>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2019 brought to you by Veeam! >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. We're here at the Fontainebleau Hotel. VeeamON day one of two-day coverage of the Veeam conference, very swaggy hotel. Dave Russell is here. He's the Vice President of NFI Strategy at Veeam. David, good to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> Thanks so much for coming onto theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks for having me again. >> You're very welcome. So let's see, you're well over, let's see, a year out, just about a year out of Gartner. Right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> And so okay you've been injected with the Kool-Aid fully, I presume, right? >> There you go, in the green, yes. >> But we're still going to talk a little bit about the magic water, but before we get into that, talk about your first year here. >> Yeah. >> Your impressions. Do they meet, exceed your expectations? >> It exceeded my expectations, but I can honestly say I'm not doing what I thought I was going to be doing here, but it actually turned out to be better. The other thing I will honestly tell you is I'm now on Pacific Coast time at the moment. Arizona, we're too unsophisticated for Daylights Saving, right so I'm either Mountain or Pacific but I'm Pacific now. But by 10 a.m. my time, I pretty much what I thought I was going to do that day is out the window and I'm doing something else and it's fun though. I mean now especially with the investment that we had earlier in the year and the cash reserves we ended last year with, looking at a lot of partnership capabilities, looking at ecosystem activities, certainly involved with customer activity. We're redoing our marketing and how we're focusing our go-to-market so it's a whole variety of things that sort of change hourly. >> So on the, I think we just talked about the M&A side. You've always been a dot connector in your, right? Because you talk to all the vendors, you talk to all the customers and you could see the picture. You have a huge observation space so part of your job on strategy is to try to what? Figure out where the gaps are. >> Yeah. >> And then drive strategy around do we build, do we buy? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah and it really does net down to what you said. It's a build/buy decision. It's an acceleration to market kind of decision and then the hard part is what are you willing to trade off and of course the real answer is as little as humanly possible. But you have to decide, just because you can do it, just 'cause you have the money doesn't necessarily mean you should pull the trigger. So if anything, it's curious because people like myself and a couple of my colleagues, we almost are more discerning. So we look at, okay, the technology, is it really viable? Do our due diligence, right? But then we also look at well, does this fit culturally? Is the integration point really there? Is the customer value really going to be significantly improved and if you cannot answer that very favorably, then keep the money. >> So you worked at IBM for a number of years, you worked at Gartner for a number of years. Now you're back working for a vendor. >> Yeah. >> Compare and contrast those roles. I mean Gartner, you do a lot of writing, you do a lot of traveling, you talk to a zillion people. I'm sure you talk to a lot of people here too, but you're coming at it from a very biased perspective whereas Gartner of course you're unbiased. You're serving the end customer. So talk about the difference in those two roles. >> So I approach it a little uniquely in that I'm biased. I mean I'm paid by a vendor, right? And so there's a certain inherent bias in there, but I go into a customer conversation and say "Maybe you shouldn't be using Veeam for certain things." So I'll give you an example. We have Unix capabilities with Solaris AIX. There are other vendors that do that even better than we do. They have rich application integration. If someone says that's my number one problem, honestly we're not your best choice. Now the reality is most of the world is moving towards more physical and virtual Windows and Linux. So I'll come in, say, a large enterprise and I'll say, "Okay, if you're like most shops," and I'll always undersell it. "Like probably 85% of your workload "is physical virtual Windows Linux." and they always interrupt me and go, "No, no, no, it's 92%." Like, "Okay, well we can help with that 92%." >> Yeah, yeah. >> The other 7%, I'm honestly going to tell you, we're not best of breed. >> Yeah that's a safe balance view that the AIX Solaris piece. >> Series. (Dave laughs) There's certain things. >> Yeah. >> We want to stick to our swim lane. We think it's a pretty wide lane, but there's no reason to come out of it. >> So your role as strategy, talk a little bit about how you're turning that strategy into action and specifics at Veeam. >> Yeah a big part of it has to do with cloud. >> I know that's the word that we've been talking about for a long, long time. So there's the aspirational aspect of Cloud and the operational. The aspirational is I want to be able to move in and out. I want mobility, I want the ability to exit. The operational is I want to be able to do this efficiently, meaning I want to be able to either send data to the cloud, my on-prem backup or I want to be able to protect SAAS-based workloads or infrastructure as a service workload so cloud-native workloads and then over time, I might want to be able to leverage that for something other than availability. So how can you rapidly make the data and only the portion of data that I need available to me when I need it? >> I was taking some notes during the key notes and I was just doing like a little, not really a tag cloud, but I was trying to identify as I heard them and grabbed them, the attributes of cloud data protection. I want to throw some out to you. You tell me. We'll play kind of word association, I guess. So I have fast recovery, API-based, open, simple, transparent, data-oriented, automated, cloud pricing, federated to accomodate the edge. Are these some of the attributes that we should associate with cloud data protection, maybe some of the things that I'm missing. How do you look at the attributes of a company and its products providing cloud data protection? >> Yeah so a big part of it, I actually like the phrase hybrid cloud even better than people say multi-cloud. The reason I like that is because hybrid presumes that you can have on premises as well. So like if it was the Dave and Dave company tomorrow, we'd probably be born in the cloud. Everything would be software as a service. We'd get some public cloud space. Now if we'd been in business for 20 years, we've got investments that we've made and we don't want to get rid of that any sooner than we have to. So hybrid cloud I like, but I think you nailed it in that what do every one of those attributes have in common? It's trying to get your most precious resource to you in a way that you want to consume it with as least amount of friction as possible. We want to reduce the aggravation associated with being able to access that rapidly. >> When you think about the customer conversations that you've had at Veeam and even going back to your Gartner days, I've always felt this notion of not hybrid, I see hybrid and multi-cloud as different. I've always looked at multi-cloud as multi-vendor. >> Yeah. >> Yeah I've got line of business, I've got shadow IT, I've got different IT projects and I've got multiple clouds and it's just, to me it was always less of a strategy than sort of this is where we are and now people need to put together a hybrid strategy. So IT's been asked to come clean up this mess as it always is. What's your take on the hybrid landscape and how we got here but more specifically, customer strategies when you consult with your customers? >> Yeah you're right that there's a lot of departmental buying, there's a lot of, in some cases, it's best of breed so I'm very willing to go look at multiple providers because I didn't sign up to go deploy the third best solution. Everyone wants what they think will be the most appropriate tool for them and rightfully so. So I think that's how we got, to your point, we didn't have a strategy that said I want 10 vendors. We arrived at an implementation choice that resulted in 10 vendors being deployed and then to your point further, then we had to layer on something on top of that. That's really where we come in and simple as it sounds, we really want to promote choice, choice of infrastructure, choice of cloud, choice of hypervisor, choice of operating system. >> So great discussion vector is the best of breed versus sort of integration. >> Yeah. >> And my question is that's been a decades-long. >> Yeah. >> Sort of trade-off that people have made. You see it in the software business, the hardware business and all through the industry. Is the API economy changing that. Can you be both, I mean Veeam, let's agree. Veeam is a best-of-breed provider. While your portfolio's growing, you're a billion-dollar company, you take a company like Dell who's got this ridiculously large portfolio. They can come into a customer and say well even with services or at IBM, we can wrap the big blue blanket around you and integrate everything. With the API economy, does that change the game on that argument of best of breed versus integration and convenience? >> It's a nuanced answer. The answer is a little yes and a little no. >> It depends, right? >> Let me decompose that because that's a cop-out, but the "it depends" aspect is really, APIs are wonderful to create an ecosystem and other integration points. If that's about offering your expandability to do something, that's a positive. If that really means that well because I can't deliver what you need, you got to go and write it yourself, that is a negative. So if the API is leveraging something for even greater value but beyond what the tools are originally designed to do, I think that's net positive, but if you have to exploit the API to just to get the product to work, why did I buy your product when I have to go hire someone to write code to work on your product? That's, you don't want that business. >> Okay so the last Gartner Magic Quadrant that came out was one that you sort of spearheaded back in 2017. It was like this perfect storm of backup analysts leaving Gartner and so there's been a little bit of delay in terms of the new one coming out which is coming our shortly as I understand it, but one of the observations that you can make if you look at the 2016-2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant is that Veeam moved from lower right to upper right which is rare. Can you explain that a little bit? You were saying that it usually goes in a different pattern. Elucidate, please. >> Yeah. Yeah so the magic in the Magic Quadrant is if you could actually jump from one quadrant to straight to leaders and that would be a very atypical progression. Usually it's a backwards Z. You come into the lower left, probably get over to the lower right, fall back, but go up to the upper left and then maybe you get to leaders in the upper right. The magic part in Veeam, the thing that they were able to do is go from visionary lower right to leader upper right. >> Okay and why do you think they were able to do that? I mean there are numerous attributes, but presumably 350,000 I think is the number of customers helped and so you've got a lot of references and proof points, the technology itself, but it's rare. Why do you think Veeam has been able to succeed in that regard? >> I think it's because Veeam has been good about getting answers to the most pressing problems. Again Veeam doesn't do everything. It doesn't support every single operating system, but the vast majority of the concentration of where customer issues are and where customer environments are getting deployed at, we can address very well and actually this weekend, I got here Friday night. So all day Saturday, all day Sunday and yesterday 'til 5 p.m. I took our SE training and so I've deployed Veeam, worked with active directories, all kinds of things for 72 hours basically and it was really that easy to use. In fact, my most difficult thing is I stayed in class until 6:30 at night because I'd never done active directory. I've never been an exchange admin before so I had to kind of come up to speed on those tools a little bit, but once I got that, the product was incredibly powerful, but also very intuitive. So you still have a little bit of that independent analyst DNA in you so I'm going to ask you to try to put that independent hat on. When you think about Veeam's traditional base of SMB, they're very successful there, obviously superglued itself to the virtualization trend. The last couple of years, Veeam has tried to move up-market, develop some relationships with some large players and has had some success there. Is the product well-suited for that larger enterprise and where do you see that going in terms of the up-market progression? >> Yeah so in theory, that's what I'm here to drive, the enterprise word is in my title, but in reality I focus more broadly than that. But if I just think about enterprise, I ran the numbers last week and company inception to date, we've actually derived over $2 billion of software-only revenue from the enterprise market and that's been accelerating. Now in 2017-18 and the first quarter of this year, almost $1 billion. So we're moving and we're moving fast. We had our sales kick off like most companies do. January, go to sales kick off and Ratmir says, "Hey don't chase just the big deals, the $2 million deals. "We've never sold a $2 million "without having a $200,000 deal first." The very next week, we got a $2 million deal on the first paper so he shot low. He should've said five million, but the interesting thing about Veeam and to answer your question, I think we resonate with the kind of challenges a large enterprise has. We allow them to move at their own scale if they want to move in a very large fashion, they can with Veeam. I would honestly tell them move as appropriate for you. As assets age, as you're willing to take on the change in an environment, do so, but I think Veeam is interesting. It's the same piece of software that I installed on my laptop this weekend that can also go to a Fortune 100 company. The same piece of software that manages 50,000 agents, we have at one shop, 50,000 Windows agents. We can do that with same code base and the only thing that's different is we just horizontally scale out how we deploy the capacity and then how we deploy the mover agents. >> I tweeted out this morning, Ratmir was standing in front of a chart with all these features and over the time and that's been part of the hallmark of Veeam is not checkbox features but real substantive features and you've had a consistent progression. Even Ratmir said, we don't have a big long-term roadmap that we share with our customers even internally. Yeah we have a direction and a vision, but very focused, almost like a bit of an Agile development methodology but the point is that, and you see that some companies are really good at this, some companies, not so good at this, but just consistently delivering features that are in-demand, that customers want, listening to their customers and just nailing it and that seems to be the hallmark of Veeam and as they say, some companies just don't have that in their DNA. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah I think what it really comes down to is at the end of the day, every developer thinks like a customer and they do that because they spend a lot of time on our Veeam forums and I'll be honest, when I was a mainframe backup developer, I didn't talk to that many customers. I was just writing code and I didn't know how people were actually putting the product to use in production. I didn't always know what feature might be most helpful for them. >> You were guessing. >> I was trying to think of the art of the possible, hopefully an educated guess, but I was really just trying to say what might be good, what might be of resonance versus actually having someone goes on a forum and says Veeam, what I would like you to do is X. That's one of the reasons why we do have, to your point, we don't have a 10-year roadmap where we say this feature is coming in 12 months, this feature is coming in 24 months. It's fluid and in some cases, we actually moved up delivering our physical agent management by a year because we started selling more and more of those and people said I need that feature functionality faster. We're willing to trade-off some of our other feature functionality. So if we can be, as long as we can continue to respond to the market, I think we're well-positioned. >> How does a capability like that surface itself? Obviously by talking to customers, but how does it get into the development pipeline so quickly? >> Yeah well in some cases, we've got a huge amount of not just, our part of R&D. It's the research, it's experimentation, it's incubation of new things. So when we find that sweet intersection point, then we can quickly operationalize that. In other cases, we just have to be nimble. We have to react fast. >> Is it a command and control culture though where somebody says okay this is what we're doing or is it more sort of the team gets together and says oh this really makes sense based on what the customers are telling us, let's go. How does that decision get made? >> Yeah well ultimately it is a command and control in the sense that our co-founder, one of our co-founders runs sales and marketing. Our other co-founders runs R&D and they ultimately get sign-off on their respective areas, but it is collaborative in the sense of we do bring forward, here's what we see in market, here's what see in our customer forums. Here's what our ecosystem of partners are telling us, here's our view of the top five things we ought to go do. >> I was struck by the other slide that Ratmir had. It was the $15 billion slide and it was probably, backup and recover was maybe I don't know seven out of the 15 if I remember, but there were all these other segments. It was sort of analytics and disaster recovery and data management, all new pockets of opportunity. $15 billion today, obviously growing with especially the cloud. How do you see that landscape and how does that affect the way you look at strategy? >> Yeah so I actually put that bubble chart together. >> Oh, I like it. >> The rationale between the bubbles, we have core, we put backup in the middle because that's what we do but also that's how we ingest data and now we can do other things around it. So the reason for those bubbles and they were of varying sizes and the bubbles were sort of in and out of to varying degrees the main backup bubble according to how much intersection we thought as a company we could have with that. Where we thought we could add value, where we thought there was an ecosystem potential. So for example, analytics. We're not going to become the next best analytics company tomorrow, not even years from now. We could partner and we can provide data and we get better access to data to be able to do that. So we'd want to facilitate that. In other cases, maybe we really do want to go own and acquire. >> Well and so to your earlier comments there, I didn't use the term, the phrase land and expand, but that's clearly what you guys are doing starting with the $200,000 sale and growing it to a $2 million sale. So those bubbles are potentially cohort sales. >> Yes. >> That you can sell sort of like bananas in bunches I like to say, right? >> Yeah. And part of that is who do you sell that to. And so if you're able to go and address some of those ancillary bubbles or markets, now you've got a different entree point into the organization. If you're already involved with an organization, now you can offer more value because you can get more out of your data that you've already protected. So it opens up new conversations for us to have. It opens up entirely new buying centers for us too. >> Well how is the role of whom you sell to changing? I mean it was backup admin historically, right or maybe a Veeamware admin. Veeam admin. How is that changing? >> So greatest example I would tell you are events. So we acquired a company last January or a year ago January called N2W Software. So they're predominantly at Amazon re:Invent conferences. You go to Amazon re:Invent and no one's heard of Veeam and if anyone's heard of either of the two companies, it's definitely N2WS and someone's seen it in the marketplace. That demographic tends to be totally different from the demographic if you go to the on-premises data center type of conference where they have heard of Veeam and it's a very different sort of mindset. To your point, they grew up in a very different landscape. Now instead of someone who's well-steeped in server storage and networking and maybe majored in one, possibly two of those things, now you've got a generalist where he or she is probably in their 20s, has a very different point of view of what it should take to get something working and has a very different view of how they want to be sold to, how you can go and reach them. >> So at the cloud show, there might be a development persona. >> Yes. >> That you're selling to. Obviously VMWare, VMWorld, we know what that is. It's IT guys, right, is the predominant and how do you see cloud changing that? Is it cloud architects or sort of cloud leaders? CTOs increasingly? Data Protection becomes more and more important to digital business. So how are you seeing that role change due to cloud? >> So right now we have to basically have more touchpoints. Our typical legacy fan of our customer, our customer base, our product's sweet spot still remains and it's in some cases will pull us into the cloud. In other cases, we have to go talk to someone that's entirely different. But again, that's more of an administrative view. But to your point, going up the stack now, if you go to the not even Vice President of Infrastructure, you go to the CIO, he or she says, "I am tired of thinking about boxes. "I am tired of thinking about where this resides. "I want to think business outcome." So for us that's actually a great conversation because it all comes back to data. That's what we're in the business of doing. We capture, protect and move data. >> So that brings it back to strategy. We got to run, but summarize in your words, just sort of the strategy of Veeam and where you see this whole thing going. >> Yeah I will simplistically say it's more of the same. We want to continue to offer what we think is a best of breed solution for on-prem and increasingly cloud availability, but also we want to offer real customer value in terms of now being able to leverage that data, get more value out of that whether that's DevOps, running analytics against that, security test patch, whatever it may be, we want to be able to give you just the data you need, so have granularity, and offer speed and ease of use to do that. >> So as data becomes more and more important, you're seeing companies go beyond backup, trying to get more out of there, their backup, moving to data protection, data management, not just an insurance policy anymore. Dave Russell, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with Peter Burris as my cohost. We're at VeeamON Live from Miami. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Miami Beach Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody, we're here at the Fontainebleau hotel. You're watching theCUBE, the leader of live tech coverage. This is day one of our coverage of VeeamON, the third year that we've covered Veeam, they've selected this great location here in Miami. I'm Dave Vellante, with my co-host Peter Burris. Ratmir Timashev is here, he is the co-founder and executive vice president, world-wide sales of Veeam, business guru, sales and marketing maven, a very successful entrepreneur, welcome to the theCUBE and thanks so much for having us. >> Thank you Dave, thank you Peter, thanks for having us. Thanks for doing this at our event. >> You're very welcome, so first of all congratulations, you hit that billion dollar milestone. You predicted it back in 2013, you missed it by about six months Ratmir, you know, (laughs) but really, great. Trailing 12 months, a billion dollars in revenue that includes of course your Ratable revenue, the subscription revenue, which who could have predicted that back in 2013, so amazing milestone, congratulations. And great venue here, you must be really pleased with the turnout, couple thousand people, your thoughts? >> Yeah absolutely, I personally love Miami, this is the best city. Always sunny, always ocean, always blue sky, awesome. And always sand, like that's the best place. So I've always had the dream to have VeeamON in Miami, so the dream comes true, we have over 2,000 people here and many more are watching livestream online. Very excited, very excited. >> Well, Veeam's always been a hip company, always a lot of fun, this is obviously a hip place, good fun part of the country. Let's talk about act one and act two. Act one was, you guys really rode the virtualization wave and you talked today about act two really being cloud and hybrid cloud data management. What are the similarities and the differences between act one and act two? >> So like we discussed during the keynote session, every 10 years or so there is a major industry transformation shift from one platform to another platform, so Veeamware 10 years ago created this technology visualization that dramatically fundamentally changed the way modern data centers are built and managed. And Veeam was very lucky to be at the earlier stage of that virtualization revolution that changed the whole data center. that changed the whole data center. So we were at the right time at the right place. We created the new market, Veeamware backup, and then we extended it to hyperV and HV. So we dominated that mode of data LAE share. But in the last few years we expanded our platform. So beyond just the virtualization, we added the physical support, the Unix support, the cloud support. So now Veeam represents broad, what we call Veeam Availability Platform that supports LAE clouds, virtual, physical clouds. That was act one, we dominated it. We grew from zero to 1 billion within 10, 12 years. We added 350,000 customers over that timeframe. And now it's act two, what is act two? Act two is the, again, the new major industry transformation to a hybrid cloud. What are the similarities? Again, Veeam is in a great position because we're at the right time at the right place with a brilliant product. We have the broad LAE system of our channel partners. We have a broad customer base, 350,000. And we have great technology partnerships with HP, Cisco, NetUP, Nutanix, Pure, and others, so as well as AWS, and Microsoft, and Google, and IBM cloud. So we are in extremely great position to dominate this second wave, what we call second act, which will be the next decade of hybrid cloud. >> Yeah, so optionality was a key, being able to support multiple use cases and supporting different environments. You're well positioned, you're saying, in act two. Act one you really didn't have a lot of competition, you kind of schooled the competition, I think Dell took out some of your early competition then you ran circles around everybody else. A lot more money pouring into this space now, you showed the slide, 15 billion, you've got a 15th of it. Tell us again why you feel like you can, you just used the word, dominate, with all this competition. You got the big guys now sort of learning from you and trying to copy some of your moves and maybe pre announcing some stuff to try and freeze the market. What gives you great confidence that you will dominate act two. >> Again, we have a history of innovation, so we know that there are new requirements for the hybrid cloud. People not only want to protect the data, they want to make sure that when they move to a hybrid cloud, when they put the workloads in a public cloud, that that data is protected, is secured and protected. So that's one capability that customers are looking for. Another capability, they want to be able to move the data back on-prem, or between the clouds, what we call cloud mobility, so they want to have this flexibility and freedom, be cloud agnostic or avoid that cloud lock-in. So they want to also make sure that from compliance standpoint, they are able to move the data if needed. In other use cases they want to leverage the cloud for different data protection capabilities. They want to leverage the cloud for backup, for disaster recovery as well as for long term retention, what we call cloud tier, so they want to, instead of tape, they want to replace tape with the public cloud low storage. So they want to use the cost and the skill ability of the public cloud for long term retentions. So all these use cases, extension of our platform. So we already have the, we own the one component of the hybrid cloud which is on-prem, modern data center, what some people call private cloud. We already own one component and we have 350,000 customers. Most of these customers are going to deploy hybrid cloud. In fact, according to our survey, 73% of our customers are deploying or planning to deploy a hybrid cloud. So most of them I think, in how to leverage the performance, the skill ability, and the elasticity, of the public cloud. So we own this component, we have the capabilities and we're developing product capabilities for the public cloud and with our orchestration on top of it and monitoring and analytics capabilities. So it's a complete solution. >> So Ratmir, I want to build upon this notion of act one and act two because good for you guys over ten years but the industry also is going through an act one to act two when you come right down to it. Where data, for the first four years of this industry, was about recording events that have happened. And now data going forward is becoming a strategic asset that's actually shaping the events that are happening or will happen. And it requires a new approach. It requires that data be regarded as a strategic asset and capabilities have to be established to support that data. I'm especially itched in with the introduction that you made because it suggests that you guys are going to look to an ecosystem to bring that degree of specialization and uniqueness and invention, on top of your platform, to serve a rapidly expanding range of strategic capability requirements when we think about data protection, data assurance. Do you see it the same way? >> Absolutely yeah, I 100% agree. I talked about that briefly during my keynote. We see that there are this four technology superpowers what Pat Galson from Veeamware calls technology superpowers. And those are the cloud, the mobile, artificial intelligence and age in internal things. So all this four technology superpowers. The biggest producers and consumers of the data. So it has to be both in the cloud and on the age so the new product and services are built on that data. Either we are talking about self driving cars, or we are talking about breakthrough in DNA research or cancer research. It's all built both in the cloud and on the age. And Veeam has this technology called data lapse. So when we've actually provide the access to the data, to a field party, either security or compliance or analytical tenders. So they can build more solutions on top of our data lapse. >> So talk a little bit about how you planned to deploy capital going forward, particularly as you try to leverage the opportunities in cloud two. You're seeing all kinds of new emerging technologies. We talk about coup berneties and containers all the time. You've made some acquisitions in the cloud area. Should we think about your emanate strategies as just sort of advancing your ability to either form ecosystems or actually bring in more cloud like capabilities, beyond act one into act two? >> Yeah I mean, first of all, we have a very powerful product and RNZ group. Partially we have this mentality not invented here so in other words we want to invent more in house. However, there are some cases where we need to extend our platform and we might not have the bandwidths or time through market so we're looking at some adjacent in the cloud management space, in the cloud optimization, course optimization, analytics. Those areas are very interesting for us to expand our platform to. >> I'm guessing that NIH mentality, acquisitions you make have to fit into that platform, that architecture. How do you evaluate? You say okay, can we do this ourselves? You say do we have the bandwidth? Is that technology here now? >> Does with Veeam help? >> Yeah with Veeam that's a great problem that we announced today as well. Yeah so the way we evaluate is that, is this adjacent market to what we're doing? For example, AWS or Asur, how close the buyer is. Or Office 365 backup we evolved in house. Or Office 365 backup we evolved in house. Azureware developed in house. Some technologies we are looking to acquire. The question is, is that the same buyer? If the buyer is the same, we prefer to develop in house. If the buyer, for now, is different, we would like to acquire the company and let it grow, and then merge into Veeam later. >> So your co founder runs RND correct? >> Correct >> And you run sales and marketing? So you guys fight over how you're going to allocate the dollars. But as a specialist in data protection, you're allocating all of your RND funding toward data protection. Presumably that helps you compete against the guys who are doing primary storage, secondary storage, all kinds of other software. So when you think about that road map, you told the story about how you got inspiration. You went to Silicon Valley and you were flying back and your partner said, well you know the best product just doesn't always win but you said, whoa so what, do we not invent the best products? You want to have the best products. Talk a little about that sort of organic development. How you guys think about that approach. Where the ideas come from. Is it obviously the customer input? Your knowledge of the space? Where do you see that going? >> So Veeam we believe is very different from other companies. First, we don't build long term road map because the technology is changing so fast that we want to keep that flexibility and agility to change our roadmap. We only disclose our release that we're imminent. Within the next six, nine months we already know. Beyond that, we don't provide the roadmap. We have the vision but we don't have the roadmap with the exact specific dates. >> But it's not a waterfall thinking. It's more agile applied to our-- >> Exactly, agile and flexibility that's what's, agility and flexibility that's what's most important. For example, a year ago or even two years ago when we announced version 10. We didn't know that object storage will become such a needed hot thing that all our customers are asking for. Including the on-prem object storage and the cloud object storage. So we changed our plans and we put lots of resources into object storage. And we finally released the best capability to use the object storage. We believe that object storage is the next cool thing in cloud data management because it will provide 10 times more capacity at the 10th of the course and 10 times faster performance. So it's like it's the next cool technology. That's just one example. Another thing is that, what differentiates Veeam in terms of RNZ and product strategy is that, if we release the feature, we don't do it as a marketing check box, we do cloud storage or we do object storage or we do this or we support Azure. When we design the feature, we think about is it going to be really really valuable? So that our customers, when they get it, they say wow, that's exactly what I needed. So we don't do as a marketing check box, we do provide and our customers really value that. They expect from Veeam that when Veeam releases something, it's going to be useful. >> And easy to use. >> Easy to use and very useful. >> That's important because when you're on offence, you don't have to do check box marketing. We know that a lot of times companies will do check box marketing 'cause they'll hear it in the field. The innovater has it, oh we have it too. And when you really peel the onion you see the differences and start to move forward. Okay so let's talk a little about customers. You had United Health on today. What are you hearing from customers? What are the customers saying that are inspiring you and your team? >> Today's conversations with the customers they start with the modernizing the, continue modernizing their data. A lot of customers still use the legacy backup solutions. They want to modernize. But the conversation quickly shifts to the hybrid cloud. How Veeam is going to help me not only modernize the backup data management on-prem, but how Veeam is going to help me to move to the cloud, manage the data, orchestrate the data movement in the cloud and maybe if needed, bring the data back for compliance reasons. So that conversation always occurs with any size companies. In fact, according to our survey, 73% of our customers say that they have a hybrid cloud strategy. Only 10% say no, we will always stay 100% on-prem. And about 15% say I will move everything to a public cloud. The huge majority is in the middle. 73% have the hybrid strategy. >> Yeah that sort of answers my next question but I'm going to ask it anyway. So an observer might well aren't the cloud guys just going to do their own backup and recovery. Why wouldn't that supplant Veeam? You sort of addressed it with the hybrid approach but I want to hear your answer. All the cloud guys have some form of replication or snapshotting, granted it's not as robust, you and I know that. But for the audience, explain to them why the cloud doesn't put you out of business. >> In fact cloud represents the biggest opportunity for the next 5-7-10 years. It's just historically, the platform vendors they don't provide the good tools, security tools or backup tools. We've been in this business over 25 years. Our first company was specialized in Windows Enterprise Management so we developed lots of tools around Microsoft platforms for managing active directory exchange server, share points, equal server. We always were afraid maybe Microsoft will come up with the similar solutions but they never did. The same is for today's world. Customers want to have the independence from the platform and the vendor, like AWS or Microsoft, they will never provide the capability to move the data outside of AWS. But for the true compliance security, a vendor like Veeam you need the capability not just backup AWS to AWS but you want to be able to backup AWS to on-prem and on-prem to AWS. Or AWS to Azure. So only Veeam can platform vendors, they are not looking to do that. So they want to move the data to the cloud. They're not necessarily providing more capabilities. Move the data outside of their cloud and that's where Veeam comes in, with the cloud mobility capabilities. >> One of the things that our researchers strongly pointed out, is that there are few places within a technology set of capabilities that they must control. And data protection is one of them. So they have to have an approach for managing data protection within their business that's their approach. And there are a few companies in a position to actually provide that. >> Yeah, I absolutely agree. Some customers they think that if I put the data into AWS or Azure or Office 365, Microsoft is going to protect it or AWS. No, it's your data, microsoft protects the infrastructure. So it's a off time service. That's where Microsoft or AWS are responsible. The data is yours. You are responsible for protecting the data recovery. If you delete an email, it's not Microsoft's fault. If you need to do an e-discovery on your email system, that's not Microsoft's problem. >> If you're out of compliance, Microsoft executives aren't going to jail. >> Exactly. That's your responsibility. Your data, Your responsibility. In fact we have a white paper that talks about the shared responsibility model. So there is a shared responsibility. AWS, public cloud providers, they're responsible to keep the service up and running. So therefore resilient infrastructure. Not the data, the data is yours. That sits on top of that resilient infrastructure. >> Yeah you've gone after Office 365 as the starting point for SaaS. Maybe there's other opportunities down the road. Right now it's probably a small market but I think it could emerge over time. But the overall time, you showed $15 billion. Today you have 1/15th of it. Lot more competition today. You see some of your competitors risk $250 million you have to one up them with a $500 million risk. You told me years ago Ratmir, we're probably not going to do an IPO. Give us an update there, same stance on that? >> No we've actually very open to the idea about IPO and we're exploring different opportunities. But we believe that we can continue growing organically because the company is very profitable. So we're reinvesting money into RNZ and we have good foundation for the next act two. But speaking about Office 365 by the way, it's the fastest growing product in the history of Veeam. >> Really? >> Of backup for Office 365 is the fastest growing because we have 350,000 customers, most of them are using Office 365 and they need to protect that data. So and they love Veeam, they are buying. But also we'll actually need new customers just buying Office 365. 23% of our customers for Office 365 are new customers. Also a little bit surprising for us. >> So O365 OneDrive is another opportunity that you guys have gone after. >> It's all part of the same product, yes. >> Salesforce maybe not quite there yet but you could potentially see that emerging as an opportunity? Do you see that? >> Yes we are looking at Salesforce. We are looking at G's width. We are looking at other SaaS applications that are popular among the business customers. >> One point really quickly Dave, is that 1/15th of that $15 billion TAM is just Veeam. Your ecosystem is increasingly going to use the Veeam services to expand the Veeam share of that, the virtual Veeam share of that, even as you grow. I think that's what's particularly interesting is how will that ecosystem add additional services on top of that, to grab more of that overall share. >> And I think, and please comment on that, that's unique to Veeam and the data protection space. You have your own events. You have premier partners that come in. Some of your competitors don't, they're not quite there yet. Some of the other larger competitors it's a small little piece of their whole business so the focus really is accentuated. >> Veeam has always had a channel part in ariant stretch. From day one we were 100% channel, 100%. We don't take the deal directly. Also, we build the broad service provider system network. So we have over 20,000 what we call Veeam cloud and service providers that provide the services to our customers based on Veeam platform backup in the cloud, disaster recovery, manage backup. Finally today we announce with Veeam that's another new initiative that we are expanding our ecosystem with Veeam APS where we want our partners, together with us, build this secondary storage systems that provide a single solution because some customers they want to buy in the form of the hardware appliance, our solution. So it's going to be pre installed, similar experience, out of the box functionality, easy to deploy, easy to manage with a single interphase. All provided and with a single support wise. So those systems will be created together with our partners. Like we announced one with Nutanix as well as with ExaGrid. We are working, Nutanix is one of the most innovative companies in our industry and we were very happy to partner with them because we believe that we will develop the right solution and we will be able to take this APS and offer our other partners to Build a secondary storage system, together with us. >> Well we've seen this little company, years ago, called Veeam, what a great name, superglue itself to the virtualization trend and really ride that wave now going onto act two, which is a cloud rapid timid shift. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Thank you Dave. >> Keep right there everybody. This is theCUBE, we're here at VeeamOn2019 in Miami. We'll be right back after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois It's theCUBE covering VeeamOn 2018 Brought to you by Veeam. >> Dave: Welcome back to VeeamOn 2018. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the Noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is our second year at VeeamOn, #VeeamOn. Alan Stern is here. He's the technical solutions architect at Cisco. Alan, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Alan: Great to be here. It's a real honor and privilege, so I'm excited. >> It's a great show. It's smallish. It's not as big as Cisco Live which will be at the next month but it's clean, it's focused. Let's start with your role at Cisco as a solutions architect. What's your focus? >> So my focus is really on three areas of technology. Data protection being one of them, software defined storage or object storage, and then the Hadoop ecosystem. And I work with our sales teams to help them understand how the technology is relevant to Cisco as a solutions partner, and also work with the partners to help them understand how Cisco-- the benefit of working with Cisco is advantageous to all of us in order to help our customers come to solutions that benefit their enterprise. So your job as a catalyst and a technical expert-- so you identify workloads, use cases, and figure out how can we take Cisco products and services and point them there and add the most value for customers. That's really your job. >> To some degree, yeah, I mean in a lot of these solutions, this is an area that our executive team has said, "Hey this is something we can go help our customers with" and then it's handed down to my team and my job is then to make it happen. Along with a lot of other people. >> So let's look at these. Data protection is obviously relevant at VeeamOn. What role does Cisco play in the data protection matrix? >> So Cisco provides an optimal platform for great partners like Veeam to land these backups. It's critical, it's funny we often talk about backup, and what we should be talking about is restore. Cause nobody backs up just for the sake of backing up. But how do I restore quickly, and having that backup on premise on an optimized platform where Cisco has done all of the integration work to make sure everything is going to work is critical to the customer's success. Because as we know maintenance windows and downtime are a thing of the past. They don't exist anymore. We live in an always-on enterprise and that's really where folks like Veeam are focused. >> For you younger people out there, we used to talk about planned downtime which is just-- what? What is that? Why would anybody plan for downtime? It's ridiculous. >> Stu: Alan, what if we can unpack that a little. I think back and the data center group, you and Cisco launched UCS, the memory that it had was really geared for virtualization and I could see why Veeam and Cisco would work well together because some unique architecture that's there. This is a few years ago now that UCS has been on the market, What's the differentiation and maybe bring us inside some of the engineering work that happened between Cisco and Veeam in some of these spaces. >> So we take our engineers and lock them in with Veeam engineers into a lab and they go in and deploy the solution, they turn all the various nerd knobs to get the platform optimized. Primarily we talk about our S3260 which in a 4U space holds about 672 terabytes of storage and they optimize it and then publish a document that goes with it. We call them Cisco-validated designs. And these designs allow the customer to deploy the solution without having to go through the hit-or-miss of "what happens when I turn "this nerd knob or that nerd knob, "alter this network configuration or that one" and to get the best performance in the shortest possible time. >> Those CVDs are critical, but field knows them, they trust them, can you speak a bit to -- the presence that you have having Veeam in your pricebook, what that means, to kind of take that out to the broad Cisco ecosystem. Yeah, and it's more than just having it on the pricelist. It's the integrated support, so that the customer knows that if there's a problem they're not going to end up in a finger-pointing solution of Cisco saying "Call Veeam" or Veeam saying "Call Cisco." They have a solution and we're in lockstep so that there aren't going to be the problems. The CVD insures that problems are kept to a minimum. Cisco has fantastic support, Veeam has great support. They were talking this morning about the net promoter score being 73 which is unbelievably good. So that in the event that there is a problem, they know they're going to get to resolution incredibly quickly and they're going to get their environment restored as quickly as possible. >> So when I think about the three areas of your focus, data protection, object storage, and Hadoop ecosystem, there's definitely intersection amongst those. We talked a little bit about data protection. The object store piece, the whole software defined, is a trend that's taking off, we were talking earlier about some of the trade-offs of software defined. Bill Philbin was saying, "Well if I go out "and put it together myself when there's "a problem, I've got to fix it myself." So there's a trade-off there. I don't know if you watch Silicon Valley, Stu but the box. Sometimes it's nice to have an appliance. What are you seeing in terms of the trends toward software defined-- What's driving that? Is it choice, is it flexibility? What are the trade-offs? >> It's a couple of things. The biggest thing that's driving it is just the explosion of data. Data that's born in the cloud-- It's probably pretty good to store with one of the cloud providers. But data that's born in your data center or that is extremely proprietary and sensitive; customers are increasingly looking to say "You know what, I want to keep that onsite." and that's in addition to the regulatory issues that we're going to see with GDPR and others. So they want to keep it on site, but they like the idea of the ease of use of cloud and the nature of object storage and the cost-- the cost model for object storage is great. I take a X86 based server like UCS and I overlay a storage software that's going to give me that resiliency through erasure coding or replication. And now I've got a cost model that looks a lot like the cloud, but it's on premise forming. So that also allows me, I'm putting archival data there, I can store it cheaply and bring it back quickly. Because the one challenge with the cloud is my connectivity to my cloud provider is finite. >> Just a quick follow-up on that, I know Scality's a partner or there are other options for optic storage. >> Sure, both Scality and Swiftstack are on our global pricelist like Veeam. We also work with some other folks like IBM cloud object store, Cohesity, which sort of fits in between space, as well as, we're doing some initial work with Cloudy. >> Think about the hadoop ecosystem. That brings in new challenges, I mean A lot of Hadoop is basically software defined file system. And it's also in a distributed-- The idea of bringing five megabytes of computing to a petabyte of data. So it's leave the data where it is. So that brings new challenges with regard to architectures, protecting that data, talk about that a little bit. >> The issue with Hadoop is data has gravity. Moving lots of data around is really inefficient. That's where MapReduce was born. The data is already there. I don't have to move it across the network to process it. Data protection was sort of an afterthought. You do have replication of data, but that was really for locality, not so much for data protection. >> Or recovery to your earlier. >> But even with all of that the network is still critical. Without sounding like an advertisement for Cisco, we're really the only server provider that thought about the network as we're building the servers and as we're designing the entire ecosystem. Nobody else can do that. Nobody has that expertise. And a number of hardware features that we have in the products give us that advantage like the Cisco virtual interface card. >> That's a true point, you managed your heritage so of course that's where you started. So what advantage does that give you and one of the things we talked about in theCUBE a lot is, Flash changed everything. We used to just use spinning disks to persist and we certainly didn't it for performance. Did unnatural acts to try to get performance going. So, in many respects, Flash exposed some of the challenges with network performance. So how has that affected the market, technology, and Cisco's business? >> We're in this period of shift on Flash. Because if you think about it, at the end of the day, the Flash is still sitting on a PCI bus, it's probably ISCSI with a SATA interface. >> You got the horrible storage stack >> We move the bottleneck away from the disk drive itself, now to the bus. Now we're going to solve a lot of that with NBME and then it will come to the network. But the network's already ahead of that. We're looking at-- We have 10 gig, 40 gig, we're going to see 100 gig ethernet. So we're in pretty good shape in order to survive and really flourish as the storage improves the performance. We know with compute, the bottlenecks just move. You know, I think this morning you said Whack-a-Mole. >> Thinking about the next progression in the Whack-a-Mole, what is the next bottleneck? Is it the latency to the cloud, is it-- I mean if it's not the network, because it sounds like you're prepared for NVMe. Is it getting outside the data center? Is the next bottleneck? >> I think that's always going to be the bottleneck I use analogies like roads. We think about a roadway inside my network it's sort of the superhighway but then once I go off, I'm on a connector road. And gigabit ethernet, multi-gigabit, some folks will have fiber in the metropolitan area, but at some point they're going to hit that bottleneck. And so it becomes increasingly important to manage the data properly so that you're not moving the data around unnecessarily. >> I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the cloud here. at the Veeam show we're talking about beyond just the data center virtualization. Talking about a multi-cloud world. I had the opportunity to go to Cisco Live Barcelona, interviewed Rowan Trollope, he talked heavily about Cisco's software strategy, living in that multi-cloud world, maybe help connect the dots for us as to how Cisco and Veeam go beyond the data center and where Cisco lives beyond that. >> So beyond the data center, we really believe the multi-cloud world is where it's going to happen. Whether the cloud is on-prem, off-prem, multiple providers, software, and servers, all of those things and both Cisco and Veeam are committed to giving that consistent performance, availability, security. Veeam, obviously, is an expert at the data management, data availability. Cisco, we're going to provide some application availability and performance through apt dynamics, we have our security portfolio in order to protect the data in the cloud and then the virtualized networking features that are there to again insure that the network policy is consistent whether you're on prem in Cloud A, Cloud B, or the Cloud yet to be developed. >> So we'll come back backup, which is the first of the three that we talked about. What's Cisco's point of view, your point of view, on how that's evolving from one -- think about Veeam started out as a virtualization specialist generally but specifically for Veeamware. Now we've got messaging around the digital economy, multi-cloud, hyperavailability, etc. What does that mean from a customer's standpoint? How is it evolving? >> Well, it's evolving in ways we couldn't have imagined. Everything is connected now, and that data -- that's the value. The data that the customer has is their crown jewels. What Veeam has done really well is yeah they start off as a small virtualization player, but as they've seen the market grow and evolve, they've made adaptations to really be able to expand and stay with their customers as their needs have morphed and changed. And in many ways, similar to Cisco. We didn't start in the server space, we saw an opportunity to do something that nobody else was doing, to make sure the network was robust and well-built and the system was well managed, and that's when we entered the space. So I think it's two companies that understand consistency is critical and availability is critical. And we both evolved with our customers as the markets and demands of the business had changed. >> Last question: What are some of the biggest challenges you're working on with customers that get you excited, that you say, "Alright I'm really going to "attack this one" Give me some color on that. >> I think the biggest challenge we're seeing today is a lot of customers are-- their infrastructure because of budgets, hasn't been able to evolve fast enough and they have legacy platforms and legacy software on those platforms in terms of availability that they've got to make the migration to. So helping them determine which platform is going to be best, which platform is going to let them scale the way they need, and then which software package is going to give them all the tools and features that they need. That's exciting because you're making sure that that company is going to be around tomorrow. >> Well that's a great point. And we've been talking all day Stu, about some of the research that we've done at WikiBon the day before, quantified in a Fortune1000, they leave between one and a half and 2 billion dollars over a three to four year period on the table because of poorly architected, or non-modern infrastructure and poorly architected availability, and backup and recovery procedures. It's a hard problem because you can't just snap your fingers and modernize and the CFO's going "How we going to pay for this" We've got this risk, this threat, We're sort of losing soft dollars, but at the end of the day they actually come down they do affect the bottom line. Do you agree that-- I said last question I lied. Do you agree that CXOs are becoming aware of this problem and ideally will start to fund it? >> Absolutely, because we talked earlier about the days of planned downtime are gone. Let a CXO have a minute of downtime and look at the amount of lost revenue that he sees and suddenly you've got his/her attention. >> Great point. Alan we've got to run. Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE >> My pleasure. Great to meet you both. >> Thanks for watching everybody. This is theCUBE live from VeeamON 2018 in Chicago. We'll be right back.

>> Voiceover: Live from New Orleans, it's The Cube. Covering VeeamOn 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. (funky electronic theme music) >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract a signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. Ratmir Timashev is here, he's the co-founder of Veeam and he's joined by Peter McKay who's the co-CEO and president. Gentleman, good to see you. >> Good to see you. >> Welcome to the Cube, congratulations on the great keynote this morning. >> Great to see you, Dave. >> Seemed like you guys were having fun out there. >> Yeah it is, it's a lot of fun, it's a great, great time. >> So Ratmir, I want to start with you. A lot of people in our audience may not be familiar with Veeam. We've been sort of sharing with them, the rapid ascendancy of the company. But come, go back ten years, why did you start, you and your co-founder, start the company? >> Yeah, the company's ten years old. Last year we celebrated ten years, it was started in 2006 by me and my partner who is the technology side. He's my technology genius. I'm on the sales and marketing. So we started the company with the simple idea to build the new version, or new generation data protection for virtualized environments. VMware was getting hot back in 2005, 2006, 2007. It kept more and more penetration within enterprise. Back then the cloud was like, 10 or 20 percent penetrated, but we saw that, it's going to be 90 eventually, so we wanted to ride this big wave, technology revolution wave. And now I think we, looking back ten years I think we're in a very similar spot with the cloud. Cloud is where visualization was 10 years ago so and we want to ride this new wave or the cloud wave the same way exactly that we rode the VM wave, visualization and hyper-V wave. >> You know that's interesting, I was explaining to the audience this morning that your ascendancy coincided with Vmware and what happened was we consolidated resources and the one resource that was so precious was for backup and everybody had to re architect their backup and you guys were the, were an answer and obviously one of the more popular answers. Now we're into this cloud era and you see a similar opportunity, you're messaging sort of focuses on that and there's an emergent strategy that you're >> Yeah. >> putting forth. >> I mean I think everybody is moving into a multi cloud environment, right? Where there's going to be, their data's going to be all over the place, they're going to be on premise or manage service providers or in AWS or Azure and so and for us we need to be able to make it available and always on and so that's our focus is to make it very easy for our customers to store their data and run their applications and always be available no matter what the environment is. On premise, off, no matter what the infrastructure is. >> So we talk about digital transformation a lot on The Cube, every event we go to, it's digital transformation, you guys had a little bit different spin on that, digital life, always on, availability, capabilities. You're having fun with green. (laughs) >> Ratmir: Yeah. >> Peter: Oh yeah. >> Green is, >> We always have fun with green. >> Green is go. >> As you can tell. >> A lot of things you can do with green is go, color of money >> Celtics, right? Boston Celtics. >> Boston Celtics. Number one pick. >> Veeam green team. Veeam green machine. >> Veeam green machine, love it. So give us your perspective on this whole digital life. What is that all about? >> Yeah so our message in the last 10 years has evolved. Originally when we started our message was very simple. We're number one VMware backup. That message really resonated and we did deliver on the purpose of number one VMware backup. I remember first time when we introduce that concept, our competitors look at us like who knows them? But then we did in fact become the number one VMware backup, so And our message has evolved over time so from technical message to, that is focused on our core customer which is IT prone. The person that really understands the modern technologies, responsible for the modern data center. Understands the modern storage cloud technologies and visualization technologies. But that message has evolved as we are growing, becoming bigger, and we're going more into a enterprise so now solution become bigger and broader. That covers cloud. So we had to evolve our message so right now our message is, has become more consumer centric, more emotional, touching our digital life. Because we believe that that's at the end of the day, that's what we do. We enable our customers, our businesses to provide this seamless digital life experience for their users. That's what we do. >> So I love it when a successful company brings in a new leader. Because as opposed to things are bad and they have to make a change, we saw this last week, I mentioned I was at ServiceNow Knowledge, Frank Slootman, incredibly successful CEO, stepped aside, brought in a new, and part of that transition was about reaching a new constituency, so my question to you, Peter, is traditionally the Veeam audience is hardcore operational people. Your messaging is much higher level in the organization so how are you dealing with that sort of bifurcated personas, who are you targeting in this sort of new messaging? >> So as the, in the early days of Veeam it started in kind of that SMB market and kind of expanded into commercial and now very focused on the enterprise and so a lot of the enterprise are kind of working through this transition. The digital life and the new, staying relevant to the new users that are coming online and so we've found that our message needed to evolve as well and it needs to be, lines in business now are getting more involved in some of the decision making so our message wasn't where it needed to be in terms of evolving it for that enterprise customer and one that we think will foster that digital transformation for a lot of our companies customers and so we view this was the right time, especially with version 10, version 9.5 which was very successful and version 10 which really expands our enterprise capability but also we needed to, it broadens a lot of the applications down to things that we could do in an enterprise and we needed that message to also be kind of that enterprise in a broad strategic message. >> Peter, when I talk to customers these days, it's a very fragmented market out there, I think, as Ratmir said you rode that VMware wave, now customers adopting lots of sass, they're doing multiple public clouds, they're trying to figure out how they modernize their private cloud. Before it was VMware, therefore I need backup. Now it's how much does their choice on where they put their data and their application drive to you, how much do you have kind of the brand Veeam out there to kind of pull into those other environments and do customers turn to you for help in sorting out that kind of multi cloud world? >> Yeah actually I was talking to a friend of mine who is a key analyst at ESG, Jason Buffington, you know Jason. >> Yeah he's coming on. >> He had a great point about the industry, that our data industry or storage industry or data protection industry, he said that every new wave you go from mainframe to client server, from client server to visualization, from visualization to cloud. There is always a new backup leader. Because the technology changes so much and the people or the company that doesn't have this old baggage with the old technology, old agent based or supporting all these legacy platforms, that can move much faster and that's what Veeam has demonstrated with visualization. The only exception is the transition from visualization to cloud because cloud is based on visualization. So and based on the concept of the data mobility, and that's, from the mental concept to visualization and so we believe that we are very well set with our leadership position in visualization to also dominate cloud market because our technologies are modern technologies specifically built for visualization and cloud. >> And is the argument then that an Amazon or an Azure won't dominate that, because essentially they are a cloud stovepipe, is that right, can you expand on that a little bit? >> That's the way we look at it, I mean it's choice. People want to put, they should be able to put their data wherever they want or their applications, and we should make it very easy for them to do that. If they want to do an Azure, but it's not only just putting it in Azure, it's being able to get after it, get it and move it and transfer data no matter where wanted to so for us it's about providing the flexibility to move the data or run the apps no matter where you want at any time. >> Peter you ran a company that Vmware acquired that was an Azure service. Veeam has some Azure service solutions, customers often times are trying to switch from there's no more shrink wrap software anymore, models for buying it, where do you see customers in that adoption? Curious of your old role and kind of today what you're seeing. >> It's interesting, so Desktone was very much of a platform for managed service providers and cloud providers and so in coming to Veeam, a big part of our business, which is very different than I think a lot of the other people in the market is focusing on those cloud providers. Not just Amazon, Azure, the public, but also we have 15, over 15,000 managed service providers and cloud providers that run our platform as a business. And so when we rolled out a number of features here that if, unless you were a managed service provider or a cloud provider, you wouldn't get the multi-tenancy and the things that we built on scalability that are really changing the game we believe for the managed service providers. But it's also, what we saw at Desktone that went into Veeam. It's, our customers are also doing it as a service within their organization. Things like multi-tenancy are things that they need and scalability are things that they need as a business, so it's a lot of similarities between the world that I lived in and Desktone and VMware to where we are today. >> One of the impressive stats, you said 2016, 231,000 customers that you have. Are all of those paying customers, you have the free version, can you give us any insight as to how many pay versus free >> It's actually over 245,000, that was at the end of the year, so we're adding 4,000 new customers every month and those are all paid. We don't count the people who downloaded the free version of it. >> That's good to know, you could have millions of >> We have millions so far our other free products, yes. >> Awesome. >> Millions of users. >> That's important. >> And another stat you put out in the keynote was an NPS of 73 which is really, really good. Can we talk about that a little bit? Ratmir you were making the point off camera that it rose from the low 60s. What's going on there? >> Yeah so last year it was 61, the year before it was 62, so we were kind of very high but flat, so and this year it actually jumped to 73 and the reason that I personally contribute that to is because we had extremely powerful release 9.5 and customer are extremely happy with the improvements, and the easy of operate and using all these new capabilities, it was the most, the smoothest upgrade, the smoothest release and with the powerful features. The second reason I think our NPS, net promoter score, rose that much is because Peter came on board. (laughs) So in the last 10 month, Peter really, really strengthen our team. I thought that we are moving very fast but now, so we have the concept of Veeam speed, that means moving really fast but now we, actually with Peter we are moving 10 times faster, all of magnitude faster. >> I don't believe it's me but I think what Veeam has always done is done a really good job of listening to our customers and communicating with our customers on a regular basis. We built at a customer success business, part of our business that we're investing in, but we have a whole, a team of people who just solicit and communicate with our partners, and our customers on a regular basis, so they know what we're doing, it's rare that they don't really get a good sense of where we're going and the vision and strategy of Veeam so I think that goes a long way in driving our NPS score. >> We got to break but last thing we really haven't double clicked on is the ecosystem, maybe a quick word on that and then we'll wrap. >> That's a big, obviously, a partner community, we have 45,000 partners, we have 15, over 15,000 managed service providers in cloud. Probably the area that is impacting our business quite a bit now recently is a lot of the alliance partnerships that have. Today we have Veeamware, we have Cisco, very strong and successful, we announced HPE which not only is a development partnership but also a resell partnership and go to market which is dramatically impacing >> Former competitor. >> Yes yes which has opened up a tremendous amount of opportunities for us so we're going to continue to expand into other companies, we're, because 50% of this market is changing over in 2017 and 18, from legacy solutions to new, in the hardware is a piece of that and we're trying to embed as much of that into one sales motion, one bundle for our customers, making it easy to try and buy Veeam. >> Okay, founder gets the last word, bumper sticker when the buses are pulling away, the trucks are pulling away from New Orleans, what's the bumper sticker on VeeamOn 2017? >> See you in 2018. (laughs) Let's have another great year, and another stick with Veeam. >> We find out I think Thursday where 2018 is going to happen. >> Yes. >> Alright so stay with us alright thanks Gents for coming to The Cube. >> Excellent, thanks for having us. >> You're welcome alright keep it right there buddy we'll be back with our next guest, The Cube are live from VeeamOn in New Orleans, be right back. (funky electronic theme music)