>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Veritas Vision, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is Day One wrap of the Veritas Vision conference. Veritas, as we said earlier, is a company that has gone through a number of changes, Stu. I mean, I remember when the company launched in 1983. It was sort of, you know, it was focused on backup. It was Veritas and Legato. And they kind of grew through the PC era and the client server era, really started to take off. And then they exploded in the internet era. Their evaluation went through the roof. They ended up buying C8's backup business. They really drove that and then got purchased by Symantec for a big number. I mean, I think the number was 15 billion. I mean, it was in the teens as I recall. Really never did much under Symantec, or, Symantec never did much with Veritas. I think they had a vision of information management and that never really panned out. Spun the company back out, devested it, sale to Carlyle and some other investors for, I thought the number was 8 billion, somebody told me 7 billion today. That must be net of cash. 2.3 billion dollars in revenue. My understanding from sources is that valuation is way, way up, nearly double from 2015. Now, maybe that's an inflated number, but I'm not surprised. The market's been booming. So that's sort of the inside organizational issues. We're here at The Aria, what do you say, Stu, a couple thousand people, 2500? >> Yeah, it's about 2000, Dave, and it's interesting, I talked to some people that had gone to the old Veritas Vision, years ago, and gotten up to about 4000 or 5000 people. But, grown since last year, good energy at the show. We got to talk to the Vox community people. They've got 10,000 people online contributing to their forums, participating, launched the VIP program for some of the super users they have here. Definitely good crowd in the keynote. Good people clapping and participating, getting excited. It surprised me a little bit the number one topic of conversation is GDPR. As you said in our last interview, we're going down the deep abyss of how you're going to get litigated out of all of your money if you don't follow this. It's like way worse than Y2K, ah, some stuff's going to break and maybe turn off for a bit. >> Well, you know what I liked about the GDPR discussions though, they had answers. >> Yeah. >> Other events where I've gone to GDPR, it's been scary, scary, scary, scare you, scare you, scare you, and then call us. >> Yeah. >> And we'll give you some services. What I liked about, what I'm hearing from Veritas is, they've got at least a quasi-prescription as to what to do. So that's good. But the more interesting part to me Stu is you've got this enterprise backup legacy, I'll say it, legacy backup install base, enormous. A leader, they've mentioned many times, 15 years in a row leader in the magic quadrant. And I believe it, you talk to customers, what are you running, NetBackup, everybody's running NetBackup. But how they're transitioning into this vision of multi-cloud, data protection resilience across the Enterprise, across clouds, hyper scale. What I'm not fully clear on yet is how they get customers from point A to point B. And we heard from the keynotes this morning and Bill Campbell. We invested a bunch of dough in R&D, we're writing stuff that's cloud-native, container-based, micro services. So sort of all the right application development buzzwords and I believe that they're developing there. But I don't understand how they migrate that install base. Is there some kind of abstraction layer? Is there some kind of new UI? We heard them jokingly say today in the keynotes that, we hear you, customers, we know our UI sucked, we're working on that. I didn't see any announcements on that, but, that's something that, presumably, is a promise they're putting forth. But, I wasn't clear, maybe you could help clear it up, on how you get from point A of legacy install backup software to this nirvana of multi-cloud hyper scale micro services. >> Yeah, I mean, Dave, when we talked to Bill Coleman, his three Vs, value, vision, and that values of the company itself, clearly has got a compelling vision. He said not only ten years from now, but probably five years from now, every product I'm selling is going to be obsolete. And it's an interesting thing to hear because 15 years of experience, we're trusted, but we know that every product that you bought from Veritas in the past is going to be replaced by new things. And, right, how do we get, say okay, I've been buying that backup for a decade, do I get this visualization product, and if I'm looking at AWS, is Veritas the company I turn to? So really it gets down to, Dave, that blocking and tackling. Talked about the consultants, the partners, both on the go to market side as well as the technology side. Can Veritas get in there, can they have compelling differentiated products that solve a need in the market? We've talked to a number of companies this last year where I've looked at is this hybrid multi-cloud world. If you're software, how do you play in this market? Because isn't Microsoft, Google, Amazon, aren't they going to just do this? Information governance invisibility, absolutely. Amazon has a solution for you. Google has a solution for you. Microsoft has solutions. But, if I'm going to be across those environments, we haven't had a solution that goes across all of those environments. So, there's a hole in the ecosystem, and Veritas, along with many other companies, are trying to put that big elephant on the table and eat pieces out of it, so, it's interesting. >> And Coleman's background, from BEA, started at BEA, I think he took the thing up to half a billion dollars, sold it to Oracle for a big number. But you look at what BEA did, they were sort of the application integration glue. And that's a lot of, you hear a lot of similar messaging modernized around multi-cloud, around hyper scale, around micro services and the like. So, Coleman obviously has experience doing that. I thought he's a very clear thinker. I had not met him before. Furrier knows him pretty well, from his VC days. But I thought he laid out a pretty clear direction. So he's got street cred on this. SEEP com, done it before, I think this company has a decent balance sheet. They seem to have some patient capital in Carlyle. It doesn't appear that Carlyle's trying to suck all the money out. They don't have the 90-day shot clock. He basically, Bill Coleman basically said, look, we're fine shrinking to grow. We're shifting from a upfront license model, perpetual license model, to a ratable model. We could never do that as a public company. So it's going to be very interesting to see if and when they emerge as a public company, what that looks like and where they come from. >> Yeah, and Dave, one of the things I've been poking at is where do they sell to? If this was the backup administrator, that's not somebody that's going to help them with the transformation. It's digital transformation, it's my cloud strategy. It's things like GDPR where I'm going to need to get up the stack to the CIO, to the C-suite, prove the value that Veritas has, and therefore they can then get all these new products in where everything, the 360 data management, really at the core of what they're doing, and whole lots of other products. I mean, Dave, we didn't even dig into some of the object and file storage pieces that are in here. I know we've got their chief product officer on the Cube tomorrow. But a lot of products, pretty broad software suite. And for an infrastructure company, it's always interesting to hear them say, really, infrastructure doesn't matter. The no hardware agenda, but it's your data that matters, and we've got a vision here at Veritas Vision to bring you forward and lots of plays on the name of the company. Veritas, the show is the truth in information. >> Yeah, so, let's talk about the lineup tomorrow. A lot of product stuff tomorrow. Mike Palmer's coming on, he gave a great keynote this morning. Very funny, he gave a scenario of the world ending because basically people didn't have their data act together. They had these images of Las Vegas hotels in chaos and waterfalls running through the hotels and drones attacking and just total chaos. So we're going to get into a lot of the portfolio stuff and I think try to answer, Stu, some of those questions that I raised about how do you get customers from point A, where they are today, to point B. Are you going to, how are you going to transition them. Are there financial incentives? Is there some kind of abstraction layer that you're developing? What is that framework that brings us to that nirvana? So, give you the last word here, Stu. >> Yeah, so looking forward to digging in more with some of the customers, some of the partners. Good energy at the show. It's exciting to be here for the first time. And looking forward to Day Two. >> All right, good, good wrap, Stu. Thank you, and thank you for watching. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news. We saw some Oracle news today. Hitachi changed its name or Pentaho changed its name, we're not really sure about that. But all the news on siliconangle.com, go to wikibon.com for all the research. And of course, thecube.net to see this show, replays, youtube.com/siliconangle is where we archive all this stuff. Lot of websites. >> Yeah, and make sure to subscribe on our YouTube channel. >> Yeah, please do subscribe on that YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter, @thecube, @stuminiman, @dvellante. That's a wrap Day One, this is The Cube, we'll see you tomorrow from Veritas Vision from Vegas, take care. (techno music)