(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 Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Veritas Vision, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is Day One wrap of the Veritas Vision conference. Veritas, as we said earlier, is a company that has gone through a number of changes, Stu. I mean, I remember when the company launched in 1983. It was sort of, you know, it was focused on backup. It was Veritas and Legato. And they kind of grew through the PC era and the client server era, really started to take off. And then they exploded in the internet era. Their evaluation went through the roof. They ended up buying C8's backup business. They really drove that and then got purchased by Symantec for a big number. I mean, I think the number was 15 billion. I mean, it was in the teens as I recall. Really never did much under Symantec, or, Symantec never did much with Veritas. I think they had a vision of information management and that never really panned out. Spun the company back out, devested it, sale to Carlyle and some other investors for, I thought the number was 8 billion, somebody told me 7 billion today. That must be net of cash. 2.3 billion dollars in revenue. My understanding from sources is that valuation is way, way up, nearly double from 2015. Now, maybe that's an inflated number, but I'm not surprised. The market's been booming. So that's sort of the inside organizational issues. We're here at The Aria, what do you say, Stu, a couple thousand people, 2500? >> Yeah, it's about 2000, Dave, and it's interesting, I talked to some people that had gone to the old Veritas Vision, years ago, and gotten up to about 4000 or 5000 people. But, grown since last year, good energy at the show. We got to talk to the Vox community people. They've got 10,000 people online contributing to their forums, participating, launched the VIP program for some of the super users they have here. Definitely good crowd in the keynote. Good people clapping and participating, getting excited. It surprised me a little bit the number one topic of conversation is GDPR. As you said in our last interview, we're going down the deep abyss of how you're going to get litigated out of all of your money if you don't follow this. It's like way worse than Y2K, ah, some stuff's going to break and maybe turn off for a bit. >> Well, you know what I liked about the GDPR discussions though, they had answers. >> Yeah. >> Other events where I've gone to GDPR, it's been scary, scary, scary, scare you, scare you, scare you, and then call us. >> Yeah. >> And we'll give you some services. What I liked about, what I'm hearing from Veritas is, they've got at least a quasi-prescription as to what to do. So that's good. But the more interesting part to me Stu is you've got this enterprise backup legacy, I'll say it, legacy backup install base, enormous. A leader, they've mentioned many times, 15 years in a row leader in the magic quadrant. And I believe it, you talk to customers, what are you running, NetBackup, everybody's running NetBackup. But how they're transitioning into this vision of multi-cloud, data protection resilience across the Enterprise, across clouds, hyper scale. What I'm not fully clear on yet is how they get customers from point A to point B. And we heard from the keynotes this morning and Bill Campbell. We invested a bunch of dough in R&D, we're writing stuff that's cloud-native, container-based, micro services. So sort of all the right application development buzzwords and I believe that they're developing there. But I don't understand how they migrate that install base. Is there some kind of abstraction layer? Is there some kind of new UI? We heard them jokingly say today in the keynotes that, we hear you, customers, we know our UI sucked, we're working on that. I didn't see any announcements on that, but, that's something that, presumably, is a promise they're putting forth. But, I wasn't clear, maybe you could help clear it up, on how you get from point A of legacy install backup software to this nirvana of multi-cloud hyper scale micro services. >> Yeah, I mean, Dave, when we talked to Bill Coleman, his three Vs, value, vision, and that values of the company itself, clearly has got a compelling vision. He said not only ten years from now, but probably five years from now, every product I'm selling is going to be obsolete. And it's an interesting thing to hear because 15 years of experience, we're trusted, but we know that every product that you bought from Veritas in the past is going to be replaced by new things. And, right, how do we get, say okay, I've been buying that backup for a decade, do I get this visualization product, and if I'm looking at AWS, is Veritas the company I turn to? So really it gets down to, Dave, that blocking and tackling. Talked about the consultants, the partners, both on the go to market side as well as the technology side. Can Veritas get in there, can they have compelling differentiated products that solve a need in the market? We've talked to a number of companies this last year where I've looked at is this hybrid multi-cloud world. If you're software, how do you play in this market? Because isn't Microsoft, Google, Amazon, aren't they going to just do this? Information governance invisibility, absolutely. Amazon has a solution for you. Google has a solution for you. Microsoft has solutions. But, if I'm going to be across those environments, we haven't had a solution that goes across all of those environments. So, there's a hole in the ecosystem, and Veritas, along with many other companies, are trying to put that big elephant on the table and eat pieces out of it, so, it's interesting. >> And Coleman's background, from BEA, started at BEA, I think he took the thing up to half a billion dollars, sold it to Oracle for a big number. But you look at what BEA did, they were sort of the application integration glue. And that's a lot of, you hear a lot of similar messaging modernized around multi-cloud, around hyper scale, around micro services and the like. So, Coleman obviously has experience doing that. I thought he's a very clear thinker. I had not met him before. Furrier knows him pretty well, from his VC days. But I thought he laid out a pretty clear direction. So he's got street cred on this. SEEP com, done it before, I think this company has a decent balance sheet. They seem to have some patient capital in Carlyle. It doesn't appear that Carlyle's trying to suck all the money out. They don't have the 90-day shot clock. He basically, Bill Coleman basically said, look, we're fine shrinking to grow. We're shifting from a upfront license model, perpetual license model, to a ratable model. We could never do that as a public company. So it's going to be very interesting to see if and when they emerge as a public company, what that looks like and where they come from. >> Yeah, and Dave, one of the things I've been poking at is where do they sell to? If this was the backup administrator, that's not somebody that's going to help them with the transformation. It's digital transformation, it's my cloud strategy. It's things like GDPR where I'm going to need to get up the stack to the CIO, to the C-suite, prove the value that Veritas has, and therefore they can then get all these new products in where everything, the 360 data management, really at the core of what they're doing, and whole lots of other products. I mean, Dave, we didn't even dig into some of the object and file storage pieces that are in here. I know we've got their chief product officer on the Cube tomorrow. But a lot of products, pretty broad software suite. And for an infrastructure company, it's always interesting to hear them say, really, infrastructure doesn't matter. The no hardware agenda, but it's your data that matters, and we've got a vision here at Veritas Vision to bring you forward and lots of plays on the name of the company. Veritas, the show is the truth in information. >> Yeah, so, let's talk about the lineup tomorrow. A lot of product stuff tomorrow. Mike Palmer's coming on, he gave a great keynote this morning. Very funny, he gave a scenario of the world ending because basically people didn't have their data act together. They had these images of Las Vegas hotels in chaos and waterfalls running through the hotels and drones attacking and just total chaos. So we're going to get into a lot of the portfolio stuff and I think try to answer, Stu, some of those questions that I raised about how do you get customers from point A, where they are today, to point B. Are you going to, how are you going to transition them. Are there financial incentives? Is there some kind of abstraction layer that you're developing? What is that framework that brings us to that nirvana? So, give you the last word here, Stu. >> Yeah, so looking forward to digging in more with some of the customers, some of the partners. Good energy at the show. It's exciting to be here for the first time. And looking forward to Day Two. >> All right, good, good wrap, Stu. Thank you, and thank you for watching. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news. We saw some Oracle news today. Hitachi changed its name or Pentaho changed its name, we're not really sure about that. But all the news on siliconangle.com, go to wikibon.com for all the research. And of course, thecube.net to see this show, replays, youtube.com/siliconangle is where we archive all this stuff. Lot of websites. >> Yeah, and make sure to subscribe on our YouTube channel. >> Yeah, please do subscribe on that YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter, @thecube, @stuminiman, @dvellante. That's a wrap Day One, this is The Cube, we'll see you tomorrow from Veritas Vision from Vegas, take care. (techno music)

(lively music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. We're here at The Aria Hotel covering Veritas Vision. This is day one of our two day coverage. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Tyler Welch is here, the Director of Communities at Veritas. He's joined by Justine Velcich who runs the VIP program for the VOX community and advocacy. Folks, welcome to theCUBE and thanks so much for coming on. >> Hi. >> Hi. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, Tyler, let's start with you. What is VOX, what does it stand for, what's it all about? >> Yeah, so VOX is Veritas Open Exchange. It is our customer community where our customers, our partners, employees are sharing knowledge and information. VOX in Latin means voice. If you think about Veritas in terms of truth, this is a place where we're being very open. We want people to come, share their knowledge, help each other and learn. >> Yeah, so I see the three bullets: seek answers, share insights, and make informed decisions. So these are practitioners in your community and your ecosystem just sharing ideas and helping each other grow. Is that the basic idea? >> Absolutely. If you think about digital transformation, right? To transform means your going from somewhere to another location and if we're sharing knowledge and information, these individuals are saying, "Hey, there's a lot of complexity right now." Right, we know things are changing in our industries. How we store our data is changing. And in VOX, we've got users that are saying, "Hey, I understand this complexity, I can simplify that, "I can help you, and I'm going to share my experience so "that others can benefit from that." >> Alright, Justine, let's bring you into the conversation. What's your role, what's the VIP program all about? >> My role within the VOX team is I lead the community and advocacy programs for VOX. So the VIP programs, so Veritas Information Professionals is an award program. It's a program essentially rewarding our super users, our top users in the community who are making outstanding contributions within the VOX platform. Some of them log in every single day and jump in to produce content and help out the community answering questions and whatnot. So it's a recognition program just to say thank you. >> I find some people that aren't in IT don't understand the communities that are built. It still amazes me how much people give back. I think back when Dave actually found Wikibon, it was around online communities and we said, "I don't need you full time." One of my favorite stats is if you took .02 percent of the United States television watching in one year, you could create all of Wikipedia. It's like tiny little bits ... Can you give us the size of the community? I heard some people are coming on every day, tell us a little bit to help us get our arms around the voice of your community? >> So VOX actually launched just over a year ago. We actually took a lot of the content from the Veritas technologies that were part of Symantec. We brought them over, we brought those users over and since then we've actually seen an increase of over 10,000 users coming to the site. It's something that we've got a lot of active employees, a lot of partners, a lot of customers that are there asking questions. >> So, coming to the site, they've come, they've registered? Well actually you have information on them already but they've agreed to participate in some way, shape or form? What's the hurdle they have to go through to become a member? >> Well to join VOX just come to the site and hit the join button, pretty easy. Create a user name and start asking questions. Most of our users actually come because they actually have a question. They'll come through Google, right? "Hey, help me do this or I'm trying to figure out this "type of deployment," and they'll land there and they'll realize "Hey, there's a lot of good information here. And there's people here that are actually really knowledgeable and I want to come back because I'm able to get answers to questions. Or I'm able to learn how to actually do things better than maybe I was doing them in the past." >> And the computer community comprises generally IT practitioners, storage admins, data center managers ... >> All of the above. We also have blogs on VOX where our employees at Veritas are actually sharing their perspectives as well. So we actually have a lot of different audiences that run from our executives that are blogging. Will Coleman has a blog. We're talking about what we're doing all the way to storage admin, "Hey I'm looking to do a deployment, "what does this mean? "How do I administer these types of things?" So through VOX, you'll see there's a lot of ways to make different connections with different audiences. >> Justine, what are you seeing as far as some of the content trends? What kinds of things are people producing? Is it sort of forum posts? You mentioned blogs, Tyler, videos, what's the content makeup? >> So from the VIP side of things, in terms of the content, and the types of participation in the program, like I said, it's our super users, it's our very active subject matter experts that are very passionate about sharing a community with like minded individuals that are just like them. They are doing everything from creating blog posts to jumping in answering troubleshooting questions and discussion boards. Actually discussions are probably one of our busiest, high traffic areas. It's quite technical in nature which is what our audience is looking for. So it's everything, all of the above really. >> What's the reward system look like? >> It's not really a reward, it's more of an award for thanking them for the last year of their outstanding contributions. We didn't want it to be a do this, get that type of an economy. It's more of a genuine effort when they can come in and just share their knowledge based on their passion for being part of a community that they get to fuel and grow. >> So their incentive really is that community feel? >> Justine: Absolutely. >> That's the primary motivation for them right? >> It's also reputation around ... You know if you're a partner and you're active in the community and you're sharing information you've got that credibility and that's important. Some people, as they're looking at the next phase of their career, these are things I'm doing, this is how I'm contributing to the industry that I participate in. I think, especially with what's going on right now and how this industry is transforming, nobody's just one thing, we all have multiple hats. This is a place where people can expand some of the things they're talking about, they're learning, and they're sharing back. >> Is there a reputation system? Does the community measure itself on the quality of the contributions or the frequency? How does that reputation get translated into ... Or quantified, or does it? >> In terms of ... Again, speaking from the VIP program, our super users, we didn't want to launch the program with a thousand qualified super users. There probably are a thousand super users on the platform but we're really looking for quality content. So we launched actually just last night so that was a big milestone for us. We launched last night with 28 individuals welcomed into the program so we kept it small for a thoughtful reason. They are everywhere from, when you asked the type of people that are part of the community but in terms of the VIP program, they're everywhere from a VP of a medium to large organization to a functional IT from an enterprise organization to a consultant and everything in between. They actually are represented across 13 plus countries and some of these people actually have known each other for decades being parts of other communities where they're talking about the same types of products. So they already have built relationships and that's kind of what makes the community unique. >> Tyler, please if you want to ... >> It's interesting you said rewards because I thought about that. The reality is these individuals are out there sharing their knowledge, we're actually just thanking them for what they're already doing. They're already there. I think that's the purpose of our program is then to give additional access to information, better connection with each other, and allow those connections and those relationships to flourish because it's a community, that's really why we're here is to help make those connections for those individuals. >> Obviously you've launched the VI program here, what else is happening at Vision? You've got the VOX online program, I always see with communities, a lot of times, there's planful things like "Hey, let's get a meetup together "or let's do something." So what's happening around this this week? >> This week at Vision, our VIPs are obviously plugged in to the sessions and they're attending those sessions. We're actually here on the Vision live floor talking to the session attendees talking about VOX. They're coming into the booth, we're showing them the platform. Again we just launched a year ago so we're still relatively new. One of the things we're doing is if you are here at vision and you're watching, come by the booth, we're doing professional head shots. Those can be things that are used in your LinkedIn profile. I don't know about you guys but I think the last time I did my LinkedIn profile, I was on vacation and I got a good light shot and I'm going to use that and I cropped it a bit so we thought, "Hey, we could do a little bit better." >> Better than the selfie. >> We're providing that right now. No selfies. >> We use cube shots. >> That's true. >> So that's one of the things we're doing to actually bring people together and share that experience of what community actually means to them and we've got some interesting responses so far from our audience. >> That's great and maybe when they update their profile they won't have that pixelated photo from like 15 years ago. I saw even there was one customer on the keynote and they blew it up on the screen and it was a little pixelated so stop by the booth and they'd get that. >> Yeah, pixelation's not really in style, I don't know if it was ever in style. I don't know, throwback. >> So you said you launched a year ago? >> Yeah. >> Is that right? >> So talk about network effects, any community like this you want to achieve some kind of scale and you get this sort of flywheel effect. I mean, 10,000 in 12 months is pretty good number. Of course, there's the number and then there's the activity and those are two different sort of dimensions. But do you feel like you're on the steep part of the S-curve or just heading there or have surpassed that? Talk about the network effect. >> Absolutely, so in my experience with launching communities you do have that hockey stick where in the very beginning a lot of people are coming and they're joining. The great news is we're seeing high activity on a monthly basis of people coming back. No surprise in a community in the very beginning you're coming through search, Google, because you're typing a question into that box, where do you land? We want them to land on Veritas Open Exchange so we can be part of that broader conversation around what's going on for information management. At Veritas, we believe that a connected experience across our different platforms. If you think about what we're sharing on social media, what we're sharing in our communities, those users that are logging in to get information out of our different portals, we want to start to blend some of those connections together and we see community as a way to do that. A great example is if you're on a product page and you want to look at information about a particular product, net backup, being able to access blogs, some of the community content's really important because there's a lot of authenticity that comes from a community voice, a user voice, alongside our voice as Veritas as well. >> You talk a little bit about how you seeded it when you had some relationship with the Symantec data but how did you actually get the seedling to not die? What was that secret because that's the hardest part I think or at least one of the hard things about building a community is cultivating it so it doesn't wilt early on. >> Yeah, communities are about the value for those individuals. The value for us in the very beginning was the content that was there and the content that was created by the community. And so as we set out, and our roadmap was to launch VOX one of the early decisions was we need to make sure we can bring all of the content over with us that's relevant. And that felt like an easy decision at the beginning but it got harder as you started to look at database structures ... >> Dave: Yeah, content migration. >> Yeah, it would be a lot easier to start over. And we stayed true to that. I think we would have launched earlier in the year had it not been for some complexity there. But I think we've been able to continue to grow because we've got good content and I want to stress the fact that that content is coming from our customers, our partners, and our employees. And those are the individuals that are sharing their experience which is so valuable and it's authentic. >> Did you have an existing CMS or did you choose a new one when you started? A content management system? >> We went from one platform provider to another and there were some differences as you would suspect in those database structures. But we realized is we're thinking about a better experience from a mobile device. How do we actually start to connect our community into Veritas.com. Integrated into our support portal, we wanted to have flexibility across some of those touchpoints realizing that our customers and our partners are going to define where they want to go and we want to be able to take that content and make it easier for them to access. >> Well, and Justine, you just launched the VIP program, you may have some new requirements or feature requirements. What are you seeing there? What kinds of things do you envision your VIPs are going to require out of the system? >> Requirements out of the system ... >> Right, you follow me? So it's sort of a new thing, the VIPs, does the system accommodate those? Do you have to add new features? These are challenging problems, right? There's underlying infrastructure that you have to deal with. How do you sort all that out? >> I think in terms of being able to maybe plug in new requirements especially with different types of technology, we're trying to introduce new types of content into the community as well that would hopefully be appealing to newer advocates that would be welcomed into the program in the future. >> Dave: Like what? >> Podcasting is something that we're actually doing. We've paired up with the social team, as well and we're running podcasts here on the Vision Live floor which is really exciting. So we're going to have new content up on the community shortly. Hopefully we'll be able to plug our VIPs into those new types of content and provide different avenues for digesting content. >> Where do you want to see this go? What's the vision? >> Success for us is we make Veritas Open Exchange, VOX, an integrated part of being a customer, a partner, or even an employee of Veritas. There's relevance there. This is a place where I have presence, I'm able to share what I know and participate in a broader conversation. Talk a little bit about roadmap, one of the beautiful things about having a close relationship with a very passionate group of individuals is they want to make things better. They want to make it easier and we see that through requirements that are coming in and questions about how to make VOX better. But also about our products and services at Veritas. There's a rich dialogue that we can have with them as result of that. So we're constantly evaluating, looking at those things, of how do we just actually make things easier. It's so easy to make things complicated these days with features, right? Let's do this, let's do that. We're looking at how do we actually make this simpler, provide a better experience so you can be on your mobile device, you can be on your tablet, you can be at your desk and find the information that you're looking for. >> Great. Alright folks, we have to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright, you're welcome. Keep it right there, everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. As theCUBE, we're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Right back. (techno music)

(exciting, upbeat music) >> (Announcer) Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge '17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back. Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. This is theCube and we're here at ServiceNow Knowledge '17. Stanley Toh is here, he's the Global IT Director at semiconductor manufacturer Broadcom. Stanley, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Nice to be here. >> So, semiconductor, hot space right now. Things are going crazy and it's a good market, booming. That's good, it's always good to be in a hot space. But we're here at Knowledge. Maybe talk a little bit about your role, and then we'll get into what you're doing with ServiceNow. >> Sure. You're right. Semiconductor is booming. But we don't do anything sexy. Everything is components that go into your iPhones and stuff like that. They do the sexy stuff. We do the thing that make it work. So, I'm the what we call the Enterprise and User Services Director, so basically anything that touches the end user, from the help desk to collaboration to your PC support desk, everything is under. Basically anything that touches the end user, even onboarding, and then, now with the latest, we actually moved our old customer support portal to even ServiceNow CSM. >> Okay, so what led you to ServiceNow? Maybe take us back, and take us through the before and the after. >> Okay. Broadcom Limited, before we changed our name to Broadcom, we were Avago Technologies. We are very cloud centric. Anything that we can move to the cloud, we moved to the cloud. So we were the first multi-billion dollar company to move to Google, back in 2007. That was 10 years ago. And then we never stopped since. We have Opta, we have Workday. And if you look at it, all this cloud technology works so well with ServiceNow. And ServiceNow is a platform that has all the API and connectors to all these other cloud platforms. So, when we were looking and evaluating, first as just the ITSM replacement, we selected ServiceNow because of the ease of integration. But as we get into ServiceNow, and as we learn ServiceNow, we found that it's not just an ITSM platform. You can use it for HR, for finance, for legal, for facilities. Recently, probably about six months ago, we launched the HR module. And then three weeks ago, we went live with a CSM portal for the external customer. >> When you say you go back to 2007 with Google, you're talking about what, Google Docs? >> Everything. >> Dave: Everything. >> Email, calendar, docs, sites, Drive, but it was unknown. >> Dave: All the productivity stuff. >> Everything. >> Dave: Outsourced stuff. >> They were unknown then, >> Jeff: Right, right, right. >> And it's a risk. >> So what was the conversation to take that risk? Because obviously there was a lot of concern at the enterprise level on some of these cloud services beyond test/dev in the early days. Obviously you made the right bet, it worked out pretty well. (Stanley laughing) But I'm curious, what were the conversations and why did you ultimately decide to make that bet? >> Okay. So 2007 was just after the downturn. >> Jeff: Right. >> So everyone was looking at cost, at supportability. But at the same time, the mobile phone, the smart phone is just exploding in the market. So we want something that is very flexible, very scalable, and very easy to integrate, plus also give you mobility. So that's why we went with Google as the first cloud platform, but then we started adding. So right now, we can basically do everything on your smart phone. We have Opta as our single sign-on. From one portal, I go everywhere. >> Dave: Okay, so that's good. So you talked about some of the criteria for the platform. How has that affected how you do business, how you do IT business? >> See, IT has always been looked upon as a cost center. And we are always slow, legacy system, hard to use, we don't listen to you. (Jeff laughing) >> Dave: What do those guys do? >> You know, why are we paying those guys, right? And then you look at all the consumer stuff. They are sexy, they are mobile, they have pretty pictures. Now all your internal users want the same experience. So, the experience has changed. The old UNIX command key doesn't work anymore. They want something touch, GUI, mobile. They want the feel, the color, you know. >> That might be the best description (Stanley laughing) of the consumerization of IT, Dave, that we've ever had on theCUBE. >> It's really honest. Coming from an IT person, it is, it is honest. And now you've driven ServiceNow into other areas beyond IT. >> Stanley: Yes. >> You mentioned HR. >> HR. We went live six months ago. >> Okay. And these other areas, are you thinking about it, looking at it, or? >> So we are also looking with legal, because they have a lot of legal documents and NDAs and stuff like that. And ServiceNow have a very nice integration to DocuSign and Vox. So we are looking at that. But the latest one, we went live three weeks ago, is the CSM, the customer support management portal. And that one actually replaced one of our legacy system that has a stack of sixteen application running. And we collapsed that, and went live on ServiceNow CSM three weeks ago. >> And what has been, two impacts - the business impact, and, I'm curious, is it the culture impact. You sort of set it up as the attitude. We had fun with it, but it's true. What's the business impact? And what has the cultural impact been? >> The last few years, we have been doing a lot of acquisition. So we have been bringing in a lot of new BU's. Business units. And they want things to move fast, and we want to integrate them into one brand. So speed and agility is key when you do acquisitions. So that's why we are moving into a platform where we can integrate all these new companies easily. We found that in ServiceNow and we can integrate them. So for example, when we acquired Broadcom Corporation, they have 18,000 employees. We onboarded them on day one, and usually when you do an acquisition, they don't give you the employee information until the last minute. Two days, all I need, is to bring them all on, onboarded into my collaboration suite. I only need two days of the information, and on day one, Turn it on, they are live. Their information is in, they have an email account. All their information is in ServiceNow. They call one help desk, they call our help desk, they get all the help and services. So it's fully integrated on day one itself. >> And you guys also own LSI now, right? >> Yes, LSI. >> Emulex? >> Emulex, PLX. >> PLX. >> The latest acquisition is Brocade, which we will close in the summer. And then, the rumored Toshiba NAND business. So, yeah, we are doing a lot of acquisitions. >> Yeah, quite a roll-up there. >> Correct. So as you can see, they are all very different companies. So when they come in, they have different culture. They have different workflow, they have different processes. But if you integrate them into a platform that we are very familiar right now, it's the consumerized look and feel, it's very easy to bring them in. >> And that is the cultural change that has occurred. >> Yes, it's a huge, >> So do people love IT now? >> They still hate IT. (Jeff and Dave laughing) They still say iT is a cost center. But right now, they are coming around. They see that we are bringing value to them. So right now, IT is just not to provide you the basic. IT is to enable the business to be better and more competitive. >> A true partner for the business. >> Yes, correct. >> Stanley, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to hear your story, we appreciate it. >> Stanley: Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from ServiceNow Knowledge '17. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)