(upbeat music) >> From Tavern on the Green, in Central Park New York, it's theCUBE; covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome to the heart of New York City. We're here in Central Park the Tavern on the Green. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're covering the Veritas Solution Day; hashtag Vtasday. So, Scott Genereux is here as executivee president of world wide field ops for Veritas. Scott, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you good to see you. Thank you. >> So, I love the location. A lot of our crew, they've never been here before; I said wait until you see Tavern on the Green, it's sweet. Customers love it. So, why this location? What are you guys doing with the Solutions Days different than the big tent event? You guys have gone to a more intimate format, explain that. >> Yeah, so last year we did the big event. We also did regional events, and it was interesting. And when we looked at the regional events; the input from our customers was; they loved the idea of doing something local, a little bigger, so they didn't have to travel. You know it's just difficult to get somebody to come out fly across the country to spend a week. And so, we decided to do 20 of these around the world. We also found out last year that the number of people who were coming to the regional events; was very very large. I mean some of our events we had four, 500 people coming. So it just made a lot more sense to us is; how do we get close to our customers, make sure they didn't have to travel; and be able to touch 'em so. >> So, collectively you're probably hitting as many if not more people. >> A lot more. >> Probably a different type of audience too when you go. So, you're doing a bunch in the US and a bunch in overseas right? >> Correct, yeah, so we've got New York, Chicago, San Francisco, we got one in Washington D.C. focus on the Fed, and we have one up in Toronto in North America. And then we've got 'em in Latin America. >> So you've been a kind of customer success executive all your life; you spend a lot of time in New York City. A lot of customers down here. A lot of the more advanced and sophisticated customers here. So, what are you hearing as you see digital transformation, big data, cloud, multi cloud; people are changing the way in which they think about data, and protecting data and getting more value out of data. What are they telling you here; the challenges that they're facing and where do they want to go with Veritas? >> You know the exciting is that look, we're still the market leader, right? Well, people say what's going on with Veritas? We're the market leader, we have been for the last 15 plus years. And, the people we're doing data protection for today, are the largest of the largest. You know, 95% of the Fortune 100 use our technology. 85% of the Fortune 500 use our technology. So, we get a lot of information knowledge experience from what you would argue and I would too. The customers here; which are the toughest of the tough too, right? I mean, they're not always nice, they tell you what they think. And they're thinking you know, two three years out of what we have to go do to support those environments. So it's interesting; you know the big thing going into this year, there was a lot of conversation around compliance. You know, GDPR in Europe was huge. And really, I kind of narrow it down to P.I.I. Regardless if you're banking, healthcare, whoever. The whole question around how do you protect data? Where is my data located? Who's touching my data? Has just become a bigger and bigger issue. And then you throw in the word cloud and as you said multi clouds, no one's using one cloud. All of a sudden your data is spread out all over the place. So, how you focus on that, how do you have visibility on that, becomes more and more important. And obviously that makes data protection, center of what's going on with customers now. >> So there are a couple of vectors now there that I'd like to explore. One is the idea that we're now looking at data protection to get more value out of it. You talked about GDPR, privacy, things of that nature. So, I want to talk about that. But also, the last thing customers want that I talked to; they don't want yet another stove pipe of data protection. And as you go, every cloud has it's own back up approach. So, I'm curious what you guys are doing. Let's start there. Are you putting in some sort of a extraction layer to be able to service all of those different multi clouds. Which cloud companies are you working with? >> Yeah, so first of all we serve all major cloud providers. For us, we're very agnostic in the sense of we don't care where your data is located; it can be behind your Firewall, it can be in Amazon, it can be Microsoft, it can be in Google, it can be in a pseudo what we would call more of a regional, you know, a sass type cloud that you support based on something uniquely in your environment. So we don't really care on where it's located. And that's actually one of our big positives. But you're right, one of the big issues customers have today is okay they start out and they might use Amazon for test development. Amazon has their own way of moving data into the cloud. And what do you do and how do you protect it? And then you go all of a sudden Office 365 because that's the you know, the Microsoft way of getting into the cloud. And so now you've got two clouds. Oracle's pushing you to do clouds. So you've got an Oracle cloud probably right? And we can go down that whole list. So everyone is driving a cloud strategy. But the problem customers have today is; they don't want to have six or seven different ways of on boarding data applications into the cloud, and they also do not want to have different ways of moving data or protecting data. And I think, so for us what we do that's very different is that, we have software that allows you to move data and applications into any one of those clouds the exact same way. I mean, if you think about it today. When you think about data replication, or protecting data; a lot of customers use hardware replication to move data. Well, the problem you run into today, when you think about it, is that the traditional cloud vendors, we just listed who they were, they don't use traditional hardware. No one's using EMCSRDF in the Amazon cloud. No one's using Hitachi's products. So, you need a software based replication tool and a data mover I'll call it, to be able to do that. And that's an area we've invested a lot of time and money on to be able to do it. And more importantly, even though I don't hear this a lot from customers any more, there was a fear for a while of cloud lock in; I don't want to be too into one cloud. We could move data between clouds also. So, you know, you don't have to bring it back and bring it back forward. So, that also makes customers at ease of how do you manage it. But it just creates a whole different environment of what to do and how to do it. >> So you're not in a technical role at the company but when you're in this business and you talk to a lot of technology people, you have to be conversant in technology. So I'm curious, so you've mentioned the high speed data mover that's something that's always been fundamental to the Veritas architecture. But you've done some other things. I've got briefed and seen some of the videos of what you guys done on 8.1.2. There's components of that are really different. I mean, modern software, micro services based architecture. >> Yep. >> That have allowed you to actually create this multi cloud sort of affinity. Maybe talk about what's the conversation like with customers with regard to modernizing your platform. >> Right. I think two things; you know it's interesting, the two things that customers always have asked us for is a new U.I. interface. You know now it's interesting like anything, customers have used us for 10 years. There's customers who love the old interface right? >> Right. >> But today, when you think about cloud or think about particular work loads, which is probably more important. You know, it's no longer the back up administrator who might have to do everything. When it used to be just the back up person, you know, having the way we used to do it, made a lot of sense. But now, you're basically grabbing someone who could be the virtual machine administrator. It could be the cloud person administrator. It could be security. And those people don't have a background in data protection. So the question is, how do you give them an interface that makes it easy for them to understand and use to be able to administrate that. So now the back up administrator can actually create groups inside of net back up. And allow those organizations to be able to look at their environments and be able to manage it very differently. So, and it's the same thing with work loads. When you think about it today, most of the data growth that we're seeing, it's traditionally not, it's not the Oracle work load, SAP work loads. 60 70 plus percent of our largest customers are creating new data based applications on non sequel stuff. It's Mongo, it's Casandra. So the new 8.1.2, supports all those environments. We didn't do that before. So that's a great interface for us. Because those data bases don't natively do back up well. The Hadoop, data analytics; huge amount of data being created there. It used to be that it used to be a sandbox; a playground. But those applications have gotten to become you know important in these customers. And so it used to be you just used to take a snap shot of this stuff and you would have about 20 copies of peta bites of data. Now you can do point in time back ups using those types of products. So 8.1.2 has that type of support in it too. And we've done a lot of stuff around VM ware specifically, focused around new innovative things that we needed to do to modernize the products. >> So those emerging work loads like not only sequel but you know, Mongo, Hadoop, etc cetera. That's now native to your stack, correct? >> Completely, yup. >> Okay, that's different. Because you've hardened that. A lot of companies in your business; maybe the some of the newer guys have to go to a partner to find those capabilities. >> Right. >> So, that's I think, big. The other thing I heard was, cloud like I think I heard self-service essentially for some of the liza business folks. Or whomever that you don't want to send them necessarily back to the back up admin. Do it on your own. Here's some policies they'll make it kindergarten proof. >> Right. >> Okay, so that's a trend you're seeing as well. >> Yes, yes, completely. >> Okay. I want to come back to something you said before, this other vector, which is other uses for back up or the back up data then just insurance. Because people don't want to pay for insurance. >> Right. >> So, you've mentioned a compliance, GDPR. I would imagine as well; when you get things like ransom ware, there's also analytics. I know you guys are applying a lot of A.I. >> Correct. >> You've got the corpus of data, just so happens that the back up data contains the data of the company. >> Correct. >> So presuming we do other things with it. So what are some of the things the customers are doing? How are they getting additional value out of the investment that they are making at Veritas? >> I think, you know, it's a couple of areas. Before we leave compliance, let me focus on one thing that's been really important is the whole question about where my data is located. This whole visual-ness of data; who's touched it last, all of that has become a really really important thing for customers because even in the natural cloud, sometimes you don't know that maybe one of the cloud providers moved your second copy of data in to a data center that is a problem for you, right? >> Physically it's in a place it shouldn't be. >> Right, yeah. It shouldn't be in a data center. It moved out of a country boundary for compliance reasons right? So, you know, we've spent a lot of time and energy creating a software technology that gives you that visibility. And not just with net back up. We also plug in all the cloud providers; we also plug in Oracle, we also plug in box.net. You know I mean, so a lot of these other companies are also plugged in. So, back to your point, we've created this huge data repository of information that now allows us when you look at our future, and we talked about a little on this session earlier; data analytics, some capabilities that we should be able to go do because we have meta data to be able to give customers that visual capability. The other thing that's interesting is that visualization software, is it also tells, it finally gives customers a proof point of what we've always known. That probably roughly about 50% of their data. And I'm being kind when I say 50. Probably hasn't been touched in three, five, four, 10 plus years, right? And we've always known that. But now we actually show a customer. Hey, using this visualization software, that you're using for compliance has also now told you where the data is located and who's touched it last, and by the way it hasn't been touched forever. It allows the customer to have two conversations; one, do they need to save it? And if they do, do they move it into a glacier type environment? Or three, do they move it to a software defying storage on the customer's floor? We can help the customer migrate it after we showed them who hasn't touched it. But we also have a software defying storage solution. That Gardener just came out and said that we're number one in this space, right? So, it's one of our fastest growing pieces of our business. Because customers all the time say to me, Scott our data protection cost is going up. And the reality is, it isn't. The reality is data is growing dramatically. Storage is going up, and oh by the way I got to back up my data that sits on the storage, right? So it all kind of combines together. >> So data protection is the percentage on the spend is not necessarily increasing but everything is growing. >> Everything is growing, yes. >> So the other thing, just a couple of points that you made me think of, the other cloud that you support is on prime. >> Yes, yeah, it's still big by the way. >> So that's another piece of it. Because you got the three laws of the cloud right? It's the law of physics. You can't necessarily put everything into the public eye. Then you got the law of economics, and you got the law of the land, in which you were talking about before, >> Right. >> If you're not supposed to leave Germany, >> Correct. >> You can't leave Germany, okay. And then, so you're using analytics to help customers to determine this. And the other thing, some of the general counselors out there don't want to keep data forever. >> Correct. >> I hear a lot from vendors, oh you could now keep it forever and GC says no, we don't want to keep it forever. >> Exactly, right. >> Okay, so you're using analytics to sort of sift through that data and surface these clues. >> Yes. >> And actions to customers. >> Yes and the new thing also at 8.1.2 is we've come out with a smart meter type technology which will let customers know how much data they're using, where they're using the data? Any hot spots in the data. And it's very file based, you know, data focused. It obviously helps customers really understand who's using what where, you know. And to be fair, they can use that to help go drive costs, figure out you know maybe someone's using something they shouldn't, maybe people are storing stuff that they don't want to store. It's not just a benefit to figure what they're doing but it's also could help and drive cost out. >> Big customer base obviously, probably the largest in the business. >> Yup, over 50,000. >> 50,000 customers? >> Yup. >> You've modernized the software. Just rap it up, the competitive customer differentiation, a lot of noise in the market place. >> Yup. >> Where do you stand? What's your position relative to the competition? Why Veritas? >> Yeah, well, so for us, when we walk in to a large customer, as you can appreciate, they don't want three or four different products; back to the cloud conversation, they don't want three or four ways of moving data in to cloud, right? They really want one. And the other issue they all ran into is this compliance conversation. You, know not everybody does everything the same. And they don't all talk together. Having a single platform, to be able to give customers the capability of backing up everything from traditional work loads of Oracle, and SAP to Mongo DB, to Casandra, to Hadoop, to containers, to open source; we're the only company out there that can do all those work loads. There are start ups. And they may do one or two things really really well, or so they say they do, we don't think they do, but they say they do, and that's what they focus in on. That's not what a large enterprise customer wants. They want capabilities to be able to scale high performance, ease of use, and 8.1.2 gives that to them. And we do more work loads than any body else in the industry. >> Excellent, well Scott thanks for coming on. We are here in the heart of New York City, at Tavern on the Green. A lot of customers, I've been talking to some of those customers today, those customers, they're as tough as Yankee fans I could tell ya. (laughing) So Scott thanks agan, good to see you. >> Alright, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. Thank you for watching theCUBE from Veritas Solutions Days in New York, right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Aria in Las Vegas everybody. This is the CUBE, the leader is live tech coverage. And we're here covering Veritas Vision, #VtasVision. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Bill Coleman is here. He's the CEO of Veritas. Bill, thanks for coming on the CUBE, good to see you. >> My pleasure, thank you for hosting us. >> Well, you're very welcome. And so, hot off the keynote, how do you feel, how's the show going for you so far? >> Well, I'll tell you what. I feel verit-awesome! >> (laughs) Verit-awesome is the watchword here. Get the crowd talk of Verit-awesome. I love that you started out with a little retrospective from last year. You used the term digital twin. We love that term, and you said it's sort of grown up now. I like to think the digital twins are sort of in their adolescent or even teenage years. The data is sort of out of control. We're not hearing today a message of legacy backup. We're hearing a vision of the future. Talk about that and what that vision looks like. >> Our customers obviously need data protection. They need resiliency. They need everything they've needed in the past. But that's not what they're interested in. That's assumed, that has to work. What they're interested in is the power of information. We like to say that our mission is to harness the power of information. And it's what's called digital transformation. Being able to use all that data out on the internet with all of their data, to change how they do business. To change what their products are. To change their supply chain. It's all about machine learning, predictive analytics, and the power of information. >> So I started in this business the same year that Veritas was born. And so I saw the ascendancy of Veritas and the many different forms that the company had taken. But I used to use Veritas as an example. You want to be like Veritas, with no hardware agenda. You want to be the glue that brings things together. And I saw in the conversation today a little bit of BEA-like thinking. The binder, if you will. Binding clouds together. My term, you guys didn't use that term, but to us, that's a critical value-add, and it's all around the data. You guys talked about digital business. To us, digital business means data, and it seems like we sort of share that common belief. >> Absolutely. You know, we've called this the information age for 50 years? But it's not been about information, it's been about technology. We finally have the ability to address that information, and do it over the internet, everywhere and everything. That's really what our vision is. You know, at BEA, we saw the internet emerging. And the world had to distribute, and take advantage of all that power across the whole world. And we invented that. But the key was, when I came up with the first concept of BEA in '93, I said, "You know, by the year 2000, "the network is going to be the computer." The network needs an operating system to make it all work. Well the concept here, and the reason that I actually took this job, is looking ahead ten years. Everything's going to be about information. No organization's going to be able to exist without leveraging the power of that information. Because that's the only way they'll bring their customer the value they need. That's the only way they compete, and without it, their business is just going to go down. >> Yeah, Bill, how are customers going to leverage data? You mentioned it's about the information, it's not about the technology. But you know, I look at customers. They've had storage people, they have network people. You know, "Oh, I'm excited about containers." We spent the last 15 years focused on virtualization. Is it Chief Data Officer? Or is it some other structure that customers, how are some of the leading customers that are going to be able to adopt this, how are they changing to be able to leverage that data and information? >> Well first, you have to understand, the technology has been complex, hard to use, hard to manage. As we saw earlier in the keynotes, it's like building a Rube Goldberg device. They had 27 different software products, and 14 different hardware products to sort of work together. Well, that's all disappearing. With cloud and the internet, it's becoming like a utility. You just subscribe to it. So that goes away. Now what you have to do, what we have to do, is we have to give them the tools that they can easily, visually look at that data, determine what's in that data, be maneuvering it, move it around, like in the movie, uh-- >> Stu: Minority Report? >> Minority Report. And literally, the things we talked about today, the demos we showed can lead to that. With machine learning predictive analytics, our biggest customers are already investing billions of dollars to do that. 'Cause they know if they don't jump ahead, their competition's going to do it. It's the power of information. >> So one of the things I might take away today was not only is Veritas hardware agnostic, but in many respects, you're workload agnostic. In other words, what I mean by that is, a lot of the events that Stu and I and the CUBE goes to, the enterprise companies are talking about on prem and that's where their business is, and much of your business, of course, is on prem. But we heard a message today of, "We really don't care where it lives. "We want to be the innovator "to help you get value out of your data "no matter where it lives." Now a lot of people will say that, but you really don't care where it lives. Is that true? >> And we can't. Look at, data's not just in an enterprise's data centers anymore. They're using clouds. We've surveyed our customers. Our average enterprise customer is using three public clouds already. And they have dozens of SASS applications like Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow. Their data's in there too. That's really complex. What we've done is we've take and build the products that run in the cloud, across the cloud, to and from the cloud all by one policy orchestration. So you don't have to think about any of that. You can discover the data, categorize the data, manage the data and analyze the data all from one interface, end to end. >> So the obvious hard question follow-up is that what give you confidence that the cloud guys, once they get that workload, aren't going to just sort of usurp that agenda? What do you have to do to maintain that customer delight? >> Well, the first thing is the cloud, the public cloud providers, are our very close partners. You know, the first month we started this, Bill Voss, who heads storage for AWS, and I worked with him and Sun, came down to us and said, "Look, our customers need backup." You know, snapshots are great, but if somebody deletes a snapshot, it's gone. Your data's gone. How are you going to protect that? How are you going to analyze that data? When we want to partner with you? So we partnered with them. But the other thing he said was, "And if we do it exclusively, "the enterprises aren't going to use us." I had the CIO of one of the top five banks in the world tell me right after I started this, "We've got to be using three clouds simultaneously. "We never want to be stuck in the cloud." So the cloud service providers know that the enterprise customers want and demand that portability. And we become their, we're the premier partner for Amazon, for Microsoft, for Google, and for IBM. >> So, it's relationships. >> Right. >> But it's also innovation. >> Absolutely. >> So talk about where you are with R & D. You're purchased by a private equity company. You might have heard the narrative beforehand. A lot of the old private equity model is to suck all the cash out. Kind of the new private equity model is to invest, grow the valuation of the company. I think that's where I see you guys going. But talk about how you're able to innovate. Talk about the R & D mojo that you guys have. >> You had several questions there. >> Yeah (laughs). >> But let me start with that, with the last one. When we carved this company out 19 months ago, it became apparent that we weren't a real player in the cloud. We weren't in some of the more modern workloads. And we had to change rapidly. So, we created a strategy that led to this whole 360 data management integrated platform, software-defined storage. Integrating it with a restful API interface. And then in one year, we built seven new products from scratch that operate in the cloud, on prem, or across cloud. Automated that entire thing. We literally took the startup mentality. Now I've been a startup guy most of my life. I spent the last five and a half years before this funding early-stage startups, and the thing is being agile, and moving fast. We can move faster than anyone around now. We're a big company. Let's take Cloudpoint. We just introduced our Cloud Snapshot. That was a thought in somebody's eye in February. We defined what we needed to do, working with our customers. We put together the team. We built a micro-service end to end archistructure, and we shipped it, supporting the major, all the major cloud snapshot capability in five months, end to end. Totally new product. Now that is a startup mentality. >> Yeah, Bill, can you explain to us a little bit some of the internal plumbing of how you've managed that. On the one hand, Veritas, trusted company, strong engineering culture, product like NetBackup, you know. 15 years, leader in it's space, versus brand new stuff, whole new spaces. What staying the same, what's changing? How do you manage some of those transitions? Because you know, typical company, it's like, "We've got 7500 employees." It's like, "Well, I've got revenue streams "and product lines that I know how to do "and can keep chugging, but I've got the new stuff too." So how do you manage that internally? >> I've have a very simple philosophy of what it takes to lead a major company. You got to have a direction to go in, you have to draw higher-grade people, and you have to organize around the first two. But the key is where are you going? Where's the puck going to be in five to 10 years? And I call that the three V's. WHat's the vision of where the market's going to be? And number two, what's the value that brings to customer? The value that will justify their switching costs. And the third is, what are the values that you build your company on, that customers and partners will be able to trust and count on. So, when you start with that, we created the vision. It has to be a compelling and urgent vision. Ten years from now, all of our products are going to be obsolete. They're going to mostly be obsolete in five years. All of our traditional products. It's all going to be a microservice. Change on the fly, customers never have to upgrade kind of environment, right? There's an urgency there. And customers want to transform. There's an urgency there. The key is, based on your values, you have to develop a culture that embodies the norms to execute your strategy. And then you keep those things and balances. The cultural change has been the most profound and the most important thing we've done in this company. And this company now has a startup, win-in-the-marketplace, customer-first culture. >> So you laid out the vision. In terms of the value to customers you said, when you talk to your CIO customers and other customers, three things came out. Cut costs, deal with governance and compliance, and then help us with the digital transformation. Help us become a digital business, essentially. >> Yeah. >> So those two are pretty clear. Talk about the values that you espouse. What are they? >> So, when you start with values have to be built around what you're providing to a customer. And there's sort of three aspects of that. I'm going to give them the best possible products. I'm going to give them the lowers possible price, or I'm going to give them the best possible service that they can count on. I'm asking our customers to bet their future. So it has to be the third. So it starts with, we produce customer value, right? Then the next aspect of it is, they have to believe that what you're doing is going to be there for them, that it's going to really work. So our next one is, we're going to do that by inventing the future, to bring them the customer value. We're not going to look back and try to add features and functions where we are. We need to help them jump ahead to where they need to be. The third part of that, the pyramid there is customers are going to rely on you. So trust, accountability, ethics, integrity. Those three things come together. Then, we're all about employees, right? So, how do you empower employees to succeed, grow, and be accountable. And you put these values together, and the values will never change. The culture will evolve as strategy moves, and keeping in balance means you're going to have to reorganize on a continual basis around where you are in your strategy. I told this company, we're going to be reorganizing continuously, at least once a year. We're about to do a pretty fundamental reorganization in parts of our company. And this is second time in six months. But you have, you know, you have to be an agile organization. >> Bill, the venture community thinks that this is a hot space. There's a whole number of startups, highly focused. Obviously they're smaller than you, don't have the breadth of products. How do you look at the marketplace? What do you say about that aspect? >> Well, as I said, I spent five and a half years in early-stage venture. >> Yeah. >> We had the highest return fund for our first fund of multiple of any venture capital company. I really love that world. Venture capital is the the center of invention, the center of innovation in this country, in the world. You know, back in the 40s, 50s and 60s, you used to have these big corporate labs. You know, Bell Labs, Sarnoff Labs, et cetera. They don't exist anymore. It's all done by these. So they're inventing the future. Now the difference between the pre-dot-com era and after is, the vast majority of startups are, well, the the vast majority have failed. >> Will fail. (laughs) The vast majority of what's left are acquired, and a few go public, right? So to me, number one, they are the laboratory. They are in the areas that we that are merging, and that we don't necessarily have a core competence, we want to look on how to do that. In BEA, in six years, I did 24 acquisitions to build the company. I never acquired anything that came to us. It was all, here's part of our strategy, we need this competency, we need this time to market. How do we make it work, right? Matter of fact, there was a joke. BEA stood for Built Entirely on Acquisitions. (hosts laugh) >> Well, people used to, Larry Elison himself used to denegrate people for writing checks, not code. And then, of course, he changed the software business with (laughs) some big checks. Well, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the team. So when you took over here at Veritas, you mentioned off camera, you started with the team. How did you go about that? Maybe describe, add some color to the team. >> You know, like I said, one of the three pillars of my management is hire great people. And if you're going to transform a company, if you're going to do a turnaround, it has to start with the leadership team. Period, you can't start anywhere else. But you have to have a leadership team that shares the vision, shares the drive, knows how to work hard together. And when they walk in that room, there's not one thought about my organization or my career, or my compensation. Because they all know, if we make this work, all the rest can take care of itself. Now, when you're doing these sort of things, there are certain times in certain organizations, that people's skills are optimal. You know, the group that was managing this as part of Semantec, they weren't necessarily the best people to manage it as a change in culture, change in strategy. So I had to go out, and I brought in a couple of folks that I've worked with before. We brought in some real amazing people. Mike Palmer is just unbelievable at all dimensions of product development. Scott Genereux, he knows sales back, forward. He knows every customer out there by name, and he knows how to really motivate a sales force. Well, every member of my leadership team except Todd Hauschildt, the CIO, has come in with the same vision, the same, and of course that works down the organization as you're building. And that's how you change the culture. With that, here's the vision of where we're going. Here's the values, what we are going to do. This is how we're going to lead it. >> So major objectives. Obviously you want to keep moving fast. >> I presume you're going to, >> Yeah. >> You're reorganizing frequently to support that. But what are the main objectives that we should be looking for as outside observers over the next six, nine, 12, 18 months? We are changing the agenda of the information management industry. The first place is, for digital transformation, corporations have to switch. They have to get off what they're doing today ultimately and go to something new. And in an enterprise, that can only be one platform. You can't have two platforms deleting, moving data asynchronously. So, its going to be a major transformation. Now that has to be a platform. We've put the stake in the ground. We have that platform. Now, this is our battle to lose, because the incumbents in a transformation get to win if they're good enough. You know, in the disruption, only a startup can win. That's how I won at BEA, how we won at Sun. But this isn't disruption. Nobody's going to throw away all their data centers and jump into somebody before who said, "Oh, I've managed 100 terabytes. "Give me your 50 pedabytes." (Dave laughs) You know? And no customer is going to trust them. So this is our battle to win. We're changing the entire agenda with 360 data management. What we, our number one challenge is, we have to change the positioning in our own customers' minds, because they know us as the 30 years of that legacy, backup, recovery and archiving company. And it's really working. But that's number one. That's my number one objective. 'Cause the rest will take care of itself. >> And as a private company, do you feel like you're in a more advantageous position to do that, and why? >> Well, I don't think I could do this as other than a private company. Because it changes the economics dramatically. Also, at the same time, we're switching from mostly licensed revenue, to mostly rateable avenues, we move to subscription. In a public company, that's a, "Oh, our revenue's going to go down for awhile, "and so is our profits, but trust me." >> Hang with us. (laughs) >> Yeah, hang with us. There are companies like adobe that did that flawlessly, but it's not an easy thing to do. >> Yeah, it's not easy. >> And I'll tell you, I have the best partner in the world. When I, when we started this whole carveout, and I figured out, "Whoa, we don't have the right products. "We got to build this whole thing." I went to Carlisle with the strategy and the vision of what we needed to do. And I said, "Look, because pricing pressure is so high, "We're not going to be able to grow based on your plan." How you invested. "But if you want me to do that, "I can do it, and you need to invest this much more. "But I recommend that we invest as fast as we can "to get to digital transformation." They chose the third. They chose to, we're spending 99 million more dollars in R & D and go-to-market this year than was in the original plan. I wouldn't be able to do that in the public markets. >> Yeah. >> You know? But they are the perfect partner. They build for growth. They stay in two to four years after an IPO. Their return is based on multiples of growth, and that's what, so our goals are totally aligned, and aligned with what the customers are going to need. >> Bill, great story, I know you're super busy. A lot of customers to meet. So thanks very much for taking time out and joining us on the CUBE. >> Bill: This has been a pleasure. Thank you, >> You're welcome. >> Bill: you got me all stimulated. >> All right, good deal. All right, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is the CUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. We'll be right back. (electronic rhythmic music)