(soft music) >> From around the globe, It's theCube with digital coverage of VeeamON 2020 brought to you by Veeam. Hi buddy. Welcome to the cubes coverage of VeeamON 2020, (laughs) the virtual version of VeeamON. and I'm here with Justin Warren who's the chief analyst and managing director of Pivot Nine. Justin, Good to see you. How are things down under? >> Not too bad. It was a bit of a rough start to the year. But things are looking a little bit better here in the middle of the year. It's tough times. >> And of course Justin, you may, you guys may know, as a many times you post and of course our other almost daily CUBE host these days, Stu Minivan joining us to unpack the Veeam keynotes, the trends in the marketplace. How you doing Stu? >> I'm doing great, Dave. Yeah. As you said, rather than us flying all around the country, we're in doing remote interviews every day, Its different, 2020.(laughs) >> So this has been quite a year, obviously. Because of course it was from Veeam's perspective, started out with that blockbuster exit $5 billion exit to private equity slash VC, insight capital, insight partners which was just an awesome thing for the founders. And some of the employees and actually going forward now, I think the balance of the employees really they'll have an opportunity to grow the valuation of the company even further. I think that's what we've seen with insight. I mean they want exits, so it's like they used to talk about, Ratmir Used to talk about Act Two (laughs) well now we're going to see it play out guys. So just some high level stats, a billion dollars last year in bookings. They're really shifting to an ARR model in a big way, 375,000 customers, 160 countries, 4,200 employees. Justin, do you remember when you first ran into Veeam at like some VMUG somewhere, who are these guys? Wow. They've certainly made it. >> They really have. And it's honest surprising but also not . They've feeling when I first encountered Veeam was that it's like well, who is this people? Yeah. What are they doing? It was very much SMB. It was very much practitioner, a very technical focus and people who used it just loved the product because back then the informal tagline was, it just were. And in those days it really was amazing. That there was a product that was simple and easy to use and worked on it, all of the things that they needed it to do. And I had a very, very VM focused back in that time. Hence the name of the entire company was go Veeam. And to see it grow from that one even then was quite a broad base but a very much an SMB market and see it grow across the entire industry. It's pretty remarkable. There is no really any ... Not many other companies who've pulled off this kind of growth momentum. >> Yeah. I mean Justin I think you nailed it there. I think back it's a company that hasn't stayed at a steady state still though. In the virtualization community, there were ripple effects. When Veeam went beyond just doing VMware and started to do Microsoft. Then a few years ago, I remember after we were doing the Q bed at the show, there was such a real push forward to extend the relationship with Microsoft, to the cloud. One of the things that we think we see loud and clear at this show is that VMware relationship early strong and as VMware goes to various cloud environment, Veeam can go along with that so that the relationship stays strong, but they're also in a lot of the public clouds and expanding beyond what they're doing. Yep. They're moving into the enterprising and I think one of the things we'll dig into is how enterprising is Veeam today. But absolutely it could company that very different than they were two or three years ago. And Dave, as you correctly pointed out now there's not the, who is this weird privately held company? Who's the ownership? I think there's a little bit of a more of a understanding as to, they're a big player in the space. And a little bit more a understanding as to where things go going forward. >> Well, I want to get your take on sort of their, we're going to go through a lot today, but the vision, that Danny Allan laid out in his keynote. And I think it's quite interesting. I mean, given the energy and the VC money coming into the market behind Cohesity and Rubrik the noise that they're making, what he put up as their vision is the most trusted provider of backup solutions, that deliver cloud data management. So as you guys well know, Cohesity and Rubrik really pushing this notion of data management, which means a lot of things to a lot of people. It's interesting to note that Veeam, first of all, new management, new CEO, Danny Allan, and now CTO, and obviously in a strategy role. So he's putting forth this kind of back to basics a mentality but then leapfrogging and trying to leapfrogging the data management narrative into the cloud, bringing cloud into it, super-gluing and cloud and data management which I think is really smart because when you think about multicloud data management for data protection It's got to be about cloud native and it's got to be somebody who's got no agenda around hardware or even necessarily a public cloud agenda. And Veeam wants to the be that Company. What do you think of that messaging Justin? >> I think broadly speaking, I think Veeam can pull it off. I do have some concerns around the whole data management thought. On the first thing of just being able to pull this off across the industry, I think vein is well-placed because it's always been about software. And it's always been about partnership. Though Veeam has been channel , It has been a hundred percent channel back in the day, very, very little direction. If any, at all, they are very strong on partnerships. They will partner with anybody because basically they don't really mind who else you deal with. They just want your backup to be done through Veeam. And the backup is very strong. That is what they are great at. So the risks they may own the data management side is it we've seen this play before pretty much ever backup company at some point just to talk about, Hey, we have a couple of your data. It's kind of sitting there and not really doing anything. What if we would attend this into something else and start using it for other purposes? But it's never really paid off for anybody. No, One's really done anything with their backup data in it in a true sense because we haven't seen anyone else become very good at that and be known throughout the industry of OES. Once you've backed up your data to the scene, you can then do all of these others stuff with it. I can't name anyone who's actually been quite successful at that but I can name plenty of people who've grown. >> Well Commvault is certainly tried actually guys, once you bring up the good competitive slide I want to that's a good lead in Justin. So what this data from our data partner, ETR Enterprise Technology Research, those whose watch our breaking analysis every week you see that we use this data extensively. And basically what we're showing here is the fundamental methodology that ETR uses is this thing called net score, which is kind of like net promoter score. It basically asks customers, are you buying? Are you increasing spending or decreasing spending takes the less subtracted from the more, and then you get a net score. That's the vertical axis. And it's an indicator of spending velocity, the horizontal axis it's labeled market share. It's not like IDC counts market share. It's a measure of mark pervasiveness within the survey. Then it's calculated by the mentions of the vendor divided by the total number of mentions within that sector. Now what we're showing here is a comparison of pure play data protection vendors and you can see there's no Dell EMC there's no IBM because they're not pure plays. I can't cut the data by data protection. So I got put fourth the pure plays. But let's walk through this so you could see here is you've got the pervasive company in the upper left. You can see the net scores and they could see the so the shared ends. This is 1,269 survey respondents. And you can see the shared end is the presence of these companies within that 1269, then CIOs and IT practitioners. So you can see Commvault very high presence but then interestingly and I guess not surprisingly Veeam right there. And then it drops off Veritas, Rubrik and Cohesity, and you can see where the heat map is on the vertical axis Rubrik, One of the highest net score is in the data set, and you've got Cohesity also very high, not as great of a presence in the data set. You can see Veeam very respectable. This was a 15 year old company with a relatively high net score. Really, really respectable, as I say in the solidly in the mid thirties and then Commvault getting into the pink zone and then Veritas in the red zone, low net score. And not as great as you're great at presence, which some concerns there for Veritas. So that's guys, that's the horses on the track. Anything there surprise you? Was it Veritas's position, it doesn't really surprise me, but it is remarkable just how our wife and the rest of the players that they are. And certainly that matches in the conversations the way having here with customers and others in industry. The nine Veritas just does not come out in the way that it used to. It used to be, I would have say that it would be, it used to be neck and neck with Commvault. Now we really don't hear the name Vera Tasman at all. Which is as a long time participant in the industry, Veritas was very much part of my career very early on. They were a stand by name. They were very well respected. But say seeing that sort of thing happened to it a great company, like Veritas it's a bit sad. Really? >> Well, you mean look at you're right. The Veritas was always the gold standard of a company with no hardware agenda. Who's going to be the Veritas of X? You would always use that sort of line or phrase. But now Stu, when I think about the opportunities here, It seems like multicloud is going to within the data protection space, is going to be run by somebody who can do cloud native. So in other words, running cloud native on, Azure, AWS and Google, maybe Alibaba, but cloud native, being able to take advantage of those native services on the cloud. Somebody who's got an on-prem presence who can bring that cloud experience on-prem. Who actually can do it also across clouds, a very, very high performance, low latency, very efficient, low cost. So in thinking about that multi-cloud landscapes, do how do you assess the horses on the track? >> Yeah, well, you know, Dave, first of all, one of the things Justin said, Veeam is partner-driven. One of the conversations I'm having for VeeamON is with the partner Alliance team, they are a hundred percent partner driven. And also for so many years, we talk about one of the negatives about Veeam is, Oh, well, most of their customer base is SMB, well, if you look at the cloud, one of the knocks against cloud for a long time was, Oh, it's just the really small companies that are doing a lot of clouds. Well, my data managers whether I'm a small company or a big company, so a lot of these pieces come together, Veeam has really been able to move into that cloud environment. What they're doing, sans across them . Data protection seems to be one of those areas when you talk about, the mantras, the industry like Amazon and say, okay when are they going to eat your business? Well, you know, Amazon's got a strong storage team. But data protection. They've got some very basic functionality in there but there's a robust ecosystem and companies like Veeam, I can capitalize on. >> Well, you mentioned the there in the enterprise, of course we all know the story of there a couple of years ago, there was a big enterprise, of course, they brought in some executives from VMware, some really high quality folks. They struck relationships with companies like HPE and Cisco. I think HPE in particular is it's paid off quite well but everybody wants to do business with Cisco cause they're very partner friendly and it's interesting. They kind of pull back from that not kind of. They pull back on that major initiative, the high price, direct sales people. And I remember doing a breaking analysis when Veeam got acquired or maybe it was even previous to that and making the comment to that yeah. They had to pull back on that, but I dug into the ETR data. Veeam actually has quite a presence in large companies. Maybe it's division of a large company, or maybe it's shadow IT, I don't know. People who just you don't want the simple backup but they're VMware customers. And it seems to me they really have an opportunity to go up market. Maybe kind of to reset that enterprise strategy. What do you guys think? >> Yeah, I think that's was what they were trying to do a couple of years ago. So I think hotly, they just didn't succeed quickly as they had hoped. There was also a little bit of an issue, which is something I remember speaking to the Retina Mayor about some years ago. About the challenge of being able to serve these different markets, because what SMB wants is quite different to what an enterprise want. And being able to fulfill both of those needs simultaneously from one company it's really challenging because things that you do for enterprise annoy SMB, the things that around ran complexity to be able to deal with the inherently complex environments that are enterprise. SMB just doesn't have that issue. Whereas if you can only do things in SMB type ways that annoys the enterprise, being able to satisfy both of those markets in a way that they both happy with. And so that no one else feels neglected that's pretty much what they wish that were struggling with nothing. So the hot pivot to enterprise they existing customer base, which then was rolling mostly SMB. They started to feel a little bit neglected. No, it was just a bit of a stumble. I think it feels like they've reset now and understood how to do these in a slightly more gentle fashion. But we can call it that. So rather than going for that really aggressive push into enterprise, they are just following the natural momentum, which is people who've come from SMB. And some of those medium companies grow into very large companies and bring them with them and others just that people as they move through their career will grow from a small company to maybe a medium company. And then they'll end up in a division of an enterprise scale and they used to Veeam and they want to bring what they they know in like they want to bring that experience to the company that they now work at. That is a sort of natural flow there I think for them that is only now showing the fruit of what was actually laid down a few years ago. >> Well, and I think there was something else going on there too, which is, we now know the company was positioning for an exit that was up for sale. So enterprise is very expensive, it's time consuming. The ROI is often times very long. That's why you see enterprise startups raising gobs of money and they just ,i think weren't getting the ROI. And when you think about insight, this is one of the more forward thinking, great PE or VC firms they'll live with rule of 40, right, where a rule of 35 or 80 rule of 50, where it's not just about growth, it's about growth plus EBIT. And if you add those up and it adds the 40 or 45 or 35 or whatever their target is, I don't know exactly what Insights looking forward but that's the combination that drives value. So my guess is they wanted to dial up EBIT and give it or the sale. And they might've had specific targets, who knows. That were being negotiated but i think that probably had something to do with it. And as well as you're pointing out, Justin, it takes time but us to If we look into some of the things that we're hearing from the messaging, some of the announcements and we'll get into that. Big, big discussion around digital transformation. One of the first, if not the first to do a backup for office 365, another a new version of Veeam backup for AWS. Oh. So there were some enterprisey types of things that they were there were talking about, a little glimpse at version 11.Any thoughts there, Stu. >> Yeah. Well, David, it's interesting, Justin put up a really good point there when you opt digital transformation Dave. Well, one of the things we've been saying for years, the difference between a company before and after that is you're leveraging the data. So, If I look at Veeam and say, do I protect the data absolutely? Do I secure your data? I'm involved with that. Actually one of the leadership changes, they just hired their first CSO. So bigger push for security, that'll help them a lot in what they do with it, public sector, that's where the CSO actually came from the public by that will help them. But what I didn't, haven't heard as much yet, is okay. I'm a piece of that data. And if you're going to the cloud, I can manage, I can protected and secure it. But how do I help connect people to get more value out of the data and leverage that data? So I think Justin nailed it with that. So many pieces that are important about data that Veeam does do. But that the discussion we always have in AI is be able to take that raw data and converting it into insights and out facts. >> Well, to Justin's point earlier about data management. And I want to to pick up on what you were saying about security, obviously everybody's talking about ransomware, but to me, you're talking about the CSO. The role of the CSO is obviously of course evolving it's Al board level topic. CSO, oftentimes was off as a peer, I say off, but as a peer to the CIO on purpose, they didn't want the CSO to report to the CIO cause it would have been like the Fox watching the hen house. But i think cause it was this sort of failure equals fire mentality and they wanted the truth. But I think now people have transparent discussions at the board about security. Hey, we know we're going to get penetrated. It's all about our response. Obviously we have to deal with the layers, but we're exposed, everybody's exposed. So I think increasingly organizations are realizing that it's a team sport, you've got to get everybody involved, the lines of business, the users being responsible. And of course IT, my point is that security and data protection are now becoming two sides of the same point. Almost like privacy. We've shared that before. So when you think about digital transformation, you think about data protection as part of your security portfolio? Not just something that you bolt on as an afterthought. And I think in many respects, Justin, that's maybe a bigger market opportunity for a lot of these data protection companies and backup companies, than the so-called opaque data management that you're referring to before. >> Yeah. I'd agree with that because what I'm saying from the security side of the market, particularly within large enterprise is a change in mindset from a prevention to a resilient, that kind of mindset around it and how to deal with it. Though previously there was a lot of either we'll just ignore it cause there's not really a problem and it's not going to happen to us. Then it became a kind of a fear response of just, we want to prevent it ever happening to us. Now it's kind of we've gone to an acceptance. And when going through the Kubler Ross. A framework for dealing with grief. People aren't understanding that sooner or later bad things are going to happen to us. What we need to figure out is how we deal with it when it does. And that's the mindset that you need to have when you're talking about data protection. So it's the same kind of mindset that you need for security. And now people are starting to look at, okay, how do we firstly detect if we've actually got a problem, if there's a breach or if there's a risk, how do we notice that we know that that's happening? And then once we noticed that, what do we do about it? So that's things like catching it early so that when you you'll recovery is small, which is the same general idea around software development of fail fast. You want to just pick the failures early so that you can correct them all. Basically if you find yourself in a hole stop digging and then once you've figured that out, okay now how do we recover from this in a way that is minimally disruptive to the business. And that could be like recovering from ransomware, having grilly solid backup. So you can restore weekly, that's the best protection against ransomware that you can have. Then you can start trying to figure out, okay, we know we can recover if it happens to us now let's just try to reduce the number of times that this does actually happen. That's the general idea that I'm seeing come through. More often with CSOs, with CIOs and with board level conversation. >> I want to come back to Justin and then Stu with your final thoughts. Justin, what do you take on this Veeam universal license? Was this a case of, hey we had so much complexity across our portfolio like that you're going to the Italian restaurant, you're just here you want everything in the menu or there's too much to figure out just the order for me. And they're trying to clean that up or do you see this as sort of a more innovative licensing approach? That's more cloud friendly. What do you make of that? >> I think it's a bit of both. think it's part of VeeamON thoughts as well again, from back in the very early parts of the company, the idea was that it just works. It should be simple and easy to use. So it's completely on brand for Veeam to have a simple and easy to use licensing model. There's a lot of criticism from enterprise and particularly from medium and small business, well overly complicated licensing models. We see people wrestling daily with the billing system within AWS. We see people frustrated with the licensing approach of Oracle. We see them seemingly frustrated when you not figuring out exactly what have I lost since then, what happened and what am I not licensed for in, Microsoft ecosystem. So for them to have a simple and easy to use licensing approach, it just fits right in with the rest of what the company is doing. It does also simplify the way that they organize and operate their company, as they have to deal with lots and lots of different partners, having a complicated licensing system on top of all of those other complicated licensing systems would just make their own job much, much harder. So this way it actually works for them as well as for their customers. >> Yeah. Simplicity is the watch word there Stu and I get, I mean, I get the sense in speaking to the customers, partners, that Veeam well has basically has the philosophy make it easy to and we'll sell more. We're not going to try to micromanage, to maximize revenue. You heard this certainly from some of their big partners who said that Veeam made it transparent. Our sales people for commissions and their salespeople and really make it easy to do business with. So Stu I'll give you the last word here. >> Yeah. So I think, as you mentioned, Veeam also listening and seeing what their partners are doing. So we've watched companies like AWS, trying to make a little bit simpler as to if I'm choosing compute, I don't have to be locked into one model a aisle, pay those across the environment or pure storage and other partner of Veeams. If I stay a customer, I make it easy to be able to move from one generation the next though, that cloud like model absolutely is what we expect. And when you talk to customers today, we know the only constant is change. I actually loved in the keynote. There was a I believe it was Satya Nadella that they quoted and said that, we've seen more change in the last two months that we normally would see in a decade. So Veeam being agile, moving, listening to their customers, learning with their partners and making sure that they've got things in the modern consumption model. >> Well, guys, thanks for helping us break down the VeeamON 2020, some of the trends in the market place.Some of the commentary and the keynote. Justin Warren Stu Minivan. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks Dave. >> I thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for Stu and Justin and the entire cube team, people right there. We'll be back with our coverage of VeeamON 2020, right after this short break. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Miami Beach, Florida. It's the CUBE. Covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Hi everybody, welcome back to Miami. This is the CUBE the leader in Live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. We're here at VeeamON day one, 2019 at the Fountain Blue hotel in Miami. Danny Allen is here. He's the vice president of product strategy at Veeam, welcome. >> Thank you, I always love being here with you. >> Good to see you. >> Fresh off the Keynote we we're joking that you're up against South Beach and you had packed out room none the less. People we're into it. It was like the KoolAid injection of, the firehose of feature announcements. Eight demo's in about an hour, hour and a half. So congratulations for getting that done. >> Thank you. >> Feels like a weight off your shoulders I'm sure, you've been working on that for a long long time as have your engineers. Okay, well let's get into it. Where do you want to start? Veeam? Product strategy? I mean it's an exciting time for you guys. You know, dial back several years ago there were a lot of nice incremental improvements. But there's a lot of like, really see changing things that are going on. Your take? >> So I would argue the last ten years is all about modernizing the data center. Even though, people have been talking about clouds significantly, over the last ten years. The adoption hasn't really been there. So now were at this inflection point where all these organizations are saying okay, now I really have to do something about cloud. The fight for dominance in the cloud management era is only really beginning now. And will unfold over the next few years. >> That's some interesting competitive dynamics going on. There's a lot of money (clears throat) pouring into the space. Why do you think Veeam is in such a good position to be as, what Ratmir called the dominant player in cloud data management? >> So, two things really. So we have this maniacal focus on make it simple, make it realiable, make it flexible. But one of the other things, that I think that really drives this, is-- so those are differentiators. Simplicity, reliability, flexibility. But we have an unfair advantage. In that we have 350,000 customers that are giving us guidance on how to make it simple, how to make it reliable, how to be flexible. >> You know one of the other things-- you've been at this like I said since seven A.M this morning >> (giggles) >> We're at the Analyst and the media briefing. You just did the Keynote. You talked about the five stages the Veeam availability platform. And it was refreshing, to actually hear a company who's traditionally a back-up software company. Say, start with backup. Right? >> Yes. >> Everybody is sort of running away from the term. And you're saying start there. Backup cloud mobility, visibility, orchestration, automation. So you sort of laid out this journey, but the core of it, is back-up. Because that's kind of what you guys are all about, right? >> That's how you get your data. Everyone wants to talk about artificial intelligence, in power points. And machine learning, more real of course. And I want to talk about where we're goin', but we're not there today. I mean, we have customers that struggle with back-up. And they struggle with back-up in their data center and in the cloud. So, I always highlight to customers, yes, we want to go there. And we'll help you get there. But start with back-up, because that's about aggregating you data into one place. >> So, you're talkin' about the customers being just sort of starting really, their to really dig into the cloud. I mean obviously, I don't know what the stat is it's lke 20% of work loads are in the cloud. 80% to go, depending on who's data that you're looking at. And, typically you would think the vendor community leads-- >> Mhm. >> The user adoption. Okay, that makes sense. But so what are the specific things now that we're I guess, let's see, 2006 it all started. >> Yes. >> 2010, we started really paying attention to it. So, now that we're a decade and change in, what are the learnings on how was that affecting your product strategy? >> So, one of things, the initial thought, 2010 to 2015 maybe, people thought well I'll just pick up my data center and move it over here and drop it in the cloud. What they quickly learned is, I always say the cloud is not a charity, right? They layer in margin, and so just picking up infrastructure and moving it somewhere else doesn't necessarily leverage the cloud for what it's good at. And so, I don't -- Sometimes what we actually see is reprioritization, like the data goes back on premises after it moves to the cloud. But we are beginning to see, cloud native applications that are designed for cloud. And that's where I think it's really interesting. Looking at Kubernetes looking at functions as a service. That is where I think the cloud, is really going to find it's legs over the next few years. >> Yeah, you talked about that in your Keynote That you're going to need backup for things like Lambda and functions in the service. You're going to need back up for containers. And that's a whole new world. It's not just back-up, as we were talkin' earlier, about data assurance. Spitting down containers, spitting them up. Making it harder for the bad guys to sort of figure out where the vulnerabilities are. So, that's clearly part of the I don't want to say road map 'cause Ratmir said well we don't really have these strict roadmaps. >> Yes. >> But part of the vision. >> Yes, absolute part of the vision and strategies. So what we do is, we keep our finger in the pulse of what is happening. Like I say, we have an unfair advantage. 350,000 customers. How many of them are actually moving to the cloud? What are they moving to the cloud? Are they building in the cloud? So, having that visibility into how this cloud adoption is taking place, is giving us an advantage that frankly other companies don't have. So, we invest in understanding that and then being ready when the scale actually tips. >> Mhm. >> So, one of the things that I find particularly interesting, is that back-up, and restore, we've said it a couple times today has historically been a bolt on. Something, that you do as an afterthought. Something you do once a system's been built. But it's this transformation, this move to digital business, puts data at the center of a companies strategy and value proposition. It means that now, this whole notion, this whole-- what back-up does, and why it's now important, is because it comes, it becomes for the first time, central to what a companies strategic business capabilities are. How is that shifting, as a product guy? How is is that shifting, how you balance and how you get information about features and functions, and no road maps, but what you do next? >> We always look at how we can enable that next generation of activities. So, you made and interesting comment there. You said people always bolt on back-up after the fact. And I look back, I come out of the security industry. People will bolt security on, after they've built the system. We only really became better as an industry, when we built security into the applications, rather than-- >> Something we're still learning to do. >> Yes. And we're only now so people are still bolting on back-up I would argue that we're now going through this phase of building data management into our platforms. Building data management in is more than just back-up it's an insuring that all of the data you have the visibility across it, that you can unlock it, that you can distribute it. Because if we're only looking at data in a reactive way we're missing the greater opportunity to make our businesses run faster. >> Yeah well, faster and better, we're diminishing the value of the options that we have on how we use our data. >> Yes. >> And that's not what you want to do in digital business setting. We talk about assurance. >> Mhm. >> Data assurance, so data protection is one thing. But that seems kind of like what's already happened. Whereas, data assurances, ensure that your data is in the right place, at the right time, with the right set of services and the right set of meta data, so that you can spin up that Kubernetes cluster if that's where you need it. >> Yes. >> How does that notion, that kind of forward reaching, turning data into asset, generating new strategic value streams out of your data, from a platform like Veeam, how does that comport with this notion of assurance? >> Good question, and-- a challenge that we have frankly as Veeam, is that our typical buyer has been the back-up data center assurance buyer. And as you begin to look at how do we expand beyond this to unlock data and build systems in all of sudden there's new constituent in play. It's not the IT administrator anymore. It's the compliance team, it's the security team. It's whatever team happens to be involved. So, we operate this in a few different ways. One is certainly at a marketing level. Just the messaging around Ransome, where the messaging around compliance, and GDPR, the messaging around how you can do more with data. But frankly one of the big things that we do is events like this. We have CIO's and administrator's of IT I was speaking with CIO last night, he started out as an administrator of Veeam, sorry VMware ten years ago, and now he's a CIO. And so, these events are what enable us to get the message out, about what Veeam is actually capable of. >> That's not an uncommon profile by the way. >> (giggles) Yes. >> One more question if I may, that you got a strong security background and now your in data protection. Those two, groups, are looking at many of the same problems. >> Mhm. >> And if you think about where the security guys are going, they're increasingly looking at what they can do with data from a services standpoint that goes beyond security. And you look at what data protection is doing, you're looking at how you can start to add more data security attributes to the platform that you have. Where does this-- where does security and data protection intersect? And come together? And when do you think? >> Well, frankly, I believe that Veeam is at the intersection of that now. >> Okay. >> And to take it one step further, I think it's not only data protection, data security but also data privacy. So the advent of GDPR and regulatory around users ownership of data. And I think it's going to get worse, before it gets better. I'll be honest on that because we have this patchwork of regulations with no central model and if I was a CIO I would be pulling my hair out. But I believe that Veeam is well positioned because we're at the intersection and we can see all of this data. That's why visibility is the center stage in that five stage journey. Because you move from being reactive to being proactive with the data. And proactive in terms in of security, and proactive in terms of data privacy. >> You know it's like a three sides coin, if that's even such a thing. >> (giggles) >> We've talked about security, has shifted from one of pure defensive to responsive. How do I respond? How quickly can I respond? You know, data protection has always been about recovery. >> Mhm. >> I think two of you're firehose, demo's today were about fast recovery. From backups and >> Yes. >> And then recovery to (mumbles). And I feel like I kind of agree. It could get worse, before it gets better. When you think about privacy, it sort of reminds me of the early days of the federal rules of civil procedure and you're trying to plug holes with email archiving. And it was just a band aid. >> Mhm. >> You mention GDPR, a couple of times. How have you seen, GDPR sort of affect the way in which people think about data protection and data management? Has it been a real up-tick? In awareness? Is it still, sort of like the email archiving, plugging the finger in the dike, what's your take? >> Well, I just wrote an article on this actually because May 25th is the one year anniversary of the implementation of GDPR. But its done a few different things. One is, its raised user awareness and organizational awareness of the issue of data privacy as opposed to security. That the users have some ownership over their data. So if nothing else, its just raised awareness for the users and the organizations. The second thing though, that its done, its actually put, there's legal teeth to this. There's been hefty fines associated with it. And I think those are only going to increase. The market is only really getting started. We're going to see how it plays out over the next five years. But I expect to see more GDPR compliance issues and more fines associated with it. But ultimately it's better for the end user because they get the ownership that frankly they deserve with their data. >> So this right to be forgotten, is sort of central to GDPR. So, how can the backup corpus, you know be a linch pin of the right to be forgotten. Or, potentially the smoking gun if it's not found. >> (giggles) >> Thoughts on that. >> So, we've introduced specific capabilities for this. So, around GDPR, we have simple things. When I say simple things, complex. But we've made it simple for customers to tag data. Does this belong in this country, versus this country, this country. Because actually when you recover forget about whether it's privacy data, are you even allowed to do that. But secondly, we introduced a step and update for this was back in January that when you recover data you can actually say, I want to run this script to eliminate that user's data from being recovered. Because if they exercise the right to be forgotten, after the database is in archive, and then you recover it, their data is back all of a sudden. So we introduce, a sandbox environment. Where you could run all of the same GDPR right to be forgotten scripts, so when it's recovered that's eliminated. And our focus has always been make those types of processes really simple for our end customers. >> So I got excited this morning when you were talking about the fast recovery from back-up. >> Mhm. >> And you talked about replication and where that fits. But being able to have the architecture and the meta data access, to be able to do a fast recovery from back-up is pretty profound. >> Yes. >> It seems like your architecture is designed in a way that it's not a do-over. As a product guy that's probably quite helpful. But I wonder if you could just describe sort of the-- the tenants of the architecture. Just in terms of what it means for Veeams future, future proofing, however, you know buzzword we want to throw at it. But there's an architectural component that was my takeaway from this mornings conversation, that's fundamental. >> Yeah, one of the fundamental components is our data is self-describing. If you have WinZip and I have 7-Zip I can send you a file, and you can open it. And we did that with different programs entirely. So when we do a backup, there's no dependency on a central server, or central management environment. And that's really important when you move things from the cloud, to on premises to another cloud, to different environments because otherwise they all need to talk to one another. In order to understand , what the data is that they receive. Another problem with that model, is that if that central management environment goes down you've lost everything. With a self-describing format, what it means is even if the Veeam Software blows up and goes away if I have that VBK file, I can recover all of the data in it. And that is very unique to us. Because if you do your data protection in the cloud, you just need to move the data on premises and I can open it on premises with a completely different software stack if you will. If you acquire a new company I can open their back-ups even assuming I have the keys, and permissions and security and all of that. Even though it was managed or backed up with completely different management stack. >> So, your saying if a competitor loses their catalog. >> Yes. >> They're screwed. >> Yes. >> And that's not the case with you guys. >> We actually had this happen just recently in a (mumbles). Customer had both a competitor and our software. And they were hit with Ransomware. The Ransomware hit the meta data catalog and they lost everything in the competitors software. Now, because they were following the 3-2-1 rule and they had one data offsite with Veeam, they were able to recover 100% of the Veeam back-ups, and 0% of the competitors back-ups. >> Well, that's story. >> (giggles) >> Yeah but-- >> Case study in the making. >> But that is actually, it's fundamental to the model. And it's not only fundamental for block storage back-ups but also the way we introduce object storage, and cloud object storage models as well. That it's completely self describing even if your Veeam software goes away and your ten years down the road. You can still get that data back. >> Okay. We got to give you the final word here. Day one, we're wrapping up day one with Danny Allen. Head of Product Strategy at Veeam. Your Keynote, the Analyst Feedback, Customer Feedback, summarize it all into a bumper sticker. You know, take as much time as you like. >> (laughter) Well, this is an exciting year for us. So we've, we have a really strong focus on cloud. You probably see that all over. Cloud data management we're talking about over and over again. >> It's on the wall. >> It's on the wall. It's on the pins that we wear. It's everywhere. So cloud data management, and another thing that you, I don't know whether people have noticed but we've put the focus back on our buyer. Who is the technical decision maker. So rather than talking about the environment ten years from now, and artificial intelligence, and machine learning. While we get excited about those things, we've brought it back to our core buyer. Because the budget today is for back-up. The budget is not for artificial intelligence. There is a budget for back-up. So we've done two things. Focus on cloud, and focus on that technical decision maker and it seems to be resonating. Customers all day long, great, great conversations. >> Well, it's pragmatic. You guys are pragmatic company, always have been. Danny Allen, thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. It was great to see you. >> Thank you very much . >> All right and thank you. That's a wrap for day one. Peter Buress and I will be back tomorrow again wall to wall coverage. This is the CUBE, and we're here at VeeamON 2019, in Miami. We'll see you tomorrow. (electronic music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage, here in Las Vegas, for VMworld 2018, with Day Three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage, two sets. Our ninth year of covering VMworld, we're going to have like 96 interviews, a lot of content happening, lot of updates from the entrepreneurs, from the executives, and also the partnerships. In this segment we're going to be talking Cisco and Veeam. We got Stefan Renner who's the technical director of Global Alliances for Veeam, and Chris O'Brien, Technical Marketing Director at Cisco. Programmable networks, easy-to-use backup restore, disaster recovery, all those great stuff. >> You guys just get here from Omnia? (laughing) >> Welcome to theCUBE. >> It's a good party. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for havin' us. >> Do we look like that? (laughing) >> I feel like that. (laughing) >> You know, you guys have been very successful on the Veeam side. We had Peter McKay, the co-CEO on yesterday. Cisco has been very active and relevant in programmable DevOps, or DevNetOps, as it has been called in there. So the need to make things programmable and easy, are a nice combination. You guys have a partnership. How is the Cisco/Veeam partnership going, how did it start? Take a minute to explain, how it all came together, and what's the current situation of the partnership? Well, I think from a Cisco perspective, the partnership is going great, fantastic. They were Partner of the Year. What we're hearing from our customers is they want us to solve some of their problems around how do they scale and manage their data, right? I'm from the UCS Business Unit. We see an opportunity for us to bring UCS was built on programmability, right? We have the APIs, we have those capabilities. We started out with Veeam a few, I guess 18 months ago, maybe two years ago, really focusing on some solutions around our HyperPlex platform, and we released a number of validated designs. When we do these validated designs, it's not just Cisco doing the work. We're in the labs together, we're developing the solutions. >> With Veeam. >> With Veeam. All the engineering efforts, and then obviously, as you go through and you grow that solution, you really see an opportunity where you can enhance the solution. So things like automation, we want to bring that to the table, certainly, with our partner. >> And what's your contribution on this? Obviously, Veeam's role in the solution. Are you guys doing joint validations, or joint engineering? Talk about the integration piece with Cisco, why it's important. >> If you look back, maybe it's two years, right? I took on Veeam actually three years ago, three-and-a-half years ago, and when actually, we really started to kick off the thing with Cisco. So it's a bit more than two years, I would say it's three years, right? But in these days, a couple of years back, it's more about finding a right data protection platform, where we can host Veeam on. Meaning a backup server, right? And these days, it was more about back and recovery. Well, today we talk about hyper-availability. It's not only about backing up stuff or recovering stuff, it's about providing the whole platform, the whole orchestration layer for data availability. Back in these times, three years ago, it was about finding an s3260 or a c240 server of Cisco, which fits exactly the needs we need for Veeam to run on it, right? But over the last, now, 24 months, since Cisco really started HyperFlex and going into hyperconvergency, we partner with them to make sure we have the right data protection for this kind of solution. That's what you just talked about, talking about integrations. We really invested a lot of time and efforts on both fights, it's not only Veeam development, it's also trying to see Cisco develop, to integrate into HyperFlex, to make sure we can provide the right data protection for the customer needs are. >> So talk about the high availability, I just want to talk about that for a second, 'cause I think this really highlights one, the relationship, and the desire in the market for realtime data, whether it's for developers, or for applications, to integrate. High availability is about having data available and integrating into whatever that would be, whether it's a mishmash of application development, and routing across networks. This is a huge deal, this is not like a punchline. High availability used to be, oh, we have a data center where it's fault tolerant. There's a whole another new level that that's going to. Can you just talk what that means, because backing it up and making it available means something different now. >> Yeah. >> Talk about that. >> I do agree, because again, looking back, it was really about backing up and recovering stuff. If I look back couple of years, customers were looking for a solution, that are able to pull the VM out of the v-stream data center, make sure it's stored somewhere, and they can't get it back once it's deleted, right? >> Check. >> But now, if you look at Vmworld, right, we have it at Vmworld, it's all about automation, it's about APIs being true. I can integrate this data protection platform in my centralized management interfaces, making sure I have an orchestration layer on top of it, so it's not only about backing up and recovery anymore, it's about the whole stack from end-to-end, right? Getting data from A to Z, maybe get it offsite to an S3 storage for longterm retention. So, we really went from an on-premise, very small kind of solution stack to a big solution stack, going from a VM into the cloud, and overlaying that stuff. >> Stefan, I want you to comment on this, and of course I want to get your take as well. Talk about the time aspect of it, because you mentioned, okay, I can get it back, okay, got to get the data back. When you talk about making data available, the time series or the timeframe, is critical, in some cases, latency, nanoseconds, milliseconds. This is the new normal; you guys got to make that happen. Talk about that dynamic, are customers really doing that, obviously that want it, but what are some of the examples? >> No, they are, they are. In terms of speed, like in data protection and availability, if I talk about speed I really talk about SLAs, and the RTOs, and the RPOs, so how often do I backup, how often do I have a recovery point, that's what you just talked about, and how fast can I get a data application back once it's gone, or once it's deleted, or once it's discovered an issue in the data center. Again, over the last couple of years, that really involved because in the early days customers said, you know, I want to have that, but it's luxury, right, I don't want to pay for it, it's too expensive, I can't afford that. But looking in these days, and today, even at the conference, you talk to customers that say, I need it, it's critical, I cannot live a second without my data. So this kind of RTOs requirements, they really went down from, maybe a day, which was usual ten years back, to like five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, right now. That's maybe the maximum you can really afford as a customer, and that's where the integration part comes in, and all the stuff we do with Cisco, because with integration we can actually make sure that we can cover that, and get data back in ten minutes. >> So we're really talking about a whole new way of delivering infrastructure. If I go back to the early days of UCS and conversion infrastructure, yeah, we can support a thousand VMs, and they're like, how are you going to back a thousand VMs up? And they're like, uhhhhh, well, let's see, we're workin' on that. Today, you got your take in this platform approach, it's a fundamental part of cloud, developer, DevOps, and so I wonder if you can talk about, you know, when we were at Cisco Live, the DevNet area was one of the most exciting parts of the show. And if you think about traditional enterprise companies, really, not many, I think even one, has really done a good job with developers, it's Cisco. So where do developers play, is this a platform play, really, for cloud and hybrid infrastructure? I wonder if you can talk about that, the role of developers, and how you're approaching this mindset. >> Yeah, I think from our perspective, there's no downtime window, there's no scheduled windows of downtime, right? >> It's not allowed. >> We don't have that anymore. The way that we look at our infrastructure, we certainly want it to be robust, to address latencies, issues and concerns, and what we're doing with Veeam is really tweaking that infrastructure to make that data available when it's called on, so you can consume it as a developer, as a part of the DevOps team. All of our infrastructure, as you guys probably know, are all open systems, all policy-based models. So with these APIs being available, it allows developers to consume more, if they need to scale-out these infrastructures quickly, we can do it. We're certainly playing in the DevNet space, it's growing, we have our own separate conferences. >> The network becomes more and more important, every day, I mean, at a whole 'nother level. Talk about program ability, you got to be ready for anything Veeam wants to do with you, or whatever the customer wants with respect to high availability. >> Yeah. >> And as the definition changes, you got to be enabling that. >> Totally available if you can get to it through the network. (John laughing) And we certainly carry that all the way through the UCS fabric. >> Talk about Veeam strategy, because I think there's general perception that, oh, Veeam does backup for small- and medium-sized business, that's Veeam. And we had Peter McKay on yesterday, he said, "A third of our business is SMB, a third is commercial, a third is enterprise," number one. Number two is, you guys are getting into the orchestration and management for data availability. Can you talk about the extension of Veeam, in that regard? >> I want to actually grab on your number, because we talked about, oh, we got a thousand VMs, that needs to be backed up and recover. That was a couple of years back, Today, we talk more about ten thousand VMs. Customers actually here at the booth, I talked to customer that talked about ten thousand to twenty thousand VMs that needs to be available. Now I would call a customer that hosts ten thousand VMs no longer an SMB customer, right? That's more of the enterprise, and you're right, and I guess Peter McKay said the same. I didn't actually watch the video, so hopefully, I'm inline with him, but it's really he's, for sure, going into the enterprise, making sure the products actually fit the enterprise's needs. Talking about the orchestration piece, I mentioned before, Veeam Availability Orchestrator we recently announced and released, that's certainly a step into the enterprise market because an SMB customer, even a mid-range customer, they will not invest in an orchestration layer that provides the full capabilities of fade-over secondary data centers, and all that stuff. That's certainly an enterprise play, and that's also where the company's heading to, making sure we have the right fit for the still SMB customers, and mid-range customers, because I think they are still important to the business, right? I'm not saying they're unimportant. But also having the right products, and the scale. And I think scale is actually something we going to talk about anyway, in this conversation. The right scale, to even cover that customer, ten thousand VMs, twenty-thousand VMs, they are approaching us. >> I think the other big trend that we see, and I wonder if you guys could comment, is, again, data protection, backup, used to be an afterthought, and it also used to be kind of a one-size-fits-all. So that'd mean, almost by definition, you're either under-protected or over-protected, spending too much, or too little. Today you're offering much more granularity, and the like; it's a fundamental component of the platform that you're developing, and it's extending beyond just backup. Call it data protection, there's a security component, there's a DevOps and cloud piece, there's a management piece. Maybe you guys could give us your perspectives on those trends. >> Yeah, so short comment on that one, actually, in each and every one of my sessions I speak here, I always say, once you consider to replace your storage system, or your v-stream wired man, or you consider to use HCI, make sure you include data protection immediately, on Day One of your project, because, you're completely right, the last year or so, even still now, a lot of customers I'm going to, they tell me, oh, I replaced all my infrastructure last 6 months, 8 months, and now I want the data protection. Then I get in and I say, yeah, unfortunately, what you did on your infrastructure is completely wrong for the expectations and the requirements you have in data protection. So that's exactly what to talk about, you need to bring together those projects and make sure you bring them under one hood, and talk about this from Day One. Otherwise, you might get in to a wrong direction. >> Yeah, that whole-house view of the world. >> I think, from a Cisco perspective, we really look at, we're unifying the data, we have what your intentions are, your intentions are production apps, your intentions are data protection. I think through ACI we can certainly create the application profiles to make that happen. We carry through our fabric with the UCS system, so for us, we see ourselves as flexible enough to deliver all these options, obviously there's some improvements that we can bring, you know we were talkin' earlier. But that's part of the road map, and part of the way we want to go with Veeams. >> I think one of the things I'm impressed with Cisco about, and looking at the analysis, is that the network guys have always had the keys to the kingdom. You go back to IT, you go back twenty years, if you were a network guy, you ran the show. And you had storage guys came in, they became that same kind of tier, but the network was running everything, everything was sacred. Couldn't let the network go down. It ran offices, it ran branches. And then, when the cloud came, the network now with Cloud Native, and some of the stuff going on up at the stack, makes networking skills, people who think like a networking guy, really valuable, because the data needs to be networked. So, the data's now at the application, that's where the security is, so as you guys have your Veeam, you have needs, you're moving data around, you need more in Cisco, you're going to be better for him, so this is a nice dynamic. >> We're trying to instrument it so we understand what their needs are. If you look at AppDynamics, if you look at Tetration, all these things give us more and more visibility to make the right decisions, and hopefully those will all be automated down the road so we can move as fast as the business wants to. >> Well, and I think of things, you know people talk about air gaps for ransomware, but you need more than air gaps, you need analytics that identify anomalous behavior, and the corpus of backup data has all the data there, and if you can figure out how to analyze it, you're going to have a leg up. >> As you said, that's actually a good point because ransomware, and all that stuff, like Tetration, your project to analyze the network traffic and making sure-- I actually get informed, or I take an action, once I identify ransomware attacks, that's something that we can partner up with, because it would literally mean if Cisco identifies an attack, right, they can trigger automatically a backup or a snapshot backup of the data to make sure we actually have a backup right before the attack happens. So you can see a chain of activities and potential new products, or go to marketplace in the next couple of months and years. >> A lot of opportunities. >> Because there is a lot of stuff, and a lot of potential behind those technologies. >> And there's clear visibility from a customer standpoint, that we would report here on theCUBE, that's lookin' at nanosecs and things of that nature, where at the application, whether it's a V-map, or other things. Security and data has to be centric around the app, it decouples from the network so that you're not bumping into each other, you're helping each other, you're more effective. You help them, you guys help each other. This is the new stack model, this is the way it's going. >> I would say that's all what alliances is about, right? (laughing) It's why we have alliance business, right, because no one, neither Cisco nor us, we couldn't do it on our own, we always need a partner to do that. >> Guys, thanks for comin' and sharing the partnership news. I really think, and Alan Cohen, our CUBE guest this week, said, partnerships used to be a tennis match, now it's like soccer, a lot of things going on, multiple players, certainly you know that, Cisco's been doin' a lot of that for a while. Great stuff, thanks for coming on. Final question for you guys, big takeaways from VMworld 2018 this year. Comment, what's your thoughts, third day now, lookin' back, what's the theme here, what's the big story that people need to know about? >> Just from my experience, I've had a lot of conversations around security, and bringing it to our solution, more embedded within. I'm part of the Validated Design Program, and they're asking, at least the conversations that I've had on the floor here, has really been about showcasing some of the other aspects of Cisco, what we can bring from a security perspective to protect the data. I'm certainly bringing that home. >> Awesome. >> And what are you seeing? I just can continue what he said, because the most conversations I had is around scalability and still the data growth. We've been talking about that the last couple of years, but the more data you have, and the more VMs you have, the more challenging it is to protect it. It's all about scalability and making sure you can really cover and fulfill your needs. >> Well, congratulations on your success at Veeam, the numbers don't lie. You guys are doing very well. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations on Cisco, you guys have a clear line of sight on what you guys want to do with the network. >> Thanks. >> It's great to see, thanks for comin' on. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. CUBE coverage here, live, in Las Vegas. From VMworld 2018, it's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us, more Day Three coverage after this short break. (techno 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)