why from nashville tennessee it's the hue covering CommVault go 2018 brought to you by CommVault welcome back we're a few miles down the road from the Jack Daniel's distillery I believe there's some whiskey flowing on the show floor here but we're gonna finish a couple more interviews you're watching the cube I'm Stu minimun this is Keith Townsend happy to welcome back to the program Don Foster is the senior director of solutions marketing with Conn volt Don great to see you hey great thanks for the invite all right so been really good energy at the show these second time at the program it's my first you've got 2000 of the loyal supporters here lots of breakouts you know the pavilions been hopping labs and everything yeah how's the show been for you so far I think it's been incredible I mean first hats off to our partners and customers for coming the buzz is great this year we try to do something maybe a little bit different than in years past and really make it all about the partner ecosystem and about how solutions are more than just combo software it's CommVault together with our partners really get the outcomes what the customers want so we've really integrated everything in as best we possibly can from the content and the theaters and who's doing presentations and even how we do some of the collaboration yeah one of the themes we've been poking at a bit is like okay what's the same and what's different about CommVault you've got obviously you know trusted brand got a lot of existing customers but you know this is not the CommVault of five years ago it was a really broad set of announcements this week yeah I want want you to say what what's been anything surprise you as to kind of what is resonating which things people are getting most excited about I'm sure yesterday when you showed off that bezel and a bunch of people were booing and I you're like really the bezels it's a bunch of geeks here yeah so you know sometimes the flashy lights still you know get us going for sure well like there's always a few things that kind of surprise you and some things that really don't I mean you say what's same what's different you know there's a few terms that we use one of them being powerful simplicity the fact that the power that comma offers for customers from technology perspective you know that's always a mainstay and I think our customers know that our partners absolutely know that and the fact that we can deliver these these solutions for our customers that are really interesting an integrated way is always powerful the simplicity side I don't know even listening to Al not too long ago talking about hey we need to make things more simplified that's really resonating well and it's not just a dashboard or an interface but it's all the automation that's coming behind the scenes that's really starting to change people's idea in my and their minds and I mean we know we know the customers are expecting more me a Bob and I'll talk to battle Don look on that on the keynote stage our partners are expecting more so we need to deliver more as well so I mean those are some really interesting things on the bezel you know it's interesting appliances you never think it's like people don't want to see the equipment I mean that people see servers and their server racks every day but you bring a piece of equipment you stick in our podium and everyone wants to touch it take a selfie with it it's the new appliance look I applaud your team for not you know smoke and you know music and everything and you know here's the unveiling yeah your software company and therefore one of the deployment models might be we make it nice and easy here it is that's great and everything yeah you have little design people do their thing but at the end of the day I don't want to think about it it's most of the stuff sticking in racks in my data center or in the cloud aren't things that I need to worry about right right I mean it appliance is cool but guess what what we're doing with partners like HP and Cisco on building even larger scale and appliance that's just as school if not maybe cooler so I mean it's just it's great kind of showcase that sort of a spectrum of what we can do for our customers so let's talk about the part of the ecosystem for the size so you guys have a really big show floor great announcements with Cisco HPE but 500 partners doing a partner portion of the show what are some of the under-the-radar announcements or even trends that you've seen that customers are excited about yeah sure so actually I just before I came out here I was a TBC with one of our large worldwide partners and one of the things we were talking about they're super excited about the CommVault activate a product and then did the portfolio of applications that were launching and they basically look you guys absolutely nailed it it's kind of the duh moment you know in fact the partner said three years ago we were trying to tell our customers it's it's the data stupid like the data it's that's what's most important deer is cool but it's the data and when they heard this came out it's a whole nother route for them to talk to customers about how they can do things smarter around their data without trying to sell them on necessarily swapping out back and recovery first so let's really understand what your environment looks like and I'm hearing a lot of buzz from our partner community just on how cool what this might be able to do for them and how they're building their business but more importantly the customers are starting to realize hey GDP are just isn't in an EU thing the California just brought their own regulations we're gonna see that probably come to a state near year before you know it so you're gonna have to have a need to act and really maintain and control that data that's really what activate does right going beyond just metadata and giving giving companies a chance to really understand what they have and how they might need to act against it either to meet their compliance requirements or maybe just be smarter with data yeah I love that be smarter with data I think I was saying you know half the customers that they're starting with compliance because that's something we have to do but then there's the opportunities as to what can I do with the data a great example in the keynote it was like oh well I can actually use intelligence too how do I call the data yes you want to save a lot of data but I don't necessarily need to save all the data and that could save me millions of dollars when I do that so yeah I mean the power of data I think we are still in the early days of you know how does CommVault help customers through that that's so I mean it's it's really kind of in the breath of how we crawl information and what we sort of unlock as we do that right so you probably saw we talked about the four dimensional index the 40 index and it's real it's to call it 4d just to try to make it sound super technical but there really are multiple dimensions that we pull together from information and the meta information and where it comes from and whatnot that's all super important from a starting point but once you start working through a review process you've been vent oriented you want to be able to start adding in some tags maybe some entity detail on where and how that fits the organization and then from that you can get deeper into context and content so the content indexing adding and those are tributes being able to really start to align different different sets of data against one another and then the next piece which we do a little bit ourselves and we also work with partners like lucid works like folks like brain space we can start driving context from that information so before we've even talked about moving or storing data we're crawling this information and really giving customers the chance to solve what really is probably a top-three issue for CIOs and that's what they do do I have where is it and is there value in it or is there risk in it or what is is what I don't know about my data bigger than I realize and that's what this helps to unlock and solve for so I think now we're at the beginning of just the beginning of where infrastructure traditional infrastructure companies like con vault are bleeding into data management specifically with 4d indexing where we're providing data outside of the traditional or what's the file size the data was created centered on recover backing up recovering today that actually providing business context and value that application is v's can pick up are you starting to see any movement in is v-space to leveraging the data that's provided by index 40 so we're definitely seeing interest you know so when people think about data they tend to go down this idea of a data Lake and I've talked I'm sure you guys have heard this oh yeah we just throw the data Lake we throw the data lake well what are you throwing in the data Lake now that's a good question we don't know what's in the data Lake anymore and it becomes a data swamp you probably heard those level of stories right well if you don't know what's in there if the integrity of the information then it becomes a major challenge well a lot of the partners the is V is the folks that want to build and work on solutions outside of you know on top of the data they need to know that they have a good source of truth from what they're working from so being able to showcase that we have sort of that virtual data layer the fact that we can crawl data it's not even under our own management and then be able to offer that information back up to another another partner that really starts to you know sparks and some ideas or maybe what could be next so action we're still working through that we still have some things to do around software development kits and make it easier for our partners to build and get that ecosystem going but it's absolutely right down the alley what we were we want to take this all right so Don I hear your data Lake and the data swamp and when we go to the world of multi cloud and edge components really what we get into is the data ocean because there are currents and weather patterns and you know challenges unforeseen the edge of the map you know don't go there things like that it's one of the things you know I've been looking at the last couple of years when I look at companies like comm vault is you know how do you play in the multi cloud world we had a good chat with AWS I stopped by the Microsoft Azure booth here and as things like multi cloud and edge computing fit in you know weirdoes comm bolt fit so on the cloud space I mean it really starts with how you're actually leveraging or moving data or using data in the cloud right and it seems seems minor but if you're not really using the cloud natively if you're not storing data in a way that an s3 blob expects it and you don't have the index behind it if you're just passing it out into containers so you're not really putting that rigor to what that information is then you start to lose a lot of the downstream capability and so taking advantage of all these different services that are inside of the cloud so I mean this is back in 2008 you know 2007 when AWS was starting to really hit cloud computing you started hearing about Microsoft and Microsoft as you're starting up we realized that we wanted to work with these blob based storage devices and from there we realized all right if we're gonna let customers go to the cloud we want to make sure that once their data goes there there's never a reason for them necessarily to have to pull it back let's be able to help them orchestrate the resource utilization and in order for us to do that that data has to be natively accessible really easy right there in that cloud so that's kind of been our vision so as we've supported AWS and there are many services as we supported Microsoft Azure there many services as we're working through in supporting Google cloud platform Oracle cloud we're tying into those back-end services to make sure that that native access is always available and the red thread there is really the way CommVault indexes it very similar what the 40 index is from an activate perspective that red thread is how we can help manage and information across those clouds so it gives customers an ability to know all right it can be in cold storage but I still know where it is what it's meant for and at any point in time I can use it to drive more insight or pull it up into a production compute resource in the cloud all right don't want to give you the final word as we're coming towards the end of our broadcast here CommVault go what what main takeaway you want customers to have when they think about CommVault and think about this event great so I want them to walk away and realize okay the CommVault maybe they thought we were you know five years ago or the cow bought that maybe they're hearing from other people that isn't from us give us a chance and really take a look the things we're doing around AI the way we're working in a delivery of cloud environments the fact that we have that reliability that dependability and all the modern technologies that you're looking for I bet they will be surprised if they just give us a chance they'll see that the power in our software has become something that's really simple and will actually help them get faster to achieve their outcomes than if they looked at buying point solutions and trying to piece it together on their own so that's really well that's really what we're looking for is start to learn and understand at the new con volt is I bet will surprise them all right Don Foster really appreciate you giving us the update we appreciate the opportunity to be able to dig in with your customers in this broad ecosystem for Keith Townsend Tom's to minimas we'll be doing a wrap-up here in a second and thanks so much for watching 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