>> Narrator: From Chicago, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day, 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, we're here covering the Veritas Vision Solution Day. Veritas last year had a big tent event thay thousands and thousands of customers. They decided this year to go out to the customers. Like us, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Jeff Kroth is here, he's the manager of data management and analytics at Softchoice, which is a Veritas partner. Welcome to theCube, thanks for coming on, Jeff. >> Thanks for having me. >> So tell me more about Softchoice, what's your sort of niche and differentiation in the market? >> Sure, so Softchoice is about a two billion dollar North American IT Solution proivder, we're actually the number three Global Midmarket Managed Service provider. We provide the breadth and coverage across a variety of vendors, helping our customers modernize their IT infrastructure. >> So Midmarket is unique, you know, it's not big enough to have like thousands of people do it, data protection for example, they're Generalists, typically, IT Generalists, they're not small, not like the CEO doing the back up. So talk a little bit about the unique aspects of Midmarket from your perspective. >> Well I think some of the things that we bring to the bare Midmarker is helping customers who don't have that deep IT staff with our technology mentorship, with our skills transfer that we provide our customers, we have a managed service that we provide which really helps our customers do more with what they have. >> So data protection is one of the hottest topics going here at VMworld in August, and for the last two years it's been probably one of the hottest topics. That along with Cloud and obviously the AWS partnership with VMWare. Why is data protection so hot right now? What are the factors? >> I would say data protection and data management is hot. It actually comes back to the underlying data behind it, they say, Gardener says data is the new gold and the new natural resource. Well if you don't have your data protected, available, and modernized, you can't leverage things like data analytics to get the most out of your data. Our customers, we see, customers use data as a competitive advantage. Go back look at Blockbuster and Netflix, they weren't able to take advantage of their data and understand that, so really to me data protection is the foundation and building block to grow into an analytics environment where you're really taking advantage of the underlying data for that competitive advantage. >> And I want to do a little tangent here, cause when you hear things like, "data is the new oil, its the new gold," it's actually, in our view, even more valuable, and here's why. Oil, you can put a quart of oil in your car or in your house, but you can't put the same quart in both. Data, using the Netflix example, you can use the same data in a variety of different ways. So in some regards, it's even more valuable. So I guess the bottom line here is digital transformation, which is real, is all about how you use data and that has direct implications on how you protect data, doesn't it? >> It does. >> And so, the other thing is Cloud. You hear a lot of talk about Cloud, and Multicloud, and we're moving into this world of more distributed data. What kind of challenges does that present for customers? >> I mean we are a big Microsoft partner and have a big partnership with Azure, you know, helping our customers on that Cloud journey I think is an important part. One of the things and one of the trends that we're finding is ensuring that you're monerizing your current data platform as you do that data migration to the Cloud. One of the things we see is customers really struggle with cost containment as they make that Cloud migration. So being able to understand what the data is and ensuring that you're only moving the right amount of data and the right workloads to the Cloud to keep costs down, I think is one of the important things, one of the things we're helping our customers, making sure they're getting real value out of the Cloud and doing that cost containment. >> We heard this morning Joe T was talking about some Cloud repatriation and you definitely are seeing it he gave an example of a large company in Dubai who said, "we're going all in on Cloud," and they went all in on Cloud and said, "wow, this is really expensive." Make sense, right? Renting is often times more expensive than owning. So I look at that as, you know, those that have had to repatriate, a lot of that is poor planning so how do you help your customers plan which work loads should be in the Cloud and follow those laws of economics, and physics, and governance, you know the law of the land, how do you help them? >> So it's really a couple of things, we have a couple of assessments that we use to help customers understand their existing workloads and what makes sense to move to the Cloud and what makes sense to keep on premise. So that's an assessment that Softchoice offers. The other thing is aligning to Veritas's 360 data management strategy is really getting a deeper understanding of what that data is that you have so you're aligning the right costs associated with that data to decide what you move to the Cloud and what stays on prem and I think that's a big thing, it's really understanding what that data is and aligning it to what needs to be moved. >> We talked to senior leaders in IT and business, they tell us that if you got to move to the Cloud you really want to change the operating model, that's where you're going to get the biggest bang for the buck. What does that mean in terms of data protection? If you're going to go digital, go Cloud, change your operating model, that's going to have implications on data protection, isn't it? And what do you see as the-- >> It is, and what I think we're seeing in Softchoice as a whole, you know we are a big proponent of the Cloud, what I think we see that, you really don't think that customers are going to go fully Cloud. It's really taking that hybrid approach and aligning what applications make sense to go to the Cloud, what applications make sense to stay on prem. So really having that full view of your environment so you can make intelligent decisions on what to move to the Cloud and what to keep on prem, aligning to the usage of that data. >> Now what about your partnership with Veritas? You kind of exclusive Veritas, you work with other back up vendors? Maybe talk about that a little bit and then what do you see as Veritas's strengths and what's on their to-do list? >> Yeah, so we're a Veritas Gold Partner both in the US and in Canada. We're not an exclusive to Veritas, we like to take a very agnostic approach and really help customers understand what their environment looks like and what makes sense for them. Veritas is a key player as part of our data management strategy and going down the road of our analytics strategy, helping customers really understand the value of their data. You can't get into the analytics world unless your data is in the right place so, again we like to take an agnostic approach but Veritas does align very well from a data management strategy for Softchoice. >> Why, why is that? Is that their stack, they've just been around longer, they focus a lot on governance, and I heard things like categorization, throwing out Federal rules of civil procedure today, that's a long history, so why, what's so special? >> I would say it's the overall breadth of their portfolio, it's helping customers back up to Cloud, back up for the Cloud, it's helping customers do things like DR and replication. It's really getting that full 360 view, you know one of the things we're big on is things like Infomap and Data Insights and really helping customers really understand what the underlying data is, associating the cost with that, so as they move workloads to the Cloud they get a full understanding of what they're moving so they're just not blindly moving things to the Cloud, helping keep costs down. Again, when customers, like as in the example we saw earlier today, a lot of customers think that Cloud is a logical strategy for them but over time they see that it increases cost. So it's really about aligning the right sizing of your environment, moving the right applications, the right data to the Cloud and using that as part of your overall strategy. We really see customers really taking a hybrid approach, it's not ever going to be fully public Cloud, it's not going to be fully private Cloud, it's going to be a combination. >> So we're going to ask you about the competitive landscape cause you are sort of Switzerland here, even though got an affinity, it seems, to Veritas, but you've seen a lot of VC money move into the space, you're seeing a lot of specialists emerge, you've seen some startups come after the Incumbents like Veritas, certainly you know Commvault's another, IBM's another, of course DELL EMC, add those guys up they probably have three quarters on the market place so of course the startups are going to come after them. And they're got shiny new toys and probably developing in Cloud Native and probably talking all the right language. But how do you squint through the hype from the marketing side and sort of help customers figure out how they're going to have the greatest business impact? >> I mean I think that's a good point. I think we're seeing a lot of small niche players that are born in the Cloud or have this shiny new marketing collatoral that they're going to market with and I think what's important for us is making sure our customers understand a full road map on what they're trying to do. So, we do see a lot of upstarts that are going after some of the Veritas, the IBM, the DELL EMC businesses, the world. But it's really making sure you're not taking a point solution and trying to go forward with that, it's understanding Portfolio, like Veritas's that has that depth and breadth and really has that history and background. You know, Veritas has been doing this forever and they really know their stuff. >> Yeah, so we've stressed that platforms are important to pay attention to, you know an API based platform is going to beat a product every time and have some legs. It might be it might have other implications in terms of complexities, but it can drive your business forward as opposed to your point, being a point product. And I'm curious as to your thoughts, particularly as it relates to analytics, which is in your title. For years people have looked at back up as just insurance, people that are trying to get more out of it. But how are people using the corpus of back up data and analytics use cases, why the affinity between data protection and analytics? >> I think data protection and data management are kind of clumped into one category. If you don't have a modernized IT infrastructure and you don't have a good data management strategy, it's impossible, you know poor data in, poor data out. You can't make intelligent analytics decisions or have that data for your analytics team if the information isn't there and accessible and good data. So it's really having a very keen data management strategy enabling your analytics users to have the right data to make the right decisions, cause if you don't have the right data you can't make the right decisions, and no analytics tool can go in and make informed decisions based off bad data. So data management is definitely part of the overall analytic strategy cause it's really the first step. >> And why the, in the back up corpuses, because you've got visibility on that data and it's the logical-- >> Sure. >> The logical one place, even if it's virtual, to actually be able to do those analytics, right? >> Exactly. >> Okay, and then I'll give you the last word. Thing's that your learning here today at the Vision Event, customers obviously Chicago, big customer center, you're based in Atlanta another big customer center. We were just in New York a few weeks ago meeting some pretty senior level folks. What are you learning here, what's the conversation like? >> I think the one key thing that I've taken out is that really customers aren't going full Cloud. It's you know, I think I saw a stat and 92% of customers are taking a hybrid approach and leveraging a really full data management policy to be able to handle on prem, to be able to handle private Cloud, public Cloud, and the combination. Really having that tool set to give you visualizations across an entire hybrid IT infrastructure I think it important. And that's really one of the key takeaways. >> We would agree, we've talked for quite some time now, years actually how organizations can't just shove data into the Cloud, they can't just put their business up into the public Cloud, rather they need to move the Cloud operating model to their business. it's very clearly, that's the trend, you're seeing so many signs of that. AWS and VMware partnering up. You certainly saw Google do that and this summer with Istio on prem, Microsoft obviously with Azure Stack, huge presence in hybrid Cloud. So those predictions are coming true. Jeff thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Yep, thanks for having me. >> Oh you're very welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody, this is Dave Vellante, we'll be back from Veritas Vision Day in Chicago at the Palmer House Hotel, you're watching theCube. (soft techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE, covering VEEAMON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to VEEAMON 2018 in Chicago, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Karl Rautenstrauch is here, Karl Rautenstrauch, Senior Program Manager for Azure Storage at Microsoft. Karl, thanks for coming on. >> It's a pleasure, guys. Thank you for having me. >> You've got a beautiful picture of your family. You got three boys at home, is that right? >> Karl: Three boys. >> Alright. >> They keep me out of trouble. They get into it, they keep me out of it. >> I'm one of three boys. My mom, you know, kept us going. You must have a strong woman at home. >> She is a saint. >> At any rate, thanks for coming on. We love talking Microsoft Azure, Cloud and storage. Let's start with your role. >> Karl: Sure. What do you have? >> What do you do at Microsoft? >> Absolutely. So for the last year I've been program manager with the storage team, and I've kind of a unique role. Usually you see program managers who focus on features, right? You are championing a new feature in your service, your platform. For me, I get to work with our partner ecosystem. So I spend a lot of time with our great partners, like Veeam, and our channel partners, like SHI, CDW, Softchoice, Insight. I'll tell you, I've got the best job in the business. I can't complain. I get to work with great, smart people everyday. >> So is your role transferring knowledge to those partners, assisting those partners, acting as a catalyst, gathering information from them and feeding it back to the product teams? >> Yeah, really all of the above. Helping to make sure that we've got a combined solution, an end-to-end solution, that's the best thing for our customers. So everything from upfront assessment through implementation through health check afterwards, our goal is to have the happiest customers in the public Cloud, and we can't do that without our partners. >> How should we think about the Azure Storage portfolio? Can you paint a picture for us? >> Oh boy, it has grown drastically just in the last couple of months. So not only do we have our first party offerings in the disk, traditional VM disk as we all know it, you're going to attach to a server, we have hosted file infrastructures where we provide file shares that don't require a server to manage, our partnership with NetApp where we are going to be operating NetApp systems in our data centers and offering their native services. And we just continue to expand with big data solutions, with Avere, our new acquisition, that is really aimed at high performance compute environments like we see in genomics and media and entertainment. It's just a portfolio that continues to grow. We all joke that storage is boring, right? Nobody cares about storage, but honestly, it's one of the most interesting and fastest growing and evolving platforms in Azure. >> We joke, sometimes we call it snore-age, but Stu and I are kind of boring people, so we love talking about it. >> I like that. >> So you got file, you got object, you got block, you got big data solutions, you got high performance file solutions. Okay, like you say, this expanding portfolio. >> Karl, I look back at my career and Microsoft's had a long partnership, not only on the compute side, but really on the storage side, maybe isn't as well known as shipping on every PC and server out there. Lot has changed, when you talk about Azure and Azure Stack coming out. Maybe explain a little bit, I believe you called it the first party versus the second party. How that Microsoft does it versus Microsoft partners, how those mesh together. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well I'll tell you. So I joined the company about five years ago, and I've been on the storage team for the last year. I was a field specialist, a subject matter expert, before that working very, very closely with customers. And what I love that I've seen over this period through the Satya Nadella era, is just this open Microsoft that says, we don't have to do everything. We don't have to try to provide everything to the customer. We really believe in, and I think we just diffuse that best of breed attitude going forward. Our partners feel that. Whether we're working with Veeam in Azure Public Cloud as a target, or them offering protection of VMs in public cloud, which is necessary by the way. I think that's a huge fallacy in the industry, that you place your app, you place your machine in a public cloud, and it's magically protected by pixies. It's not. >> Backup and security aren't a concern, wherever you put it, right? >> Absolutely, wherever they are. So we rely on our partners like Veeam to provide that. And really where Azure Stack comes in, is providing that consistent experience, not just to our customers, but also to out partners. So Veeam is able to protect Azure Public assets, in the same manner they're able to protect Azure Private, for Azure Stack resources. So really it's just offering customers choice to use best of breed solutions, and allowing our partners to have an easy means to support both on-premises and public Cloud. >> So it's like a service catalog that you guys offer, and then you advise customers or they pick and choose what they want? How's that all work? >> Yeah, so really what we do, and that's a great way to put it. We have what we call the Azure Marketplace that's present in the Azure Public Cloud, and we extend that to Azure Stack. So if I'm a customer who wants to deploy Veeam, per se, in either infrastructure, I go to this catalog of apps. I mean it literally is a catalog of apps. Search for Veeam, there it is, and I can single click deploy in either Azure Stack or Azure Public. >> Microsoft is unique in the sense of its hybrid strategy, in terms of what you have in the cloud you have on-prem. You're trying to, wherever possible, make it identical. >> Karl: Absolutely. >> Microsoft and Oracle are really the only two companies that have a stated strategy to do that. Let's talk about Microsoft in terms of where you're at, in terms of getting that substantially similar capability in on-prem and in the public Cloud. >> Yeah, absolutely. That's a great, great topic to discuss. Azure Stack, I always like to tell folks, full disclosure, and we don't try to hide this at all, that's not who we are, but it will always lag a little bit behind Azure Public. When you think about the controls in customers' data centers for rolling out code updates and new versions of software, new capabilities, there's always an adoption curve. You have folks who are a little more hesitant to release quickly and adopt quickly. So Azure Stack offers them the capability to defer some of those updates for a period of time. So there will be a lag. We have to qualify for multiple vendor platforms, we've chosen to go to market in a hyperconverged model with our partners, like Dell EMC, HP, Lenovo and Cisco. Whereas Azure Public, that's a completely controlled infrastructure, and we're able to deploy very quickly. And we do; we're constantly iterating and releasing new features. So I think that's the biggest difference between the two. >> So Karl, you give a session here at the show called Migrating to Azure. That whole move is pretty challenging. >> Karl: Oh yes. Am I lift and shifting? Am I transforming? Am I building new? What are you hearing from customers? And give our audience a taste of some of the key takeaways that you were talking about. >> Yeah, absolutely. So that's one of the biggest concerns that we've had over the last couple of years. I said earlier, we want the happiest customers in Public Cloud, and no Cloud regret or remorse. So what we talked about in our session was a tool that we released recently called Azure Migrate, that is all about assessing and setting expectations for customers around what can and cannot migrate, how much it will cost to run that infrastructure in Public Cloud, either as is or optimized, and then suggestions for optimizing their infrastructure to get the best bang for their buck. So there are great opportunities to save cost when platforms are adopted, like Azure sql, platform as a service offerings. When I've got that time-sharing concept, when I take away maintenance activities around operating systems and software releases, there are significant cost savings versus a lift and shift, which can quite honestly be more expensive than what that customer is doing on-premises today. So Azure Migrate is meant to help customers avoid that, no regrets. >> I wonder what you're hearing from customers cuz there's some concern. Maybe I should just do infrastructure as a service. Cuz if I get into those platform as a service, am I locked in? Microsoft is used for lots of business scribble applications. I see Microsoft strongly in the Kubernetes ecosystem, getting into the functions as a service, which those things are trying to give me a little bit more portability and flexibility. Maybe discuss some of that. >> Yeah, that's great, and I'm glad you brought that back around. So there is always that concern about the Cloud Hotel California, right? And that said, I like to half jokingly refer to it as you get in, you can never leave. And there is that jeopardy with any provider. That if you're using some proprietary platform that you can be locked-in, and really we try to promote the use of containers extensively with those customers who have that concern. And even with our hosted analytics and hosted database infrastructures, we make sure to provide those portable cross-Cloud platforms, like Postgres, MySQL. Our analytics is all Ubuntu based. Really we don't want that lock-in to be there, we don't want that to be a concern. So continuing support for open platforms and ecosystems is really something we're committed to. >> The lock-in, openness choice, it's a spectrum. I've been in this business for a long time, and Unix used to be the open system. And then today, you can't get more locked-in then a Unix platform. So I feel as though, and I wonder if you guys can comment, the Cloud has transparent pricing and transparent billing. And so lock-in is if I have a customer and they're trying to move and they're up for a contract renewal or something or a maintenance, I'm going to jack their maintenance. But you can't just do that across the board, if you have transparent billing. So there's the pricing aspect. There's certainly a lock-in with the processes and procedures that you choose, but no matter what you choose, whether it's open source, a Cloud provider like Amazon, an on-prem provider like the many that we know out there, you're going to be locked-in to your processes and procedures. So it's a matter of degree. I personally see it, because of the Cloud, as a lot less onerous than it used to be. Do you guys agree with that? >> I mean Dave, it's that application is the long pole in the tent for ones I see. What I've been using and if I go to something new, if I go build this new architecture, Cloud Nader or whatever, that's a pretty big bet. So depending on how deep and tied that is to a specific platform, even if I'm choosing a database, migrating databases aren't easy. >> But that's the issue. It's the bet that you're making. It's more so than the lock-in because lock-in, you're going to be locked in to whatever bet you make, so you've got to make the right bet. To me, it's a way for consultants to act like an advocate for the customer. What's more important in my view, is negotiation strategies, how you place that bet, how you architect your Cloud strategy. >> And I mean Dave, just quickly, I remember four years ago you and I interviewed Brad Anderson with Microsoft, and we were poking him on licensing. I don't hear that discussion about Microsoft as much, of course we always want it cheaper, and everything like that, but Microsoft's done a great job. In the Cloud communities, they're known as participating in those communities, and giving customers- >> Well that's our take, what's your take? >> No, I love it. And I think what I'm seeing is customers are hedging their bets. So you do, and it is a bet. You do have to not go all in with somebody, with any Cloud provider, but you got to put your chips with some proprietary platforms. And what I'm seeing is that multi-Cloud that we're all talking about is really becoming the reality. I can think of very few customers that I've worked with who have had Azure as their single public Cloud. And really that's how they avoid that z-series down the road, right? Where you're locked-in, you got one provider that platform. They're saying, look, I'm going to deploy on the best service in the best public Cloud for that application instance, as Stu mentioned. That's happening. >> Horses for courses, as they say in England. >> Karl: There you go. >> So we're here at VEEAMON. Your relationship with Veeam, they've obviously partnered up with you guys in a big way. Your thoughts on the partnership? >> Yeah, love working with these guys. I'm very fortunate in that I get to work with some of the best that we have, and everything from the relationship that we have on a marketing level, an engineering level, a field level, they're really ingrained in our ecosystem at all levels. Just a very, very easy partner to work with, very responsive to their customer needs. And that's what we look for. We want to work with the partners that customers love. So I'm just thrilled to be part of this relationship. >> Karl, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I think you embody the new open Microsoft, and you guys are making great progress. Congratulations and thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you Dave, it was a pleasure. Stu, thank you very much. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. VEEAMON live from Chicago, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)