(gentle upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Connections 21. My name is Dave Vellante and I'll be hosting the program today. I want to start with a bit of an assessment on the keynotes that we heard this morning, but before I get into that, I want to set the framework for thinking about Commvault as a company. This company has been around for a long time, since the late 1980s, but really came into prominence in the client server era and it has ridden numerous waves, including network backup and recovery, data management, and now cloud data services. It's a company with more than $700 million in revenue and a market value of nearly $3 billion. Since coming on as CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani has embarked on moving the company towards a subscription model, focusing on optionality for on premises, hybrid and cloud workloads. It's launch of metallic and data management as a service are two components that underpin the strategy. At his keynote earlier today, Mirchandani drew on his experience as both a former CIO and current CEO roles to connect with his audience. His major themes hit on data, the value of data, and the imperative to get control of your data. Of course, data protection has become a fundamental component of digital transformations. For years, data protection was an afterthought or a bolt on, but today, organizations are forced to think about their digital stacks in their entirety, which means they have to build resilience into their platforms from the start. Mirchandani said that if we embrace, manage, and properly protect data, it will become the defining disruptive difference for an organization. But he talked about the gap between what the business wants to do and what the technology teams are actually equipped to do and when it comes to data, I couldn't agree more. He called this the business integrity gap and I'll come back to that. He also put out some fun facts and I'll share those here. According to IDC, 64 zettabytes of data was created and replicated in 2020. That's the equivalent of 2 trillion 4K movies. That's a lot of data. Gardner says by 2025, 85% of business will be delivered through SAS applications. Sophos, the security firm, estimates that the average cost of a ransomware attack is approaching nearly $2 million. The security company Proofpoint did a survey and 64% of surveyed CSOs felt that they were at risk of a material cyber attack in the next 12 months. I'm surprised that number was so, so low. I think the other 36% are busy responding to a cyber attack. Coming back to Sanjay's business integrity gap. Here's how I see it. Data by its very nature is distributed, decentralized, and it's becoming more so with hybrid connections, multicloud installations, and edge use cases. This is only going to accelerate in the future. As such, organizations need to rethink their approaches to getting value from data. Instead of building monolithic data architectures and hyper-specialized technical data teams, organizations are beginning to empower lines of business and domain owners to take end-to-end responsibility for data ownership. The underlying technology platform is becoming an operational detail that serves the data owners, where data protection and governance is computationally automated in a federated model. So the policy is centralized, but the implementation of that policy is done by software. This means that data governance, security, privacy, access, and policy are all adjudicated wherever possible by software and our automated, irrespective of physical location. Data silos are not just a technology problem. They're a symptom of flawed organizational constructs, steeped in the notion that highly technical data specialists and centralized teams should be the stewards of the data and serve multiple lines of business simultaneously, without proper business context. Now, this is changing. Data is being used to create a new class of products and services that can be directly or indirectly monetized, or drive other value, for instance, like saving lives. It's about the organizational mission. Now in this sense, data is undergoing a renaissance, where the responsibility for end-to-end data ownership is being distributed and decentralized, where highly specialized technical teams are becoming enablers for generalists that reside within the lines of business, i.e., those who are building data products and services. This is not shadow IT. It's decentralized management with federated governance. Now, by rethinking the data management paradigm, the responsibility for good data protection policy transcends technical teams and becomes a priority for the entire organization. To that end, Commvault laid out its strategy to deliver a comprehensive set of intelligent data services, spanning data protection, security, compliance, governance, data transformation, and data insights. In my view, a huge part of Commvault's strategy lies in automation. That's a key ingredient of cloud and any cloud strategy. In other words, supporting cloud native and cloud-like data management capabilities that can be programmatically deployed, secured, managed, and governed, and applied across an organization's sprawling data empire. The world of enterprise technology is complex and the winning technology companies are going to be those that can abstract the underlying complexity and assist organizations to implement sound data management practices, irrespective of data location, in the most efficient way. So as you hear the stories and examples here at Commvault Connections, you can decide for yourself if the company is on the right track and if what you hear aligns with your digital business skill goals. So let's now get a practitioner's perspective and hear how the CSO is thinking about data protection. Up next is Dave Martin, Chief Information Security Officer at ADP. You're watching theCUBE. (gentle upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. On October 28th, we'll be attending Commvault Connections '21. This is a premier industry event and it's focused on hybrid data services. The broadcast will be live from Commvault's Tinton Falls HQ. Now the agenda is packed with educational inspirational keynote speakers. For example, Dave Martin will be speaking. He is in the global chief security office at ADP, Stephen Orban of AWS and Dave Taunton of Microsoft will be sharing insights. And of course Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani, he's a long-time guest of theCUBE and a rare example of a CIO transitioning to a CEO role and having excellent success with Commvault transformation. These sessions that are referencing will engage you on topics like ransomware, SaaS, and hybrid cloud, and more there's something for every data professional. And by attending, you have the chance to have an exclusive consultation with the dev team at Commvault, which is always a hot ticket item. Now you can catch all the action live on SiliconANGLE and thecube.net so go right now, register for connections '21, it takes less than a minute. I just did it. We'll see you there. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Techniques to protect sensitive data have evolved over thousands of years literally. The pace of modern data protection is rapidly accelerating and presents both opportunities and threats for organizations. In particular, the amount of data stored in the cloud combined with hybrid work models, the clear and present threat of cyber crime, regulatory edicts and the ever expanding edge and associated use cases should put CXOs on notice that the time is now to rethink your data protection strategies. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we're going to explore the evolving world of data protection and share some information on how we see the market changing in the competitive landscape for some of the top players. Steve Kenniston AKA the Storage Alchemist shared a story with me and it was pretty clever. Way back in 4,000 BC the Sumerians invented the first system of writing. Now they used clay tokens to represent transactions at that time. Now, to prevent messing with these tokens, they sealed them in clay jars to ensure that the tokens or either data would remain secure with an accurate record, let's call it quasi immutable and lived in a clay vault. Since that time, we've seen quite an evolution in data protection. Tape, of course, was the main means of protecting data, backing data up during most of the mainframe era and that carried into client server computing, which really accentuated and underscored the issues around backup windows and challenges with RTO, Recovery Time Objective and RPO, Recovery Point Objective, and just overall recovery nightmares. Then in the 2000s data reduction made displace backup more popular and push tape into an archive last resort media data domain then EMC now Dell still sell many purpose built backup appliances as do others as a primary backup target disc base. The rise of virtualization brought more changes in backup and recovery strategies as a reduction in physical resources squeezed the one application that wasn't under utilizing compute i.e backup. And we saw the rise of Veeam, the cleverly named company that became synonymous with data protection for virtual machines. Now the cloud has created new challenges related to data sovereignty, governance latency, copy creep, expense, et cetera but more recently cyber threats have elevated data protection to become a critical adjacency to information security. Cyber resilience to specifically protect against ransomware attacks as the new trend being pushed by the vendor community as organizations are urgently looking for help with this insidious threat. Okay, so there are two major disruptors that we're going to talk about today, the cloud and cyber crime, especially around ransoming your data. Every customer is using the cloud in some way, shape or form. Around 76% are using multiple clouds that's according to a recent study by HashiCorp. We've talked extensively about skill shortages on theCUBE and data protection and security concerns are really key challenges to address given that skill shortage is a real talent gap in terms of being able to throw people at solving this problem. So what customers are doing they're either building out or they're buying, really mostly building abstraction layers to hide the underlying cloud complexity. So, what this does, the good news is it simplifies provisioning and management but it creates problems around opacity. In other words, you can't see sometimes what's going on with the data, these challenges fundamentally become data problems in our view. Things like fast, accurate, and complete backup recovery, compliance, data sovereignty, data sharing, I mentioned copy creep, cyber resiliency, privacy protections these are all challenges brought to fore by the cloud, the advantages, the pros and the cons. Now, remote workers are especially vulnerable and as clouds expand rapidly data protection technologies are struggling to keep pace. So let's talk briefly about the rapidly expanding public cloud. This chart shows worldwide revenue for the big four hyperscalers, as you can see we projected they're going to surpass $115 billion in revenue in 2021, that's up from 86 billion last year. So it's a huge market, it's growing in the 35% range. The interesting thing is last year, 80 plus billion dollars in revenue but a 100 billion dollars was spent last year by these firms in CapEx. So they're building out infrastructure for the industry. This is a gift to the balance of the industry. Now to date legacy vendors and their surrounding community have been pretty defensive around the cloud, "Oh, not everything is going to move to the cloud, it's not a zero sum game we here." And while that's all true the narrative was really kind of a defense posture and that's starting to change as large tech companies like Dell, IBM, Cisco, HPE, and others see opportunities to build on top of this infrastructure. You certainly see that with Arvind Krishna's comments at IBM, Cisco obviously leaning in from a networking and security perspective. HPE using language that is very much cloud-like with its GreenLake strategy. And of course, Dell is all over this. Let's listen to how Michael Dell is thinking about this opportunity when he was questioned on theCUBE by John Furrier about the cloud. Play the clip. >> Well, clouds are infrastructure, right? So you can have a public cloud, you can have an edge cloud, a private cloud, a Telco cloud, a hybrid cloud, multicloud, here cloud, there cloud, everywhere cloud, cloud. Yet, they'll all be there, but it's basically infrastructure. And how do you make that as easy to consume and create the flexibility that enables everything. >> Okay, so in my view, Michael nailed it, the cloud is everywhere. You have to make it easy and you have to admire the scope of his comments. We know this guy, he thinks big, right? He said enables everything. What he's basically saying is that, technology is at the point where it has the potential to touch virtually every industry, every person, every problem, everything. So let's talk about how this informs the changing world of data protection. Now, we've seen with the pandemic there's an acceleration toward digital and that has caused an escalation if you will, in the data protection mandate. So essentially what we're talking about here is the application of Michael Dell's cloud everywhere comments. You've got on-prem, private clouds, hybrid clouds, you've got public clouds across AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba, really those big four hyperscalers. You got many clouds that are popping up all over the place, but multicloud to that HashiCorp data point, 75, 76%, and then you now see the cloud expanding out to the edge, programmable infrastructure heading out to the edge. So the opportunity here to build the data protection cloud is to have the same experiences across all these estates with automation and orchestration in that cloud, that data protection cloud if you will. So think of it as an abstraction layer that hides that underlying complexity, you log into that data protection cloud it's the same experience. So you've got backup, you've got recovery, you can handle bare-metal, you can do virtualized backups and recoveries, any cloud, any OS, out to the edge, Kubernetes and container use cases, which is an emerging data protection requirement and you've got analytics, perhaps you've got PII, Personally Identifiable Information protection in there. So the attributes of this data protection cloud, again, it abstracts the underlying cloud primitives, takes care of that. It also explodes cloud native technologies. In other words, it takes advantage of whether it's machine learning, which all the big cloud players have expertise in, new processor models things like Graviton and other services that are in the cloud natively. It doesn't just wrap it's on-prem stack in a container and shove it into the cloud, no, it actually re architects or architects around those cloud native services and it's got distributed metadata to track files and volumes and any organizational data irrespective of location. And it enables sets of services to intelligently govern in a federated governance manner while ensuring data integrity and all this is automated and orchestrated to help with the skills gap. Now, as it relates to cyber recovery, air gap solutions must be part of the portfolio, but managed outside of that data protection cloud that we just briefly described. The orchestration and the management must also be gapped if you will, otherwise, you don't have an air gap. So all of this is really a cohort to cyber security or your cybersecurity strategy and posture, but you have to be careful here because your data protection strategy could get lost in this mess. So you want to think about the data protection cloud as again, an adjacency or maybe an overlay to your cybersecurity approach, not a bolt on it's got to be fundamentally architectured from the bottom up. And yes, this is going to maybe create some overheads and some integration challenges but this is the way in which we think you should think about it. So you'll likely need a partner to do this, again, we come back to the skills gap if were seeing the rise of MSPs, managed service providers and specialist service providers, not public cloud providers, people are concerned about lock-in and that's really not their role. They're not high touch services company, probably not your technology arms dealer, excuse me, they're selling technology to these MSPs. So the MSPs, they have intimate relationships with their customers. They understand their business and specialize in architecting solutions to handle these difficult challenges. So let's take a look at some of the risk factors here and dig a little bit into the cyber threat that organizations face. This is a slide that, again, the Storage Alchemists, Steve Kenniston shared with me, it's based on a study that IBM funds with the Panama Institute, which is a firm that studies these things like cost of breaches and has for many, many, many years. The slide shows the total cost of a typical breach within each dot and on the Y-axis and the frequency in percentage terms on the horizontal axis. Now it's interesting, the top two are compromised credentials and fishing, which once again proves that bad user behavior trumps good security every time. But the point here is that the adversary's attack vectors are many and specific companies often specialize in solving these problems often with point products, which is why the slide that we showed from Optiv earlier, that messy slide looks so cluttered. So it's a huge challenge for companies, and that's why we've seen the emergence of cyber recovery solutions from virtually all the major players. Ransomware and the SolarWinds hack have made trust the number one issue for CEOs and CSOs and boards of directors, shifting CSO spending patterns are clear. Shifting largely because they're catalyzed by the work from home. But outside of the moat to endpoint security identity and access management, cloud security, the horizontal network security. So security priorities and spending are changing that's why you see the emergence of disruptors like we've covered extensively, Okta, Crowdstrike, Zscaler. And cyber resilience is top of mind and robust solutions are required and that's why companies are building cyber recovery solutions that are most often focused on the backup corpus because that's a target for the bad guys. So there is an opportunity, however to expand from just the backup corpus to all data and protect this kind of 3-2-1, or maybe it's 3-2-1-1, three copies, two backups, a backup in the cloud and one that's air gapped. So this can be extended to primary storage, copies, snaps, containers, data in motion, et cetera, to have a comprehensive data protection strategy. Customers as I said earlier, increasingly looking to manage service providers and specialists because of that skills gap and that's a big reason why automation is so important in orchestration. And automation and orchestration I'll emphasize on the air gap solutions should be separated physically and logically. All right, now let's take a look at some of the ETR data and some of the players. This is a chart that we like to show often, it's a X, Y axis, and the Y-axis is net score, which is a measure of spending momentum and the horizontal axis is market share. Now market share is an indicator of pervasiveness in the survey. It's not spending market share, it's not market share of the overall market, it's a term that ETR uses. It's essentially market share of the responses within the survey set, think of it as mind share. Okay, you've got the pure plays here on this slide in the storage category, there is no data protection or backup category so what we've done is we've isolated the pure plays or close to pure plays in backup and data protection. Notice that red line, that red line is kind of our subjective view of anything that's over that 40% line is elevated, you can see only rubric in the July survey is over that 40% line. I'll show you the ends in a moment. Smaller ends, but still rubric is the only one. Now look at Cohesity and rubric in the January, 2020. So last year pre-pandemic Cohesity and Rubrik they've come well off their peaks for net score. Look at Veeam, Veeam having studied this data for the last say 24 plus months, Veeam has been Steady Eddie. It is really always in the mid to high 30s, always shows a large shared end so it's coming up in the survey, customers are mentioning Veeam and it's got a very solid net score. It's not above that 40% line but it's hovering just below consistently, that's very impressive. Commvault has steadily been moving up. Sanjay Mirchandani has made some acquisitions, he did the Hedvig acquisition. They launched metallic that's driving cloud affinity within a Commvault large customer base so it's a good example of a legacy player, pivoting and evolving and transforming itself. Veritas continues to underperform in the ETR surveys relative to the other players. Now, for context, let's say add IBM and Dell to the chart. Now just note, this is IBM and Dell's full storage portfolio. The category in the taxonomy at ETR is all storage. Okay, this previous slide I isolated on the pure plays, but this now adds in IBM and Dell. It probably representative of where they would be, probably Dell larger on the horizontal axis than IBM, of course and you could see the spending momentum in accordingly. So you could see that in the data chart that we've inserted. So smaller ends for Rubrik and Cohesity, but still enough to pay attention, it's not like one or two when you're 20 plus, 15 plus, 25 plus you can start to pay attention to trends. Veeam again is very impressive. Its net score is solid, it's got a consistent presence in the dataset, it's clear leader here. SimpliVity is small but it's improving relative to last several surveys and we talked about Commvault. Now, I want to emphasize something that we've been hitting on for quite some time now and that's the renaissance that's coming in compute. Now we all know about Moore's law, the doubling of transistor density every two years, 18 to 24 months and that leads to a doubling of performance in that time frame. X86, that X86 curve is in the blue and if you do the math, this is expressed in trillions of operations per second. The orange line is a representative of Apple's A series culminating in the A-15 most recently, the A series is what Apple is now... It's the technology basis for what's inside, and one the new Apple laptops, which is replacing Intel. That's that orange line there we'll come back to that. So go back to the blue line for a minute. If you do the math on doubling performance every 24 months, it comes out to roughly 40% annual improvement in processing power per year. That's now moderated. So Moore's law is waning in one sense so we wrote a piece Moore's law is not dead so I'm sort of contradicting myself there, but the traditional Moore's law curve on X86 is waning. It's probably now down to around 30%, low 30s, but look at the orange line. Again, using the A series as an indicator, if you combine the CPU, the NPU, which is the neural processing unit, XPU, pick whatever PU you want, the accelerators, the DSPs, that line is growing at a 100% plus per year. It's probably more accurately around 110% a year. So there's a new industry curve occurring and it's being led by the Arm ecosystem. The other key factor there you see in a lot of use cases, a lot of consumer use cases Apple is an example but you're also seeing it in things like Tesla, Amazon with AWS Graviton, the Annapurna acquisition, building out Graviton and Nitro that's based on Arm. You can get from design to tape out in less than two years Whereas the Intel cycles we know they've been running it four to five years now, maybe Pat Gelsinger is compressing those, but Intel is behind. So, organizations that are on that orange curve are going to see faster acceleration, lower cost, lower power, et cetera. All right, so what's the tie to data protection? I'm going to leave you with this chart. Arm has introduced it's confidential compute architecture, and is ushering in a new era of security and data protection. Zero Trust is the new mandate and what Arm has done with what they call realms is create physical separation of the vulnerable components by creating essentially physical buckets to put code in and to put data in separate from the OS. Remember the OS is the most valuable entry point for hackers or one of them because it contains privileged access and it's a weak link because of things like memory leakages and vulnerabilities. And malicious code can be placed by bad guys within data in the OS and appear benign even though it's anything but. So in this architecture, all the OS does is create API calls to the realm controller. That's the only interaction. So it makes it much harder for bad actors to get access to the code and the data. And importantly, very importantly, it's an end-to-end architecture so there's protection throughout if you're pulling data from the edge and bringing it back to on-prem and the cloud you've got that end-to-end architecture and protection throughout. So the link to data protection is that backup software vendors need to be the most trusted of applications. Backup software needs to be the most trusted of applications because it's one of the most targeted areas in the cyber attack. Realms provide an end-to-end separation of data and code from the OS and is a better architectural construct to support Zero Trust and confidential computing and critical use cases like data protection/backup and other digital business apps. So our call to action is backup software vendors you can lead the charge. Arm is several years ahead at the moment, head of Intel in our view. So you got to pay attention to that, research that, we're not saying over rotate, but go investigate that. And use your relationships with Intel to accelerate its version of this architecture or ideally the industry should agree on common standards and solve this problem together. Pat Gelsinger told us in theCUBE that if it's the last thing he's going to do in his industry life he's going to solve this security problem. That's when he was at VMware. Well, Pat you're even in a better place to do it now, you don't have to solve it yourself, you can't and you know that. So while you're going about your business saving Intel, look to partner with Arm I know it sounds crazy to use these published APIs and push to collaborate on an open source architecture that addresses the cyber problem. If anyone can do it, you can. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts all you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast, I publish weekly on Wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com. Or you can reach me at dvellante on Twitter, email me at Dave.Vellante@SiliconANGLE.com. And don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey and data action. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everybody, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is braking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Techniques to protect sensitive data have evolved over thousands of years, literally. The pace of modern data protection is rapidly accelerating and presents both opportunities and threats for organizations. In particular, the amount of data stored in the cloud combined with hybrid work models, the clear and present threat of cyber crime, regulatory edicts, and the ever expanding edge and associated use cases should put CXOs on notice that the time is now to rethink your data protection strategies. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we're going to explore the evolving world of data protection and share some information on how we see the market changing in the competitive landscape for some of the top players. Steve Kenniston, AKA the Storage Alchemist, shared a story with me, and it was pretty clever. Way back in 4000 BC, the Sumerians invented the first system of writing. Now, they used clay tokens to represent transactions at that time. Now, to prevent messing with these tokens, they sealed them in clay jars to ensure that the tokens, i.e the data, would remain secure with an accurate record that was, let's call it quasi, immutable, and lived in a clay vault. And since that time, we've seen quite an evolution of data protection. Tape, of course, was the main means of protecting data and backing data up during most of the mainframe era. And that carried into client server computing, which really accentuated and underscored the issues around backup windows and challenges with RTO, recovery time objective and RPO recovery point objective. And just overall recovery nightmares. Then in the 2000's data reduction made disk-based backup more popular and pushed tape into an archive last resort media. Data Domain, then EMC, now Dell still sell many purpose-built backup appliances as do others as a primary backup target disc-based. The rise of virtualization brought more changes in backup and recovery strategies, as a reduction in physical resources squeezed the one application that wasn't under utilizing compute, i.e, backup. And we saw the rise of Veem, the cleverly-named company that became synonymous with data protection for virtual machines. Now, the cloud has created new challenges related to data sovereignty, governance, latency, copy creep, expense, et cetera. But more recently, cyber threats have elevated data protection to become a critical adjacency to information security. Cyber resilience to specifically protect against attacks is the new trend being pushed by the vendor community as organizations are urgently looking for help with this insidious threat. Okay, so there are two major disruptors that we're going to talk about today, the cloud and cyber crime, especially around ransoming your data. Every customer is using the cloud in some way, shape, or form. Around 76% are using multiple clouds, that's according to a recent study by Hashi Corp. We've talked extensively about skill shortages on theCUBE, and data protection and security concerns are really key challenges to address, given that skill shortage is a real talent gap in terms of being able to throw people at solving this problem. So what customers are doing, they're either building out or they're buying really mostly building abstraction layers to hide the underlying cloud complexity. So what this does... The good news is it's simplifies provisioning and management, but it creates problems around opacity. In other words, you can't see sometimes what's going on with the data. These challenges fundamentally become data problems, in our view. Things like fast, accurate, and complete backup recovery, compliance, data sovereignty, data sharing. I mentioned copy creep, cyber resiliency, privacy protections. These are all challenges brought to fore by the cloud, the advantages, the pros, and the cons. Now, remote workers are especially vulnerable. And as clouds span rapidly, data protection technologies are struggling to keep pace. So let's talk briefly about the rapidly-expanding public cloud. This chart shows worldwide revenue for the big four hyperscalers. As you can see, we projected that they're going to surpass $115 billion in revenue in 2021. That's up from 86 billion last year. So it's a huge market, it's growing in the 35% range. The interesting thing is last year, 80-plus billion dollars in revenue, but 100 billion dollars was spent last year by these firms in cap ex. So they're building out infrastructure for the industry. This is a gift to the balance of the industry. Now to date, legacy vendors and the surrounding community have been pretty defensive around the cloud. Oh, not everything's going to move to the cloud. It's not a zero sum game we hear. And while that's all true, the narrative was really kind of a defensive posture, and that's starting to change as large tech companies like Dell, IBM, Cisco, HPE, and others see opportunities to build on top of this infrastructure. You certainly see that with Arvind Krishna comments at IBM, Cisco obviously leaning in from a networking and security perspective, HPE using language that is very much cloud-like with its GreenLake strategy. And of course, Dell is all over this. Let's listen to how Michael Dell is thinking about this opportunity when he was questioned on the queue by John Furrier about the cloud. Play the clip. So in my view, Michael nailed it. The cloud is everywhere. You have to make it easy. And you have to admire the scope of his comments. We know this guy, he thinks big. He said, "Enables everything." He's basically saying is that technology is at the point where it has the potential to touch virtually every industry, every person, every problem, everything. So let's talk about how this informs the changing world of data protection. Now, we all know, we've seen with the pandemic, there's an acceleration in toward digital, and that has caused an escalation, if you will, in the data protection mandate. So essentially what we're talking about here is the application of Michael Dell's cloud everywhere comments. You've got on-prem, private clouds, hybrid clouds. You've got public clouds across AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba. Really those are the big four hyperscalers. You got many clouds that are popping up all their place. But multi-cloud, to that Hashi Corp data point, 75, 70 6%. And then you now see the cloud expanding out to the edge, programmable infrastructure heading out to the edge. So the opportunity here to build the data protection cloud is to have the same experiences across all these estates with automation and orchestration in that cloud, that data protection cloud, if you will. So think of it as an abstraction layer that hides that underlying complexity, you log into that data protection cloud, it's the same experience. So you've got backup, you've got recovery, you can handle bare metal. You can do virtualized backups and recoveries, any cloud, any OS, out to the edge, Kubernetes and container use cases, which is an emerging data protection requirement. And you've got analytics, perhaps you've got PII, personally identifiable information protection in there. So the attributes of this data protection cloud, again, abstracts the underlying cloud primitives, takes care of that. It also explodes cloud native technologies. In other words, it takes advantage of whether it's machine learning, which all the big cloud players have expertise in, new processor models, things like graviton, and other services that are in the cloud natively. It doesn't just wrap it's on-prem stack in a container and shove it into the cloud, no. It actually re architects or architects around those cloud native services. And it's got distributed metadata to track files and volumes and any organizational data irrespective of location. And it enables sets of services to intelligently govern in a federated governance manner while ensuring data integrity. And all this is automated and an orchestrated to help with the skills gap. Now, as it relates to cyber recovery, air-gap solutions must be part of the portfolio, but managed outside of that data protection cloud that we just briefly described. The orchestration and the management must also be gaped, if you will. Otherwise, (laughs) you don't have an air gap. So all of this is really a cohort to cyber security or your cybersecurity strategy and posture, but you have to be careful here because your data protection strategy could get lost in this mess. So you want to think about the data protection cloud as again, an adjacency or maybe an overlay to your cybersecurity approach. Not a bolt on, it's got to be fundamentally architectured from the bottom up. And yes, this is going to maybe create some overheads and some integration challenges, but this is the way in which we think you should think about it. So you'll likely need a partner to do this. Again, we come back to the skill skills gap if we're seeing the rise of MSPs, managed service providers and specialist service providers. Not public cloud providers. People are concerned about lock-in, and that's really not their role. They're not high-touch services company. Probably not your technology arms dealer, (clear throat) excuse me, they're selling technology to these MSPs. So the MSPs, they have intimate relationships with their customers. They understand their business and specialize in architecting solutions to handle these difficult challenges. So let's take a look at some of the risk factors here, dig a little bit into the cyber threat that organizations face. This is a slide that, again, the Storage Alchemists, Steve Kenniston, shared with me. It's based on a study that IBM funds with the Panmore Institute, which is a firm that studies these things like cost of breaches and has for many, many, many years. The slide shows the total cost of a typical breach within each dot and on the Y axis and the frequency in percentage terms on the horizontal axis. Now, it's interesting. The top two compromise credentials and phishing, which once again proves that bad user behavior trumps good security every time. But the point here is that the adversary's attack vectors are many. And specific companies often specialize in solving these problems often with point products, which is why the slide that we showed from Optiv earlier, that messy slide, looks so cluttered. So there's a huge challenge for companies. And that's why we've seen the emergence of cyber recovery solutions from virtually all the major players. Ransomware and the solar winds hack have made trust the number one issue for CIOs and CISOs and boards of directors. Shifting CISO spending patterns are clear. They're shifting largely because they're catalyzed by the work from home. But outside of the moat to endpoint security, identity and access management, cloud security, the horizontal network security. So security priorities and spending are changing. And that's why you see the emergence of disruptors like we've covered extensively, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler. And cyber resilience is top of mind, and robust solutions are required. And that's why companies are building cyber recovery solutions that are most often focused on the backup corpus because that's a target for the bad guys. So there is an opportunity, however, to expand from just the backup corpus to all data and protect this kind of 3, 2, 1, or maybe it's 3, 2, 1, 1, three copies, two backups, a backup in the cloud and one that's air gaped. So this can be extended to primary storage, copies, snaps, containers, data in motion, et cetera, to have a comprehensive data protection strategy. And customers, as I said earlier, are increasingly looking to manage service providers and specialists because of that skills gap. And that's a big reason why automation is so important in orchestration. And automation and orchestration, I'll emphasize, on the air gap solutions should be separated physically and logically. All right, now let's take a look at some of the ETR data and some of the players. This is a chart that we like to show often. It's a X-Y axis. And the Y axis is net score, which is a measure of spending momentum. And the horizontal axis is market share. Now, market share is an indicator of pervasiveness in the survey. It's not spending market share, it's not market share of the overall market, it's a term that ETR uses. It's essentially market share of the responses within the survey set. Think of it as mind share. Okay, you've got the pure plays here on this slide, in the storage category. There is no data protection or backup category. So what we've done is we've isolated the pure plays or close to pure plays in backup and data protection. Now notice that red line, that red is kind of our subjective view of anything that's over that 40% line is elevated. And you can see only Rubrik, and the July survey is over that 40% line. I'll show you the ends in a moment. Smaller ends, but still, Rubrik is the only one. Now, look at Cohesity and Rubrik in the January 2020. So last year, pre-pandemic, Cohesity and Rubrik, they've come well off their peak for net score. Look at Veeam. Veeam, having studied this data for the last say 24 hours months, Veeam has been steady Eddy. It is really always in the mid to high 30s, always shows a large shared end, so it's coming up in the survey. Customers are mentioning Veeam. And it's got a very solid net score. It's not above that 40% line, but it's hovering just below consistently. That's very impressive. Commvault has steadily been moving up. Sanjay Mirchandani has made some acquisitions. He did the Hedvig acquisition. They launched Metallic, that's driving cloud affinity within Commvault's large customer base. So it's good example of a legacy player pivoting and evolving and transforming itself. Veritas, it continues to under perform in the ETR surveys relative to the other players. Now, for context, let's add IBM and Dell to the chart. Now just note, this is IBM and Dell's full storage portfolio. The category in the taxonomy at ETR is all storage. Just previous slide, I isolated on the pure plays. But this now adds in IBM and Dell. It probably representative of where they would be. Probably Dell larger on the horizontal axis than IBM, of course. And you could see the spending momentum accordingly. So you can see that in the data chart that we've inserted. So some smaller ends for Rubrik and Cohesity. But still enough to pay attention, it's not like one or two. When you're 20-plus, 15-plus 25-plus, you can start to pay attention to trends. Veeam, again, is very impressive. It's net score is solid, it's got a consistent presence in the dataset, it's clear leader here. SimpliVity is small, but it's improving relative to last several surveys. And we talked about Convolt. Now, I want to emphasize something that we've been hitting on for quite some time now. And that's the Renaissance that's coming in compute. Now, we all know about Moore's Law, the doubling of transistor density every two years, 18 to 24 months. And that leads to a doubling of performance in that timeframe. X86, that x86 curve is in the blue. And if you do the math, this is expressed in trillions of operations per second. The orange line is representative of Apples A series, culminating in the A15, most recently. The A series is what Apple is now... Well, it's the technology basis for what's inside M1, the new Apple laptops, which is replacing Intel. That's that that orange line there, we'll come back to that. So go back to the blue line for a minute. If you do the math on doubling performance every 24 months, it comes out to roughly 40% annual improvement in processing power per year. That's now moderated. So Moore's Law is waning in one sense, so we wrote a piece Moore's Law is not dead. So I'm sort of contradicting myself there. But the traditional Moore's Law curve on x86 is waning. It's probably now down to around 30%, low 30s. But look at the orange line. Again, using the A series as an indicator, if you combine then the CPU, the NPU, which neuro processing unit, XPU, pick whatever PU you want, the accelerators, the DSPs, that line is growing at 100% plus per year. It's probably more accurately around 110% a year. So there's a new industry curve occurring, and it's being led by the Arm ecosystem. The other key factor there, and you're seeing this in a lot of use cases, a lot of consumer use cases, Apple is an example, but you're also seeing it in things like Tesla, Amazon with AWS graviton, the Annapurna acquisition, building out graviton and nitro, that's based on Arm. You can get from design to tape out in less than two years. Whereas the Intel cycles, we know, they've been running it four to five years now. Maybe Pat Gelsinger is compressing those. But Intel is behind. So organizations that are on that orange curve are going to see faster acceleration, lower cost, lower power, et cetera. All right, so what's the tie to data protection. I'm going to leave you with this chart. Arm has introduced it's confidential, compute architecture and is ushering in a new era of security and data protection. Zero trust is the new mandate. And what Arm has it's done with what they call realms is create physical separation of the vulnerable components by creating essentially physical buckets to put code in and to put data in, separate from the OS. Remember, the OS is the most valuable entry point for hackers or one of them because it contains privileged access, and it's a weak link because of things like memory leakages and vulnerabilities. And malicious code can be placed by bad guys within data in the OS and appear benign, even though it's anything but. So in this, all the OS does is create API calls to the realm controller. That's the only interaction. So it makes it much harder for bad actors to get access to the code and the data. And importantly, very importantly, it's an end-to-end architecture. So there's protection throughout. If you're pulling data from the edge and bringing it back to the on-prem or the cloud, you've got that end to end architecture and protection throughout. So the link to data protection is that backup software vendors need to be the most trusted of applications. Backup software needs to be the most trusted of applications because it's one of the most targeted areas in a cyber attack. Realms provide an end-to-end separation of data and code from the OS and it's a better architectural construct to support zero trust and confidential computing and critical use cases like data protection/backup and other digital business apps. So our call to action is backup software vendors, you can lead the charge. Arm is several years ahead at the moment, ahead of Intel, in our view. So you've got to pay attention to that, research that. We're not saying over rotate, but go investigate that. And use your relationships with Intel to accelerate its version of this architecture. Or ideally, the industry should agree on common standards and solve this problem together. Pat Gelsinger told us in theCUBE that if it's the last thing he's going to do in his industry life, he's going to solve this security problem. That's when he was at VMware. Well, Pat, you're even in a better place to do it now. You don't have to solve it yourself, you can't, and you know that. So while you're going about your business saving Intel, look to partner with Arm. I know it sounds crazy to use these published APIs and push to collaborate on an open source architecture that addresses the cyber problem. If anyone can do it, you can. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search Braking Analysis Podcast. I publish weekly on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can reach me @dvellante on Twitter, email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey and data action. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everybody. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Commvault Future Ready 2020 brought to you by Commvault. >> Hi and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman and I'm joined by David Vellante here. Of course, we just had the keynote for Commvault Future Ready, Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO. Dave, he's been there a little bit over a year. We've been watching the transformation of Commvault as they are trying to go much deeper in the cloud. Of course, the space, data protection overall, backup and recovery, been a super hot one. Especially, if you talk about everybody accelerating what they're doing with the cloud, Dave, from an end user standpoint, as well as for Commvault. So why don't we start with the company first, as I said, the move to subscription, the move to cloud, a lot of change needed, and that's one of the reasons they brought Sanjay into the company. Of course, he'd been at Puppet before that, he was the CIO of EMC before that. So Dave, tell us your thoughts lately on Commvault. >> Okay, so Commvault, obviously Stu, has been around for a long, long time, and it's kind of a diversified player in the data protection space. I've always felt like they've had a more diversified sort of vision and portfolio. Sanjay took over, what was it February last year, right? So he kind of came in and inherited a company in transition. And transitioning from what has largely been a legacy sort of on-prem, perpetual software licensed business to now one that's transferring into a subscription based model, obviously a large maintenance base. I think about 60% of their revenues comes from services, and most of that is maintenance, okay? So he's inherited that, and then they're going into a subscription model. So that's going to hit the income statement, and then boom COVID hits. So Sanjay is getting it all from all sides, but Commvault is a 670, roughly, million dollar company on a trailing 12 month basis. And the market cap's in the 1.7, 1.8 range, so they trade at about 2.7 times revenue. So that's much better than a hardware company, but it should be better than that as a software company. So the challenge that he has is, okay, how do we get the company growing again? How do we transition to that subscription based model? The good news on Commvault is their balance sheet is tremendous. I mean, they have no debt, no debt. I mean, several hundred million dollars in cash, over 300 million and zero debt, which kind of interesting to me, Stu. Because many companies during this COVID pandemic have tapped the credit markets, Commvault has chosen not to. Maybe they should right now with such low interest rates, and maybe that can help get the growth engine going. But I think they're very conservative in that standpoint and obviously very proud of their balance sheet, but with the likes of Cohesity and Rubrik, and I know we're going to talk about that pouring money into the market, trying to attack them, and we'll talk more about their position relative to those guys, you might like to see 'em raise a little bit of money or take on some debt and really go after some of those opportunities that you referred to upfront, it is a hot market. >> Yeah, well, Dave, you talk about some of the newer entrants raised just insane amounts of money when you talk about that space. Not only Cohesity and Rubrik, but also talked about Veem. Of course, we've watched Veem go from a change in ownership and how much money they have. And from a revenue standpoint, Veem actually might be bigger than Commvault at this point, I believe, right? >> Yeah, I think so. I mean, they're billion dollar bookings, they say. I mean, I believe it, but they're a privately held company. Commvault, we can tell actually what their numbers are. Guaranteed Cohesity and Rubrik are losing money. So their cost of acquiring a customer is huge. Commvault is, let's face it, it's servicing its install base, and it's mining that. And that's why it's, it's cashflow positive. I mean, it's a very healthy company financially. The challenge that, again, Sanjay has is how do you get growth? They're a company, as I said earlier, in transition. Let me share with you, if I may, some data from our friends at ETR. What we're showing here is the fundamental methodology of ETR, which is that net score, Stu. We talk about that all the time, ETR is, as I say, our data partner, Enterprise Technology Research. Every quarter, they go out and they say, "Based for each company and their various segments, "are you adopting new?" That's the lime green, that's the 2%. "Are you increasing spending?" That's the 30%, and this is from the July survey so this is relative to the first half. "Are you flat?" You can see that fat middle 56%, and then you can see decrease is 7% and that's in the pink, and then 5% replacing. So good news here is more people are spending more, more customers spending more, than are spending less. Net score's the red subtracted from the green, so it comes out at roughly 20%, which is that's certainly not terrible. It's a legacy company that's been around a long time. So you would see a company that's a newbie, that's hot. We'd always talked about UI path automation anywhere, Snowflake, they're in the 70% range, but they're much, much smaller companies but they're growing very, very rapidly. So this is respectable and very common for a company that has been around as long as Commvault. >> Yeah, thanks so much for sharing that data, Dave. Of course, as you said, huge customer base, they've been around for awhile. I remember when we first did Commvault GO two years ago, very excited, very engaged user base. There was a good strategy discussion and an understanding for what Commvault needed to do to get to the cloud, but there was an understanding that they couldn't keep doing with the same team what had brought them to the place before. You always say, Dave, what got you to where you were isn't going to get you to where you need to go. Talk a little bit about the keynote. Last year at Commvault there were a couple of big pieces. Number one, is they really had their first SaaS offering with Metallic. And what the momentum has been on Metallic is, first of all, they made a big partnership announcement with Microsoft ahead of this event. Multi-year, Metallic has a few different solutions. One of them, of course, is to work on Office 365, so when we go to SaaS and we go to the cloud, we understand that data protection isn't something that just comes inherently. Some people thought, "Oh hey, I did it "in my own data center, but once I go to the cloud, well, "I'm sure it just takes care of things "like data protection and security." The answer is I still need to think about it, and the ecosystem has helped filling that gap. So Metallic was the first step and what we saw, Dave, really looks like a holistic refresh of the product line. Commvault back in recovery, Commvault disaster recovery, Commvault complete data protection, all aligning themselves to be more to what you were talking about, going to that full ratable model, and the other piece was Hedvig. So Hedvig software company, helping them to be in more cloud-native environments. And they launched a Hedvig X, so it's the full integration of that solution. Less than a year from the acquisition to fully integrating it and making it an offering that's ready for what they're doing. >> Is that they're cloud play? Actually Hedvig is sort of in that space, right? As with cloud you think subscription, but also Commvault is basically putting its stack in the cloud, right? And taking advantage of cloud services, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Metallic, specifically is built for the cloud. >> So let's talk a little bit about cloud, I have some other data here. And the cloud, if you pull up that next slide, the cloud has been eating away at on-prem vendors. We know it's been growing at 2000, 3000 basis points higher than the on-prem business. But what this slide shows is that same net score methodology that we talked about before, but it's filtering, you can see in the left hand side here, it's filtering on AWS, Google and Microsoft. So there's 585, AWS, Google and Microsoft customers in the ETR dataset. There's like about 1200 in the overall survey this quarter. And this shows the over time the net score of Commvault in those accounts, so you can see, as I was saying, go back to 2018, you can see prior to Sanjay taking over this thing was dipping and dipping, losing momentum coming into kind of the April survey and then July survey of 2019, and it's kind of bouncing off the bottom now. So it seems like they're making some progress there, and what we want to see is that momentum continue to grow. Again, net score is a measure of spending velocity. So what you want to see is as that transition occurs more sort of a net score increases over each quarter. >> Yeah, well, Dave as you mentioned earlier, there absolutely are some headwinds potentially there, but it looks like Sanjay, at least, has stopped some of the bleeding on this and, stated goal of course, to return to growth. And so we would want to see that go from just up one or 2% to be able to track with the cloud. Probably a good time for us to talk a little bit about the competition, Dave, because if you talk just in cloud markets, are you tracking along with the cloud? So the hyperscales themselves, of course, growing at very huge percent. A company that's been around as long as Veritas isn't necessarily going to be doing 35 to 70% growth as you would see from AWS or Azure. But what do you see out there for some of the competition in general, who were some of the key players that we need to look at? >> Yeah, so I mean, think about the backup guys. I mean, the traditional space, you've mentioned Veritas. Veritas, by the way, in the ETR survey data is not playing well, they're in the red. They've been losing share, the share donors, as they say, you've got some big players, Dell EMC, obviously, kind of living off the data domain base. Remember Dell EMC fell behind, prior to the Dell acquisition, they weren't investing heavily in the data protection business. They were kind of living milking off that data domain base. Back when you were there, they had the networker and they had Avamar, and so there was a bifurcated thing. Frank Slootman came and he tried to clean some of that up, but then he was onto his next big thing, of course, it was ServiceNow. And so, you know, Dell is a big footprint, obviously, but they're very hardware centric, as you know, so they have a big hardware agenda. IBM with Spectrum Protect, Veem was hurting them. They did the deal with Catalogic to kind of stop the bleeding, he kind of did. Again, big install base, and then you got the sort of newcomers. Veem is not really a newcomer anymore. I think they've been around for 15 years, big acquisition. Decent momentum in the market, especially started the Microsoft base, and they're kind of everywhere, so you see them. And of course you see Cohesity and Rubrik spend a lot of money, as you said. And it's interesting, let me pull up this next data point. In the ETR data set this past quarter you saw Cohesity actually overtake Rubrik. Rubrik was very, very strong earlier on. They're kind of neck and neck in this chart, what this chart shows is not net score, it's now market share. Now market shares, not real market shares, Stu. I have to be cautious here because it's not like IDC tracks market share. What it is is pervasiveness in the dataset. So in other words, within this segment, the number of mentions of the vendor divided by the total mentions in the segment, okay? So it's really pervasiveness or presence in the data set. And what this shows is you can see we've got 65 Commvault customers in the survey, and it shows the impact of Veem, Rubrik and Cohesity in the Commvault base. And you can see up through, let's see, that's the recent surveys is you see the increases up to the increasing red line is Veem, and then you got the Rubrik line and then the Cohesity line, but they're all recently, since the October 19th survey, down, trending down. So that says to me that Commvault is holding serve within its own base and actually doing better as these guys are declining in this base. You can see the comment that ETR made, "Rubrik, Cohesity and Veeam are all seeing "market share declines in shared accounts with Commvault," so that's good news. I think this is very important, Stu, and here's why. Is Commvault has got to hunker down and maintain those customers. It does not want to be a share donor much in the same way that Veritas has been. So that's a quick scan of the competitive marketplace. And again, from my standpoint, I'd like to see Sanjay maybe get a little bit more aggressive. I liked the acquisitions. Hedvig, it's great, deal with actually some more subscription, but I'd like to see them go hard after a cloud native. I have to dig into that, maybe you can comment, but really cloud native and multicloud across clouds being able to have that same experience on-prem as I do in the clouds at very high performance, very low latency. >> Yeah. Well, Dave, first of all, one thing, talk about the competitive win rate. That's something you always look at is how are you doing against the competitors? Not only did Sanjay come in, but you saw changes along how the channel chief, I believe, and the salespeople. So definitely reinvigorating that piece of it, as well as, Dave we saw, in the keynote. So the portfolio is updated, an aggressive engineering investment, some through acquisition, some through changing the code and moving in these environments, leveraging partnerships, great to see the Microsoft one, love to see something along the lines of Google. We understand Amazon, you play in that ecosystem, it is challenging to necessarily partner deeply with AWS, unless you're one of a few strong players in the marketplace, but working closer in cloud. And Dave, one thing I'd point out, last year, one of the things that really impressed me at Commvault GO is they did have some good developer actions. So when you talk about cloud native, of course, enabling developers is one of the key things. Like many companies out there, inside the company you've got developers, so how are you unleashing that? So Hedvig, a good acquisition along those lines, but you know, in the middle of the show floor, they had people that you set up with whiteboards and just go at it. So, you know, reminds me of days past when you used to have these engineering-driven shows where you could go in and really understand that. So helping to developers, enable them, backup and recovery just needs to tie into all my DevOps and IT Ops and all my other environments to make things just more automated because also you talk cloud native, Dave, automation has to be a big piece of it. And to your point, we actually have really good guests coming on the program. Not only will we have Sanjay, relatively fresh off the keynote, I've got a panel with the product people to really dig in and understand that. We'll poke and prod at some of the cloud native pieces and understand where that's going, got their head of strategy also on the program. >> Yes, I think you're making a great point about automation. Just speaking about M&A for a moment, I like M&A, I like growth through M&A, I'm comfortable with that as long as it fits into the portfolio. Your point about automation, I see opportunities there for M&A, things like visibility, observability, obviously hot analytics, automated operations, IT Ops, anything that sort of removes labor and complexity and gives me visibility across clouds. That I think is something that could be interesting, again, as long as it fits into the portfolio. I'll say this, I mean, Sanjay was at EMC and knows M&A because I've no doubt they were bringing all their M&A candidates to Sanjay and saying, "Okay, what do you think of this tech, do you use it?" Probably kick the tires a little bit, so he, I'm sure, was a part of those. I'm sure he saw the good, the bad, and the ugly. You were there, EMC was pretty good at acquisitions, but then it got a little out of control. >> And Dave, talk automation, Sanjay came from Puppet. Puppet was one of the early companies along helping people move along from those manual tasks to how can we automate those? So, absolutely, Sanjay now a little over a year in there, starting to see from the product standpoint, and expect to see some of the trailing results as to how that moves forward. >> And then again, blending that, if it's a tuck in or whatever, maybe there's some big chess move out there. I would just suspect given Commvault's conservative nature you wouldn't see that. Although, they could do it. I mean, at their revenue level, their balance sheet would allow them to raise some debt, if they wanted to do that now would be the time to do it. But it's interesting, everybody's doing it and they're not. So I kind of liked the contrarian play. Given the opportunity in the market, given the TAM expansion through, beyond backup into data management, and it's a cloud and multicloud, I do think there's maybe an opportunity for them to be a little bit more aggressive. >> All right, well, Dave, thanks so much for helping us dig in and kick off our coverage. >> You're welcome, Stu. >> All right, stay with us. We have a bunch of interviews here for Commvault Future Ready. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of CONMEBOL. Future Ready 2020. Brought to you by combo. Hi, I'm Stew Minuteman. And this is the Cube's coverage of Con Volt Future ready event Welcoming back to the program. Fresh off the keynote stage. Sanjay Mirchandani. He's the CEO of Con Volt. Sanjay. Nice job on the keynote. And thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks to Good to see you again. >>Nice to see you too. So, Sanjay, about a year and 1/2 into your journey with Conn Volt, you took over. And you know what it looks like? You've almost completely refreshed the portfolio there. Start a little bit, you know, future. Ready. Tell us how you're getting Conn Volt and its customers ready to be prepared for what happened today as well as the >>right. So, you know, we've we've given visit The past 18 months, have flown by in the past four or five. Even faster. Um, the change. You know, the change that we've had all deal with us as organizations has been tremendous. We've been hard at work. When I came on board, I should have talked about how we were setting out to simplify, innovate and execute all three of those pillars and, ah, future ready, which I love as a term completely embodies what I think the work we've been up to and what the world needs today, which is really getting it ready for whatever's next. And, you know, and it's coming together of innovation, simplification and and hopefully you'll agree some good execution to bring it all together. Yeah, so we've been busy. >>Sanjay, you talked a bit about just the moment in time that we're in. Wonder if you could bring us inside. You know your customers. So there's certain things that we saw for a couple of months. People put a pause on. Other things absolutely have been accelerated. We talk to customers about their adoption of cloud, you know, digital transformation. It's one of those things. That boy, I hope I'm through some of those or you know, can be as agile as possible. But, you know, what do you hearing specifically from our customer base and how they're dealing with things? >>You know, Cto, I touched a little bit on that during my keynote. And you know this this this this time that we're in has really caused, I think a couple of shifts. The first structural shift was Oh, hey, this thing is here to stay and let's get our employees Working and productive and keep the business is running and keeping them safe and everything else. That first shift happened right on. Honest about What was it that March, April and businesses small and big had to figure out how to take go from their their their operating model into, ah, remote. With the remote model, you re prioritize and you thought through what was important at the time and what it was was really getting laptops into the hands of your employees, getting them safe into their working environment, making sure your business processes leaning in that direction. You could take care of your customers. And so that was sort of the first structural faith, the second structural failures. Okay, how do we really drive productivity? One of the new priorities. What do we need to do, what you want to invest in? What do you want to pull back from? And from our vantage point from A from a technology and data point of view, what we're hearing is the themes that if I had a paraphrase of conversations I have with CIOs, it's NGOs. It's really around a simplification. This is a This is a great time to really simplify and, you know, and make sure that you're working with the tried and tested. This is not the time to experiment. This is not the time for esoteric. This is really about simplifying and working with the tried and tested. The second is really about focusing on skills, you know, this is you need you need to be able to leverage, and you need to be able to bring productivity from the from the people that you have an I t. And really focus around that that's, you know, that sometimes for gotten, you know that I like to call them. The unsung heroes of technology has just been pushed into their homes. They're now doing their jobs, longer hours, tougher scenarios. They have no access to their data centers. So it's over. So let's think about skills and the third, you know, the third thing, really that has been propelled into this conversation is cloud. So if you were on a journey, you're off the journey you need to get there quickly, okay? And you need to really newly leverage a light touch, low touch, remote sort of capability. A So fast is you can't call a digital transformation. Call it whatever you'd like to say. But it is about truly leveraging the cloud in a way that that was no longer, you know, a one year, two year three applying. You just have to bring it right to those kinds of things we're hearing and dealing with. >>Yeah, it's so important, Sanjay. Especially that simplicity piece. You know, I remember a few years ago there were certain customers that were adopting cloud, and it was the reminder. Oh, hey, your data protection in your security, you need to make sure you take care of that when you go to the cloud. And unfortunately, you know, some of the people that are now accelerating things you have to quickly say Oh, wait. I can't work this in a few months. I need to take care of this upfront, so help us understand a little bit. You know, the announcements that you've made. How are you making sure that you're ready for customers? The simplicity that they need to take advantage of the innovation and opportunity that the cloud on solutions provider >>absolutely and and make a mistake for me to. Simplification is not just the technology is easy to use, even though that is a big part of what we're working on and working and delivering through these announcements. But we've also got to make sure that the partnerships that we that we that we have lend themselves to what customers need, you know, engineered better its source not in the field, you know, and then and then the ecosystem to make the technology available and consumed commercially in the way that customers would like to keep that simple to. But today, if I just focus on the portfolio, you know, we've we've you could say we've completely rebuilt this incredible stack of technology that we've built this company out and, you know, and we weave in a nutshell. What we've done is announced A. We've taken our backup and recovery suite and be saying we've got a new company, backup and recovery product. We've got a brand new con Volt disaster recovery product. You can get them together as a unit Azaz the complete backup and recovery suite, if you would. So that's one big set of offerings. The second and you know the second is is we bought Hedvig sort of next generation software defined storage technology company last year, and we've been feverishly work quietly at work, integrating Hedvig into calm bolt not just as a company, but in the technology and our new hyper scale technology. Hyper scale. ECs is the embodiment of those two things coming together, the best of data protection from Con Volt and the best storage subsystem to drive that from Hedvig, also from console. So the two come together on all of this technology, whether it's the suite that I mentioned or the hyper scaler, all of it you can. You can mix and match any way you want with it with a world class user interface or user interfaces if you want command lines. If you want AP ICE will keep it open, all of it to you. In addition, we've got announcements or under Activate Suite on. Recently, we talked about our partnership with Microsoft with the metallic azure sort of combination for customers. So it's ah, it's a left to right set of announcement with simplification threatened right through it. >>Sanjay, you mentioned partnerships. Ah, a little bit before the show, you had, of course, the extended partnership with Microsoft with metallic. Maybe give us just a little bit more color about you know how, Con Volt make sure their position and working closely with those hyper scale >>hours. Yeah, you know, and we work with all the hyper scaler. So, you know, there we are probably the most prevalent data protection technology, if you would in the public cloud. And most of the way we talk about over an exabyte that we've helped customers, right, that the cloud is just one data point we've we've been, you know, seen is from the outside in as being the transport capability across across hybrid cloud scenarios. The partnership, the partnership with Microsoft and Microsoft Azure in particular, is the coming together of these things because customers, when we talk to customers and Microsoft office of customers be here from them, they want the ability to be, if you know, as they get more prevalent in the cloud as their workloads get more more pervasive in the cloud, they want to make sure that the same industrial strength data protection cloud in that they had well while they were on prayer for primarily on Prem. Our solutions are completely hybrid. And so the partnership really brings together again. You know, technology that's engineered better together, our data protection and their their cloud best in class our channels working, working together and making sure that it's easy for customers to work work with us. And we're available on the azure marketplace and our field forces also aligned around it. So it's again a 3 60 kind of conversation that we have with customers as much as much of today's announcements. >>Yeah, Sanjay, you talked about the hyper scale er's. You mentioned that the integration of the Hedwig Solution work with Dev Ops and really the cloud native type solutions. Of course, one of the things everybody's looking at when you were hired to this job is you've got background in the automation in developer world. So you know, how is that scene in the update? The portfolio really that embracing of cloud native and develop our environments? >>Cloud without automation is not a cloud, right? It's just it's just it's just infrastructure that's put somewhere else. It's deep, deep degrees of it off automation that really bring cloud to life. Right? And I was fortunate that have been in the Dev ops world for a while in a market leading with marketing product. And I was very pleasantly surprised when I when I came to convert and sell the deep degrees of automation and work flows that are core technology had, with Hedvig acquisition being a platform layer being the storage layer that is multi protocol and appeals incredibly to Dev Ops engineers because everything in the product you know is call a bill through an A p I for a set of AP eyes. It's it's Richard's got work flows and and it's multi critical. So whether you're using VMC or you're building the next generation container applications or you're just using object storage, it doesn't matter. We can mix and match it across, you know, private and public cloud environments, and it's all culpable and it's all programmable. It's all automated on as much as you want >>it. All right, So, Sanjay, I know we can't talk too much about Financial Piece is where we are in the quarter. But one of the things Dave Volante and I were discussing and looking at Kahn Volt. You know, there's some good data, you know, especially if you look at win rates against some of the some of the newer players in this space that the data that we have from ET R was showing, you know, increased win rates for Con Volt. Just could you give us a little bit of your competitive landscape view you talked about? Customers don't want to take too much risk, you know? How do you balance between being, you know, a company with a large install base? But you want to be, you know, more modern? >>Oh, yeah. And you know, the use cases we're talking about. The cloud that we're seeing those leaders are today's use cases, not yesterday's use cases, and we're winning in the base is the fact that we respect that customers are coming from Okay, There's a lot of stuff that runs that business that is still good. That isn't in the cloud that they're they're working their plants journey from that to something else as well. That's where we're leading in areas where they have it in the public cloud, and we always like to stay 1 to 2 steps ahead of the hard problems our customers going to encounter. So our portfolio is is absolutely cloud ready. Our portfolio is rich in that in that capability, and we're not slowing down. You know, we're winning because we have the breath of technology that we support. Both, You know, source source data that customers want o protect and target scenarios where maybe the hyper scaler or anything else where customers want to take it. And the flexibility, the second thing. And if you heard the interview I did with Run from from Johns Hopkins, it's the optimization off our technology around each of those cloud scenarios that gives our customer's true, you know, true value around the compute and storage decisions they have to make. And we helped them make through deep through deep degrees of AI and ML built in. So so it's not just about moving bits. It's about optimizing all of that on the entire life cycle of that data, from the point it's created to the point. >>Excellent. Well, Sunday. Want to let you have the final word? Give us what you want customers to have as the take away from today's future. Ready event? >>Sure. So, first of all, I wanted to, you know, I want to thank all our our audience here, our customers for being with us. It's being with us as a customer, being looking at us as a prospect for technology. We are investing like, you know, we've invested over a $1,000,000,000 over over a period of time as a company in data protection, and we're taking that to a whole new level with the innovations that we're bringing to the table. So, you know, we truly believe that the journey with as it pertains to data the journey to the cloud requires you to be able to think through the life cycle from storing, protecting, optimizing and using that data all the way through. And our solutions can be used independently. Best of class across each of them or together better together. And, you know, we I I urge you to take a few minutes and look at some of the some of the great innovations we've brought to table and rest assured that everything we're doing eyes with hybrid cloud in mind and is it is completely cloud optimized. >>All right. Well, Sanjay Mirchandani. Thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations to you and the team on the work on the updates. Definitely. Look forward to hearing more in the future. >>Thanks. Too good to be here. >>Alright, stay tuned. We've got more from Con vault Future ready on student a man. And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault GO 2019, brought to you by Commvault. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault GO 19, from Colorado. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. Stu and I are pleased to welcome somebody new to theCUBE and to Commvault. We've got Tom Broderick, VP of Strategy and Chief of Staff to the CEO of Commvault. Tom, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, I like you're on brand, the new Commvault venture, >> Yeah, I got to sport the colors, right? >> Metallic, very nice. >> That's right, I had the big jacket on yesterday, so. >> Oh wow, all right. So lots of change at Commvault. You're new as well, you've worked with Sanjay, now this is your third different company working with Sanjay Mirchandani, the CEO. Talk to us a little bit about your short time here at Commvault. There's been so much change that he's driving, cultural change, Metallic was something that was conceived, designed, built in a very short time period, a lot of acceleration. Your first few months here, what's it's been like? >> It's been, obviously, a ton of activity. And, one of the things that we know, and I think it's obvious, Commvault as a company has been in this state of transition. You bring a new CEO on, and we've got a new leadership team, that is merging well with the core leadership team of people that have a lot experience at the company and it's working really well. From the beginning we knew that we needed to focus on three areas, inside the company and outside. It's really around, as we talk to folks, around simplifying our business. And when we say that, normally in an event like this it goes towards how do we simplify working with our partners, how do we simplify working with our customers, how do we simplify our products, that kind of thing. But, from my perspective, one of the things that I focus on, is also, how we focus on simplifying ourselves on the inside, because this is an area where we can be much more efficient in how we bring our technology to the marketplace. So I'm focused on breaking down silos, I'm focused on driving effective communication in the business, so that we can deliver that technology to our partners and our customers. So, simplifying the business. Innovation is the next big key. So, obviously, our technology, and this is one of the things before coming on, I did a lot of research on Commvault technology, I've been out of this part of the market for quite some time, and the core technology is super solid. But we needed to innovate further, and shoulder out into different areas, and that's where you see things like Metallic come into play, the acquisition of Hedvig, where we're using our balance sheet, in a way that's very different for the company. This is our first acquisition as a company. And then of course all the new features and functions that we put into SP17, which was just released in the core product. And then lastly, it's around execution. So, simplify, innovate, execute. And when we talk about execution, a lot of that falls on the go-to-market side so this feeds right into some of those leadership changes that we announced this week, and that we announced earlier, bringing folks like Riccardo Di Blasio on, and that's how we think about things. So that's been a structure that's allowed us to do so much change in such a little amount of time. >> So Tom, I'd love to dig into that a little bit, so we've talked of Commvault traditionally has done a decent job of trying to move a little faster, so if you talk about the core product, it's on a 90 day release cycle, it's not the nine to 18 months train that many of us that have been in the industry a long time was like, okay, we got to get on the train, jam everything into it, hope we go and when we get to the end that we actually release something that we're happy with and it's supported and it works. Your last stop with Sanjay was at Puppet. Very different mindset, I'm curious what you learned there, and how that is really permeating the whole industry and what changes need to happen in Commvault to live in this new sass role like Metallic's going to offer, you know, if you're not delivering code, what are you doing. >> Yeah, it's a great question Stu, and the thing is, obviously we're living a different world than what we were 20 years ago, agile methodologies have sped everything up, and people are used to faster release cycles, how do we get new features out to customers in a much more expeditious way. The challenge though, and I'll bet if folks are watching this, the challenge internally is how you do that effectively. So one of the things that we did at Puppet was we had to get better at bringing the technology to the market, end to end across the business, so inside the business. It's not enough for the developers to say, "Okay, code's ready", and just throw it out there. Is the field enabled, is the pricing right, is the packaging right, is the documentation right, is marketing activated, all those elements of it. So again, this is a little bit inside baseball, from a Commvault perspective we're institutionalizing this as one of the core processes that helps us operate the business. I talk a lot about inside, I talk about how sometimes you have to go slow to go fast, and what I mean by that is the cross-functional elements of the business need to get together sooner in the process to make sure that everybody's on the same page, aligned, they know the key dependencies and they know when they can make their deliverables, so that when we're ready to go to market with the new technology, or new product, or a new service pack release, that everybody is ready to go with that because it does nobody any good if the code's ready, you throw it over the wall and then it just kind of falls down because people outside weren't ready. >> But operational simplification, as you describe it, that's really challenging to do, number one. Number two, doing it at a company that's been in business for 20 years, where you have different functions, you probably have some incumbent folks in there. Lot of change, how have you been able to accomplish that in such a short time period, it seems like, one of the things that Stu and I've been hearing is that there was a lot of receptiveness, within the incumbency internally at Commvault, but operational simplification it's no simple feat. >> No, it's really easy when you write it down on a piece of paper, it's hard once you get the humans involved. But the thing is, and this is one of the things that I've noticed at Commvault, it's been tremendously refreshing to me, is that, you know we have about 2,500 people in the organization and if I was going to give a massive generalization, we have 2,500 people that want to do the right thing, and they truly want to do the right thing for our customers. The issue in the past is that they haven't been aligned in all the same direction, or set of directions. So we were a little bit haphazard in certain ways. But people want to do the right thing, and once I started talking about these concepts and once we started implementing them, and now that we're actually seeing results, it's amazing, I have so many people coming up to me saying, "Wow, I didn't really get it at first, but now that we're actually implementing these kind of processes inside the company, it's amazing, the transformation that we're seeing, and we're so glad that we're doing it." >> Can you talk to us about the decisions for the Commvault ventures, that's one of the things that struck me when I saw some of the press releases earlier in the week, Metallic, a Commvault venture. The Hedvig acquisition, a Commvault venture. Some of the conversations that Stu and I have had this week, it's like a startup mentality within Commvault. Talk to us about the strategic decision to go that venture inside Commvault route. >> Yeah sure, absolutely. So obviously, Hedvig is indeed a venture, I mean, via acquiring a company that were a startup. But as we looked at bringing them into the Commvault folds, internally, inside the company, we had some guiding principles that we created straight away. And the number one guiding principle was don't break the business. Meaning, we're not going to come in and overwhelm them with Commvault. Because they created a successful entity amongst themselves, and a great technology that we think fits really well into our portfolio. But we do want to create some degree of separation because, we might be talking to different customers, this I why, I think I saw David Wigglesworth on a little bit earlier, and he's setting up the emerging technologies sales unit because they're going to be taking this to market a little bit different way. The development team is not being merged right into our core development team, they're remaining a unit amongst themselves reporting to Sanjay, right directly to Sanjay. On the Metallic side we did take the startup approach from the beginning, and we said look, it's easy for organizations to say, hey, we want to build this new thing to serve this new part of the market, and we're going to invest resources into it, let's put the plans together and go get it done. But especially for public companies too, it's easy on your 90 day cycles, to all of a sudden say, you know what, we have to rebound, or take those funds that we were going to put there, and move them elsewhere. And we said, no, we can't do this, this is super strategic to us, we have to ring fence it, and we have to let them build this product in a different way. So, I was talking about business readiness before, in terms of the process that we institute, they were actually the first group to implement it within their small team, and it created a great proof point for the rest of the organization to see how it works. >> So Tom, we've had some great conversations with a lot of the new leadership this week, you mentioned we had the conversation with Wiggs, he's starting to hire some of those sales people. We know there's always change going on in an environment, but is Commvault mostly through with the strategic leadership hires and now it's down to the next layer as to things like the overlays in some of the new initiatives, or is there still more work to be done on the structural piece of things? >> Good question Stu. You know, our work is never done. I think it's the same with any organization. I think most of the major parts and pieces are put in place, like where we want them. One of the things that you mentioned earlier, that this is my third tour of duty with Sanjay, and I say one of the really powerful things that he brings to an organization is the ability to build a strong, well-functioning leadership team. And I say well-functioning. And he did it at EMC, he did it at Puppet, and he's doing it here. And now we've got that senior leadership team in place, that is going to be continuing down this path of positive momentum that we've got. >> One of the challenges making through this big move, we said that the team definitely was receptive, we know that they're ready, but clear communication, just without getting into too many proprietary things that you've done, what tips can you have to make sure that an organization of this experience and this size isn't just going to get like, "Oh my God, whiplash, "they're changing management, I don't know where I fit." Or anything like that, how do we make sure that you get everybody pointing towards the true north, and, ready is I think the word we've heard over and over, so making sure that everybody in Commvault is ready to move forward? >> It's hard and it takes a lot of discipline. I do think you need to be as transparent as you can be, with the workforce and with your employees. They need to understand where we're going with this because if it's just a bunch of change for change's sake, that's difficult environment to live in. And we're certainly not that, we have objectives and goals, and we know what we want to get to. Obviously there are strategic elements of it that we can't necessarily discuss all the time, but at least directionally we have to be able to explain the moves that we're making in such a way that makes sense to people. If we believe it, and we've done our diligence, then it should be transferrable and we should be able to make it so that it's clear to everybody on the Commvault team. And we are focused on making that happen. Internally we do a lot of communication. Sanjay writes a lot of blogs internally. Sandy Hamilton writes a lot of blogs, Riccardo is constantly talking to the teams, and that just permeates down. We need to continue to get better at it, it's hard, organizational communications are hard. But we need to lead from the top as well, make sure that as we demonstrate what it means to communicate that all throughout the organization, we're creating that sort of culture. >> In the last few seconds here Tom, I would love to get your perspectives. What's the biggest thing that you're going to take away of the last three days of your first Commvault GO? >> Tom: Wow. >> Too many to count? >> (laughs) It's exciting, I'll say that, very specifically, walking through the Metallic booth and the Hedvig booth is inspiring to me, the amount of traffic going through those two booths, that's exactly-- >> That's probably what that applause is for right now, in fact it is, I see it. >> That is, they invited me over at 4 o'clock, I said I couldn't make it. It's been truly inspiring, and I think people are excited. And for me it's, obviously you want your customers excited, you want your partners to be excited, but for me too, it's just as important to have our employees excited, and that's a major takeaway that I'm bringing from this conference. >> I think we would echo that we've heard a lot of excited folks. Well Tom, thank you for joining Stu and me on the program, we look forward to Commvault GO 2020 already. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> Excellent. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from Commvault GO 19. (upbeat music)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of day one of convo go and 19 from Colorado. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu minimum and we have a cube alumni back with us. Arch, not van Venkatraman. You are the research manager for storage and data center for IDC. Welcome back. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Likewise, so here we are. Day one of con BOGO, lots of stuff. Nutrition's I stopped coming out in the last day and a half or so, but also lots of momentum that really kind of the dust kicked up when Sanjay Mirchandani took over the home from Bob hammer just about nine months ago. You've been covering combo for about three years. Just love to get your perspective on the last three years and what you've seen particularly in the last nine months. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I've been tracking them for three years and they've been slowly making that pivot to the cloud world to changing how they're pricing to, you know, to really break free from that perception that they're very traditional, they're very cumbersome, they're expensive, they're trying to break through that and hiring Sanjay was kind of validation that Hey we are committed to the future and Sanjay comes from this very agile DevOps seed, open sores, containerized property worlds. >>So he, he is new culture and Sandra came in and he started, I think he started making a lot more changes. We saw that their journey to the cloud was a lot more accelerated and they're starting to talk this new language that is attracting developers. So they talk about cloud native technologies. They're talking about database and data as the bottleneck in development life cycle, which is all new music to develop us ears. And then that means you're going to bring in data management, which is a huge issue right to the developer strategy, right to the boardroom strategy. That's where it needs to be because data is actually at the heart of what companies are doing. And we keep talking about speed of fins, speed of development and speed of applications. I think it's time we start talking about speed of intelligence and speed of insights because that's what's going to give companies a competitive difference. >>And that's what Sanjay brought in in the last nine months. And I was tracking the Hedwig acquisition as well and a lot of companies, a lot of people who I spoke to here were extremely excited about what Hedwig brings into the table and there was a lot of interest in what they bring in. So I think Sanjay brought in a new culture to come ball and he cemented that new culture with Hedwig because with Hedwig they acquired that new startup culture as well. So it's really coming together of a lot of new culture and that's going to overpower the old culture and going to bring a lot transformation within. >>So as arch and I, but I'd love to get your insights into how that that changed and you said, right. Do you know Sandra came from puppet? We talked to them earlier today about moving faster and CIC D and all this wonderful things. But how that aligned with customers. We talked to customers that are seven or 10 years working with convolve inside the organization. You know the person that owned the backup and recovery process, you know, how familiar are they with their developer team and how that's coming together in an organization. So is Convolt meeting the customers where they are? Are they skating to the puck? How does that alignment? >>Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's, it's imperative that come moved and a lot of traditional data protection vendors move because customers are moving as well and they are forced to move because they are seeing lot of onslaught of data. Data's corporate data is growing 50 to 60% every year. That's just business data. So they're grappling with data growth and they're expected to do more with less and data is fragmented everywhere. So they are forced to make that change as well. So they are employing data protection officers, but at the same time they're also employing data scientists and newer data model architects to do new things with data because they are under pressure to deliver that better customer experiences. So companies are going through that change and we, in August we did a research and asked organizations, are you happy with your existing data protection tools and are you going to change it? >>And interestingly, 60% of those who are operating in multicloud environments want to change their data protection environment. And that shows because until now there was this huge power of incumbency, right? I will, I'm okay with this, I'll probably buy the next version of this and try and do iterative improvements. But now companies realize that this data growth and fragmentation and multicloud environment represents a new frontier and they need to move from this thinking that they've had and they're willing to change and work with the newer kind of companies that provide them what they want around unification and simplification. >>Yeah, I think you brought up some great points there. We've found when we talked to customers, they seem to be more open than ever to try something new. I kind of wonder if that's why metallic almost has a separate brand, a separate web website. It is a Convult venture because you know Combalt has incumbency and it has a pedigree. But if I'm trying something new, Convolt might not be the first one that I think of. >>Yeah. So today was the first time I heard about metallic and there is some, I love the branding and there's so much of gloss and shines, I need to get behind the gloss and shine. But I've seen that was one of the busiest places that we have seen today in the exhibition. And that shows commitment to the, it's, it's, it's, it's, they're entering the SAS world and they're talking that cloud likes scalability and it's also more than applications. They're talking about the pricing is a like consumption base, that cloud language and it's going to propel them along the way. And your perspective as customers that you talk to in any industry have so much choice. You're saying, Hey, the customers are recognizing in this multicloud world in which they find themselves operating. We've gotta be able to change our data protection strategy. I imagine things like the rise in cyber attacks or GDPR or the new law in California. >>That's coming are some compelling events. But when customers look at the landscape, and as was saying, they're so much more open to maybe trying new vendors, for example, how does Combalt part, you know, significant part and combat maybe new part with Hedvig and with metallic as a sort of this startup within combo. How did they elevate and differentiate themselves in your opinion, in a competitive landscape? Interesting. Yep. So when you look at startups, they have a lot of agility, but they're not able to bring that enterprise grade skill. Excuse me. And if you look at a lot of traditional vendors, they have that scale and enterprise grade guarantees, but they don't have that agility. But with this initiative, they've done some clever things and brought agility and skill together. That's their differentiator to see no, grab some water, we'll talk for a second. You probably even taught all day. >>That's the hazard, right, of going to these events is your voice, especially with the altitude. But, but as, as we've seen other large incumbents do the same thing. Absolutely. Everyone's pivoting to the same. It is. But also integration of technologies is not easy. Right. And that's sort of the table stakes is how are they, for example, going to integrate Hedvig such that one had bigs installed. ACE has a smooth, seamless transition and this opens up more opportunity for them and vice versa that that Combolt's install base now has more opportunity. Talk to us about what you've seen. They talked a little bit yesterday about some of the integration connections that they've made so far, but that's really key because a lot of companies don't do integrations. Well yeah, there've been some big acquisitions and they do integrations for years and years, right? It's been just 13 days since the acquisition closed. >>So it's still early days, but they need to keep that momentum up and I see a lot of synergy. So bringing storage and data management together is a good idea. But at the same time, I heard Sanjay alluded to it on the stage as well, where they're talking about application and data and moving away from that infrastructure. Right. And that that view is very important because companies need to move from protecting data centers to protecting centers of data. That's what they need to think about. So they need to abstract from infrastructure, but which is why when you look at it all though it's software defined storage. The language that they use is very clever. They're talking about APIs, they're talking about newer workflows, they're talking about changing business processes, they're talking about enabling data, they're talking about controlling data and using it data, using data for insights. >>So they're putting in a lot of newer perspective to this infrastructure view and taking a software defined container defined API defined view, and that's kind of very, very modern. I think that's going to bring a huge amount of difference. So thinking about some of the customers that you've spoken to will say in the last year that are either using Combolt or evaluating combo, some of the positioning that you just talked about to kind of very interesting, but I presume quite strategic with how they're talking about protect, use, manage control data. Are you hear from Comvalt are you hearing and seeing this is what I've been hearing from customers, is there an alignment? Are you hearing from custom what you heard from customers? I'll start over like in the last year, what combat is now delivering and the messaging that they're articulating. Are you now, are you seeing alignment like they're going in the direction that I'm hearing with what customers are wanting. >>He has, the customers are grappling with multicloud data services, so it's not just data protection but they need to get visibility of data across their, all the data sets across the board that they're challenged not just with structured data but growth in unstructured and semi-structured data as well. So they need to look at newer kinds of storage like object storage and all that. So they are grappling with newer kinds of challenges and that's why this new language is going to be hugely useful. And that's why this coming together of storage and data management can actually make a big difference because together they can paint a picture for the organization and tell them these are the challenges you're grappling. You don't need to buying different solutions from different places and buy it and bring it all together. We have deeper level of integration and we can solve it and convert. >>We'll be able to get to the customer at the storage level before they hit the customer, hits the data management problem and then starts hunting for a newer solution. So they're getting in early before the problem actually becomes an operational issue and that the Hey red, they are ready with the solution when the customer gets there. You might, you mentioned data visibility a minute ago and that's critical, right? For organizations that are, whether it's a smaller organization or one that's heavily matrix, if you don't have, and a lot of them don't have visibility into all of the data. Something that you talked about in the very beginning of the interview, that speed of intelligence and speed of insights, it can't take advantage of that. Yeah, yeah. Yes. So companies are investing into a lot of data scientists. But then so, so I was talking to actually three, I was doing a CIO executive dinner on this whole topic about data driven. >>And then so some of organizations, some of the CIS put their hands up and said, Hey, we have actually employed new data scientists. These data engineers and data scientists don't come cheap, right? They're very heavily skilled, talented, talented professionals. So you employ them. And now we're working backwards. Now we are trying to do what we can do with the data models and there's so much problem we are facing. We don't know what data is good data to be analyzed, what data we can delete, what data is cold data that we can send to archives and what do we need to, what are the use cases that we need big data analytics for? So they're working backwards and they're not able to leverage and capitalize on all the resources that they've spent on hiring these kinds of data scientists and data engineers. So I think they need to start that. Organizations need to get a hygiene about their data first and then take the next step around analytics and hiring these kind of data scientists is the first step. Sorry >>are tryna just, I was curious if you could comment on a statement that Sanjay Mirchandani made this morning. He says we need to rethink the kind of the lines and into definitions between primary and secondary storage. What do you think of that statement and where do you think vault ultimately will fit in the broader marketplace? >>You's quite aligned with what I see when I talk to customers as well. So, so companies, data is growing and it's fragmented, but at the same time the lines between primary storage and secondary storage are blurring as well. So the data that's cold today may be hot data tomorrow. So they need to understand, get visibility into data. Just 10% of data is hard data today. So that data needs to sit in the most expensive storage environments. They can leverage it and the rest needs to be, needs to go into tiered, into other colder storage, cheaper alternatives. But at the same time, when you want to access that data, it should not be difficult because now when you push it to a cloud archive your, that's your archive and be damned, right? You're not going to get that data back on in the format you want at the time you want, at the cost you want. So you need to make sure that you invest in storage technologies and you make that data tiering in such a way that when that called data is suddenly becoming warm data or hot data, you need to have access to it instantly in the format you like. Archna thank you for sharing your insights and recommendations and just your view on the industry and combat. We appreciate your time. No problem at all. Thank you very much. First, zoom and a man. I am Lisa Martin and you're watching the cube from combat go 19.

>> Narrator: Live from Denver, CO, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO 2019, brought to you by Commvault. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault GO '19 from Colorado this year. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and we are excited to welcome a couple of new guests to theCUBE. One of them brand new to Commvault. We have Mercer Rowe, VP of Global Channels and Alliances. Mercer, welcome to Commvault and TheCUBE. >> Thanks so much. >> Lisa: And we've got Carmen Sorice III, pinky out, GTM Chief of Staff for Commvault. You're the veteran here. You've been there for a year. >> A whole year, yes. >> Lisa: Exactly. Guys, so much excitement in the last, you know, nine months since Sanjay Mirchandani took over. Analysts saying, hey Commvault, you've got to upgrade your sales. You've got to upgrade your marketing. You've got to shift gears and expand the market share, and we're seeing a lot of movement in all three of those directions. The channel is really critical for Commvault, Mercer. It's responsible for a significant portion of revenue. You guys have made some strategic changes there with respect to channels and alliances. First of all, before we get into that, you're brand new, brand, brand new to Commvault. What attracted you to this company that's 20 years old that, as Sanjay was telling us, it's like the new Commvault. >> So, if I look back at my career in the last 10 years or so, I've been in IT for about 20 years, for the last 10 years or so, I've been a part of launching cloud businesses for a number of some upcoming and some new vendors, such as VMware, IBM, SoftBank and others. And a lot of that, in that process, what I've been working on is helping existing customers to move their workloads into the Cloud. We know that the market is evolving to a hybrid Cloud type of deployment model. I mean we can see that across the board with the way our customers are behaving, with the way that the Cloud vendors are behaving. But that's been a challenge because of the technology matching, right? Figuring out how to essentially put the same technology stack in the Cloud as you do on-prem to be able to move those apps over. I really started to look for companies that could bridge that gap and it could really operate in a hybrid Cloud scenario. Commvault is absolutely positioned perfectly for that in my mind, and so it's such an opportunity as we shift from our kind of act one as a great data protection company to a true hybrid Cloud data platform or data plane. >> Yeah, Carmen, maybe give us a little bit of your insight as to some of those change in roles as Mercer was just saying. Cloud is having a huge impact. You know, we've watched, you know, for years the shifting role of the traditional VAR or SI or the like, so bring us a little bit of insight as to what, today, is important to your go-to-market. >> Yeah, so what's important to our partners, especially the VARS is continuing to be relevant with our customers, right? Change is the only constant, and it's, the rate of change is just accelerating. So partners are looking for vendor partners like us to help them be relevant, to come out with the solutions that are going to be more relevant, even tomorrow. And, from a Commvault perspective, if you think about everything we've done from a data backup and a data management perspective, we've been the best in the industry, as we've just seen with Gartner and Forrester. All right, so we're proud of that. But what our partners were looking for is, where are we taking this next? Where's the innovation going to come from? So when you weave in things like Metallic that now gives our partners a consumption option. So if they have customers that want to buy software as a service, they now have that option. And then when you add software-defined storage, it takes us in to a completely different area, and you had asked Stewart about the Cloud, when you think of Cloud native applications and you think of containerization, that's changing the way backup data and primary storage data is being managed and the lines are blurring. Now with Hedvig software-defined storage, we have an opportunity to come out with integrated offers to help our partners be even more successful. >> So from a go-to-market perspective, in the last year, there's been a lot transformation, right? Not just in terms of leadership changes, but this big focus on ensuring that, as customers' environments change in this hybrid multicloud world that they are living in whether it's by design or its by acquisition or different types of growth, right? Talk to us a little bit about how Commvault foundationally is set up to really make some big shifts and big bets in new routes to market. >> Yeah, I can take that from where we were a year ago 'til now and then feel free to expand. So when you look at, we've always been a partner business, a partner friendly business. A significant percentage of our revenue, like north of 90% goes through our partners. What our partners were asking for is, hey, you guys are partner friendly, but we need you to be partner driven. So, when you come up with solutions, make sure they're channel ready, make sure they're partner ready, make sure we have our eyes on the market so that we're not just trying to sell software to our partners. We need to better understand their go-to-market models, how can we help them grow their business by offering a different variety, a variety of different services. So I think the evolution you've seen is a year ago the company made significant investments on becoming partner-first. So we've invested in channel leadership, partner leadership, not only at the corporate level but also in the field, and since Sanjay came on board, as you referenced, in February, that change is just continuing. So we're making our next level of investment in channel executives, in executives period, who have context about what channel is. And when you've lived in the channel, you've dealt with channel conflict, you bring that to the table, you bring that experience to the table. So I think you're seeing an evolution of us in our next phase of investments, helping our partners be successful, and becoming partner-first, and we've done a lot of new things with our programs that I can get in to. Financial incentives, rebates, making it easier on our partner portal to interface with us. And we're going to continue to do that, so that's we're not only just the right product choice, we're the right financial choice for our partners going forward. >> And I think, to add to that, if you look at our Metallic launch, obviously the reason we work with partners is in service of our customers. Right, that's the whole reason we partner, it's 'cause we want to great a better value proposition for our customers. And when we launched that product, a little tid bit, the company did a lot of research. Went out and talked to non, not-current Commvault customers, so potentially new greenfield customers and consistently got the feedback that they wanted to buy softwares and service applications that like that through a partner, because they could have a conversation about their entire IT environment. So it's really exciting to be in a spot where we are not only partner-first, partner-led but we're in a position where we know that this is the way our customers want to interact with us. That's number one. Number two is as we start to make some of these transitions into SaaS as we move into adjacencies like we're doing with Hedvig, it's so important to have our partners be the tip of the spear to help our customers through that journey. You know, innovation is great, but innovation also creates complexity. That's where partners help us move our customers through that journey and be successful. >> You know, we were talking to one of your launch partners earlier today and they were very excited about Metallic. On the same hide they did recognize that there is a significant change as to how they have to engage, you know, what part of the organization. You know, it's a good thing they have a Microsoft practice that this plugs into for the O365. So, bring us a little bit as to how you're helping the channel transform. >> Oh, absolutely. So, as you can see, a lot of the partners, you can see a lot of them that are here today, have moved from being pure, say in the solution of outer space, just to use as an example have moved from pure solution providers to also having MSP offerings, or other kind of services offerings, because they realize that customers want the flexibility of consumption economics while also, you know, being able to work with their trusted partner. So whether it's them, whether it's service providers who we want to drive into more of a, as a service model, and obviously we're planning to release all of this technology to our service providers to allow them to offer Commvault-based or Commvault-powered services in the market, or whether it's our great alliance partners. Companies like Nedap and Hitachi, where we have OEM relationships or other kind of very deep, collaborative relationships in the market. Adding some of these features and functions and capabilities as we move, as we help our customers to move into the Cloud, as we help them to give them more options for these multicloud or hybrid deployment models. This opens up additional apertures, additional opportunities for services, for wholistic end-to-end solutions from these partners that actually increase their ability to be relevant with the customers but also the share wallet. >> I want to get your perspective, Mercer, on differentiation, because partners, your partners work with a lot of your competitors. We know that there's a lot of coopetition, right, in technology but what is it about some of the things that Commvault is putting in place or some ideas that you have to really differentiate how you're enabling partners, whether we're talking about a VAR or a Disty or all the way up to a global services systems integrator that can deliver massive enterprise scale. >> Yeah, I can start with that if you're okay. So, it's all about listening to partners, right? Listening to what they need and what they're asking you for. Because many times a vendor becomes vendor-arrogant, right? And you're not listening to the partners. So our partners have been clear. They said we want a predictable financial model with Commvault. What translates to a program that's a full year program that gives them financial incentives so they don't have to guess what we're going to do in any given month or any given quarter with some kind of SPIF. So we've delivered on that. They've asked, number two, they said, they've said to me, and you're going to be hearing this, is you've always had great products, please, that has to continue. That's like a ticket for entry. And we've seen that we continue to lead in that space. And then I mentioned earlier about innovation. They want to know that we're going to take them into the future. So those three things are really critical for our partners. And then the last thing they ask for, which is basically a foundation across that, is field engagement. We need to be more tightly engaged with your sellers, so that we go in on joint sales calls. That we're bringing each other opportunities, and I think with the new sales leadership we have, Riccardo Di Blasio, our new CRO, our boss knows full well how to grow businesses with partners and through partners and it's by engaging in the field. And that's why we're going to have more people in the field, so that we can engage with partners and create opportunities together. So those are kind of the four foundational elements that we see. >> Mercer, I was wondering if I could get your viewpoint just in general about the channel. There was a lot of fear for a number of years about, you know, the Cloud, coming in and that readjustment. How do you think it's going? What's the general, you know, feel of the channel today, and how their interaction is with, you know, that ever-changing interaction with the big public clouds. >> You know, it's a great question, and I remember when we were first launching the cloud business as VMware. I used to go to, I built our channel model but I would introduce myself in the partner meetings with, Hey, I'm from VMware Cloud. We're here to kill your business. (laughter) Because there was a fear. And that fear, I think, in a certain way, has kind of dissipated as the market has realized as partners and mostly from the customers have realized that there is not a one size fits all strategy. The Cloud is not the solution to all IT needs. It is certainly an important part of most customer's strategy, in fact, I don't think that there are many customers that don't have Cloud as a part of their overall IT strategy, however, it's not the entire environment, and it certainly doesn't solve all needs. So, from a general perspective, the savvy partners have embraced the Cloud, they've embraced services, and they've look at it as a wholistic part of how they do business with their end customers. 'Cause as we think about, you know, to the last question, as we think about partner profitability, I think about it in two main vectors. There's margin, field engagement, revenue, and so forth, which is very, you know, this is the financial element of working with a partner like Commvault to make money. And that's obviously a very important part and that's something we will continue to invest in. Programs, and so forth, to support our partners to be profitable working with Commvault. But the other is in the practices, in how they build services, in how they build end-to-end solutions. Which, another tidbit on Metallic that some people picked up on was that we've released the telemetry APIs. Meaning that partners who are working with Metallic can see exactly what their customers are using. How are they growing? Oh, they've all of a sudden backed up a new workload. Hey, maybe they have a new project. Maybe I should call them, so I'm not waiting until renewals. I'm not waiting until the sort of forcing events to have an opportunity to place a call into my customer and say, hey, I noticed you're doing something new. How can I help? >> That insight, and sorry Carmen, we were talking about that a little bit earlier, I think with maybe with Rob Kaloustian. That was really interesting, because it really it changes the word partner, right? It can't. Because if they're actually able to follow along and maybe even make some educated predictions or suggestions to the customer, then the customer feels like, okay, you're not only selling me this, you're actively helping me optimize my deployment, learn from it and plan for what's next. So that definition of partner changes for the better. >> And I think the whole SaaS model is like the next step beyond Cloud. So you were asking me about Cloud. Very briefly, the way I've seen it over the last probably seven to nine years is, I had billion dollar VARS tell me nine years ago, don't ever try to come in here and sell me a multi tenant cloud service, 'cause I'm selling hardware. That moved to, hey, you know what? We see the customers changing. I was with a service provider. Why don't you come help us? And then a couple of years later they said, you know what? We're kind of building our own service now, so we don't need your services anymore. So, in a few, you know, three to five years, they went from stay out, I'm never going to sell a multi tenant service to quickly, well maybe not so quickly, some not as quick as others, realize that they have to get there. I think SaaS is like the next step beyond that. >> Well in this business I think if that teaches anybody anything it's never say never. Right? >> That's right. >> Well guys, thank you so much for joining Stu and me, sharing with us how things are really transforming here, but also what you're doing for global alliances and channel to really catalyze Commvault's business. We appreciate it, and we say best of luck as you enter week three? >> Yes. >> Lisa: Or day three? >> Day three, day three. >> Lisa: Gentleman, thank you for your time. >> Great, thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watchin' theCUBE from Commvault GO '19. (fast tempo music)

>> Announcer: Live from Denver, Colorado, it's The Cube. Covering Commault Go 2019. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Commvault Go 19! I'm Lisa Martin, with Stu Miniman. And Stew and I are pleased to welcome to The Cube for the first time, we have Chris Powers, VP and General Manager at HPE. Chris, welcome! >> Thank you very much, thank you. I was telling Stu earlier, you know, long time watcher. First time participant. >> All right, well, awesome, we love that. So here we are in your native area of Colorado. We were just talking about the weather which is probably a topic if you live or visit Colorado that is always an interesting conversation because it changes >> Chris: Rapidly. >> So rapidly, exactly. You guys had snow last week, we have beautiful weather. Well, at least so far this week. But I only got in last night. >> Well stick around till this weekend cause we'll have some more snow. >> All right, I brought some boots. So Chris, talk to us, you've been a long time HPE guy, let's have just kind of a status of the HPE, Commvault relationship, the partnership. What's going on there? >> Absolutely, so Commvault is key important partner to HP. We actually have an arrangement via a capability we call HPE Complete by which we actually skew up Commvault products, we go through the background working with Commvault making sure we have application integration so that customers have a lot of confidence in them. And then a customer or a partner can buy a complete solution on a single P.O. from both companies. So it really provides that ease of transaction, ease of evaluation. And then confidence in the delivered solution that they purchased from HPE. >> So confidence and simplification are great from doing a transaction. Talk to us about how Commvault and HP are working together to really have customers in this multi-cloud world that a lot of them are living in have confidence that they're able to access secure data in a way that is as simple as it can be. >> Well there's a couple things we have. We have integration with Commvault products with a number of our, across a number of our platforms. Commvault is the backbone for our HPE GreenLake backup as a service product, right? And what that gives is the confidence and the capabilities of having a cloud-like experience for your backup environment. But it's managed and controlled on premises. So it brings the benefits of both with the Commvault and Telesnap technology we've got that integrated in with our HPE Primera 3Par and Nimble platforms and that makes snapshot management much more seamless and much more of core portion of their data protection strategies. So there's a number of connection points that we have and we will continue over time to just continue to broaden and exploit that, you know, where the opportunities exist. >> Yeah, I just had a conversation with Craig Rutledge, last week about GreenLake. Bring us inside your customers and you know, how is it some of their buying patterns are changed? GreenLake's actually been around for about nine years, I hadn't been aware that it had been around that long. But you know, cloud and as a service, Commvault's talking about there's a new SaaS offering that they have. You know storage used to be just something you thought about with a box. Now, you know, software is one of the key delivery mechanisms for how I manage and deal with my data. >> That's correct. Well, you know, a lot of the consumption models changed. You know quite a bit over time. And there are more and more, we're seeing more and more of our customers really being more interested in not purchasing the box. Really, I mean the box delivers something. Really, this is shifting more towards purchasing what is being delivered, right. And so that's why these SaaS service models are really that significant. They're a market changer in a couple of aspects. First of all it changes the economics. You know from a consumption standpoint about what are you purchasing? Second thing it does, is it pushes back under the vendor more of the responsibility of the day-to-day maintenance and the activities. Right, it offloads. And so you could be using these IT, you know, compute storage services. Really focusing on them to bring your business outcome as opposed to spending a lot of your time and energy managing the infrastructure itself. >> Chris, of course we've heard a lot about data this week. One area I'm surprised I haven't heard about it much, maybe I just haven't been in the right conversations, is AI. And I know, I've talked to your peer Patrick Osborne, quite a few times about how AI is impacting your portfolio. Maybe help us understand how it fits into this whole discussion. >> Certainly, you know, it's really in two forms. One is AI to support your infrastructure management itself. Right? So a key component of our strategy is something we call the global intelligence engine. And that brings with it a combination of really monitoring what's happening within the environment. Creating from that a set of, think of fingerprints. Associated with workloads such that we can begin to trace and understand, based upon those fingerprints, if there's something changing in the environment, applying rules based AI to understand what an immediate type of response is. So that's how we're using it to simplify infrastructure management, because it is amazingly complex to what it used to be years ago. The second way though is actually bringing to market capabilities that support AI type workloads. And that's a step that Patrick's really focused on with our Mapar, blue data, integration. And it's really, so it's bringing both of those sets to marketplace. Wanting to help customers better manage their environment and then more on effectively being able to utilize those tools to then manage their businesses. >> And this is part of your, the intelligent data platform strategy that HPE is talking about. Can you kind of walk us through that IDP pitch? >> Absolutely. So, first and foremost it starts with workloads. Right? And it's workload optimized systems. That being either from your primary, from you file based from your object in secondary all the way to managing your cloud capabilities. And it's providing that workload mobility, data mobility across those platforms. We layer on top of that this notion of the global intelligence engine. Right? That I've already spoken to. And then what we have is effectively then able to make sure that we have SaaS type plugins for infrastructure management, right? Plugins and (mumbles), chef puppet and so forth. And then also optimizing from an application standpoint what is necessary from a workload standpoint from a data protection standpoint. In all of this then focused at consumers. Be it the data administrators. Be it the line of business owners being the IT infrastructure ops people. It's really this layered sort of capabilities but it starts and ends with workloads. Right? We don't talk about platforms, it's really how do you optimize the capabilities for a specific set of workloads, recognizing that the data associated with those workloads needs to transition over time. >> Chris, wondering if you have any customer examples that might be able to illustrate the power of HPE plus Commvault. >> Certainly, just reflecting back to the backups as a service, via HPE GreenLake. We have number of large customers that utilize GreenLake for the core of their operational activities. Just recently we took down a number of large deals in Europe utilizing HPE with Commvault to provide that in a backup environment managed by HPE GreenLake. >> And from the value of doing that is that you know obviously there's simplicity. You know, does that have an organizational change to how they think about their data protection once their, they leverage GreenLake. >> Well definitely, upon you know leveraging GreenLake, because no longer do you have this arm of backup administrators, you know sitting with you, within your company, right? You are procuring a service, right? You're no longer having to take care of it and manage that infrastructure, be responsible for it. And we take it upon ourselves then to also make sure that that infrastructure is being continuously updated, refreshed. Basically taking that headache of IT management away and focusing on the business outcome. >> Yeah, I'm wondering too, you could probably give a good kind of longterm view of this. How do you see that as different from the previous trend of outsourcing that we've gone through? >> So, I think that trend of outsourcing a lot of times that turned into, once you played it out over a couple of years, turned into more of a game of asset sweating. Right? And so you know, this notion of continually keeping up from a serviceability standpoint, optimizing the capabilities, I think it was more of a focus from an asset utilization play as opposed to delivering a service. I think the real change now, is delivering a service and what does that involve as opposed to like I said, arbitrating and taking advantage of an asset play. >> So when you were talking, you mention the term business outcomes a second ago and my ears perked up, so whether you're talking about whether it's a large retailer or it's a bank for example, talk to us about some of the business outcomes that you guys together with Commvault are helping customers achieve. You talked about kind of a consumer focus, but in terms of kind of like distilling that down to how an organization is maybe delivering new products and services because not only is the data protected and it's available, it's recoverable they've got the AI to be able to gain insights from it. Favorite story maybe that shows like business transformation by leveraging HPE and Commvault together. >> So I think, you know, that the best stories there are really in regards to given that we've freed up resources from that day to day operational type of activities and coupled together with last year, as you mention, that AI type understanding the insights. What it's really doing is it's allowing companies to really accelerate from a flexibility standpoint it's that notion of flexibility and speed to be able to react quickly. And we're seeing that across a large number of customers and that's really what's differentiating customers in this new, what we call the intelligence era, it's that speed and agility to adopt those new quick, adopt new business models, adopt new opportunities quickly change on a dime to recognize when things are changing and then chase after it and take the opportunity. >> So as we're here at day one of Commvault Go 19 this is their fourth event but a lot has changed for them since Sanjay Mirchandani came onboard just about what nine months or so ago, I'm just curious, you've been a partner a long time. Your perspectives on maybe this new Commvault or this Commvault 2.0 that you're seeing that HPE is partnering with? >> So I think it's refreshing, right? It builds into it a new energy, right? A new sense of focus and it's really I think as all of this within the IT industry are recognizing it's this whole notion about service and customer, really it's customer experience and the service enablement that we provide from infrastructure capabilities. I mean we are providing the tools to allow these companies to accelerate and so I think it's really great. It's really great, you know? Companies need to go through transformation, new leaders come in, breathe some different viewpoints and so forth and I think it's very healthy. >> Cultural change is always challenging to do but in some cases it's like you said, it's refreshing, they've also done a lot even with the launch of metallic yesterday just in terms of how quickly we are seeing them go from ideas to you know, to conceiving technologies and delivering them quite quickly to not just their kind of sweet spot of the enterprise, the large global enterprises, but you know down into the mid-market. So in terms of that speed and agility I think there articulating that and showing that pretty well. As to your point, customers have to have the ability whatever size they are, whatever type of industry they're in to be able to react quickly to take advantage of the next wave or be on the front of that next wave and having an infrastructure that is smart, that is optimized, cost-efficient, is as table-stakes to that. >> Absolutely, absolutely. Right, and I think what they've been able to demonstrate this week, you know, as part of their announcement said, is that flexibility, that awareness that there's continuous opportunities to be chased. >> Excellent. Well Chris, we thank you for joining Stu and Me on the The Cube today, telling us what's new with HPE and Commvault. We appreciate your time. >> Appreciate it, thank you very much! >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube, from Commvault Go 19! (upbeat music)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. Hey, >>welcome to the cube at Lisa Martin in Colorado at convo go 19 I'm assuming a man and stew and I are pleased to welcome back to the cube and Alon my who hasn't visited us in awhile, but he's kind of a big deal is the CEO of Commonwealth's on Jay Mirchandani. Sanjay, welcome back. >>Thank you Lisa. Good to be a good too. >>So exciting. This is the fourth go. I love the name go and lots of stuff. So you have come onboard to combo in about about nine months ago and man, are you making some changes? You know the analysts said combo, you gotta, you gotta upgrade your sales force, you gotta expand your marketing, you've gotta shift gears and really expand your market share. And we've seen what Combolt is doing in all three of those areas along with some pretty big announcements in the last couple of days. Talk to us about this, this first nine months here. And really maybe even, I would start with the cultural change that you have brought to a company that's been run by the Bob hammer for 20 years >>right now. Firstly, I'm very fortunate to be here because the company is, it has incredible foundation. The bones of the company, if you would, are solid a great balance sheet, um, over 800 patents, no debt, cash on the books, profitable. It's just, you know, and great, great technology wrapped around some amazing people. So when I look at the, when I look at it and you go, this is this, this is an incredible asset. My role really when I came in when I transitioned with Bob and Al for a period of time was really about making sure we didn't break anything, making sure that we kept the momentum, understood the culture, took time to talk to customers, talk to partners, talk to our employees, shareholders and understand, um, what are the focus areas that we needed to go after. And the last nine months has been about, you know, a lot of learning on my part. >>But also a very receptive group of employees and partners saying, you know, we'll give you a chance. Let's get this done, let's see where it goes. So that's where the nine months had been around and it's been a, it's been fabulous. >> So that's actually one of the things I've heard from your team is you've come in loud and clear with the voice of the CIO. Having been a CIO yourself, that's something you want them to focus on. Everybody, we always talk about listening to the customers, but you know, the role of the CIO has changed an awful lot. You know, since you first became a CIO, clouds change everything in a Nicholas CARF said for a while, does it even matter? Right. Um, so you know, Ferguson side a little bit as to how you want to make sure you're delivering for what the CIO is need. >>Not necessarily what, you know, they were saying that they want. No, it's fair. And, and as much as the role of the CIO has evolved, I don't think it's changed fundamentally. They still, you know, the guardians of the data, the, you know, the compliance and everything else and of course more than anything else, the productivity and the competitive edge that businesses need, technology and business, regardless of which business you're in, are interested intrinsically tied. Your delivery of anything you do today is tied to technology. If you, if you want to be future proof. So if anything, the role of the CIO has only been elevated. I'm, I say this playfully, but I do say it. I said, if I wasn't running this great company that I am now, I'd love to be the CIO of a dysfunctional it organization at a large company because there's so much you can do. >>Many of the decisions that we would spend an inordinate amount of time on the infrastructure, the application, how do you bind it, what are the protocols? Which data center, how much, who runs it, which partner? I kind of dissipated if you're not going to the cloud in some form of fashion, come on, right? If you're not building cloud native applications, come on. If you're not using dev ops, come on. So you've got all this time back now where you're not hopefully having conversations that don't matter and you're really go and building new things. So I think it matters. That's great stuff. And absolutely we agree. We've talked many times on the cube. It definitely actually matters more than today. If anything. Not only did they need to be responsive to the business, but oftentimes it can be one of those drivers for innovation in change in the business. >>Um, I love something you said in your keynote, you said data is at the center of everything you do because right. Most CEO's, hopefully infrastructure is something they might have under their purview, but it's not what drives the business. It's the data, it's the application, it's their customers that matters. So to speak a little bit to the role of data has changed a lot. You know, you and I worked for that big storage company where we even didn't talk as much about storage back about data back in the day. Today it's the life blood of the company. It's everything like that. >> And you know that that is one of the reasons I'm at Convolt because for the past 30 years I've been in technology, I've done app side, I've done infrastructure side, I've done a mix of all of those. And the more I think of an dev ops, I've done that. >>The more I think about it. If I were, if I was sitting with a CEO today and having a conversation about what matters in technology, who's maybe a CEO is not a technologist, I would say data matters. I would say the asset of your company is the data. It's gone from something that you used to manage down, compress deduplicate and hope it went away and you wanted to minimize its footprint to something where you want to maximize its value. And those aren't just words. I mean that is what makes great companies, great companies today, the way they use data to their competitive advantage. So this is, this is exactly the mindset where the mindset, the Guppy do to convo because all we do, all we do is help our customers be data ready. As I was saying this morning, that's, I love that term because that kind of encapsulates it for me. So that's, that's where my head's at. >> Yeah. I mean, we've always said that the thing that defines a company that's gone through debt, that digital transformation is that data drives the business. >>It, it absolutely should, but we're, when you talk with customers that have, whether it's a big university, a research university, healthcare organization or whatever type of organization that has multiple departments, so much data that potentially has a tremendous amount of value that they actually aren't managing well or can't get visibility out of. When you say we want to help you be data ready, w what does that mean to them? >>It means a few things. You summed it up perfectly. That's the world, the customer, the chaos that customers could live in because fundamentally, Lisa, if I had over-simplified applications, we're intrinsically to date data that you use for tied intrinsically to the application to build. So if you had an SAP system, your data was very tightly tied to that. If an Oracle ERP system, it was very tight detail yet it'll supply chain system. You were tied to that. And once data side of getting released from the abstracted, from the system that was built on, you've got a little bit of chaos, then you had to figure out who had access, where, how, how are you replicating and how are you backing it up over the policies, your plan compliance. And then it became chaos. And what I say to customers being data ready, saying do you have a strategy and a capability, more importantly to protect, manage, control and use that information in the way you wish to for competitive advantage. >>Just protecting it is like a life insurance policy, controlling, managing and using it as where you get the value out of it. Right? And so as companies become more data driven, this is where we help them. So the whole concept of the show, what we're sort of bringing to market is the fact that we can help our customers be data ready. And some of the technologies we've talked about today lend themselves to exactly that. Alright. So Sanjay, one of the questions many of us had coming into the show is how exactly Hedvig your, your first acquisition was going to play out. You made a comment in your, your opening keynote this morning that we need to rethink primary and secondary storage. So some of us read the tea leaves and be like, well, you know, you're selling an SDS storage, your, you're in the primary storage market as we would've called it before. >>Yes, the lines are blurring. I don't think those there. So I want to give you the chance to let us know where we're going. Years primary and secondary storage as we classified them, we're looking grayer and grayer mean they'll always be primary storage because there's always a certain user use cases for, for high-performance scale up capabilities. But a lot of the stuff was getting murky. You know, is it really primary? Is is it lower end primary, is it secondary and it doesn't, it shouldn't really matter. And with that, would that segmentation game a set of other capabilities like Oh, you know, file block, object cloud, more, more segmentation, more silo and more fragmentation. And I'm a big believer that this is all about software. The magic is in the software. And if you, if you forget for a minute that it's software defined storage as we call it today, but a set of capability's, a universal plane that allows you to truly define how customers get that ubiquity between any infrastructure that they run. >>Okay. Which in turn gives them the abstraction from the data that they bill. Okay. We've just taken a lot of workload and pressure off the customer to figure all that stuff out, keep whole manage. So I wouldn't get, I wouldn't get wrapped up on the whole storage thing as much as I would on the SA on the universal data plane or the data brain as I called it, nicknamed it in the show, you know, earlier as the left and right side one size, the data management, the other sizes, you know, traditional storage management. Yeah. Maybe I was reading too much in this. There's two brains. I think you've, you turn them sideways. They look like clouds too. But uh, yeah. Yeah. Um, partners wonder if you could speak, you know, we're talking about obviously the channel hugely important, we're going to talk to a lot of your team, but from a technology standpoint, you've got a lot of those hardware providers as well as different software companies that are here in the expo hall. >>Does metallic and Hedvig in those, you know, how will that change the relationships? I mean there's one, I've never built a business in my life that wasn't partner centric and partnerships to me is where both sides feel like they won. They went together. And so I've been very clear with our team, our channel, our board, our ecosystem that we're not doing this alone. That's not my intent. And our goal is to work together. Now we have partners in across the spectrum, cloud partners, technology partners like NetApp, HPE, Cisco. We've got ecosystem partners, the up the, the startups that are building new capabilities that we want to be, they want to be part of our ecosystem and vice versa. Traditional channel. Okay. so we've got the whole run of those, of those partnerships and we've been very focused. But we've also being very clear that we're in this for the long haul with them. Hedvig is today sold through channel and will continue to and metallic is built to be only sold through the channel. >>And you guys also, I was looking at some of the strategic changes that you've implemented since you've been here. Leadership changes to the sales organization, but even on the marketing side go to market. You mentioned that the channel opportunities for Hedvig as well as metallic, but also you guys have a new partner programmed, really aimed at going after and cultivating those large global enterprises with your SIS. So in terms of of you know, partner first, it really seems like the strategic directions that you're moving in are really underscoring that. >>Absolutely. Everything we do, every single thing we do is, you know, the question, the reviews we do, the internal inspection we do with the business. The, the way I look at the, the, the go to market conversations as to uh, the, you know, the pipeline is always about which partners involved, who's the partner involved, you know, and on an exception where we don't have a partner involved. My um, my F it's a flag to me going why? Um, no, we're, I don't know if you're speaking with Ricardo today or at some point he'll, he'll, he'll let you know exactly what we're doing there and how we think about it. And then we've just hired Marissa Rowe, I don't know, you know, Mercer and so Mercer's just come on board as our sort of partner lead worldwide. Yup. >>We're going to be talking with him as well. >>It's a cultural shift folks and we're completely committed to it. 100% committed. >>So one of the things that, that Stu and I were chatting about earlier today that you guys talked about in the keynote is in terms of how quickly metallic was conceived, design built really fast. Does that come from kind of a nod to your days at puppet where you are used to much shorter cycles? And how did, how did internally, the Combolt folks kind of react and we're able to get that done so quick. >>They embraced it. And I'll tell you, I'm, people will tell you that I'm used to saying this, this, this thing. I say that competition and time are not our friends. So we have to, we have to get out there before somebody else does. And if you're coming out with something, it's gotta be better than anybody else has. And so we all agreed there was a need for world-class solution, but we also understood that we had to do a differently doing it the way we've always built something probably probably wasn't the best answer. We needed to go shake things up because it's a different audience, a different delivery capability. But the beauty of the whole thing was that we had core technology at vault that was truly multi-tenanted, truly secure, truly scalable, which we had. This was years of, of great IP, which we took and we built on top of. >>And so we ended up focusing on the user experience and the capabilities of a SAS solution, the modern SAS solution as opposed to putting a wrapper of SAS around substandard technology. So in full credit to the team, we do 90 day releases on our core technology today. Right. So yeah, I think, I think that refresh cycle is what customers expect of us. That you know the and, and then that's what we do today. Right. So something, I don't think it's, I'm not giving myself any credit for it. Yeah. And Sanjay actually we had a customer on earlier talking about that cadence release cycle and he said to Combolt's credit, they're hitting it and it makes my life more predictable when the channels yeah. You know, and so they know when to expect something. So we have a 90 day and Tom will talk to you about this when he, when he comes on, how we get our channel ready for it, how are we enabled them, our own support so we give, so we are completely buttoned up and taking advantage of that release cycle. >>All right. Great. Sunday, nine months, you've already made quite a few moves in the test board, making a lot of pieces there from what we hear, you know, this is just the beginning. Give us a little bit going forward though those people watching what does Sanjay's next nine to 12 months, you know, foretold and as much as you think it's a lot of moving parts that we've, we've changed, um, there we're all part of a, of a roadmap that and so that, and I've been very open and public about it. When I came in there was a lot we had to do and I wanted to be really focused about getting this company back to growth and really helping you realize the potential that it had with, with its heritage of great technology, great customer base, great ecosystem. So I laid out a very simple three point plan, simplify, innovate, execute and tell. >>People are tired of me talking about it and giving me proof points that I'm done. I'm going to keep talking about it. And so simplify is everything about how we use the product, the user experience with us and how you engage with us. OK. innovators innovate in everything we do, products, experiences, everything we have to, we have to challenge the status quo and say it's a smarter way of doing it. Metallic is a complete encapsulation of that, of that energy. Okay. And the last is execute. It's all about getting out there and getting it done. Doing what we say and saying what we do. Just get it out there, get it done. And um, and I think the team has been amazing. They've just rallied around it. And if I embraced it, this is what I think this is what they want. So the changes, sorry, just sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off but it, I'll sum it up by saying that, you know, the nine months have been very focused in the direction making. Now it's about really making sure we help the company and how customers realize its true potential because the technology is great. The people are great. We're a good company. People love our technology. They stay with us forever. Because it does what it's supposed to. We just think we have a lot more to offer. Now. >>I know we're only day one at the show. Things did kick off a little bit yesterday with partners. What's some of the feedback that you've heard from those customers? Either those that have been using vault for 10 years or those that are maybe newer to the bandwagon? >>Well, somebody asked me if I had 10 cups of coffee before I went on stage in the sporting, but I think it's a good proxy for what I feel on the show. I feel incredible energy. I think that the customers, the partners, our own people, it's just, there's a buzz and you've been to shows before and some of them are just, you know, some of them have that energy and some of them are flat. Well this one's just full of energy and uh, and it's, it feels like a lot of adrenaline here and this people are excited and um, you know, I'm excited to go walk the floor. >>Well, your competitors are taking notice. There was some interesting digital signage yesterday at the airport. I noticed that that wasn't okay. I didn't, I missed it. Invitation. Highest form of flattery. Sanjay, >>I got the notice that there's, there's a lot of investment that goes into this. Uh, this, this segment of the market. It's been really hot. Um, what, what's your take on all the startups in as well as the, the, the big companies that have been putting a lot of it that it's an important space, right? Um, it's, it's, it's in the top three to five depending on which study you look at data protections back because it's one thing to have data and nothing to know that it is the way you want it. It's also a testimony to the a, it's not an easy space to get into when you're telling your customer that you're protecting them. That's a big word. Okay. I believe that you earn your way there day on day release, on release. And we've done that. I mean the animals the same good things about as in half a years we had customers on stage, you know, and it, customers don't just come up on stage and they, they really believe it. We have a, we had a pretty decent turnout at the partner event yesterday. You know, I think we're, we're in a great space at a great time and we've got 20 years of, of great pedigree that I don't take for granted as much as people sort of go, Oh, you're an old company. I go, Oh, don't mistake pedigree for anything else. You know, we've got some incredible IP over 800 active. >>Yes. >>You were sharing some of those thoughts this morning. I was looking to see where I put them. How are you guys leveraging the data that you have under management to make combos technology even better and to help make some of those strategic, >>it's this deep learning. It gives as much, you know, we applying AI implicitly. I don't want it to be an AI washing my technology for my customers. It's in there. It just works for them and it's my job to make my product better so they get more value out of it as opposed to for them to bolt on something to make my product better. So I don't, I really don't care what other shit about it. What I care about is I'm building that right into, into the intelligence. We have all the data, we know we, our customers use it, how they back it up, what their expectations are, what the SLS are, what their protocols are. We know this stuff and you, you have to, you know, we've been around enough to know this stuff. So now we're taking all of that with technologies like deep learning and machine learning and making the product better. >>So Sunday, one of the toughest things to do out there is have people learn, learn about somebody again for the, for the second time, you know, you only get one chance to make a first impression. So maybe I'd love your insight. You've been on board for nine months, you know, everybody knows Combolt it has a strong pedigree as you said, has a lot of patents. There's the culture there, but anything you've learned in the last nine months that you didn't know from the outside, he was still a pretty good secret. And there's a lot of people that don't know us as long as even though we've been around in the enterprise and and have have achieved a ton, there's still a ton of customers that don't know us and you know in our chops to get it out there. And if you've looked at our digital presence, if you've looked at how we're engaging online, it's a different Convolt. In fact, one of my favorite hashtags that's a, that that's trending at the show is a hashtag new comm vault. Is that right? I like that one. >>As I say, I might have started it, I don't know. But it is, it's an opportunity, right as to said, you know, we all wish sometimes in certain situations we could make a first impression. Again, I think you have that opportunity is you're saying there's, you have I she was saying close to 80% of, I think I read the other day, 75 80% of Commonweal's revenue comes from the fortune 500 you have the big presence with Bleagh global enterprises. This sustainability initiative that you were doing with the U N that Chris talked about. So there's, there's a lot of momentum behind that as well to take and really kind of maybe even leverage the voice of those enterprises to share with the world the benefits that Convolt provides. Like you said, data protection is hot. Again, if you have the data and it's, and you don't have the insight and it's not protected and you can't recover it quickly, then what value >>or used, if you can't use that know, why does it have to be compartmentalized where you say, Oh, that is my archive. Why can't I, why can't I say that? Yes, it is my archive, but I can, I can leverage that data for other things in my business. Okay. And so our product orchestrate allows customers to discovery to do, sorry, activate, not orchestrate to do eDiscovery, to curate information to use it for R and D to have a policy on sensitive governance needs. There's so much we can do with that, with with the data that's just sitting there, that and from different sources that I believe that at some level, protecting and protecting, managing and controlling our almost table stakes. So I'm raising the stakes uses where the magic is. >>All right, raising the stakes. Well, Sanjay, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on the cube today. Can't wait to see where those stakes are going to be. Combo go 2020 hashtag new comm volt hashtag new comm vault. Thanks Lisa. Thanks. Thank you so much. Hashtag new cobalt for Stewman eman and Sanjay Mirchandani and Lisa Martin, you're watching the cube from Cannonball. Go.

okay we're back this is Dave Volante I'm back I was just meeting with Joe Tucci and Mike cappellas and in an analyst breakout and got some good information I'll share with you a moment this is Silicon angle TVs continuous coverage of EMC world and we're live here in Las Vegas and we have a good friend Dave Cahill from SolidFire on we met SolidFire a year ago at EMC world the CEO Dave Wright popped out of Rackspace conceived and founded SolidFire to be exclusively focused on the cloud service provider market flash all flash array focused on the cloud service provider market like no other company most companies sell flash arrays all flash array sort of broad set of use cases SolidFire is uniquely focusing on the cloud service provider space and we're going to get into that with with David Cahill David welcome to the cube it would be back so you moved to Colorado a lot of interesting personal stuff going on and it's it's it's great to see you you know doing so well personally and it seems like SolidFire is really making some progress you guys are as I said before are uniquely positioned in the cloud service provider space but so why don't we get into it maybe give us the bumper sticker because you could maybe maybe add some color to what I just said yeah and then give us an update on where we're at yeah sure so so guys that are building large-scale multi tenant clouds it's a unique customer set in the last year has done nothing but validate that for us we've been in early access with a handful of partners and our cloud service providers in that regard and continue to expand out that program now and it's it's as evident now as it was then that this customer set has unique challenges around scale around automation around performance and around efficiency that you don't traditionally see in the prize and so we continue to be laser focused on that customer set large-scale multi-tenant clouds and there's plenty of them being built yeah so um so where are you at you guys go through your beta program and yeah so we're heading the crap out of the kick in the beating the crap out of the system we are heads down charging towards full GA later in the year but the purpose of the early access program really is was to get some select cloud service providers to beat the crap out of the system and let them continue to you know evolve the services that they're gonna offer based on the SolidFire system and and make it a better offering GA both from a infrastructure standpoint but also from a services standpoint because you know these guys are advancing the way that we think about the cloud cloud 100 was let's move your data to the cloud cloud 2.0 is let's move your apps to the cloud and so that's a mindset shift which requires evangelism on the part of the cloud service provider to the end customer in addition to the infrastructure right if you if you if you crack the code on the economics of high performance in the cloud you open it up to a much broader application set that's so um so actually Dave I want to see if it call inaudible here so you are you hanging out here you got it something to do after this so we are I'm around okay so Sanjay merchandani was the CIO of EMC we're gonna lose them if we don't bring him on I realized now look at the schedule yeah I take off for 20 minutes everything gets behind so if you wouldn't mind I want to bring take a quick break when I bring Sanjay in interview him and then bring you back and then pick this up with me okay all right so listen keep it right there we're going to come right back with Sanjay merchandani CIO of EMC we're right back you the cube is this conceptual box if you will we bring people inside of the cube and then we share ideas the cube is a comfortable place it's a place where people feel happy and are happy to share their knowledge with the world and we're happy to be ambassadors of that knowledge transfer yeah can I get okay we're back and this is the segment with Sanjay Mirchandani CIO of EMC now Santi has been on the cube a couple of times and really has been leading emcs transformation efforts internally so the company's not just talking about transformation actually transforming I was at the CIO event in October EMC CIO event Sanjay really he noted that event and was the sort of highlight at that show working with a number of EMC CIOs to help them understand how EMC was transforming Sanjay was a really first of all welcome to the cube thank you good to be here and so that was a great event it was the MCS first real effort to bring together CIOs and and they used you EMC usually was a showcase which is smart you guys are doing some internal transformations but there was a lot of interest around what you were doing obviously a lot of talk about infrastructure transformation but also new metrics and things like that what did you take away from that event well you know the whole thing is that people want proof points the whole thing today is about proof points and we've been on this journey first in virtualization then we move that to cloud and we've now incorporated obviously big data into that but nobody builds infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure you want to drive value out of it and we translated value for the business for EMC is a customer internally around agility speed time to market and there's been a shift in the way our internal customers think about things because it's all about hey give it was faster doesn't have to be perfect out of the gate but give it us quicker so we could work together and get it right so we've been we've been we've built out our cloud and now we're working through the layers of in layers on top of that of that cloud of you words are things like platform-as-a-service true business intelligence as a service connectivity between our infrastructure and our legacy applications or if I have the liberty of building our new applications how do you do that and then on top of all of that these devices we're having thousands of these devices a month into the network how do you bring a true user experience and give our users productivity outside of email mm-hmm on this device so that's what we took away that customers were interested in these layers so so when I hear something like VI as a service I think I get excited as a business person I said can I get access to a self-service bi portal right and actually begin to interact with data you know without having to call up you know an army of IT people is that the vision is that you're actually doing that right right and right so talk about the hello yes we should go it's actually very exciting because it's the first layer of value that we're adding directly on top of our cloud infrastructure right so the number one area where you have rogue IT or shadow IT whatever you like to call it is some form of business reporting so users will say IT can't provide me my reports fast enough or IT can't provide me the reports the way I want them or in the format that I want them or as frequently as I want so it's usually shadow IT usually the big percentage of it is there on some kind of reporting system so what we decided to do was we built a cloud infrastructure we've got the capabilities we've got green plumbing plays so what we're doing is we're creating as much of this data that the custom that our internal customers want access to give them one version of the truth so you take away the noise about where is the data and instead spend time on two things helping our internal customers build the skills to do the analytics the way they wanted and give them data scientists as a service as a human service to really enable them because we see the data left to right nobody else does all elements of data within the company mm-hmm so so we give them data scientists as a service and we'll give them the ability will give them skills around tool sets that they want to use a Microsoft reporting tool or SAS or something else on top of the green flap we're enabling the platform we're enabling some competency around the tools when we're enabling data scientists with subject matter expertise in the data and then the and then our internal customers can go off and have a nice day with that information any way they want it so how do you deal with the issue of credentials like who gets to see you which data well obviously we put business rules behind all that so our security officers involved you know and we we are now tearing the data based on access based on you know profiles etc so all of that has to come together so it's not an all-or-nothing formula you know we're bringing best practices into play and and making sure those those are things that you understand how to do in a traditional world right and and if it's rogue IT or shadow IT as you you know that now comes into picture so you have better control over that stuff yeah so um we actually just did you mentioned shadow IT we just did a survey on IT transformation we had one of the questions we asked is you know what percent of your your IT budget or organization's IT budget is managed by a centralized organization and only about when I say only about 38% said 100% yeah so if more than half had some kind of shadow IT and about 20% had a 25% of the spend or more going to shadow I mean and let's be honest it was cloud computing stuff that was in the arsenal of IT for years is out in the open you can get access to the credit card for the same amount of infrastructure and in a drop of a hat that my IT guys need so it's just shadow IT has gone out of the dark corners of the organization right into the open into the plow yeah it's okay you know and so it's a whack-a-mole syndrome yeah so we're saying you got to either embrace it or get out of the way yeah and so you know the pitch that my my leadership team and I are making to our organization is we have to be the brokers of value it's not about authorship it's not about where it was built or where it was written it's about how soon can we add value to the business and we have to be the brokers of value all right and not it's not all about hey if it wasn't written here it isn't good enough for this for this company so yeah you've always been very forward-thinking about that I mean you know shadow IT freaks out some people oh we got to pull it in but you're like okay fine so now I want to tie it into the messaging that you were hearing at EMC world so it's it's IT transformation transform IT or sorry its transformation transform IT business and in yourself yeah we've said okay IT transformation that's about the cloud the new new cloud infrastructure Bob as well the business transformation is about data unlocking data value data value and then self obviously will you make cloud architect maybe that's a piece of what I'm gonna talk about to are so-so is that a reasonable way to look at what the messaging is and how that maps from a practitioners perspective and I'm trying to squint through okay how much of that is marketing and how much is actually implementable so you've talked about the the cloud transformation internally at EMC IT as a service um how about the data piece you talked about bi self-service bi but how about even going beyond that you're actually getting into that point where you're leveraging that yeah are you able to monetize yes great question by the way and there's lots of new answers to that to that question because when you chunk something down to saying you know IT is about you know transforming I tease about infrastructure well transforming IT is about infrastructure self service automation cataloging and creating the capability to present IT as a service did that make sense yeah my goal is to break down the big black box of IT into little box black boxes of IT so customers internally can pick and choose what they want at the price points they want and at the service level they want and I present that up and as much of an automated Service Catalog as I can now that is transforming IT there's a lot of process transformation alongside technology transformation and the you as human transformation which I'll get to in a minute once I built that what do our internal customers want they want big data we talk about big data they want Anytime Anywhere computing capabilities so if you've got that sleek little MacBook Air in front of you or the latest Android device that has showed up at your door or an iOS device they want to be able to compute any way they like on any form factor any screen anywhere we have to render that so for us today Mobile is an opt-out strategy so you ever tell me explicitly that you don't want mobile when I give you a solution it's automatically opt-in yeah two years ago it was the other way round hello I mean okay now how do you do that you do that based on the fact that I've got a cloud infrastructure and I'm building mobile capabilities on top of that bad infrastructure to expose elements of that data manage those devices create that user experience on top of that infrastructure security apps the hole in your login monitoring authentication you know so on and so forth and so how do you do that so that's that's to be transforming you know the business how they use it how they consume it what they want to do with it etc said differently in the first so transformed IT transformed the business is transformed IT was building the factory floor building the production line it was all about IT transform the business is all about the business it's where you're building the widgets you want off that factory floor transform you is what gets the lease attention but it's probably the most pivotal thing in all of this is the bits are gonna be just really cool bits on the on the data center floor unless somebody knows what to do with them and really drive value with it and so for me the focus of my leadership team and myself is not so much just about the architectural roadmap but it's bringing the thousands of people that are involved with IT whether it be our own people or partners that helped us along with us in this journey in a way that they're showing us the way I mean I could come up with s best roadmaps somebody's got to make them happen yeah and I think you're hitting on a really important point you know the people piece we always sort of ignore that we talk about the technology but you know well when you look at the spending that goes on in this industry the vast majority of his own people which you know on the one hand says okay that's important we're investing in our people but we're in a labor-intensive IT economy and and that's stifling innovation you've talked frequently as have your colleagues about the 70/30 mix 70% goes to running the business 30% goes to the innovation but decades of infrastructure investment in silos have really stifled yes innovation and so yes you got attack the processing and the people problem right or else that's not gonna change which slaves to that yeah trust me that's that's what it is yeah and so so that in order for us to move the industry forward Palmer talks about getting deeper into the business integration you can't get there you know if you're you know stuck in all this infrastructure right you sort of bring the first five minutes of my presentation you know and and but that's exactly true you know we've we've you know we say 70% is lights on 30 percent 25 30 percent is innovation it's not even innovation it's just new stuff compared to old stuff yeah it's not me I mean yeah yeah that's that's the binary call you need to get beyond that into true innovation and and you know that that takes a lot of effort and people are so stuck in I gotta get this done I gotta get this out you know I gotta work do this work around I got a triage this problem that the technology and the processes are so institutionally complex the business has gone this way I teeka's continue to run this way because we haven't had time to move this way I think today and I say today I mean the period of the technology that were in is the technology lends itself to agility the business is open to how it needs it and open and and welcoming to how it wants it consumed the technology good enough iterate agile and it's up to IT to adapt at this point to say I'm willing to bring those two things together and really change how I do things for the business that makes sense yeah and well it does especially when the context of the IT services discussion we had earlier and we talked about you said binary you know it's either you're you're maintaining or you're doing something else right I think when organizations if you can present IT as a service can start to really align with their their their objectives of their entry to like a portfolio right run the business grow the business transform the business right and maybe align it to business unit and really start to make IT a much more fundamental part of the strategic plan and the operating plan and that's what excites me listen I had one more question for you I've been hearing a lot about propel I heard first heard a couple months ago we heard more about it last week at sa P sapphire you did yeah okay yep that Jo was just talking about Jo Tucci so you know I know talk about propel yeah I didn't use that word but he talked about OSAP and he said hey it's going live soon I heard it's going live this summer but my fifth great so what's that all about okay so you know as as here's how I like I like to think about it for a few years we were building on infrastructure and it was a drive for efficiency in the business so you it's what I call you know when you start trimming the fat but you got to build back some muscle and the muscle we were trying to build back was a cloud infrastructure and applications that took us into the future right the business wasn't slowing down their plans because I couldn't keep up with them they were going just as fast as they had to go driving shareholder value creating new markets new products getting and doing the things they had to do we were working with 10 12 year-old legacy systems like every other company in our class it grow fast grow globally acquire companies you're just trying to tread water sometimes and just stay afloat we made a conscious call up two and a half years ago to revamp our core systems align a business systems no different than a retail bank pulling out their core retail banking systems and back-end systems and putting in new ones once they've used on a main route for many years very trivial but we just we didn't just stop at the a player we're completely building out this this new line of business solutions on and on what is essentially an EMC VMware RSA and partner friendly technology so it's s ap on the top and the a player Vblock architecture we've used in the spring frameworks gem fire all of the other products you know the middleware products that that allow us to move into the cloud from VMware all built on a V you know running on everything V yeah right so the only thing that we're bringing over over 12 years is data that we're spending a lot of time transforming so they're ready for big data and the database physically everything else is brand-spanking-new so at every layer of that stack we are transforming IT the business and ourselves I mean if you know what I encapsulate the the the the theme for this event we're living it July 5th my team's been working for the last couple of years the last couple of months have been torture as you would imagine anything of the scale you know we closed the quarter we turn on the lights the next morning and we're in a new system and we got to take our users through it so you know the teams in the next you know stellar job but we still have a little bit ahead of us so I said you'll be in the beach but Sanjay's team as the IT I always pulls the shorts we don't get we don't get a long weekend we don't get a very long month actually Dante merchandani one of the best CIOs in the business we had Oliver Bushman on last week and other real innovators I really appreciate names good to be here as always I keep it right there and we'll be right back

okay we're back this is Dave vellante and silicon angles continuous coverage of EMC well we're back with Dave Cahill we had to take a break to interview Sanjay mirchandani and Dave thanks for letting us call inaudible there we were talking about SolidFire you unique focus on cloud service bars you're the only all flash array company focusing exclusively on cloud service providers you were talking about how you're in beta you're working at aha get a lot of good feedback bring us back to that and give us a quick update on that program yeah so we are like I said before we're in early access for the select group of cloud provider customers will continue to beat on the product with them over the course of the next few months and then towards the end of the year will go full GA to the broader market you know when market focus from our standpoint is large-scale multi-tenant clouds and where that's most prevalent today is public clouds large-scale virtual private clouds and private cloud providers yeah so um seen a lot of action in this space obviously across the entire hierarchy right and we saw EMC were here at emc world they just made a big acquisition I don't know how big actually there's a lot of rumors about the number yeah yeah I had rich Napolitano on earlier the acquisitions going to be part of his group and he said we never announced the number you don't know that I'm I said I called 400 the globe did I called 400 the global be fact what they'd say for 20 30 for 30 I had called 400 but I mean you know yeah the mark is frothy but it's a huge market it's got to be 20 plus billion yeah you know of total available market and you guys got to be excited about that on the one hand it's validation on the other hand it might be like oh oh yeah now we got to move yeah you know it when you're at the intersection of flash and cloud your life's noisy to begin with right and so in some ways EMC doesn't do us any favors by paying for 30 million for extreme I oh but but at the end of the day it's an incredible validation of the opportunity and the opportunity here isn't flesh EMC did not pay 430 million for flash they paid for a next gen art architecture capable of scaling out on a new medium and that's the difference I mean you can look at this market and it is it is so noisy and everyone's raising their hand and throwing I ops in a box and saying I'm in business but the trick is you know when you're architecting for scale it's a totally different set of design constraints and I think what you saw with emc is they're so close to the flash market that they were able to see that hey you know what we cannot retrofit an existing architecture into this problem we need to go get our own you know extreme IO slot it in they grabbed it early enough they can influence development they can spread it across their lineup I mean I think it's a great move but for us it's an incredible validation of the challenge that we're trying to solve every day which is scale out next-gen scale-out storage systems with flash as a means to an end but but flash is just the beginning of the story otherwise you're dead in this space so you're saying that the EMC moved to acquire extremely Oh was an admission that can do that the traditional controller-based architectures aren't going to cut it in this market space and so they had that piece with the enterprise flash drives and they had a PCI you know connect with VF cash and is a big opportunity in between that they were missing well I mean you know they have a whole portfolio right they called it baskin-robbins you could take you take VF cash you take thunder whenever it comes out you take extreme I oh and then you take their legacy and then you let you know emc Salesforce as long as you position it accordingly have at it but the trick is you know when do those flavors start dripping into each other right and as long as you segment them based on workload of customers that appropriately that's fine this is the key Dave the software and the management capabilities around that infrastructure and that's you know listen the flash is a is a commodity component of the architecture you know we're in and to me it is it is just the beginning of the innovation you take this hardware without the ability to scale without efficiency without performance control without complete automation you can't drive the economics necessary to take this flash and you know let's go at two for two or three percent of the market today with super high performance I ops to open up the rest of that market you need software and you've got to crack the code on the economics of efficiency automation performance control to open up that market much wider than just that two to three percent of the workloads that needs screaming fast I ops you know last year at vmworld we talked to some of your early customers and one of the things that we uncovered in those discussions was their different from the traditional enterprise guys right there thinking about running a business we were just talking to Sanjay Mirchandani about transforming IT go do an IT as a service and I'll tell you he's way ahead of the average I teashop most I tea shops are just starting to think about this transformation where's cloud service providers that's their business yeah and so one of things they said to us was look we're looking we're interested in the capability that companies like SolidFire bring because we can add value on top of that or we can sell that value to our customers right so it's not a cost plus model it's a hey this is something you need and you'll pay through the nose for because it's quality of service around applications is that is that bearing out to be true in your early beta trials and I mean this the cloud provider market is survival of the fittest right the biggest difference at the highest level is you know you've got guys traditional enterprises where I t is a cost center for this cloud service provider set I t is a profit center right and these guys look at it in terms of quality of service cost of service or breadth of service and if they're not improving or differentiating relative to the gorillas in the space on you know quality of service cost of service of breathless service that they're going to be out of business and that's the mandate that they have and so it is totally about delivering a service to their end customers not just turning a bunch of knobs to a captive user base which is what traditional enterprise IT is about ok so I'll give you the last word you know what's next what should we be looking for from from from SolidFire over the next six months yeah so from a SolidFire perspective and I think the most interesting thing for us is is just heads down and development right now so over the next six months we're going to continue to push forward with the early access customers let them prove out the solution and let them start to charge to market with their respective services and also I think you're going to see the market developed as well where cloud providers realize that it's not just about hosting data they need to host applications they need to compete on breadth of services relative to Amazon and for that that requires different mindsets and requires different architectures you think we're going to see you emerge this year a new definition of what's what was traditionally known as tier 1 storage you know the emc v-max the the IBM ds8000 HDS I mean those are it goes guys are the only tier 1 players you think that we're going to see a new definition there that's around multi-tenant around supporting horizontal applications across the port so I don't as much look at it in terms of tears I always break the market into either workloads or customer sets and I think of or than anything else you're going to see this customer set continue to emerge that cares about large-scale multi-tenant cloud environments yeah when I say to I don't mean tiering I don't confuse you with that I mean do you mean the last you're right versus module yeah ok ok all right ya know in that sense I do think that yes there is a new class of guys going at that performance tier I mean that's another thing that emc did with extreme IO is you know look at the Prophet pool that was at risk where is the MC you know that sin is flowering and market right edge end of the day 430 million is because of barges nothing yeah relative to the opportunity there Dave Cahill hey thanks very much great to see you man right that's all a good trip back keep it right there with right back