(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana it's the Cube. Covering .NEXT conference 2018. Brought to you by Newtanix. >> Welcome back to the cube. We're here in New Orleans, Louisiana. If you didn't hear, in our opening into we had some sounds of the city, and have a different interview than our usual technology talk here. Happy to welcome to the program Robert Mercurio, who's the bassist for the band Galactic. New Orleans based. Was one of the performers here last night. We we're right over at Mari Gras World next door. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Alright, so for those of us that aren't at this show, New Orleans is a special city. Great music. Great food. Some place I like to come. Not too often though, because I don't get enough sleep, and I eat too much. (laughter) >> Robert: Try living here. >> This is your hometown, so give us a little plug. >> Yeah, I mean it's the greatest town in the world, I feel like, and we've toured all over the world. And, we're gone a lot. So, probably about half the year I'm gone, and it's just an awesome city to come back to. It's small enough where I feel comfortable, and clean enough, but there's obviously enough culture to keep us entertained, you know. >> Alright, and tell us about your band. Galactic been over 20 years. >> Galactic's a band that we started here in New Orleans, in college, in like '94. So, we've been a band for 24 years. Been touring for about 22 years. Never really have taken much of a break. Which I would love, but no. We're just working all the time, and we've been original members since the beginning. And, just happy to have New Orleans be our home, but we bring the sound all over the world. >> It's interesting. The connection I'd make here. If you talk to like IT folks, it's like, yeah we'd all like a break. >> Robert: Yeah right. >> There's always more stuff. There's the next thing. How do you keep inspired? What, you know. How do you, the next creativity, and keep going? >> Well I will say that the city in general is inspiring. You know I mean, there's so many great musicians. There's so many great clubs. There's always new music coming out of the city, and just going out on any old day of the week can be inspiring in that kind of way. I also get a lot of inspiration, I do, I'm a producer. So, I produce other bands outside of Galactic. And, that's inspiring as well. You know, diving into a project with a band. Really diving into the songs. Figuring out their workflow. Figuring out their process can be inspiring. It's something I can take back to my band. >> So after 24 years, producing, now that you've gotten into producing. What surprises you? Like when you get to a band, and you're like, "Oh wow!" "That's amazing." >> That's a good question. I mean. It. Song. The song is what it always comes down to, you know. And like. What really surprises me is when I meet like an amazing songwriter. That still, no matter what, I'm just like, "How do you do that?" You know, because, I don't claim to be the best songwriter. And, when you do, or you're in the presence of somebody, and you're working with somebody like that it's pretty special. I mean, it's a real talent, and it's a real gift outside of just being a good musician. Having that craft is next level. >> So after 24 years, ton of experience. How do you nurture raw experience when you see it? Or raw talent? >> You know, I mean advice. Giving 'em maybe perspective on stuff. Inspiration and confidence, you know, to give to an artist, a young artist to kind of keep them going, and keep them inspired. It's a good question. It's a hard thing to answer. I guess I just kind of, >> Interviewer: There's no science to it? >> No yeah exactly. There's no science to it, and if anything I see my self with a younger artist, in somewhat like a fatherly figure, you know or something like that. Like somebody you can get solid advice from. When I work with a young band, sometime I feel like, now that I am in my 40's, and sometime the bands are in their 20s, I'm like I could be their father, so you know. >> Alright, so Robert, you've toured the world. >> Yeah. >> You're playing live in front of audiences all the time. Have to imagine there's things that go wrong. How do you deal with this? Any good stories for us? >> Good question. God, you guys are just full of them. (laughter) Yeah, things go wrong. You learn to roll with the punches. That's part of being a pro. Stuff, will happen. You will get sick on stage sometimes. >> Interviewer: THat's a story. >> You got to improvise. (laughter) You got to roll with it, and you know, it's not the kind of job that you can call in sick. So, sometimes you're up there, and you're not feeling that great. And, sometimes you have to maybe go throw up in the middle of a song or something like that. It happens if you have the flu or something, and you just kind of learn to roll with it. >> I think Anthony Bourdain probably has some more stories about things like that too. >> Yeah, yeah I think. (laughter) Who knows, but he might be able to take an off day here or there, I don't know. >> So after 24 years, >> Yes. >> How does the band collectively stay creative. I mean that's a long time together. >> It is. It's a long time together. We are a band that's known to collaborate a lot with other artists. Starting about 12, or maybe even longer, we started making albums with different guest vocalists. And, I guess instrumentalists, and stuff like that. So we're kind of unique band in that we don't really have a permanent singer. And, usually a band is all about their singer. And that's the band pretty much. Without Steve Tyler of Aerosmith, they wouldn't be Aerosmith, you know. Many examples like that. But with Galactic, we've gone through a bunch of different lead singers, guest vocalists, and we collaborate and song write with different people all the time. So, we've been fortunate to work with some of the New Orleans greats. Before he passed, Alan Toussaint, who's one of the greatest New Orleans song writers. We've worked with Irma Thomas. We've worked with a bunch of rappers. We've worked with, Corey Glover from Living Colour toured with us for 3 or 4 years. We've toured with Cyril Neville. Currently we're working with this artist Erica Falls, and she's been touring with us for a couple of years, so. Just kind of like. That's definitely been a recipe for keeping the band fresh and creative. >> Robert last thing. I'm just curious, with the impact of technology on what you're doing. How you reach your audiences. You know engage. >> Technology has change the way that we record. It's changed the way that we've been able to collaborate. We can write a song with somebody that lives in San Francisco. Like right before I got up for this interview, I was on the phone with this rapper that I'm producing his album. And we're not going to be in the same room ever, throughout making this whole album. Which is kind of crazy. But, through the internet, and through computers, and you know the cloud and all that, it's made it possible to be able to do stuff like that. We also, you know touring, we toured, We started touring in '96, and that was before cell phones were popular. It was before smartphones, you know. It was before everybody had a personal computer. So, that has been able to change the way that we can communicate, and keep in touch. It's kind of crazy to think when we first started touring we had to use payphones, and put a bunch of quarters in to call home, and it was a lot harder, you know to wrangle everybody up at the end of the night, and stuff like that. Now you can just send out a group text, and it's time to go. Or, you know, we have our whole tour book on our phone. That's something I tell young artist too, and they just are like, "How did you ever do it?" "You didn't have GPS?" "How did you get to the." We had to use a map. (laughter) >> Interviewer: Had these paper things we hung up. >> Yeah it was totally a whole different experience to what people have now. It's gotten, and made things a lot easier to do what we do. >> Great. So, people want to find out more, galacticfunk.com is the website. >> Yeah galacticfunk.com. And, we're doing a huge national tour in August and September, and hopefully we see somebody out at the shows. >> Alright, well, Robert Mercurio with Galactic. Thanks so much for joining us. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Mindeman. Getting back towards the end of two days of live coverage here from Newtanix .NEXT 2018. Thanks for watching the Cube. (light music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's the Cube. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. This is the wrap for Veritas 2017. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Mindeman. And Stu, two days where we're witnessing the evolution transformation of Veritas. Veritas used to be the gold standard for what wasn't known at the time as software design but just software function to deliver storage capabilities, no hardware agenda and now you're seeing investment under the leadership of new management. Some innovation, a cycle that's quite rapid. It's hard to tell how much of that is really taking shape in the customer base. Seems like the channel, partners are picking up on it. Customers are still sort of trying to figure out how to move beyond so their existing legacy situation, it's like Heath Townsend says. The vendor community tends to move at the speed of CIO. It's a great quote. But overall, I think very good show. Some surprises here in terms of specifically the breadth of the Veritas portfolio not just a backup company. Really focused on data management, focused on information management which obviously is relevant in the digital economy. What were your takeaways? >> So Dave the big strategy is the 360 data management. And I think one of the things we teased out in here is first of all, nobody thinks the cloud is simple. Multicloud, where customers are and when you dig into it and what Veritas has learned in the last year is that there's a lot of work to be done. Where are their deeper integrations that they need to have. There's different requirements from the different partners here. See Microsoft, the top level sponsor. Russinovich up on stage, giving kind of his usual hybrid cloud with a lot of open source pitch there but seems a good fit from the customers and partners that we talked to here to say Microsoft aligns well with what Veritas is doing. Amazon big player here. Lot of integration is happening behind the scenes to make sure that Veritas can work there. And then you follow Google of course, big focus around data, good to see where Veritas is going. We had a nice conversation with Google. Google seems very open on a lot of these not as much focus on some of the functionality that Veritas has so it's a good natural fit and then IBM and Oracle kind of rounding out the big players here. The thing I've come in, I think every show I've gone to this year Dave, is where do companies that have been around for more than a couple of years fit in this multicloud world and absolutely that's where the puck's going as Bill Coleman said that's where they're betting the company and putting it forward and we wondered coming in would it be like ah, yeah. This is a net backup and Veritas foundation suite with a new coat of paint on it? And no, I mean they really brought in a lot of new management team sure there's engineers here with a lot of expertise and experience to build on to know how to do this but I was pretty impressed with what I saw this week Dave. >> So no hardware agenda is evolving to no cloud agenda. That's one of the things we learned here and we had a good discussion. Got a little bit awkward at times but good discussion about why Veritas relative to the other players here. And what the answer we got back which we had to tease it out a little bit was essentially the upstart guys, the Rubrics, the Cohesity's to a certain extent Zerto I think they tried to put Veeam in that category we'll come back to Veeam it's kind of interesting Maybe not big enough to deliver on that multicloud vision. And they're really not even trying. Cohesity and Rubric I don't know. >> They've added a lot of cloud recently, actually Rubric's been doing it for a while, Cohesity definitely seen there. They understand that cloud but I think what maybe I'd say Dave, they tend to start from an on premises piece as opposed to you say this Veritas strategy is it doesn't matter and what many of the player, right, where is there natural gravity? Is it on premises or is in the public cloud and Nutanix, they partner with Google, they're doing the cloud. But absolutely, most of their >> Dave: They make more money. >> Stu: Most of their revenue is, you know, is found there. >> So the upstarts I kind of buy the Veritas argument that there maybe doesn't have the Gravitas and the heft to attack that multicloud other than pick at it and grow and they'll do hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and maybe get to a billion and have a great exit. I think that'll happen. And then the other guys, the big guys, HPE, Dell EMC, IBM, they certainly have the capabilities to do that. But is it going to be the main focus of those companies? HPE maybe. We'll see. HPE and Veeam are an interesting partnership. My information suggests that Veeam is driving many tens of millions of dollars through Hewlett Packard Enterprise now that the microfocus deal has been done and they got rid of data protector. IBM they're kind of re-invigorating the storage business, data production is part of that. Dell EMC is I think challenged to invest They can't invest in as much as they used to certainly not in acquisitions. The acquisition pipeline is basically dried up. >> Stu: Dave, Dave, look at the DataMain was a great acquisition by EMC at the time now under Dell EMC. I mean, you're probably closer to it than me. I don't hear a strong cloud message coming out of that group when we talk about backup and the like. Dell corporate, of course they've got Microsoft partnerships Veeam has Amazon partnerships but it very much is tied to appliances or arrays or servers at the main piece, it's not a software message which is where Veritas is. >> Dave: If you look at Dell EMC's acquisitions recently, Isilon a couple billion, two and a half billion I think, Data Domain two and a half billion, DSSD a billion, which really hasn't turned into much at this point in time anyway. Extreme IO, not sure what they paid but you know you're hearing ebbs and flows on that but that my point is that is how under Joe Tucci EMC innovated. They would incrementally add on to their existing platforms. You were there. You saw it. And then they would invest in what Joe Tucci used to call tuck in acquisitions. And all that was well and good and they were able to sort of keep, not sort of, they were able to keep pace with the industry. That's basically stopped. That strategy. We've seen cuts and layoffs but still a financial windfall I think is coming for Dell. And VMware is a secret sauce there so we don't have to dig into that too much but my point is that services is going to be the lynchpin for that company in terms of attacking multicloud services and VMware. So now you >> Stu: And pivotal of course too. >> Dave: And pivotal as well, that's right. Great point. Now you come back to Veritas. Focused on that strategy of information management. Investing apparently in RND. Seemingly patient capital with Carlyle so you know me, I like to unpack the numbers. From what I can tell, my sources and got to do some more digging on this but when Veritas was acquired by Carlyle it was about 2.3 billion dollar company, wouldn't surprise me if on an income statement basis it's actually shrunk. It wouldn't surprise me at all. In fact, Bill Coleman kind of hinted to that. And especially if you start looking at rateable revenue models, maybe bookings could be up and I've heard numbers as high as 2.6, 2.7 billion but who knows. I've also heard now, the evaluation at the time of the acquisition was 7 billion and change. I've heard numbers as high as 14, 15 billion now, maybe a little inflated but I think easily over ten. And I think this company has an opportunity to get to three billion, get the evaluation up to 15, maybe even 20 billion. Big win for the private equity investors and the key to that, I think, is going to be a continuous investment. Go to market that aligns to those new areas that they're talking about and very importantly the ecosystem. I want to see this thing start exploding. The big highlights here were the cloud guys. What else would you highlight? You know, you walk around the shows a lot of smaller partners here Really would like to see that ecosystem grow. That's something that we're going to watch. And the audience grow. I think this show is up from last year next year I believe it's in Las Vegas again moving to the Cosmopolitan little bit better venue, bigger venue we'll see if they can get up to where the big boys go over time but overall I'd say pretty good second year for Veritas Vision. >> Yeah, you know Dave, when you look at the different areas Veritas has a full suite of software to find storage. The analogy I've used all the time storage industry is a knife fight in a dark alley. So you've got some big players out there that all have their software defined storage messaging out there of course Veritas would say they all have the hardware agenda. There's some truth to that but Veritas also has to partner with a bunch of these players to get there so where did they get the reach, how does the channel help them punch above their white, the differences there a two and a half, 2.6 billion dollar run rate company, revenue company that is private. So you know, they're trusted because they have history. They're not a small startup can this innovation and all the new team members come in and definitely the cloud piece is pretty interesting, Dave we see, we'll be back at Reinvent with the Cube and Veritas will have a presence there. Amazon, huge ecosystem, where do they play where do they show up, data, we've said so many times on here it becomes repetitive data is the new oil and customers need to take advantage of them. Can Veritas' message get them at the table and in a conversation where so much, it's about infrastructure and I love the message here at the show. It's not infrastructure technology it's information technology and we want to put a highlight on that so like the message, like where it's going, here are the customers but can they get at the table when there's so many different there's the startups, there's the big players everybody pulling at where the customers are and the GDPR was an interesting angle 'cause it was the crispest, the most crisp conversation I've heard on GDPR. I know you've been talking about it at least the last six months on some Cube interviews, I've done a number of interviews. But it really crystallized for me this week at the show. >> I'm glad you mentioned that because I've done a couple shows where GDPR has come up and I was like okay, yeah we get it. It's coming. It's nasty. How are you going to help me again? And I think Veritas did a really good job this week of saying look, we are here to help. We're going to start with Discovery and they sort of laid out the journey and I think they made a good case for their portfolio aligning well with solving that problem. So this could be a nice little kicker there. One of the things I wanted to sort of riff on a little bit was the tam, the data protection space. It reminds when ServiceNow went public I know it was a story about Gartner Antlis was very negative on and saying a helpdesk is a dead business and then Frank Sluman did a masterful job of expanding the tam, explaining that tam, guiding the company to a massive opportunity. And I see a similar dynamic here. On the one hand I say wow. Got a lot of companies in this data protection space even though it's exploding lot of VC money coming in, you're seeing new entrants like Datrium now gets in the space even though they're not just backup, that's not their primary but I mean you certainly saw SimpliVity with what's kind of their specialty. But guys like Datos.IO and some of these new guys coming in like we talked about Rubric, etc there's a lot of players here. Is the market big enough to support those? Part of me says ehh, I don't know but then I think back to that ServiceNow example. I think the tam is going to explode because it's not about backup. And it's not even just about data protection. It is about information management and I think Veritas got that right. What I like about their chances is they're big. They've got a big install base and I think their vision is right and they don't have that cloud agenda. They're a pure software company even though they do sell some appliances sometimes. And they got what seemingly is good management. I think I'd like to see them attract even more management as they grow and as they start executing this and as I say, the ecosystem has got to grow. >> Yeah, so Dave, IT has to deal with information governance. That's the defense they need to play. There's going to be money thrown at that. Some of the conversation we had this week IT operations becomes one of those tail winds that should lift companies like Veritas to be able to have further discussion and grow those budgets to be able to be a much more important piece. >> Alright good, Stu. Thank you. Good working with you again. It's been a long few weeks here but we're at it again next week. The Cube is at Big Data NYC which is done in conjunction with Strata in New York City. We've got a big party on Wednesday night. Actually we've got a presentation, Peter Burrows, Neil Raden, Jim Cubillas and we got a panel. Talking about software eating the edge. That's on Wednesday at 37 Pillars. Tweet me at @dvellante if you don't have an invitation I'll get you one although I heard there was a waitlist last week but we'll get you in, don't worry. And then we're also at Splunk next week, I'm going to be at Dotconf in DC. We've done Dotconf since I think 2011 was the first year we did Dotconf. >> And I'll be keeping a big eye on Microsoft Ignite next week while we don't have the Cube there. Obviously pretty important things like Aster Stack expected to roll out and got so many shows Dave. >> So the Cube, we love digital content creating content, sharing with you our community. Follow @thecube that handle for the Cube gems, you'll see a bunch of videos. Go to thecube.net, that's where we host all the videos from all of our shows. And then siliconangle.com is where we write up our news and analysis of these events and news of the day and of course wikibon.com is our research site. A lot of really good deep work going on there. So thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Mindeman. We're out from Veritas Vision 2017. We'll see you next time. (music)