>> [Announcer] - Live from Nashville, TN it's the Cube covering Commvault Go 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> [Stu Miniman] - Welcome back to the Cube's first time in Nashville, TN here at Commvault Go. I'm Stu Miniman and with my co host Keith Townsend and happy to welcome back to the program, Dave Kloempken, who's the global Sales Director with Cisco. Dave, thanks so much for joining us. >> [Dave Kloempken] - I appreciate the opportunity to be here. This is great. >> [Stu] - Alright, so we've been talking this morning with some of the Commvault executives and ecosystems and partnerships are of course really important. Where they sit, they're a software company. They work with partners to do appliances and they've had a partnership with Cisco for a while now, But been some updates. So, maybe give us your view point about the partnership itself and give us the news that was announced this week at the show. >> [Dave} - Yes, so Commvault is a kind of critical partner for us so it leads to us doing like more of a portfolio sales approach. Which is important when we're out competing in the marketplace. And if you like at from a Cisco perspective, we sell convergent infrastructure solutions. We sell hyper convergent solutions. They run companies, mission critical business applications. And in the past, we hadn't really participated in that data management part of the business. And that's really one of our key core pillars going forward and Commvault is a key partner, especially in the enterprise space, is where we think we can really be successful. >> [Stu] - Yeah, Dave, drill us in a little bit more. I think at Cisco. I mean Cisco really drove that convergent infrastructure marketplace when you talk about the partnerships with IBM, with the VCE, Dell EMC activity and many other storage partnerships. I mean this is billions and billions of dollars of the foundational layer for lots of enterprises around the globe. So, data of course, a critical component of that. What do Commvault and other partners like that what do they mean to that overall solution? What are you hearing from your customers? >> [Dave] - So, in this part of the convergent infrastructure business, we have a lot key partnerships and from a Cisco perspective we own about 60% of the server part of that business. So, we're really the market leader in that area of the business. And what we're seeing, though, is our customers are looking for more than just that. So, they're looking for us to expand into other areas. So, it could be analytics. It could be data management. It could be IOT. And those are all really critical. When you think about probably the past decade or so, I would say we see an infrastructure led kind of part of the business where customers stored vast amounts of data. But they really didn't use it. And today what we're seeing is really the applications and data arcing. We're seeing that customers want to gain valuable business insights. They're looking to gain competitive advantage. They have to protect the privacy of that data. So, you think about things like GDPR and other global regulations. You think about big data. But now artificial intelligence is really taking off. The intelligent edge with IOT and analytics. Again, to use the data competitively. So again, we think it's more of a infrastructure led world where really data is kind of that new oil. >> [Stu] - Alright, so we know Cisco has a lot of partners. Commvault has a lot of partners. The branding that you have together, if I understand, is Scale Protect. >> [Dave] - It is. >> [Stu] - Just give us the thumbnail, why does one plus one Scale Protect equal more than the sum of the parts? >> [Dave] - So, with Scale Protect there's a couple of things. It's Cisco and Commvault going into offer a complete data management solution. It provides that seamless scale ability. Also, what it does is it provides us the ability to kind of scale and simplify the customer experience. If you look at kind of Legacy Data Protection, or Data Management Solutions, you have lots of touch points, lots of activities, lots of configuration, lots of room for error to go on. So, if we can use best practices and really optimize that performance, to scale seamlessly; that really provides a customer with a much better solution than you're going to get in kind of the old Legacy or even if people are selling things differently. >> [Keith] - So, Dave let's talk about some of the drivers behind the deepening of the partnership in Cisco bringing a complete data management solution with both Commvault and Cisco to customers. You mentioned, obviously, compliance data recovery they are important things. But what about this data movement theme that we heard this morning on a show forward. Customers want this flexibility between on-prim and off-prim public file private cloud. >> [Dave] - Sure, so we see lots of customers talking about moving data, moving work loads. Even moving data centers to the public cloud. And what we see at Cisco, and what we even see IDC kind of supporting, is that 90% of our customers are really in a multi cloud world. And when you talk to a customer, you're probably going to hear them talk about two or three private clouds. We have customers that have three public cloud vendors. Hybrid clouds, SAS environments. So when you look at that, we see the kind of new normal or distributed data center. Where you have applications and workloads spread across all these different environments and platforms. And some of the key things, from a Cisco perspective, is what ties all that together. It's the network. It's foundational. Obviously that's a core competency of Cisco, it's where we excel. They talked about performance today, and it's where performance is critical. So being able to get data in and out of those environments, is just really important. >> [Keith] - So, we have data and we have data. We have the transport of data which Cisco is obviously expert in helping you get data from point A to point B. Then we have the data of the storing of the bits. So, talk to us about how customers have benefited from that complete Cisco story coming from using Commvault to help at that storage layer, and then Cisco at that both compute in the data center and the network layer that connects you between the data center and the public cloud. What unique value is Cisco bringing to customers? >> [Dave] - So we have the ability to do a number of things. So, customers are going to look at... What are the two key things that customers are looking at? It's data and applications. And when they look at data, they have to kind of decide where and how do I want to store it. They have to understand, how am I going to manage all the growth? How am I going to protect it across all these environments? So we have the ability with Cisco to go ahead with primary storage, to manage that. With secondary storage, we can manage it on-prim. And we obviously have the network that can connect people to their various private and public clouds, as well. And so that's really our key value proposition. >> [Keith] - So you're Director of Sales. Who are you having this conversation with with the customer? Is this the Director of Infrastructure, the networking group, the storage group as we see the consolidation of activities, who's the audience? >> [Dave] - So I think it depends on what the kind of story is, obviously. I'm going to give you the "it depends" insert. When you look at probably data protection, it could be storage or back up type of folks. When you look at servers and hyper conversions and things like that, it could be server or virtualization teams. When you look at a multi cloud environment, you start to go up that stack. So, from a Cisco perspective, our ability to go up to various levels and various groups in a company, is really why we're successful. All the way up to that CxO level. >> [Stu] - Dave, when you talk about customers having a multi cloud environment, what we find is they want to have that really cloud experience wherever they are. It's really more about that operating model than it is about the destination of it. When I think back to hyper conversion infrastructure, that really was some of the ideas. I want to have some of the same flexibility. We heard Commvault this week expand their as a service offerings, which get to the purchasing models. Bring us inside what Cisco's doing with hyper flex, with Commvault and what you would call my own data center that might be if I owned it. >> [Dave] - Absolutely, so when we look at kind of data center modernization or that new normal, hyper convergence is one of the key disruptors in the data center architecture today. And customers are looking for three or four things. They're looking for simplicity. They're looking for consolidation. How to I consolidate, compute, network and store it. And how do I have that more cloud like experience that can reduce the complexity of the data center. So, what we're seeing is that hyper convergence market is pretty hot, it's growing at 80% per year. Our versions of that is called hyper flex. Its focus is on mission critical business applications and agile provision that can reduce the complexity. But the nice thing is in the next mid December, we'll have integration with Commvault and TeleSnap built into hyper flex. So you can do snap shotting from hyper flex. So that is some of the new things that are going to be coming in the next couple of months. >> [Keith] - And then we always like to talk about day two operations. What are the concerns customers are having when we start to expand out these relationships, these alliances? What are some of the concerns and answers to that concerns that customers are having when it comes to this kind of split mold support? >> [Dave] - Yes, so it does introduce some complexity into the discussion. But the things that Cisco does really well is we have a couple different offers that we can provide the customers. One is: we'll take the first call. So we can take the first call on a lot of our third party relationships. Which is important. And we can also sell a much more detailed solution support, kind of a contract. Where we'll take second and even third calls. On the whole stack, basically. So those are some of things that we offer. I mean, we have a global tacker or call center It follows the sun. It's first in class. So when we're able to take those first calls, or even do additional kind of services on top of that, that's pretty significant. The other thing is, we work with partners. Partners are probably 90% of our business. And partners provide a lot of services and bring, they're really the glue that brings a lot of these different solutions and vendors together, as well. So I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about one of the key value propositions of Cisco right now. >> [Stu] - If Cisco just let go to market power that Cisco and the Cisco channel have, are one of the leaders in the industry out there. Give us a little more color as we talk to how you get these solutions, joint solutions, out to the marketplace. >> [Dave] - So I handle actually the whole solutions business for the data center part of the business and we have lots of partnerships. And we do it a number of different ways. From an engineering perspective, we do what we call validated designs. Where we basically insert best practices and we can help partners and customers with step by step on how to install and implement a solution with the best practices that ensure best optimal performance. We do all kinds of reference architectures, white papers. I mean there's a meriot of engineering work that we do. And then from a sales perspective, we obviously work very closely with our partner sales organizations. We're going to go ahead and put together programs and initiatives to go out in the market. It might be a competitive take out. It might be broader than that. And then we also we'll probably choose a certain number of channel partners that we want to work with together jointly to go ahead and put programs together and drive the go to market out into the customer bases. >> [Stu] - Dave, really appreciate all the updates on what you've got here. Congratulations on the updates with Commvault and Keith and I will be back with more coverage here from Commvault GO 2018 in Nashville, TN. Thanks for watching The Cube. (upbeat music)