(upbeat instrumental music) >> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, Celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. (upbeat instrumental music) Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back everyone. theCUBE's Live coverage here in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, VMworld 2019 coverage. Dave, 10 years of Cube coverage, Yip! we started out 10 years ago. VMworld is the last show standing. Our next guest is Todd Forsythe, CMO of Veritas. Great to see you, first time on theCUBE. Thanks Todd. It is inaugural. (John laughs) Aafter 25 years in the industry, it's crazy. With your talent, I think we're going to have a good segment here. I'm sure we will. Very entertaining. No, seriously we've known each other, we were on an advisory board together. You're a prolific marketer, you do a lot of great things. You're progressive, you try new things with startups, but also you got to run a big operation. >> Todd: That's right. MarTech stacks, you like to look at platforms. This is a re-platforming of the internet we're seeing with Cloud 2.0, and I want to get your thoughts on this, because you got a unique perspective at Veritas, you know, an older brand modernized in real time. That's right. New products refresh in a massively changing growth, still growth market. It's a data business. Absolutely. That's right, a 100%. So what's your take on this? As you look at the landscape, you've got the modern brand, you got to take it out there, new products. You know it's interesting, I had a really fascinating conversation yesterday with a customer, and the customer said, "You know, I was walking through the expo hall, "and I saw Amazon, I saw Microsoft, "I saw IBM, I saw Dell Technologies, "I saw Kubernetes, I saw Pure, I saw Nutanix, "I thought I was in my own data center." And it's interesting, I think about our business, and in our business, data doesn't care. Like you know data doesn't care if you're running a modern architecture. Data doesn't care if you're running Legacy. So what we're really focused on is helping companies manage data in highly complex, and extremely demanding environments regardless of their infrastructure. And Cloud 2.0 speaks to the complexity of that, because you know, these, and we were talking earlier with VMware about these categories that used to exist, these Gartner Magic Quadrants. You know, you can't put something that's not a silo in a silo, you're horizontally disrupting. And data does that, data has to move around and it's got to move everywhere. So there's no more silo boxes of categories. A 100% agree, you know it's interesting, we launched Enterprise Data Services earlier this year, and that was the precise reason why, because we've relooked at what data protection is. Data protection is no longer backing up your data from a cloud to a cloud from your on Prime, it's a much broader category. It covers how your data becomes available, how resilient you are, understanding where your data is, how it's categorized so you can respond to ransomware attacks, manage regulations around the world. So our view of data protection is a platform that is horizontal and cuts across. Well you guys, I mean the heritage of Veritas is the original data management company, right? Yeah. With no hardware agenda, and so my question for you, Todd, is what attracted you to Veritas? Softball question, so the most amazing customers any company could possibly imagine, Global 2000, the top telecommunications companies, the top banks, top stock exchanges. Secondly a product strategy that's really zoned in, back to your point about this, a platform that cuts across all of these diverse technologies and solves problems for customers that abstracts them from the complex environments that they're in so they could focus on outcomes, and Greg has done an amazing job recruiting a top notch leadership team. So it was really great product, good leaders. Okay now, follow up is you guys, you know, number one, top anyway, right and with Gartner Magic Quadrant, everybody wants a piece of your hide, (chuckles) the whole industry is coming at you. So, what's the sort of messaging strategy to keep top spot from both outward facing and also product development? Sure, sure. So we look at two types of competitors. Competitors that are offering point solutions, predominately playing in the mid-market, and when you're a large financial institution, and you have a highly complex environment, you're in a multi-cloud world, and you can't afford to have a siloed backup data. So you need to understand how your data is classified, where it's stored. So if you're responding to ransomware, and that ransomware attack is targeted to a specific server, you need to know if you have PII there, or if you have cat pictures there. If you have cat pictures there, then, (chuckles). >> John: Let 'em have it. Let 'em have it, exactly. (John laughs) So our platform cuts across protection, availability, and insights, which categorizes your data. So the data gets categorized in NetBackup, extends to the analytics platform, so you know where your data is, and you could take action on your data. The hard question of the day, instead of a softball I'll give you a hard one, you got to refresh the brand of Veritas has got a lot of pros and cons. The pros are, you know, well-known, a lot of customers, I got a customer question later, but the brand is important, because you have the new modern platform products, platform and products. Yeah, yeah. You got to get the name, Veritas has old meaning. You have a lot of older customers, you have legacy customers. How are you going to go out there and refresh? Is there any new plans there? We have a ton of plans. You know, we have the product, we have the customers. The product, the platform product is amazing. We are a quiet company, so we need to be noisier in the marketplace, and we need to insert ourselves into relevant conversations that are top of mind with CEOs and CIOs, whether it's ransomware. If you look at all of the ransomware attacks, It's a huge opportunity I read like two weeks ago in the State of Texas there were 10, 15 municipalities that were attacked. At the same time. At the same time! and we have a solution that can help customers recover from ransomware, so we have to insert ourselves in those dialogues because we have a very, very specific point of view that can help customers. Well but to John's point, right? Everybody that you compete with will say, we have a solution that, you know, helps solve ransomware. So, how do you separate from the pack? Like I said, everybody's trying to take pick you off. You know, we want a piece of that install base, right? 'Cause you got to keep the install base, and you got to keep growing, right? I'll lay down the gauntlet. I would love any competitor to showcase how they can support 500 workloads, a 150 storage targets, 60 cloud providers, at enterprise scale with a high degree of reliability. Our differentiator is we can cut across these very complex, very demanding IT environments, at scale. I want to get your thoughts on the customer journey question, because I think, you know, you mentioned the customer base, we've been following what you guys do. I mean I ran, I was in Bahrain for a regional Amazon event I was covering in the Middle East, and in the exhibit was this Veritas, and they recognized, hey, there's theCUBE guy. I was like, hey, thanks for watching. But seriously, you guys are everywhere. You got huge customers, but you probably have a lot of customers that are trying to go from here to there, VMware was talking almost specifically around, you know, you got the enterprise scale world, and they want that cloud Nirvana, and then there's that missing middle in between. So, you probably have a lot of transformational stories. What is the patterns of customer profile that you see? Some of them making the journey? Some of them are having a hard time? What's the state of the mind of the customer that you guys have? Well, we are definitely seeing a hybrid, multi-cloud world as you've heard here this week. 52% Of our customers are running in a hybrid cloud environment, and we have a core relationship with their legacy infrastructure, and our customers are asking our help to extend their data protection, and their NetBackup environment into the cloud, to backup the cloud, and across new modern workloads. So our customers are pulling us into their environments to do more. And that's cloud and hybrid basically. Cloud and hybrid. Public cloud and on premises. And our customers are also realizing that they're responsible for backing up their own data in the cloud. There's this misperception in the industry that if I move to a cloud provider, the cloud provider will manage my data, when in actuality you are still responsible for your data. You know, Amazon with security has a shared responsibility model. They say, okay, we protect the EC2, the infrastructure for S3, et cetera. You're responsible for pretty much everything else. And I think that you could draft off that message. Yeah, yeah! You guys too, a couple of years ago, had a great event call Veritas Vision where everybody came in, and then you changed that. Now you sort of go to where the customers are, and I'm wondering, how's that working out? It predated you. Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! So I won't ask you why that decision was made, but you know, how's it working out? I mean, a company like yours, there was like four, 5,000 people there, it was a really good event. So, a great question, and a highly relevant question, because we're just about to launch our series. So, you know, having run large, large, large user conferences, and you look at distribution of your customers and, you know, you typically find that 80% of your customers are coming from the US. You look at our customer base, global international customers. We have a high percentage of customers that are outside of the U.S. So, our strategy is let's take our user conference, let's take our message, let's take our value proposition to the customer. So, we are kicking off next month an entire series around the world, Germany, Paris, Rome, Seoul, Bali, Singapore, Melbourne, our vision series, where it's our anti-user conference. We're taking content directly to our customers. Is this regional or are those cities based? How is that segment? City based. So it's like an Amazon Summit kind of thing you go to? Yeah, yep. Okay so as a follow-up. So, as a seasoned pro in this space, why either, or, why not do both? I mean there's a budget obviously is one thing, it's expensive to run these events, I get it, but. I would prefer to put more money to where the customer is at. The field, kind of. Yeah, into the fields, you know, one of the life lessons of being a marketer is go to where the customer is. Don't try to get the customer to come to you. Well, your head of sales will love that message, you're going well. (Todd laughs) So our strategy is to go where the customer is. Yeah, and that does help sales actually. So, while you're on that point, you're a very progressive marketer, for the folks that don't know you, I'll share with them that, you know, you like to try things, and you love start-ups, and you love to promote new things. The marketing stack, I've said on theCUBE, and we'd love to have you challenge us if you want, love to debate it, I said, the MarTech Stack just didn't pan out. I mean, it worked? No, no, it didn't, no! Did it work? Is it evolving? Is it siloed? Is the cloud changing the MarTech Stack? So again, pretty aggressive statement, but my point is, email marketing was great for that generation, still is. There's new organic flows, maybe I'm biased, but I'd love to get your thoughts. How is the marketing tech world evolving with cloud computing? So, I'm going to say something provocative. >> John: Okay, all right, here we go. I think the CRM industry has gotten B2B marketing wrong. What I mean by that is you look at most CRM capabilities in B2B and they're focused on an individual. They're focused on a lead, they're focused on nurturing an individual, but if you look at our customers and enterprise, individuals don't buy, buying groups, committees, and accounts buy. So where we're focused is looking at accounts, and understanding account company based behavior that shows buying intent and triggers, which then initiate our marketing. So it's not built around a lead, it's built around-- >> John: So account based marketing? Account based marketing, but account based insight and intelligence around, is there a project or buying opportunity? And you know our good friends at Manigo, that's what they do, which is AI driven, trigger-based marketing. And that's where I think the industry is going. And what's your thoughts on organic marketing, because one of the things that's hot, is we live this world with theCUBE, and we've been kind of pioneering this model where co-creating content together and pushing it out into these digital streams is an organic process. It's technically earned media and PR parlance, but we're seeing the evolution of the CMO-like action around storytelling, right? And so, like community based storytelling, it's an organic function, it's hard to control. You can't just buy it, it's got to be kind of nurtured or enabled. That's right. What's your view on that? Because this is an emerging trend we're seeing, VM were just reorganizing a whole storytelling integrated group of PR pros, that are acting like the marketing, in their marketing. Well you know, one of the most active, customer segments we have is our VOX Community, and if you think to your point about co-creation of content in collaboration, our VOX Community collaborates on solving problems that customers have, they call that-- >> John: Can you take a minute to explain, what is VOX Community to us? VOX is a community of our technical users, where they help each other share best practices and solve problems. >> Dave: A lot of how-to? A lot of how-to-- Not Vox Media. Not Vox Media, correct. Just need to make sure to get that out there. Forums, there's videos. Is this your community, or is it third-party? Veritas. Okay, Veritas. It's a Veritas community, yeah. And then to your other point, John, the marketing world has changed. We've quickly moved into a world where we now have an anonymous relationship with our customer, with email, with direct mail. Yeah, we're always driving to registration to capture a name, that world is long gone. A Facebook show that's been weaponized, so you know. Yeah, that's right. It's the data business, at the end of the day. The user experience is horrible, right? Everybody hates that, and so yeah, there are other ways now you can use data, you can infer. Yeah, that's right, exactly. You can read the tea leaves, and probably make a pretty high prediction, or highly accurate prediction. What is the most under reported trend that you think marketers should look at in terms of capabilities that are working out in the field for you? I would say the ability to leverage predicative analytics, call it AI or machine learning, understand what's happening at an account, and whether there's a buying trigger. I think accessing that information, learning from that information in terms of how should you initiate a selling motion, and then enabling the sales force with that intelligence, I think is a wide open territory. All right, we got a-- So a couple of other things. If I can? Yeah! Just to get it in. So you guys made a big platform enhancements a couple of years ago, and then a big eight dot, whatever it was, eight dot something, two, three, five. I think it was 8.2. Customer momentum, can you update us on that? Maybe even customer examples, and then I've got a partner question for you. Yeah, so I talked about the value of the platform, and we'll take Renault as an example. So Renault, a NetBackup customer, Renault wanted to make their virtualized SAP environment highly available, and they looked at a variety of different solutions, and they looked at some solutions that were homegrown and others, and they realized just extending the Veritas platform was faster time to market, 60% cost savings. So, there's a perfect example of a customer leveraging our platform play. And a couple partner questions. So, you know, we're here at VMworld, so your VMware partnership obviously pretty important, and then we're at Pure Accelerate next month, you guys are there, you got a big presence there, I know you got a tight partnership with them. That's right. Give us the partner update. Partner update, so we have very solid relationships with Amazon, Microsoft, VMware, Google, Nutanix, Pure, and that's where we're really doubling down in terms of technology integration, joint go-to-market. >> Dave: Great. And the community site is vox.veritas.com, I just was checking it out. Thank you for the plug. There's a church one, there's a religious one, not to be confused with Vox Media, so just want to make sure everyone got that URL. We think community is super important. Thanks for coming on theCUBE Excellent! and sharing your insights. Thank you gentlemen. Thank you. Todd Forsythe, CMO of Veritas. More live coverage of VMworld after this short break. (upbeat dance music)

>> Announcer: LIVE from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to San Francisco everybody, this is Dave Vellante with David Floyer, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, we go out to the events, we Extract the Signal from the Noise, this is Pure Accelerate 2017. This is the second year of Pure Accelerate. Last year was a little north of here at, right outside AT&T Park. Pure, it's pretty funny, Pure chose this venue, it's like this old, rusted out, steel warehouse, where they used to make battleships, and they're going to tear this down after the show, so of course the metaphor is spinning rust, old legacy systems that Pure is essentially replacing, this is like a swan song, goodbye to the old days, welcome in the new. So very clever marketing by Pure. I mean they did a great job setting up this rusty old building-- >> It's bad. Nice, it's a nice building. >> Hopefully it doesn't fall down on our heads and, so, but let's get to the event. The messaging was very strong here. I mean, they pull no punches. >> You know, legacy, slow, expensive, not agile, we're fast and simple, come with us. Of course the narrative from the big guys is, "Oh Pure, they're small, they're losing money, "you know, they're in a little niche." But you see this company as I said earlier when Matt Kixmoeller was on. They've hit escape velocity. >> Absolutely. >> They're not going out of business-- >> Nope. Okay, there's a lot of companies you see them-- >> And they're making a profit. >> Yeah, you read their financials and you say ah oh, this company's in deep you know what. No, they're not making a profit yet, Pure. >> They are projecting to make a profit in the next six months. >> But they basically got you know, 500 and what, twenty-five million dollars in the balance sheet, their negative-free cash flow gets them through by my calculation, in the next nine or 10 years, because they have zero debt. They could easily take out debt if they wanted to, growing at 30% a year. They'll do a billion dollars this year, 2.4 billion dollar market cap. They didn't have a big brain drain six months after the IPO, which was really important, it was like, you know business as usual. They've maintained the core management team. I know Jonathan Martin's you know, moving on, but they're bringing in Todd Forsythe to run marketing. A very seasoned marketing executive so, you know, things are really pretty interesting. The fact is, we haven't seen a billion dollar storage company that's independent since NetApp, there's only one left, NetApp. EMC is now Dell EMC. 3PAR never made it even close to a billion outside of HPE. Isilon couldn't make it, Compellent couldn't make it, Data Domain you know, couldn't make it as a billion dollar company. None of those guys could ever reach that level of escape velocity, that it appears that Pure and Nutanix are both on. Your thoughts David Floyer. >> I couldn't agree more. They have made their whole mantra, simplicity. They've really brought in the same sort of simplicity as Nutanix is doing. Those are the companies that seem to have been really making it, because the fundamental value proposition to their customers is, "You don't need to put in lots of people "to manage this, it'll manage itself." And I think that's, they've stuck to that, and they are been very successful with that simple message. Obviously taking a flash product, and replacing old rusts with it is, makes it much simpler, they're starting off from a very good starting point. But they've extended that right the way up to a whole lot of Cloud services with Pure. They've extended it in the whole philosophy of how they put data services together. I'm very impressed with that. It reminds me of Ashley, the early days of-- >> Of NetApp. >> No, of NetApp and also of the 3PAR. >> Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely, simplicity, great storage services, Tier 1. When I say NetApp, I'm thinking, you know, simplicity in storage services as well. But you know, this is the joke that I been making all week is that you talk to a practitioner you say, "What's your storage strategy?" Oh, I buy EMC for block, I buy NetApp for file. At Pure it's sort of, not only challenging that convention, but they're trying to move the market to the big data, and analytics, and they also have a unique perspective on converge and hyper-converge. They count a deep position hyper-converge that's you know, okay for certain use cases, not really scalable, not really applicable to a lot of the things we're doing. You know, Nutanix could, might even reach a billion dollars before Pure, so it's going to be interesting. >> Well, I think they have a second strategy there, which is to be an OEM supplier. Their work with Cisco for example. They're an OEM supplier there. They are bending to the requirements of being an OEM supplier, and I think that's their way into the hyper-converge market is working with certain vendors, certain areas, providing the storage in the way that that integrator wants, and acting in that way, and I think that's a smart strategy. I think that's the way that they're going to survive in the traditional market. But what's, to me, interesting anyway, is that they are really starting to break out into different markets, into the AI market, into flash for big data, into that type of market, and with a very interesting approach, which is, you can't afford to take all the data from the edge to the center, so you need us, and you need to process that data using us, because it's in real time these days. You need that speed, and then you want to minimize the amount of data that you move up the stack to the center. I think it's a very interesting strategy. >> So their competing against, you know, a lot of massive companies I mean, and they're competing with this notion of simplicity, some speed and innovation in these new areas. I mean look at, compare this with you know, EMC's portfolio, now Dell, EMC's portfolio. It's never been more complicated right? But, they got one of everything. They've got a massive distribution channel. They can solve a lot of problems. HPE, a little bit more focused, then Dell EMC. Really going hard after the edge. So they bring some interesting competition there. >> And they bring their service side, which is-- >> As does Dell. So they got servers right? Which is something that Pure has to partner on. And then IBM it's like you know, they kind of still got their toe in infrastructure, but you know they're, Ginni Rometty's heart is not in it you know? But they, they have it, they can make money at it, and you know, they're making the software to find but... And then you get a lot of little guys kind of bubbling. Well, Nimble got taken out, SimpliVity, which of course was converged, hyper-converged. A lot of sort of new emerging guys, you got, you know guys like Datrium out there, Iguazio. Infinidat is another one, much, much smaller, growing pretty rapidly. You know, what are your thoughts, can any of these guys become a billion-dollar company, I mean we've talked for years David about... Remember we wrote a piece? Can EMC remain independent? Well, the answer was no, right? Can Pure remain independent in your view? >> I don't believe it could do it, it was, as just purely storage, except by taking the OEM route. But I think if they go after it as a data company, as a information company, information processing company, and focus on the software that's required to do that, along with the processes, I think they can, yes. I think there's room for somebody-- >> Well, you heard what Kix said. Matt Kixmoeller said, "We might have to take storage "out of the name." >> Out of the name, that's right. >> Maybe, right? >> Yes, I think they will, yeah. >> So they're playing in a big (mumbles), and the (mumbles) enormous, so let's talk about some of the stuff we've been working on. The True Private Cloud report is hot. I think it's very relevant here. On-Prem customers want to substantially mimic the Public Cloud. Not just virtualization, management, orchestration, simplified provisioning, a business model that provides elasticity, including pricing elasticity. HPE actually had some interesting commentary there, on their On-Demand Pricing. Not just the rental model, so they're doing some interesting things, I think you'll see others follow suit there. I find Pure to be very Cloud-like in that regard, in terms of Evergreen, I mean they essentially have a Sass subscription model for their appliance. >> And they're going after the stacked vendors as well, in this OEM mode. >> Yeah, they call it four to one thousand Cloud vendors, so you're True Private Cloud Report, what was significant about that was, to me anyway, was a hundred and fifty billion dollars approximately, is going to exit the market in terms of IT labor that's doing today, non-differentiated lifting of patching, provisioning, server provisioning, (mumbles) provisioning, storage management, performance management, tuning, all the stuff that adds no value to the business, it just keeps the lights on. That's going to go away, and it's going to shift into Public Cloud, and what we call True Private Cloud. Now True Private Cloud is going, in our view, to be larger than infrastructures that serve us in the Public Cloud, not as large as Sass, and it's the fastest growing part of the market today, from a smaller base. >> And also will deal with the edge. It will go down to the edge. >> So punctuate down, so also down to the edge so, what's driving that True Private Cloud market? >> What's driving it is (mumbles), to a large extent, because you need stuff to be low latency, and you need therefore, Private Clouds on the edge, in the center. Data has a high degree of gravity, it's difficult to move out. So you want to move the application to where that data is. So if data starts in the Cloud, it should keep stay in the Cloud, if it starts in the edge, you want to keep it there and let it die, most of it die there, and if it starts in headquarters again, no point in moving it just for the sake of moving it. So where possible, Private Cloud is going to be the better way of dealing with data at the edge, and data in headquarters, which is a lot of data. >> Okay, so a lot of announcements here today, NVMe, and NVMe Fabric you know, pushing hard, into file and object, which really they're the only ones with all-flash doing that. I think again, I think others will follow suit, once they have, start having some success there. What are some of the things that you are working on with the Wikibon Team these days? >> Well, the next thing we're doing is the update of the, well two things. We're doing a piece on what we call Unigrid, which is this new NVMe of a fabric architecture, which we think is going to be very, very important to all enterprise computing. The ability to merge the traditional state applications, applications of record with the large AI, and other big data applications. >> Relevations, what we've talking about here. >> Very relevant indeed, and that's the architecture that we believe will bring that together. And then after that we're doing our service end, and converged infrastructure report and the how, showing how the two of those are merging. >> Great, that's a report that's always been, been very highly anticipated. I think this is our third or fourth doing that right? >> Fourth year. >> Right, fourth year so great looking forward to that. Well David, thanks very much for co-hosting with me-- >> Your very welcome. >> And it's been a pleasure working with you. Okay that's it, we're one day here at Pure Accelerate. Tomorrow we're at Hortonworks, DataWorks Summit, we were there today actually as well, and Cloud Foundry Summit. Of course we're also at the AWS Public Sector, John Furrier is down there. So yeah, theCUBE is crazy busy. Next week we're in Munich at, IBM has an event, the Data Summit, and then the week after that we're at Nutanix dot next. There's a lot going on theCUBE, check out SiliconANGLE.tv, to find out where we're going to be next. Go to Wiki.com for all the research, and SiliconANGLE.com for all the news, thanks you guys, great job, thanks to Pure, we're out, this is theCUBE. See you next time. (retro music)