>> Narrator: From Chicago, it's theCube covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here on the ground covering the Veritas Vision Solution Days in Chicago. Just a couple weeks ago we were in New York City at the iconic Tavern on the Green. We're here at the Palmer House Hotel. Jyothi Swaroop is here, he's the Vice President of Global Marketing for Veritas. Great to see you again. >> Thanks Dave, glad to be here. >> A few weeks ago we saw you in New York. Since then you've been around the globe talking to customers. You just gave a great presentation to about 60, 70 customers here in Chicago. Obviously a lot of your customers here, New York, one of the big NFL cities, so what have you learned in the last couple of weeks? >> Well, a lot. It's been exciting, right. Since New York I've been in Dubai, Milan, Rome, all over the place. Sounds exciting but a lot of jet lag and travel but a lot of exciting customers with interesting challenges that we can solve for. But I guess I would summarize it into three parts. Obviously there are data protection challenges that we solve at Veritas and have done so over 20 years. There are a lot of storage challenges that we talked about and how they're moving to the cloud and how we can assist with that. And lastly, interesting thing is the whole compliance in AI and ML related challenges as to how do they look ahead while staying compliant with what they have already. >> There are some major trends forcing people to rethink their data protection strategies. Obviously, cloud is one, the whole security and data protection world's coming together, the edge, just the whole distributed data trend. Machine intelligence is another one. There are things that you can do with all that data, machine plus data plus cloud really changes the game. You guys have some hard news in that area. Bring us up to date, what are you announcing? >> Right, so we're announcing Veritas Predictive Insights. Really excited about this announcement because when I joined Veritas about 16 months ago, I felt like Veritas sits on top of all these exabytes of data. We protect the largest number of exabytes of data, right. So we have access to the metadata of that data. So my question to the engineering team is what are we doing with that metadata? Are we going to use it, leverage it, so our customers can benefit from it? From all of this user data that we get from other customers. And the answer was, "Yes, we're working on something. Hold on, you're new." And now we have it. So at Veritas, yes it takes 12 to 16 months to build something at scale, right. We have hundreds of engineers that have worked on this. So what we have done now is, especially with our appliances portfolio, we're able to give our customers intuitive, predictive, and proactive maintenance and support of their systems. Now what does that mean? It means firmware upgrades, patches, things like that. They don't have to be a personalized, you know, fly in an engineer in to do kind of things. They can be automated. Oracle recently at Oracle OpenWorld announced this whole autonomous database. Why can't data protection be autonomous, right? So that's how we think, right. Make everything autonomous, make everything predictive and proactive and that's what Predictive Insights is about. >> So let's unpack that a little bit. So what are the enablers that allow you to actually take this next step. Obviously you've got the data, you've got a classification engine that allows you to put data in buckets, if you will. Explain what that is and why it's important. >> I'm glad you brought up the classification engine because that was at the heart of everything Veritas did for the last 20 years, right. We call it Big Veritas Information Classifier where we classified all of the data that came in on Ingest, unlike other people, other customers and other vendors. We classified all of the data that came in from that back up and we told our customers, "Here's PII numbers, your sensitive information is structured data, is unstructured data." We did this really well for a long time. Now we wanted to take that to the next level, right. We wanted to tell our customers what's actually going on with your infrastructure. You've classified the data, you've put it in here, what can you do with it next? Where can you put it? Can you optimize it after the cloud? How much will you pay for it? Can you remove something off of it? How much do you pay for that? Can you put some data retention on prem? How much would that cost you? So we would not only want to give them information about the classification of that data, but how to monetize that data, how much money would it cost to store that data in different areas. >> So this is a case where, if you go back to something you might remember, 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure mandated that you were able to recover and deliver to a court of law electronic records. Well data classification was critical component there. This is one of those cases like, if you've got an older athlete, like Tom Brady, maybe he's not as fast as he used to be, but he's got it all up here, he knows the plays before he sees it. You guys have the experience around things like data classification which are table stakes to allow you to do this but it's still a challenge for many folks in the industry. It's a metadata problem, isn't it? >> Yup, it absolutely is. It is a metadata problem and it's a metadata advantage for us at Veritas because we sit on top of the highest amount of metadata. >> So how do I take advantage of the Veritas Predictive Insights? Where does it live? >> So where we've announced it, it'll be out there the beginning of the year, 2019. We're rolling out with our appliances portfolio first because we have more control over it because the appliances and the hardware have been integrated with our software. So we give our customers predictive insights on all of their appliances that they buy from Veritas and their systems. Going forward, we'll extend that to our software only sales motions, as well. As extending it to other software platforms and other hardware platforms from other vendors, as well. So we're working on some integrations that I can't talk about today but we want to essentially take predictive insights and move it beyond Veritas in the future. >> Okay, so, talk a little bit more about how it works. Using machine learning technology, you're building models and training the data for different customers, how does it all actually come to fruition? >> Sure, so the first thing is, you know, we're generating what we call SRS or a system reliability score, right. So our engine processes all of this information that comes from a customer's data, the usage data, and maps it to the hundreds of other customers, thousands of other customers usage data that we have to find patterns, right. So for example, if a disc hasn't had a firmware upgraded and hasn't done so for months, we can predicatively let the customer know this disc is going to fail if you didn't upgrade this. But that's not enough. We actually allow them to click a button and upgrade the firmware right there to that disc so it's done, right. So it's not only letting customers know that here's something that's going to go wrong, but here's how to fix it, as well. That's just one example of what we can do. >> Well that's key, it's like the old days. You know, you have a pager and you get an alert and then you got to go do something. You're saying you're actually building automation into the process. >> Right, it's like chat bots. You respond to the chat bot right there and it does the action for you. You don't actually have to go somewhere and figure it out. >> So you've got this SRS score. >> Jyothi: Right. >> So what happens when you cross that threshold, it tells the system, "Okay, take some remedial action," or does it allow the customer to sort of make that choice? What's next? >> Sure, so the SRS score is like a credit score, right. There's a lot of complexity underneath that score. So at the highest level we tell the score, the customer if your score is above a certain point, your systems are healthy, they're running well. If they go below a certain point, right, let's say a 700 score for a credit score, you got to go watch or widen your goal below and we'll give them the 10 or 20 reasons why the score went down. Whether it's a firmware thing or a support issue or a hard drive issue. We tell them exactly what's about to go wrong so they can go fix it before it actually goes wrong. >> What do you, actually, before we go there, just some examples, some use cases that you expect in the field, you've talked to customers about. Give us some more. >> Sure, so data, like we talk to a lot of companies with massive data centers. So one of the things that it says with our appliances, simple things like temperature changes. I was in Dubai, look, the temperature there can be crazy. It goes over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. So it says simple things like temperature changes can have massive effect on your hard drives and how that works. If my AI and ML algorithms or my software can proactively tell me the temperatures going up, this is what's going to happen, you increase the cooling, do something different, move the data somewhere, back it up. That's great for the customer. Can I take action just based on a simple thing like temperature. There's another interesting customer, here in New York actually, that came to me and said, we had this problem like every so many weeks, their discs would fail. And they thought it was their temperature because it was in the summer. It wasn't and after a lot of research, it turns out it was the fire alarms that were going off. So the fire alarm and the fire alarm testing that was going on was actually causing discs to fail. >> Because of the vibration or? >> For the vibration and the decibel level. It was interesting, right. And now our AI, ML knows that so it's recorded, we know it and we'll be better off going forward, right. We'll tell other customers now that have data centers with massive, loud, high decibel fire alarms that this could be a potential issue. I'm not saying that is the issue, but this could be a potential issue that they would have never thought of otherwise. >> So what do you expect the business impact to be? When you talk to customers about this capability, you know, under non-disclosure, etcetera, how are they seeing this impacting their business? >> So it's three things, right. Proactive support and maintenance, that's really important. The customers are tired of talking to large vendors where the support connections are horrible, right. They have to go in and raise a ticket and do certain things and then they will ship a guy over to their site who'll come and fix it. That's just too long. >> Dave: Slow and reactive. >> Slow and reactive. We want to make this proactive and autonomous, that's number one. Number two is total cost of ownership, right. So when customers are able to predict these failures, they don't have to have a certain set of money set aside for solving problems when the occur. They're like, "I know this problem has come up. I need to budget for it." So their TCO models get better and more predictable, right. And last but definitely not the least, you know, when we extend this to beyond Veritas, they will be able to do more with their data. Again, what is that more? We don't know yet today. But when we are able to extend this to beyond Veritas, customers will be able to do a lot more with their data centers. >> So a couple of things this plays into. Obviously digital transformation is all about being on all the time, you don't want to have, you don't want planned downtime or unplanned downtime. This allows you to at least plan more effectively and potentially eliminate any downtime so your data is always accessible. And it's also cloud-like in that you're automating a lot of the either recovery from failures, or you know, you're pushing a button and saying okay, remediate this, patch that so you don't have the failure. So that's a sort of cloud-like approach. So you said it's available the first part of '19. And it's available, is it in appliances or? How do I get this. >> So we'll be rolling it out in appliances first, all the Veritas appliances. And then we'll extend it to software only, as well as beyond Veritas going forward. >> Awesome, Jyothi, thanks very much for taking us through the new capability. AI brought to data protection, anticipating problems before they occur, remediating them in an autonomous way. I appreciate your time. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thanks for coming back on. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guess right after this short break. You're watching theCube from Chicago, Veritas Vision Solution Day. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

(bright, peppy music) >> Announcer: From Chicago, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Hello everyone, welcome to Chicago. We're here covering the Veritas Solution Day. Veritas, last year, had the Veritas Vision Conference and they brought together all their customers. This year they decided to go around the world, I think they have six or seven of these across the globe. And we just were in New York a few weeks ago at Tavern on the Green. We're here at the Palmer House in Chicago. Iconic hotel. About 60 to 70 customers here. Of course Chicago's a big opportunity for companies like Veritas because there's such a good customer base here. But what I want to do now is set up what's going on in the data protection business. According to a number of sources, Gartner, IDC Data, other survey data, certainly anecdotally when we talk to customers, about half of the customers that we talk to are going to replace their data protection platform within the next five years. Why is that? Well, there are a number of factors that are affecting that and I want to talk about the reasons why, the implications to the market, and what that means for customers. So if you look back 10 years ago, there was a similar dynamic going on catalyzed by the ascendancy of virtualization. What was happening is that you had all these servers that were underutilized and so the brilliance of virtualization was we're going to consolidate those servers, virtualize the compute power, dramatically increase the utilization and reduce the physical capacity that's on the floor. So you can get rid of stuff. Get rid of servers, spend less, and get more value out of that asset. Because you had all these underutilized hardware assets. Data protection backup in particular was the one workload that actually could use all that compute power. Why, because at the end of the day, you're backing up this huge stream of data. And so as a result, when you had to do a full backup, you didn't have the physical resources. So people had to rethink how they architected backup because of virtualization. So you now have a similar dynamic, but for different reasons. Some of the big trends that are going on here. The first one is of course digital. So digital means data and it's all about how you get value out of your data because data is increasingly an important asset. People are realizing that protecting that data is more and more important. As a result, people are rethinking just the definition of recovery. Recovery has to be faster, you've got to be always on in this digital world. So digital transformation is critical. You can't just bolt on backup as you have for the last 20, 30, 40 years really. Backup has been a bolt on. You've also got cloud. Everybody wants cloud-like. So you're seeing a shift from improving or dealing with resource utilization and allocation, as I explained in the virtualization world, now to automation. Why automation? Because people want a cloud-like experience. They realize they can't just shove all their data into the public cloud. There's data all over the place, and I'll talk about that in a moment in terms of distributed data, but specifically people want a cloud-like experience. What does that mean? That means they want pay-as-you-go, they want simple deployment, they want fast seamless recovery, and they want a lot of automation. While the price of technology comes down year after year, the price of people doesn't. And you can't just keep throwing people at the infrastructure problem, because it's so complex, you have to automate. And you want to shift resources toward higher value activities. Digital transformation, dev opps, application development. So this distributed data world, this multi-cloud world, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment when I discuss the Edge, it's becoming a forcing function. Multi-cloud is a forcing function to rethink your backup. Because you've got different infrastructures, a service providers, you've got SAS providers, you've got all kinds of clouds that are popping up all over the lines of business and within your own data centers. As a result, you need to think about how do I catalog all that data, how do I protect that data, how do I govern that data, how do I deal with things like GDPR and make sure that I'm in compliance. So it becomes a much more complicated equation, and the variables are distinct. For example, I don't really understand what point in time means anymore. If you have distributed data, what does it mean to have a point in time copy? Point in what time? Who's the master? So you need some kind of controls in that multi-cloud world. That's a forcing function to rethink your backup. The other thing is platform. Platform beats products. I'll talk about that in a moment. People for years have looked at backup as purely insurance. Everybody hates buying insurance, we all know that, so you're seeing people trying to get more out of their backup and recovery platforms. For instance, integrating disaster recovery. So that's becoming an integral part of people's strategies. You're also seeing analytics becoming more and more important. People are trying to, because all the data sits in the corpus of the backup, people are saying why don't we analyze that data and get more out of it. Why don't we take snapshots of that data and make it available to dev opps. And what about ransomware, which again I'll talk about in a moment. Could I maybe look at anomalies in that data to determine if there are some problems. Many, many use cases emerging. Data classification, governance, I mentioned GDPR before, so you're seeing backup shift from pure insurance to a higher value business opportunity. And then of course, there's security, there's compliance, there's governance, ransomware is critical. Organizations are creating air gaps, meaning disconnecting from the internet, so that if they get hit with a ransomware attack they can isolate their data, but just even that is not enough. People can get through air gaps by physically putting in, whatever. Sticks or malware et cetera. So you still have to be able to use analytics to look at that corpus of backup data and identify anomalies. But again, because of those security risks and because of the importance of digital transformation and data people are rethinking how they do data protection. And finally, there's the Edge. We are living in a distributed world, it's a multi-cloud world, as I said before it's a forcing function, and the Edge is one of those clouds, if you will, which changes the way in which you think about backup. How does it change. Locality of the recovery data. If you've got Edge data, if you've got multi-cloud, you've, as I said before, got to have a global catalog and recover that data locally. Another thing to think about is SLAs. In a cloud world, you, the customer, are responsible for the recovery. Well, the cloud vendor can get the light back on on the disc system, or the computer, or the compute system, you are responsible for the people and the process to recover your business. That is not the cloud vendor's responsibility so you need to think about that. And think about recovery as recovery at the business level, not just recovery of the data, but recovery, getting your business back online. There's also the three laws of the cloud. We learned this from Pat Gelsinger this August at VMworld. The laws of physics, the laws of economics, and the law of the land. Those will dictate where you put data and how you back up that data. So all of this has created a new landscape in the data protection business. Let's run down that landscape. Who are the leaders. You've got Dell EMC, you've got Veritas, you've got Convault, and you've got IBM. Those guys comprise probably 2/3 or more of the marketplace. And you have startups like Cohesity and Rubrik who have raised hundreds of millions of dollars going after them and challenging them. You've got a whole new set of players that are taking new approaches. Actifio, for example, got the whole copy data management thing going. Datrium is creating end to end, both primary storage and data protection backup in the same platform with a software-based cloud-like, SAS-like offering. You've got companies like Zerto and Imanis Data that are specialists. You've got companies like WANdisco, again, taking new approaches. And then you have Oracle, with the Oracle recovery appliance, which is totally changing the way in which backup worked for Oracle databases exclusively. Taking a database-led approach to backup. And then of course you've got the storage players that are part of the ecosystem even though they're not directly competing with backup software vendors. Guys like Pure, NetApp, InfiniteApp. They're partnering with backup vendors. And then of course, there's the cloud guys. AWS, Azure, Google. The thing to think about as customers, really three things. Platform versus product. What's the platform look like? Is it an API-based platform? Because you want to program to that platform infrastructurer's code, you want to support your dev opps infrastructure. The second is cloud-like pricing, and cloud-like deployment. You want a cloud-based operating model to simplify your operations and lower your IT labor costs and shift those costs to more strategic efforts and initiatives such as digital transformation and application development. And the third is ecosystem alignment. Make sure that your backup software vendor and you backup solution vendors are all, their ecosystem is aligned with your ecosystem. Because you're going to get more facile integration and problem-solving and flexibility if those systems align. So take a look at that as well. Couple of things I want to mention and emphasize. New application development models. Cloud Native, Kubernetes. Function, you know people call it server-less, but function-based programming. Really to support dev opps and infrastructure as a code. That is going to have implications on how you protect data. And finally AI. How can you talk about anything today without talking about AI. Anticipatory staging of data for recovery, as in the example. Predicting where problems are going to occur. Machine intelligence will increasingly play a role in this whole landscape. So, as you can see, there's a lot going on. This is why data protection is such a hot space. That's why the VCs are getting in. It's why the incumbents like Veritas, Dell EMC, IBM, Convault, those that I mentioned are trying to re-platform and hang on to their large install bases and ultimately grow them. And it's why companies in the startup and the niche spaces, are tucking in and identifying new opportunities to participate. So that's a quick overview of what's going on here at the Veritas Vision Solution Day from Chicago. We'll be here all day talking to customers, talking to practitioners, technologists, and executives. So keep it right there, you're watching theCUBE. I'm Dave Vellante. Be right back. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From Chicago, it's The Cube. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Windy City everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're goin' out to the events, we extract a signal from the noise. We're here at the Veritas Vision Solution Days in Chicago. We were just a few weeks ago we were at the iconic Tavern on the Green in New York City. We're here at the Palmer House Hotel, beautiful hotel right in downtown Chicago near the lake. It's just an awesome venue, it's great to be here. Arista Thurman III is here, he's the principle computer engineer at the Argonne National Labs. Great to see you, thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Yah, good to be here, thanks. >> So tell the audience about Argonne National Labs. What do you guys all about? >> About science, so we're all about the advancement of science. We do a lot of different experiments from technology for batteries and chemistry. The project we're working on is the advanced photon source, which is a light source that's used to collect data in experiments with a photon source. >> OK, so you're an IT practitioner, >> Arista Thurman: That is correct. >> Serving scientists. >> Arista Thurman: Yes. >> What's that like? Is that like an IT guy serving doctors? Are they kind of particular? >> Arista Thurman: A little bit. >> There's some challenges there, but yah it's great. So basically you have a unique customer base, and they have additional requirements. So, it's not like a normal customer base. They're very smart people. They have a lot of demands and needs, and we do our best to provide all the services they require. >> Yah, so given that they're technical people, they may not be IT people but they have an affinity to technology. First of all, it must be hard to BS them, right? (laughter) >> Arista Thurman: No doubt, no doubt. >> They'd cut through that, so you got to be straight with them. And they're probably pretty demanding, right? I mean, they have limited resources and limited time and limited budgets, and they're probably pounding you pretty hard. Is that the case, or are they more forgiving? >> They're great people to work with, but there can be some challenges. I mean, it's unique in the idea that they work on multiple platforms. So it's from Unix to Linux to Mac. Multiple computers in their offices, multiple data requirements. And a lot of things happen without a lot of process and planning. Some things are ad hoc. So, it puts a little bit of strain sometimes on you to try to make everything happen in the amount of time they have. And everything is There's some challenges with regard to how to get things done in a timely fashion when you don't know what's going to happen with some of these experiments. >> I mean I imagine, right? They can probably deal with a lot of uncertain processes because that's kind of their lives, right? You must have to cobble things together for them to get them a solution sometimes, is that the case? >> We do sometimes. I think it's all about getting enough funding and enough resources to take care of all the different experiments. >> Dave Vellante: A balancing act. >> Yah. >> Dave Vellante: Ya so you look after, compute and storage. >> Arista Thurman: Yes. >> Right, so talk about what's happening generally there and then specifically data protection. >> So in general, my primary focus is Linux. Linus administration, Red Hat Linux. And we've seen a lot of data growth over the last five years and we've got projection for more growth as we are planning for an upgrade. So we're going to change our bmine and make it more efficient. Have a better light source and that's all planned in the next two to three years. And so, there's a lot of extra projects on top of our normal workload. We have a lot of equipment that probably needs to be refreshed. There's resources and with IT and any kind of data management things change. So whatever we're doing today, in the next three years we'll be doing something different because things change with regard to CPU speeds, performance of IO networking, storage requirements. All those things are continually growing exponentially. And when scientists want to do more experiments and they get new resources in, it's going to require more resources for us to maintain and keep them operational at the speeds and performance they want. >> Yah, we do hundreds of events with The Cube. We do about 130 events this year, and a lot of them are so-called "big data" orientation. And when you go to those data oriented events, you hear a lot of, sort of the roots of that. Or at least similarities to the scientific technical computing areas and it's sort of evolved into big data. A lot of the disciplines are similar. So, you're talking about a lot of data here. Sometimes it's really fast data, and there's a lot of variety, presumably, in that data. So how much data are we talking about? Is it huge volumes? Maybe you could describe your data environment. >> Primarily we have things broken up into different areas. So we have some block storage, and that provides a lot of our virtual the back-end for our virtualization environments which is either Microsoft or Red Hat RHV. I would estimate that's somewhere in a petabyte range. And then we also have our NAS file systems which spread across multiple environments providing NFS version three and four and also to Windows clients CIFS and some of the Mac clients also utilize that. And that's at about a little less than a petabyte. We also have high performance computing and that's a couple petabytes, at least. And all those numbers are just estimates because we're constantly growing. >> Any given time it's changing. But you're talking about multiple petabytes. So how do you back up, how do you protect multiple petabytes? >> Well I think it has to, it's all about a balancing act 'cause it's hard to back up everything in that same time window. So we have multiple backup environments providing resources for individual platforms. Like for Windows we'd do something a little different than we'd do for Linux. And we have different retention policies. Some environments need to be retained, retention is three years and some is six months, some three months, and so you have to have a system of migrating your storage to faster discs and then layer off the tape for long term retention. It's a challenge that we're constantly fighting with. >> How do you use Veritas? You're a customer obviously? >> Yah, we've been a Veritas customer for many years and we utilize Veritas in our virtualization environments. They kind of help us out with central platform. We've actually explored other things but the most cost effective thing to us at this point has been Veritas. We utilize them to back up primarily our NAS and our black files, our black file systems that provide most of the virtualization. >> Why Veritas? What is it about them that you have an affinity for? There's a zillion other backup software vendors out there, why Veritas? >> I think we have invested a lot in Veritas over the years. Predating my time at Argonne we've been using Veritas. In my previous career, in Sun Microsystems we also had some kind of relationship with Veritas. So it's easy and I think, like I mentioned earlier, we explored other things but it wasn't cost effective to make that kind of change. And it's been a reliable product. It does require work but it has been a reliable product. >> So, you'd mentioned your Linux, Red Hat Linux. >> Arista Thurman: Yes. >> So you saw this IBM announced it's going to buy Red Hat for 34 billion dollars. What were your thoughts when you heard that news? >> I was like, "Wow, what is going to happen now?" I was like, "How is that going to impact us?" Is it going to change our licensing model? Or is it going to be a good thing, or a bad thing? Right now we just don't really know. We're just kind of waiting and seeing. But it's like, OK, I mean that's a big deal. It is a biggest deal certainly from IBM. Their biggest previous deal was I think Cognos at five billion, so this dwarfs that. The deal of course doesn't close probably till the second half of 2019. So it's going to take a while. But look, IBM is known when it buys software companies, saw this with SPSS, you've seen it with other companies that it buys, it often times will change the pricing model. How do you license Red Hat? Do you have an enterprise license agreement? Do you know offhand? >> We do have an agreement with them. >> Dave Vellante: Lock that in. Lock that long term in now before the deal goes down. >> One of my counterparts is in charge of that part of it. So I'm sure we'll be having that conversation shortly. >> Yah, interesting. Well listen, Arista thanks very much for coming on The Cube, really appreciate your insight. >> Thank you. >> It's great to meet you, all right, you're welcome. Thanks for watching everybody, it's a wrap from Chicago. This has been The Cube, Veritas Vision Days. Check out SiliconAngle.com for all the news. TheCube.net is where you'll find these videos and a lot of others. You'll see where The Cube is next. Wikibon.com for all the research. Thanks for the team here, appreciate your help on the ground. We're out from Chicago, this is Dave Vellante. We'll see ya next time.

>> From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York, it's the CUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. >> We're back at the beautiful Tavern on the Green in the heart of New York City in Central Park. I'm Dave Vellante, and you're watching the CUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We're here covering the Veritas Solution Day with Veritas Vision, and Anteneh Miticu is here. He's the enterprise backup and data protection team leader at Teradyne, very experienced practitioner We love Anteneh talking to the customers. So thanks very much for coming on the CUBE. >> Thank you. Thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome. So talk about your role as the data protection team leader. What does that entail? >> Yeah, so basically Teradyne has data close to 1.5 terabytes that we protect on a day to day basis and weekly basis and we have 14 different sites that we protect data. So, we just, you know, do backups, and recovery, and restoration, and all that stuff. >> So what are the drivers of your business that affect the data protection strategy? >> So, basically data changes from day to day basis and data grows and we have a lot of threats around us that we have to protect the data. So, we have to make sure that we are on top of protecting it on a day to day basis and archiving it so. >> Okay, so one of the challenges obviously is that you're data's not just in one box. >> That's right. >> You mentioned 14 sites a terabyte and a half and... >> Not terabyte. Petabyte, sorry. >> That's right Petabyte. >> Petabyte, that's right. >> I got a terabyte in my backpack. So, and that presumably occurred over time, sprawled over time. So, what kind of challenges did that create in terms of your ability to protect your data and keep up with the backup Windows the RPO's and the RTO's requirement. >> Yeah, yeah, so basically the way the backup has been evolving is that, originally, we had tape backup where the capacity of each tape is very small and the data is big and using libraries and tape drives take a long time to boot backup and also you need people in each location to be able to manage libraries and tapes and there are so many factors that affect the day to day backup. So in combination all that when you put all that together it's very challenging to protect the data. And then, slowly, to mitigate those kinds of problems then we apply disk-based backup and then cloud-based backup which makes it easier and easier. >> So you still use tape? >> Yes. >> Just not for backup, right? >> Yes, we still use tapes in some locations, but slowly we are growing towards cloud backup and disk-based backup. So, because of still using tape, still using libraries, still using managing multiple locations using people who are in that location to help us out while the team is managing it from remote side. All that is challenging and complex. >> So here at this Veritas Solution Day, CEO is here earlier when you sit down with the Veritas executives, you're a big customer, what do you tell them? What do you tell them you need? What do you tell them you want? What do you tell them in terms of the direction you want Veritas to go? >> Yeah, so basically what we want is simplicity on our tape backup on our backup structure strategy. And also, it shouldn't be too expensive to protect data. So, now the cost of storage is getting cheaper and slowly it's getting cheaper to put data on the cloud but we want to see simplicity, number one. We want to see user friendly software and applications to be able to help us manage the data and visibility to the data that we're managing so that we understand what's dark data and what's live data. And we want to be able to see all our environment from a single platform instead of multiple platforms. So the conference today is showing us that kind of road map, that things are getting integrated and the visibility is coming and the cost is coming down much, much better. So, down the road we can see that we're going to be able to manage much better than how we've been managing so far. >> So Anteneh, you're one of Veritas' 50,000 customers. As you well know there's a lot of startups in this business. There's a lot of competition, it's a big market. A lot of money pouring in. So you must be, the vendors must be knocking down your door to try to win your business. So how do you evaluate that? You come to a session like this you hear some road map items. We were talking to a customer earlier and he was saying, you know, they don't really want to migrate if they don't have to. You have an affinity with Veritas. What kinds of things do you evaluate? Are you thinking about changing your backup approach or even your backup vendor? How do you evaluate those decisions? >> Yeah, I mean, obviously we always have to check and see where we should go in terms of protecting our data. And we have to evaluate our strategy. So, so far Veritas has been one of the great companies we've been working with and we don't see any plan of moving away from Veritas, but, there are so many other companies that are coming that are simpler and that provide much better flexibility. So, if those companies work out, we'll see how it goes, but as of today, Veritas has been very good for us. We've been working with Veritas for a long time at least as long as I've been working with Teradyne. So, but, we'll see how it goes. >> So there's the promise of 8.1.2 is to deliver to you the simplicity that you're demanding. Where are you today in terms of releasing? >> Yeah, so, right now we're on 8.1.1 so what I have heard on 8.1.2 is incredible. Basically, it's going to give us a lot of capabilities that we are doing outside of 8.1.1 which is manual like upgrading our clients and being able to see all our clients and mass of service from one location. All that integration is coming. So, I'm very excited about 8.1.2 and I can't wait to go back and start using it. >> When you have to go from 8.1.1 to 8.1.2 can you describe what that's like? What the planning is like, what you have to do to get there. How much is involved? >> Yeah, so, you're going to have to go and deploy 8.1.2 on the master server and that is going to give you the capability to be able to push it to other servers as well. But before, 8.1.1 then we have to go to each master server and push it which was very time consuming. And also, we have over 400 clients that we have to use something else outside of net backup to be able to upgrade. Now, we can use 8.1.2 to be able to upgrade all those clients from 8.1.2. >> And you referenced earlier Cloud, you use multiple clouds I presume, like most companies, and SAS is in there as well? >> Yeah, so we just started using Cloud. We still are using the old-fashioned way which is tape and disk on most of our locations, but right now just deployed Azure Cloud using backup catalyst server and that's working out very well. It's working out very well and it's making our life much simpler and much better. So we see ourselves moving toward that direction. >> You like the cloud, okay. So, we joke, do you get your weekends back? >> Yeah, actually people who supported from the field offices, now they get their weekend back. Because they are the ones who helped us out while we are supporting it from Boston. >> So you're using Azure, you said. Are you a Microsoft shop predominantly? >> No, this is just the beginning, but we're open on NWES and other cloud providers as well. >> Okay, so it's not, Azure wasn't selected because you had a big Microsoft install base. It was more for the capabilites of the infrastructure that you went there. >> Yes, yes, but we are very flexible and we are open to see other providers as well. And that backup provides users the capability to use other providers as well. >> So, traditionally, the backup admin was somebody to whom pretty much anybody had to go the application guys had to go, the database people, the lines of business, if they wanted to protect their data. That sort of group, or that individual would really be the gatekeeper, if you will. With the Cloud, there's a move towards self-service. Now, what do you think about that and how does that fit with your strategy? Is that something that you're aggressively promoting? How do you protect the corporation from anomalous behavior or non-compliance and things like that? Talk about the trend towards self-service and how that role of the backup admin is evolving. >> Yeah, so the role of the backup admin is very complex, even before. But now, because of self-serving, self-service is available, then the database admins or the virtual team can be able to manage their own backups from their side. But still, backup admins have to be able to manage it in a way that fits according to the strategy that we want the organization to run their backups. So the role of the backup admins is now more complex, and it's not only in one place doing one thing, but working with multiple team allowing other people to have visibility and control while the backup admins manage it from behind. >> You've been with Teradyne almost two decades. You remember the days when backup was just always an afterthought, and still is in a lot of applications, by the way. But increasingly with things like Dev Ops, applications are getting more involved in essentially making infrastructure programmable and building in security, building in data protection. Have you seen that trend at your company and where do you see that going? >> Yeah, so say that again? Sorry. >> So, specifically with regard to building data protection in from the beginning as opposed to bolting it on at the end. Is that something that you guys are able to do with your developers and your Dev Ops teams? >> Yeah, so right now, protecting the data is very strategic and the approach is not just taking the data and putting it somewhere and forgetting about it, but with a plan and purpose, you know? >> So anything here today that you saw that was exciting? What did you think of the event? >> The event was great, and I was glad to be here. And the last couple of years, I was in Vegas with the Veritas Conference as well. And it was very good to be able to talk to other peers and good to get the road map from Veritas as to where they are heading going forward, and so we can be able to align our road map with their road map as well. It's good to get the big picture, and it's good to have conversations and discussions. Just now we came out of so many detailed technical discussions. I'm excited to be here. >> So you saw Richard Branson last year. That was pretty cool, wasn't it? >> That's right. Yeah, he's a great guy and I'm his admirer, and seeing him up close and explaining his experiences and all that stuff was great. >> It's always good to see billionaires giving back and he does sincerely. >> That's right. >> Thanks very much for coming on the CUBE and sharing your experience and your knowledge. I really appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome. Alright. Keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're going to take this short break. You're watching the CUBE, from Veritas Solutions Days at Central Park Tavern on the Green. We'll be right back. (digital music)

>> From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE covering Veritas Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome to New York City, everybody. We're here in the heart of Central Park at the beautiful location, Tavern on the Green. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. And this is our special coverage of the Veritas Solutions Day. The hashtag is VtasVision. Veritas Vision last year was a big tent customer event, several thousand customers at that event and Veritas decided this year to go out to the field. 20 of these solution days, very intimate events, couple hundred customers, keynote presentations from Veritas, breakout sessions, getting deep into the product but also talking strategy, and intimate conversations with executives, CxOs, CIOs, backup admins, and of course, New York City is one of those places where you get very advanced customers pushing the envelope, very demanding. I often joke they're as demanding as New York sports fans, and so they have high expectations. But they also have a lot of money, and so the vendor community loves to come to New York, they love to get intimate with these customers in New York, as do we at theCUBE. So we're going to be talking to customers today, we're going to be talking to executives of Veritas, some partners. So I want to talk a little bit about what's going on in the marketplace, in this backup and recovery space. It's transforming quite dramatically. For those of you who follow theCUBE, you know last year at VMworld, last two years, actually, data protection was one of the hottest topics at the event. Of course, multi-cloud, of course there was a lot of AI talk and containers and Kubernetes. But staid old backup, old, reliable data protection was one of the hottest topics. We're seeing VC money pour into this space. We're seeing upstarts like Cohesity and Rubrik trying to take aim at the incumbents like Veritas and Commvault, and IBM, and Dell EMC, so those traditional companies, those enterprise companies that have large install bases are trying to hold onto that install base and migrate their platforms to a modern software-defined platform, API-based, using containers, using microservices, building on top of the code that they've developed, simplifying the UI, and at the same time, allowing for an abstraction layer across clouds and multi-clouds. So what are the big drivers that are really pushing the trends, the megatrends of this space? Well, certainly digital transformation is one of them. The last 10 years of big data, people have gathered all this data, and now that data is in this place and people are now applying machine intelligence to that data. They're doing a lot of this work in the cloud. So digital transformation, data, big data, cloud, multi-cloud, simplification. People want a much simpler experience, so bringing the cloud experience to their data, wherever the data might live. Because of course, you get the three laws of cloud. You've got the law of physics, right? Physics says you can't just shove everything into the cloud. It just takes too long. If I have big bog of data, if I have a petabyte of data, you know how long that's going to take to put into the cloud? So I may not just move it in there unless I stick it on a Chevy truck and it cart it over on a bunch of tapes and nobody really wants to do that. So there's the law of physics. There's also the law of economics. It's very expensive to move that data. You need a lot of network bandwidth, so, you know, you might not necessarily put everything into the cloud, you might keep stuff on-prem. And of course, there's a law of the land. And the law of the land says, well, if I'm in country X, let's say Germany, that data can't leave that country. It's got to be physically proximate inside the boundaries, the borders of the country, by local law. So these three laws are something that was put forth to us by Pat Gelsinger in theCUBE at VMworld this year. We've evolved that thinking, but it's very true when we talk to customers about this. These are trends that are driving their decisions about cloud and multi-cloud and where to put it. We talked in theCUBE about the stat that the average enterprise has eight clouds. Well, we're a small enterprise and we have eight clouds, so I think that number's actually much, much higher, especially when you include SAS. So lots of data, lots of copies of data, so you need a way to abstract all that complexity and have a single place to protect your data. Now, a big part of this, digital transformation is driving more intense requirements on recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives, RPO and RTO, what do those words mean? Recovery point objective, think about... Ask a businessperson, how much data are you willing to lose? And they go, oh, what are you talking about? I don't want to lose any data. But if you think about it and you ask the next question, how much are you willing to spend so that you lose no data, and if they have to spend millions and millions of dollars to do that, they might relax that requirement a little bit. They might say, well, you know, if I lose 15 minutes of data in any given time and have to recreate it, not the end of the world. So that's what RPO is, is essentially the point in time that you go in to recover and how much data loss you're exposed to. And the way this works is you take, let's say, snapshots to simplify the equation, you push those offsite away from any potential disaster, and it's that gap between when you actually capture the data and when that disaster might happen that you're exposed. So to make that as close as zero as possible, that gap as close to zero as possible, is very, very expensive, so a lot of companies don't want to do that. At the same time, digital transformation's pushing them to get as close to zero as possible without breaking the bank. The other part of that equation is recovery time objective, how long it takes to get the application and the data back and running. And because of digital transformation, people want to make that virtually instantaneously. So because of digital transformation, people are re-architecting their data protection strategies to have near-instantaneous recovery. This all fits into the megatrend of cloud. People want it to be simpler, they want it to mimic the cloud-like experience, almost as if I'm on Amazon or I'm on Netflix, so simplifying the recovery process and the backup process is something that we're going to hear a lot more of. Automation is another big theme. People tend to automate through scripts. Well, scripts are fragile, scripts tend to break. When changes are made in software, scripts tend to have to be rewritten and maintained. And so it's a very high maintenance type of activity to do scripts, and over time, they just fade away, or don't, they stop working. So automation through API is very, very important, something that you're hearing much more, is much more thematic in this world of data protection. The other is getting more out of the corpus of data in my data protection infrastructure, because, let's face it, backup and recovery, it's like insurance. I hope I never need it, but if I do need it, it's very valuable at that point in time that I do need it. But it's an expense. It's not driving bottom-line revenue. It's not necessarily cutting cost. It is indirectly in the form of reducing the cost of downtime, but that's harder. That's kind of viewed oftentimes as a soft dollar benefit. So what you're hearing is a lot of the vendor community and the user community are talking about getting more out of the data that they have and out of the backup and recovery infrastructure by bringing analytics, and machine intelligence, or AI and machine learning to the equation. Studying analytics to identify anomalous behavior, maybe identifying security breaches, creating air gaps such that I can potentially thwart ransomware or other malware infections, analyzing the corpus of backup data because it holds all the company's corporate data, it's accessible. If you can analyze that data and look for anomalies, you might be able to thwart an attack. So getting more out of that data through analytics. Predictive maintenance is another example of data analytics that's driving some of these trends beyond just backup and recovery. And also governance. Governance and privacy are kind of, security and privacy are two sides of the same coin, so with GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation that came out, that went into effect in terms of fines going into effect this past May, very, very onerous and expensive fines, people are using their data protection corpus and the analytics around that to reduce their risk and to better govern their data. So these are some of the big trends that we're seeing. So Veritas is a leader here, we're going to be covering this all day. Veritas and some of its other brethren that have been around for decades are getting attacked by a lot of the upstarts, but they got the advantage that the install vendors have the advantage of a large install base. The incumbent vendors have the advantage of a large install base. The upstarts have the advantage of they're starting with a clean sheet of paper. We're going to talk to customers and find out what are they thinking in terms of their backup approach. Industry data suggest that over half of the customers that you talk to are rethinking their backup strategies because of digital transformation. Well, we're going to talk to some customers. Are they thinking about sticking with Veritas or they thinking about migrating? Why or why not? What are some of the advantages and considerations there? So Veritas, a long, rich story going back to the '80s when the company was founded, was a hot IPO, really super hot company, got sold to Symantec for about 13.5 billion, and then Symantec spun it out to private equity several years ago in an eight billion dollar go-private sale, and subsequently, Veritas got off the 90-day shot clock. We heard this from companies like Dell where they didn't have to report and get abused by the street for either missing a number or having one little metric that was off. So they could write their own narrative. They could invest in R&D, they could have more patient capital. And so you saw this from the Carlisle group that took Veritas private and has been sort of this march toward a new platform, spending money on R&D, and now, really going to market very aggressively. Another thing you're going to hear about is partnerships, partnerships with AWS and some of the other cloud-providers. There's a partnership that's being announced with the flash storage company, Pure, today. So we're going to dig into some of that. So we'll be here all day, Tavern on the Green. You're watching theCUBE and we're here in New York City. Keep it right there, we'll be right back. I'm Dave Vellante, back shortly. (digitalized 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 back to New York City everybody. We're here in the heart of Central Park at Tavern On the Green, a beautiful facility. I'm surrounded by Yankee fans so I'm like a fish out of water. But that's okay, it's a great time of the year. We love it, we're still in it up in Boston so we're happy. Dave Vellante here, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Nathan Hall is here, he's the field CTO at Pure Storage. Nathan, good to see you. >> Good to see you too. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. >> So you guys made some announcements today with Veritas, what's that all about? >> It's pretty exciting and Veritas, being the market leader in data protection software. Now our customers are able to take Veritas's net backup software and use it to drive the policy engine of Snapshots for our FlashArrays. They're also able to take Veritas and back up our data hub, which is our new strategy with FlashBlade to really unify all of data analytics onto a single platform. So Veritas really is the solution net back up that's able to back up all the workloads and Pure is the solution that's able to run all the workloads. >> So what if I could follow-up on that, maybe push you a little bit? A lot of these announcements that you see, we call them Barney deals, I love you, you love me, we go to market together and everything's wonderful. Are we talking about deeper integration than that or is just kind of press release? >> Absolutely deeper integration. So you'll see not just how-to guides, white papers, et cetera, but there's actual engineering-level integration that's happening here. We're available as an advanced disk target within that back up, we've integrated into CloudPoint as well. We certify all of our hardware platforms with Veritas. So this is deep, deep engineering-level integration. >> Yeah, we're excited about Pure, we followed you guys since the early days. You know we saw Scott Dietzen, what he built, very impressive modern architecture, you won't be a legacy for 20, 25 years so you've got a lot going for you. Presumably it's easier to integrate with such a modern architecture, but now at the same time you got to integrate with Veritas, it's been around for about 25 years. We heard a lot about how they're investing in API-based architectures, and microservices, and containers and the like, so what is that like in terms of integrating with a 25-year-old company? >> Well I think, from Pure's perspective we are API first, we're RESTfull APIs first. We've done a ton of integrations across multiple platforms whether it's Kubernetes, Docker, VMware, et cetera, so we have a lot of experience in terms of how to integrate with various flavors of other infrastructure. I think Veritas has done a lot of work as well in terms of maturing their API to really be this kind of cloud-first type of API, this RESTful API, that made our cross-integration much easier. >> You guys like being first, there were a number of firsts, you guys were kind of the first, or one of the first with flash for block. You were kind of the first for file. You guys have hit AI pretty hard, everybody's now doing that. You guys announced the first partnership with NVIDIA, everybody's now doing that. (laughs) You guys announced giving away NVME as part of the Stack for no upcharge, everybody's now doing that. So, you like to be first. Culturally, you've worked at some other companies, what's behind that? >> Well culturally, this is best company I've worked at in terms of culture, period, and really it all starts with the culture of the company. I think that's why we're first in so many places and it's not just first in terms of first to market. It's really about first in terms of customer feedback. If you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant we're up, we've been at leaders quadrant for five years in a row. But this year, we're indisputably the leader. Furthest to the right on the X-axis, furthest north on the Y-axis and that's all driven by just a customer-obsessed culture. We've got a Net Promoter Score of 86.6 which is stratospheric. It's something that puts us in the top 1% of all business-to-business companies, not just tech companies. So, it's really that culture about customer obsession that drives us to be first. Both to market, in a lot of cases, but also just first in terms of customer perception of our technology. >> You guys were a first at really escape velocity, the billion dollar unicorn status, and now you're kind of having that fly-wheel effect where you're able to throw off different innovations in different areas. Can you talk more about the data hub and the relevance to what you're doing with Veritas and data protection? Let's unpack that a little bit. >> Sure, sure, the data hub, we had a great keynote this morning with Jyothi the VP of Marketing for Veritas and he had an interesting customer tidbit. He had some sort of unnamed government agency customer that actually gets penalized when they're unable to retrieve data fast enough. That's not something that many of our customers have, but they do get penalized in terms of opportunity costs. The reason why is 'cause customers just have their data siloed into all these different split-up locations and that prevents them from being able to get insight out of that data. If you look at AI luminaries like Andrew Ng or even people like Dominique Brezinski at Apple, they all agree that you have to, in order to be successful with your data strategy, you have to unify these data silos. And that's what the data hub does. For the first time we're able to unify everything from data warehousing, to data lakes, to streaming analytics, to AI and now even backup all onto a single platform with multidimensional performance. That's FlashBlade and that is our data hub, we think it's revolutionary and we're challenging the rest of the storage industry to follow suit. Let's make less silos, let's unify the data into a data hub so that our customers can get real actionable information out of their data. >> I was on a crowd chat the other day, you guys put out an open letter to the storage community, an open challenge, so that was kind of both a little controversial but also some fun. That's a very important point you're making about sort of putting data at the core. I make an observation, it's not so much true about Facebook anymore 'cause after the whole fake news thing their market value dropped. But if you look at the top five companies in terms of market value, include Facebook in there, they and Berkshire keep doing this, but let's assume for a second that Facebook's up there. Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon, top five in terms of US market value. Of course markets ebb and they flow, but it's no coincidence that those are data companies. They all have a lot of hard assets at those companies. They've got data at their core so it's interesting to hear you talk about data hub because one of the challenges that we see for traditional companies, call them incumbents, is they have data in stovepipes. For them to compete they've got to put it in the digital world, they've got to put data at their core. It's not just for start-ups and people doing Greenfield, it's for folks that are established and don't want to get disrupted. Long-winded question, how do they get, let's think of traditional company, an incumbent company, how do they get from point A to point B with the data hub? >> I think Andrew Ng has a great talked-point on this. He basically talks about your data strategy and you need to think about, as a company, how do you acquire data and then how do you unify into a single data hub? It's not just around putting it on a single platform, such as FlashBlade. A valuable byproduct of that is if you have all the stove-piped data, though you probably in terms of your data scientist trying to get access to it, now have to, they have 10 different stovepipes you've got 10 different VPs that you have to go talk to in order to get access to that data. So it really starts with stopping the bleeding and starting to have a data strategy around how do we acquire and how do we make certain or storing data in the same place and have a single unified data hub in order to maximize the value we are able to get out of that data. >> You know when I talked to, I'll throw my two cents in, I talk to a lot of chief data officers. To me, the ones that are most insightful talk about their five imperatives. First of all, is they got to understand how data contributes to monetization. Whether it's saving money or making money, it's not necessarily selling your data. I think a lot of people make that mistake, oh I'm going to monetize my data, I mean I'm going to sell my data, no, it's all about how it contributes to value. The second is, what about data sources? And then how do I get access to data sources? There's a lot implied there in terms of governance and security and who has access to that. And in the same time, how do I scale up my business so that I get the right people who can act on that data? Then how do I form relationships with a line of business so that I can maximize that monetization? Those are, I think, sensible steps that aren't trivial. They require a lot of thought and a lot of cultural change and I would imagine that's what a lot of your customers are going through right now. >> I think they are and I think as IT practitioners out there, I think that we have a duty to get closer to our business and be able to kind of educate them around these data strategies. To give them the same level of insight that you're talking about, you see in some chief data officers. But if I looked out at the, there's a recent study on the Fortune 50, the CXOs, and these aren't even CIOs, they're actually, we think as IT practitioners that the cloud is the most disruptive thing that we see, but the CEOs and the CFOs are actually five times more likely to talk about AI and data as being more disruptive to their business. But most of them have no data strategy, most of them don't know how AI works. It's up to us as IT practitioners to educate the business. To say here's what's possible, here's what we have to do in order to maximize the value out of data, so that you can get a business advantage out of this. It's incumbent on us as IT leaders. >> So Nathan, I think again, that's really insightful because let's face it, if you're moving at the speed of the CIO, which is what many companies want to do, because that's the so called, fat middle and that's where the money is. But you're behind, I mean we're moving into a new era, the cloud era, no pun intended, is here, it's solid but we're entering that data of machine intelligence and we built the foundation with the dupe even, there's a lot of data now what do we do with it? We see, and I wonder if you could comment on this, is the innovation engine of the future changing it? It use to be Moore's Law, we marched to the cadence of Moore's Law for years. Now it's data applying machine intelligence and then, of course, using the cloud for scale and attracting start-ups and innovation. That's fine because we want to program infrastructure, we don't want to deploy infrastructure. If you think about Pure, you got data for sure. You're going hard after machine intelligence. And cloud, if I understand your cloud play, you sell to cloud providers whether they're on-prem or in the public cloud but what do you think about those? That innovation sandwich that I just described and how do you guys play? >> Well, cloud is where we get over 30% of our revenue so we're actually selling to the cloud, cloud service providers, et cetera. For example, one of the biggest cloud service providers out there that I think today's announcement helps them out a lot from a policy perspective actually used FlashBlade to reduce their SLAs, to reduce their restore time from, I think, it was 30 hours down to 38 minutes. They were paying money before to their customers. What we see in our cloud strategy is one of empowering cloud providers, but also we think that cloud is increasingly, at the infrastructure layer, going to be commoditized and it's going to be about how do we enable multicloud? So how do we enable customers to get around data gravity problems? I've got this big, weighty database that I want to see if I can move it up to the cloud but that takes me forever. So how do we help customers be able to move to one cloud or even exit a cloud to another or back to on-prem? We think there's a lot of value in applying our, for example deduplication technology, et cetera, to helping customers with those data gravity problems, to making a more open world in terms of sharing data to and from the cloud. >> Great, well we looked at Pure and Veritas getting together, do some hard core engineering, going to market, solving some real problems. Thanks Nathan for hanging out, this iconic beautiful Tavern on the Green in the heart of New York City. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, keep it right there everybody, Dave Vallante. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Veritas Solutions Day, #VeritasVision, be right back. (digital 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 back to the beautiful Tavern on the Green, in the heart of Central Park. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name's Dave Vellante. We're covering Vertias Solution Days, #VtasVision. Veritas used to have the big, single tent, big tent customer event, and decided this year, it's going to go belly to belly. Go out to 20 cities, intimate customer events where they can really sit down with customers across from the table; certainly, this beautiful venue is the perfect place to do that. Harish Venkat is here as the VP of Marketing and Global Sales Enablement at Veritas. Thanks for coming on, Harish. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> So, we're going to change it up a little bit. Let's hit the Escape key a few times and talk about >> Yeah. >> some of the big mega trends that you're seeing. You spend a lot of time with customers. You had some intimate conversations today. What do you see as the big trends driving the marketplace? >> So at my level, what I observe with the highest thing is simplicity, instant gratification, is two things that customers love. Forget about customers, even we as individuals, we love simplicity and instant gratification. Examples around that, you know, think about back in the days where you had to take a picture, process the film, and then realize, "oh my god, the film's not even worth watching." Now you have digital photography, you take millions of pictures, and instantly you view the picture, and keep whatever you want, delete whatever you don't want. A small example of how simplicity and instant gratification is changing the world. In fact, if you listen to Warren Buffett, he'll say, "Invest in companies that is making your life a lot easier," so, if I spread that across the entire industry, I can go on with examples like Netflix disrupting Blockbuster because it made it easy for customers to watch movies at their time, and making it easy for consumption. You look at showrooming concept, where you go to Best Buy's of the world and many others, and look at a product, but you don't buy it right there. You go to your phone and say, "okay, do I do a price compare?" And then order it on the phone, where someone delivers it to your house So the list goes on and on, and the underpinning result as a result of this is disruption, all right? You look at Fortune 500 companies, just in the last decade. Over 52% of those companies have been disrupted and the underpinning phenomenon is all about instant gratification and simplicity. >> And Amazon is another great example of, I remember when my wife said to me, "Dave, you got to invest in this company." It was like... 1997. >> Yeah. >> Invest in this company, Amazon? >> Yeah. >> At the time, it was mostly books, but they started to get into other retail, so right-- >> We missed that boat, didn't we? >> I actually did, but I sold, ah! (laughs) >> I never lost money making a profit, so okay. So, at the same time, customer... Customers just can't get there... >> Yeah. >> Overnight, so what are some of the challenges that they have in getting to that level of simplicity? >> Yeah, so you look at IT spend, and when you look at the breakdown of IT spend, you'll see that about 87%, and in many cases, even greater than 90%, they spend just to keep the lights on and these are well-established companies that I'm talking about. In fact, I was doing a Keynote in, in Minneapolis one time and a CIO came and said, "Harish, I totally disagree." "In my company, it's 96%." >> (Dave laughs) >> Just to keep the lights on! So you're talking about less than 10% of your IT spend gone towards innovation, and then you look at emerging companies who are spending almost 100% all around innovation, leveraging the clouds of the world, leveraging the latest and greatest technology, and then doing these disruptions, and making things simple for consumption, and as a result, the disruption happens, so I think we have an opportunity to re-balance the equation in the enterprise space, and making it more available for innovation than just keeping the lights on. >> So part of that... the equation of shifting that needle, moving that needle, if you will, just eliminating non-value-producing activities that are expensive. We know, still, IT is still very labor-intensive, so we got to take that equation down and shift it. Are you seeing companies have success in shifting, re-training people toward digital initiatives and removing some of the heavy lifting, and what's driving that? >> Yeah, so I think it's a journey, right? So, I mean, the entire notion of journeying to the cloud is one of the big initiative to take out heavily manual-intensive, data center-intensive, which is costing a lot of money. If I can just shift all of those workloads to the cloud, that'll help me re-balance the equation. I view the concept of data intensity, which is really two variables to it. Back to your point, if I can take the non-core activity, rely on my partner ecosystem to say what is best in class solutions that I can use as my foundation layer, and then innovate on top of it, then yes, you have the perfect winning formula to really have a lot of market share and wallet share. If you're trying to do the entire stack by yourself, good luck. You'll be one of those guys who will be disrupted. There is no doubt. >> So well, okay, that says partnerships are very important. >> Without a doubt. >> You're not too alone. >> Channel is very important. >> Yes. >> So, so what do you see, in terms of the ebb and flow in the industry, of partnerships, how those are forming? Hear a lot about "co-opetition," which is kind of an interesting term, that is now, we're living. >> Yeah. >> What's your, what's your observation about partnerships, and how companies are able to leverage them? What's best practice there? >> Yeah, so just as Veritas, we're a data protection leader company. We have incredible market share and wallet share, amongst the Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies, but even within our incredible standing, we have to rely on other partners. We don't do everything on our own. We have incredible relationship with our cloud service providers, with the hyper-converged system to the world, like Nutanix. We just announced Pure today, so when we combine those partnerships, we can offer incredible solutions for our customers, who can then take care of the first variable that I talked about, and then innovate on top of it. So I think partner ecosystem is extremely important. For customers, it's very important that they pick the right players, so they don't have to worry about the data, and they can continually focus on innovation. >> We were talking to NBC Universal today, and one of themes in my take-aways was he's trying to get to the... he's a, basically a data protector, backup administrator, essentially, but he's trying to get to the point where he can get the business lines to self-serve. >> Yeah. >> And that seems to me to be part of the simplicity. Now... an individual like that, got to re-skill. Move toward a digital transformation. Move that needle so it's not 90% keeping the lights on. It's maybe you get to 50/50. >> Yeah. What are you seeing in terms of training and re-education of both existing people and maybe even how young people are being educated, your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think the young people coming out of college, they're already tuned to this, so to me, those are the disruptors of the world. You got to keep an eye on those millennials of the world because you don't have to train them more, because they're coming out of college, you know. They don't have the legacy background. They don't have the data centers of the world. They are already in the cloud. They're born in the cloud, sort of individuals, so I think the challenge is more about existing individuals who have the pedigree of all the journey that, you and I, we have seen, and how do you re-tune yourself to the modern world? And I think that presents an opportunity to say, "Okay look, if you don't adapt real quick," "you don't have a chance to survive" "in this limited amount of time you have in the IT space," but having said that, we're also seeing that you have some time window, and that time window will continue to shrink, so when we talk about this transformation journey, you can see year after year, the progress that, that's been made in the transformation, this leap and bound, and that's all related to Moore's Law. You think about computer and storage, it's becoming a lot cheaper, and so the innovation rate is continuing to go up. So you have very limited window: adapt or die. >> So, Harish, we were talking about, we've talked about digital transformation. We talk about simplifying; we're talking about agility. We're talking about shifting budget priorities, all very important initiatives. How is Veritas helping customers achieve these goals, so that they can move the needle from 90% keep the lights on to maybe 50/50, and put more into innovation. >> So four major themes: one is data protection. If you don't have your core enterprise asset, which is your data protected, then you can't really innovate anything on top of it. You'll constantly be worrying about what happens if I have a ransomware attack, what if I have a data outage, so Veritas takes care of it, back to the notion that you pick the best players to take care of the fundamental layer, which is around the data. The second thing that I... I would say Veritas can help is the journey to the cloud. Cloud, again, is another instrument for you to take out cost out of your data center. You're agile, you're nimble, so you can focus on innovation. Do you see the trend? So again, Veritas helps you with that journey to the cloud. It allows to move data and application to the cloud. When you're in the cloud, we protect your data in the cloud. The third thing I would say is doing more with less. I talked about the IT equation already. Software-defined storage allows you to do that. And the last thing I would say is compliance. We can't get away from compliance, the fact that Veritas has solutions to have visibility around the data. You can classify the data. You can always be compliant working with Veritas. You take care of these four layers, you don't have to worry about your data asset. You can worry about innovation at that point. >> So it, to me, it's sort of a modern version of the rebirth of Veritas. When Veritas first started, I always used to think of it as a data management company, not just a backup company. >> Right. >> And that's really what we're talking about here today, evolving toward a data-centric approach, that full life cycle of data management, simplifying that, bringing the cloud experience to your data wherever it is. Could be "on-prem." >> Yeah. >> Could be in the cloud, sort of this API-based architecture, microservices, containers... >> Yep. >> All the kind of interesting buzzwords today, but they enable agility in a cloud-like experience, that Netflix-like experience that you were talking about. >> Absolutely, right, so we're super excited. The one thing I would also say is what our latest net backup, 812, the other thing that I talked about, which is simplicity and ease of use: we are addressing both of that in addition to the robust brand that we have around protecting data. So you now you have simplicity, ease of use, instant gratification, all the basic ingredients, and Veritas is here to protect them. >> Harish, it's been a great day. Thanks for helping me close out the segment here. This venue is really terrific. It's been a while since I've been at Tavern on the Green. Some of you guys, I don't think you've ever seen it before. Seth's down here; he's, he's a city boy but we country bumpkins up in Massachusetts, we love coming down here, in the heart of Yankee country. So thanks very much-- >> Of course. >> For helping me close out here, great segment. All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We're out here, from New York City, Tavern on the Green. You've been watching theCUBE; I'm Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (light electronic music)

>> From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. (robotic music) >> We're back in the heart of Central Park. We're here at Tavern on the Green. Beautiful location for the Veritas Vision Day. You're watching theCUBE, my name is Dave Vellante. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we got the CEO of Veritas here, Greg Hughes, newly minted, nine months in. Greg, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> It's great to be here Dave, thank you. >> So let's talk about your nine. What was your agenda your first nine months? You know they talk about the 100 day plan. What was your nine month plan? >> Yeah, well look, I've been here for nine months, but I'm a boomerang. So I was here from 2003 to 2010. I ran all of global services, during that time and became the chief strategy officer after that. Was here during the merger by Semantic. And then ran the Enterprise Product Group. So I had all the products and all the engineering teams for all the Enterprise products. And really my starting point is the customer. I really like to hear directly from the customer. So I've spent probably 50% of my time out and about, meeting with customers. And at this point, I've met with a 100 different accounts all around the world. And what I'm hearing, makes me even more excited to be here. Digital transformation is real. These customers are investing a lot in digitizing their companies. And that's driving an explosion of data. That data all needs to be available and recoverable and that's where we step in. We're the best at that. >> Okay, so that was sort of alluring to you. You're right, everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. It changes the whole data protection equation. It kind of reminds me, in a much bigger scale, of virtualization. You remember, everybody had to rethink their backup strategies because you now have less physical resources. This is a whole different set of pressures, isn't it? It's like you can't go down, you have to always have access to data. Data is-- >> 24 by seven. >> Increasingly valuable. >> Yup. >> So talk a little bit more about the importance of data, the role of data, and where Veritas fits in. >> Well, our customers are using new, they're driving new applications throughout the enterprise. So machine learning, AI, big data, internet of things. And that's all driving the use of new data management technologies. Cassandra, Hadoop, Open Sequel, MongoDB. You've heard all of these, right? And then that's driving the use of new platforms. Hyper-converged, virtual machines, the cloud. So all this data is popping up in all these different areas. And without Veritas, it can exist, it'll just be in silos. And that becomes very hard to manage and protect it. All that data needs to be protected. We're there to protect everything. And that's really how we think about it. >> The big message we heard today was you got a lot of different clouds, you don't want to have a different data protection strategy for each cloud. So you've got to simplify that for people. Sounds easy, but from an R&D perspective, you've got a large install base, you've been around for a long, long time. So you've got to put investments to actually see that through. Talk about your R&D and investment strategy. >> Well, our investment strategy's very simple. We are the market share leader in data protection and software-defined storage. And that scale, gives us a tremendous advantage. We can use that scale to invest more aggressively than anybody else, in those areas. So we can cover all the workloads, we can cover wherever our customers are putting their data, and we can help them standardize on one provider of data protection, and that's us. So they don't have to have the complexity of point products in their infrastructure. >> So I wonder if we could talk, just a little veer here, and talk about the private equity play. You guys are the private equity exit. And you're seeing a lot of high profile PE companies. It used to be where companies would go to die, and now it's becoming a way for the PE guys to actually get step-ups, and make a lot of money by investing in companies, and building communities, investing in R&D. Some of the stuff we've covered. We've followed Syncsort, BMC, Infor, a really interesting company, what's kind of an exit from PE, right? Dell, the biggest one of all. Riverbed, and of course Veritas. So, there's like a new private equity playbook. It's something you know well from your Silver Lake days. Describe what that dynamic is like, and how it's changed. >> Oh look, private equity's been involved in software for 10 or 15 years. It's been a very important area of investment in private equity. I've worked for private equity firms, worked for software companies, so I know it very well. And the basic idea is, continue the investment. Continue in the investment in the core products and the core customers, to make sure that there is continued enhancement and innovation, of the core products. With that, there'll be continuity in customer relationships, and those customer relationships are very valuable. That's really the secret, if you will, of the private equity playbook. >> Well and public markets are very fickle. I mean, they want growth now. They don't care about profits. I see you've got a very nice cash flow, you and some of the brethren that I mentioned. So that could be very attractive, particularly when, you know, public markets they ebb and flow. The key is value for customers, and that's going to drive value for shareholders. >> That's absolutely right. >> So talk about the TAM. Part of a CEOs job, is to continually find new ways, you're a strategy guy, so TAM expansion is part of the role. How do you look at the market? Where are the growth opportunities? >> We see our TAM, or our total addressable market, at being around $17 billion, cutting across all of our areas. Probably growing into high single digits, 8%. That's kind of a big picture view of it. When I like to think about it, I like to think about it from the themes I'm hearing from customers. What are our customers doing? They're trying to leverage the cloud. Most of our customers, which are large enterprises. We work with the blue-chip enterprises on the planet. They're going to move to a hybrid approach. They're going to on-premise infrastructure and multiple cloud providers. So that's really what they're doing. The second thing our customers are worried about is ransomware, and ransomware attacks. Spearfishing works, the bad guys are going to get in. They're going to put some bad malware in your environment. The key is to be resilient and to be able to restore at scale. That's another area of significant investment. The third, they're trying to automate. They're trying to make investments in automation, to take out manual labor, to reduce error rate. In this whole world, tape should go away. So one of the things our customers are doing, is trying to get rid of tape backup in their environment. Tape is a long-term retention strategy. And then finally, if you get rid of tape, and you have all your secondary data on disc or in the cloud, what becomes really cool, is you can analyze all that data. Out of bound, from the primary storage. That's one of the bigger changes I've seen since I've returned back to Veritas. >> So $17 billion, obviously, that transcends backup. Frankly, we go back to the early days of Veritas, I always thought of it as a data management company and sort of returned to those roots. >> Backup, software defined storage, compliance, all those areas are key to what we do. >> You mentioned automation. When you think about cloud and digital transformation, automation is fundamental, we had NBCUniversal on earlier, and the customer was talking about scripts and how scripts are fragile and they need to be maintained and it doesn't scale. So he wants to drive automation into his processes as much as possible, using a platform, a sort of API based, modern, microservices, containers. Kind of using all those terms. What does that mean for you guys in terms of your R&D roadmap, in terms of the investments that you're making in those types of software innovations? >> Well actually one of the things we're talking about today is our latest release of NetBackup 812, which had a significant investment in APIs and that allow our customers to use the product and automate processes, tie it together with their infrastructure, like ServiceNow, or whatever they have. And we're going to continue full throttle on APIs. Just having lunch with some customers just today, they want us to go even further in our APIs. So that's really core to what we're doing. >> So you guys are a little bit like the New England Patriots. You're the leader, and everybody wants to take you down. So you always start-- >> Nobody's confused me for Tom Brady. Although my wife looks... I'll stack her up against Giselle anytime, but I'm no Tom Brady. >> So okay, how do you maintain your leadership and your relevance for customers? A lot of VC money coming into the marketplace. Like I said, everybody wants to take the leader down. How do you maintain your leadership? >> We've been around for 25 years. We're very honored to have 95% of the Fortune 100, are our customers. If you go to any large country in the world it's very much like that. We work with the bluest of blue-chips, the biggest companies, the most complex, the most demanding (chuckling), the most highly regulated. Those are our customers. We steer the ship based on their input, and that's why we're relevant. We're listening to them. Our customer's extremely relevant. We're going to help them protect, classify, archive their data, wherever it is. >> So the first nine months was all about hearing from customers. So what's the next 12 to 18 months about for you? >> We're continuing to invest, delighted to talk about partnerships, and where those are going, as well. I think that's going to be a major emphasis of us to continue to drive our partnerships. We can't do this alone. Our customers use products from a variety of other players. Today we had Henry Axelrod, from Amazon Web Services, here talking about how we're working closely with Amazon. We announced a really cool partnership with Pure Storage. Our customers that use Pure Storage's all-flash arrays, they know their data's backed up and protected with Veritas and with NetBackup. It's continually make sure that across this ecosystem of partners, we are the one player that can help our large customers. >> Great, thank you for mentioning that ecosystem is a key part of it. The channel, that's how you continue to grow. You get a lot of leverage out of that. Well Greg, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on your-- >> Dave, thank you. >> On the new role. We are super excited for you guys, and we'll be watching. >> I enjoyed it, thank you. >> All right. Keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante, we're here in Central Park. Be right back, Veritas Vision, be right back. (robotic music)

>> From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Hi everybody, welcome back to Tavern on the Green. We're in the heart of Central Park in New York City, the Big Apple. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at the Veritas Solution Day #VtasVision. Veritas used to have a big main tent day where they brought in all the customers. Now they're going out, belly-to-belly, 20 cities. Dave Raffo is here, he's the editorial director for TechTarget Storage. Somebody who follows this space very closely. David good to see you, welcome to theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's great to be on theCUBE. I always hear and watch you guys but never been on before. >> Well you're now an alum, I got to get him a sticker. So, we were talking about VMworld just now, and that show, last two years, one of the hottest topics anyway, was cloud, multi-cloud, Kubernetes of course was a hot topic. But, data protection was right up there. Why, in your view, is data protection such a hot topic right now? >> Well there's a lot of changes going on. First of all, couple years ago it was backup, nobody calls it backup anymore right. The whole market is changing. Data protection, you have newer guys like Cohesity and Ruberik, would come out with a, you know, architecture. They're basically, from scratch, they built scale-out and that's changing the way people look at data protection. You have all of the data protection guys, the Dell EMC, CommVault, Veeam, they're all kind of changing a little. And Veritas, the old guys, have been doing it forever. And now they're changing the way that they're reacting to the competition. The cloud is becoming a major force in where data lives, and you have to protect that. So there's a lot of changes going on in the market. >> Yeah I was talking to a Gartner analyst recently, he said they're data suggested about 2/3 of the customers that they talk to, within the next, I think, 18 months, are going to change they're backup approach or reconsider how they do backup or data protection as it were, as you just said. What do you think is driving that? I mean, people cite digital transformation they cite cloud, they cite big data, all the buzz words. You know, where there's smoke, there's fire, I guess. But what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, it's a little bit of all of those things, because the IT infrastructure is changing, virtualization containers, everything, every architectural change changes the way you protect and manage your data, right. So, we're seeing a lot of those changes, and now people are reacting to it and everybody's figuring out still how to use the cloud and where the data is going to live. So then, you know, how do you protect that data? >> And of course, when you listen to vendors talk, data protection, backup, recovery, it's very sexy when you talk to the customers they're just, oftentimes, drinking from the fire hose, right. Just trying to solve the next problem that they have. But what are you hearing from the customers? TechTarget obviously has a big community. You guys do a lot of events. You talk personally to a lot of customers, particularly when there are new announcements. And what does the landscape look like to you? >> So they're all, you know like I said, everybody's looking at the cloud. They're looking at all these, how they're going to use these things. They're not sure yet, but they want data protection, data management that will kind of fit in no matter which direction they go. It's kind of, you know, we know we're looking at where we're going to be in five years and now we want to know how we're going to protect, how we're going to manage our data, how we're going to use it, move it from cloud to cloud. So, you know, it's kind of like, it's a lot of positioning going on now. A lot of planing for the future. And they're trying to figure out what's the best way they're going to be able to do all this stuff. >> Yeah, so, you know the hot thing, it used to be, like you said, backup. And then of course, people said backup is one thing, recovery is everything. You know, so it was the old bromide, my friend Fred Moore, I think coined that term, back in the old storage tech days. But when you think about cloud, and you think about the different cloud suppliers, they've all got different approaches, they're different walled gardens, essentially. And they've got different processes for at least replicating, backing up data. Where do you see customers, in terms of having that sort of single abstraction layer, the single data protection philosophy or strategy and set of products for multi-cloud? >> Well, where they are is they're not there, and they're, you know, far from it, but that's where they want to be. So, that's where a lot of the vendor positioning is going. A lot of the customers are looking to do that. But another thing that's changing it is, you know, people aren't using Oracle, SQL databases all the time anymore either. They're using the NoSQL MongoDB. So that change, you know, you need different products for that too. So, the whole, almost every type of product, hyper-converged is changing backup. So, you know, all these technologies are changing the way people actually are going to protect their data. >> So you look at the guys with the big install base, obviously Veritas is one, guys like IBM, certainly CommVault and there are others that have large install bases. And the new guys, the upstarts, they're licking their chops to go after them. What do you see as, let's take Veritas as an example, the vulnerabilities and the strengths of a company like that? >> So the vulnerabilities of an old company that's been around forever is that, the newer guys are coming with a clean sheet of paper and coming up and developing their products around technologies that didn't exist when NetBackup was created, right. So the strength is that, for Veritas, they have huge install base. They have all the products, technology they need. They have a lot of engineers so they can get to the board, drawing board, and figure it out and add stuff. And what they're trying to do is build around NetBackup saying all these companies are using NetBackup, so let's expand that, let's build archiving in, let's build, you know, copy data protect, copy data management into that. Let's build encryption, all of that, into NetBackup. You know, appliances, they're going farther, farther and farther into appliances. Seems like nobody wants to just buy backup software, and backup hardware as separate, which they were forever. So you know, we're seeing the integration there. >> Well that brings up another good point, is you know, for years, backup's been kind of one size fits all. So that meant you were either over protected, or under protected. It was maybe an after thought, a bolt-on, you put in applications, put it in a server, an application on top of it. You know, install Linux, maybe some Oracle databases. All of the a sudden, oh, we got to back this thing up. And increasingly, people are saying, hey, I don't want to just pay for insurance, I'd like to get more value. And so, you're hearing a lot of talk about governance, certainly security, ransomware is now a big topic, analytics. What are you seeing, in terms of, some of those additional value, those value adds beyond that, is it still just insurance, or are we seeing incremental value to customers? >> Yeah, well I think everybody wants incremental value. They have the data, now it's not just, like you said, insurance. It's like how is this going to, how am I going to use this data? How's it going to help my business? So, the analytics is a big thing that everybody's trying to get in. You know, primary and secondary storage everybody's adding analytics. AI, how we use AI, machine learning. You know, how we're going to back up data from the edge into and out of thing. What are we going to do with all this data? How are we going to collect it, centralize it, and then use it for our business purposes? So there's, you know, it's a wide open field. Remember it used to be, people would say backup, nobody ever changes their backup, nobody wants to change backup. Now surveys are saying within the next two years or so, more than 50% of people are looking to either add a backup product, or just change out their whole backup infrastructure. >> Well that was the interesting about when, you know, the ascendancy of Data Domain, as you recall, you were following the company back then. The beauty of that architecture was, you don't have to change your backup processes. And now, that's maybe a challenge for a company like that. Where people are, because of digital, because of cloud, they're actually looking to change their backup processes. Not unlike, although there are differences, but a similar wave, remember the early days of virtualization, you had, you're loosing physical resources, so you had to rethink backup. Are you seeing similar trends today, with cloud, and digital? >> Yeah, the cloud, containers, microservices, things like that, you know, how do you protect that data? You know people, some people are still struggling with virtualization, you know, like, there's so many more VMs being created so quickly, and that you know, a lot of the backup products still haven't caught up to that. So, I mean Veeam has made an awful great business around dealing with VM backup, right? >> Right. >> Where was everybody else before that? Nobody else could do it. >> We storage guys, we're like the cockroaches of the industry. We're just this, storage just doesn't seem to die. You know the joke is, there's a hundred people in storage and 99 seats. But you've been following it for a long time. Yeah, you see all the hot topics like cloud and multi-cloud and digital transformation. Are you surprised at the amount of venture capital over the last, you know, four or five years, that has flooded in to storage, that continues to flood in to storage? And you see some notable successes, sure some failures, but even those failures, you're seeing the CEOs come out and sell to new companies and you're seeing the rise of a lot of these startups and a lot of these unicorns. Does it surprise you, or is that kind of your expectation? >> Well, I mean, like you said, that's the way it's always been in storage. When you look at storage compared to networking and compute, how many startups are there in those other areas. Very few, but storage keeps getting funded. A couple of years ago, I used to joke, if you said I do Flash, people would just throw hundreds of millions of dollars at you, then it was cloud. There always seem to be like a hot topic, a hot spot, that you can get money from VCs. And there's always four or five, at least, storage vendors who are in that space. >> Yeah, the cloud, the storage cloud AI blockchain company is really the next unicorn right? >> Right, yeah, if you know the right buzz words you can get money. And there's never just one right, there's always a couple in that same area and then one or two make it. >> Yeah, or, and or, if you've done before, right, you're seeing that a lot. I mean, you see what the guys like, for instance at Datrium are doing. Brian Biles he did it a Data Domain, and now he's, they just did a giant raise. >> Qumulo. >> Yeah, you know, Qumulo, for sure. Obviously the Cohesity are sort of well known, in terms of how they've done giant raises. So there's massive amount of capital now pouring in, much of which will go into innovation. It's kind of, it's engineering and it's you know, go to market and marketing. So, you know, no doubt, that that innovation curve will continue. I guess you can't bet against data growth. >> Right, you know, yeah, right, everybody knows data is going to grow. They're saying it's the new oil, right. Data is the big thing. The interesting thing with the funding stuff now is the, not the new companies, but the companies that have been around a little bit, and it's now time for them to start showing revenue. And where in the past it was easier for them to get money, now it seems a little tougher for those guys. So, you know, we could see more companies go away without getting bought up or go public but-- >> Okay, great. Dave, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Alright. >> It was great to have you. >> Thanks for having me on. >> Alright keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from Veritas Vision in Central Park. We'll be right back. (theCUBE theme music)

>> From Tavern On The Green, in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Hello everybody welcome back to the Tavern On The Green. We're here in the heart of Central Park in New York City you're watching theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, big events, small events. We're here at the Veritas Solution Days, #VtasVision. Veritas Vision used to be a very large, big tent conference. They've changed the format now and they go out, they're going out to 20 cities this year belly to belly with the customers and we've got one here. Vishal Kadakia who is the data protection manager at NBC Universal. Vishal thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> No problem thank you for having me. >> So as I say we love to get the customer perspectives, but let me start with this event. Why, you're a busy person, you're managing a lot of data, why do you take time out to come to event like this? What do you learn? >> You always get to learn new stuff, new products that you don't necessarily get to learn, 'cause you're always just zoned into your day-to-day work that you're doing so you don't always get to see what the new features may be or you miss it. These type of events are generally good to come see that. >> So what's the day in the life like these days for data protection manager and really I'm interested in how it's changed over the last five or six years, as you see things like, the buzzwords, digital transformation, big data, cloud, multi cloud, all the vendor buzzwords, but you actually have to live that. So how has that changed the role of data protection and data protection managers specifically? >> It's definitely a lot more complicated. Before you were just backing up om prem, you had tape, pretty much made it simple. Now you have all these different workloads, you're sending out to clouds, multi tenant as they keep calling it, the hybrid, which is another buzzword. Trying to manage the different workloads is a lot more complex than it was five years ago. You have various cloud vendors, you have various storage vendors, so managing all of that, obviously the data growth from the smaller backups to now, big data which could be terabytes, petabytes, to try to back that up has been a bit of a challenge. >> But that's a challenge for someone like you who's, you know, RPO and RTO is not getting relaxed. >> Right. >> Right. And you know people always talk about getting my weekends back so, but now you have to keep up with all of these other technologies so what is it? Is it a lot of reading, is it just going to sessions like this, having vendors come in, how do you keep up with it all? >> I think it's a big mix of both. It's going out to these events, but also having vendors come to you. Doing your own research, so it's a combination of just constantly keeping up. So, I would say it's a combination of all. >> One of the things that I would be concerned about in your roll is to have just more stove pipes. Are you able to just conceptually, not technical, deep technical anyway, I love tech, but are you to create, let's call it a abstraction layer for your data protection. Is that kind of your vision or where you're headed, so that you don't have to have 10 different formats and methodologies and processes around data protection? >> Yeah, I think that's the goal that I think every company's trying to go to, is consolidate, simplify. Whether that's vendor, whether that's hardware. I think that's really the goal of any organization now. And that's kind of where we're headed also. >> So if it's a baseball game analogy, and you're nine inning game, where are you in terms of that journey? Is it early days, kind of first inning, are you kind of warmin' up in the bullpen, are you sort of well into the game? >> I think we're well into the game. We're probably into the middle innings I would say. >> Okay. So you can see sort of that vision becoming a reality. And what are the priorities then in terms of getting to that point? Is it skill sets, is it technology, is it people? >> I would say it's technology. I would say that consolidation is probably the big word. We're all trying to consolidate while trying back up the large data sets. And I think that's where we are right now. That's where we're starting to get to, and see the plan forming, seeing where our methodologies, our strategies on how we're going to go forward. >> As you move toward the cloud, Vishal, whether or not it's even pushing data to the cloud, a lot of times you just can't. But it seems like that cloud operating model is something that's alluring to folks. Simplifying, agility, self service, are those initiatives that you guys have enacted? >> In terms of that, yeah we're I think in that phase, I think we're in our beginning to form that plan, because once you get to a cloud, you have to really have a good plan. Otherwise, your data is going to be all over the place. You're not going to know where it is, and managing that's just going to become that much harder. So I think in terms of that, we're trying to really come out with a good plan of how you migrate to the cloud. 'Cause once you get to the cloud, there's a whole different set of complexities that you have in managing it. >> Like what? Maybe tick off a few, so we can paint a picture. >> So once you get to the cloud, migrating, so you've formulated your plan how to get to, what cloud to use, what vendor you're using. How do you migrate from your on prem to the cloud is I think one of the big complexities, which I think kind of stumps a lot of people. You know you want to go to the cloud, just don't know how to get there. >> Is that just because the volume of data and you got to move data and it just takes so long? I mean to back up your iPhone takes forever and it fails left and right. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So okay. It's the amount of data and the time it takes? >> Right, and you also have legacy applications, which may not be cloud ready and how do you deal with that? So you have that hybrid model you still want to keep some stuff om prem but you want to go the cloud. What goes to the cloud, which cloud do you go to? All of that is where I think we're really at and I don't think it's any different than any other organization, so that's kind of where. >> And how about this notion of multi cloud? I mean is that something that is real in your business? >> Yeah, I think it definitely is. I think our end users are trying to take advantage of where to go best? Some places Azure might work best. Some places AWS might work. There's also Google now that's coming up, so I think you have to kind of consider where the workload would be best to go to. >> Is Shadow sort of IT and cloud creep problematic for you and in other words, you know, lines of businesses saying, it's easy, I can swipe a credit card and I'm up and running in minutes. And then, oh I got to protect this data, it's got to be compliant. Has that been a challenge for you, do you feel like you have that under control? >> No, that has definitely been a challenge area. Different groups that have kind of tried to do their own thing and then found out, oh wait, this is way harder than we thought. Let us go back to our central team. But by then it's kind of all over the place, right so that's definitely been interesting. >> Yeah it's hard, because thinking about that you probably might have done it differently. You might have put in processes and procedures in place and now you've got to clean up the mess so to speak. But okay, so I want to get into Veritas, and you're a Veritas customer? >> I am. >> So how does Veritas help you with all these solutions? I mean a lot of the things I've just asked you, I think are part of either their road map or they're making claims that they can currently help solve some of these problems. Can they, what do you do with Veritas, and how legitimate is their ability in terms of being able to solve some of these problems? >> So we've been able to use Veritas to kind of, as a central location, management of everything. One of their tools as such is CloudPoint. So our biggest thing is if you don't have a central management tool like CloudPoint, which can manage your various cloud backups, then you're left with managing each cloud on its own. So as an operations standpoint, that's like a nightmare. So having a tool such as CloudPoint, right, and then that getting integrated back into NetBackup, which now gives us a central location for all my backups, for reporting, for audit purposes, any of that has been great. And I've been using Veritas since 3.1 so I've been a Veritas customer for a long time. I've seen the evolution of when it was 3.1, a lot of it was manually operated, a lot of scripts, where now a lot of it is automated. So that's helped a lot. We're automating VM policies, we're automating SQL backup policies, all of that has been great. >> Where are you today in terms of these. >> I'm sorry? >> Where are you at today in terms of the release? >> We're, I know they just released eight one two, we're on eight one one. >> Okay so close to current. Yeah I've seen some videos on eight one two. It looks like they've really put a lot of time and effort in to refreshing it. It looks like a microservices architecture, they're talking about containers and certainly you know, saying all the right things. From your perspective have you dug into it yet or is it still early? >> It's still early. I did deploy it on a test environment. Haven't fully played around with it but some of the cool concepts obviously are, you're going away from that Java console eventually, getting to that web based, able to access it from anywhere, the manageability, like a central tool to manage all of that. That I think they're finally gearing towards that and. >> And you guys are a VMware shop? >> We are a VMware shop. >> So when we were at VM World last August, this past year, and even the year before. Data protection was one of the hottest topics, you know, on the show floor. Were you there, I don't know if you were there. >> I was not there. >> I mean it was really a lot of buzz there, sort of a lot of new entrance in that space, and would I imagine a lot of people coming after you for your business, because that's a very large install base. So when you look at the vendor landscape, how do you look at it? Where do you position Veritas, relative to some of the other upstarts? Your thoughts on the competitive landscape, why Veritas? >> Well, my point of view has always been, if it's not broke you don't fix it. There may be other that may be doing something better, but at the end of the day if it's not drastically different, it's a lot of work to move away from one product to another. They'll always come to you and say, hey, we do this better, we do this better. But then when you compare it, to me, Veritas is that all encompassing. It doesn't only do virtual, it does physical well also. It doesn't only do big data, it does all the traditional databases as well. They're always constantly evolving and adding new workloads that it can also be compatible with. >> Yeah so, I would imagine it would be a little difficult to go to your CFO and try to justify a huge migration project given the other priorities that you have. Give me some insight there. I mean what kinds of things do you want to focus on, I mean obviously nobody wants to migrate anything, it's like moving a house. >> Yeah. >> You really don't want to do it, I mean sometimes you get a bigger house or a nicer house or a smaller house, but it's, moving is always a pain. So you'd rather put your effort in your shop somewhere else. Where are you putting that effort? What are some of the priorities that you have either personally or professionally? >> I would say in this sense I think it's I don't want to work the weekends, right. So how do we automate? How do we make operations easier for everybody, the engineering, the solution, the operations. I want to make it simple. I think Veritas allows us to do that 'cause they're an open source, they work with many vendors which makes it nice. So you can, such as VMware, it works with vRealize. All those plugins with VMware and you can eventually just automate and make it simple. >> And kind of get rid of a lot of the scripts which tend to be fragile, they take a lot of maintenance, they tend to be error prone, so if you can through a set of APIs automate programmatically move towards sort of infrastructurous code or a DevOps environment. I'm sure you guys do that internally. And what a difference it makes, from the sort of classic waterfall in terms of speed, agility, quality. I presume that you're seeing that in your shop? >> Yeah, we definitely are and something like a flex appliance would allow us to move towards that. It simplifies, gets us to where we are, but also helps us with our goals of simplifying, reducing our footprint, but still being able to be agile enough to go to cloud, to keep a hybrid model. So something like that is I think where we're seeing. >> Well Vishal, we love the customer perspective, Thank you for coming on. We like to hear the truth, Vertias, truth in Latin, of course. And really appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome. All right keep it right there everybody. We're here at Vtas Vision, #VtasVision, Veritas Vision Days in New York City, Central Park, Tavern on the Green, beautiful location. My name's Dave Vallante. We'll be right back, right after this short break. (upbeat music)

from Tavern on the Green in Central Park New York it's the to covering Veritas vision solution day brought to you by Veritas welcome back to New York City everybody we're in the heart of Central Park at the Tavern on the Green beautiful location here a lot of customers coming in to see and hear veritas solution days we talked to Scott general earlier about sort of why these solution days very intimate customer events around the world David Moyes is here he's the vice president of software to find storage and appliances at Veritas David thanks for coming on oh thanks for having me you're very welcome so wait appliances you guys were software company what what's going on we are we are a software company and we have been a software company for a very long time and we will continue to be a software company for a very long time but what we find is that you know customers oftentimes they want to deploy software but then they find that there's a lot of additional challenges that come with that there's the maintenance of the actual server infrastructure there's patching of the operating system there's vulnerabilities that show up those additional operational costs sometimes outweigh the benefits of just buying a purpose-built appliance and those purpose-built appliances can sometimes you know how workflows built-in to them that just make them so easy to use that you know one person could potentially operate petabytes of an appliance versus a whole army of people trying to maintain hundreds or thousands of individual servers so you put out a stat this morning which I wasn't aware of you guys have more than half the market I think it was an IDC stat maybe was Gartner more than half the market for integrated the purpose-built backup appliances is that right that's right so for backup appliances purpose-built back of appliances that actually hosts the backup software we have more than 50% market share people have that much trust in the appliances that we build and find that simplicity so compelling that they want to buy it and that form factor from us you know about a decade ago I wrote a piece in the early days of wiki bond talking about services oriented storage and and when we think about software-defined storage what you described today was actually sets of granular services that I can invoke when I need them or not if I don't need them very cloud like I mean I could replace the s in Software Defined with s and services and that's your kind of philosophy and approach isn't it it is in fact what we find is that people want data services on top of that data when you're reporting enterprise data and you protecting exabyte so that apprise data the way the Veritas does having it just sit there and do nothing is is kind of wasteful to a large extent unless you're just waiting for a disaster to occur or data corruption or something like that if we can support to think about what are the governance capabilities lineage audit all of the different things that we could potentially build as services that are then can be downloaded onto that purpose-built backup appliance those all become added value to the customer but you you did what you described was not just another you're not just dropping in another stovepipe appliance you talked about having visibility across the entire portfolio you really stress that a lot you said several times you can't get this from any other backup vendor or any other vendor really talk about that a little bit well what's interesting is that look from the moment that data is actually born from a primary application and then it's protected its protected into a backup solution and then it's probably put into some sort of a storage solution either maybe at a duplication storage solution then it's moved to an even cheaper tier and eventually off to the cloud or somewhere else each of those are disparate if we can actually build a connector framework that can actually extract that information and bring it all together so that we can start to make assertions about hey how did this data flow how did it originate what kind of information do I have do I even need it anymore after seven years should I purge it or should I delete it is it even a risk to my organization to keep it you can only do that when you can make those associations across the lifecycle of that data and so we tracked the data through its entire lifecycle and that's only through the integration of all that product portfolio and that's something that you're not going to see with the small point solutions that are being built by startups and it's even very rare to see in some of the larger companies that build these solutions you know dude I'm glad you mentioned that about getting rid of data because so often today in the in the news media and you here in vendor presentations people talk about keeping data forever yeah that's that's dangerous in a lot of case a lot of general councils out there don't want to keep data forever there's data that you want to delete if in fact you can because of the compliance risks that it brings to your company you don't want to keep working process or some rogue email that floats around the organization get rid of that keep what you have to and get rid of the rest right and then the problem is if you don't know what you have and also you don't know how many places that that data is propagated how can you possibly delete it all we've helped customers in some cases that I'm not going to mention who they are but we've helped them delete up to 50 percent of their data after it's aged out and I've talked to banks before and I've asked them like hey after seven years what do you do with your data they say well we just keep it because we don't know what it was originated for we don't even know what's in it and therefore it's too risky for us to go and delete but at the same time to your point it may be even too risky to keep in some cases especially a liability to keep that deal and what's the what's the technology enable are there is that your catalog you're sort of copy data management self so it's a combination of things the catalog is what helps us understand what we have and where it is and how it's actually moved through that lifecycle and then we have a component called the Veritas information classifier and that component allows us to crack open the data and actually determine what's inside whether it's personally identifiable information social security numbers there's a number of different patterns we can look for actually document types and we can actually tag that data and say hey this data has information that's pertains to a specific individuals so for example if I'm following gdpr rules I can now find out all the data where it's propagated specific to an individual who said now I want all my stuff deleted and that's a very powerful technique so such as the data it's the metadata associated with that taste well that's a that I think it's a unique capability in terms of being integrated into a solution and so that's that's cool I also want to talk about Acme financial services yeah is artificial company or a real company but but an anonymized company that you talked about moving to your system your appliance based system they were able to reduce TCO by 40% shave two thirds of their hardware infrastructure away come back to that is I have sort of a tongue-in-cheek there get rid of tape at least we're possible no new tape I think is what you that's right and then save 20 million dollars a year in reduced downside downtime costs so my tongue and cheek is who everybody remembers the the no hardware agenda of signs you know bhai live in Massachusetts that we used to see those right next to the EMC facilities and you're only a hardware agenda it seems with your appliance is to get rid of hardware is exactly right look we we are actually putting out technology that allows you to take ten heads or ten servers and consolidate it down to two or three to make the total cost of ownership for your product less because at the end of day it's in our benefit right we're a software vendor we want to maintain ourselves as a software vendor we want to take Hardware out of the equation to the extent that's possible but we don't want to do it at the expense of simplicity and so striking that balance is what's most important yeah and and you also have talked about a little you showed a little leg if you will on a road map that's right I'm one of the things that struck me and it's sort of there today but but even more in the future is the ability to scale compute and storage independently and more granular chunks explain what that is and why that's important to customers well you know if you think about it the way that these integrated backup appliances work even back up people just dismiss backup appliances they just grow and grow and grow to a certain capacity they scale up and scale up and at some point the performance just starts to tank and taper off so what if you could actually grow them almost in a node-based architecture think about its compute and storage that you grow together and as you add more compute you add more storage and so that means that I can do more micro services or I can provide better deduplication but my deduplication doesn't slow down when I go from two petabyte to four petabyte because my compute has actually grown in lockstep with my storage you made a big deal about eliminating tape where possible and you also and I want to push it this a little bit talked about the economics of solution relative to tape I was somewhat surprised because the conventional wisdom would say tape is you know pennies on the dollar come here to to disc based solutions how is it that you're able to make that claim well there's a couple of different things that come to play number one is that again through the cloud catalyst capability of net backup we can actually keep data deduplicated before we send it to our disk based solution which means that it stays in some cases 50 to one deduplicated and you're not necessarily gonna get that capability on tape you'd have to rehydrate don't have to rehydrate so if you talk about about pennies well multiply that by 50 because if your data duplicates that much that's the kind of thing you're talking about the second part is the operational cost of actually maintaining tape now if I'm keeping data for seven years thirty years the lifetime of a patient that tape infrastructure age is out and I'm doing tape migrations all the time those are not cheap and sometimes though tape infrastructures not even available anymore the other compatibility is not there that's right the other thing is well the other thing is is the network costs right if you're going to be pushing stuff over the network absolutely your network and your and you pushing bigger things over the network you have more network infrastructure just for the purposes of moving data from one here tier to another tier it's wasteful David talked about the Flex appliance what I took away from that is it sort of allows for services oriented deployment fast migration it allows you to sort of test out new services to see whether or not you like it what what is that what does the customer have to do to exploit that capability today the customer would buy our high-end backup appliance which is the 53:40 they would buy the Flex software which is a software package that allows them to basically augment that's appliance so that it can actually maintain that catalog and then quickly deploy them those services as I showed in the demo in three minutes or less we can deploy a service on from the service catalog in the future you should expect that we should we will begin to build that into all of our appliances that's just the way of doing things it becomes a service-oriented architecture and that catalog is just going to be a natural way of us operating ok I want to also ask you about another capability that you discussed which was your ability to look across the portfolio and identify predictive failures yeah everybody talks about machine intelligence being used you know in that use case IOT you hear about that along what are you guys doing what's unique well you know in some cases what we're doing is not completely unique I mean there are some companies that have done this pretty well they've done it for their own point solutions I think where it gets interesting is when you say look we're not just building a point solution we have a number of different products again for the entire lifecycle of data from the moment it's born and if I can integrate all of the telemetry that I get from those different products I can now start to get predictive about things that might have happened not just at one stage within one product but might happen down the road when I go to move it into my long-term retention as my long-term retention ready for it is it going to impact the performance of my long-term retention solution and so therefore should I think about scaling on my long-term retention solution independent of you know so or ahead of the actual growth of my purpose-built Beco appliance right so it's that portfolio view that makes it so powerful right it's okay two things actually the portfolio view and also the full lifecycle view as well that's right something you've been hitting on not just a point product all right David I know you Jam it a lot of a lot of customer conversations here in New York so I gotta let you go but thanks so much for stopping by the cube appreciate my pleasure I really appreciate your time thank you welcome all right keep it right there everybody you're watching the cube live from Veritas solution days in New York City right in the heart of Central Park we'll be right at right back after this short break [Music]

(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)