>> Narrator: Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to day two of live coverage with theCUBE here at Cisco live 2018 in Europe. We're in Barcelona, Spain. I'm John, for the co-founder of Silicon Angle. Co-host of the theCUBE, with Stu Miniman, analyst on wikibon,com. As well as Cube co-host many events certainly Stu is not a stranger to Cisco. Open-sourced. And overall, the discretion that digital is having on the enterprise. Our next guest is Michael Kay, global technologist of product strategy of theme software. Michael it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Hey John, hey Stu. >> So, you guys are here with Cisco Veeam, you guys have been a big success story we've coverd on theCUBE many times. You're up Cisco. What's the vibe here, what's going on in the show? >> So back in mid 2017, October 2017, we announced we were going to be on the global price list, and so obviously that this is different from last year in that we're having more conversations, people know what we're doing. For starters, asking how do we protect the network? How do we protect the ASA? Using the firewall and etc. It's very good to have those conversations with the enterprise guys. And they now understand we're able to protect their workload, their data. So, I imagine that it will be exactly the same when we go over to Cisco Live in the US, but this is obviously the first show that we've had where we are talking about availability with Cisco as a joint partner on their global price list. >> One of things that we always see is that with you guys, your logo is everywhere. You've got the big green Veeam. What's the relationship that you guys have with customers? Because you're playing a lot of great spaces. I mean, what's the main relationship in brand promise that Veeam has? >> So I guess from our point of view is that we come from SMB root, if you'd like. But over the years, over that last 10 years, we've developed that scalable product that allows us to protect the larger workload within the enterprise. We also have cloud offerings to enable our service provider partners. So, exactly that, we want to be able to play and protect data in whatever facet that needs to be. So, whether it be cloud, whether it be on-premises, SMB, commercial, enterprise, we want to be able to protect all of those workloads. >> So Michael, one of the things we've been talking about here at the show, you won't just go look at world's agents. It's a big ecosystem and it's been changing. Cisco has got a lot of pieces of big movement software that's happening to cloud and data center. They have dozens of storage relationships and that's where Veeam ties in a lot. Maybe gives a little bit of an overview, kind of the breath and depth of the relationship where you play in relation to UCS, Converged, Hyper Converged, all those pieces. >> Yeah so I guess Converged first. If we look at the majority of the data centers and the customers that we speak to there is still very much, there is a large footprint of Converged infrastructure where that be FlexPod, VersaStack, Pure FlashStack, or Vblock from a DeliMC point of view. And the good thing where we come in is that we have storage integrated in all of them. So, regardless of like, compute, however it brings a nice simplicity model to the customer from that stack. But for us to just slot into that and be able to leverage the storage integrations and to be able to take an efficient snapshot of those virtual machines and push them onto a, maybe Cisco 2600, that modular, scalable server that will both compute and high density storage really gives us a best of both worlds in terms of plugging it into that fabric interconnector. Making is converge backup story or converge available story. >> Yeah so, you mentioned a lot of options out there. Still, most customers, there are more customers that aren't doing some flavor of Converged drive or Converged than are - there is a lot of buzz behind the Hyper Converged piece of it. What are you hearing from customers? You know, you've said there's a lot of kind of CI versus HI that numbers show that out. I mean, there's a lot more solutions out there. It should be in the market a lot longer. But you know, where are the customers? What are some of the decision points and how has your organization held on them? >> So I guess where we are seeing things that are HyperFlex, where we also have storage integration there from a protection point of view. Seeing many of them feed into that main data center. So, we're protecting the data, we're using our replication engine to push data into that larger data center for hot DR or high ability type solution. And I think that's where we're seeing it. But we are also seeing it more HyperFlex or more HCI come into that main data center for some certain verticals from that point of view. >> Okay, so if I could just unpack what you're saying there, you know, mostly HCIs have been kind of the robust, smaller environments where you know, traditional three tier or CI has been there but we're starting to see that. That blurring of the lines between what is there. >> Yeah, people are definitely bringing that HCI, that simplicity, that scalable simplicity model into their main data center as it kind of merges with that converged offering right? So. >> Yeah, the other thing that's very clear, the Veeam show last year when we covered it really customers trying to bake out their cloud strategy. You know, how does that tie into all this discussion here? Cisco is talking a lot about multicloud, that's really the management plain, how do you see that from an availability solution? >> Yeah, okay, so yesterday I sat in the Keynote and reading some of the stuff, we had our sales kick off last week and some of our stuff really resonates with our message as well that's out there. So the whole multicloud, our tagline is around any app, any data, any cloud. So it kind of resonates with what Cisco is saying. And that's obviously a good thing. But, so whether that be the public cloud, whether it's to enable our service providers to leverage the Cisco technology plus Veeam to offer a service out to our existing Veeam customers. The On-Premise's solution. Or whether that'd just be on-premises they sense that we just talked about whether Converged or whether HCI top plate. >> What the big thing you guys learned at your sale's kick-off because we always wonder what goes on in these sale's kick-off. People like cheering, their making their quota, business is good, but they listen to customers. What's the big used cases that you guys are really doing well with Cisco on? I mean that's ultimately the pattern that has kind of emerged. There is always a best product. What's the hot, used case for you guys? >> So I think one of our biggest things is about how do we partner with the likes of Cisco. How do we leverage that relationship to bring more Cisco validated designs, reference architectures, from a technical point of view up. So when the good door, the numbers being rah-rah as you're in the sale's kick-off but ultimately it's about the vision. How do we go forward with that partnership? Being on that price list is really going to help us get into some of those accounts, from that point of view. But also, we've got, from a technical point of view, I know that we've got the design, we've got the model behind this. >> Yeah, when did you guys get onto the price list? Recently? >> Uh, I believe it was October. >> So just recently? >> So really recently. >> Some deals are just going to be flying in. Right? (laughs) >> Hopefully, right. >> What's the biggest challenge that you find with Veeam's customers? Because you guys have certainly done really well. Again, we've covered your success on theCUBE many times with other events, like Vmworld and others. What's the ah ha moment for the customers with Veeam? Is it just the easiest solution? Is it a technical paid point they saw? What's that moment when the customer really gets it? >> So, I think the simplicity, that easy-to-use, easy to deploy, regardless whether you're three, six tier host shop or whether you're a multi 10,000 VM type enterprise estate. It's being able to use that same tool-set to protect all the way through. That's really simple. We really want to keep that user interface really easy to consume, and use, and scale. So that's one of the key areas that I've seen that we're playing in. >> Alright, so it's 2018 now, we've got a looming, headwind that a lot of customers we are concerned about, haven't heard a lot about it at this show, but GDPR, that's definitely something on everybody's mind. Is this another Y2K that's going to slow down ID bind or are there engagements? How does Veeam work with customers? What's it going to do with the landscape of IT this year? >> So we were, we've been looking at GDBR Compliance and our messaging in those has been, we've been really working on how we start mentioning this and marketing this out from a Veeam perspective. So we're not going to keep, we're not going to get anyone GDBR compline. But what we are going to do is help you understand where that data is, how long has it been kept for, where is it kept, where it's stored, et cetera. So update three that we've released just before Christmas it was around location tag in. So if that back-up comes into a certain GO then we want to be able to tag that, and that tag stays with that back-up data wherever it goes. Then we've got Veeam ONE, the monitors and reports against that. So you know whether you've violated GBDR compliance or a violation of where that data should have be located. But it's one of the things that it's not a day that kind of goes back the moment where I'm not speaking to someone about GDPR. And obviously, it's really, it's coming around very fast. May this year, is when it comes into force. >> Are people shaking in their boots? I mean, I'm hearing, like, a lot of people really nervous. I mean it's kind not has been played up. Certainly the press has been covering it but I mean the Y2K problem, you remember those glory days, you know, the millennial, you know that bug never really happened. But GDPR is a freaking, hard-core enforcement. And the penalties are stiff. >> Yeah. >> I mean it's ridiculous. >> That's a big percentage of your gross income. Right, the people that I speak to are definitely aware and concerned that they need to be in this particular state by the time we get to May. It's not about waiting until that date in May. It's about how do we do it now and start understanding it a bit more about our data. Cisco yesterday, on the main stage said, "it's all about data." And absolutely resonates exactly with what we want to do. We want to be able to do more with that but also we need to understand what that data is and how long do we keep them for. Or why we're keeping it? And ask those questions to these new data protection officers, data-- >> Well people are having more data driven strategies and we were commenting yesterday. We didn't kind of, we didn't hear much here about that Cisco not using that data driven. Is it just not a real big data show or not a lot of AI here yet but if you got data driven, you better have data protection, right? I mean, you can't have both. >> They kind of go hand-in-hand, right? And I think that's another thing where we're coming into the fold. Is that we've got features in our tool-set that allows us to spin up that data, in an isolated network. We had to run test against them. Run compliance checks against them. To make sure that, one, the back-up comes up. So, when you're not waiting until that problem hits. So you can bring it up but also test against updates, et cetera. >> Alright, so here is a question for you. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer. Okay, "Well you know, I really am on-premises, on-prem." Stu, depend on how you want to argue that point. Well Stu and I argued about it yesterday about on-prem versus on-Premises. I'm on-premises, I'm getting my cloud operation. I've got my data protection. But I really got to get into the cloud. I've got some stuff in the cloud now. Cloud is my mision. I'm going to be moving to the cloud in a very big way. How does Veeam help me? >> So, we want to bring the technology that you've been using on-premises, hopefully, maybe Veeam, and we want to take that same, easy-to-use concept, that same UI that you've using and really, hopefully you've seen it as a simplistic approach to your data. We're taking the headache out of the data protection story. But if you are pushing into those public clouds, being able to give you a seamless way-- >> So same dashboard, same-- >> Similar tool-sets, exactly that. And being able to protect that. >> Across multiple clouds as well? Because multicloud is hot. >> Yeah, exactly, we want to be able to be like we are within virtualization. Being able to protect any workload on VMWare, Hyper-V, et cetera. We also want to be able to protect any of those public clouds. From using the same tool-set to be able to protect that same file format that we're backing up to, same fundamentals that we have. >> I want to get your view on Cisco Live here. You're in on Keynote, you go to number shows, you know, this show used to be, it was hard-core networking, it was all networking. CCIEs and everything. We're sitting here in the DevNet zone. They've got developers, got good storage ecosytsems here. How do you look at the audience here compared to say, a VM world or some of the other partner activities that you go to? >> So I think like couple of years ago, they were kind of saying that you need to broaden your knowledge as an IT consultant, IT person, within a company. You have to expand your technologies. You can't just be the networking guy. You can't just be the storage guy. And I think that we're, I don't know if you guys see it, but definitely seeing more broaden people like, again, like I said there, the people that I'm having conversations with at the booth, they're all aware of what we do now. So, they have clearly broaden their knowledge away from that networking. But, also with the likes of the DevNet. So like being able to code, and all of the API driven type stories that we hear. It's also being able to leverage that and push that into whatever that data center needs to be from an automation orchestration point of view. So, and everyone plays a part in that. Whether it's the storage, whether it's the availability, whether it's the compute vendors, whether it's the virtualization. Everyone has a part to play in that, that automation orchestration piece. >> Awesome. Well how has your experience with the show has been as a European flavor year, what's your take away? >> Um, I guess-- >> John: Customer action, good partners? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm speaking to your Cisco reps. Kind of seeing it from a Veeam point of view in your region. Understand a bit more about around GDBR. GDBR is coming in. So there is no way of getting around that. Understand what tools can actually help you be more compliant. Also, look at, I've spoken to a number of people around that conversion, HCI piece, and they weren't aware around the integration. So, go away and see if we do fit in that integration piece. Existing customers go away and find out that information, and yeah. >> So what's the difference between an North American customer and an European customer? Do they have little nuances? Do they have regional issues by sovereignty in countries? Is there a buyer behavior from a Veeam customer standpoint? Difference between a customer in North America versus Europe? >> So, I'm mostly over in Europe but the customers that we speak to over in the US, that's the most concerning part around that GDBR piece, there is still, I have that understanding of what GDBR is doing. If they are holding data. Especially these larger enterprises. They are going to be holding data for those European countries. So they need to be compliant that way. And that's the misunderstanding maybe from some of the people. >> So European are more savvier on the compliance side? >> From the people that I have spoken to they know that it affects them because they're in country and holding that data. However, it affects everyone. It's a global compliance if you're holding data from anyone. >> I think in North America they kicked the can down the road. Oh wow, GDBR's upon Europe. Alright, Europeans are very savvy on compliance. That's a huge issue, data drive, data protection. We're here inside theCUBE with Veeam software. I'm John Furrier and Stu Mimiman live from Barcelona for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. More coverage after this short break. (electronic music)