. Awesome website If your eyes are second biggest purchase typically behind the home and and so Stew was asking you earlier if you if digital transformation meant anything to you and you said Well, we kind of went through a ten years ago yet, and it's kind of true You guys were like born in the Internet company would talk about >> that. So our heritage is that we've been around for forty forty years. We started producing magazines back in nineteen seventy seven. And then in ninety six, we would launched our first website on DH. We've basically just migrated those revenues from our print business online. And then about two thousand thirteen. We stop printing magazines all together. So we're truly digital business now, >> and people talk about digital transformation oftentimes in the context of data. So maybe talk about some of the things that you're doing in your business, some of the challenges that you face, where data fits in and we'Ll really get into it. >> Okay, so I'm we've got a couple of areas where we've been on premise for our data centers. Wave had that strategy for probably about fifteen years, and we've started to reach limits in terms of how we manage capacity within their on what we found is using cloud services as really enables so unlock capabilities, particularly around things like data on their. More recently, when we're thinking about using Cuban eaters and SDO, we've been able to take advantage of things like some of the security features, mutual tear less and service discovery. >> All right, so they also bring us inside your organization a little bit. You're head of infrastructure? Yeah. What does that mean to your business today? >> So way basically run the platform that runs auto trader dot co dot uk on were responsible for making sure that's available twenty four seven three six five So way. Want to make sure that we're able to give our internal customers the ability to release new applications new features as quickly as they want, but also that we're ensuring that our consumers are retailers get a great experience that it's fast performance secure. >> Yeah, and it could give us tease out a little bit, just kind of the scope, how many people you have and how do you balance the stuff that kind of is under your purview and the stuff that you manage that is outside of your four walls. >> So there's about twenty five people within the team. There's probably about ten people building the infrastructure and about fifteen people that are responsible for monitor in it. So we're not a big organization in terms of operations in infrastructure on. We have to work very closely with our product squads because we manage some elements of it. But we're dependent on them managing other elements as well. So we're trying to unlock platform capabilities so that we've got consistency that we're trying to provide those those capabilities rather than going off on finding something else. >> You've got infrastructure on Prem and you've got infrastructure in the cloud to cloud services, right? Yes. So oftentimes those aren't the same. But talk about your situation and you're on a journey, I presume. >> Way started about forty months ago, building out our cloud services on DH. Probably in the last four months, we've really started accelerating that that migration plan of applications moving it up into into Google Cloud on DH. Our ambition is to get that done in eighteen months because the complexity of managing multiple environments is something that we want to try and avoid. Minimize that. >> So is the aspiration to go all in >> waiting absolutely way. We've taken a view that for services that we can we'll take money services and then everything else will be cloud first >> believe I heard you say Cooper Netease is in the mix now. Can you explain where that fits? How you're using it? >> So that see, that's the platform that we're using. Teo. Build out all our applications in the clouds so that that's that's That's a lot of important >> air using any communities in your data center today? No, not all from a cloud. That's the platform layer that using the >> public? Absolutely so when we talked about should we use Cuban? It is way did discussed. Should we do it on Prem or do it in the cloud? And we just figured that we didn't want the overhead of managing it ourselves on prime, we thought it be better just to take it as a service almost and manage up in the cloud. >> Most of the shows we go too many of them, anyway. It's too, and I and the Cube they talk about multi cloud, and we often say multi cloud as a function of multi vendor. But certainly way heard today from Google. A multi cloud. What's your cloud strategy? Because there there's another camp that says, Well, if you do, multi cloud is more complex, it's less secure, it's more expensive. Are you trying to be kind of unit cloud or is that horses for courses? >> So we're three clouds today. So our data platforms, it's partly in G C P. But then partly in another cloud provider on then we're also for our enterprise applications were using another cloud provided because it makes sense to do so. So we want to use the right cloud for the right applications. I think that most of our customer facing applications will end up in G C. P. But some of the back end services my end up in of the cloud provide us >> Okay, so it's strategic fit based on the application? Absolutely. So what is the wheelhouse of of of? Of Google, in your view, from a customer's perspective. >> Um, so the fact that Cuban eighties was developed by Google is a really strong play there. It gives you confidence that they know Teo to look after it. Things like SDO have made a massive difference to our organization as well. We part of the reason why we've ended up using GDP was based on using SDO, and that was around solving a specific problem that we had so that those of the sort to to solve areas that we focused on. >> Just when you look at you know, you've got that hybrid, multi cloud environment that we find is pretty much the standard today. Can you speak a little bit of the management layer? How you look at that, you know, Is it good enough today? And what what? What could the industry do to make it even better? >> It's good enough for our needs. I think that the challenge that you've always got is data ingress and egress between between clouds as you want to move data or query data, making sure that you could do that in a secure way. That's probably the biggest challenge that you'd have on also around the cost of doing so. Those you know, those are probably the bigger challenges >> in the challenges. The cost in time of moving data is its security or the above. Maybe you could dig into that little bit. >> It's probably a little bit of all the above. If I'm honest, I think you could do so much to security plight. Private VP ends Between Between the cloud providers It's I guess that's the time and actually moving some of that data between the clouds is that there's a challenge, and then they cost. Like I say, it's difficult to predict how much it might cost you two to move some of that >> big challenges and from a business perspective that a driving your technology strategy, obviously you want consumers coming to your site. You want to make that as rich as possible for them. You've gotta monetization strategy as well. But you talk a little bit about the business drivers that are affecting your technology. >> Okay, so consumer demand is constantly changing. Technology is massively disrupting how people think about search for cars. We can see that there's a demanding in the in the marketplace for people just to be ableto choose it, choose a car on DH, have that customizing delivered. They want tohave complexity around how they look for finance on their cars. They want all that sort of taken away. They don't wanna have to turn up tio a car showroom and then go through the same conversation that live with salesperson that they've just gone through online. They want that journey to be seamless, so there's some challenges that the industry facing trying to do that where we're trying to help our retailers, providing those services that customers want. So to be able to understand what the part ex valuation is on their car before they turned up to the dealership and know that it's going to get honored because they've got to trust in it so they can understand what, what making spend on a monthly faith on what cars are available. So we're trying to change what we provide to our consumers on also to support our retailers. Manage that changes well, >> Russell thinks a really great point. You make way. No many industries, and especially your industry, is changing really fast. So what are those stresses and strains mean to the infrastructure team in Oak and maybe talk a little bit about the relationship of kind of business? Tow it how that's changed in the last few years. >> So probably over the last ten years, it has always been seen as the sort of the blocker in terms of making sure that new products and features become become available quickly on our role is really to make sure that we're providing the infrastructure at the right time for people so that they can basically just dial it in when they need it. So if they want to release a new application, they don't need to come and speak to somebody in ops to stop provisional server. They just create a pipeline, deploy their application and then the service provisioned at the same time. On we do things like checking for a Wasp Bonham abilities at the same time and making sure that the application and the infrastructure is working hand in hand. So we've taken a lot of that dependency away from people, sort of with handoff points and everything. >> You're a business that has obviously transformed over the years. I think you said you started in the sixties seventies seventies is a publisher basically, paper printing presses and the like. Nineteen ninety six is when you went online. Is that right? So that early days pretty much of the Internet. So the heart, uh, and so you've proven that you could transform forward thinking. I'm wondering what the conversation might be like inside the company about things like autonomous vehicles. Is there a day that comes where owning your own vehicle is the exception rather than the norm? What implications that might have for your business. It's very hard to predict, obviously, But are you having those kind of conversations? You have other lines of business that you're launching toe >> say you're absolutely right. Those those things are area of concern on wave people, constantly looking at new and emerging changes in threats across the whole industry. On DH, they are absolutely looking at how that might impact our business. What we're actually seeing, though, through research that we've done is people still aspire to own car. So car ownership is still something that people want to want to look at with regards to the second part of your question. We are ultimately focus, that is, that's where we are. We don't operate outside of the UK and Ireland. We absolutely focus on our core on making sure that the services that we offer around that really support our customers need, whether that be consumer or retailer. >> Well, it's interesting that the auto industry really has it been wildly disrupted. I mean, you certainly see Tesla and people talk about autonomous vehicles, but still, the big car makers, they're still doing quite well. They dominate the market so and so it's going to take some time, you know, and there's some skeptics out there, but it's very interesting to see how you guys evolve, what other opportunities you go after. I want to ask you. So Google next is coming to tow London in November. How important is it for you? As somebody is based in the UK tohave, Google have local events like that? I mean obviously a traveling a far distance to come to this event. How important is that to you as a customer? >> It's important for us to be able Teo, get more people involved in the conversation. There's obviously a cost on time effort in terms of coming out tio something here. But it's in The scale of this is enormous in comparison to what we see in the UK, but it just means that having that presence in the U. K. Means that we can just get more of our engineers in front of the right people tohave a better conversation, understand more about what's coming and how we might be able to use that within our business >> things that so you just sort of near early on in your cloud journey. But knowing what you know, and you get it early on, I think you might do differently if you had a mulligan, you want to do over again our advice you give to your colleagues and piers. >> So I think the big thing that we found is modest modernizing applications Before you start moving them into the cloud, I think there is a tendency, Probably way we're in the in the cloud, probably about nine years ten years ago and we bought those workloads back on prime. And the reason why we did that is because we didn't treat them differently way manage those instances in the same way that we managed on prime, which is completely do a wrong way to do it, in my opinion. So we needed to change our mind set in terms of how we manage the infrastructure. You need to make sure that you re architect your applications, that you are taking advantage off the features and functionalities things like auto scaling, that you plan for failure. All those things that you typically control on Prem. You have to think about differently in the clouds. >> We will talk about this a lots to changing, the operator >> said that the long pole in the tent is, you know, modernized those applications. Any change? Migrations is really tough. So but do you have a time for him? How long would take you to get to that? All in that you're planning on >> eighteen months, Cesar, that's >> not just a lift, Did Shift >> S O. That is a modernization. But the approach that we've taken and is to try and give the people the confidence and courage really to go at it is we've picked ofsome easier applications. So this journey about being cloud native, we started six or seven years ago, and we've started getting people building their applications on our private cloud. And those ones have been really easy to move on to the public cloud and some of the applications that I've been a little bit trickier that I've been on our short traditional virtual ization platform. We're trying to pick those off in parallel, so you do one that's really easier one that's a bit harder. So you give people confidence and then you're trying to solve some tricky problems alongside it, and I think that just incrementally gives you more confidence that you're moving in the right direction. >> Right straight. Just like skiing on the then the blacks. And they go into the greens and they're making your moves. >> Just just a little bit. A little bit harder each time you got it, but yeah. >> Russell, thanks so much for coming in. The queue was great. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you for watching. We'll be right back from Google next in San Francisco.

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering the RSA Conference 2019. Brought to you by ForeScout. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at RSA at Moscone at downtown San Francisco. We're in the ForeScout booth, our first time in the ForeScout booth, we're really excited to be here and we're talking about cyber security, I don't know what the official number is this year, probably 45 thousand professionals walkin' around, talkin' about security. And we've got our next guest on, he is Russell Jones, partner on cyber risk services for Deloitte. Russell, great to meet you! >> Same to meet you as well. >> So, I asked him before we turned on, what's getting you excited these days and he said, everything! So, this is a crazy busy space. What have you been working on lately, what's kind of your take away from the first couple days at the show? >> Yeah, it is a crazy, busy space and if you look at the cyber landscape, everything's moving at the speed of the internet, so it's this cat and mouse game in terms of attackers trying to find new ways to get into systems that is driving the industry. When you talk about health care though, the issue is these systems, like medical devices, often times are connected to people. >> Right. >> And so, the implications of a hack against, let's say, a MRI machine or a fusion pump, could be devastating to an actual person connected to it. And that's really what's driving a lot of innovation in terms of some of the technologies you see, like ForeScout, and also, a lot of what's going on from a regulatory perspective, and also the hospitals and the health care system themselves. >> Right. >> Trying to solve that problem, managing cyber risk as it relates to clinical technology. >> And a lot of that stuff wasn't connected before, right? There weren't IP addresses on every MRI machine or all these pump machines or, you know, you have a pacemaker, all these things. How are they looking at kind of the risk reward from a connected device that gives you all kinds of benefits-- >> Yeah. >> but it does open up this attack surface that previously had maybe an air gap there? >> That's a great point, bottom line is the life saving, life extending attributes of these medical technologies and medical devices far outweighs the risk of cyber, however, we got to be smart about managing that risk. So, we're going to see more connectivity, not less. Train's left the station, in terms of what's coming and in the future of the healthcare, connecting more of, not only the medical devices, but the information in them and being able to share that and then bring it together and aggregate it in ways that, you know, with analytics on top of it allows doctors and researchers in the clinical community to connect dots in ways that solve cancer, solve some different maladies that have plagued us forever. >> Right. >> So I think, on the one hand, it's great, this connectivity is extending healthcare out to people in rural locations and it's also bringing together a lot of different data from everything from your Fitbit to your pacemaker to apps that you have on your phone in a way that's going to benefit us. >> Right, right, so, one of the things about healthcare is they're way out in front of, kind of, not healthcare in terms of regulations. >> Yeah. >> You know, and HIPAA's been around for a long time, GDPR just went into place in Europe last year, so when you look at it from a regulatory environment, which people have to consider, there's not only the complexity of the machines, there's not only the complexity of the security, but you also have regulatory environment. >> Yeah. >> How is the cyber security in healthcare, with their very unique regulations, kind of impacting the way people should think about the problem, the way they should implement solutions? >> That's a good question, I think we've thought about, in the cyber community, forever. We talk about confidentiality, integrity, availability, right, the triangle. When you think about healthcare and clinical technology and medical devices, you need to flip that triangle upside down and the focus is integrity and availability, those things together equal patient safety. So, in other words, as we're connecting more of these devices to each other, to electronic health record systems, to the cloud, the integrity of the information in there, which is being used by doctors and other folks to make decisions about treatment, about surgical procedures, about medicines, it's crucial that that information and the integrity of it is maintained. And then the availability of the device is critical, right? If you're going in to get an MRI and it's down because it's been hacked, there's usually not a spare MRI and so there's a profound impact for patients that are scheduled back to back to back to back to go get that procedure, that MRI that's going to be used by a doctor to do some surgery or some other kind of a treatment plan >> Right. >> So integrity and availability are huge in the cyber world. And, if you look at the regulations, depending on which one we're talking and which part of the world, right? You mentioned HIPAA, we've got security and privacy, you've got GDPR, you've got the FDA that have guidance around what they want the manufacturers to do, building security into the devices. >> Right. >> They all have an impact on cyber and how it's going to be addressed, how we're going to manage cyber risk in the healthcare world. >> Right. >> In that environment. >> And then there's this whole new thing, I went to the Wall Street Journal Health Conference a couple weeks back, I don't know if you were there, but there was two people up where you now you can take your genetic footprint, right? >> Yeah. >> You can take your 23andMe results and after you figure out where your family's from, you can actually sell it back into a research market-- >> Yeah. >> so that doctors and clinicians and people doing trials on new drugs can now take your data in kind of a marketplace, back into a whole nother application so it's kind of outside of the core healthcare system, if you will. >> That's right. >> But I mean, it's basically, it's me, right? (laughs) In the form of my DNA footprint. >> Yup. >> It's crazy, crazy amounts of strange data that now is potentially exposed to a hack. >> That's right, and so the implications there, obviously, privacy, right? That's a huge issue, I think, that we're going to have to address and that's why you see GDPR and that's why you see the California Consumer Privacy Act. >> Right. >> There's a recognition that, again, the train's left the station, there's a lot of good things that come out of sharing data and sharing information, there's a lot benefits that can come out of it for the consumers, patients. There's a dark side as well and that has to be managed. That's why we have the privacy regulations that we have, we're probably going to see more, probably going to see more things like the California Consumer Privacy Act. >> Right. >> More states and eventually-- >> Right. >> probably a federal act for the US. >> Do you think that the healthcare industry is better equipped to deal with GDPR and the California Healthcare Act because of things like HIPAA and they kind of come from that world? Or is this just a whole new level of regulation that they now have to account for? >> I think it's probably a mixed bag. On the one hand, healthcare has been dealing with privacy for a long time, even before HIPAA, right. And then HIPAA has very specific requirements around how you have to manage that information and consent and notifying the patient of their rights. On your other hand, you look at some of the new things, like GDPR, it goes way beyond HIPAA, and I think-- >> It goes way beyond HIPAA? >> Goes way behind HIPAA, like for example, this whole notion of the right to be forgotten. >> Right. >> Right, that's a requirement on the GDPR. That means, me as a patient, if I tell my doctor, I want you to get rid of all my medical records, everything in your system everywhere about me, I want it gone. Not that it makes sense-- >> Right, right. >> but, at least in Europe, if they ask to do that, you have to be able to comply. From a technology perspective and a medical device perspective, some of these devices are very complex, ecosystem of devices, components that make up the product. >> Right >> That's a very difficult thing to do. There's no one delete button-- >> Right. >> that you hit that can delete you from all different instances, downstream from where you came into the healthcare system. >> Right. >> And so, when you think about it from a cyber perspective, it gets to be very challenging. >> The other thing, right, is health care's always under tremendous kind of price pressure from the insurers and the consumers and a bad medical event can wipe-- >> Yeah. >> people out, right? >> Yeah. >> Especially when they're later in life and they're not properly insured, when they're making kind of an ROI analysis on cyber investments versus all the other things they can spend their money on, and they can't spend it all on security, that's not possible, how are they factoring in kind of the cyber investment, it's kind of this new layer of investment that they have to make because all these things are invested versus just investing in better beds and better machines and better people? >> That's the million dollar question. (laughs) I would say, some hospitals and health systems are doing it better than others, so maybe a little bit more further along and mature about thinking about the total cost of ownership and also, the patient factor, right? What has to be balanced, obviously, is not just the costs, but at the end of the day, what's best for the patient. And you hear this term, patient centricity, a lot today. And there's a recognition from all the players in the echo system, it's all about the patient. >> I'm so glad you say that 'cause I think a lot of people probably think that the patient sometimes gets lost in this whole thing, but you're saying no. >> There is an acknowledgement over the last few years and it's called patient centricity, it's an acknowledgement that the way we're going into the future of healthcare and the kinds of medical devices and technology and cloud solutions that are becoming part of the healthcare fabric, they're all being built and geared towards the patient being the center of the equation, not the doctor, not the hospital, it's the patient. >> Right, right, right, that's good to hear. >> And so, to answer your original question, we're in early days and really trying to balance the patient and patient centricity versus we've got vulnerabilities in our environment that could impact the patient and we've only got limited people and costs. >> Right, right. >> Making decisions that kind of balance all of those things. >> Right, alright Russell, last question, we're sitting here in the ForeScout booth. >> Yes. >> Obviously you have a relationship with them, talk about kind of what their solution adds to some of the stuff that you're workin' on. >> So, ForeScout, one of the reasons that we're working closely with ForeScout, their solution, really, they've taken an approach that's holistic around these issues that we're talking about, right, managing cyber risk, complex environment, a lot of different devices that are connected to each other and to the cloud and to the internet. They have built a solution that focuses on ability to have visibility into those devices that are on your network, some of which you may not even know exists, and then being able to kind of build an asset inventory around that visibility that allows you to do things like detect, based on policy, activity that suggests that you might be hacked or there might be some internal processes or players that are doing things that are going to put patients at risk or have you in non-compliance with GDPR, HIPAA and the rest. >> Right. >> And then their solution goes beyond ability to kind of visibility and detect, but to actually do something actionable, right? Security controls and orchestration with other technologies, like Simp Solutions and SOAR Solutions. Being able to orchestrate, hey, I know that I detected some activity on this infusion pump that suggests that we may being hacked, let me send an alert out, but then let me also, maybe, quarantine that part of the network. So, it's the ability to orchestrate between different security technologies that exist in a hospital environment, that's what we like about ForeScout. >> I'm just curious, when they run their first kind of crawl, if you will-- >> Yeah. >> are people surprised at the results of what's on there, that they had no clue? >> I mean, yes and no. >> Yes and no, okay. >> I think, most of the big hospitals that we work with, they know that, what they don't know, and especially when-- >> They know what they don't know. >> you're talkin' about a health system that maybe has a 100 thousand connected medical devices across the health system, they know what they don't know. They're looking for solutions to help them better manage and understand the things that they don't know, that they don't know. >> Right. >> Versus what they do know about. >> Right. >> And I think that's what we bring to the table in terms of kind of cyber risk services Deloitte brings, and then that's what ForeScout brings with their solution to be able to kind of help solve those problems. >> Well Russell, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day to share those stories, super-- >> Thank you. >> super important work, you know, it's one thing to steal a few bucks out of the bank account, like you said. >> Yeah. >> It's another thing to start taking down machines at the hospital, not a good thing. >> Not a good thing. >> Alright >> Thank you. >> He's Russell, I'm Jeff, you're watchin' theCUBE, we're at RSA in Moscone in the ForeScout booth, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (techno music)

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering IBM thing twenty nineteen brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back. We're here in Moscow, named North for IBM. Think twenty nineteen. I'm stupid. I'm unhappy. Toe. Welcome back to the program. A cube alone. Dave Russell, who is the vice president of enterprise strategy with Team and IBM partner Dave. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Hey, thank you for having against two. >> All right, S o. You know, big thing we're talking about here of the show. It's hybrid cloud. It's multi cloud and IBM, you know, spent, you know, big money to make acquisitions in the space to be there. Multi club. Something I've been hearing from theme for a number of years. Talk to us about kind of the relevant. Why beams here at this show? And we'll get into it from there. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, So I've been traveling the world. Really? You mentioned Barcelona just a moment ago. Been? You know, Barcelona, Vegas, a number of other cities really pitching beams, multi cloud capabilities and story. And the short version of it is we believe that all organizations are really multi cloud today. Whether they realize it or not, they're going to be more multi cloud in the future. And what I mean by that is if you think about availability, backup in recovery and replication, you know it's a Zurich zur stack. It's a ws. It's private cloud. It's obviously what you have on premise, and it's the stuff you haven't even thought about tomorrow. And you. If you want to make a little adjacent stretch, you can put software is a service. I think in there, too, So it's about really offering protection, but also portability. >> Yeah, absolutely. When you have that multi cloud world world, of course, data is one of the most important things and how to lie for you. No protect and secure my data and leverage that data is critically important. IBM has a lot of different pieces. Where's the intersection between vehement IBM? >> Yeah, it's actually pretty exhaustive. So I'm a former I B M for fifteen plus years still live in Tucson, where IBM storage has a big presence and, you know, so it's everything from tape. We still believe Tape has a role to play, by the way, actually just released some new tape capabilities. It's, of course, the servers that they offer, and as well as the GTS Global Services and IBM cloud, of course, were interact with but their storage raise their virtual ization solutions. All of that. We have hooks and integration into today. >> Yeah, IBM have a pretty broad and deep portfolio, so lots of places for for being too play Dave. If he had an announcement recently updated, you were just alluding to some of the function of what? Why do you walk us through what the latest is? >> Yeah, it's actually the largest in company's history, which is now eleven years shipping product as of today, which is three weeks ago today we released the product, but as of today, there's sixty four thousand downloads that's against the base of three hundred thirty thousand ish customers might be three hundred thirty two thousand, but sixty four thousand dollars in exactly three weeks. Couple of capabilities from a cloud perspective alone. We've got this kind of probability that we spoke about take any workload on premises or physical virtual that's running in your shop and to be able to move it somewhere else. Really, to click restores to be able to get Teo Zura zur Stak E. W s. From an IBM perspective, we can definitely support IBM cloud in that we've got beam availability suite for a W s, where we can take instances running in a Ws like Mongo to be Cassandra and bring that back. You may want to bring that back for safekeeping or even transformation on prime two of'em instance, we've got all kinds of interesting things to not least of which is called cloud Tear. It sounds like an archive solution. It's it's really not. We underneath the covers take what's on running on premises for you. Let's say you're a beam shop today, and we can take out those unused blocks, unbeknownst to you and stage als off objects storage. And we can optimize how we do that. Right? So we can make sure you avoid egress charges. We essentially short version of that is in active source side D duplication of optimizing the blocks in the cloud. And then we leave uninterrupted access to it on prime. You don't ever have to know what's in the cloud. Change your behaviour. Changed the application to update it. Those are just a couple of the many things that we introduced. >> Well, yeah, quite a few things there, Dave. You know, in a multi cloud world. Can you bring us inside the customers? You know, Who is it that teams working with there? You know, cloud architect. Seems like it would be different than kind of the traditional, you know, storage or system administrator there. You know, one of the things we worry about in a multi cloud worlds is I've got different skill sets I need for all of these and how their organizations manage that. And, you know, how is the organization shaping up? >> Well, today You're right. It can be dispersed people, you know, disparity, folks. You know, it could be the software as a service person. It could be someone that's used to thinking, say, a ws. And I know when we go as a company to ignite their conference when we go there because, Ah, company Ricard called and two ws that specializes in that the people that come up to that desk don't even know who I mean. So >> reinvent your saying for all it was on >> my bed yet. So, you know, they don't even know the on premise, right? They only know what their specific focuses. And so, you know, we interact with a multitude of different roles where they tend to unite is vice president of infrastructure. But it could be many different touch points. I think is an organization. If you're especially a C i. O, you're probably a little bit worried about how many different things are going on there. Can we have a common management plain? >> Yeah. One of the areas that's really interesting. We talk about the public clouds. IBM has a long tradition with kind of C. S, P. S and M s bees, the service providers ahs. You will where does seem interacted at that layer of the ecosystem. Yeah, >> well, we have really twenty one thousand different being cloud service providers today, some of which manage over one million different machine instances just themselves. So we did a number of actually updates for them as well. And that's actually one of the tape integration points we now offer tenant to tape ifyou're a cloud service provider to offer an additional capability. But we offered, you know, the engine, if you will, that people can build it back up as a service disaster, recovery as a service, a solution around. >> Okay. Excellent. And thiss new release. What was it called? Yeah. >> It's a long name. Its aversion nine dot five update for >> that That screams major release. Yeah, >> well, it's the importance of it belies the, you know, the Newman clincher. But, you know, the reality is it's the biggest in our history. >> Yeah. So, Dave, give us a little insight. You know, you're doing the presentation here at IBM. Think give us some of the the team present where we're going to be seeing the bright green throughout the show. >> Yeah. Yeah. So there's been a couple of different things taking place already. I'm really going to hit multi cloud. Very, very hard. Really? From a how you should think about. So I really intended to be so much a beam commercial we'll talk about, you know, unabashedly, what being capabilities are but really set up a thought process. You know, a framework I get to kind of play a little bit of my analyst role, but, well, how much you want, You know, approach this. >> Yeah. David, I'm glad you brought it up. I love when you get here. We put your analyst hat roll on. We can. You know, talk is analysts here when I look at multi cloud networking. Management and security have just been this challenge we've been looking at. We've made progress as a whole, but there's still a lot of concerns. And, you know, multi cod sure isn't simple for the enterprise today. Ah, where we doing well is an industry. I know there's some areas that Beam has specific expertise to help on DH solutions, but I won't give a critical eyes, too. You know, what we need to do is an industry as a whole to make things better for customers, You >> know, the number one thing I would say is have a design, have a plan, don't fall into this haphazard. And one of the reasons I assert that just about every organization is multi cloud is because no matter what size you are, somebody somewhere has deployed something in a cloud or two or more. And again, if you throw software is a service into that. Now, this's just geometrically expanded. But it hasn't been like a conscious design strategy. >> Yeah, in many ways that we used to talk about shadow it Teo and many thie old. It was we used to call it either silos or cylinders of excellent, depending on the organization that you lived into. The concern I have is we're kind of rebuilding these in the cloud. So how we've learned from the past, our customers, you know, the CEOs, the organization's getting a better handle around their environment today. Or are we failed to do what was done in the past? >> I think we're getting incrementally better. Obviously, some organizations are, you know, accelerating faster than others. I think initially, when people thought, well, I can lift and shift and life will be better. You know, I can just like I introduce server virtual ization. Now, everything's cheaper, and I'm going to spend a lot of money to do that, you know? Well, I'm going to go to the cloud. It's going to be cheaper. And I just doing the same exact capabilities, instances and deployment that I was doing before never really worked out. So I think if you're approaching us something fresh and new and trying to actually take advantage of those capabilities here in a better position. >> Yeah. So I had a really interesting discussion earlier today. Had had the heads of V M wears cloud a group in an IBM cloud on. Of course, one of them comes up is you know, are we just lifting and shifting or re transforming and how to developers fit into it? So I'd love to hear from a beam standpoint as that, you know, application, maturity and modernization happens. You know What? What does that mean to the VM portfolio? >> Well, I would be really exciting if we do see more of a development base because I think really then you can add on extensions to what? Today the team is a data capture retention engine. It's best known for backup in recovery, disaster, recovery. But it could be so much more than that. So just a quick commercial button integration. Answer your question of we can now stand up ad hoc, isolated instances of machines and you can run things on that like GDP are scrubbing. You know, you can also do what we call a secure restore you, Khun. Understand? Well or not, it has a virus associated with it before populated back into the environment. But as a application community, you may want to say tomorrow morning at ten AM I want thes ten servers stood up with fresh data so my team could go in there and now generate faster applications for the business. It's really a business transformation St That's why I think we need more developers. >> Yeah, I remember one of the demons I attended, the CTO of Microsoft came, and you handed out his book, which I read recently, and it was kind of that they called it. It's not like science fact. But, you know, you talked about about cyber security and the challenge we faced in, you know? Okay. The global terrorists are going to come, you know, wipe out, you know, the entire infrastructure, and it's a little bit close to home, you know, because you kind of understand the security threat. Where does seem fit into the security picture when it when it comes to multi cloud things like Ransomware and the like, >> Yeah, unfortunately, things are going to happen. And we know this because things are already happen to number of organizations. It doesn't, you know, really take too long to find somebody that's been affected by this already. And so when that happens, you need some first level step of remediation. You need to get back as fast as you can to known. Good copy of your data. You know, Certainly that's where beam comes in, but being ableto also have portability. What if we could go and take your Azzurri instance data? Do the bios conversion for you automatically and send that to Amazon or vice versa. So you can have another offline, baldheaded copy. Or, you know, in that ransom where notion I presented to you. You know what? If you have to go backto backups, put ransomware typically lies dormant before it actually deploys the payload. So you don't know exactly how far back you need to go. So with this capability, you could go back on ly so far as you need to me Because you could verify exactly when vulnerability was introduced. But do that in a way that's sandbox isolated off the network and not putting you at risk. All >> right, Dave gives little look forward. What would be it would be expecting to see from beam through twenty. Nineteen? >> Yeah, we're focused a lot on increasing scale way. Believe that were very easy to use. Solution. People say no. Simple, you know, flexible, reliable. We wantto keep enhancing that, but we're looking at additional work loads to protect all the time cloud capabilities to expand upon a new ways, though, to take what it has always been a data protection company and make it a data management company. Things we were just speaking about from a developer angle. You're going to see us go a lot harder on that. We have a significant amount of investment way Got the largest We believe storage software investment history of five hundred million ended last year with a rich cash reserves. So now, instead of busy trying to do stuff, we're also looking at busy. What else do we need to acquire? Potentially. All right, >> well, Dave, the Cube is really excited to be back here in the redone Mosconi. A little bit more glass, a little bit more light, a little bit more space. The theme is having its annual user conference at facility. We really like to the front of blue in Miami for people that are going or thinking about going to tell him what they should be expected if they attended. >> Yeah, well, you'll get to see live demonstrations of everything I've been speaking about and Mohr, you know, seeing is believing, right? It's one thing to have power point. It's another thing to actually see someone demo it. And some of our folks, they actually demo this live on stage mean they're not canned demos. They're actually going into real servers and doing things like having a virus infiltrate and then remediating from that. So you'll get to see that you get to Seymour of road map. You'll get to see more customers, success stories and our partner ecosystem. We have a huge number of partners, of course, IBM being one of them. But we'll have a whole legal system of people there as well that have built his business around. Wien. >> Alright, Dave, want to give you the final word takeaways as to the importance of what's happening here at IBM, think the partnership and beyond, Well, >> IBM like you mentioned. I mean, they're probably the last major portfolio vendor on the planet, right? And they do just about everything you can imagine. And so from a partnership perspective, there's there's no geography, There's no vertical. There's practically no cos. Size, and there's almost no technology that's untouched. So the opportunity to interact and partner is huge. We believe we can offer some advantages in terms of simplicity in terms of cloud mobility and exploitation of IBM infrastructure. And we're just happy to be here and view them as a very strong partner. >> All right, well, Dave Russell. Always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right. And we'll be back with more coverage here from IBM. Think twenty nineteen. Of course, the Cube will also be a giveem on May twentieth through twenty second at The Phantom. Blew in Miami, Florida on stew minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube.

>> Live from Washington D.C. It's theCUBE covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018 brought to you by Amazon web services and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Washington D.C. everybody you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage I'm Dave Vellante, with John Furrier, we're covering the AWS public sector summit Barry Russell is here, the General Manager of Worldwide Business Development and Operations for the AWS marketplace and service catalog and he's joined by Dmitri Alperovitch who is the co-founder and CTO of CrowdStrike a hot new company, just raised a boatload of dough we're going to talk about that, but welcome gentleman, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Barry, let's start with you. So we saw Teresa put up a slide, I tried to count and it was over two hundred ISVs and SAS providers for GovCloud, the marketplace is booming. What's going on from your perspective? >> So we launched marketplace in the GovCloud at New York summit last year, back in 2017 and we launched it in a little over four hundred products that were available. The team is more than double that now, there's nine hundred and fifty or more products available. But the exciting thing for us is that today we're able to make SAS; SAS inscription, SAS contracts available from partners such as CrowdStrike. It just gives customers more flexibility and choice in how they deploy software into a region like GovCloud. >> So Dmitri, we're going to get into the funding and the news in a second. But from your standpoint, marketplace, why the attractiveness, no concerns, it's all systems go, go hard in. What's your perspective? >> Absolutely. AWS has been a huge partner for us since really the beginning of the company. We've built our entire business on AWS, we're cloud end point security vendors so we have a little agent that lives on every server, desktop, laptop, both on premise and cloud environments. But the back-end is all on AWS where we process mass amounts of data and the exciting thing in the last year or so in partnering with AWS is being able to offer that capability to their customers through the marketplace where every asset that you have on AWS can now be protected by CrowdStrike and we're very very excited about that and actually today, we launched our 'Falcon' is the name of our product on GovCloud, offering to target primarily the Federal Government as well as the state and local and other enterprises actually, that are interested in that high level of assurance that GovCloud provides. >> What specifically- can you just drill down the product I just want to make sure that we get that right. So, you're on Amazon, you're protecting Amazon end points within their cloud. That's great for Amazon commercial enterprises, repeat one more time the public sector piece, how does that work? Who's the customer? Is it just the agency, or is it also enterprises who work with that? Talk about the dynamics. >> So when you look at our customers it's a mix of large enterprises, about twenty percent of fortune 500 companies, and various federal agencies. Basically we install on every machine they have that runs Windows, Mac or Linux systems so servers, desktops, laptops, everything within their environment but there's no on-premise equipment. So the agent connects to our cloud which runs on AWS and we collect all the execution activities that are taking place and apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to discover security threats. So it's a big data problem and we collect over a hundred billion events every single day just to give you a sense of how much that is, in two days we process the amount of data that Twitter processes in a year. So, really huge amounts of data. >> So Barry, do you go out to partners, do you even have to sell them on this concept, are they beating down your door, what's that dynamic like? >> Yeah, we work with partners that, well first of all, we have to get them to architect for AWS. So, before we even think about listing a product in marketplace, Dmitri will tell you, they have to first architect to run well on AWS so that when the software is deployed or the customer accesses that environment, it's running optimally. And the customer is protecting both assets that they have running on AWS and On-Prem. I think vendors have really warmed up to the idea of marketplace as a sales channel for them. And the reason for that is we really serve two different types of customers. One type of customer who can go to the public marketplace website and subscribe to a product, deploy that and immediately purchase it. And then, for large enterprise and public sector federal government customers, we still have that feature of private offers, which enables the customer and the vendor to negotiate on price and terms but still transact digitally through marketplace and have it all seamlessly built by AWS. Lots of flexibility for sales teams that are in the field. >> Okay, so they work out the financial arrangements and you guys facilitate that experience? >> That's right. We handle the deployment, subscription and billing for the customer. >> So obviously, you know, the commercial space SAS is exploding. What are the drivers in federal, are they similar, what are the differences? >> For customers that are wanting to move to SAS based applications, I think it's pretty simple. Customers have reached a point where they don't necessarily want to manage the underlying infrastructure or software itself. So they're really looking to manufacturers like CrowdStrike who have a fully managed SAS based environment running on AWS. All the customer wants is the outcome the functionality of the software, for it to be performant and do what the vendor said that it was going to do. Managing all of that infrastructure and underlying technology, that's the expertise of the manufacturer themselves and the movement to SAS is all about simplifying for customers. >> How about CrowdStrike news I want to get to the valuation question. You guys are valued at over three billion dollars just reported on siliconangle.com and around the world you guys raised two hundred million dollars in a round of funding. Total capitalization is about four hundred million, roughly? >> Yeah, over four hundred million. >> OK. So you're feeling good today, right? >> Very good. More than anything else it's an indication of our growth, we've doubled the company in terms of revenue last year. We had a year over year increase of five hundred percent in terms of one million dollar deals we've closed. So it's really an indication that we're separating ourselves from the rest of the pretty crowded endpoint security marketplace and establishing ourselves as a leader. >> And what's the money going to be used for? Mostly expansion, sales, marketing? >> It's further expansion, our growth internationally sales and marketing, engineering, helping build out more of the platform capabilities. >> I want to get your take on the cloud because you guys built your business on day one. We were commenting off-camera saying that with our company we have never owned a data center. Have you ever owned a data center? >> We do a few things, small things, but most of our stuff is on AWS. >> So, for the people out there trying to do cloud that don't have that clean sheet of paper of a start-up like you guys were seven years ago. The key to success, to really take advantage of the cloud, not just migrate to it, but actually use it. >> Well, you know, it's interesting in security it's been an interesting journey because when we started back in 2011, doing security in the cloud was a heresy. In fact, I remember meetings with major banks back in those days when we were telling them about our plans and how we're going to do security in a very different way. They said 'This sounds intriguing, but we'll never be a customer because we'll never do cloud." Now, most of these guys are customers, so the mindset has definitely changed a lot. And what we're seeing now is actually our competitors that for years have been trying to compete with us by saying 'Well we're on-premise, CrowdStrike is cloud, you can't trust cloud.' Now they're desperately trying to move to the cloud and of course, unless you build it natively in the cloud to begin with it's very very hard to do. You can't just put an appliance in a data center and call it a cloud, and that's what they're struggling with. >> How do customers determine whether something- How does it pass the smell test? You know, you can say you do things, what's the flaw in having that non-optimized fully cloud-ready, or born in the cloud solution? What's the test? >> That's a great question. So, one test is scalability. We replace a lot of our competitors because they just couldn't scale. Because they used traditional sequel-based databases, single appliances, not a multi-tenet environment, they deploy it to two hundred thousand end points and the thing just comes crashing down. So that's one big thing and then in terms of better security, unless this is what the cloud really gives you in security, unless you can aggregate all of this data, and we process a hundred billion events per day and do machine learning on that data to try and discover new types of attacks, you're not leveraging the benefits of the cloud you're not delivering better protection. >> We've had many interviews over the years, Dave and I, around security with Amazon. You took a lot of heat on it being not secure turns out the cloud is actually becoming more secure, you're an expert in security, you've done a lot of thread analysis over the years looking at your bio and you're successfully leading a great company. Hackers love to attack where the data is, so the cloud's complexity, if you will, or its distributive nature, makes it less hackable, some say. What's your take on that? How do you view that opportunity? So say, look at it, if I put everything in one spot, I can brute-force it, or I'm going to get hacked. What's your take on using the cloud as an opportunity to have better security? >> You know, in this day and age almost every single company that is not concerned in moving to the cloud is making a huge mistake because the reality is, when you look at the security teams that Amazon has, or other cloud providers have, they are way ahead of virtually everyone in this market. They're way ahead of the big banks that have a lot of money,6 they're certainly way ahead of the federal government, so you're getting the best of the best and security technologies they have the same level of scale that we do in terms of seeing all these types of attacks and can react a lot faster. So yes, while it may present itself as a bigger target the reality is that you'll be getting a much higher level of protection than you can ever do yourself. >> So what's the inside scoop on the tipping point? You were talking before, years ago, financial services, customers for example said 'Never, we'll never go to the cloud'. We've had many interviews, 'that's an evil word.' >> That's right. >> What was the tipping point? Was it the realization that companies like Amazon could do a better job? Was it fear of missing out? Was it economics? Was it the losses that they were taking? What was it? >> I think it was a combination of everything. It's funny because in those days we actually asked them, 'Well, how did you feel about virtualization when it came out? I bet you didn't like that either.' 'No, we didn't like that, now we use the virtualization.' 'How do you feel about open source?' 'No, no. We hated it. Now we use it.' Right, so it's a journey for a lot of companies. Whenever something new comes out that's a big paradigm shift. But a few years in typically they realize the adoption. What we're seeing now particularly in the public sector is that realization that the commercial sector went through probably three or four years ago. And now we're seeing the big push and the executive order from the present that you have to adopt cloud, that you have to move to modern IT infrastructure and we're seeing a lot of success and the federal government agencies are realizing we need to do security in particular very differently and the cloud is a huge differentiator. >> How about, anything you can add to that Barry? Your perspectives on it? >> No, we're seeing enterprise customers and not just in financial services but across all industries. On the public sector side, you have organizations like GoodWill or City and Newport and then on the enterprise side, you have really large organizations like Siemens or 3M that are not only leveraging AWS but have also started leveraging solutions that are available in the marketplace and I think that in the past couple of years we have seen a turn both in the enterprise customer and in public sector customers that are really starting to adopt cloud and move to that as their primary mechanism. >> And we have seen in the last year huge adoption of the public sector across many sensitive agencies they're starting to adopt our solution on the GovCloud platform because they're seeing the benefits of that security model. >> It's a no-brainer, really, if you look at the speed and scale that you can do things, but you've got to check the boxes of the public sector, a little bit different than the commercial enterprise. So, talk about the public sector we're here at the public sector summit, it's like a reinvent in and of itself of that ecosystem. What does the current landscape look like? What's the orientation? What's the posture of their technology strategies? What's their appetite? Can you guys just give us some color commentary on the public sector customers? >> Sure, go ahead? >> Yeah. You know, one of the reasons that GovCloud was built and stood out was to give customers that needed FedRAMP or ITAR compliancy, you know and an opportunity to operate those workloads that they were moving over. Here's what I would say, you know, it's not just traditional public sector customers, like government agencies or the federal government that are operating in GovCloud, it's also enterprise customers that serve those needs. So there's this cross-section of pollination of customers and server team partners that are serving the federal government and government entities and large educational institutions or state and local government. But they want the same level of innovation, scale, they want to free up their developers to develop new applications and services for the citizens that they serve. They want all of the same things that the enterprise customers that we've been talking about have had for a number of years. They want the exact same thing. >> The paradigm shift, Dmitri, we were talking off-camera about the public sectors looking to the private sector because there's leadership there. No-one says, 'Hey, let's just do what the government does, there's no real- the inefficiencies that use cases there. You mention paradigm shift. How has the paradigm of operating and servicing and selling and delivering product value to the public sector changed? I mean, we still hear, the Oracle, thing was in the news about the DOD JEDI project? So the old way of selling and procuring is changing? >> It is, and the fact that customers can now leveraging Amazon and buy through the marketplace, all of these services directly from Amazon without having to go do separate contracting vehicles and separate prosumers, but the other benefit you get is the SAS deployment model in times of value. Traditional security solutions as an example take literally twelve to eighteen months to deploy. We had an agency in the US government that bought our solution recently and deployed throughout the entire agency in two weeks. So that ability to automatically get value of the solution helps secure the enterprise is something that you can only achieve with a cloud-based solution. >> I talk to a lot of people in D. C., we've been covering, opening up more coverage here it's still hot-market for the cloud area and certainly government as well. And then, in an off-the-record conversation, I won't say the name, but he says 'Look, I can't deny the Amazon solution, this cloud-native stuff is amazing, when have prices ever gone up? They don't, they go down, but they take more account-control because they get more penetration. So the prices go down. In the old way, prices went up! So, again, this is the shift in the mindset where you get more business, but you're driving the prices down at the element level. Is this the key thing that you're hearing too? >> Absolutely, and when you look at some of the customers that, I don't want to speak for you, but that Amazon has acquired in terms of intelligence community and others that you would never think would ever move to the cloud given the sensitivity that they have, and yet they've realized that to do things differently, to accomplish their mission, they have to use the cloud. So we're absolutely seeing that paradigm shift and the nice thing is that it's coming both from the bottom-up with these agencies realizing that they have to do things differently, and there is support in the White House in terms of IT modernization that we need to adopt the cloud to be successful. >> So do you feel like we'll finally start turning the corner in security? What I mean by that, is if you look at some of the metrics about, OK, a company gets infiltrated, they don't even realize it for whatever, two hundred and seventy five days, we spend more on security every year but we feel less secure. Is the cloud beginning to change that or are some of those metrics or even subjective measurements, I'm happy to spend more but I want to be more secure, are we starting to see the fulfillment of that promise? >> Absolutely, no question about it. And I'll give you a very concrete example. We actually launched, two weeks ago, a guarantee. If you're a customer using our service and you get breached on a system we protect, we pay up to a million dollars of various costs that you have because we believe that we can actually secure you and we're willing to put our money where our mouth is and establish that guarantee and there's no one in the industry that is doing anything like that. >> That's putting your money where your mouth is, I mean that's fantastic, usually these guarantees give a free month of service. >> No, no, no. We will pay cash to reimburse various expenses and set a response, legal fees, everything else that comes into it. >> Congratulations for taking that step. I mean, others are going to have to follow. >> That's good leadership. One of the guys on the stage from the CIA, Dave, you had the quote said that security-- >> Cloud security on its worst day- Cloud security on its very worst day is far better than my client's server systems. (John laughs) >> So there it is, to your point, OK, let's get the plug in for you guys. So you've got eight months of you starting to work together in the marketplace. >> We did. >> Tell us about that relationship, how's it going? What do you guys do? You're selling products together? Give a quick update on the relationship between that. >> Okay, so our Falcon platform in the last eight months has been on marketplace where customers that are coming in, and provisionary resources on EC2, on AWS can immediately get Falcon to protect those resources and that has been a fantastic growth area for us. We've also been partnering on the new GuardDuty offering that Amazon launched last year we're the intelligence provider for that platform. So it's been a great partnership we're looking to do a lot more, in particular with the GovCloud in the public sector. >> Last word? >> Well for us now, we're able to have a solution we can recommend to customers that's fully SAS-based, running on AWS and proven in its capability so, you know, it's great to partner with their sales and alliance team on the commercial and public sector side. We're going to look forward to seeing what we can do for the rest of the year. >> Well, Barry, thanks for coming back again it's great to have you on theCUBE and Dmitri, wonderful, and congratulations on the raise and making some progress, really appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. >> Alright, keep it right there buddy, John Furrier and I will be back with Stu Miniman, we're live from AWS Public Sector Summit. You're watching theCUBE.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're here live at theCUBE in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE with Stu Miniman. It's our third day of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Our next two guests are from NetApp. Russell Fishman, Director of Product Management, and Keith Barto, Director of Product Management, both directors of product management. One was the former CEO of Immersive, now with NetApp for a few years. Guys, great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us, John. Thank you. >> We saw you guys in Barcelona, obviously. The NetApp story just keeps on getting better. Also, you have core customer base. Cisco's going under transformation. You guys have been transforming ever since I started seeing NetApp arrive on the scene in the 90s. Every year there's always a new innovation. But now, more than ever, you're hearing even Cisco Bellwether in the routing networking business putting up old way network, hey there's a firewall. There's some devices in there. To a completely new, obviously, cloud made in the modern era really things are changing. So what's your reaction to that? Obviously, you guys are a part of that story. You have a relationship with Cisco. What's your reaction to that? And talk about your relationship with Cisco. >> So we obviously have a huge relationship with Cisco. And most folks will know about our FlexPods, I think that's probably the most famous way that we collaborate with these guys. We just came off the back of an amazing year, five straight quarters of double-digit, year-on-year growth, killing in the market. Obviously, we have to brag a little bit, right, come on. >> It's theCUBE, come on! >> It's theCUBE, we gotta be a little bit excited about it. So we're really excited about that, it just really talks to the strength of the relationship, right? So there's a very strong relationship there, and it's been there with FlexPod for eight years, and there's been a lot of transformation, exactly to your point John, a lot of transformation during that time, a lot of focus on the clouds. So one of the questions I always get asked, is why is converged infrastructure still relevant in a cloud-first world? And it is not obvious answer, now clearly our customers think that it is, and so do our partners. But it is not obvious why that is. NetApp has gone through, you talked about transformation, NetApp has gone through this massive transformation, huge focus on clouds, I mean, we have these cloud-first, cloud-native, focus around our data management platforms. We talk about a concept called the data fabric, I don't know if you've heard of the data fabric before. >> Yeah. >> And the data fabric really talks to how, our vision for how enterprises want to manage that new digital currency that is data across all the silos that they want to leverage, right? We've been able to bring some of that goodness into FlexPod, and that's why we're still relevant now. >> Yeah, so Keith, I think back to when converging infrastructure was built as about simplification, we were gonna take all these boxes and put it down to a box and that was the new unit of measurement. Well, Russell was just talking about we've got multi-cloud, when I think of NetApp now, it's always been a software company, but now software in that multi-cloud world, help connect the dots for us, as to management of converged infrastructure into that whole multi-cloud story. >> Yeah, we were very privileged to be acquired by NetApp last March, and my company Immersive, a lot of us came actually out of Cisco. So I was one of the original FlexPod architects from Cisco and had the privilege of helping to build the network, the storage that we brought into FlexPod, and a lot of our customers and our retailers kept on saying, "How do we know we put it together properly? "How are we following the best practices from the CVDs, "from the NVAs, from the TRs?" And so we took those rules and those analytics and we put them into platform, into a SaaS-based platform, and we were able to analyze that, coming from our customers' FlexPods, from within their deployments, from within their multi-data centers, and bring that into our service, run those analytics, prove those best practices, show the deficiencies, get our resellers out there to help our customers, 'cause FlexPod is a meet in the channel play, and we relied heavily on our resellers to make it a success. >> What was the driver for that product? When you started that company and that happened, what was the main motivation behind that? Was it analytics, was it insight, what was some of the things that you guys were building in, was it operational data? >> The real reason was people kept on asking, "How do I know?" Because it's a reference architecture, not a product, "How do I know I did it right?" Because it's really important, we're gonna run our key business applications on this platform, right? My SAP, my Oracle, my Sequel, my SharePoint, my Outlook. I gotta make sure this stuff is really gonna work properly, and it's going to grow in scale with the business. So I need to make sure that those redundant links are there. I need to make sure that when I do VMWare upgrade, or a Microsoft upgrade, that the firmware is alignment with the best practices in the interoperability matrix, so we wanted to make that as easy as possible, so that from a single dashboard, you can see all of those things, you can diagnose it quickly, you can get those email alerts and notifications, and because you end up with disparate operation teams, the server team, the network team, the storage team, the hypervisor team, sometimes they don't always talk effectively with each other, and from one single dashboard, we're now able to show everybody where things are today, and then, one of my favorites, when there is a problem, you call either Services or Support, and you say, "Hey it's not working," and they say, "What did you change?" And you say, "I didn't change anything." We have that historical-- >> Finger pointing kicks in, it was his fault! >> Yeah we have the historical snapshot and trending, so we can go back and look at where things were and do a comparison to where they are today, and it allows us to have a much faster mean time to resolution. >> And what do you guys call that product now within Cisco? What's it... >> It's now called Converged Systems Advisor in NetApp. >> Awesome, so what's next for convergers. Obviously, people, both cloud growth, we're seeing the on-premise, Wikibon has reported, the true private cloud numbers, which basically say there's a lot of on-premise activity going on, that's gonna look like cloud, it's gonna operate like cloud, so they need to have that. There's migration going on, but it's not a lift and shift, to cloud, there's gonna be, obviously, the hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. So, cloud folks still buy hardware, too. You gotta still run stuff, networks aren't going away, storage isn't going away, so what's next for the converged infrastructure play with FlexPod? How do you guys manage that roadmap? >> So, we just announced some things coming into, jointly with Cisco, coming into Cisco Live. One of those things we announced was something called Managed Private Cloud on FlexPods, or actually no, FlexPod Managed Private Cloud, sorry, I switch it around. And FlexPod Managed Private Cloud, it really talks to exactly what you're talking about, John, which is... What we find, cloud has fundamentally changed customers' expectations of what they want on-prem. They recognize the need on-prem, we live in a hybrid world. Those of us that've been in the industry long enough, and have a couple of gray hairs, know that there are very few transitions that are really absolute in the business. A lot of people pronounce that it's gonna be this way or that way, and the reality is, it's something in between. And that's fine because cloud is just another tool in the toolbox, and you don't want to hit every nail with the same hammer, you want to find the right tool for the right job. So what we've done is we've taken some of that cloud goodness, which really means not having to worry about the underlying infrastructure, all right. Worrying about the applications, being more application-focused, more business-value-focused, more line-of-business-focused. And being able to deliver that in a way that people can consume it on-premise. So it really feels like a FlexPod delivered like a cloud, but from a management day-to-day perspective, you don't have to do it-- >> So, it's flexible. >> It's flexible-- >> FlexPod. >> But it's done for you, so it's your little piece of cloud, sitting on-prem, and you don't have to manage it or run it day-to-day. >> Let's talk about what you just said about the whole transformation, people say a certain way, basically you're kind of saying, a lot of press, and a lot of analysts say, "Oh, you've got to do this digital transformation." Customers will take a pragmatic approach, but you guys at NetApp have been talking for a long time, I've been following it, non-disruptive operations. >> Yes. >> So what you see in the cloud if people wanna take those first three steps, but they don't want to have to overhaul anything, containers have proved to be great resource there, Kubernetes is showing a great way to have life cycle management on the app side of infrastructure. How does your customers, and Cisco customers, maintain that non-disruptive operational playbook, because Cisco guys are gonna start changing, moving up the stack too-- >> Absolutely. >> Doesn't mean storage is gonna go away, but they don't want to disrupt anything, your thoughts? >> And it doesn't mean any of it goes away, that's the funny thing, we talk about where we want to focus, but it's as much about not having to worry about the things that we had to worry about that are just there in the future, right? So it's kind of like if you went back 200 years, going to get fresh water was a big hassle, now it isn't, it's delivered to you, right? I know it sounds like a crazy analogy, but the reality is is that we shouldn't have to worry about the basics of on-premise, private cloud, it should just be automatic, it should be simple to execute, simple to manage, simple to order, simple to deploy, and then you focus on the value, so that's what we've been really focused on. >> Keith, when I listen to my friends in the networking space management's still a challenge. The punchline is usually, they hear single pane of glass, and they said that's spelled P-A-I-N. >> I've heard that one too. >> Talk a little bit about how your solutions tie into some of the broader tools out there. >> Well, we first looked at the compute layer and said, because of the extensibility of USC Manager and the API integration, we're able to take advantage of that, and be able to pull that data out, and XOS, right? We're able to do that exact same thing, and the background that we had at Cisco, and knowing those products really well, we were able to gather all the specific data we need to look at those best practices. And it's a complex architecture, but it's a very elegant architecture, because of the high availability, it can provide the performance, the non-disruptive operations that you were bringing up, John. We want to make sure that we're able to keep those things in line, so as we bring our next release of CSA out, we're going to be adding Enterprise Fibre Channel, so the new MDS switches, we're gonna be bringing our relationship with VMWare in our engine to be able to ingest the configuration of VMWare in. We're also bringing back our partner-centric reseller portal so when customer is running Converged Systems Advisor, they can share it to their reseller, and the reseller's going to be able to provide managed services, support services, and professional services to expand, to repair, to augment those existing FlexPods in their customers' environments. So we're really excited to be able to bring that solution back to our resellers-- >> What's that going to do, what's the impact of that, because I almost imagine that's going to enable them to want to be tightly integrated but also get data from their customers. What do you guys see as the value for the partners to take advantage of that? >> Well, I just met with a partner at our booth, just a few moments ago, and walked them through the solution they had never seen it before. It takes a reseller a week, or even multiple weeks, depending on the size of the FlexPod, to actually go through the configuration of the servers, the network, the storage, the hypervisors, and correlate that into a deliverable to their customer. We can do that in sub-10 minutes, sub-15 minutes. >> So faster time to the customer value. >> Faster time to customer value, faster time to resolution if there is a problem, and then again, they're running in their key business applications on this platform, we've been doing it for eight years, we want to continue to expand upon the value the FlexPod can offer. >> But I wanted to add just a couple of things to what you were saying. We talked about FlexPod really being a channel play. That's important to us in product management, not so important to our customers. What it really means to our customers is they tend to have a very close relationship with their partners. Their partners are the ones that are really enabling FlexPod for them. What we're doing with Converged Systems Advisor, is we are creating such a close relationship at a technical level, technology level, between the customer and the partner, that the partner's there to help them on a daily basis. Where there is a problem, it's almost like the telematics in your car, right? All the cars now, they're phoning back home, they're telling where there's something wrong, you get this letter or an email, you need a service, you need... This is exactly what we're achieving with the Converged System Advisor-- >> When you call support, what don't you want to hear? What's your model number, what's your serial number, what's your contract ID? Wouldn't it be great if everybody's singing off the same sheet of music? >> Well, you bring a great point there. There was so much discussion, well, converged infrastructure a public lot, those are gonna be really simple, and they're gonna be homogenous, and they're all gonna be great, but yeah, you're smiling and laughing because the reality is you're never gonna find two customers that have the same environment, no matter what you're talking about. >> No. >> So I need the tooling, I need the data and the analytics, to help get through that. I shouldn't have to spend half an hour on level one support. >> And that's all-- >> I shouldn't have to go through multiple forms the same time. >> Yes, and you're right Stu, that's always been, that's always been the mantra for FlexPod since the word dot. We don't get to an 11 billion dollar install base unless you're doing something right, and the word, the reason the word flex is in there, it's a dichotomy, whenever you go into these sorts of discussions, do you make it really fixed, right? Which is almost like, I call it like straight jacket, right. But you know what you get, right? Or do you make it flexible, right? And the flexibility really addresses the business need as opposed to the technology need. So the product guys love it when it's fixed, the customers love it when it's flexible. >> Yeah, you're talking about basically, changes... You want changes to be rolling with the... Technology rolling with the changes. >> Yes. >> Not be stuck in the straight jacket, or we'll also say tailor-made suit, but things change, you wanna... Fashion changes, so this is a real big issue, and talk about support, I think the ideal outcome is not to even call support, with analytics and push notifications and AI, you can almost see what DevNet's doing here, around how developer are getting involved with DevOps and network DevOps. Coders can come in and use the analytics, if tightly integrated in, so that you get the notifications, or they know exactly your environment. Is that, how far along are you guys on that path, because analytics play a big role, you've got the command center there, the Converged Systems Advisor, implies advising, resolution, prescription, what's the vision? >> So Immersive was a Cisco solution partner at the very beginning, so we were a part of this group right behind us, and it was exciting to be a part of that, to attend Cisco Live and be a part of DevNet, and we expanded upon, as you mentioned, the API, integrations of all these platforms, and when cluster data ONTAP came out for NetApp, we did the exact same thing, right? So we get integrated with NetApp, and very easily able to bring all that data in. Now, massaging that data is the hard part, right? Understanding what is noise and what is the real goodness, so you have to find those best practices, look at the hard work that our teams have done around validated designs between Cisco and NetApp, and look at the best practices that come from those particular pieces of hardware. And then once that intelligence is built, correlating that in the cloud service is really where the magic happens. So our teams are back there talking with the network experts the storage experts, the compute networks, the virtualization experts, and so when we have that data, and now you can decision-eer, right? You can start advising your resellers. So we bring up the rules dashboard, and then we do have alerting that we can send to ticketing systems to the remedies, the ServiceNows-- >> It's interesting, I'd love to get the product perspective on this, and across the bigger picture, because the trend we're seeing, certainly on theCUBE, over the past few years, and most recently this year, is the move from device, hardware, to system. So the systems approach really becomes more of a holistic view where, you're looking at the holistic view of multiple things happening. >> Yes. >> It's not just, this is the box, here's where the rack is, command line interface, you guys taking that same approach, can you just add some color on NetApp's vision on looking at holistically, 'cause that's really where software shines. >> No, no, and that's absolutely, so we have a way of seeing FlexPod as a, we call it a converged system, and for that exact reason. So what CSA is able to do is look at anything that happens within that converged system and the context of the overall system, and that really is the key, right? When you understand things in context it means so much more. Just think about when you listen to someone talk, a word taken out of context means nothing, right? So when we listen to that infrastructure, what it tells us is understood in context. And what it will ultimately do, and I think you were kind of hinting at this, John, the vision here is that there will be self-healing infrastructures, self-healing converged systems, just like the cloud, right? So we are continuously monitoring the configuration, the availability, and other aspects of your converged system and we are able to take action to make sure it stays on the rails. >> We saw you guys at the RSA event, you guys had a small little party we went to, and we were riffing, having fun with some of the NetApp folks, and the big trend in cloud is server-less. So the joke was, is this storage-less solution coming? To your point about this, if you think about it, it's just storage somewhere. This is kind of a joke, but it's also kind of nuanced. This is elastic-- >> No, no! It's absolutely true, if you look at NetApp's strategy, if you look at our cloud strategy, we're the first third-party branded services part of the AGI core services, we're not in the marketplace, we're actually part of AGI core. It's NetApp cloud volumes for AGI, and a customer doesn't know what's going on behind the scenes but let's be clear, we're talking about software-defined storage here, right? >> And cloud-ified, too, as well, talk about cloud operations. >> Yeah, still at the end of the day, for us, our intellectual property is not really tied to hardware, we obviously use that as a way to get our intellectual property in the hands of our customers. But we're not tied to a-- >> You guys made a good bet on cloud, I remember talking before Kurian took over, you guys were kicking the tires on Amazon years ago. >> Yes, yes, yes, that's right. >> So it's not like a Johnny-come-lately to the cloud, you guys have been deep in the core. >> Absolutely. >> To end this segment, I wanted to get your thoughts, because you guys are here at Cisco Live, what should the audience understand that couldn't make it out here as the top story at Cisco Live, and what is your role with Cisco here, what's the big story, top line, high-order bit, NetApp, Cisco story. >> So I'll go first, and I'll let my friend here go second. We were really excited coming into Cisco Live, right. We had this pretty big announcement last week, there were a few different aspects to it, but I'll talk about two of them. A new focus between Cisco and NetApp on verticals around FlexPod, and what that really means is that we're focused on very specific verticals, including healthcare, but there'll be others that come down the line. We announced a new solution base on Epic PHR. We announced some lead customers, including the Mercy Technology Services, which is part of the Mercy Hospital group. So that was super exciting, I think what it does is it just demonstrates that our focus is on the outcomes, as opposed to the actual infrastructure, the infrastructure is the way to deliver that. So we're very excited about that at Cisco. The second thing that we announced was, I said, mentioned this Managed Private Cloud, we actually announced it with four of our major joint partners, Dimension Data, ProAct, Microland, and oh my Lord, ePlus, yes of course. That was super exciting as well, and what it does is it captures the imagination, and it's always very fun when you're standing at a booth, and people say, "Oh, I've known FlexPod, "I've seen you guys around." But there's always something new to talk about. >> The relevance is more than ever. >> Absolutely. >> Keith, what wave is NetApp riding right now, if you look at the Cisco action going on, what they're going through, what should people know about the big wave that you guys are taking advantage of right now? >> I think the big wave is absolutely gotta be what we're doing with the hyperscalers. We by far have taken the industry by storm, when you think about what we've done with Microsoft, what we're doing with Google, you know, sorry? >> And Amazon. >> And Amazon, thank you. >> Small companies. >> Yeah, just small hyperscalers, right? It's amazing what we can do with cloud ONTAP, across those vendors, and when we look at what our customers have done with FlexPod, and their relationship with Cisco and NetApp, and our ability to work together to help customers get their data from their core data centers to cloud, back, to their customers, and for us to be able to use analytics the way we do on FlexPod, I think there's a real opportunity-- >> And riding the scale wave too, scaling is huge. Everyone's talking about large-scale, talking about hyperscale as that is the largest scale you can see. >> Well, and our ability to control where the data lives, right? Because you want to be able to hold control of your data, and being able to use familiar tools like what you're already using in your own data center and in your own converged infrastructures, being able to use that ONTAP operating system to be able to control that experience is gonna be very important. >> Guys, thanks for coming in for the NetApp update, great news, great alignment with Cisco. It's a large-scale world, and certainly, the world is changing, storage is gonna be a critical part of it, server, storage, infrastructure, cloud operations on-premise, and in the cloud. TheCUBE, bringing you live coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, stay with us for more day three of three days of coverage here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live, we'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Chicaco, Illinois. It's theCUBE Covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back in Chicago at VeeamOn 2018 #VeamOn, my name is Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, our exclusive live coverage of VeeamOn. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Cube alum Dave Russell is here. He's the newly minted VP of enterprise strategy at Veeam. Dave, it's great to see you again, thanks for coming back on. >> Thanks for having me, guys, what a difference the year makes. >> Yeah, so newly minted. Last year we had you on as Gartner Analyst, we've followed your work for years. I've personally followed you for, actually many decades. Going back to your IBM days. So, let's start. How'd you end up at Veeam? >> Unexpectedly, very similar to IBM to Gartner transition. Wasn't looking to make a change. Opportunity came literally out of the blue. So, this transition was also equally out of the blue. Some emails, phone calls started taking place over one weekend. Actually on a Sunday, so towards the end of the weekend. And, after a little bit of discussion of a couple of opportunities, and kind of looking at where I might be the best fit, and realizing that I really didn't think I was in a position to relocate. You know, me move the family, even though no one else said that I had to do that, I just felt like to do another position justice, you really have to be there. And in the situation with Veeam, I didn't think that was the case. I also thought I could jump in there, and they've got lots of other great people, I mean, Danny Allen is one of many examples. So I ultimately, from Sunday morning to, I guess, the following Saturday evening, some things were sort of in flight, and they landed where they did. >> So, California, of course as you know, doesn't have non-competes. People leave companies all the time. You were in a position at Gartner. You saw everything, from everybody. You did the Magic Quadrants for years, and years, and years, you had visibility on companies' plans. And now you're here, many of the folks that were customers, or people that you were advising are now competitors. How do you, as an analyst, and now a professional at Veeam, draw that line between what you can and cannot share? >> I don't want to make it sound too simple, but it's actually not that hard. And what I mean by that is, it's not hard, I think, for anyone that does an analyst job role, to understand how to compartmentalize. Right, you can't go and talk to a three-letter company, and then talk to a two-letter company, and mix the two conversations. And the same with transitioning jobs. When I came from IBM for 15 plus years, to Gartner, there were a lot of things I knew, of course, lot of things that I knew about even the backup space that I was focused on. I was the technical strategist for that product, development manager for that product. Even in Adjacent areas like storage, meaning storage arrays, my colleagues, new colleagues at Gartner would say, "I wonder what the road map is for that." And I would say, well I know what the road map is for that, >> Keep wondering. >> But you know, I'm not going to say anything. And no one asked me to, it was never that kind of situation. The same, I think is true right now. No one's asked me, "So what do you know?" In fact, I probably over-rotated, in that I literally shredded everything that I had, and took pictures of me shredding documents that I had. I literally took every drive that I have and overwrote it, not just deleted it, but overwrote it with multiple patterns and took pictures of that. Semi-ironically, I guess I'll just give this example, but kind of leave it at a high level. For a couple of days it looked like I was going to the West Coast. And so I shredded everything but their Magic Quadrant response, and then when I realized that wasn't the case I shredded that Magic Quadrant response. So, I had to reach out to Veeam and said, hey you know the thing I just shredded? Your marketing plan that you gave me in person two weeks ago, the Magic Quadrant response that I had already printed off and highlighted and done notes on. Can you resend that to me again, I need to re-read that. (laughing) >> Okay, so now, you've clearly had a choice of places to go, you're sought after, you've had an impact on the road map and strategy of many, many of these companies. Why Veeam? >> Well. I don't know if Veeam is going to love me saying this, but I thought there were two great opportunities, and I'm not kidding, I only looked at two, there were a couple more, but I looked only seriously at two, and for very different reasons. The reason that I really liked Veeam, was that their problems set, or what I thought I could offer was really different. It wasn't, hey we need someone to really focus on strategy and to navigate through, going through a financial transaction or an IPO situation, and what happens after that. It was more operational. It was more, we already are in the enterprise, but we need to go big in the enterprise. We already have some strategy people, but we need enterprise strategy. So it was more of an augmentation play. And I thought that was really interesting. I thought where Veeam is in its life cycle was interesting, not that a younger startup isn't also equally as compelling, but when I looked at where I thought I could be of value, and ultimately what was right for the family, it was, I thought, the best decision. >> Dave, you've been covering backup for a long time, but would it be safe to say that it's one of the hottest times in this space that you've seen, and why is that? >> I'm a Homer, so I'm going to say, I think I've been saying for 28 years there's never been a time like this in backup. But I actually think there's evidence to support that that's true. So let me give you a couple cases, or examples. Case in points. Every year I ask the question, are you more or less willing to switch backup vendors, is essentially the gist of it, and that was through my Gartner days. And there's kind of a scale, are you somewhat more willing to augment the solution, are you far more willing to augment the solution, all the way to, are you somewhat more willing to completely replace it, or far more willing to completely replace it. Long story short, the heat index, or I'm far more willing to completely replace the solution, is on the rise. And that kind of flies in the face of the myth that people don't switch backup solutions. The other thing that was interesting is, also drawing from my Gartner heritage, last December at a conference, did onstage polling, you could ask people questions, and one of them was: one year from now who do you think will be your strategic backup vendor? The top response is: we won't have a strategic backup vendor. That was 23% of the audience. 22% said it would be Veeam. And then you went down the list for organizations or vendors that have far more market share than Veeam. So, the fact that the majority of people say, basically out with everybody, and then the second highest response is: we're going to choose number four in market, based on market share. That's pretty, I don't want to say, can we say damning? Is that okay to say on here? Okay that's a pretty damning indictment of the state of the industry. >> So, I know you don't see the stuff, or maybe you do, some of it, but the stuff that the Wikibon research guys do. And they've just done some work, and I want to run it by you, and just sort of stink test it, if you will. Clearly we've been talking all day that data protection is moving up in the minds of CXOs. I mean, that's kind of well-known. But, they discovered a dichotomy between the business and IT with respect to the degrees of automation. In other words the business expects that there's far more automation than actually exists. And that's leading, in their conclusion, to what you were saying before is, a lot of opportunities for customer churn. It seems to be very churn-ripe environment. And the other piece that I'd love your comment on is, the Global 2000 generally, specifically, really, the Fortune 1000, is leaving billions of dollars on the table over, let's say, a three or four year period in either inadequate data protection or poorly architected data protection. So do some of those findings jive with your experience and your knowledge of the marketplace? >> Yeah they really do, because the last three years at Gartner, one of the fun things I got to do, it was a little more horizontal, was participate in CIO level research. And there was like 4:15 a.m. phone calls for me, but it was still fun to do, because there was, I think 3700 CIOs participated from around the world. So if you look at the big takeaways from there, the short story is, CIOs think that they are much further along on their journey than they actually are. I don't think it's because these men and women are blind, it's just they're thinking that we've been talking about this for so long, haven't we automated more? Aren't we more virtualized? Aren't we more into the cloud? And haven't we done more of our objectives that we set out to do? The sad reality is, the case is often no. And if you look at backup and recovery in particular, I totally agree with you, I mean for the amount of money that's being spent in this industry, our rate of return is not so great. It's not a spending problem, to your point, you're spending billions and billions of dollars, on software and then you're spending even more billions on hardware, and you're obviously spending human capital to go and manage this stuff, and professional services, what have you. So how come we can't restore the file? >> Right. And essentially many parts of that business are failing. So we can do better, is your point. >> I wanted to ask you about the value of data. One of your former colleagues at Gartner, Doug Laney, wrote a great book. I got an advance copy, Doug's been on theCUBE many times. Infonomics is the name of the book, really talking about a methodology to understand the value of data. Do you feel like organizations, especially in this digital world, have a good understanding of the value of their data, and if not, how does that affect their data protection decisions? >> I'll give you the short, not so great answer, which is no I don't think that they do. But to elaborate on that, I think someone or some people do. I don't think that's distributed around the whole enterprise so for example, if I'm the backup person, I think I know what I need to go and protect. You might be the Cassandra administrator, and you say, no this is the future of our business that I'm actually instantiating this new application right here. Meanwhile I'm not doing anything to protect that whatsoever. So if I'm operating under an independent view, that doesn't align with the business, then we're in trouble, and I, unfortunately, think that's too typically the case. That all parts of the business aren't interlocked. >> Yeah, back to your point about some of the transitions happening in the market. There's a number of players that are putting forth primarily appliances, even though they are software based, and Veeam is 100% pure software, how do you see that dynamic playing the market right now? >> Well I don't think there are any wrong answers, I know that sounds like a weasel cop-out, so let me double click on that, >> Stu: You're no longer an analyst you can't say, "It depends." >> There you go, yeah, there are 16 shades of gray actually. So the part that I think is very positive, on an appliance delivery model is that solves initial deployment challenges, that solves proof of concept challenges, that's a wonderful thing to be able to say, "Dave I want you to go take this box and just try it." And then you say, "You know what, I do like that." Great, you can actually keep the car you just test-drove. We can cut a PO for you right now. So there's actually a value in my mind for that hardware delivery model. Then you get other customers, that are on the other end of the spectrum, right? I don't want to spend more money on your server, that you're going to charge me for when I actually have more buying power, if I'm a large size organization, I can go to name your server company and buy it for cheaper than you can. And what I've found is, what I used to do, at Gartner, ask questions of, what is your purchasing intention around backup and recovery? It literally became kind of right down the middle. Some people were moving away from appliances towards software base, some people were doing the opposite. Others were kind of of open mind somewhere in the middle. So at net net, I think anyone, whether you're a startup like, so let's just name names, Rubrik and Cohesity, they're today primarily sales motion of a hardware appliance, but obviously they offer a virtual appliance as well. You take the other end of the spectrum, someone like Veeam, where Ratmir's made it very clear, we are not in the hardware business. And you look around and you see, there are a lot of hardware partners. So at the end of the day, whether you own it or enable it, I'm not convinced is 100% the point. I think it's just really offering the choice. But more importantly, what's the experience of that choice? People don't want to be integrators, so that favors appliances, you would think, but maybe people don't want to be integrators, and if they have a tightly coupled solution. Where they don't feel like they're assembling it, but they also don't have to just buy whatever Veeam says is going to be the controller this year, then maybe that's positive too. >> What's your point of view, and it may not be Veeam's sweet spot, but I wanted to get your thoughts on this, when you look at an Oracle environment, and you see how Oracle approaches data protection. Obviously there's RMAN in there, but it seems like the database and the application take more responsibility for recovery in particular, and it seems to work quite well, but it's expensive. And it's probably overkill for most applications. Do you see that as a trend, or is that a sort of an isolated tip of the pyramid? >> I would've said years ago that I thought it was a trend. Because the notion of either a hypervisor, or an application being more aware of recoverability, or availability, would make a lot of sense to me. Because they understand more about what's going on in that particular system. The reality is, and Oracle does a number of great things, RMAN is wonderful, ASM is wonderful, they have a couple of different appliances, but I'll just leave it at the fact that that's not the predominant Oracle protection mechanism today even for Fortune 500, means that there's some sort of feeling that maybe that's not answering all of the issues. >> Is that you feel like that's an opportunity for Veeam then? I infer from your response. >> I do, and honestly, to be fair, I think it's an opportunity for others besides Veeam, But absolutely I think it's an opportunity for Veeam, because Veeam is trying to go in and further penetrate that space. Oracle is forever going to be vitally important. I don't think we're ever going to see a day where SAP running on Oracle on on-prem server goes to zero. >> Right. >> Dave on the keynote stage this morning you said you want to be a builder again, what do we expect to see from you in the next coming year? >> Well I think the big thing is, I have had the luxury of being able to listen to and advise people, and that's a, I was going to say blessing, that sounds corny, but it's a privilege. But I miss the direct connect, it'd be great to be able to really go to product groups and say here's what I think we need to do in the next rev of the solution. Or here's my rationale from talking to, either Veeam customers or Veeam prospects, about why they're not choosing us for some workloads, maybe it's high end work, Oracle. And be able to effect change. I really was serious on stage when I said, I view this as my last stop. This is my third switch or second switch and third company so hopefully I'm here for 10 or 12 years, otherwise that's a little premature of a switch. >> Well, Dave, congratulations on the move, and the new role at Veeam. Your reputation is impeccable, and I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Always good to see you guys, thanks for having me. >> Alright, you're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from VeeamOn 2018 in Chicago. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)