it comes to building a brand in a powerhouse brand enterprises really rely on customers to do that to really leverage the voice of customers to get the word out and to have customers go on record to talk about the power and the value of being because when customers go on record to talk about it there really is no better marketing than you everything is connected now and that data that's the value those are the data that the customer has is their crown jewels what beam is done really well is yeah they started off as a small virtualization player but as they've seen the market grow and evolved they've made adaptation to really be able to expand and stay with their customers as their needs have more been changed again in terms of the product design or we think customer pros make it easy for the customer and really seek to your core customer that that customer that is using your product every day so make it easy powerful and affordable that that was our four core principles in designing the product and the whole business model decided to be here the most exciting thing to me is is the recognition the conversations with customers with this journey towards intelligent data management as you as you said most customers are in stage 1 stage 2 but for us this is a partnership this is not just giving software this is talking to customers talking to partners making them success you [Music]

welcome to the Windy City everybody you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage my name is Dave Volante I'm here with my co-host Stuart men immense dude this is our second year of covering v-mon you've painted the town in green we certainly have we've been talking about for I can't even now tell you how long data is at the center of it all companies are taking a new look at what does it really mean to ensure that I know where all my data is that I ensure it's protected and that it's in compliance all this challenges are much bigger part of them not just the day that backup remedy company's overall data management pirate market which is much bigger and more and more companies are digitizing their organization and for us we're kind of the ones that keep that up and running and I think it was important for us to make sure that message gets out but some years we've been saying women's VMware only the most right there be only we will never do physical crappier would always say we're just gonna do virtual virtual well in the enterprise that can't be there's ten fifteen twenty percent of all these enterprises that are gonna stay physical so last year we introduced a comprehensive m2m platform now we can do virtual physical and cloud for our enterprise customers for everybody but we see it more in the entry box allowing workloads to move seamlessly across multi clouds Rob I they soon go play on glass to manage all your data it grows the cloud there's a dichotomy between what the businesses expect in terms of the levels of data protection the levels of orchestration and automation that exist and what IT can deliver and it seems like beam is trying to fill that gap they did what most of the big companies do they start off with a partner day beams all about their partner you cannot be a platform provider without an ecosystem that's embracing and extending the value merging that value proposition together with these companies and brought about a tremendous impact on just a customer success they are experienced in in leveraging our technology they want to make sure that if I'm buying something from you it'll integrate into my existing environment so I don't have to do a complete rip and replace that's a very expensive proposition this is a company that has grown from you know very small to quite large it's gonna be probably close to a billion dollars in bookings this year we're not losing kind of what made us great which get in the door just get in the door to any of these companies go into coca-cola just get in the door and then do a really good job and expand from there which is really what we've been doing since the beginning but they've taken over Chicago VM is famous for its parties part vmworld and other big events work hard way card them so VM is known for having the best parties pleasure seeing you and congratulations on all your success thank you very much this day Volante with stew minimun you're watching the cube live from Chicago v-mon 2018 [Music]

(uptempo techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois. It's theCube, covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back, here in the windy city. This is theCube's coverage of VeeamOn 2018. I'm your host Stu Miniman, and they're breaking down the show, but we always have room for bringing some diversity to the show. Both, we've got Charu Madan, who is the director of strategic alliances with Nutanix. Always want more women in technology on our program. >> Thank you. >> And also, we can't go without getting in to talk to more users. So also happy to welcome to the program Chris Hippensteel, who's network and system administrator with New Resources Consulting. Right over the border in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Thank you both for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> So Charu, I saw you last week. You're following me around at all these shows. Of course I was at your show Nutanix. NEXT in New Orleans. Just give our audience your role at Nutanix. What brings you to the Veeam show? >> Absolutely Stu, thank you for having us here, and it looks like we'll be forklifted out of here as being the last Cube event of the day. But yes we had an amazing event last weekend in New Orleans and as you saw the customers were stoked, they were pumped. I just got a chance to talk to so many customers about our direction, about what they heard at the keynote, and I think they were absolutely excited. Our direction in software being a cloud company. All those things resonated so well. And I think the fact that we launched our freedom campaign, you probably heard that freedom to build, freedom to run any application, freedom to invent, freedom to really focus on multi-cloud, and not be bogged down by which cloud. And hybrid cloud is a complex journey, and finally freedom to play. And I think that would resonate very well with Chris out here. So I think that was a very powerful message we sent out that we are giving our customers choice, and ability to run Nutanix anywhere and any workload. >> Yeah absolutely, I had a great conversation with your new CMO, Ben at the show as a customer. So Chris is this your first VeeamOn? >> Yes, this is my first VeeamOn Conference. >> All right, tell us a little bit about your role and your organization. >> Yes, so I'm the network and systems engineer and administrator at New Resources Consulting. And so I pretty much take care of the whole show. Anywhere from simple help desk questions to rebuilding an SAN environment. I came into the company, and there's a lot of legacy equipment, and things were breaking. It wasn't good so-- >> So Chris before we get into the tech, and the company itself. Give us a thumbnail what the operation is. >> Yeah, so New Resources Consulting is a consulting firm out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We have users based all over the U.S. and in Canada. We focus a lot on managed services, Oracle solutions, PeopleSoft. We do a lot with the water and waste management out in L.A., in Boston and Denver. We focus on that part of IT. >> It sounds very much as changing dynamic happening there. What are some of the stresses on the organization? What's your role in connection with the business? >> Some of the stresses that I was having was we're sitting there trying to get development servers spun up and with the legacy equipment. It going down a lot. I just wasn't able to do that. So now I'm happy that with Nutanix, I'm able to keep everything running smoothly. It's almost like the company doesn't even know I'm there sometimes. >> It's interesting. Last week, we've been talking a lot about invisible. This week, it's about availability. So maybe you could speak to what that means for your operation. Give us the before and journey that you went through. >> Yes, so before as I mentioned, I had a lot of legacy equipment. I was bidding on things on eBay. They didn't even have the option to buy some things that I needed to replace, and my availability wasn't really there. Both at work and in my home life. I was constantly putting out fires instead of working on growing the company, getting new equipment in, doing new processes. That was before, now after my wife is quite happy that I'm home at reasonable times, and not leaving the house at 9 or 10 p.m. or four o'clock in the morning to go switch out controller cards or drives in my SAN. It's allowed me to work on other projects doing Office 365 roll out. As well as a lot of documentation that wasn't there before me, and helping out my users. Where I wasn't able to do so much because I was putting out all those fires. All right Chris, I've heard from Nutanix customers forgive me my weekend back. Lots of new opportunities. As the first one I think, it helped me in my home relationship. >> Chris: Yes. >> So families are happy to see, a happy wife, a happy life. >> Chris: Yes, exactly. >> Charu give us a little bit of color on what you're seeing and maybe some of the Nutanix Veeam partnership. >> Yeah, and I'll replay what I heard and what I saw actually from customers last week in New Orleans and this week here in Chicago. In New Orleans, Veeam folks had a break out session where they were going to talk about the partnership, and what we are doing together. And it was a full house, people had to be turned back, and could not be accommodated in that room. So that's just a testament to show how much interest there is in Nutanix, in Veeam and the joint solution. Then I talked to customers like Chris. Got talking to him in details on Monday, and Chris is talking about how Veeam and Nutanix has simplified his operations, reduced costs, tremendously for his company. And really helped in focus on driving business value to his internal clients verses like he said, "Keeping the lights on." Just talking to customers about this and hearing the excitement, the elation from our customers. That is really empowering, so I think the two companies have very similar principles. We both love simplicity for our clients. We are both extremely customer-centric, so that makes us very well positioned as companies who work very well together having that common DNA. So we are very excited to have a great partnership with Veeam and I would say now amping up our partnership, and doing even better, bigger stuff. >> Chris, one of the things I hear through both companies. Multi-hypervisors, all good. How the cloud story is maturing. Any commentaries? What you're using from the hypervisor space and what does cloud mean to your organization? >> Yeah, so we don't do too much of the cloud. We keep everything in-house but we are a VMware shop currently, but we're looking forward to Veeam and Nutanix to roll out their hypervisor. Get that solution ready for us. VMware is what we currently use and it's working great, but moving to Nutanix, it allowed me to save a lot of money on cost with the licensing I currently had to the licensing I have now. And Nutanix is going to help me out even further when I move over to their hypervisor, saving me even more money for my company, which is always good for everybody. >> All right, well Charu. Chris is a good set up there. We're talking about age V. I talked to Peter McKay a little bit about it at Veeam, but give us the update on bringing those solutions together. >> Yeah, great question, and yes, I guess some of the rumors are true. We are working on it. The teams are actively working on bringing that delight to customers like Chris because Chris you're not the first one who's asked for it. We've had thousands of customers asking us for that capability of Veeam being able to back up, not just with VMware but also now with our Acropolis Hypervisor. It's imminent. We already have hundreds of customers running the beta. We launched the beta a couple of months back, and the GA is right around the corner. It's not years, it's not months. What the Veeam folks tell me, it's a matter of a few weeks and we are very excited about getting that out. And really like Chris just said it so well. Helping them save costs and helping our thousands of customers do the same. >> It's really nice to see both companies working together, and know that they actually listen to their customers. They listen to what we want and then they go and they find the solutions and work together to actually make it a reality. >> All right Chris, I want to give you the final word. We're getting towards the end of the show. They got the closing keynote. They've got the big Veeam party. >> Chris: All right. >> Nutanix had a great party in New Orleans last week. Veeam actually had a great party too. >> Charu: That's true. >> New Orleans last year. So just for your peers, tell them some of the key take aways. One of the main things that you got out of coming to the show. >> Yeah, the big things I really liked. A lot of the break out sessions, I was able to actually sit down face-to-face with technicians that I had talked to over the phone that I looked up and I've learned so much from. And actually dig deeper into conversations with them 'cause coming to something like this, it's different than just being on the phone with somebody for support or asking questions, or reading knowledge-based articles. So a lot of the break out sessions, getting to meet more of the faces from Nutanix and Veeam, and talking to them about new things that I'm looking forward to. And just brainstorming how I can better run my business with their advice. >> All right, well Chris and Charu. I appreciate you helping bring us to a close of our coverage. Here in Chicago has been a deep dish of all of the technology for the culture. A little bit of sports discussion. So thank you so much for watching. Of course, always go to theCube.net for all the replays of this show. See where we're going to be at. Come say hi to us. Hit us up on any of the social media. For Stu Miniman, my co-host for the week Dave Vellante. The whole crew here from SiliconANGLE Media. Thank you so much for watching theCube. (uptempo techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you by VeeamOn. >> We're back. VeeamOn 2018. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, where we go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. Dave Vellante, with my co-host Stu Miniman and Marc Crespi is here. He's the Vice President of Sales Engineering at ExaGrid, another Mass boy. Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you again, Marc. >> Thanks, great to be with you guys again. Great to be on another fantastic VeeamOn in the world-class city of Chicago. >> Yeah, it's a great city. What's happening at VeeamOn for ExaGrid this year? >> Quite a few executive meetings, a lot of customer contact, existing customers, prospective customers, meeting with the joint sales teams and so on. We coordinate a lot with VeeamOn in the field and on an engineering level, so great to get off the phone and see each other face to face and really deepen the relationship. >> So, talk a little bit about what the conversation is like with customers, particularly as it relates to data protection. We're hearing a lot on cloud, multi-cloud, intelligent data management. What does that all mean to your customers? >> Sure. So, obviously VeeamOn provides a wealth of different functionality in all of those areas, whether it be the intelligent data management, which includes cloud components, et cetera. We at ExaGrid play a role, mostly on the on-premise side, to be honest, of the equation. And because we typically deal with a quite large customers, the use of the cloud is really, typically relegated for older, more archive oriented data, or long-term retention backup data than it is for primary data, or even primary copy for disaster recovery simply because of the logistics of managing that much data when you may need it. However, the cloud plays a very important role in those types of customers, as many of them have regulatory requirements, compliance requirements to keep data long-term that they may never need to access, or never need to touch. In which case tiering that out to the cloud is a potentially good strategy. >> Marc, one of the things we're watching at this show is how VeeamOn's trying to get deeper and broader into the enterprise. If you can, give us a little color as to how you're seeing, where is VeeamOn being successful, what are customers liking for that kind of solution? >> Sure. We're seeing a significant amount of traction with VeeamOn and enterprise customers. In fact, we met with a large travel agency out here at the show who's looking at both VeeamOn and ExaGrid as a combined solution. So we're working very closely. VeeamOn has a dedicated enterprise team in the field, and they're breaking down doors to a number of the different enterprises. And our solution, the way it scales and its performance profile is very well-suited to the enterprise. We are an enterprise-class company as well, so we're doing cross-introductions for each other and to each other's enterprise customer base as we go. >> Talk a little bit more about your solution, where the sweet spot is. We always talk about horses for courses on theCUBE. >> Marc: Sure. Yeah. >> What's your favorite course? >> So, we define a target customer, the first demographic that we use is typically the amount of data they have under management. Put another way, the amount of primary data they have, or the utilization on their primary storage. And where we typically live, these days is 50 terabyte is kind of the low end, all the way up to multiple petabytes of data being backed up. And we can store many, many weeks, or months, or years of that data because of the data deduplication impact. But that's our sweet spot. And typically that's the most key demographic for us to look at, is how much data they're managing. >> And you're an infrastructure provider, obviously. You have software, but you don't do backup software. That's not your specialty, right? >> That's correct. That's one of the reasons we have such a close relationship with VeeamOn. And, quite honestly, we partner with a number of folks, but VeeamOn is clearly one of our key, if not our key partner because they provide the data protection functionality, the management, et cetera, and we provide the intelligent hyperconverged secondary storage that can store all of that data, deduplicate it, replicate it, and also provide, uniquely, I might add; support for some of VeeamOn's really critical features, like Instant VM Recovery and Virtual Lab and SureBackup. Because of the way our product is architected those features work extremely well with us, where in some cases, in some solutions they don't quite work as well. >> I think back to a number of years ago deduplication was all the talk in the storage industry. How are the latest trends in everything from Flash's adoption, NVMe, and NVMe over fabric coming soon, how's that going to impact what customers are doing in your space? >> Sure, so first I'll tackle the deduplication part of it. There's no question that it's now become an accepted norm. It's rare these days that you're explaining what it is, or what it does. But there still is one left over misconception that I think it's really important for all of us who have deduplication to educate customers. And that is that not every type of deduplication is created equal. Sometimes people conflate it with compression. You know, all compression's kind of the same to a certain extent. The way deduplication is implemented, there are certain characteristics that will either increase the amount of data reduction you get or lessen the amount of data reduction you get. For customers it's really important to know what type of algorithm you're dealing with 'cause that's going to translate to cost over the long term. So that's the first thing. The other trends, the adoption of Flash and so on, really has been more on the primary storage side, where that level of performance is required for high transaction, high performance requiring applications and so on. Because Flash remains quite a bit more expensive than spinning disc is, it's inroads into backup or secondary storage have been somewhat more on a limited basis. >> So, if I understand you correctly, a large part of the data reduction is a function of the algorithm... I don't want to say not so much the workload, but I was always under the impression that the workload determined the sort of data reduction efficacy. >> Marc: Sure. >> Which I'm sure is true, but you're saying the algorithm also has a huge impact. >> It's a combination. So, there's no question that certain data types deduplicate extremely well, other types not as well, and some not at all. You know, pre-compressed, pre-encrypted data tends not to deduplicate well at all. Where the algorithm comes in is there's a couple of elements, not to get to get too much in the weeds, but something called block size, which is basically the size of the objects that you examine when you deduplicate, and then whether or not you do what's called variable-length analysis, which is adjusting to the fact that the data is expanding and shrinking as it's changing. Algorithm's that implement very large block sizes and avoid variable-length technology are going to get much lower deduplication ratios than algorithms that implement both of those elements, smaller object sizes, and variable-length technology. And we're in the latter category of the more aggressive form of deduplication. >> So, you've got greater granularity and the greater ability to drive data reduction ratios, assuming the workload is favorable to that. >> Exactly right. If you were to compare the same workload across the two algorithms, the less aggressive and the more aggressive, the more aggressive is going to do better on that workload than the less aggressive. >> And again, I know it depends on the workload, but are we talking about on a percentage basis 10% better, 20%, 50%, a 100%? >> Marc: Multiples better. Some cases five to 10 times better. >> Even an order of magnitude in some cases. >> Marc: An order of magnitude better, yes, in some cases. >> What about encryption? What's the state of encryption these days? What are you advising customers with regard to encryption? >> Well, for years we've been under the impression that everything's going to have to be encrypted at some point. It's been a slow journey. You know, there's PCI compliance, HIPPA compliance. Obviously, there's been some pretty infamous hacks that have happened and so on. So the way we look at encryption, we have encryption solutions, self-encrypting appliances, and we recommend to customers, even if you don't need encryption today, if there is a slight chance that you'll need it in the future, then go with our encrypting line of appliances. The cost difference is nominal. It's in single-digit, low single-digit percentages, and it's there when you need it. So you don't have to potentially swap after that. We also do encryption any time we move data over the LAN. So we're fully ready for all of these compliances. It's certified encryption, you know, federal level certification, et cetera, so-- >> Yeah, Marc, let us know what companies aren't aware of the need for encryption and I'm going to short those stocks. (laughing) >> Okay, you got it. Yeah, you might want to change your bank. >> All right. Got to ask you. Brady, if you were Robert Kraft, would you have traded Tom Brady? >> Absolutely not. >> That's unanimous, there. Three for three on that. >> Absolutely, no. >> Okay, why not? What would the rationale be? >> I think he's got a lot more to give yet. I think it would have been on par with the Babe Ruth trade. It would have been a historical disaster. You know, he got us to the Super Bowl last year. Granted, Philly inched us out, but I still think he's the GOAT and he's going to stay the GOAT. >> Giselle said Tom Brady can't catch the ball. I would say also, he can't play defense, so-- >> I would agree with that as well. >> All right, what about Garoppolo? Do you think it was the right move to hold onto him, essentially as an insurance policy in case Brady went down before the trade deadline, or should they have been more proactive and gotten more for him? >> I think it probably would have been the right move for the Patriots to hang on to Garoppolo, however, for Garoppolo himself, and for the fact that they needed to get at least something for him, I think it was the right move at the right time. He needs to play. He's a great quarterback. He's already turning that San Francisco franchise around. >> Right. >> So I'm happy to see him play. I actually now start watching 49ers games 'cause I want to root for him. >> Me, too. I'm a fan of Garoppolo. >> Marc: He's a son of the Patriots. >> I agree. I think it was the smart move, Stu to keep him as an insurance policy, just in case. You don't know. I mean, Brady, you know, 40 plus years old. I mean, look what happened last year. >> It's the economics, Dave, though. They weren't going to pay him what he needed to be able to be a backup, and I agree with Marc. He was ready to play, obviously and it is fun to watch him on the 49ers. >> No, we agree. One of 'em had to go, right? Okay, and now we're three for three. So Peter McKay, Patrick Osborne, and now Marc Crespi all say Brady should stay. Right move. We'll see. Hey, they're the favorite to win the Super Bowl next year. Hopefully, they can get there. >> Sounds like I'm in good company. >> Marc, thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's always a pleasure to see you guys. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE, from VeeamOn 2018. (upbeat music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE, covering Veeamon 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody, the Windy City, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and we're here day two at Veeamon 2018, theCUBE's second year doing Veeamon, and I'm Dave Vellante, with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Patrick Osborne is here, the newly minted VP and GM of big data and secondary storage. >> And CUBE alumni. >> HPE and many time CUBE alumni, did you get a sticker? >> Yeah, it's already on my laptop. >> Oh, awesome, great to see you again. >> Good to see you guys. >> Thanks so much for coming on, always fun at Veeamon. >> Yep. >> They have a big presence. Your show, HPE Discover, they painted the Chi-Town green. >> Patrick: Yep. >> What's going on at the show for you guys? >> So a huge partner for us, in our ecosystem, as you guys know, HPE and the world of virtualized workloads, like, you know, we definitely own the space in terms of the number of Veeams sitting on our infrastructure and they are a great partner. You know, we've got thousands of customers, and I think what we're seeing, too, is that as Veeam grows up into the midsize and enterprise space, that is, you know, that's where our wheelhouse is. And so we're getting a lot of customer interactions in that space, and then, with some of our offerings around Nimble and SimpliVity, where they play very well in the commercial segments, that's a great way for us to go grab new logos, be present in the channel. So it's a really good partnership for us on both ends. >> I definitely want to understand what's going on in big data, but before we get there, let's talk a little bit about secondary storage and your point of view there. We know that data protection is moving way up on the list of CXO priorities, we also know there's a dissonance in the customer base, between the expectations of how much automation is actually there from the line of business, versus what IT can deliver. >> Patrick: Yeah, yeah. >> And so there's this gap and now you have multi-cloud coming on in a big way, digital transformation, and so it feels like backup and recovery and data protection is transforming. Throw in security and it even complicates it further. What's your point of view on what's going on in this mix? >> Well, certainly the sands are shifting in the secondary storage market. I think because of a heightened customer expectation in this area, whether it's, you know, I want to do more with my data, running things that we do at Veeam, like test data, automation, Sandboxing, security, you know, ransomware. All those are higher level data services than just what people were doing in the past around backup and recovery. So for us, we're really focused a lot on automation right in this space. The death of backup and recovery in that traditional space is essentially caused by comPlexxity, right? So automate or die in this space, nobody wants to deal with backup, right? What you want is outcomes, and what we're doing is, for our product line, we've got sort of this three-tiered mantra, of predictive, cloud-ready and timeless. So we want to be able to, through platforms like InfoSite, be able to heavily, heavily automate all those activities. Cloud-ready, because, you know, as we talked before, it's a hybrid world. People, especially in secondary storage, want to have some data on-prem, and certainly a lot of it for archival and retention off-prem. And then, timeless is sort of this scenario around, even though I'm operating a data center, I want the purchasing experience to be elastic, and like, again, the cloud, right? So consumption-based as a service. So that's what we're trying to bring to the market for secondary storage and storage in general. >> Dave: Awesome. >> Patrick, as I look at this space, you talk about that hybrid, multi-cloud world that we talked about. The two big, main things are data and my applications. So you talked a bit about the data, connect for us, kind of the applications and things, cloud native and 12 factor microservices, versus traditional applications. And you've got that whole spectrum, what are you seeing from your customers and how are you helping them? >> Yeah, so, we're definitely seeing a lot of the tech leading customers in the enterprise from HPE, you know, the big logos, right? They're out there disrupting themselves, disrupting industry, are massively betting on analytics, right? So, they've moved certainly from databases to batch now, it's all, you know, I think people call it fast data, streaming analytics, Kafka, Spark. So we're seeing, that part of our business that HPE's growing, like, non-sequentially, right? So it's really good business for us. But what's going on right now, is that the customers who are doing this, these are all net new apps. Kubernetes, you know, new styles of application, it's not a rip and replace, it's more of an augmentation scenario, where you're providing new services on top of existing apps. So that is very new and I think one of the things we'll see over the next couple of years is, how do I protect those workloads? How do I provide multi-cloud for them? So it's an interesting space, it's very nascent, a lot of tech-heavy investment going on for the, you know, the big players in the market. But that's going to have a long tail into the mid range. >> How will the data protection architecture sort of change for those new emerging applications? You know, maybe IoT is another piece of that. And maybe, where does your partnership with Veeam fit into that? >> Yeah, so we are having a number of strategy discussions on that this morning, you know. And I think that space is, you know, there's a lot of identification that has to go on. Do I want to back it up, do I care? Right, are those persistent streams? Or that IoT data that's coming in, do I really have to back it up at the end of the day or can I back up the results? So, a lot of it is not just an availability issue, it's certainly a data management issue. But a lot of the tools that we would need to do that, today, they're focused on bare-metal, VM wear, virtualization, a lot of stuff that hasn't been written yet, right? So I think there's a lot of actual tech development that has to go on in this space and I think we're kind of poised together as partners to deliver in that area the next couple years. >> You guys have this tagline, "We Make Hybrid IT Simple." >> Patrick: Yes. >> IT, you know-- >> Patrick: Very quantifiable. >> It ain't simple. (laughter) So, where does storage fit into that equation? >> Yeah, the stats that blow my mind was, I think IBC came out with this, was that there's essentially around 500 million apps in the data center today. And then, in any sort of spectrum of bare-metal, being virtualized, maybe being containerized, in the next four years there's going to be 500 million net new apps, right? So that's like, it's mind blowing, in terms of, most people have a flat budget, maybe a little increase. So you think that you're doubling the amount of apps you have and all the services around it. So for us, the automation piece is absolutely key, right? So anything we can do with InfoSite as a platform, we're going to be extending that to other products, you see we've done it for 3PAR, we'll be bringing that experience. But anything we can do around automation, analytics, that's going to take a lot of the mystery and comPlexxity out of managing these apps and services, I think is a win for the customers, and that's why they're going to buy into the platforms. >> Yeah, it's like, imagine if you're a young family, you've got two kids and you have twins. >> Patrick: Yeah. (laughter) >> Uh-oh. (laughs) >> Or you decide to have two more, like I did. (laughter) >> Patrick, we've been talking about intelligence in the storage world for decades. >> Yes. >> Why is it real, you know, more real and different now, than it was in some of the previous generations? >> Yeah, I think, you know, some of the techniques... So, we've had systems that have called home and brought telemetry home forever, right? But I think what's going on is that, as you take the tools that we've developed, and a lot of them are new, right, that are allowing you to do this, it's the practition of the data science, which is like the key, at the end of the day. InfoSite is an amazing piece of technology, a lot of the magic is in the way that you set up your teams, and to be able to take that on, right? So, it's no longer a product manager, an engineering guy, support person in a different organization, right? What we have is what's called a peak team, right? Which just takes all the functions, brings them together with a data scientist, to be able to take a look at, how can I do machine learning, AI, a more predictive model, to actually take use of this data, right? And I think the techniques and the organizational design is the big change that's happened over the last couple of years. Data's always been there, right? But now we know what to do with that. >> Yeah, and like you said before, the curve is reshaping, it's not this linear Moore's Law curve anymore. >> Patrick: Yeah. >> It's this exponential curve. >> Patrick: Exactly. >> I can't even draw it anymore you know, it used to be easy, just put the dotted line straight out, now it's twisting. So, that increases the need obviously, for automation. Now talk about how HPE's automation play is differentiable in the marketplace. >> So I think a couple of things from a differentiated perspective. Obviously we talked a lot about InfoSite as a platform, as a portfolio company, we're definitely trying to take out the friction, in terms of the deployment and automation of some of these big data environments. So our mission is to be able to, like you would stand up some analytic workloads in the public cloud, to provide that same experience, on-prem, right? And essentially be the broker for that user experience. So that's an area that we're going to differentiate, and then, you know, in general, there's not that many mega portfolio companies, right, anymore. And I feel like, that we're exploiting that for our customers, bringing together compute networking and storage. And certainly on the automation side. So you know, for us, I really feel that you're no longer going to be buying on horizontal lines anymore. You know, best of breed servers, best of breed networking, best of breed storage, but bringing together a complete, vetted stack for a set of workloads, from a vendor like HPE. >> Yeah, and it was just announced, the deal's not closed yet, but just to mention to the audience, HPE just made an acquisition of Plexxi, a networking specialist-- >> Patrick: Yeah, a good friend, too, Rich Napolitano. >> Rich Napolitano. Just this week, which is interesting, because that brings cloud scale to some of the hyperconvergence infrastructure. It's essentially hyperconverge networking, so really interested to see how that plays out. HPE has made a number of really effective acquisitions over the last several years, starting really with 3PAR, was the one. Clearly Aruba, you know, the Nimble acquisition, you know, SimpliVity, so, SGI. So some really strong, both tactical and strategic moves for HPE, really interested to see how Plexxi sorts out. Okay, we got to talk sports for a minute. I asked Peter McKay this question, I asked his boss, some sports fans, if you were Robert Kraft, would you have traded Tom Brady? >> (sharp inhale) No. >> No way? >> No way, no way. >> Okay, that's consistent with McKay. >> Yeah, no way, that's like trading Montana, that didn't work out. >> That did work out, right? They traded Montana, then they won another Superbowl. >> Yeah, I know, I mean, I think, for me, he's an icon and then he's still operating at maximum efficiency, which is amazing, but I think he got a lot of legs in him. >> What do you think of the... Well hopefully he stays, hopefully he does play 'til 45. What do you think of the Garoppolo trade, though? Are you disappointed that they didn't get more, or do you think it was the right move to hang on, just in case Brady went down again? >> I think it's the right move at the end of the day, right? You're not going to get much from him anyways, and they're certainly not going to pay him out as a backup quarterback. What I don't like, though, is the fact that he's gone to the 49ers, and that's where most of my engineering team is in the Bay Area. So, to have to deal with yahoo 49ers fans, you know, for the next couple years, is going to be painful. But it's good, it's a good renewed rivalry. >> So you're not a-- >> Celtics, Warriors, you know, Patriots, Niners. >> You're not an instant transplanted 49ers fan, because of Garoppolo, right? >> Patrick: No, absolutely not. >> He's a carpet-bagger, right? >> He's out, he's off the team, he's out of the house. >> I love it, okay, Bruins were a big disappointment this year. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We thought that, you know, the Celtics were super exciting, let's go there, I mean. You know, you watched the Celtics early in the year, 'cause your like, after Hayward went down, you're like, kind of' we were all walking around like this. And then you-- >> I felt like, it's like where Kennedy was shot, right? I know exactly where I was, right? >> Right, and you had people blaming Danny Ainge for, like, making a move, I'm like, come on, guys. And you see what happened with the young players, and then they sort of tailed off a little bit, they were struggling, you know, Ky was trying to find his way and now they're the exciting team. Up to on Cleveland, I mean, you got to believe that Lebron is going to step up his game with a little home cooking. But let's assume for a second that they get by Cleveland (laughs) which will be a huge task. I mean, I don't think there's anybody in the NBA who can stop Kevin Durant, but I'd love to see Marcus Smart try. >> So two things in that scenario. One is that, who needs Kyrie Irving more right now, Cleveland or Boston, right? (laughter) Which is amazing, can you imagine saying that a couple months ago? It blows my mind. And then, for me, it's a revamping of the NBA, right? If you get the Celtics versus the Warriors in that style of play, I mean, it's definitely, it's changed the whole game, right? Shooting guards, ballers, I think it's fantastic to see, you know, a whole new style of play in the NBA. >> It's so exciting to see the Celtics back in. >> Team basketball, defense, passing, all of it, it's great. >> And ESPN is losing their minds, they don't know what to do. Stephen A Smith doesn't know what to say. >> Patrick: ESPN Live. >> He's actually pissed I think, yeah. (laughter) So, now, Stu, you're a Yankees fan, of course, and you know my line on the Yankees. Stu's kind of a weekend Yankees fan. My line on the Yankees is, that sucks you can't beat us in April. (laughs) Here it is in May. >> Dave, I'm just quiet around you, because I know where my paycheck comes from. >> I appreciate that perspective, Stu, okay. >> Patriots win, we're in agreement. >> Think about all these renewed rivalries, it's great. Celtics, Sixers, Red Sox, Yankees, it's unbelievable. >> And like I said, San Francisco-- >> Patrick: Phillies! >> And the Pats. >> The Pats! >> Well Patrick, always a pleasure seeing you, thanks for making time out of your busy schedule. >> Yeah, absolutely, it was great. >> For coming on theCUBE. Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest, right after this brief break. You're watching theCUBE, Live from Veeamon 2018. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: It's theCUBE, covering VeeamOn 2018, brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to VeeamOn 2018 everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Mike Conjoice is here, he's a Solutions Architect at Bupa Dental. Mike, over from the pond? >> Yeah absolutely. >> Over the pond rather, to America, welcome, from Bristol, England, great to have you on theCUBE, thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> Bupa Dental. Tell us about this 90,000 person organization. >> Yeah, so, Bupa's a global organization. They're primarily known for their health care insurance. Bupa Dental is a market unit that provides dental, NHS and private. So we're one of the largest private providers in the UK. We've got around 460 practices at the moment across the UK and Ireland. Bupa itself, 90,000 staff, 8,000 of that is dental. So that's clinicians and support staff. Were acquiring new practices, about three practices a week. >> Massive scale. >> Mike: Absolutely, it's huge. >> I've got to ask you, before we get into it. So health care, in England, NHS, you mentioned NHS and private. A lot of us in the United States, you know, have I think misconceptions, but what's your take on the quality of healthcare in England and the UK? A lot of people I talk to love it, they say it's really high quality. What's your take? >> It's certainly a different way of doing things, but then, it's a good model I feel. 'cause we all pay in, everyone can get that healthcare they need, they don't have to worry about being ill. You know, being ill shouldn't bankrupt you. So we do the NHS and private side of things. It's usually a lot of the same clinicians that run those models, but private we tend to cut the line a lot quicker, things like that. You're paying for the speed of the access to the clinicians, things like that. >> Okay, so but it's a hybrid model, so if you can afford it, then you can complement it, and it allows you to accelerate things. >> Mike: Absolutely. >> Okay, so there's still that level of quality that you can pay for, >> Yes, it's tiered >> But everybody's got healthcare, a hundred percent of the citizens are covered. >> Mike: Yeah. >> Mike, what's the kind of the stresses and the changes happening in healthcare, regulation like that impact from the technology sector? >> So at the moment, GDPR is obviously the big buzzword, I'm sure it's not the first time you've heard that this week. >> It's May 2018 >> We've got a countdown going. So a lot of our data is patient data, so it's critical healthcare data. So we're very lucky in Bupa to have a large information governance team that can manage a lot of the compliance and regulatory factors for us. So we need to be very aware of what we're doing with that data. We have the GDPR compliance side of things, where you've got the right to forget in an organization, but also the healthcare side of things can overrule that, that we are obliged to keep records for you know, certain amounts of time, depending on ages and things like that. >> And what kind of solutions are you architecting? >> So we, as I said, we acquire heavily, we acquire about two to three practices a week. So we are growing, so everything we look at is scale, not where we are now, but where we're going to be. You know, we've got plans to be at a thousand practices in no time at all. So a lot of the legacy frameworks that we follow, a lot of the legacy operational models we went with, they worked, but they don't scale well. So we need to put things so automation and intelligence, like Danny's been talking about in the keynote. It's things we really need to look at. We've started leveraging our data a lot more. So we pull back a lot of this data, we've got so much data, but we weren't really doing a lot with it. We've started running a lot of business intelligence, you know MIS data across that, to kind of learn how our patients use, I mean nobody likes going to the dentist, it's not a luxury treat that people go for. So trying to make that journey easier for the patients is kind of our end goal. We want to make it as painless as possible, apart from the dental bit. From making an appointment to kind of feeding back afterwards, and keeping that loop going, it's not just a one time end to end project. >> Yeah, so that whole experience. Take us inside the pieces that your patients don't see. Paint a picture of your infrastructure, I mean, what's there, what does it look like, and ultimately what applications are you supporting, you know, the top ones. >> Yeah, so dental practice management software isn't as advanced as probably as most people would think. Each practice has got a virtualization host in each. So we've got 500 service, remote branches on an MPLS link, so they're all coming back to a central data center where we keep all our offsite backups. >> Those are 500 physical servers? >> Yes, they're running Hyper-V, so they've got... They're quite low capacity, so there might be one or two VMs on each one. So although the scale is huge, the kind of the density is quite minimal. So we're bringing all that back across MPLS links that we're still not in an amazing place with network links in the UK, so some of our practices, they're not the best links, they're slow. Bringing back a lot of that data every night can be, you know, a massive issue, especially with the legacy software we were using previously. We need an offsite copy, we can't just cope with a local copy. We've had issues where practices have failed, practices have flooded, and without an offsite copy, you know, that backup drive floating in the water (mumbles) >> How does that local copy get made? That's done in an automated way from your remote location >> Yeah, so... >> It's not some gal at the desk doing the backup >> No, no, no >> like it used to be. >> Each practice has got like a USB or a NAS, depending on the size of the practice, and so we centrally manage that through the Veeam console in our data center. So each practice has a local backup job, to that storage every night, and then a backup copy job to our offsite data center to keep two copies of the data. >> And the office is closed, right, so it's not like you're dealing with high volume transactions that you're having to capture. I mean you've got a long enough window to get the stuff offsite, is that true? >> Yeah, so our bottleneck is always network, it's never source or target, it's always network. You know, some of our links we might get 200K uploads, so, if you're transferring a few gig of data it's never good. A lot of our data is digital imaging as well, which is really taking off. So you know you used to go and get an x-ray, now it's all 3D models of a scan of your mouth. So those files are... >> A lot of data. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Well we've done Cube gigs in the UK, so we know, sometimes those pipes are pretty small. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, so in the primary applications that you're supporting is this dental, this what you folks offer >> Yeah, so we've got, there's a couple of big players in the practice management software space, so we're kind of a split across those. They are moving towards private cloud software, but it's a slow process. These are the same softwares that you find in a single-person dental practice to these massive scales that we've got, so there's... They're very well known across the industry. So change is quite hard for them. >> So you're a Microsoft shop. Who's your server vendor? >> Dell. >> So you've got Dell servers, and Dell storage as well? >> Yes, so we've got Dell storage in the core. Just equal, equal logic. >> But Veeam is your primary data protection right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And how long have you had Veeam in there? >> Probably two and a half years now. >> Okay, great, so let's go back to three years ago. >> The good times. >> What was life like then, and why did you bring in Veeam, and what change, take us through that whole case. >> So, like I said, we're highly acquisitive. So that came with a certain cadence and expectation. So we basically got what was given to us when we bought the practice. There was a lot of legacy backup providers, you know, all the classic ones. All over the place, no standardization of what was set up, what was backing up, the reporting. There was no central pane of glass to manage that. So it was taking a lot of engineer time to check those backups. So the infrastructure team that look after that, they were having to dedicate possibly two engineers a day just to check backups, which was an absolute nightmare. It's expensive as well, you know, they're not cheap guys to hire, so you just, you're getting them to do manual admin work. So we needed a change obviously, especially with the expectations of growth. I'd worked with Veeam previously as an MSV, so I knew the product, I knew how it worked. I kind of put it forward, I think it would be the best idea for us to go with it. So we kind of went through a partner, to kick off the initiation, and straightaway they said this is a big project, you want to get Veeam directly involved. So we had a lot of help from Veeam, the SEs, the sales guys. Everyone we wanted, we had access to, just because of the size of it. And it was something Veeam hadn't really done before, the whole remote office, the whole remote office scheme, because of the licensing, it can work out expensive per socket. So they were quite interested in it as well. That was our primary driver was kind of centralizing all that management and the reporting, and just freeing up time, just was the main... >> So did you, was it sort of a wholesale, we're doing Veeam, we're going all in? Across 500 server platforms. >> It was a big blast of it at the start, so we had a lot of physical 2003 servers, so they needed to be replaced anyway, so that was perfect timing for that. >> Dave: How convenient. >> Yeah it was good timing. 2008 >> Sorry CFO, we got to do it. >> We were very lucky actually. Our finance team are very trusting of us. If we say this is the right solution, they kind of, well, if that's what it takes. >> They bite the bullet. >> Yeah, yeah. So we had probably about 200 in one go, well, in one go, over a period of a couple of months. >> Dave: In (mumbles) kind of >> It wasn't the slickest process, because we were learning at the time. The network bandwidth was a big issue. But now moving forward we're still replacing servers. Any kind of BAU replacements, we'll always go out with this Hyper-V Veeam model. Any new practice we bring on, Hyper-V Veeam. It's just, we've done a lot of power shell scripting on the background as well to... 'Cause if you think, we've got 500 hosts, that's a thousand jobs running. It's 500 local, 500 copy. It's a lot to keep track of, so... >> So Mike, the next acquisition, do you have to change the infrastructure, or can you drop Veeam in as a first before you rip out some of the gear? >> We do tend to rip and replace, just to kind of standardize it. So we keep a... We don't want to go to 350 practices and they're one model, and there's 10 at a different one. So we tend to rip and replace with our MPLS and the server, switching, just trying to keep it standard as possible for management. >> Hard work. I mean what was your result? >> Pretty good actually, yeah. >> What changed? How did you measure the success? Was it sort you saw it and... >> So, reporting before was done by an MSP that looked after us. Reporting was creative, shall we say. So were getting 98-100% successes of what they reported on. So they may have been backing up 20 files, that was working. >> They had their thumb on the scale. >> Absolutely. So we've got a lot more confidence in what we're backing up now, even if we, you know, get, which we never do, but even if 30% failures, I'd rather know about 30% actual failures than just be blissfully ignorant. It's saved a lot of the infrastructure team's time, you know, with the scripting and the reporting, we're pulling a lot into Power BI as well, so management can see those stats realtime. It's just, you know buzzword, it just works. >> That was an ad, it just works. So you save time, your staff save time. What happened, they got their weekends and nights back? You were able to not hire as many people, I presume you didn't fire anybody? >> Not that I know of, no. It's allowed them to concentrate on the work they should be doing, the project work, the forward thinking work. With that kind of block it was not allowing these guys to innovate and to see where to change. They were doing a lot of reactive work, whereas now they're fully proactive, they're kind of looking about, what's the next thing, how can we get ahead of the curve. >> Why Veeam, I know we've got to go, and you might want to jump in. But why Veeam relative to the other choices that you had? >> Well first of all it was my experience with Veeam. I've never had a bad experience dealing with them. Their support is absolutely flawless. Anyone I speak to, I always say, hopefully you never need them, but, their support guys are just out of this world. The help they'll give and what they'll, they'll go above and beyond, they'll help with things that aren't necessarily Veeam, just to get you up and running. >> Mike, the last question I had for you is, you've been expanding beyond just virtualization, you're using Hyper-V, it was big news when Veeam supported that. You're doing a lot with SAS these days, you're probably not too much in public cloud, but what do you see, what interests you, what might bring you beyond kind of the one product you're using today? >> So 365 is big for us, we're going to be pushing to 365 next year. So the Veeam backup for Office 365 is something we're definitely going to look at. We do leverage Azure very heavily for our development. So things like direct restore to Azure are good for us. We can spin up a practice straight in Azure if their physical area fails, things like that are a big boost to us. >> All right we got to go. Mike, are you going to the party tonight? >> Mike: Absolutely. >> Dave: You're fired up? >> Theme party, yeah. >> Right, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you from me. >> Actually, sorry, one last question. >> Okay. >> If you had 'em all again, what would you do over, differently? >> Probably nothing, really. >> Oh, that was easy. All right, well, thanks again for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Keep right there, we're going to be back with our next guest right after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE! Covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back in the windy city, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman this is our second day of covering VeeamOn 2018, second year of theCUBE at VeeamOn Danny Allan is here, he's the Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam. Welcome back to theCUBE, it's good to see you again. >> Thank you, very excited to be here! >> Loved the keynote yesterday, gave a lot of detail. The bumper sticker, the summary on your product strategy, how would you summarize your product strategy? >> It is to be the most comprehensive intelligent data management platform that meets the demands of the enterprise. >> So, when you say intelligent data management, people hear that, and they don't--certainly don't go immediately to backup and data protection, so you've expanded that notion of what you guys do, there's a TAM expansion there as well, which is great. What do you guys mean by intelligent data management? >> So, believe it's a journey first of all, right? And it starts with backup in our application, I know that there are vendors that are saying hey this is a new world, completely different. You know what, the cornerstone of this, is still backup in our application so that is the first stage in this journey. We believe that, right now, especially the customers I'm talking to, they're deploying things on the public Cloud, they're deploying things SAS Clouds, it's all over the place, it's growing, it's sprawling, they're trying to get their hands around it. So they have to do that first, is the next step, and then it's an evolution beyond that to okay, now we understand it, now let me do something with it, let me actually drive the business to better outcomes. >> So, some things we know, or we believe anyway, that data protection and orchestration are moving up on the list of priorities for CXOs. That's I think very clear, you would agree. But there's a dichotomy that exists between the perception from the business side, as to, what can be done in terms of data protection, particularly with regard to the degrees of automation and what IT today can deliver. So there's tension there, and there's, frankly lots of opportunity for churn. When you talk to people about, okay, are you going to switch data protection vendors as you go to this digitalization, multi-Cloud? Or you went to them, and they go no we're totally open, we have an open mind. So that's good news for you guys. So thinking about those trends, how do you take advantage, from a product standpoint? >> Well Veeam has been known, I always talk about three words, it just works, people love us because the software works and it's reliable. So that's the starting point in all of this, the opportunity I believe is in that, it just works. And so if we take them through this journey, towards intelligent data management, every step has to be about it just works. In some ways, the step from stage one to stage two, which is aggregating data, is at an infrastructure level, as you get to the later stages of three, four, five, it's it just works at a business level, and so our focus is still going to be on that simplicity, reliability, making sure the platform works. >> So I want to follow up on that, because, it just works obviously is going to resonate with the IT pro, who's got to deal with failed backups, with poor reporting, with lousy recovery, blah, you know, slow, etc, etc, etc, gettin' pounded because they're losing data, we all know that thankless world. But in terms of the business side, there's billions of dollars being left on the table by businesses in the fortune one thousand because they have inadequate data protection, processes, procedures, architectures. Not, I mean there's becoming aware of it, but what's the above-the-line message? So, it just works, how do you crack through that billions of dollars of opportunity and get CFOs to open up the wallet? That is the great opportunity for you guys, I think. >> It is, so they have challenges in a number of areas, right compliance, security, regulatory, we don't talk to executives at the C level and hear them say oh I need backup, I need replication, they're saying reduce my costs. Well if you can leverage it just works, and deploy this in a way that requires less FTEs, that makes it simpler to do it, that can give them attestation, proof, that hey, I can fail over to the public Cloud, I can burst up to the public Cloud or a manage Cloud, if I can give that fluidity, that's an it just works at an ROI perspective. Or, we talked about intelligent data management, sometimes, I'll be honest, I roll my eyes when I hear artificial intelligence. And that's not because it's not real, it's because what we haven't done is taken it just works and applied it to the business. So an example of this, forget artificial intelligence for a moment, one of the examples I give is, if you see malware crossing the network, that is a really good time to do something, let's leverage that intelligence to provide an outcome. And that's an it just works at the business level rather than at the infrastructure level. >> Alright, so Danny, above the message it's, any data, any app, across any Cloud. We have these pesky little things called like, physics, and data gravity, and the like. So protecting, getting access to my data in the public cloud versus the edge with, where we're going to see 90+% of the data in the future versus my traditional data centers where it's providing the stats. It's a complicated world, how do you make it that simple? >> So let me expand our benefits into a third area, so Veeam took off, in that it was easy to use, it was reliable, but the second one is the portability and the agnosticism of the platform, you didn't need media servers, it was all self-describing backup things, VBKs or vibs, without trying to get too technical here, that self-describing capability allows us to move between infrastructures. In some ways what VMware did, at the hardware level, they decouple the workload from a physical server, we're decoupling the workload from the infrastructure on which it sits because it's this self-describing, very portable format, that enables fluidity of movement. >> I haven't heard much about Edge yet, is that a place that you expect to begin to have a play? >> Yes, and I expect we have to do that, and the reason is because a lot of the computing now is happening at the edge and you want to make you actions out of the edge. There's this concept in the US Air Force called the OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, and act, and you would try to act out on the edge, but my belief is that data protection systems will do some of that protection out on the edge, but sometimes they won't know what to do, and so the information will be sent back to the Cloud, or sent back to the core to make a better business decision on what should we do with this data. >> You think about your platform, we were talking to Peter McKay about, you've kind of gone from a product company to a platform company. We talked about that a little bit, but I wonder if we can dig into it more from a standpoint of your role as head of product strategy. What does platform mean, where do you see that platform going, can you share a little roadmap with us? >> Platform to me has kind of three connotations to it, one is that you have the capabilities within the platform that are very broad, and we believe we have that, we can cover physical/virtual Cloud, we have orchestration, we have reporting, we have all of those capabilities. The second, though, is comprehensive APIs, you need to have the extensibility in a platform that you can actually talk to the ecosystem of partners. And that's actually the third area, it's being able to work with your Ciscos and your NetApps, and your HPEs and all of our partners to deliver these better outcomes. >> Yeah, I mean, it's funny, last year, Stu, when you saw Veeam, and you took the introduction of those capabilities. I noted, I remember the ascendancy of EMC back in the day, they did a really good job of connecting to everything that was out there. I mean, it sounds so simple, but it's integration work, they just went in and rolled up their sleeves and did the dirty work. >> A lot of work Dave, I've got the scars, living in interrupt lab, so. (laughing) >> And you guys do that dirty work, and every time you do that it expands your total available market. I don't want to say it's unique in the business, but you seem to have an aptitude to do it without it appearing to be such a heavy lift to the marketplace. Why is that? >> Well it's, frankly it's a scalability thing, we're an almost one billion dollar company, this year we should cross a billion dollars in bookings, and if you want to scale, to add more and more partners, you take our storage integrations for example we were doing maybe one a year for a few years, and we recognized all these vendors knocking on our door saying hey, give us that capability. And so we've added, just in the last six months, IBM, Lenovo, Infinit App, Pure. The only way you can do that, is to have a consistent API framework that people can plug into. It's the way we scale. >> Again, I look at a company like VMware, we saw all the sort of integration challenges that they went through, and the limited resources they had, you remember it, and the Cartel got the SDKs first, and it took forever to get the integrations done a year later you might see some function. It just seems like you guys have some sort of good process internally to actually make this stuff work. >> We're the largest small company you've ever met, we're really agile internally. It helps us to respond to the customer requests, they come to us and say hey I want this, I want this. If we can't respond to that quickly we'll never be successful. >> Danny, I just wonder if you can expand a little bit on the Cloud opportunity. Should we be looking to see more Cloud services out of Veeam kind of layer on what's happening, you have the acquisition a year ago, and-- >> Unquestionably, so I'd say 2017 was the year of agents, we added support for physical and for Cloud, but through agents. I tell everyone that 2018 is really the year of the Cloud for us, we started the year by acquiring N2W software, but last week for example, it's not even making huge PR announcements, we just release version two of backup for Office 365, which adds OneDrive and Sharepoint support. And you'll see in the next release of our product, Anton has a break-in session on this today, another huge capability around, not just integrating with the cloud but actually integrating in a way that provides business value. I'm a big believer in, you don't just put a check-box in, I support Cloud, I can send things to the Cloud, it's how do I actually use the Cloud in a way that delivers business outcome. So this year actually, 2018 is about Cloud for Veeam. >> I want to follow up on that because as an observer of this industry for a long time there seems to be sort of two philosophies, and you just laid out yours, you're not a big believer in check-boxes, and I've seen it, you're an old company. We got every feature, and they would take the salesperson, we have this they don't. Grr, headlock, buy it! (Danny laughing) So you're not trying to do the check-box game, you're trying to map business value, or your features and capabilities to business value for the customer, that's how you sell, and emphasize in your sales motions? >> Yeah, so, this is somewhat of a controversial statement, but we sometimes say we won't be first to market with a feature, we'll be first to market with a solution. So you can come out with, for example, sending things to object storage in the Cloud, and if you're sending up a one gigabyte object, that is a totally--you're not going to leverage that in the real world. But if you deliver that in a way that is actually effective, then you can leverage the Cloud as a tool, because the Cloud is not a destination for most of these enterprises, it's a tool in their toolbox that they use to solve a problem. So we're all about solving those problems. >> Excellent. Alright, Danny, thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE, we'll give you last word on VeeamOn 2018, and maybe give us a little preview of what we can expect? >> Well, we're really excited to be here, the most exciting thing to me is, is the recognition, the conversation with customers about this journey towards intelligent data management, as you said, most customers are in stage one, stage two, but for us this is a partnership, this isn't us just giving software, this is talking to customers, talking to partners, making them successful. >> Alright well hey, congratulations on a great show, and all the success. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, happy to be here! >> Alright keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. From Chicago, theCUBE, VeeamOn 2018. We'll be right back. (light music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE! Covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Day Two of VeeamON 2018 in Chicago. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Dante Orsini is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Biz Dev at iland. CUBE alum. Good friend of theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Great to see ya. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> What's happening with iland these days, in the world of cloud service providers? >> Well Dave, it's been insane for us. Obviously Veeam's a huge partner of ours. We've been working together for what, seven years now I think. And it's just amazing to see the growth of this company. Right? We've integrated Veeam -- our relationship. We started off basically providing managed backup many, many moons ago. But six years ago we started to build our own platform, on top of Veeam, on top of Cisco, on top of HPE. Customers really wanted to see more control. They wanted greater levels of security. They really wanted a true enterprise cloud. To do that we had to enhance the VMware stack. We had chose to take Veeam and integrate them via their API. Today if somebody deploys anything in the world with iland, it's automatically backed up by Veeam. If you fast forward a bit, as you see what Veeam's done to innovate with cloud and multi cloud, they've really helped build our business. >> Dante, if you go and look back before the whole cloud wave, the typical service provider. They would have one of everything. You'd walk down the aisles and there'd be whatever it was. An EMC box. A digital box. Whatever it was. Did virtualization change that? Were you able to consolidate? Create a platform. Create a simpler environment to manage. Or is there still a lot of bespoke infrastructure lying around? >> Yeah, that's a great question. For us, I'd love to tell you we hit it right the first time twelve years ago. But no. Just like you said. There's all sorts of different technologies right? But I think what we've done is we quickly standardized. We leverage Cisco UCS from a compute perspective. We leverage some of their storage platforms for the things that we do with Veeam Cloud Connect Backup. We actually help them drive the validation of that product before it came to market. We operate at scale with them. Same thing with Veeam. We're their the largest cloud provider in the world right now. As far as leveraging Veeam technologies. In addition to that on the storage front, we also because of the demands of the environment, we really want to deliver a secure cloud service. Encryption is table stakes, and has been for years. HPE Nimble plays a critical role for us there. That's really our stack. Cisco from a network and a compute perspective, VMware with the hypervisor, and HPE from a storage perspective. >> It's sounds like you've taken some very cost effective platforms. Nimble, Veeam, etc. And then architected an enterprise class solution. You guys are adding value around that as an integrator and obviously a service provider. >> Yup, correct. And I think the market is demanding more and more from a cloud provider. People want true transparency. They want control over the infrastructure. For us it's like, how can we develop an API? So we can make this platform extensible. And then still work with the customers that are struggling with the promise of cloud. And Stu, you see this all the time, right? >> Yeah, and Dante, one of the things we're discussing here is it's a very hybrid world. As Veeam said, customers are doing lots of SAAS. They're using service providers. They have their own data centers. They're using a few public clouds. One of the things I've been watching real closely is companies like iland and the other cloud service providers Amazon and Microsoft aren't the enemy anymore. It's, well we actually have to partner with them on some services. We do some things locally. Maybe give us your viewpoint on how that's changed in the last couple of years. >> Yeah, great question. I would tell you that we're not quite there yet, Stu. From my perspective. You guys know, we're known best for providing disaster recovery as a service. That's where we've made a name in the space. But the irony is we've really focused on building this cloud infrastructure. So an I as platform. And ironically that's the majority of our revenue. When we look at public, clearly it is a hybrid world. Where we spend a lot of time, is investing in how can we highly automate the integration? Because we know that people are going to have workloads everywhere. The idea is, think about it from a recovery perspective. If I'm protecting your traditional workloads. And you've got a dev team that's using various different services that are proprietary to a public cloud, that stuff's got to talk to each other in a true resiliency capacity. We wanted to make sure that people could actually highly automate and orchestrate a failover to us, a test to us. But also integrate the connectivity portion of that. Right? Making sure that all these things can talk together is important. You understand as well as I do, as these cloud architectures change, become more modern, and they're more service driven. The traditional, I'm going to move from point A to point B is no longer in play. It's how can I have more diversity amongst my vendor base? If I'm using containers. You've got a globally distributed architecture. If I can deploy some of that with iland, and some of that maybe using Kubernetes, that gives me diversity for recovery. >> Dante, you've hit one of the key things we've been as an industry struggling with. That pace of change is just so rapid. How do you internally deal with that pace of change? As to I architected something today, and tomorrow there's something new. Tell us what you're hearing from your customers as to how they make their decisions and sort through this constantly changing Rubrik? >> Well it's definitely insane. We see all sorts of various different use cases, depending on the industry. And that pressure to innovate at the speed of light is, really people struggle with it. I think from our perspective, there's a couple things that we're doing. One, we actually wrote our own assessment application. We call it iland Catalyst. This was really designed to help both our customers as well as our partners. Cause we go to market through a lot of partners as well, to help streamline this pre-sales process for a customer. Again, we focus squarely on the VMware infrastructure stack. Being able to pull an inventory of what somebody has in their environment. And then go through and select resource pools and VM's, for whatever the purpose. Whether they're looking to work and shift workloads. Or whether they're looking to protect them from a backup or DR perspective, we're able to mitigate all the challenges associated with that. To your point. As people are looking at cloud, it's like okay. Is this cloud thing real? And how's it apply to my business? What can I really do with this? And by the way, I got to deal with my budget also. What's this stuff cost? We've got some really smart people. But you can't scale our smartest people globally. We wanted to really drive that into an application. It's really helped get people to outcomes much quicker. So do it right first. >> Dante, if you reverse back a few years ago, VMware was calling Amazon a book seller. Amazon was calling guys like VMware the old guard. The old way. They kissed and hugged last year. You must've loved that first of all. Because it was like, great, VMware specialist. We'll just drive truck through that opportunity, because we get service provision, cloud, VMware stack, boom. Now fast forward. They've got this little kumbaya thing going on. How do you now differentiate from that? >> Yeah, that's a great question. First of all, VMware, obviously a very strategic partner. I think they've got a long road ahead of them. On some of the things that they're doing. I think the promise of where they're going is great. But I still think there's a lot of folks that struggle with the idea. Think about co-mingling my traditional workloads. And then trying to integrate cloud native services on top of it. I think it's a tall order. We'll see where it goes. We're keeping a close eye on it. But in the interim for us, we continue to see folks that are saying, look I want to get out of the data center business. I've built my data center on VMware. I need to have much greater levels of control and visibility. And you need to make this easy on me. From that perspective, we've been able to do really, really well. We work with a lot of service providers that are looking for that level of a consultative approach. But also want to realize the benefits of a cloud. The point being is, I want a great cloud but it needs to be enterprise class. And I also need to know that I might need help architecting that migration. >> Well that's the key, right? You're not going to get that from an Amazon. They're not going to come into your shop. They're not going to hold your hand through it. They're not going to help you build the architecture route. And help you manage it on an ongoing basis. >> Dante, it's May 2018, so I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about GDPR. >> Hey Stu, I love you man! This is great. You guys know we operate globally, and have for over a decade. GDPR we were way out in front of this. I'm not sure if you follow, The BSI just came out with a new standard. 10012, I believe. I think our Compliance and DPO Officer would be pretty proud of me for remembering that one. >> Dave: I'm proud of ya. >> It's tailor made for GDPR. We've been pre-certified, one of four companies that did it. We do a ton in the security side and the compliance side. And I know they go hand in hand. We went through a global audit last year. On the back of some of the ISO work we do with the CSA, the Cloud Security Alliance. And actually came out with a gold star certification. Sounds juvenile, right? A gold star, woo hoo! But it's a big deal. Only iland and Microsoft have actually achieved that level of certification. Yeah. On the compliance side we're way out in front of GDPR. We're doing a lot from a thought leadership perspective in educating both the partners and the marketplace. I think it's going to see what happens with Brexit also. I think you'll see the rest of the world kind of find their way to their own type of regulation. >> What do all those acronyms mean for your customers in terms of GDPR compliance? How does that turn into value for them, and make their life easier? Can you explain? >> I think right now the whole market's been in my opinion has been ill prepared for this. You see a lot of people scrambling. Being able to identify what data is going to fall under that regulation. How you treat the data. How you're able to account for the data. And also destroy the data. And validate that. Is frankly I see some of the biggest sweeping change in marketing. I see marketing people really scrambling. Because they have to make sure that they double-opt in. Cause the fines for breaching this are unbelievable. I think you're going to see the regulators make an example out of certain people. >> No doubt. >> Quickly. >> There's going to be some examples. They're going to go after the guys with deep pockets first. But the fines are... What are the fines? Four, is it 10% of the turnover? No, 4% of turnover. >> 4% of your previous year's turnover. >> Which is insane. >> Yep, yep. >> That's going to hurt. >> Or something like 20 million pounds, something like that. >> Which ever is greater. >> Which ever is greater. Yes! Yes, exactly. Yup. >> It's pretty onerous. Dante, VeeamON 2018, we'll give you closing thoughts. >> Fantastic event, right. Just super appreciative for our relationship with Veeam. They've been behind us. They've been behind this whole cloud provider community. I mean guys, you know this. Raat Mere and team had the ability to go take this stuff to a public cloud many moons ago. They chose to enable a managed cloud provider market first. We are very grateful for that. >> Awesome. Hey thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Great to see you. >> My pleasure. >> As always. >> Yup, go Yankees! >> Oh whoa, time out. >> Go Yankees. >> While we're on the topic. Listen, you can't beat the Red Sox in April. Okay, you know that, right? >> Yeah, here we go. >> So it's going to be interesting to see. I mean I have predicted the Yankees take the east, and they go to the World Series. But you got to be excited as a Yankees fan. >> Could be a good year. >> I've always liked Brian Cashman. I think he's one of the best GM's in the business. Watch his moves at the trading deadline. He's going to beef up the bullpen. I hope the Sox can hang tough with him because anything can happen. >> It's true, anything can happen. >> Hey, great to see ya. >> Great to see you guys, thank you. >> Go Sox. >> Dig it. >> Keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE! Covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to the Windy City, everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day two coverage of VeeamON 2018. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, my cohost. Peter McKay is here, he's the co-CEO of Veeam. Peter, great to see you again, >> Great to be here David, Stu. >> Thanks so much for making some time. Lovin' the show, we're watching the evolution of Veeam. You know, go from scrappy fighter, now movin' up the stack. We know from our research that data protection and orchestration are moving up the list on CXO priorities. You were brought in to really uplevel, top-level the company's messaging, the branding, the talent. How you feelin'? >> I'm feeling good, I think this was a major step, right. You know, a lot of work going in to just really understanding the market, for me at least. Coming out of VMware and coming into an availability market. So I became a student of the space, talking to a lot of customers, talking to a lot of partners, really pulling together what that business message is, versus a feature-function message. What we were doing to actually help drive the business, you know, especially now when more and more data is being accumulated, more and more companies are digitizing their organization. And for us, we're kind of the ones that keep that up and running. I think it was important for us to make sure that message gets out, to when we deliver it in the market, that people think of us as that strategic solution for their mission critical, always-on, which we call hyper-availability, for the enterprise. Any app, any data, any time. >> Very partner focused event, here. You can't walk anywhere without bumping into a partner. When, you were at VMware for a number of years, and VMware was famous for every dollar spent on a VMware, some number, $15, $17 was spent on the ecosystem. So that was sort of, probably ingrained, in the ethos of your career, right? >> Yeah, and you know, when coming here you recognize there was a lot of great discussions, a lot of good technology integration with, you know, companies like Cisco and HP and NetApp and others. But there wasn't this follow-on go-to market. Like, how can we make it easier for our customers? How can we make it easier for our customers to buy a combined solution versus a technology? And so to do that well, we recognized early that we had to uplevel the relationships we're having with Pure and Nutanix and all these other companies that were really getting in front of these enterprise and mid-market companies, but with multiple tracks. And we felt that if we can do more together with them, that we would have, the customers would have a better experience. And so, we started going down that path, we started to do things more together. Merging that value proposition together with these companies. And then merging our sales efforts together. It brought about a tremendous impact on just the customer success, their experience in leveraging our technology. And this is just kind of the start of it, because I think there's a lot more to come, that on the partner side that I think is going to be, you know that gets us to that two billion, three billion mark. >> Yeah, so I wanted to touch on that so, that combined with the expansion of your product portfolio, the move into cloud and multi-cloud and orchestration expands your TAM significantly. Talk about some of the numbers. Over $800 million in bookings-- >> 827, yes. >> 30 plus percent growth, >> 36. >> 36% growth. >> But who's countin'? (laughs) >> Oh that's good, and so, now, and of course currency as a Swiss based company, let me get this right, currency now is somewhat of a headwind for you guys, right? So you're blowing through that, or no, do you guys hedge or how do you handle it? >> Nope, we're US dollars, everything is US dollars. Everything is US dollars. >> So that's a tailwind then for you guys? >> That is, it is, you know, lookit. We've always operated as a long-term software company. A long term sustainable, we don't have the quarterly, we're not public, right? So we don't have to hit targets in earnings along, and you know currency's going to go up and down at various times. Some days, some times, you're going to have the benefits, the tailwinds and headwinds. So, for us, we just continue to make the right decisions based off of where we see what's the best interests of our customers, what's the best interests of our partners, and then let the dust settle. >> But you do pay attention to the months and the quarters internally? >> We do, yes, well in large part because our ecosystem does, right? When you're selling with Cisco you need to know when their quarter ends, and when their year ends, right? Or Nutanix, because they're all motivated by those quarters. And I've always been in, for the most part, public companies that had that quarter. So we still operate that way, but the way we make decisions is based on what's the long-term best interests of our customers. >> And there's not that external 90-day shot clock, Stu, as we talked about. >> No, yeah, no. Yeah, so Peter one of the things that's really interesting to look at at your company, you're at 133 customers a day. That's 10,000 a quarter. Very different when you talk about the enterprise, it's not just how many customers, but there's, at least traditionally been more, it's more belly-to-belly. You have to be deeper engaged. You've got this partner? Bring us inside a little bit, some of the challengers there are about going from the scale and simplicity that built Veeam, to deeper in to these enterprises. >> That's a really good question, and you know there is two elements of that. The first one is first, do no harm. Your SNB business is cranking double digits, your mid-market is cranking double digits, and invest heavily in this massive opportunity we have in front of us in the enterprise. But make no mistake, that's a major effort that we've embarked on two and a half, three years ago. Our technology, as you mentioned it, is broadening. Our messaging is upleveled. Our focused marketing efforts are very much targeted to very specific customers. Our support is different, I mean everything we do. The ecosystem is different to go into that enterprise space. So it's a massive investment that we're doing around the globe, to get much closer to those companies. But, we're not losing what made us great. Which, get in the door, just get in the door to any of these companies. You're going in, you're going to Coca-Cola, just get in the door and then do a really good job and expand from there, which is really what we've been doing since the beginning. >> On that, you know I heard like, AIX support is coming. All the enterprises like, well but I have this other application that you're not certified. You go down the SAP HANA route, and Oracle and everything else, you can just get bogged down in so much red tape. >> And that's changing, it used to be that we're, not used to be we are the number one VMware backup. We're the number one virtual backup. And we're the best in the world at virtual. But, and Ratmir would always say, we're just going to do virtual, virtual. Well in the enterprise, that can't be, right? You need to be, obviously virtual, cloud, 'cause every conversation you're having is multi-cloud, right? And you need physical, because there's 10, 15, 20% of all these enterprises that are going to stay physical. And so for us, we needed to do that. Now we've done, now we can do virtual, physical, and cloud for our enterprise customer, for everybody, but we see it more in the enterprise. >> When Veeam first started, it saw an opportunity to help with the virtualization problem. Backup had to change with virtualization. Veeam, right place, right time, right product and right attitude, boom. What's more straightforward than what's going on now, what's happening now, and I wonder if you could comment, from our perspective is, there's a dichotomy between what the businesses expect in terms of the levels of data protection, the levels of orchestration and automation that exist, and what IT can deliver. And it seems like Veeam is trying to fill that gap. Which says a couple things, it's a jump ball, to use the basketball analogy, which we'll be talking about later. And the second thing is that there's a lot of potential for customer churn. Which is good news for you guys. >> First off, there's a lot of churn going on. Anybody that bought a solution two, three, four, five, 10 years down the road, the game has changed, right? We kind of track three things. One, it's all about the data, right, and the data today is becoming much more critical for businesses, right? Our business, every business, it's all making better decisions with more critical data and at the right time. The second is it's massive data growth. It's exponential, it's, what did they say? 2x every, every, 10x every five years? And so we're seeing this massive increase in growth of data that if you use the same methods you used in the past, it's really expensive and really difficult to be able to manage that and keep it running and available. And the last is sprawl, it's everywhere. I mean data is on devices, from thermostats to automobiles to everywhere. And so, used to have it sitting in an easy data center, and now the data is everywhere. And so, you have the criticality of data, you have the massive growth in data, and you have a massive sprawl of data. And what we believe is we want to be that hyper-availability solution. That we're protecting that data, we're helping you manage that data, we're helping you orchestrate that data, and be able to protect it for companies who need it in real time because it's becoming so critical today. >> The other change that we would observe, is you're really kind of going from what was a product company, to a platform company. You showed that platform slide. Talk about the importance of platform in the enterprise to sustain growth. >> Yeah, I think there's, in the enterprise obviously it's more complicated. And you know, because of the sprawl, because of all the things I mentioned, it needs a bigger, broader solution that can be able to handle backup, backup and recovery, replication, failover. You need to be able to have a single pane of glass, whether it's in the cloud or on premise. You need to be able to manage and orchestrate workloads, from on premise, I want to put it in Azure, or I want to put it in Service Provider, and so the ability to be able to automate and orchestrate that movement requires a platform to be able to do that. With us, but also the ecosystem, right? I mean do it with the hardware providers, people who have a component for security, to make sure that if we detect ransomware, to kick off a backup, a clean backup. And so, this orchestration and automation is going to be a critical part of that platform. >> Peter, I wonder if we could step away from the technology for a second, talk a little bit about culture. We've been noting you come on board, Veeam's always had a good team, but been bringing on some key pieces, especially help focused on the enterprise. It's a challenge for a lot of companies to get into that space. Why is Veeam positioned well, talk to us about your methodology on how you bring these type of people in. >> We have, we've grown a thousand people over the last 12 months and that's on top of what we did the year before, and we're probably going to add another seven, eight, a thousand people this year. And the key is to do two things. One, we're investing heavily in our team, today, right? Because we're growing at 36% year over year, you're doubling almost every three years, less than three years. So you need to have that investment in the existing team, married with skillsets from outside, and bring in the best talent I can get to blend with that culture. So marry the culture of old with the culture of new, and that's, you know we look for hungry, humble, and smart. People who fit that description, that's what we look for, that's what we check for when we're recruiting top talent, whether an executive or you know, a front line sales rep or customer support. >> So, we only got a couple minutes, I got a question. If you were Robert Kraft, would you have traded Tom Brady? >> Oh, you saved that question! (laughs) >> What do you think? We're going to chime in, Stu and I have an opinion. >> If I was Robert Kraft, no, I would not have traded Tom Brady, Tom Brady has earned the right to plan his future with the Patriots. I think this needs to be a happy ending for Tom Brady, and I think it would be a happy ending for Robert Kraft, I would have proactively figured out how to handle Garoppolo far better than they did, I thought they handled that poorly, but no I would not have traded Tom Brady. >> So you mean, you would have wanted to get more for Garoppolo? >> Definitely. >> Yeah obviously, right, okay. >> If you were going to get rid of him, you should have done it sooner, or you should have done it, you should have figured out, how you'd be able to do it later. >> And got more value. Okay, so you're on the side that basically, Brady should be allowed to cash his chit for all these years taking haircuts, okay. (all chattering) >> Most importantly, performance. There's nobody who performed better. >> And Dave, Brady's performance, it's not like he's fallen off a cliff or he's some old man. >> He was MVP! >> Come on Dave, didn't you hear the note today? The reason Tom Brady's staying in there, is he hasn't gotten a thousand yards of rushing yet. I think he's 36 yards off, you know, >> That could take another three more years! >> He's way more mobile now than he was 10 years ago. >> Oh, so you guys are both optimists for the coming year? >> Oh, yeah. Well you know-- >> As long as we don't play the NFC East in the Super Bowl, we're okay. (speaking quietly) >> Okay, how about the Celts? Up two-zip, LeBron really, he showed up in the first quarter last night. I know you couldn't watch the game, because you were hosting a bunch of different events, but do you think LeBron's going to come back at home, a little home cooking? You know, can the Celts make it to the finals? >> I think Brad Stevens has exposed the Cleveland Cavaliers for the team that they are. Which is LeBron and a bunch of other guys. And so I think, yes LeBron's going to have, I mean he had 45 points, so it's like we're waiting for him to break out, hit 45 points and they still lost. So I'm not so sure you're going to see that massive resurgence, I think they'll get one game in Cleveland, I think the Celts will have one game, they'll win one game in Cleveland. >> I mean, I think you're right, I think Brad Stevens has exposed the supporting cast. Now unfortunately, if the Celtics make it that far, the Warriors aren't going to be exposed, 'cause their supporting cast is pretty strong. But it'll be great to get there, to compete. >> How about getting there, with your two top players are out. >> And what do you think, Gordon Hayward comes off the bench next year, he's your sixth man, I mean wow. >> Yeah, who do you trade to get even, and what would you trade for, to make the team better? I mean it's already in great shape. >> It's good to be a Boston sports fan isn't it? >> Peter: It's great to be a Boston sports fan. >> Peter thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, always a pleasure seeing you. >> Dave, Stuart, good to see you. >> Alright, keep right there, everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. VeeamON 2018, from Chicago, you're watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to VeeamON 2018. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. #VeeamON, our second year of VeeamON coverage, this is day one. Carey Stanton this year is the Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam. We're having a great conversation about it. Hockey, Cape Cod. >> Golden Retrievers. Golden Retrievers. >> Oh, I love dogs. >> Dave, how many times do we travel the world and talk to a local? (laughs) >> Boston area guy. >> So welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> And welcome to Boston. >> A year and a half in Boston, right downtown empty nesters. My two children are back doing university in Canada. I've got a sophomore and a junior so my wife and I are living in Boston empty nesters, it's awesome. >> That's great, you've got to love it. And I love the fact that you're from Ottawa, but you're a Bruins fan. >> Yes, I've basically turned into a Bruins fan. I'm a Red Sox fan and a Patriots fan and the Celtics are in the playoffs. >> Yes, love this guy. >> You'd better be if you're working for Peter MacKay. >> Yeah, you have to. It's like you have to sign in. And I've worked for Peter for 17 years, three different companies. >> Okay, so you were at VMware. >> I was at Vmware, I was at Desktone, and then we did IBM and part of that was Watchfire which we sold to IBM. So, a long journey. >> So give us the update, what's happening in alliances. >> Yeah, so it's great. As you know we have our global reseller agreement that we announced most recently with NetApp just in March. We're now on their GPL. We went live on Cisco, we announced Cisco back in August but we went live on November 15th and we have HPE and all three of them are just exceeding expectations as far as the demand and the interest we're getting from our sellers. As you've seen from Peter and Veeam, we're targeted to the enterprise. We have our messaging our own hyper-availability. So these partners bring us a huge opportunity by working into their customer base, but we close 133 customers a day, right you heard Peter mention that. But we're bringing them into our customer base which is traditionally SMB and commercial and we're working with them on their enterprise. But an exciting stat for that one is that we say no naked Veeam. When you sell with an alliance partner it's six to eight times larger than if we sell standalone. So it's working, the messaging and the enabling we have with our field and we're 100% channel. So that's working very well on just the enablement with Jeff Giannetti, Sean, and Olivia, and Ameya. >> Well the other thing that you guys seem to have done is figured out how to take a long view, a strategic view with these partners. Many organizations, they look for the tactical. Okay, how much money >> Yes, yeah. are we going to make this year? You're looking at the lifetime value of a customer. >> Correct. >> It's frankly quite unique in this business. >> Well, the interesting thing we're doing which is not just on the global resellers which is on all of our partners is that we look and say what's a good partnership look like or what's the great partnership look like. And what we have is the investment that we are because we're private is we'll do the front-end investing up front. We'll do a joint business plan, have shared metrics across the table. So whether that's with Pure Storage or with Nutanix, with our VMware, Microsoft, we front-load all of those investments. To your point, is that we're not just waiting to see did we have success year one and then we'll invest year two. We take that three year business case view up front and do the front-end load investment. So, what does that mean? That's a dedicated business development team. We have 25 people working and go to market with HPE or 12 working with Cisco and we take that from technical architects, field marketing, product marketing and to make that in clot entire plot. >> Yeah, Carey, I wonder if you can give us a little bit of a compare and contrast. VMware built one of the best ecosystems out there. We already talked once today. For every dollar you spend on VMware you did 15, 20 dollars with the ecosystem, Veeam's nice vibrant ecosystem >> Yes. getting deeper with some of those partners. Give us a little compare from your previous life. >> Yeah, sure, so at VMware no question that they had that solution so we take that here as well and we call it the Veeam Currency. So when you're going in and selling Veeam, if you're selling an average selling price of $10,000, we're working with our partners where they're seeing that that deal is going to turn into a $50,000 traditional with an alliance partner sale in conjunction with their hard work. So they're managing the entire software process so they're seeing their up leveling the messaging so no longer just pinpointing at a hardware solution. And they're increasing their average selling price by 10x, so Cisco is at a great set. 10x, again I'll repeat 10x with Veeam on doing those deals. First it's just trying to go in and sell HyperFlex Standalone. >> It's just a really critical time in the industry right now. Our research shows that there's a gap between what the business expects in terms of the degrees of automation, the level of quality of services and what IT is actually delivering. So that says that customer base is really ripe for churn in a lot of accounts. And so you guys being aggressive with partnerships in regard to making that investment as a private company, the timing frankly couldn't be better. Especially as you go from what was a virtualized world where you guys did very, very well to now this cloud, multi-cloud digital, you know throw in whatever buzzword you want. But, we are at an inflection point. >> Yeah, we sure are. I think that what we're seeing with our partners especially on HPE and Cisco and Nutanix is they're all near hyper converged and so they're going in a whole different sales motion. We're seeing it on our hybrid cloud, we're a number one close sell partner with Microsoft. So we have our backup, native backup to Azure and so we're seeing this destructive market in the market place and we're also seeing a lot of our partners have competitive takeouts of Dell Avamar, right and their data domain. So we're going in and taking out Dell Avamar and they're going in and data domain so we have a lot of synergy and so as these traditional vendors such as Avamar, Veritas, Commvault, and the IBM Tivoli Solution is that we have those sales motions going with our partners that are going after those hardware solutions. So, again, it's very synergistic with our tier one partnerships. >> Well you see a huge drive towards simplicity. I mean, another thing you guys do really well is, and it sounds so simple, but you're compatible with a lot of different clouds, for example. So more work loads, more environments increases your TAM and your friendliness to partners. It sounds simple, but execution is not. >> Yeah, we're a Swiss based company, we remain. The Switzerland is that we work with all partners in all routes and so we've seen a lot of success in that way. We see a lot of demand coming from our customers, our partners wanting to work with us in these multi-cloud solutions that we have with Microsoft. >> Biggest challenges, is it a channel conflict? Dealing with deal registration, I mean, what are some of the challenges you guys are facing? >> I think that challenge is just enabling our sales teams on how to work with these partners and to understand the sales motion. And some of our sales execs are 20 year veterans that have come in and worked in a traditional place where when you went out to tackle an enterprise deal, you did that standalone. And we realize that we don't take any deals direct. So just getting them in the sales motion with our partners is a challenge, but one that is easily adapting to success that we're having in the field. >> Alright, Carey I know you're super tight on time. We promised to get you out >> Yes, sir. of here. We've got to leave it there, but thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. We really enjoyed having you. >> Okay, thank you very much. >> Alright, keep right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from VeeamON 2018. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois it's the CUBE, covering Veeamon 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back in Chicago, Veeamon 2018, you're watching the CUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Day one of our two day coverage of Veeamon, On our second year. Vaughn Stewart is here who is the vice president of Technology at Pure Storage, Cube alum, good friend. Great to see you man. >> Good to see you Dave, Stu. >> Dave: Thanks so much for coming on. >> Vaughn: Great to be back. >> So Pure, you know, I remember when you joined Pure and you were like, "Dave, this is going to be the rocket ship of a lifetime." it's turned out to be the case. First company since NetApp to hit a billion dollars in the storage business. It's like independent storage companies are back. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> So give us the update, what's happening at Pure? >> So fantastic year. Wrapped up end of January, right. So first independent storage company to hit a billion dollars. Actually, we're kind of on the cusp of maybe being the the fastest infrastructure company, if not the fastest tied with being the fastest to hit a billion dollars. So the growth rates been great, the products, obviously, have been off the charts. Whether you're looking at it from an analyst's perspective, you know, the gardener reports, the IDC market scape, so if you look at from the customers perspective with the NPS scores, right. Just crushing in terms of the products, the customers stating that we're not overstating the capabilities, and we make some pretty bold statements. But when you kind of boil it back to where we're at now, I think our focus is helping customers adopt a data centric architecture as a part of their IT or data center modernization plans, right. This is, we've kind of gone through this phase of like virtualizing everything, now everything's in the cloud and now we're starting to mature a little bit and we're always looking at this tsunami of data that's being created and it's more around, where's your data going to reside? Because there's going to be some gravity around it and bring the compute to where the data should reside. And so our products and our strategy is to help customers again, this data-centric architecture, adopt new technologies that are going to help them radically shift how they operate, changing the cost of operations, changing the complexity to either let an existing storage team scale to a larger capacity per full-time, you know, FTE or to allow actually the application teams or the private cloud teams to just manage their infrastructure stack, right. We're seeing we're seeing kind of growth in both areas. I think beyond that, our technology with our evergreen storage as a subscription model has also been able to be transformative for Enterprise about how do they acquire, refresh, and introduce new technologies within the storage space. And so it's been pretty exciting. >> So let's talk about some of that. I remember, I've I've been around a long time Stu, as you know, so Al Shughart, the legend, once told me when I was just a pup trying to understand the business. He said, "Dave, the storage business is simple. The customers want it to be dirt cheap, rock solid, and lightning fast." >> Vaughn: Yeah. >> This is the days of spinning discs, which we're kind of dirt cheap, but they really weren't that rock solid and they really weren't that lightning fast. So you guys actually delivered on that promise but you added some other things. Simplicity, the business model of reduced friction. You mentioned Evergreen, so it's not, obviously, not just about flash, where we say, "oh, flash, Pure storage flash, we have flash too." It's so much more than that. The way you positioned it just now the company in terms of data centricity. And, as they say, the business model innovations have really worked well for you. You've been able to stay ahead of the competition. I wonder if you could comment. >> Sure. So I, for your audience, I think it's important to maybe back up a bit. Pure was born in in the the wave of a number of all flash arrays. >> Dave: Yeah. Right? And a fair amount of them were acquired by large existing storage vendors. And I think now that the dust has settled a bit, you know, we were kind of the phoenixes that rose through those ashes, if you will, within the storage space and I think, really, the key driver there was, it wasn't about performance. Flash makes everything faster. >> Dave: Right. It was about a combination of the business model, the operational simplicity, but also, what I would call, the Tier One Feature Sets, right. You had to deliver on six nines of greater availability. You had to have all the data management capabilities to plug into a large partner ecosystem like veeam, which, you know, we're at Veeam live and that was kind of what I would call Act one of Pure, which was, you know, flash ray based, you know, storage for your traditional enterprise apps. Last year we introduced flash blade, right. This was a radically different architecture. It was to scale out a scale out blade-based storage platform that scaled capacity and performance linearly. And the adoption in that space has been this next-generation apps, which... Are just..the sets are growing, you know, out of control and beyond what we would have ever expected with an Enterprise app. So whether it's AI, machine learning, deep learning, analytics, or this new use case we're seeing, which is rapid data recovery. The flash blade, because of the combination of its low latency and massive parallel throughput, has really been a big growth vector for us and it's kind of act two, if you will, of Pure Storage. >> Dave: Go ahead Stu. >> Yeah, Vaughn I'd love to hear more your thoughts on, kind of, an application proliferation. so I think back, you know, you and I lived through that wave of virtualization. While I love virtualization, one of the challenges I had with it was I could take my old application that was probably already too long in the tooth and stick it in a VM and then keep it for another five to ten years because it didn't care about the hardware, their OS, and all that standpoint. Today, talk about cloud native apps, talk about IOT and analytics and all of these micro services and everything like that. It's a huge impact on infrastructure and how we build things. It brings up to speed how we bridge from, kind of, the old world and the new world. >> Yeah, I'm glad that you asked this question. I wish you would be coming to our conference next week - >> Stu: Well, Dave will be there. >> because we'll have a session discussing this and it'll include an internal case study. And so that's all the details I can give right now. For a long time I think a lot of IT vendors, particularly, those who made hardware products, try to position this on-prem versus the cloud, right. and it was really the wrong mindset. Cloud is just one more deployment model for an organization to look at. The question that I think organizations have is, what fits where? And I think, to your point, if you're looking to build a new application or re-platform an existing, what you have today versus in the past was, you had a contained set of APIs and interfaces to work with, right. If you were building on, say, you know, a database vendor's enterprise business suite that was the tools that you got to use. Today you look at what's available, an open source or in the public cloud space, and you get to build a massively disaggregated application that's comprised of functions and and microservices, right. And it gets to leverage these notions of scaling on demand and being being very elastic. What I would share with you and what we discussed with customers is, your development team will want to go as fast as they can and leverage all these new tools and they're iterating very quickly, and the cloud is an ideal platform for that. But you need to plan and look forward to, around what's the the volume of data that you may be dealing with? What's the access requirements of that data over time? And where's it going to be a better position? Should it sit in the cloud? Should it sit on Prem? Should it sit in a private to public cloud hybrid type of architecture model and leverage, say, the compute and all the software agility within the cloud and yet still have stewardship over your data and not have to deal with with maybe unforeseen things like charges per, you know, API call or egress charges things of that nature. >> And Edge as the whole, >> And so I'm grossly simplifying a lot this. but these are the conversations that you get within the enterprise, which is where the sweet spot is. These are real considerations that that they have right there past the is cloud secure or, you know? They're past the data sovereignty type of concerns. They're more around how is this going to scale long-term because, for example, I'll give you an example. So we rolled out meta, which is our AI as part of our support for our products. This all getting ahead of the customers and predicting faults, getting them... This is what helps us achieve greater than six nines availability across the entire fleet for the last two and a half years, right. It's, it's getting ahead of the problems. When we work on looking at some of the AI that we create around meta and we want to test it, we have to download a year's worth of phone home data from the cloud. That takes 45 days to download today and it's not going to get any faster as the install base gets larger, right. And so those are challenges that you have to look at and say, maybe I started in the cloud but maybe I need to look at something in a hybrid model because it's going to impact my business agility. And so these are conversations that we can have and our architects have with customers based on whatever their criteria or forecast look like. >> So just about a year ago Scott Dietzen stepped down as CEO, brought in Charlie - >> Vaughn: Yeah >> new leader. It was kind of, kind of interesting, it was right on the heels of Frank Slootman doing something similar. Frank Slootman just stepped down as chairman and so how's the new leadership going? What, what has Charlie brought? I can't wait to interview him next week on the CUBE but give us your take as somebody who's been an industry observer and, obviously, a long-time Pure employee. >> So ,so a great question. So just for the audience to know, so Dietzen is still with us, right. He stepped down from being the CEO and is now the chairman of the board. and I owe a large gratitude of debt to Scott. Scott brought me into Pure and I'm always encouraged when, you know, every now and then you get that that direct email from him, you know, you know, keep, you know, keep being a thorn in someone's side and push this forward. That was a little self-serving, so I apologize. But what I like about Charlie is, and, and understand I was, I was with Ned F for 13 years, right. And so we did this large growth cycle, not as early as with Pure, but going through a lot of the same growth pains and and whatnot that we have today. But we did all that growth under Worman Joven before they changed over. What was nice about Scott is, he told me on day one that he didn't know how far he would take Pure but it was apparent to him that he had taken it as far as he could, he would find his, his, his heir and obviously Charlie was the choice. And what Charlie's brought in has been a lot of structure, right. The formation of business units, a lot of accountability, a lot of, what I would say, that maturation phase from startup, right. That's kind of grown to the, to the the maximum output of your current organizational structures, to looking forward into a structure that that is going to allow us to scale better over time, right. Continue to grow as well as.. I think Charlie be the first to tell ya, you know, Pure's on a trajectory to hit two billion dollars and can do that on inertia in the current products, right. Charlie's focus or one of Charlie's focuses over the last handful of months is, is, what are we going to become two years from now and what investments do we need to start making in the near term to get prepared for two years from now? >> So I, I brought up Frank Slootman who's in the service now because I know, I know Frank and Scott were close, right? There's some board action going on there over the years, they're part of the Silicon Valley mafia with the Mai Bucherii. But but I, and we can joke about that but there's a there's a culture of succession that has really taken hold in in certain parts of the valley and, and again, very similar to what we saw as service now, where was the new guy was brought in to take them to the next level. And the existing CEO, you know, mature enough, you know, maybe, maybe worked so hard for all these years too, maybe felt like they need a little break. but still mature enough to say, okay, I know my limitations and I want to bring somebody else in. So it's been sort of this new thing and I want to tie it back to something we were talking to before on the CUBE. I mean, you guys hit escape velocity. When you look back at the sort of the virtualization craze with Three Par and Isilon, Data Domain, Compelling. Yeah, they kind of hit a billion-dollar status you know, they hit unicorn, but they never hit billion dollar revenue. And, and so now, and then the other thing you talked about was some of the bigger players decided to buy up flash companies. >> Vaughn: Yeah. >> And they said, you know, rather than pay 2.5 billion dollars for a data domain or Three Par, we'll spend a billion dollars or, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars and then we'll organically grow that internally. Did it work? Yeah, maybe yeah, you know. Maybe some of it, maybe not. But, but you guys stayed the course and are now on track to do two billion. >> Vaughn: Yeah >> So here's my question, long-winded sort of narrative babble, sorry about that. I used to question Worman Joven all the time Tucci, even. Can you stay independent? Right? That was the big question. You know, because Converged is coming. But now it looks like being an independent is actually in vogue. Best-of-breed is actually still a viable business model. >> So obviously I'm not in on the inside of whatever the board decisions may be. >> Yeah, but you're an observer who know this business. We're kind of talking about Vaughn the prognosticator, analyst, if you will. >> What I think is different today, and Stu and I were talking about this because we ran into each other over in the corner with Duncan. You know, the emergence of all the flash vendors and them getting acquired and really what's happened by and large is just the same old products just got flash injected into them and, you know, got, you know, the the vendors hope to get another decade out of them. But okay, they're faster, but it doesn't fundamentally change your business model or your operations and sometimes that's a good thing, right. For some customers, right, their change averse. >> Right, they don't want that disruption. >> Yeah. For us, right, we're trying to usher in now this this next wave of shared accelerated storage and it's a disaggregated model, right. Start to look up it at what, you know, in a commercial sense, if you will. What are the enter.. what are the the hyper scalars, you know, delivering, you know? They're not running data direct attached storage. They're not doing HCI, right? They've got pools of compute and pools of storage and it's either disk and cold or it's flash flash and hot and, you know, they've got network and it's all over Ethernet, so it's greatly simplified. We're trying to help our customers with, with that type of architecture. Whether they're looking at simplifying their private cloud or extending the private cloud to the public cloud, or what's even more interesting, as they look at like their data pipelines, you know, a lot of, you know.. There's, there's AI and analytics in every organization of every size. They may or may not sit inside the IT department but they tend to follow that model of eighths and software. So I'm just going to do it on DAS and I'm going to build this siloed cluster. And, you know, it must be cheap regardless of whatever the efficiency I get out of it. And what we're trying to help large organizations look at is data pipelines and flow and the flexibility that you gain by separating compute from storage and not having to worry about the performance issues or constraints of disk-based systems from a decade ago because technologies like flash and now with non-volatile memory Express and non-volatile memory expressed over fabrics, right. You're getting direct memory to memory communications from the servers to the storage. So you're getting all the benefits of pooling and sharing your storage with all the benefits of it without a local bus in terms of speed and performance. And so it can change, particularly, a large volume of data. You can change your agility. >> So that that is certainly a tailwind for you but it was a tailwind for a lot of companies and you have the product. Let's assume best product just for sake of argument. I'm sure you would agree. But best product doesn't always win, right? So what I'm hearing is there was business model innovation. >> Vaughn: Yeah. >> Obviously very strong go to market. You guys knew where all the skeletons were buried with all the reps that you guys hired. But there were other factors involved in your ascendancy, which maybe is independent of the structure of the industry because the industry structure is changing. It's going from, you know, now remote cloud services into these digital, this digital matrix and somehow you have to fit into that digital matrix and participate in that. >> Yeah, it's.. I think you brought up two points,\. So I think if you if you're going to be a start-up, to be successful, it's not just technology. You've hit the head on the nail there. Pure had.. the technology had to deliver, Pure had that. The business model was innovative, the marketing was off the hook, right? For a start-up, you know, we were punching above our weight but you also have sales, have sales force execution and, you know, you never know what you get when you walk into a start-up. But you've got to.. If you don't hit on all four of those dimensions then you don't achieve escape velocity. In terms of shifting from startup to, you know, becoming mainstream. Not only did we achieve a billion dollars last year, we were cashflow positive for the year and we were profitable for Q4, right? So that puts a lot of wind in ourselves as we go forward. You know, with, at the end of last year, a half a billion dollars in the bank and now a billion dollars in the bank. You know, for us to go you know figure out what we're going to grow and go into. I think moving forward and being independent, I think we'll see, right? I think there's always a tick-tock in our industry, right? Things are distributed, they're centralized, their distributed, I want one throat to choke, I want best-of-breed. I think with all the distributed apps and all the analytics platforms that are going to start to become more important than what we're used to in the X83 space. I think best-of-breed is starting to rise up right now and so I think the runway for Pure to stay independent is there. Don't get me wrong, we're going to have to do our works with plugging into clouds, right? And all those those ecosystems because customers want a transparent experience. But we'll be sharing some news on that, I think next week. >> Well and excited to here that. The cartel will continue to suck up startups, no question about it. But, you know, we love companies like Pure, put Nutanix in that mix and it was sad to us to see all their run of the virtualization comers, they just disappeared. Because if it's just the cartel building new products, you're not going to have the level of innovation that you get with VC funded startups in the valley. you just, you're just not. >> Well, in the US you're seeing, I mean, you're, in the US you're seeing VC investment starting to diversify a bit, right? >> Dave: Yeah >> Colorado's getting hot, the Boston area is, it has been there for a while but it's getting hot. >> IOT and security. >> And, you know, that's been the great thing about, you know, about IT in the US, right, is we've been an innovative landscape. I think the barrier has probably forced some innovators out based on just the cost of living. So, you know, who knows what the mix will look like a decade from now, but yeah, we're still going to be Silicon Valley centric for the near-term. >> So I love talking you because we can have these conversations. We were joking off-camera, we could go for 90 minutes, which we easily could. We got to, we got to go soon but let's talk about Veeam, relationship with Veeam. You guys are kind of birds of a feather in a lot of ways but, but take us through that. >> Yeah, so the opportunity to partner with Veeam was a no-brainer. There were synergies there, right? Pure and Veeam both trying to just disrupt legacy markets, doing it through simplicity, right? Riding the wave of, you know, virtualization as a primary business focus but not exclusive. our Net Promoter scores with both companies are off the charts, right. Customers love it and, you know, we're multiples higher than any of our competitors. And so bringing the technologies together were real simple. So last month we announced, four or five weeks ago we announced and released a new set of solutions and integrations. It was comprised around three areas of benefit, right? Accelerating backups, increasing the speed at which you could recover data, and adding a new level of agility within your ecosystem. So delivering those three value props were based on us supporting their Universal API adapters. So now that they can offload some of the backup process to array-based snapshots and that preserves the performance, makes the window collapse faster. That's where when production data sits on the flash array. We've also certified putting the flash blade behind the Veeam servers as a backup data repository and the benefits of that from a backup window are faster data ingestion times across your real estate. Obviously, smaller footprint, lower cost within the data center. The bigger impact on both of these is on rapid data recovery. So with Veeam, through their explorer integrations, you can pull files, disks, VMs, applications, right out of the array snapshots. If the array is still online but someone's just munched the data, if the array is no longer there and you need to pull from the flash blade, flash blade gives them a capability that they never had with disk, which is they can start because, you know, how Veeam recovers, right? They actually start the data services and recover them from the backup repository and then live migrate it back to the production environment. With the live, with the back and the data repository being all flash, now they can bring up a significant, if not all of your data back online and then trickle restore it back to the production data sets. We had a customer with a large distributed database that was on a more traditional disk backup system that was really focused on ingest, right? Make the backup window not so much focused on the restore times. It took them in excess of 36 hours to put back their database and this was the mission critical database to the organization. We've come in and replaced that. 36 hours is now 30 minutes. So is all flashes as repository for your backup for everyone? Maybe not for every organization but we're seeing a big growth ramp on that in the enterprise. The last piece that we've brought to market together in integrations is, integrating with their data labs. That's their environment to be able to on-demand create, test, and DEV infrastructures for you and that pairs really well with all flash arrays and snapshots because it's instantaneous, consumes no new storage, and our automatic QOS preserves that, preserves the resources for the production environment from the lab. And so those are our three areas: accelerate backups, rapid restores, and give you some agility with your test DEV. >> Okay and the agility in the ecosystem is oftentimes underappreciated, right? >> I'm amazed at the customers that I.. Large enterprise customers, right? Revenues in the tens of billions of dollars that you still meet with today, where they've half staffs that their job is to restore, you know, an Oracle database to an Oracle developer and that's all the guy does 40, guy or gal, does 40 hours a week, it's amazing. >> Right, Vaughn, great to see you again. >> Dave, awesome. >> Thanks so much for coming to the CUBE. We'll see you next week Pure Accelerate at San Francisco. We're there Wednesday, I believe, we're broadcasting. So look for all the things that Vaughn teased. He showed a little leg on some stuff, so we'll be covering that next week. We're back here tomorrow. Stu and I will be kicking off at 9:30 with Peter MacKay, so don't miss that. We're out for today, Veeamon 2018 the CUBE. See you tomorrow (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE! Covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to the windy city, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here covering VeeamOn 2018, #VeeamOn. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Stu Miniman, my co-host, Brian Kuhn is here. He's the chief digital officer at OVH US. Thanks for coming to theCube. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Yes, so OVH, a lot of people might remember OVH vCloud Air >> Yeah, that whole thing happened almost a year ago actually so the acquisition of vCloud Air happened May eighth of 2017 so we're just a little over a year since the acquisition happened. >> Dave: Alright, how's it goin? >> It's going great! What it means is we've been running that business for about a year now, the European side of the business came a little bit later, but learning all about our customers, learning what they need, and finding new ways of making them happy. >> The epic nature of the return that VMware gave to its ecosystem is well documented. Tod Nielsen, the former COO if VMware used to talk about how every dollar spent on a VMware license 15 dollars was spent in the ecosystem. Everybody was really freaked out that the Cloud was going to destroy that ratio, it was going to decimate the ecosystem. Fast forward, I don't know five-seven years later, VMware is certainly growing, the ecosystem seems to be thriving. What's your take? >> Well I agree with you, the ecosystem is thriving, we're here at a conference that's part of that ecosystem. In terms of what we do, in terms of what OVH is, as an infrastructure provider, we're thankful that it's thriving. Because we have other opportunities to serve customers needs based based on that VMware stack, and based on the services that that ecosystem provides to the customers. >> Why is the data center booming right now, in your view? >> Why is the data center--what do you mean by that? >> Well the data center business, the enterprise business is cranking! >> Well, I think that's partially because you have that next wave of customers that are figuring out that being in the Cloud is a better thing than being on-prem and having to need those resources to manage that type of activity. >> And the data! >> Brian: And the data, yeah. >> Brian, maybe you could expand a little bit that ecosystem, because some people looked at the VMware stack and were like, ope, they're gonna--not close it, but, we've done all these integrations, we've done all these things in the data center and now when I put it in the OVH or the IBM or the AWS Cloud how many of our services can we move with them? What use is--Veeam obviously is there, partnering with you and with VMware heavily but, can you speak to kind of the breadth and depth of what did come along, and anything that doesn't come along for that journey. >> What came along as part of the acquisition, or it comes along with customer migration. >> No, no, the things that, if I did these here in my data center versus going to the OVH Cloud. I can do Veeam and interplace, there's other parts of the ecosystem that I can, but there's some things I'm--you know if I go to OVH, I'm not saying hey can I throw in my storage array with it, so that's where we're trying to understand what part of the ecosystem, when do you get it? >> Yeah, let's go with the positive side first, so it certainly as moving to a Cloud provider and someone to host your private Cloud or host your software defined data center stack. You don't have to worry about power, you don't have to worry about, in our case, water, cuz we're water-cooled technology, you don't have to worry about the network. So the infrastructure piece of managing this great, you don't have to worry about, I would say, maybe some of the redundancy-type issues or having the data center that's available. OVH manages its own network, so we don't have to worry about capacity or throughput in that means. I think on your other flip-side you're saying what can't I do, because I'm in a hosted private Cloud environment versus a co-lo or on-prem-- >> I'm just saying there's a part of my stack that I was building myself, and now you take care of it, or Amazon takes care of it, or IBM takes care of it, and maybes there's not a way for that software or hardware to come along to the Cloud. >> Yeah, your point is it hollows out the value proposition of the traditional ecosystem and moves everything into the Cloud, right? >> Stu: So somebody like Veeam's makin that transition well, but not everyone has. >> But we haven't seen that. You see well--you've certainly seen the Cloud exploding, maybe it's moderated some of the growth in the data center, but it still seems to be thriving for those companies that are well positioned. >> I don't disagree, and I'm thankful that it is, because that gives us more opportunity to help those customers out. >> So why does a Cloud service provider like yours, wrong question. What does a chief digital officer in a Cloud service provider like yours do? I started to say why does it need one, but everybody needs a CDO! But what's your role within the company? >> OVH US is a separate, standalone company than OVH Group, partially because of, how we want to make sure the, data sovereignty is covered and protecting our European customers. So we are bringing up a standalone company. So Russ Reeder was here, you spoke with him at VMWorld last year, he's the CEO, so he has his own staff, and one of the people on his staff is me, as the chief digital officer. Up until recently I managed marketing so that was part of my portfolio but we still have my title as chief digital officer so that we can serve strategy. So what are we going to do, how are we going to serve our customers, what are the segments that we're going to tackle, and how are we going to take and go to market and take those service offerings forward, and what is the market doing, and how is it moving? And so I have a team that's working on strategy, and that's a separate strategy than what Group has because we're tackling a different market segment. I also have a team of product managers, so looking at, okay this is our strategy, what are the offerings that we have at our disposal? What do customers--more importantly, what are their needs? How do I serve those needs and get those needs met, and how do I work then, with the engineering team, to actually build those products? So I have a team of product managers. I also have a team of, what I'll call, the sales enablement team. So technical marketing managers, or solution architects, find a term for them, but these are the folks that are ensuring that we have good strong hand-off between product and sales. To make sure that the sales team is trained, that they understand the value propositions not only at the marketing level, but at the technical level. And then they're also the ones that are really paying attention to everything it takes to get that product out into the market the right way. >> And you still have marketing, under your?-- >> No I do not have marketing anymore, but that was a function I managed for a while. >> So strategy, product management, the specific offerings, and the sales enablement, tactical marketing-- >> And I have one last thing, customer intelligence. So once we put that product out into the market, how do we know it's being accepted, how do we know it's being adopted, what new insights can we gain to feed back into the system? >> We often say that the difference between a business and a digital business is the way in which a digital business leverages data. And so if I go through these four. Your strategy, I presume data is part of the strategy when I talk about that, the offerings, there's, maybe not, well maybe there are data offerings, but maybe how data contributes to the health of the offerings? Sales enablement, we talked about that, but then customer intelligence obviously is a lot of data, it seems like data cuts orthogonally through each of these, can you talk about the data? First of all, do you buy the premise about what a digital business is? How do you leverage data, how do you, as part of your strategy, understand as the CDO, how much time do you spend, how data effects monetization? >> Yeah, so let me take this at two angles. One, what data do I use through that process, right? So the strategy team is certainly looking at data from analysts, customer data. I like a, I've seen an analogy of a school bus, you're looking forward, you're looking in your side-view mirror, you're looking in your rear-view mirror. So forward is where is everyone going, where's the industry going? So that'll be your analyst reports. Sideways is, your side-view mirrors, what's your competition doing? So, what is the data about the competition and what movements will they be making? My rear-view mirror is what are my customers doing? So that'll tie back into that the customer intelligence team that I have, is how do my customers actually behave, and how do they stack up with where the industry is going? So there's just one set of data points and then of course my product team is taking the inputs of those strategies, and having then one-to-one conversations with customers and finding out first-hand what there needs are. So as a product management professional, there's no ifs, ands, or buts, you always want to hear it first-hand from the customer, what they have to say. >> The role of marketing, sorry, the role of data in marketing. It's not your current per view, but it's your former one, so you can speak to it I presume, can you talk about that a little bit? >> Sure, so also, two different ways. We can look at this from the perspective of an E-commerce business, or we can look at this as a B-to-B business in generating leads, right? Then there's the ecosystem of all the data around marketing beyond that. So in the E-commerce business, of course I'm looking at what's coming through the funnel, and what traffic sources are feeding into it and what's my best conversion rates and those are all great data points for something like the E-commerce business. >> Dave: For transactions? >> For transactions. Similarly, on the leads side of the business, you're still looking at traffic, you're still looking at events or whatever feeds your funnel. So what are the sources, what are the channels of leads, and how are they converting? And as I nurture the customer, how many touches does it take to bring them back, what exactly is bringing them back? So these are all further data points to feed something like the leads side of the story. If I think outside that ecosystem, you think of an event such as this is, what are going to be the best traffic drivers, and how do I know what reach I've hit? So all sorts of data points around brand, and touch, and things that'll effect that as well. >> And it's definitely a lot of affinity between marketing and digital. In fact, if I were the head of marketing, I would come to you and say, hey can you help me, with my, whether it's legion, demand gen, are there new techniques I can use besides, you know, hitting the same old cookie approaches, etc. Do you guys have that discussion and how do you participate? >> Oh yeah, and I think that my head of marketing's watching me here now is probably saying yeah and I've got some tricks that I need your help with because I've got new things up my sleeve that we need the product angle for, right? And the right product marketing spin. >> Talk to us a little bit about your customer set, there's certain GOs and verticals that OVH targets a little bit more? And any kind of use-cases customer success stories you might be able to share? >> Yeah, that's great. So, as opposed to OVH Group, and France, and the European business, where they've really come from the web hosting industry up, and they have a very specific way that they've encountered the market and penetrated. At least here in the US, we're coming into the market really from scratch, and the acquisition is really what's bringing us in. So our prime market is the market that we first got from the acquisition, so these mid-sized and enterprise companies, so defining who that demographic is first as the type of customer, second then what need are we serving for them? So in the vCloud Air experience, vCloud Air was selling data center extension, data center replacement, disaster recovery, and that is certainly what we keep selling cuz we have those thousand customers that still need that story, and that's an opportunity then to tackle more customers just like that, that have the same types of needs, that same, perhaps niche need, or common day every need because you were asking earlier, like why are all these customers-- why are all these people moving to the Cloud? It's because they're discovering that if they don't they're going to be left behind, or they've got some need inside their company that is forcing them to do that, whether it's to save cost or what have you. So, in the case coming back to our customers is, it is the mid and enterprise-sized companies, we're still serving everything that is will lead in with private Cloud technology, and bring to them those data center extension, data center replacement, disaster recovery stories and we'll augment that because, what's different about us now is, we're OVH, and we have not only that hosted private Cloud product, but we also have dedicated servers, we also have public Cloud, and then we have this really fantastic backbone: we own our own network. We have this huge amount of capacity, 14 terabytes per second with that, we have an anti-DDoS solution behind that, and these are all things that we get to bring to those customers and introduce them to. So for a customer who's doing their digital transformation, migration to the Cloud, it's not just hey we can bring you over on your VMware stack and migrate you in, but it's hey we can do that plus a lot more that maybe you didn't know that we could do for you. >> Let's talk about that a lot more, are those professional services or other offerings that you have? >> Sure, so it's primarily the offerings themselves, the services. You asked me about customer so I'll give an example. We have a customer today that has come to us because of the data center consolidation need. They brought that in and also needed disaster recovery, but what they're finding now is they have a large amount of data. And what is best for them is an object storage solution, so augmenting the host to private Cloud with our Cloud offerings to solve that need. >> Last question is, so how do you guys position, relative to some of the other things that you know, for instance Vmware, we just had IBM on, IBM Cloud obviously they make a big deal out of AWS because they're such a hot company right now. How do you guys differentiate from those other offerings? >> That's a really intriguing question, right, because that's the key is how are we different? We wanted to come in and be your trusted Cloud provider, to help you do what we're going to be first, really good at, so we're really good at that VMware stack, we're going to bring you in, help you migrate to the Cloud, we're going to run and manage that business for you, or the operation of your data center, and your infrastructure. But what goes around that then, is you know, that is our core, infrastructure is our core business, so we build our own servers, we build our own data centers, we own our own network, so that is what we do best for you. But that's coupled with the fact that we're doing innovation with purpose. We've learned how to do the building of those data centers, and do water-cooling to save on costs, we've learned how to do all of this at high-capacity automation capabilities so that you have lightning speeds to get your provisioning up and running. Then we also have this concept where OVH is really about being open, so something that does differentiate us and set us apart is the freedom for you to build your infrastructure, and the freedom to choose your offerings and your providers. So OVH sponsors an open Cloud foundation and we believe in the opening of that, we use opensource technology, we use OpenStack in a lot of our products so that you have that there, we're believing that, we have the inner connectivity with our pops to other networks, if you so desire. That openness is something that sort of permeates through us and then lastly, it's our passion for our customers. We're serving 1.3 million customers around the world today, from fortune 500 companies to top-tier educational institutions, and in the case, in France, with small/medium businesses and individuals. So we have a very wide range of customers that have trusted us to host their infrastructure, and we like hearing feedback. We love operating on that feedback, and we love solving the needs for our customers. >> Alright, Brian we'll leave it there, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Great, thanks so much for having me! >> You're welcome! Okay, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break, you're watching theCUBE, live from VeeamOn 2018, be right back. (bubbly music)

>> Narrator: Live from Chicago Illinois, it's theCUBE! Covering VeammOn 2018. Brought to you by Veamm. >> Welcome back to VeammOn 2018 everybody, and you're watching theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. This is day one of our coverage of VeammOn, the second year theCUBE has been here. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. Zeb Ahmed is here, he's the Senior Offering Manager for VMWare, with the IBM Cloud, at IBM of course. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, good to see you Zeb. >> Thank you for having me, very excited to be here. >> Yeah so IBM, Cloud, big part of our business. Obviously VMWare, you've been there for a long time. Partnerships with Veamm. Lay it all out for us, what's going on at IBM, IBM Cloud. >> Yeah so we started the VMWare partnership a couple years ago, and our goal was really to build a practice run VMWare which was automated, take it to the next level essentially, not just be a me too player, what everybody else was doing out there, but rather, make the transition from on premises to the Cloud much easier for those VMWare customers. So we've automated a lot of things on the VMWare platform, you can deploy the inverse stack, in a matter of minutes, instead of days and months. So it's a much easier transition, we also work with a lot of partners, such as Veamm, but customers was using on premises, and we've allowed them to have those capabilities in the Cloud as well, in a very automated fashion. >> Quickly if I remember, I think you guys were first doing something with VMWare in the Cloud, you're kind of a year ahead of most. I mean-- >> Stu: It was a few months ahead, they were the first big partner out there with the VMWare Cloud basically. We got, put in Cloud air and everything. >> But in terms of shipping, actually, you guys-- >> We were the first ones, yeah. So we were the first ones to market with Cloud foundation stack right? Yeah and then the other vendors followed as well, but yeah that's been doing great, right? And again, it's fully automated, matter of minutes you can deploy the whole stack, a lot of value add there. >> Yeah Zeb, maybe help set the picture for us a little bit. 'Cause we talk about this multi-cloud world, IBM owns a lot of applications, IBM partners with a lot, where does IBM see themselves playing in this multi-cloud, multi-app world? >> Great question, I think I, so I refer to it two T's. So the first one being the transition, and then the transformation. So the transition is really where the challenge has been for those customers, the barrier to entry, how do these customers actually make that move seamless to the Cloud, especially the space that IBM is in on the enterprise side, these applications are legacy, very very complicated design, a lot of dependencies, so that was a challenge that we tried to solve for. And I think we're at a state now where we've not only solved for that, we've also, I don't know if you guys have seen HCX that we had with VMWare recently, which was a great migration tool, and helps customer on board Cloud, and adapt to Cloud much much faster. And then also build that ecosystem partner network. So all those tools, that we were using on premises like Veamm, right? Making those available in the Cloud for those customers, and it has been great, and also in the transformation side, right? So not only just move them to the Cloud, but also help them leverage, and go up the stack. So micro-services, blockchain, Watson, containers, all those things are available to our customers. >> I think that's a key point that I wanted to highlight is, people often say, how does IBM compete with some of the big Cloud players? You're not just infrastructure as a service, you've got a giant SAS portfolio, you mentioned Watson so, talk about your strategy in that regard. >> Yeah I mean so, the enterprise customer, typical customer, whether it's financial industry or whether health care or transportation et cetera, nobody is just looking for a partner where they can just move the infrastructure too. They're looking for the next state, they're looking to transform the business, they're trying to utilize all those new capabilities that exist in the Cloud today. And IBM has sought for that exactly because not only just use, move your infrastructure and workloads, but now you can consume all those additional gallywads, in the Cloud like Watson, make it for a more intelligent solution in the end. >> Right, so that's a key differentiator. There's only a couple of companies that have that, well I guess you guys, Oracle, Microsoft obviously has the applications, and IBM talks a lot about the cognitive piece, am I correct you can only get Watson in the IBM Cloud, is that still the case, or are you now have it on prem? >> No no, Watson can be consumed using an API. So it's a PAS platform, and if somebody wanted to consume Watson for the on premises workloads and wanted to bring that intelligence for that on premises environment they can do that. >> Dave: Are you seeing more demand for that? >> Oh yes. >> Or is it primarily in the Cloud? >> We've got huge traction in the healthcare space especially, there's a lot of financial customers that are onboarding that as well. So Watson's doing great in that regard. >> Sort of privacy reasons and-- >> Zeb: That's right. >> Zeb one of the things we've been watching with Veamm for the last few years is how do they penetrate deeper into the enterprise. Of course IBM has a strong position in the enterprise, help connect for us how the Veamm and IBM partnerships go together. >> So I think this was a very easy answer for a lot of our customers, because Veamm has a lot of penetration on the on premises workloads, especially on the back-up and business continuity space. So when we looked at the partners and the products that existed in the space, we really looked at the market space, what the customers were consuming. Veamm had a huge market share, and like I said previously, we wanted to solve for those problems and we wanted to keep the tools at the same tool set that they were using today on the premises, so this was very seamless for us, and it is seamless for the customers, to move to IBM Cloud and leverage those same tools exactly. >> So talk about choice because, I can imagine you're getting a call from Ed Walsh, "Hey, how about using my data protection software instead of Veamm?". How do you manage that? >> Zeb: It is tough, right? It is obviously tough, IBM also has a huge portfolio of products, right? In the end the decision was or it really came down to, what is it the customers are looking for? When it came to the back-up space, especially on the VMWare platform, The answer was there, a lot of the VMWare customers use Veamm. In addition to that, Veamm also checks a lot of other boxes for us. So, not only does VMWare stack, but also, I don't know if it's been announced yet or not, but AIX is something of beta that they're launching, at this event, so that is huge for IBM. >> Dave: Really? >> Oh yes, they're also in the bare metal space, so a consolidated view of all your back-ups, all your bare metal, for AIX, for virtualized platform. >> So the power guys will be happy. >> For those that aren't as familiar anymore, I mean remember AIX back in the day, but this is second week in a row I'm talking about AIX. It was Nutanix last week, and it's Veamm today. How much AIX is there still out in the wild? >> There's quite a bit, I mean IBM, if you guys know the background, right? When software was acquired it was a bare metal shop. So with that a lot of the power stuff came as well. So we have a huge power practice in IBM. >> Right, and well it's still, I remember the Steve Mills charts, which showed the availability of AIX versus, the only more available platform was the mainframe, and then with AIX, and then, and you had all that other stuff that everybody else buys but, it's a volume market so it kind of makes sense though. People will pay up for that. And still, a huge install base, now growing, and Nutanix has a relationship with the power guys, so maybe that's where sort of factored in, right? But Linux, of course, is the hot space, right? I mean sure you see it's powering the web. >> Well I'm a VMWare guy, so (laughs). >> There's Linux sitting on top of some of that. >> That's right, of course, of course. >> You've got Linux of mainframe, right? Okay, alright so, talk a little bit more about what you're seeing from the VMWare customer base, how it's synergistic and not just sort of a one way trip into a hotel California. >> Yeah, so a typical VMWare customer that we're seeing who's on premises today are looking to IBM Cloud, or actually take a leap into the Cloud, especially on the enterprise base, these customers want to transform. I mean, there has been a lot of questions for them, especially the customer base IBM focused on, questions around security, compliance, business continuity and data protection and such. So these customers not only want to just make the leap into the Cloud, but they also want to solve for some of these challenges, and also go up to stack like I was mentioning. So, we're seeing a huge push for containers, for those customers that are moving to VMWare, they want to build up the stack, on the PAS layer, and also want to leverage Watson and services like that. >> Yeah, could you expand on that a little more, things like are you working with PKS, the solution with VMWare and Pivotal, and the Kubernetes stuff, or? >> Yes, Kubernetes, Dockers, we also give the customers ability to do their own stuff, go up the stack. I mean, in the end, you know, they can consume us from an IS standpoint and build their PAS on top, or we can, they can use our own, so Kubernetes, Dockers, et cetera. >> What's the story, Stu, with Cloud foundry these days? There was a big push early on, and I fell like I can, I'm not as close as you are, but there seems to be a, I don't want to say a pull back, but maybe less enthusiasm, what's the lay of the land? >> Sure, I mean IBM was one of the earliest bloomix, I believe, and with IBM Cloud, IBM has a few different offerings, I didn't see as big of a push from IBM at the Cloud foundry summit I was at last month, but IBM, like most of the Cloud providers are giving customers choice. >> Zeb: That's right. >> So I guess the question is what-- >> And heavy in Open Source, I mean I'm seeing IBM heavy push, I'm wondering server-less, if you've got any commentary there. We've been looking at like Open Whisk and some of the pieces there. >> Yeah Open Whisk is there, there's, server-less is a thing that a lot of these customers, back to your own original question, a lot of these customers are looking for those types of services, and they're all available in the catalog. >> It's still pretty early, that hasn't overtaken the discussions of the (mumbles) and the (mumbles) stuff in your world has it? >> It hasn't, but I think the enterprise customers who are looking to move to Cloud, they are thinking about those things. So these are some of the check boxes that need to be checked for them for the future growth, et cetera. >> So you've got VMWare's obviously visualization strategy, you've got containers coming, I remember when we had Pat Gelsinger on theCUBE several years ago, when containers were, docker was rocketing, and everybody was like oh docker's going to kill VMWare. And Pat's response was, "Look, we've got the best containers in the world. We're going to embrace containers". They're like, oh sure. But that's exactly what happened. What's IBM's point of view on it? >> Yeah, here's the thing, we want to give them the option to do whatever they want to do. We're seeing a lot of traction on the micro-services side, on the containerization, but I think it's going hand in hand, a lot of the customers are using VMWare platform still, yet they're also leveraging some of these other micro-services and containers, so I think Pat's right on. I think originally what was people were talking about getting rid of the IS layer of VMWare and just going containers completely. Our take is, give the customers all the functionality and the ability to do whatever they want to do, we are seeing it's more of a mix at the moment. >> And we had Edouard Bugnion on recently, found of, one of the founders of VMWare, and he was talking about the challenges in the data center at scale. And in particular when you introduce virtualization and you reduce some of the hardware resources, how do you deliver predictable, high-performance, at scale, and some of the challenges there. That's even on prem. Now introduce Cloud, and you've got distance and latency and other physics so, what's the discussion like with customers around how to architect the ideal Cloud, on prem, hybrid. >> It's a great question, because that is a question I get asked all the time, because in the enterprise base like I said, these customers in a lot of cases have a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, so network becomes a key part of that discussion. For us, the answer is very simple. We've laid down the fiber of (mumbles) across all these data centers, so when you're talking about latency, and data transfer, and those types of speeds, or having a multi-cloud strategy across the globe, it's a very simple and easy conversation because not only do we make all that information available to our customers, far as what latency they expect from which data center to another one across the globe, but also it's all private, and it's all secure, and it makes for a very good multi-cloud story. >> I don't know if you saw Jenny Remmetti's talk at IBM Think, but she used the term, a lot of people tongue in cheek, but I kind of like it, "incumbent disruptors". I mean look if you're IBM and you've got the client base that IBM has, you better come up with a term like that because that's exactly what you're trying to help your customers do. So, my question is, where does the Cloud and your offering with VMWare fit into the incumbent disruptive scenario? >> Yeah, so VMWare like I said earlier, we didn't want to be a me too player with VMWare. Not only did we want to have a good story with VMWare because obviously VMWare is a huge market share when it comes to virtualization, but on top of that, we wanted to be more futuristic, and solve for those, some of those questions and concerns that the enterprise customer had. So, tight integration on the enterprise base, on the micro-services, containerization, Watson is a huge part of the VMWare platform, you can seamlessly integrate into Watson and really have intelligent decision making on the VMWare platform. So, we wanted to ensure that we were helping our enterprise customers move to Cloud, yet also solve for the future problems. >> So the incumbent piece, both VMWare and IBM, right, incumbent customers, the disruptor would be I guess Cloud, all the new Cloud services, certainly the machine intelligence cognitive, et cetera, components is the disruptive capability, now it's up to you to figure out, okay, how do you apply all that, presumably IBM and your partners can help. >> Yeah and here's the thing, you mentioned earlier, IBM is one of the only companies in the world that can have an end-to-end, not just infrastructure, but also services wrapped around it. So if you're a customer who's not only looking to move to the Cloud but also have services wrapped around, to go end-to-end, IBM is the company to do that for you. >> Dave: Well that's interesting. Okay, I got to ask him Stu. So we had, we were at Dell Technologies World a couple weeks ago, and we had Jeff Clark on, and we asked him, we said, "Look, companies like IBM, HPE, sort of, IBM selling off its X86 division, and HPE splitting, Dell did the opposite. The mega merger". And his comment was, "Well I don't see how you can do end-to-end without both ends". Now, his definition of end is obviously different to your end definition, and I have to ask you, what do you mean by end-to-end? Is the client sort of just a commodity, we can get that anywhere, it's not really an integration challenge? >> So when I'm saying end-to-end what I'm talking about is a enterprise customer looking to move to the Cloud, solve for the future problems, essentially re-invent themselves, transform their business, leverage the new applications, micro-services that are there, but also have services wrapped around it, right? Somebody who's there to help them end-to-end, whether it's just doing migrations for example, right, from on premises to the Cloud, but also help them onboard and guide them on what is there in the Cloud, or the micro-services, or our PAS layer, and how they can transform really. >> So that to me Stu is, Zeb's talking about not a hardware view, of end-to-end, but a, maybe a systems and a software view of end-to-end, in the Cloud services. Alright, Zeb, thank you very much for, do you have one more? You good? Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Guys, thank you very much, appreciate it. >> Appreciate it. Alright, keep it right there buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from VeeamOn 2018, in Chi-town, we'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Chicaco, Illinois. It's theCUBE Covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back in Chicago at VeeamOn 2018 #VeamOn, my name is Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, our exclusive live coverage of VeeamOn. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Cube alum Dave Russell is here. He's the newly minted VP of enterprise strategy at Veeam. Dave, it's great to see you again, thanks for coming back on. >> Thanks for having me, guys, what a difference the year makes. >> Yeah, so newly minted. Last year we had you on as Gartner Analyst, we've followed your work for years. I've personally followed you for, actually many decades. Going back to your IBM days. So, let's start. How'd you end up at Veeam? >> Unexpectedly, very similar to IBM to Gartner transition. Wasn't looking to make a change. Opportunity came literally out of the blue. So, this transition was also equally out of the blue. Some emails, phone calls started taking place over one weekend. Actually on a Sunday, so towards the end of the weekend. And, after a little bit of discussion of a couple of opportunities, and kind of looking at where I might be the best fit, and realizing that I really didn't think I was in a position to relocate. You know, me move the family, even though no one else said that I had to do that, I just felt like to do another position justice, you really have to be there. And in the situation with Veeam, I didn't think that was the case. I also thought I could jump in there, and they've got lots of other great people, I mean, Danny Allen is one of many examples. So I ultimately, from Sunday morning to, I guess, the following Saturday evening, some things were sort of in flight, and they landed where they did. >> So, California, of course as you know, doesn't have non-competes. People leave companies all the time. You were in a position at Gartner. You saw everything, from everybody. You did the Magic Quadrants for years, and years, and years, you had visibility on companies' plans. And now you're here, many of the folks that were customers, or people that you were advising are now competitors. How do you, as an analyst, and now a professional at Veeam, draw that line between what you can and cannot share? >> I don't want to make it sound too simple, but it's actually not that hard. And what I mean by that is, it's not hard, I think, for anyone that does an analyst job role, to understand how to compartmentalize. Right, you can't go and talk to a three-letter company, and then talk to a two-letter company, and mix the two conversations. And the same with transitioning jobs. When I came from IBM for 15 plus years, to Gartner, there were a lot of things I knew, of course, lot of things that I knew about even the backup space that I was focused on. I was the technical strategist for that product, development manager for that product. Even in Adjacent areas like storage, meaning storage arrays, my colleagues, new colleagues at Gartner would say, "I wonder what the road map is for that." And I would say, well I know what the road map is for that, >> Keep wondering. >> But you know, I'm not going to say anything. And no one asked me to, it was never that kind of situation. The same, I think is true right now. No one's asked me, "So what do you know?" In fact, I probably over-rotated, in that I literally shredded everything that I had, and took pictures of me shredding documents that I had. I literally took every drive that I have and overwrote it, not just deleted it, but overwrote it with multiple patterns and took pictures of that. Semi-ironically, I guess I'll just give this example, but kind of leave it at a high level. For a couple of days it looked like I was going to the West Coast. And so I shredded everything but their Magic Quadrant response, and then when I realized that wasn't the case I shredded that Magic Quadrant response. So, I had to reach out to Veeam and said, hey you know the thing I just shredded? Your marketing plan that you gave me in person two weeks ago, the Magic Quadrant response that I had already printed off and highlighted and done notes on. Can you resend that to me again, I need to re-read that. (laughing) >> Okay, so now, you've clearly had a choice of places to go, you're sought after, you've had an impact on the road map and strategy of many, many of these companies. Why Veeam? >> Well. I don't know if Veeam is going to love me saying this, but I thought there were two great opportunities, and I'm not kidding, I only looked at two, there were a couple more, but I looked only seriously at two, and for very different reasons. The reason that I really liked Veeam, was that their problems set, or what I thought I could offer was really different. It wasn't, hey we need someone to really focus on strategy and to navigate through, going through a financial transaction or an IPO situation, and what happens after that. It was more operational. It was more, we already are in the enterprise, but we need to go big in the enterprise. We already have some strategy people, but we need enterprise strategy. So it was more of an augmentation play. And I thought that was really interesting. I thought where Veeam is in its life cycle was interesting, not that a younger startup isn't also equally as compelling, but when I looked at where I thought I could be of value, and ultimately what was right for the family, it was, I thought, the best decision. >> Dave, you've been covering backup for a long time, but would it be safe to say that it's one of the hottest times in this space that you've seen, and why is that? >> I'm a Homer, so I'm going to say, I think I've been saying for 28 years there's never been a time like this in backup. But I actually think there's evidence to support that that's true. So let me give you a couple cases, or examples. Case in points. Every year I ask the question, are you more or less willing to switch backup vendors, is essentially the gist of it, and that was through my Gartner days. And there's kind of a scale, are you somewhat more willing to augment the solution, are you far more willing to augment the solution, all the way to, are you somewhat more willing to completely replace it, or far more willing to completely replace it. Long story short, the heat index, or I'm far more willing to completely replace the solution, is on the rise. And that kind of flies in the face of the myth that people don't switch backup solutions. The other thing that was interesting is, also drawing from my Gartner heritage, last December at a conference, did onstage polling, you could ask people questions, and one of them was: one year from now who do you think will be your strategic backup vendor? The top response is: we won't have a strategic backup vendor. That was 23% of the audience. 22% said it would be Veeam. And then you went down the list for organizations or vendors that have far more market share than Veeam. So, the fact that the majority of people say, basically out with everybody, and then the second highest response is: we're going to choose number four in market, based on market share. That's pretty, I don't want to say, can we say damning? Is that okay to say on here? Okay that's a pretty damning indictment of the state of the industry. >> So, I know you don't see the stuff, or maybe you do, some of it, but the stuff that the Wikibon research guys do. And they've just done some work, and I want to run it by you, and just sort of stink test it, if you will. Clearly we've been talking all day that data protection is moving up in the minds of CXOs. I mean, that's kind of well-known. But, they discovered a dichotomy between the business and IT with respect to the degrees of automation. In other words the business expects that there's far more automation than actually exists. And that's leading, in their conclusion, to what you were saying before is, a lot of opportunities for customer churn. It seems to be very churn-ripe environment. And the other piece that I'd love your comment on is, the Global 2000 generally, specifically, really, the Fortune 1000, is leaving billions of dollars on the table over, let's say, a three or four year period in either inadequate data protection or poorly architected data protection. So do some of those findings jive with your experience and your knowledge of the marketplace? >> Yeah they really do, because the last three years at Gartner, one of the fun things I got to do, it was a little more horizontal, was participate in CIO level research. And there was like 4:15 a.m. phone calls for me, but it was still fun to do, because there was, I think 3700 CIOs participated from around the world. So if you look at the big takeaways from there, the short story is, CIOs think that they are much further along on their journey than they actually are. I don't think it's because these men and women are blind, it's just they're thinking that we've been talking about this for so long, haven't we automated more? Aren't we more virtualized? Aren't we more into the cloud? And haven't we done more of our objectives that we set out to do? The sad reality is, the case is often no. And if you look at backup and recovery in particular, I totally agree with you, I mean for the amount of money that's being spent in this industry, our rate of return is not so great. It's not a spending problem, to your point, you're spending billions and billions of dollars, on software and then you're spending even more billions on hardware, and you're obviously spending human capital to go and manage this stuff, and professional services, what have you. So how come we can't restore the file? >> Right. And essentially many parts of that business are failing. So we can do better, is your point. >> I wanted to ask you about the value of data. One of your former colleagues at Gartner, Doug Laney, wrote a great book. I got an advance copy, Doug's been on theCUBE many times. Infonomics is the name of the book, really talking about a methodology to understand the value of data. Do you feel like organizations, especially in this digital world, have a good understanding of the value of their data, and if not, how does that affect their data protection decisions? >> I'll give you the short, not so great answer, which is no I don't think that they do. But to elaborate on that, I think someone or some people do. I don't think that's distributed around the whole enterprise so for example, if I'm the backup person, I think I know what I need to go and protect. You might be the Cassandra administrator, and you say, no this is the future of our business that I'm actually instantiating this new application right here. Meanwhile I'm not doing anything to protect that whatsoever. So if I'm operating under an independent view, that doesn't align with the business, then we're in trouble, and I, unfortunately, think that's too typically the case. That all parts of the business aren't interlocked. >> Yeah, back to your point about some of the transitions happening in the market. There's a number of players that are putting forth primarily appliances, even though they are software based, and Veeam is 100% pure software, how do you see that dynamic playing the market right now? >> Well I don't think there are any wrong answers, I know that sounds like a weasel cop-out, so let me double click on that, >> Stu: You're no longer an analyst you can't say, "It depends." >> There you go, yeah, there are 16 shades of gray actually. So the part that I think is very positive, on an appliance delivery model is that solves initial deployment challenges, that solves proof of concept challenges, that's a wonderful thing to be able to say, "Dave I want you to go take this box and just try it." And then you say, "You know what, I do like that." Great, you can actually keep the car you just test-drove. We can cut a PO for you right now. So there's actually a value in my mind for that hardware delivery model. Then you get other customers, that are on the other end of the spectrum, right? I don't want to spend more money on your server, that you're going to charge me for when I actually have more buying power, if I'm a large size organization, I can go to name your server company and buy it for cheaper than you can. And what I've found is, what I used to do, at Gartner, ask questions of, what is your purchasing intention around backup and recovery? It literally became kind of right down the middle. Some people were moving away from appliances towards software base, some people were doing the opposite. Others were kind of of open mind somewhere in the middle. So at net net, I think anyone, whether you're a startup like, so let's just name names, Rubrik and Cohesity, they're today primarily sales motion of a hardware appliance, but obviously they offer a virtual appliance as well. You take the other end of the spectrum, someone like Veeam, where Ratmir's made it very clear, we are not in the hardware business. And you look around and you see, there are a lot of hardware partners. So at the end of the day, whether you own it or enable it, I'm not convinced is 100% the point. I think it's just really offering the choice. But more importantly, what's the experience of that choice? People don't want to be integrators, so that favors appliances, you would think, but maybe people don't want to be integrators, and if they have a tightly coupled solution. Where they don't feel like they're assembling it, but they also don't have to just buy whatever Veeam says is going to be the controller this year, then maybe that's positive too. >> What's your point of view, and it may not be Veeam's sweet spot, but I wanted to get your thoughts on this, when you look at an Oracle environment, and you see how Oracle approaches data protection. Obviously there's RMAN in there, but it seems like the database and the application take more responsibility for recovery in particular, and it seems to work quite well, but it's expensive. And it's probably overkill for most applications. Do you see that as a trend, or is that a sort of an isolated tip of the pyramid? >> I would've said years ago that I thought it was a trend. Because the notion of either a hypervisor, or an application being more aware of recoverability, or availability, would make a lot of sense to me. Because they understand more about what's going on in that particular system. The reality is, and Oracle does a number of great things, RMAN is wonderful, ASM is wonderful, they have a couple of different appliances, but I'll just leave it at the fact that that's not the predominant Oracle protection mechanism today even for Fortune 500, means that there's some sort of feeling that maybe that's not answering all of the issues. >> Is that you feel like that's an opportunity for Veeam then? I infer from your response. >> I do, and honestly, to be fair, I think it's an opportunity for others besides Veeam, But absolutely I think it's an opportunity for Veeam, because Veeam is trying to go in and further penetrate that space. Oracle is forever going to be vitally important. I don't think we're ever going to see a day where SAP running on Oracle on on-prem server goes to zero. >> Right. >> Dave on the keynote stage this morning you said you want to be a builder again, what do we expect to see from you in the next coming year? >> Well I think the big thing is, I have had the luxury of being able to listen to and advise people, and that's a, I was going to say blessing, that sounds corny, but it's a privilege. But I miss the direct connect, it'd be great to be able to really go to product groups and say here's what I think we need to do in the next rev of the solution. Or here's my rationale from talking to, either Veeam customers or Veeam prospects, about why they're not choosing us for some workloads, maybe it's high end work, Oracle. And be able to effect change. I really was serious on stage when I said, I view this as my last stop. This is my third switch or second switch and third company so hopefully I'm here for 10 or 12 years, otherwise that's a little premature of a switch. >> Well, Dave, congratulations on the move, and the new role at Veeam. Your reputation is impeccable, and I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Always good to see you guys, thanks for having me. >> Alright, you're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from VeeamOn 2018 in Chicago. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you my Veeam. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we are covering VeeamOn 2018, #VeaamOn. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my cohost Stuart Miniman, Duncan Epping is here, Chief Technologist, Storage and Availability at VMWare and the world's number one blogger in virtualization, Yellow Bricks, yellow-bricks.com. Duncan, thanks very much coming to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> No problem, my pleasure, it's been a while. I actually hoped to be on the show probably six, seven, eight years ago, I don't know how long it is, but I've watched many episodes. So it's great to be part of it. >> Well great, Duncan one of the biggest problems is you're so busy, every year at VM World you were totally booked up, so no thanks so much we're so glad we could do this. >> So Stu and I remember the peer insight we did many many years ago back when we had Boonyon on recently, and he was talking about when VMWare sort of created virtualization, it pushed the bottle neck around. It created a lot of stress on the storage systems. And WMWare for years dealt with that through API integration and the like and very well sort of covered. But I wonder if you could take us through your perspectives of the journey of storage at VMWare and generally, or specifically, and virtualization generally. >> Yeah, it's a good question. I think everyone that has been part of the community has faced all of the different challenges from a storage perspective. I mean, Stu, you now what kind of problem EMC had when VMWare first started doing virtualization. And I think the key reasons for these were fairly straightforward. When we started virtualization and we started leveraging shared storage systems, those shared storage systems were never designed with virtualization in the back of their minds. They were designed for physical workloads, maybe one or two machines connected to it, you know in larger volume it may be 10 or 15, but not 10 or 15 physical hosts with hundred of virtual machines. So we started noticing is that from a performance perspective systems were lagging, we were doing all sorts of things to the storage systems that they weren't expecting, virtual machine snapshots. They were seeing IO patterns that they had never seen before. Instead of sequential IO we had a lot of random IOs so we had to start doing different things from a storage perspective so as you said, we started with APIs, we had the vSPhere APIs for IO filtering, we have the Divi APIs, the array integration, so that we can offload some of the functionality, but of course on top of that what we started doing within VMWare is we started exploring what we could do smarter from a storage point from our stance. So not just looking at how we can help the ecosystem, but also what we can do from our perspective, so there were two main efforts over the past couple of years. The first one is virtual volumes. It has taken a while before the adoption ramped up. I think part of that is mainly because a lot of our customer base was still on vSphere 5.5. Now that we're starting to see broader adoption of vSphere 6.0 and actually 6.5 and 6.7, we're starting to see the adoption of stuff like virtual volumes go up as well. That is also due to the fact that our partners like Pure Storage, Nimble, HP with 3PAR has been pushing or have been pushing VVols tremendously. So they've done a great job, and we're starting to see a lot of customers adopting VVols, and that way we're getting around some of the limitations that we have from a traditional storage perspective. >> Explain that, what are customers telling you about the benefits that they're getting out of VVols and VVol and VVol adoption? >> Well, there's two main things. It kind of depends on what kind of problems you're facing, but a lot of customers come to us with management issues and scalability issues. From a scalability perspective we have larger customers that literally have thousands of volumes. If you look at an E6 cluster today you're limited in terms of the numbers of volumes you can connect to a cluster. So that's one thing. As soon as they start moving to VVols now they're not managing those individual volumes anymore but they're managing the storage system as a whole, and they start creating policies, and that's where the management aspect comes into play. So it becomes a lot easier to manage, because instead of having thousands of volumes to select from, they don't normally have to look at a spreadsheet, for instance, to figure out where to place a virtual machine, now they simply make a policy and the policy engine will figure out where to place that virtual machine. >> Dave: It sounds like cloud. >> It actually is, you know, the cloud version of, cloudified version of storage I would say. But it brings a lot of benefits. And the funny thing is that we've been talking about policies and policy engines for a long time, even in the cloud, but try to come up with one cloud that actually has a decent policy engine. Hardly anyone has that today. From a storage perspective I think storage policy based management framework that VMWare has is quite unique. Well now we're starting to see that popping up in other areas, and that's the strange thing about it. >> Always back to the software mainframe Stu. >> Yeah, and Duncan one of the things we've really seen, a transition for, it took us about a decade to try and fix storage in a virtualized environment, and today most things are built either understanding virtualization, or at least that's part of the puzzle, and then of course VVols led us into was the ability for vSANs. Help us kind of transition that threshold as to how that's just kind of a given underneath for vSAN and other solutions like it. >> Yeah, if you look at vSAN it has been around for a while. The beta was in 2013, as you guys know. We have a large adoption, at least we saw a large increase over the last couple of years, I would say the last two years. You guys have spoken with Yangbing before, so you know about the business side of vSAN, I'm not going to cover that, but if you look at it from a technology perspective we stared developing this 2008, 2009, that's when we started thinking about what we could do different from a storage perspective. There were already some companies doing something in the hyperverge space and we figured we could do something significantly different than they were doing. They had a storage solution that sat on top of the hypervisor, we own the hypervisor so we can create something that sits within the hypervisor, and that's when we started looking at including these different technologies, so we started looking in how can we introduce things like deduplication and compression? What can we do with for ROBO solutions? Can we do something like stretch clustering in an easy way? There are a lot of stretch cluster solutions out there, but if you look at a stretch clustering solution today it typically takes weeks to implement that. If you look at something like vSAN, it was our aim to actually to be able to deploy something like that from a storage perspective within hours instead of weeks, right? And we've been able to achieve that, and it has been a huge undertaking, but I think it's fair to say that it has been rather successful. >> All right, Duncan, help connect the dots to where we are here at VeeamOn. It's funny, I think Veeam started out heavily in virtualization, still heavily involved in virtualization, they've got a v in the beginning of their name. When I hear the keynote this morning, a lot of hyper, reminded me of before we had, before hyperconverge fully took over, VMWare tried to call it a hypervisor converge system around VMWare, so talk to us a little bit about data protection, the Veeam relationship and how that fits into things like vSAN and vSphere? >> Yeah I think, I talk to a lot of customers as a Chief Technologist, it's part of my role to talk to customers and have discussions about what's on top of their mind. Data protection is always one of those things that comes up. I would say it's always in the top three. Whenever you talk to a CIO, a CTO, protection of the data, availability of data, resiliency, reliability, it's fairly important. Veeam of course, for us, is a great partner. Primarily because of the simplicity of the features and the products that they offer. Whenever I talk to a customer and they explain how difficult it is to manage their backup and recovery solutions I always point them to a partner like Veeam simply because it's going to make their life a lot easier if you ask me. And I can see that Veeam is slowly transitioning. As you mentioned, the v is in front of the name. The v is in front of our name as well, but we know that it's not, the whole world isn't just VMWare and the whole world isn't just virtual. There's a lot of other different solutions out there, and actually Veeam's looking at other revenue streams as well. I would argue, though, if you're looking at something like the edge space which I think that more or less exploring at looking at things like IoT, there's going to be some form of virtualization within that, whether that's VMWare based or another solution of course is going to be the question. That is something that we'll need to figure out in the upcoming years, but I think there's a big opportunity out there. If you ask me, the keynote was really interesting. I kind of missed the end of details. I'm hoping that the closing keynote is going to give some more details on what they will be doing in the IoT space, how they see their solution evolving from that point of view because it's a market that's still being developed, but that's definitely going to be interesting. >> So Duncan it's interesting to hear you say that when you talk to customers data protection is in the top three, even amongst CIOs. It used to not be that way. Data protection was always a bolt on, it was an afterthought, it was kind of one size fits all. What's changed? >> Well I think the importance of the data has changed. If you look over the last 10 years whenever you talk to any company out there that has lost any significant amount of data they understand what the value was of the data that they were hosting. I think the big difference over the past 10 years is in the past we had applications like email, maybe some file services and that's it. But now everything revolves around applications, and that's also the shift that I'm seeing in the industry. Also from an IT perspective, right? In the past, over the past decade I think everyone has been focused on the infrastructure layer. If you look at something like VBlock, very much infrastructure focused. If you look at something like hyperconverged solutions, very much infrastructure focused. But now whenever we talk to customers, customers are more and more interested in what we can do for the application layer. What kind of benefits do we have for Exchange, for Oracle, for SAP, you name it? I think that's also a big change that's happening in the industry right now. One of the things from a technical perspective, and there may be others, but when VMWare really became prominent it was wonderful but we were reducing the number of physical resources, and the one workload that took a lot of physical resources was backup, and then sort of Veeam swept in and took advantage of that sea change. What's the technical constraint now when you think about things like multi cloud and SaaS and IoT, data's much more distributed, it's out of the control necessarily of a single platform. So from a technicals perspective, what's the big challenge and sort of the gate to architectures today? >> Well as you said, the distribution of data is the big challenge as it stands right now from a technical perspective. I think the biggest challenge that most of the players in this space, and not just Veeam, some other players as well, will have is trying to figure out how to control and manage their data. Other platforms are facing similar challenges. And no one really has solved this problem yet. We're starting to see some players in this space that have solutions that sit out in Azure, that sit out in Google Cloud, but it's a very challenging solution, and I think if you ask me, and this is something that I've said internally as well, the company that is capable of managing and owning the data is the company that's probably going to be most successful in the cloud war that's now happening. I think that's the most critical aspect. Workloads can move around, but data is very difficult to move around and own as well. >> Duncan one of the discontinuities we see in the marketplace that you mentioned earlier, wondering if you can talk to, in the enterprise in the data center, how do we get them to get to that next version? Comfortable with it, it's stable, it works. I look at the cloud, I'm running Microsoft Azure or AWS I'm running the version that they want. How do we help close that gap? Because from a security standpoint, from a features standpoint, we need to move there, but you know it seems to be just one of the greatest disconnects we see between kind of my data center and somebody else's cloud. >> That is a great question. I think we had a lot of challenges in the past. I think it's fair to say with vSphere 5.0 it was a great release, 5.5 among great releases. But the challenges that we have from an upgrade perspective was typically V centered and all of the components connected to it. It's not just the vSphere platform but if you look at the vSphere platform, the challenges that we had were all of the components integrating with it, whether that's something like vROps, VRA's, or VREalize Automation, but it could also be something like Evermar or maybe Veeam. So there were so many different components we had to take into account. So what we started doing within VMWare was simplifying the architecture from a vSPhere perspective. If you look at vSAN for instance, it used to be a solution where we had multiple functions spread out across different virtual machines. I'm now trying to bring that back into a single virtual machine again. Actually dumbing it down, making it easier to upgrade. So that is something that is actively happening within VMWare, and it is something that we started with 6.0, and that's also the reason why we see the adoption from 6.0 to 6.5 and 6.5 to 6.7, is at a must faster pace than 5, in the 5 code stream, so 5 to 5.1, for instance, took a lot longer for a lot of customers or 5.1 to 6.0, took extremely long for a lot of customers. It's the key reason is complexity from our infrastructure stand. While we're changing that, we're evolving that in the upcoming years. >> Duncan it's the last question here, but as the technologist, things that you're looking at that are exciting to you, that you know, get your juices flowing? >> Yeah, that's an interesting one because it's something that I've been thinking about recently. I've been doing vSphere for the last, well wasn't even called vSphere back then, but I've been doing this for the last 12 years, virtualization. Thirteen years maybe something like that. At least as a consultant and then as a technologist and technical marketing, but recently I'm starting to look more and more at the edge space. For computing, IoT, I think that's a really interesting space, especially because there isn't really significant market. Well, there is a significant market out there, but there isn't really one player out there that really stands out. No one has really figured out what customers would like to do with it and how our customers are going to use it. So the edge computing space and IoT's a really interesting thing and especially because of the distributed aspect is one of the things that I've been always been passionate about, vSphere clusters, which is a distributed mechanism. So distributed computing is definitely something that has my interest. >> All right if you care about virtualization, VMWare, follow the yellow brick road, yellow-bricks.com. Duncan, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me guys. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Chicago, VeeamOn 2018. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois. It's the Cube, covering Veeamon 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody, this is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm joined by my co-host Stewart Miniman, Ratmir Timashev is here, he's the cofounder of Veeam and in my opinion, the man who brought Veeam into the modern era, created the persona of Veeam, allowed it to punch above its way, Ratmir thanks for coming back in the Cube, great to see you again. >> Thank you Dave, thanks. >> So congratulations on another kickoff to another great event, you painted Chicago green. Love it, first of all how do you feel. >> Fantastic, awesome. It's great being here, great city, the weather is finally nice, so spring is here finally, so we are great time. >> Yeah we had a little trouble getting in, but everybody's here, everybody's here safely which is the most important thing. I want you to talk about the evolution of Veeam, you started out as a virtualization specialist, generally VMware specialists, especially focusing on small business. We used to see you everywhere, now you're extending into the enterprise. What's that all about, what's the vision, give us your perspective. >> You're absolutely right, Veeam started with the single focus to be the best for VMware, for VMware, data protection, cap replication, and we started as the easy to use, simple, powerful solution for SMB, moved into mid-enterprise and now we added lots of enterprise features, and moving into the large enterprise. And last year was really the most important and most successful year, 2017, in the history of Veeam, so we finally admitted that we'd be lying to our customers for 10 years. >> Dave: You've been lying? >> Yeah, we've been lying. >> What do you mean by that. >> For 10 years we've been saying, Veeam is VMware only, Veeam is high B only, we will never do physical. So last year we introduced the comprehensive M2M platform to do everything, virtual, physical, and cloud. So we integrated our agent-based technology into our flagship product, to provide a single panel blast to manage all your data across the cloud, M2M. >> Why lie for a decade? >> That's a good question. You know, when you deal with sales people, smart sales people, they constantly ask you, hey, when I will do that, I will go and do physical, I was going to do physical. You have to tell them no, never, because once you say yeah, we will do physical, the next question is when. >> Dave: Yeah, when can I sell it, right. >> So we don't want to give our sales people an excuse to lose a deal because we've got the best virtual, go and sell the best virtual, and make our customers happy. >> You don't want to head fake the customers either. >> Maybe explain, what were the core principles back from the early days that are still holding true, what is the same and what's different now that you're doing cloud and virtual. >> Again, the core principle. >> Stu: Or physical, I should say. >> For principle, again, in terms of the product design, think customer first, make it easy for the customer and really stick to your core customer, that customer that is using your product every day. So make it easy, powerful, and affordable. That was our core principles in designing the product, and the whole business model behind Veeam. >> Talk about the metrics a little bit. Stu and I were talking at the open, 820 some odd million in booking, so you can see a billion dollars. We said, software companies that are a billion dollars are few and far between so that's a huge milestone if and when you hit that. But talk about that and the growth, share with us whatever metrics you can. >> Again, 2017 was one of the most successful years in our history, yeah, like you mention, we recorded bookings revenue of 830 million and that was 36% growth. Actually, our growth is accelerating as we become bigger. So we just celebrated 300,000 customers, we are adding 4,000 new customers every day, and Peter Mackay, our president and co COO mentioned this morning at the keynote, that we're adding 133 customers every single day, so that's very impressive. >> Yeah, it's awesome. So yeah, just to give you a sense, 300,000 customers, VMware, who basically owns the enterprise, says slightly over half a million customers. >> So we probably are on 50% of VMware, so we own 50% of VMware market in terms of data protection. >> So one of the challenges that we mentioned upfront was okay, so you drove a truck through the opportunity when virtualization VMware came in, and a lot of the incumbents were caught flat footed. They didn't have the architecture, they didn't have the go to market, et. Cetera. Now things are changing, moving to cloud, moving to this digital world, how does Veeam retain its edge in that new world. >> That's an excellent question, so that's the big opportunities that we see for the next five years. So we won the first battle, the battle of on pram, highly virtualized modern data center. We are the leader, we are number one data protection and ideal ability for that market, right. So the next battle, the next opportunity that we see for the next five years is to dominate the, what we call intelligent data management market in the multi cloud world. So we have to think how we approach that, once you win the market, like there is a saying, the winner takes it all. Once you win the market, you are going to dominate that, so for us the next two or three years are the most critical in dominating this multi cloud world for the next decade. >> Ratmir, I'd love to hear, you wrote that virtualization wave, which really was about creating virtualization admin, huge shift going from silos to admins. And we're seeing that change from architects in the cloud and the like, talk to, who you're selling to, and the partners that you have to grow. There's just so much change happening in that kind of environment. >> Yeah we see the change as we are moving from VMware administrator, so originally the product was designed for VMware administrator, now we are moving to the infrastructure person that is responsible not just for private part of your infrastructure, but for the multi cloud strategy, which includes the public cloud, SAS, physical servers, everything than an enterprise has as far as the infrastructure. >> Okay, so I want to go through just a couple of things that we talked about earlier and get your reaction to this. So some of the things that we've seen in our research is that data protection and orchestration are becoming much much more important in the list of CXO concerns. And that's something that your messaging is going after. But there's a dissonance between the business expects out of data protection and what IT is actually delivering, and I wonder if you can comment on that. >> Sure, so yeah, we are introducing our new message. So our previous message was focused on VMware administrator, now we are moving into the enterprise, and our message is about the importance of data. We see the three characteristics of the modern data, hyper critical, hyper sprawled, and hyper growth. So this leads to the need of creating a new type of solution what we call is intelligent data management solution. To manage the hyper available enterprise. So we're using the word hyper a lot because the data is now hyper critical, it's over distributed, hyper distributed, and is growing exponentially. That's part of our new message, that as we go into the C level people, about how important this data, and what with all the things that going on, in terms of the security compliance and how we're going to extend this platform to solve other business issues and provide more value and more business outcomes of using your late. Veeam's emporium has grown within this enterprise customers. However, as we mentioned, we are moving further, we are not standing still, so we have added lots of capabilities in terms of protecting cloud, native cloud, AWS, Azure, as well as a physical servers. So we are moving more into the end to end strategic data management platform provider from being just a niche point solution. >> I want to give you another stat that came out of our research, which I think you'll love, is that our David Foyer calculated that on average, a Fortune 1000 company over I think a three or a four year period, loses about a billion and a half dollars in value because of poorly architected data protection approaches, whether it's they're not end to end, or they're not protecting their cloud data properly, or they're not doing, whether it's backup or disaster recovery properly, well over a billion dollars over a four year period, your thoughts. >> Yeah, that's similar to what our research shows as well. So we do annual research and ask all customers how much down time and data loss costs them annually or through hour, that research shows that average enterprise can lose as much as over 10 million dollars per hour, so if you add it up over four years, that might be close to that number. But with all the compliance and the new security risks and security threat, and reason where this is becoming more and more of a critical business critical problem to solve. >> So this is a huge opportunity for Veeam, because when you think about your total available market, what a lot of time analysts will do is they'll add up all the spending on let's say data protection solutions, but to me your tam is actually quite a bit larger because of this lost revenue opportunity. It's many tens of billions, maybe 30 to 50 billion, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. >> Yeah definitely, so data protection is just part of that core market right, so that data management is much bigger, by data management we mean not just the protection of data, but using this data to help businesses, to accelerate the innovation rate, so to reduce risk, to comply with the new regulations. So all these challenges are much bigger part of not just the data backup and recovery, overall data management market which is much bigger and probably is larger than 20, 30 billion range. >> So okay, so you have 2,500, 3,000 of your favorite people here gathered this week. As always I expect that you're going to have a big sendoff, a big party, what can we expect this week. >> As always, that's part of the Veeam culture, is work hard, play hard, and so Veeam is known for having the best parties. Yeah we, now Peter runs the company day to day, but culturally we still remain young entrepreneurial spirited company right, so we like party and we like to work hard. >> Well you know, if you've never been to a Veeam party, you're missing it. I don't usually stay for these things, I get out of here, we have to do so many Cubes, but we'll be at the Veeam party this week. >> Awesome, awesome. >> Thanks very much, always a pleasure seeing you, and congratulations on all your success. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright you're welcome. Keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest, you're watching the Cube from Veeamon 2018. We're in the Windy City and we'll be right back.