(digital music) >> Welcome back to VeeamON 2022. We're in the home stretch, actually, Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante here. Daniel Fried is the general manager and senior vice president for EMEA and Worldwide Channel. Daniel, welcome to theCUBE. You got a big job. >> No, I don't have a big job. I have a job that I love. (chuckles) >> Yeah, a job you love. But seriously Veeam, all channel. I mean it has been. >> Yeah, I mean, it's something which just, just a few seconds on, on that piece here, the channel piece, it's something that I love because the ecosystem of partners, an ecosystem of partners, is something which is spending its time moving and developing and changing. You've got a lot of partners changing their roles, their missions, the type of services, type of product that they offer. They all adapt to what the market needs and all the markets around the world are very different because of all these different cultures, languages, and everything. So it's very interesting. In the middle of all that, you know, these tens of thousands of partners and you try to create and try to understand how you can organize, how you can make them happy. So this is fantastic. >> So you're a native of the continent in Europe, obviously. We heard Anton, today, who couldn't be here or chose not to be here, cause he's supporting family and friends in Ukraine. What's the climate like now? Can you share with us what's it like Europe? Just the overall climate and obviously the business climate. >> So the overall climate, the way I see it or I feel it, and obviously there may be some different opinions, that I will always appreciate as also very good opinions. My view is that it seems in Europe that there are a distinction between what people do for businesses, Their thinking for the business, which may be impacted by the situations that we know in Europe between, because of obviously the issues between Ukraine, because of Russia, let's put it this way. And then there is the personal view, which is okay. That happens from time to time, but life continues and we just continue pushing things and enjoying life, and getting the families together and so on and so forth. So, this is in most of the countries in Europe. Obviously, there are a number of countries, which are a little bit more sensitive, a little bit more impacted. All the ones who are next to Russia, or Belarus, so on and so forth. From an emotional standpoint, which is totally understandable. But overall, I'm pretty impressed by how the economy, how people, how the businesses are, you know, continue to thrive in Europe. >> Has Brexit had any...? What impact, if any, has it had? >> So for us Veeam, the impact is... So first there is an impact which is on the currencies. So all the European currencies are no, have slowed down and, and the US dollar is becoming much stronger. >> Despite its debt. >> Right. >> Shouldn't be, but yeah. >> But that doesn't impact on the business. I just... >> Yeah. Right. >> So everything which is economical, macroeconomical is impacted. We have the inflation also, which has an impact, which also has increased because of the oil, because of the gas of everything that they have been stuck, to be stuck. But people get used to it. As Veeam from a business standpoint, one of the big things is we stopped sales, selling into Russia and into Belarus and we are giving our technology, our product, our solutions for free to Ukraine. And that was a piece of the business that we were doing, within EMEA, which was non-neglectable. So it's, I would say a business hole, now that we need to try to fill with accelerating the business service in the other countries of Europe. >> I mean, okay. So thank you for that but we really didn't see it in last quarter's numbers that you guys shared with I mean, IBM. Similarly IBM said, it's noticeable, but it's not really a big impact on our business, but given the cultural ties that you had to Russia and the affinity, I mean you knew how to do business in Russia. It's quite remarkable that you're able to sort of power through that. How about privacy in, around data, in Europe, particularly versus the US? it seems like Europe is setting the trend on things like privacy, certainly on things like acquisitions, we saw the arm acquisition fail. >> Yeah. So there is a big difference. Effectively, there is a big difference between, I would say North America and the rest of the world. And I would say that EMEA, and within EMEA would say the EU is leading very much on what we call server sovereign cloud. So data privacy, which in other words, data is to as much as possible is to remain within either the EU or better within each of the countries, which means that there is again... It's I would say for in EMEA it's good, I would say for the business, for the partners, because then they have to develop around the cloud a number of functions to ensure that because of this data privacy, because of this GDPR or rules and things, all the data remains and resides in a given geographical environment. So it's, which is good because it creates a number of opportunities for the partners. It makes obviously the life of customers and their self a bit more difficult. But again, I think it's good. It's good. It's part of all the way we structure and we organize. And I think that it's going to expand because data is becoming so key, a key limit, a key asset of companies that we absolutely need to take care of it. And it is where Veeam plays a big role in that because we help paying companies managing their data and secure the data in sort of way. >> Yeah. Ransomware has been a big topic of conversation this week. Do you sense that the perception of that as a threat is universal? Are there, are there differences between North America and the EU and other parts of the world? Universal? >> Yeah, it is universal. We see that everywhere. And I think this is a good point, a good question too, is that it's very interesting because we need to get acquainted to the fact that we are going to ever. And so we are going to be attacked. No way out, no. There... Anybody the morning, is waking up, is going on emails and click clicking on an email. Too late. Was a run somewhere. What can you do against that? You know, all humans make mistakes. You can't so it'll happen, but where, where it's absolutely very important and where Veeam plays a big role and where our partners are going to play an even bigger role with our technology is that they can educate the customers to understand that, to have run somewhere is not an issue. What has, what happened is not a problem. What they have to do is to organize so that if they have run somewhere, their letter is safe. And this is where our place a big place. A couple hours back, I was, I was doing a kind of bar with something else. It's totally crazy, but that's okay. I'm going to say it. It's about the COVID. What, no, what do we do? Do we have, do we have something against COVID? No. People were going to get COVID, certainly many people still doing it, but what is important is to be capable of not being too sick. So it is the prevention, which is important. It's the same thing here. So there is this mindset we have psychologically with the partners and they have, they have to provide that services to their customers on how to organize their data using the technology of Veeam in order to be safe, if anything happens. >> So another related question, if I may. When Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA and divulged that the NSA was listening to all the phone calls, there was seemed to be at the time, as I recall, a backlash sentiment in Europe, particularly toward big tech and cloud providers and skepticism toward the cloud. Has the pandemic and the reliance on cloud and the rise of ransomware changed that sentiment? Had the sentiment changed before then? Obviously plenty of Cloud going on in Europe. But can you describe that dynamic? >> Yeah, no, I think that's... Yeah. I think that people were too... You know, as usual. It absolutely reminds me when I was at VMware, when we went from the physical boxes to the virtual machines. I remember the IT people in the company said, "No, I want to be capable of touching." Something here. When you talk about cloud, you talk about something which is virtual, but virtual outside, even outside somewhere. So there is a resistance, psychological resistance to where is my data? How do I control my data? And that is, I think that is very human. Then you need to, you know, it takes time. And again, depending on the cultures, you need to get acquainted to it. So that's what happened be before the pandemic, but then the pandemic took place. And then there was a big problem. There was nobody anymore in the data centers because they couldn't work there and then people were starting to, to work remotely. So the IT needed to be organized to compensate for all these different changes. And cloud was one of them where the data could be stored, where the data could reside, where things could happen. And that's how actually it has accelerated at least in a number of countries where people are a bit leg out to accept the adoption of cloud, cloud-based data. >> So is there a difference in terms of the level of domination by a small group of hyperscale clouds versus smaller service providers? You know, in theory, you have EU behaving in a unified way in sort of the same way that the United States behaves in sort of a federated way. Do you have that same level of domination or is there more, is there more market share available for smaller players in cloud? Any regional differences? >> Yeah. There are big differences. There are big differences again, because of this sovereignty, which is absolutely approved very much in Europe. I'm tell you, I'm going... I'm giving you an example that it was in, I think in October last year, somewhere. The French, the French administration said, "We don't want anymore. Any administration investing in Microsoft 365, because the data is in Azure. The data is out in the cloud." That's what they said. So now these last days, this last week that has changed because Microsoft, you know, introduced a number of technologies, data centers in France, and so on and so forth. So things are going to get better. But the sovereignty, the fact that the data, the privacy of data, everything has to remain in the countries is doing something like the technology of the hyperscalers is used locally wrapped by local companies like systematic writers, local systematic writers, to ensure that the sovereign is set and that the privacy of the data is for real and according to GDPR. So again, it's a value add. It makes things more complex. It doesn't mean that the Google, the Google cloud, the Azure, or the AWS are not going to exist in Europe, but there are going to be a number of layers between them and the customers in order to make sure that everything is totally brought up and that it complies with the EU regulations. >> Help us understand the numbers, Daniel. So the number of customers is mind-boggling it's over 400,000 now, is that right? >> Yeah. Correct. >> Yes. Comparable to VMware, which is again, pretty astounding and the partner ecosystem. Can you help us understand the scope of that? Part one. part two is how do you service and provide that partnership love to all those companies? >> The partners. So yeah, we have about 35,000 around the world, 35,000 partners, but again, it's 10 times less than Microsoft, by the way. So, and this is very interesting. I often have the questions, how do we manage? So first of all, we do tiering, like anybody does. >> Sure. >> We have an organization for that. And we have a two chair sales motion. That means that we use the distributors to take care of the mass, the volume of the smaller, smaller partners. We help the distributors, we help. So it's a leverage system. And we take care obviously more directly, of the large partners or the more complex partners or the ones of interest. But we don't want to forget any of those because even the small one is very important to us because he has these customers maybe in the middle of nowhere, but he's got a few of them. And again, to have a few of these customers, when you adapt, you know, it makes.. At the end, it makes a big business. You know, one plus one plus 1 million times makes, you know, makes huge things. And plus we are in the recurring business now, now that we've introduced three, four years ago, our subscription licenses, which means that it's only incremental. So it's just like the know the telephony, know the telephony business, where the number, the cell phone plans, you know, it's always grabbing as many as possible consumers in this case. So it was the same thing or I have the same, the same kind of, I do a parallel with the French, the French bakery, the French Boulangerie where I say they do their business with the baguette. And then from time to time, they sell the patisserie or they sell the cake, cookie or something, but the same of small things makes a big things. So it is important to have all these small partners everywhere that, that have their small customers or big customers, and that can serve them. So that's that's way. We segment by geography and what we do now is, it is something which is new. We segment by competencies. So it's what I call the soft segmentation. Because if not, we will have a lot of these partners competing to each other, just to sell Veeam. Veeam being number one in many countries, that is what is taking place. And we want them to be happy. We want, we don't want them to fight against each other. So what we do is we do soft segmentation and soft segmentation is this partner is competent in this field with that kind of use case doing this or this or this or this. It's just like you, when you go to the restaurant, you want the restaurant next to your place. So you click for the geography and then you want to, to go for Indian food. So you click restaurant Indian food, and then you want something. So we want to give that possibility to the customers to say, "Yeah, I think I know what I want." And then you can just click and get the partners or the list of partners, which are the most suited for, for his needs. So it's what I call the soft segmentation. The other thing which is important is the network. It's very interesting because when we look at a lot of companies, it's not the network. You've got VARs, you've got cloud and service providers. You've got SARs, you've got all the things. But if you take each of those individually, they don't have the competencies to answer all the request of the customer. So the networking is partnering with partner. That means to have the, the connection so that the partner A who has his customer, but these customer's are requests that this partner cannot fulfill because it's not its competency. That it's going to find the partners or the other partners that can feel this competency and work together. And then it's between them to have the model that they want so that together they can please the customer with their requests. >> Do you ever want to have VeeamON... I mean, I'm happy it's in the US and I like going to Europe, but you, have you ever want to have VeeamON in Europe? >> Yeah, we have VeeamON. We have many VeeamONs in Europe. >> Yeah. The mini ones. Okay. >> VeeamON tours. >> Globally. So where do you have them? >> Europe in APJ, that's what we do. Yes. >> Where do you do it in a APJ? In Japan, obviously in... >> Yeah. I don't know all the locations, tens and tens of them. >> A lot of them. Okay. >> The small ones. What we do, replicate what is done here on one day and then it goes. >> And you'll do that in UK. France, Germany. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Local. >> And also small countries in Saudi, in South Africa, in Israel, in Bulgaria, in all these countries. Because, you know, we can be virtual. That's nice. >> Oh, right. >> But I love to be having a breakfast or a lunch or drink next to a partner or a customer because you learn so much more. The informal information is so important to understand how the business and how the market develops and what the needs are of customers and so on and so forth. >> How was the European attendance this year? It must have been down. It's hard to get into US. It's actually easier to go back to Europe. >> Virtually I, don't have the numbers, but I- >> No. Virtual. I'm sure it was huge. Yeah. But physical. >> Physical here, we've got about 300, 300 Europeans. >> Yeah. Okay. Out of, do we know? What are the numbers here? Do we know? Have we heard numbers? >> I know 45 was supposed to be around 45K combined. >> That's hybrid. >> So, yeah. >> It's hard to get into the US. We're still figuring that out. So I'm not surprised, but now you... >> But it's complimentary. Yeah. >> Do you go to 'em all? >> No >> You can't. >> No. That's not possible. I cannot. I actually, I would love... >> But some, yes. >> I would love to be capable of duplicate myself, but- >> You go to the one. >> I'm unique. >> You go to the one in France, obviously. Yeah? >> Yeah. Usually in France. Well... >> Depends if you're home. >> Yeah. You know, that is interesting is, the way we organize, the way we organize in Europe is I really want the local leaders to be the ones managing the countries. I'm there to support. I'm not there to be, you know? Yeah. The big boss is coming, he showing. No. It is not that. Again, if they request me to come, if they want me to pass a message to certain type of customer partners, I'll do that. But I don't want to run the show. It's not the way I manage that. >> Yeah. I get that. You want to respect that as if you show up in France and that's your home country, it's like rat man showing up here. It's like taking over the stage. You'll be like, you know, it's our turn. >> But it's just like, you know, I give you another example. So obviously we have... It's even the headquarters, the EMEA headquarters is in France. Right? But it is the French office. And I don't go there. I try not to be there because it is the place for the French people taking care of the French market. And for the French manager, if I go there, everybody's going to come and ask me questions and ask me to make decisions and things. No, they have to run their business. >> So where do you spend, where and how do you spend your time? >> In airports and in planes. (indistinct) What are you asking? >> Of course. >> Do you have another question? >> Actually, if we have time really quickly on just on that subject of sovereignty, we are here in Nevada just across the border, California. People in California have no problem at all, replicating things here for disaster recovery, because it's in the US. Now, is there sort of a cultural sense that tearing down those borders from a sovereignty perspective within Europe would fundamentally change the business climate and maybe tilt things in favor of the AWS and GCPs of the world instead of local regional business? The joke that I heard recently from someone, I thought it was funny. I don't know if it would offend either Germans or French, but it was that it was that AWS was confused and they were planning on putting a data center in Strasbourg, because they thought it was in Germany and it was- >> A joke. >> But the point is, the point is it's like, it's a gum bear. >> Is it true? >> No. But it was a dumb American joke. This was told by a French person basically saying... >> But this person was certainly not from- >> Yes. Right. >> Tell you, because I would've been a very bad way. >> But the point is this idea that you have these mega hyper clouds coming in and saying, "Okay, boom, we're putting one here and you're going to use us regardless of the country you're in." How does that, you know... Is there a push within the EU to tear those barriers down? Or are those sovereignty walls enjoyed by the majority because of the way that it changes the business climate? Any thoughts from that perspective? >> Oh yeah. Yeah. To me, it's very simple. It is a hybrid thing. That means that these big hyperscalers are there, not going to be used but what they do is they're going to partition themselves and work with these local people. So that their big thing appears as being independent, smaller data centers. That's the only thing, you know. You build a house and then you put walls between the different, between the different rooms. That's the only thing that happens. So it's not at all, no. At all to Azures or Google cloud. No, it's not that. It just means that there is a structure and organization that has to be put in place in order that the data resides in given geographical locations using their infrastructures, their technologies. That make, does it make sense? >> Yeah. Except that it puts them in the position of having to have a physical presence in each place, which is advantageous in one way and maybe less efficient in another. >> Yeah. But there are some big markets. >> Yeah. And they eventually got to get there. Right. I mean... >> Yeah. >> They started it. One patient in the world where they restarted was in ANZ. And that's what they did. You know, what, 5, 6, 7 years ago. They put their data centers over there because they wanted to gain the Australian market and the New Zealand market. >> So build it and they will come. Daniel, thanks so much for coming to the theCUBE. Very interesting conversation. >> Pleasure. >> Appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, we're wrapping up. Day two at VeeamON 2022. Keep it right there. Dave and I will be back right after this break. (vibrant music)

(light music playing) >> Welcome back to VEEAMON 2022 in Las Vegas. We're at the Aria. This is theCUBE and we're covering two days of VEEAMON. We've done a number of VEEAMONs before, we did Miami, we did New Orleans, we did Chicago and we're, we're happy to be back live after two years of virtual VEEAMONs. I'm Dave Vellante. My co-host is David Nicholson. Eric Herzog is here. You think he's, Eric's been on theCUBE, I think more than any other guest, including Pat Gelsinger, who at one point was the number one guest. Eric Herzog, CMO of INFINIDAT great to see you again. >> Great, Dave, thank you. Love to be on theCUBE. And of course notice my Hawaiian shirt, except I now am supporting an INFINIDAT badge on it. (Dave laughs) Look at that. >> Is that part of the shirt or is that a clip-on? >> Ah, you know, one of those clip-ons but you know, it looks good. Looks good. >> Hey man, what are you doing at VEEAMON? I mean, you guys started this journey into data protection several years ago. I remember we were actually at one of their competitors' events when you first released it, but tell us what's going on with Veeam. >> So we do a ton of stuff with Veeam. We do custom integration. We got some integration on the snapshotting side, but we do everything and we have a purpose built backup appliance known as InfiniGuard. It works with Veeam. We also actually have some customers who use our regular primary storage device as a backup target. The InfiniGuard product will do the data reduction, the dedupe compression, et cetera. The standard product does not, it's just a standard high performance array. We will compress the data, but we have customers that do it either way. We have a couple customers that started with the InfiniBox and then transitioned to the InfiniGuard, realizing that why would you put it on regular storage? Why not go to something that's customized for it? So we do that. We do stuff in the field with them. We've been at all the VEEAMONs since the, since like, I think the second one was the first one we came to. We're doing the virtual one as well as the live one. So we've got a little booth inside, but we're also doing the virtual one today as well. So really strong work with Veeam, particularly at the field level with the sales guys and in the channel. >> So when INFINIDAT does something, you guys go hardcore, high end, fast recovery, you just, you know, reliable, that's kind of your brand. Do you see this movement into data protection as kind of an adjacency to your existing markets? Is it a land and expand strategy? Can you kind of explain the strategy there. >> Ah, so it's actually for us a little bit of a hybrid. So we have several accounts that started with InfiniBox and now have gone with the InfiniGuard. So they start with primary storage and go with secondary storage/modern data protection. But we also have, in fact, we just got a large PO from a Fortune 50, who was buying the InfiniGuard first and now is buying our InfiniBox. >> Both ways. Okay. >> All flash array. And, but they started with backup first and then moved to, so we've got them moving both directions. And of course, now that we have a full portfolio, our original product, the InfiniBox, which was a hybrid array, outperformed probably 80 to 85% of the all flash arrays, 'cause the way we use DRAM. And what's so known as our mural cash technology. So we could do very well, but there is about, you know, 15, 20% of the workloads we could not outperform the competition. So then we had an all flash array and purpose built backup. So we can do, you know, what I'll say is standard enterprise storage, high performance enterprise storage. And then of course, modern data protection with our partnerships such as what we do with Veeam and we've incorporated across the entire portfolio, intense cyber resilience technology. >> Why does the world, Eric, need another purpose built backup appliance? What do you guys bring that is filling a gap in the marketplace? >> Well, the first thing we brought was much higher performance. So when you look at the other purpose built backup appliances, it's been about our ability to have incredibly high performance. The second area has been CapEx and OpEx reduction. So for example, we have a cloud service provider who happens to be in South Africa. They had 14 purpose built backup appliances from someone else, seven in one data center and seven in another. Now they have two InfiniGuards, one in each data center handling all of their backup. You know, they're selling backup as a service. They happen to be using Veeam as well as one other backup company. So if you're the cloud provider from their perspective, they just dramatically reduce their CapEx and OpEx. And of course they've made it easier for them. So that's been a good story for us, that ability to consolidation, whether it be on primary storage or secondary storage. We have a very strong play with cloud providers, particularly those meeting them in small that have to compete with the hyperscalers right. They don't have the engineering of Amazon or Google, right? They can't compete with what the Azure guys have got, but because the way both the InfiniGuard and the InfiniBox work, they could dramatically consolidate workloads. We probably got 30 or 40 midsize and actually several members of the top 10 telcos use us. And when they do their clouds, both their internal cloud, but actually the clouds that are actually running the transmissions and the traffic, it actually runs on InfiniBox. One of them has close to 200 petabytes of InfiniBox and InfiniBox, all flash technology running one of the largest telcos on the planet in a cloud configuration. So all that's been very powerful for us in driving revenue. >> So phrases of the week have been air gap, logical air gap, immutable. Where does InfiniGuard fit into that universe? And what's the profile of the customer that's going to choose InfiniGuard as the target where they're immutable, Write Once Read Many, data is going to live. >> So we did, we announced our InfiniSafe technology first on the InfiniGuard, which actually earlier this year. So we have what I call the four legs of the stool of cyber resilience. One is immutable snapshots, but that's only part of it. Second is logical air gapping, and we can do both local and remote and we can provide and combine local with remote. So for example, what that air gap does is separate the management plane from the actual data plane. Okay. So in this case, the Veeam data backup sets. So the management cannot touch that immutable, can't change it, can't delete it. can't edit it. So management is separated once you start and say, I want to do an immutable snap of two petabytes of Veeam backup dataset. Then we just do that. And the air gap does it, but then you could take the local air gap because as you know, from inception to the end of an attack can be close to 300 days, which means there could be a fire. There could be a tornado, there could be a hurricane, there could be an earthquake. And in the primary data center, So you might as well have that air gap just as you would do- do a remote for disaster recovery and business continuity. Then we have the ability to create a fenced forensic environment to evaluate those backup data sets. And we can do that actually on the same device. That is the purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at the architectural, these are public from our competitors, including the guys that are in sort of Hopkinton/Austin, Texas. You can see that they show a minimum of two physical devices. And in many cases, a third, we can do that with one. So not only do we get the fence forensic environment, just like they do, but we do it with reduction, both CapEx and OpEx. Purpose built backup is very high performance. And then the last thing is our ability to recover. So some people talk about rapid recovery, I would say, they dunno what they're talking about. So when we launched the InfiniGuard with InfiniSafe, we did a live demo, 1.5 petabytes, a Veeam backup dataset. We recovered it in 12 minutes. So once you've identified and that's on the InfiniGuard. On the InfiniBox, once you've identified a good copy of data to do the recovery where you're free of malware ransomware, we can do the recovery in three to five seconds. >> Okay. >> So really, really quick. Actually want to double click on something because people talk about immutable copies, immutable snapshots in particular, what have the actual advances been? I mean, is this simply a setting that maybe we didn't set for retention at some time in the past, or if you had to engineer something net new into a system so to provide that logical air gap. >> So what's net new is the air gapping part. Immutable snapshots have been around, you know, before we were on screen, you talked about WORM, Write Once Read Many. Well, since I'm almost 70 years old, I actually know what that means. When you're 30 or 40 or 50, you probably don't even know what a WORM is. Okay. And the real use of immutable snapshots, it was to replace WORM which was an optical technology. And what was the primary usage? Regulatory and compliance, healthcare, finance and publicly traded companies that were worried about. The SEC or the EU or the Japanese finance ministry coming down on them because they're out of compliance and regulatory. That was the original use of immutable snap. Then people were, well, wait a second. Malware ransomware could attack me. And if I got something that's not changeable, that makes it tougher. So the real magic of immutability was now creating the air gap part. Immutability has been around, I'd say 25 years. I mean, WORMs sort of died back when I was at Mac store the first time. So that was 1990-ish is when WORMs sort of fell away. And there have been immutable snapshots from most of the major storage vendors, as well as a lot of the small vendors ever since they came out, it's kind of like a checkbox item because again, regulatory and compliance, you're going to sell to healthcare, finance, public trade. If you don't have the immutable snapshot, then they don't have their compliance and regulatory for SEC or tax purposes, right? With they ever end up in an audit, you got to produce data. And no one's using a WORM drive anymore to my knowledge. >> I remember the first storage conference I ever went to was in Monterey. It had me in the early 1980s, 84 maybe. And it was a optical disc drive conference. The Jim Porter of optical. >> Yep. (laughs) >> I forget what the guy's name was. And I remember somebody coming up to me, I think it was like Bob Payton rest his soul, super smart strategy guy said, this is never going to happen because of the cost and that's what it was. And now you've got that capability on flash, you know, hard disk, et cetera. >> Right. >> So the four pillars, immutability, the air gap, both local and remote, the fence forensics and the recovery speed. Right? >> Right. Pick up is one thing. Recovery is everything. Those are the four pillars, right? >> Those are the four things. >> And your contention is that those four things together differentiate you from the competition. You mentioned, you know, the big competition, but how unique is this in the marketplace, those capabilities and how difficult is it to replicate? >> So first of all, if someone really puts their engineering hat to it, it's not that hard to replicate. It takes a while. Particularly if you're doing an enterprise, for example, our solutions all have a hundred percent availability guarantee. That's hard to do. Most guys have seven nines. >> That's hard. >> We really will guarantee a hundred percent availability. We offer an SLA that's included when you buy. We don't charge extra for it. It's like if you want it, like you just get it. Second thing is really making sure on the recovery side is the hardest part, particularly on a purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at other people and you delve into their public material, press releases, white paper, support documentation. No one's talking about. Yeah, we can take a 1.5 petabyte Veeam backup data set and make it available in 12 minutes and 12 seconds, which was the exact time that we did on our live demo when we launched the product in February of 2022. No one's talking that. On primary storage, you're hearing some of the vendors such as my old employer that also who, also starts with an "I", talk about a recovery time of two to three hours once you have a known good copy. On primary storage, once we have a known good copy, we're talking three to five seconds for that copy to be available. So that's just sort of the power of the snapshot technology, how we manage our metadata and what we've done, which previous to cyber resiliency, we were known for our replication capability and our snapshot capability from an enterprise class data store. That's what people said. INFINIDAT really knows how to do the replication snapshot. I remember our founder was one of the technical founders of EMC for a product known as the Symmetric, which then became the DMAX, the VMAX and is now is the PowerMax. That was invented by the guy who founded INFINIDAT. So that team has the real chops at enterprise high-end storage to the global fortune 2000. And what are the key feature checkbox items they need that's in both the InfiniBox and also in the InfiniGuard. >> So the business case for cyber resiliency is changing. As Dave said, we've had a big dose last several months, you know, couple years actually, of the importance of cyber resiliency, given all the ransomware tax, et cetera. But it sounds like the business case is shifting really focused on avoiding that risk, avoiding that downtime time versus the cost. The cost is always important. I mean, you got a consolidation play here, right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Dedupe, does dedupe come into play? >> So on the InfiniGuard we do both dedupe and compression. On the InfiniBox we only do compression. So we do have data reduction. It depends on which product you're using from a Veeam perspective. Most of that now is with the InfiniGuard. So you get the block level dedupe and you get compression. And if you can do both, depending on the data set, we do both. >> How does that affect recovery time? >> Yeah, good question. >> So it doesn't affect recovery times. >> Explain why. >> So first of all, when you're doing a backup data set, the final final recovery, you recovered the backup data set, whether it's Veeam or one of their competitors, you actually make it available to the backup administrator to do a full restore of a backup data set. Okay. So in that case, we get it ready and expose it to the Veeam admin or some other backup admin. And then they launch the Veeam software or the other software and do a restore. Okay. So it's really a two step process on the secondary storage model and actually three. First identifying a known good backup copy. Second then we recover, which is again 12, 13 minutes. And then the backup admin's got to do a, you know, a restore of the backup 'cause it's backup data set in the format of backup, which is different from every backup vendor. So we support that. We get it ready to go. And then whether it's a Veeam backup administrator and quite honestly, from our perspective, most of our customers in the global fortune 2000, 25% of the fortune 50 use INIFINIDAT products. 25% and we're a tiny company. So we must have some magic fairy dust that appeals to the biggest companies on the planet. But most of our customers in that area and actually say probably in the fortune 500 actually use two to three different backup packages. So we can support all those on a single InfiniGuard or multiples depending on how big their backup data sets. Our biggest InfiniGuard is 50 petabytes counting the data reduction technology. So we get that ready. On the InfiniBox, the recovery really is, you know, a couple of seconds and in that case, it's primary data in block format. So we just make that available. So on the InfiniBox, the recovery is once, well two. Identifying a known good copy, first step, then just doing recovery and it's available 'cause it's blocked data. >> And that recovery doesn't include movement of a whole bunch of data. It's essentially realignment of pointers to where the good data is. >> Right. >> Now in the InfiniBox as well as in InfiniGuard. >> No, it would be, So in the case of that, in the case of the InfiniGuard, it's a full recovery of a backup data set. >> Okay. >> So the backup software just launches and it sees, >> Okay. >> your backup one of Veeam and just starts doing a restore with the Veeam restoration technology. Okay? >> Okay. >> In the case of the block, as long as the physical InfiniBox, if that was the primary storage and then filter box is not damaged when you make it available, it's available right away to the apps. Now, if you had an issue with the app side or the physical server side, and now you're pointing new apps and you had to reload stuff on that side, you have to point it at that InfiniBox which has the data. And then you got to wait for the servers and the SAP or Oracle or Mongo, Cassandra to recognize, oh, this is my primary storage. So it depends on the physical configuration on the server side and the application perspective, how bad were the apps damaged? So let's take malware. Malware is even worse because you either destroying data or messing, playing with the app so that the app is now corrupted as well as the data is corrupted. So then it's going to take longer the block data's ready, the SAP workload. And if the SAP somehow was compromised, which is a malware thing, not a ransomware thing, they got to reload a good copy of SAP before it can see the data 'cause the malware attacked the application as well as the data. Ransomware doesn't do that. It just holds it for ransom and it encrypts. >> So this is exactly what we're talking about. When we talk about operational recovery and automation, Eric is addressing the reality that it doesn't just end at the line above some arbitrary storage box, you know, reaching up real recovery, reaches up into the application space and it's complicated. >> That's when you're actually recovered. >> Right. >> When the application- >> Well, think of it like a disaster. >> Okay. >> Yes, right. >> I'll knock on woods since I was born and still live in California. Dave too. Let's assume there's a massive earthquake in the bay area in LA. >> Let's not. >> Okay. Let's yes, but hypothetically and the data center's cat five. It doesn't matter what they're, they're all toast. Okay. Couple weeks later it's modern. You know, people figure out what to do and certain buildings don't fall down 'cause of the way earthquake standards are in California now. So there's data available. They move into temporary space. Okay. Data's sitting there in the Colorado data center and they could do a restore. Well, they can't do a restore. How many service did they need? Had they reloaded all of the application software to do a restoration. What happened to the people? If no one got injured, like in the 1989 earthquake in California, very few people got injured yet cost billions of dollars. But everyone was watching this San Francisco giants played in Oakland, >> I remember >> so no one was on the road. >> Al Michael's. >> Epic moment. >> Imagine it's in the middle of commute time in LA and San Francisco, hundreds of thousands of people. What if it's your data center team? Right? So there's a whole bunch around disaster recovery and business country that have nothing to do with the storage, the people, what your process. So I would argue that malware ransomware is a disaster and it's exactly the same thing. You know, you got the known good copy. You've got okay. You're sure that the SAP and Oracle, especially on the malware side, weren't compromised. On the ransomware side, you don't have to worry about that. And those things, you got to take a look at just as if it, I would argue malware and ransomware is a disaster and you need to have a process just like you would. If there was an earthquake, a fire or a flood in the data center, you need a similar process. That's slightly different, but the same thing, servers, people, software, the data itself. And when you have that all mapped out, that's how you do successful malware ransomeware recovery. It's a different type of disaster. >> It's absolutely a disaster. It comes down to business continuity and be able to transact business with as little disruption as possible. We heard today from the keynotes and then Jason Buffington came on about the preponderance of ransomware. Okay. We know that. But then the interesting stat was the percentage of customers that paid the ransom about a third weren't able to recover. And so 'cause you kind of had this feeling of all right, well, you know, see it on, you know, CNBC, should you pay the ransom or not? You know, pay the ransom. Okay. You'll get back. But no, it's not the case. You won't necessarily get back. So, you know, Veeam stated, Hey, our goal is to sort of eliminate that problem. Are you- You feel like you guys in a partnership can actually achieve that. >> Yes. >> So, and you have customers that have actually avoided, you know, been hit and were able to- >> We have people who won't publicly say they've been hit, but the way they talk about what they did, like in a meeting, they were hit and they were very thankful. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> And so that's been very good. I- >> So we got proof. >> Yes, we absolutely have proof. And quite honestly, with the recent legislation in the United States, malware and ransomware actually now is also regulatory and compliance. >> Yeah. >> Because the new law states mid-March that whether it's Herzog's bar and grill to bank of America or any large foreign company doing business in the US, you have to report to the United States federal government, any attack, same with the county school district with any local government, any agency, the federal government, as well as every company from the tiniest to the largest in the world that does, they're supposed to report it 'cause the government is trying to figure out how to fight it. Just the way if you don't report burglary, how they catch the burglars. >> Does your solution simplify testing in any way or reduce the risk of testing? >> Well, because the recovery is so rapid, we recommend that people do this on a regular basis. So for example, because the recovery is so quick, you can recover in 12 minutes while we do not practice, let's say once a month or once every couple weeks. And guess what? It also allows you to build a repository of known good copies. Remember when you get ransomeware, no one's going to come say, Hey, I'm Mr. Rans. I'm going to steal your stuff. It's all done surreptitiously. They're all James Bond on the sly who doesn't say "By the way, I'm James Bond". They are truly underneath the radar. And they're very slowly encrypting that data set. So guess what? Your primary data and your backup data that you don't want to be attacked can be attacked. So it's really about finding a known good copy. So if you're doing this on a regular basis, you can get an index of known good copies. >> Right. >> And then, you know, oh, I can go back to last Tuesday and you know that that's good. Otherwise you're literally testing Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday to try to find a known good copy, which delays the recovery process 'cause you really do have to test. They make sure it's good. >> If you increase that frequency, You're going to protect yourself. That's why I got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBEs. Great to see you. >> Great. Thank you very much. I'll be wearing a different Hawaiian shirt next to. >> All right. That sounds good. >> All right, Eric Herzog, Eric Herzog on theCUBE, Dave Vallante for David Nicholson. We'll be right back at VEEAMON 2022. Right after this short break. (light music playing)

>> 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, where we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. This is our second day at VeeamON 2018, our second year. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, my co-host. Phil Goodwin is here, he's a research director at IDC's storage systems and software group. Phil, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Pleasure to be here today. >> So you've been to more VeeamONs than we have, so you've seen even a greater evolution, although we've been to a lot of VeeamUGs. We saw a lot of green. This company has painted Chicago in green. What's your take on the progression and ascendancy of Veeam beyond just being a virtualization specialist? >> Sure, obviously the most interesting thing about Veeam is how they really have become the high growth leader of this industry, and in many ways, kind of the darling of the industry because they've got a lot of the momentum, a lot of the attention that's going on in the data protection and recovery software space. I think what has really struck me over the years of these VeeamON conferences, and really from the very first one that I attended three years ago, is the degree to which there is an ecosystem that's been built up around the products that they have for things like disaster recovery as a service, backup as a service and so forth. Where people take the Veeam software, build it into their own products and go to market with that, and I think that's totally unique in the way they've done that compared to many of their competitors. >> Let's see, we're talking about 800 plus million dollars in bookings, mid-30% growth rates. I presume the data protection market's not growing that fast. >> No, although it's surprisingly strong. Last year it grew at about 7% rate. We don't expect it to keep going that fast but if you compare that to other stores' software, which is 1% to 2% or in some cases even negative, it's actually an area that's quite bright. >> Yeah it's grown much, much faster than the overall IT business, right? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> And so, why? Why is it growing faster? >> Well part of it's driven by capacity. A lot of the vendor models are associated with the capacity and so they charge upgrades every year and as data is growing at about 40% per year on a compound annual growth rate, that does cause customers to upgrade their licenses. But we're also seeing an acceleration in the deployment of applications so we expect IT organizations, according to our research, to add an additional 200 applications over the next 36 months. That's not a lot of new applications. What we find in many cases is what we would call the traditional incumbent vendors, who have their footprint within the enterprise, maintain that footprint in many cases, but those new applications have the opportunity to bring in new products and that's really where the opportunity for Veeam is. >> So part of the growth is somewhat artificial if I understand it in that it's pricing driven, and so that would suggest, given that data protection is largely insurance, that the CFOs are going to look at that line out and say, "Oh, this isn't sustainable." Unless, and I want to run this by you, research indicates that Fortune 1000 companies leave, over a three to four year period, billions of dollars each on the table because of not the most end-to-end or well-thought-out architected data protection solutions. Maybe that expands the TAM a little bit, but is that kind of growth sustainable? You've already sort of indicated it's not, but maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Right. The nature of threats has really changed a lot over the years too, so if you look back on computing, it used to be system failure, human error, and to some degree natural disaster were your biggest threats. Nowadays it's actually ransomware, malware, and other things that are much bigger threats than the traditional types of threats that organizations have dealt with. As the evolution of data protection has come about, what we've found is very much a willingness among IT organizations to not simply try and go with a single product, but to rather buy a best-in-class product for specific platforms. In the case of Veeam, I think they really did a very successful job of riding the virtual infrastructure wave when most of their competitors were architected specifically for second platform types of applications. >> Phil, one of the interesting things to watch in Veeam is their expansion beyond that virtualization. What insight can you give us about data protection and SAS and public cloud and service providers? A lot of those environments you would think that the platform or the provider might have a choice, so how does Veeam get in there? How much do customers really have choice there? >> That's really a great point because what is happening is we're moving data protection from the system level. We've moved it up to the virtualization layer and now it's really moving to the application layer, where it is the application developer whose building that data protection directly into their application. So what we're seeing is those application developers, which as you mentioned many are SAS applications on the web, building the data protection into their specific environment. But the other thing that's happening is IT organizations are suddenly realizing that much of that data that is in the web or with those SAS applications is not being protected according to the SLAs of the organization. They're using third party tools and applications like Veeam to bring that data back on site and to protect it according to what the requirements and government's requirements are. >> Okay, so let's unpack some of this. If I understood it correctly, going back to the developers, as architecting in the data protection approach, is that a result of the DeVops trend, infrastructure as code, or is it something else driving it? >> I think it's more being driven by the fact that these are discrete applications outside the data center. So if I'm inside the data center and I'm trying to protect 100 different applications, I may try and apply the same techniques to all of them, the same policies. But these are applications like Salesforce.com, or Payday, or other applications that are really, for lack of a better term, a single application. That environment really doesn't have to consider the other systems within a data center. >> So it's the SAS guy saying "one size fits all." >> Phil: For them, yes. >> Which, by the way, is an age-old problem inside the data center. Either you were not protected enough or you were paying too much. Do companies like Veeam solve that problem by providing more granularity and maybe aligning better with that? >> Yeah. They go attack the problem in a couple of different ways. First of all, they certainly have their traditional business within the data center, but they're also partnering with many of the cloud-based organizations like Azure and Amazon and others to be able to help organizations protect data they have in the cloud. Plus they're working with specific applications to be able to provide that kind of protection for a SAS app. >> I want to come back to something you were talking about with Stu about best of breeds. We do a lot of these shows. You talk to a lot of customers and a lot of technology companies. You get two ends of the spectrum. You get the best of breed guys like Veeam say, "Hey, we're best of breed, "why would you buy that old, clunky, "outdated backup capability?" And then, without naming names, you get the integrated full stack companies going, "Why would anybody buy from some tiny little company? "Oh yeah, okay they're 800 million, "but they can't do digital transformation and big data "and SAS and blah blah blah! "So why would anybody, who cares about backup?" So you have two completely counterpoised positions. How can you help us parse through that? >> I think a lot of it comes down to who is the actual consumer and buyer of the solution and that's indeed changing. What we're seeing much more is it is the application developer, the application provider, or even the line of business making the decision as to what applications are being deployed, as opposed to the central IT organization. So whereas the central IT organizations say "This is part of digital transformation," the business unit may be buying other applications. >> We talked a little earlier about money being left on the table. I don't know what your research shows but clearly there's opportunities there that's not being harvested today. From a cost-benefit analysis standpoint, I know it's one area that you focus on and spend some time there, is it a reasonable expectation that CFOs will actually look at that lost opportunity, that soft revenue that they're losing, which really is not that soft, and say, "Hey, we actually need "to increase our spending in this area?" >> Some of them, yes. What you really find is a maturity curve, of course, where you have some organizations that really have a very traditional view and have not tried to move forward. But our research is showing that about 60% of organizations have embarked on some kind of digital transformation, and that about 70% have a cloud-first perspective. Those organizations really are looking at those kinds of opportunities, both in terms of cost, opportunity cost or absolute cost, and saying, "How can we optimize this environment entirely?" >> If I were the CFO, and let's say I had the cash so I wasn't capital constrained, I would still say, "Look, this is insurance, "so figure out a way to get more value out of this data. "You got all of this data in the backup repository, "what can we do with that? "What analysis can we do? "Can we maybe be more efficient "with regard to how we do security?" It's like the US government. "Can we have this agency talk to that agency "and figure out a way we can get more leverage?" and really be putting pressure on them to do that. Is that an unreasonable expectation for CFOs? >> No, and in fact what our research has shown is that about 40% of organizations use their backup data sets for analytics. They also, about 30% of them, 33% use it for other purposes such as development and test, staging, others. So organizations really are trying to leverage that vast amount of information that they have for other purposes. One of the challenges that come out though is GDPR, the European regulation to the right to be forgotten and the way organizations have to be able to manage that data. Going into those data repositories, including backup data sets, to say "Okay, this is data "that we have to expunge by regulation." >> Phil, I wonder, we've been talking about the threats of GDPR and you might get sued or everything. The last few years, we've really been talking about how we get insights and data. Insights can transform businesses around data. Is GDPR a threat to this whole wave of getting value out of data? >> I don't think it's a threat to getting the value out of the data, I think it's a threat to how you manage that data. And the threat is much more widespread than many organizations realize. If you're doing business with anyone who is European or has traveled to Europe, and really any kind of footprint in that regard can potentially put your organization at risk if you're capturing any of that data. >> But that stat you just threw out was pretty interesting. The 40% percent of organizations that you surveyed are actually doing some types of analytics with their backup data. I would think that governance and compliance and GDPR related stuff, they're going to take, those 40% are going to take a similar approach to GDPR. Say, "Okay, guys, we got to do this. "Find some more value out of it, "or else get you in a headlock." Right? That's a huge number! >> Right, and one of the ways you do that is, and that Veeam has done is to open up APIs, application programming interfaces, to allow third party organizations to leverage that data repository and do that kind of analytics. Veaam, themselves, or any other backup vendor can't really leverage, or can't really do that, but by opening that up to third parties it increases that ecosystem and increases the value that IT organizations can get from their data and their investment. >> Some of your research. Maybe you can highlight some of the stuff you're proud of, fun stuff you've been working on, things that are current, recent, that you want to highlight to the audience. >> I think some of the interesting things, the trends in the industry really are that the kinds of things like backup and recovery and high availability and disaster recovery, we see really going into a continuum of availability. Where, if I can move data across geographies, and I can recover my application seamlessly regardless of where the data is, why do I ever need to have disaster recovery again? And in fact, that's where we believe availability is going, and in fact the theme for Veeam at this show is hyper-availability. One of the ways you do that is by placing the data in the right locations for that kind of recovery. Watching from the days of backing up once a day onto tape to continuous availability is actually a pretty interesting development. >> So who's doing a good job in this place? Sounds like Veeam is getting it done obviously, and the numbers speak for themselves. You got the startups, Cohesity, Rubrik, Zerto obviously plays in there. You have Veritas is supposedly retooling. You had Bill Coleman in there, former BEA guy who's supposedly put a lot of R and D into that. You got the leader in Dell EMC. Obviously they have a lot of resource, spend a lot of money, they're going through a retooling process. IBM has software defined everything. It seems like it's jump ball right now instead of wide open. >> It really is. You look at, you mentioned Dell EMC, they're focusing on IOT. Well IOT generates a phenomenal amount of data. What data needs to be captured, how does it need to be captured, protected, managed, is going to be a huge issue for organizations so that's a very interesting target. Veritas has been looking at their 360 data management and really taking a holistic view of data management and they're doing some very interesting things there. Commvault has done actually a pretty nice job of getting into some cloud-related kinds of things. And then finally as you mentioned, Rubrik and Cohesity, I would put them along with Veeam as probably the three companies that right now are disrupting this industry the most. There are probably certainly some other ones that are up and coming, but in terms of those that are really providing some disruption, I would probably go with those three. >> Alright, they're breaking down VeeamON 2017. Phil, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great stuff, really good analysis. Appreciate you having on. >> Pleasure, guys, take care. >> The trains are backing up. We're trying to jam everything in before they shut down our studio, so we'll be right back right after this short break. (upbeat music)