>> Narrator: From Chicago, it's theCUBE covering Veritas Vision's Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Windy City everybody. We're here covering the Veritas Solution Days in Chicago. I'm Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Robert Swanson is here, CUBE alum from DC Vast, he runs sales at the organization. Great to see you again, thanks for coming back on. >> You as well, thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome. So last year we were at the Aria in Las Vegas, we talked a lot about Cloud and the big tent event, now Veritas is doing these Solution Days, going out to where the customers are. It's probably good for you 'cause you're Chicago based, right? >> Absolutely, yeah, it's good to have the event here in my hometown. >> So how was this for you today? What'd you learn, what's the conversation been like? >> Yeah, no, it was a good morning, I like having the regional approach, a little bit more of an intimate event, had a variety of customers here and colleagues of Veritas as well. It was definitely a great event this morning. >> Lot of hot stuff going on in data protection. There's Cloud, there's multi-Cloud security and data protection are kind of coming together. The distributive data center on the Edge, new ways, new modes of protecting data. What are you seeing as some of the big drivers out there as you talk to customers? >> That's a great question and you really can't avoid the subject of Cloud. At first I think we looked at data protection really as, excuse me, Cloud, as an enabler for data protection so thinking about on-premise data and how the Cloud can help protect that. Especially for mid-market companies, it really allowed them to do some really cool retention and disaster recovery things that they might not have been able to do before or afford to be able to do before. Now we're looking it more about, alright, there's workloads in the Cloud, there's Cloud native data, what do you do with that? The Cloud providers are guaranteeing you or providing you some SLAs or guidelines around availability but that's not backup so now what do we do with the Cloud native data? Really though, as workloads start getting put out, not only into the big hyperscale or Clouds, but into Office 365 and different file share services, and in SAS applications. It truly is IT anywhere now which really creates a challenge for data protection. I mean, I feel like data management and data protection, the complexity and challenge of it has just grown exponentially in the last few years because now there is important, sensitive data everywhere that companies have to figure out how to maintain and protect and secure and really work for them. >> Wonder if you could talk about just your businesses, the whole partner channel is just fascinating, something we've been tracking now for a while. Cloud was sort of a shot across the bow to a lot of business models. It used to be, hey, I'm going to take a bunch of margin, and resell a product, and buy a boat. But that's changed, you can't just be a quote unquote box seller, that's a metaphor just for reselling somebody else's technology. You have to be a solution provider. So Cloud was in one regards a threat, but it's become an opportunity. How have you guys responded? Talk about the shift toward a solution mindset. >> Yeah, no, you're absolutely right, it really is. The channel's at a bit of an inflection point with the Cloud and contrary to some popular belief, it's not our mission as a channel company to resell hardware or some piece of software. It's getting more and more important for our partners to be people that can be companies that can offer us technology to help kind of fit in to our model and not necessarily vice versa. So now... the Cloud providers have changed the, you know where the abstraction layer occurs and there's so much automation out there that some things that we might used to provide services or manage services around low-level sys admin type task, keep the lights on kind of things, are done in an automated manner right now. We really have to redefine what we do for our customers and Cloud is important so it's really helping customers identify, where is the appropriate place to run a workload? What's better on PREM, what's better in the Cloud? Make sure you have that data portability. We have to be able to provide them guidance and services and really help in that regard as they're navigating it with us. So helping them identify where to put things, how to protect things, how to manage the data, and really how to optimize the spend as well, is something we've kind of pivoted towards. >> It's becoming more complicated. Okay, it used to be, I've got an application server, I'm going to bolt on some back up because I've got to back up the data, okay, done. Virtualization changed things quite a bit but now you've got Clouds, you've got multiple Clouds, you've got SAS, you've got distributed data. You've got to worry about, okay as you were saying, where do I put that data? You're thinking about recovery. How fast can I recovery, so where does that recovery data live? And then, who's managing this whole thing? So I would think there's a huge opportunity for you guys to come in, consult with customers, architect solutions that actually address every customer's different, their unique situations. Maybe you could discuss that a little bit and how you're helping folks. >> The lines are really starting to get blurred too on what you do with data. What's securing it versus protecting it, versus backing it up, versus replicating it, versus it being discoverable. I think that's one of the areas where we're seeing Veritas really kind of evolve. I have the experience in data management and now with some of the technologies that they're launching kind of a platform with some of their different technologies containerized and put on to a single platform I think is really seeing all of this whole concept of data management converging. >> So where do you see this whole thing going? Last question is, you looked out two, three, four, five years, you're going to have lots of Clouds, you're going to have Edge, you've got all this data, digital transformation. Specifically in the context of data protection, how do you see that evolving and what does it look like in the next four or five years? >> I think I used the term already, data portability, and workload portability, and I like that and I think that's where it's going 'cause as the public Cloud market and even non-PREM private Cloud market continue to evolve, it's really going to be about portability. Where is the most appropriate place to run a workload to have certain data? Is it in the public Cloud, is it on-prem, and maybe that changes, right? Maybe the cost modeling changes, maybe the performance requirements changed, so that needs to be portable but with portability, we have to be able to follow that data and those workloads and be able to have some kind of consistent way to protect them. I really think that's the evolution, that's kind of the arms race with a lot of the vendors in this space right now and what everybody's trying to do 'cause that's where it's all headin'. >> Alright Bob, great, thanks very much for coming back in theCUBE, really good to see you again. 85% I think of Veritas's business goes through the channel, critical partners like you make it all happen. So I really appreciate your perspectives, thank you. >> Thanks again for having me, thanks for coming to Chicago. Hope to see you here again. >> You're welcome. Keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE at Veritas Vision Solution Days from Chicago. Be right back. (digital music)

>> Announcer: From Chicago, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Chicago, everybody. We're here covering the Veritas Solution Days. Veritas used to have a big tent event last year. This year they're going out to, I think, seven cities around the globe. Probably touching more people than they would've with the single event, but they're road warriors, and we're here with them. theCUBE is the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, Roger Dombrowski is here. He's a data protection specialist at dcVAST, one of Veritas' big solution partners based here in Chicago. Roger, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. >> You're very welcome. So, data protection specialist, so you're into it. Data protection is changing quite dramatically. There's cloud, there's the edge... We just talked to Jyothi about AI, and so lots is changing. From your prospective, how are customers responding to those change? What are some of the key drivers? >> A lot of the key drivers... You used to be able to differentiate with backups and things like that. Now it's table stakes, it's an insurance policy. And that's kind of the old classic way of looking at it, but I think with today what we're finding, and I think Veritas is doing such a great job of, is mining value out of stuff that's even been around a while. So while the workloads have changed, our best practices haven't changed, our strategies haven't changed. It's where things are going, but it's also mining that metadata to get more value out of the backups than to just be a insurance policy. >> So I mean one of the obvious things is, I've talked about, is DR, but DR is still insurance. It's just more insurance and maybe you're killing two birds with one stone, but when you talk about mining data and analytics, and getting more out of the metadata, give us some other examples of how customers are exploiting and leveraging that investment in what used to be just backup pure insurance. >> Yeah, and in fact it's kind of interesting 'cause Info Map's been out for a little while, and I think we've been going around to the customer base with a slide stack, maybe a couple of slides, and really underselling the value. And what I've had a great opportunity to do with a couple of customers here very recently, is get into some deep use cases, and it's been an eye opening experience. And what's so amazing is the date we're and the information we're gathering has been in their backups for years, right? It's like the data has been there. It's been on tap, we're tapping that with Info Map. Finding stale data, ransomware, age data, all kinds of better ways to tier. You know some of the discussions were around cloud. And hey do you really want put cat videos in the cloud? Well, we can find those things with the backups. And we've been looking a that data for years. We're finally now pulling the value out of that data. >> And one of those speakers earlier today talked about, he took us all the way back to the federal rules of civil procedure, and bringing together IT and legal. So those discussions now with GDPR, et cetera, coming back to the fore. And it's important you don't want data that could be a legal risk hanging around. Everybody says, oh big data, keep all the data. And General Council's go I don't want to keep all the data. So the backup corpus is a way you're saying to investigate that and reduce risks, and also potentially identify diamonds in the rough. That you can-- >> Absolutely. >> You can mine. >> Absolutely. >> Okay. Let's talk about. I want to ask you about, there was a little company called Network Appliance, I think they were founded back in the '80s, they changed their name in the 2000s to NetApp, got out of that appliance, but appliances are still strong in the marketplace. Everybody's talking about software-defined. I think even Veritas uses it as part of its description of who they are and yet they continue to announce appliances as do others. Why appliances, from your practitioner perspective, what's going on there? >> Well, actually there's a customer whose actually here at the even today, and one of the things that really sold them on that whole form factor was the larger the company gets the more siloed, different aspects of business are. If you know if you wanted to make a change or implement something, you'd have the network team, you'd have change control, you'd have the OS team, the application teams. The appliance form factor's allowing the backup admins to wrangle in a lot of that crazy, hey, I've got to have 20 groups involved in something. Purpose built and performance tuned. I mean see it all the time. Customers, they still look at us and go, well, I think I can do it cheaper, and I've seen them try to do it, and maybe they'll save a few bucks, but the soft cost in terms of headaches, and problems, and tuning, and just limitations of building your own versus the appliance form factor. >> It's still going to run on hardware? So you're saying let the vendor do the integration and that's sort of the appeal of the appliance. There are use cases for PureSoftware based solutions, but if you just want to set it and (laughs) forget it. >> Roger: It really is that yeah. >> The appliance comes to play. What are some of the other big things and trends that you see, but let's talk cloud. You know the whole, I've often said renting is always more expensive than owning. You don't necessarily want, if you want to rent a car for a day, well go for it but if you want to drive at 100,000 miles, it probably make sense to buy it or even lease it. We heard today about cloud repatriation, I mean that's certainly a narrative that a lot of the on-prem guys want to talk about. What are you seeing in the marketplace? >> I'm seeing, I mean even before. I mean, we'll go back four or five years. Everyone's asking me, Roger, I want to get off of tape. Let's go to the cloud. What's been so interesting is to do those calculations, and I think that some people fly over that 100 miles an hour, and Veritas was one of the first ones to actually preserve deduplication all the way through the process. So it really changed, I call it that cost versus rent, or own versus rent ratio where depending on how long you're keeping data, how well the data dedupes, things like that, that's going to affect your cost model. And that's really, in my role at dcVAST, that's a big part of what I do, is to take the feature sets that Veritas brings to the table and apply them, and say, hey, does this make sense to put this in the cloud? Should this be on prem? And the great thing again is Veritas isn't. This isn't your dad's backup anymore. I mean the Access Appliance, the Flex Appliance, some of these things we're bringing to the table, Info Map, these other tools, we're not just doing backups, we're doing ancillary things to all that. >> Just geeking it out a little bit. You just talking about dedupe through the whole process. You mean without having to rehydrate the data. >> Roger: Exactly, exactly. >> Which is just a time consuming and complicated process. >> Roger: Absolutely. >> That's a technology they're pretty proud of, they talk about it a lot. >> Very, very, very much so. And I mean, if you look it, we've always been able to do it but it's the cost, right? If I have to virtualize an appliance in the cloud, it's a very expensive proposition, but if I can dedupe and all I'm doing is storing small fragments in a cheap storage target in the cloud, that's all better for the economics for the customer. >> All right, Roger, I'll give you the last word. Takeaways from today, and any other thoughts? >> Oh, I loved hearing about the telemetry. There's some new features coming in. I've heard some of this material before, but again, to hear the different perspectives, customers talking about the technology and where we're going, I'm glad we got to go and participate. >> All right Roger Dombrowski. Thanks very much for sharing your perspective. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. >> Great to see you. >> Take care. >> All right, keep it right there everybody, theCUBE. We'll be back at Veritas Vision in Chicago right after this short break, I'm Dave Vellante. (upbeat electronic music)

>> From Tavern On The Green, in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Hello everybody welcome back to the Tavern On The Green. We're here in the heart of Central Park in New York City you're watching theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, big events, small events. We're here at the Veritas Solution Days, #VtasVision. Veritas Vision used to be a very large, big tent conference. They've changed the format now and they go out, they're going out to 20 cities this year belly to belly with the customers and we've got one here. Vishal Kadakia who is the data protection manager at NBC Universal. Vishal thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> No problem thank you for having me. >> So as I say we love to get the customer perspectives, but let me start with this event. Why, you're a busy person, you're managing a lot of data, why do you take time out to come to event like this? What do you learn? >> You always get to learn new stuff, new products that you don't necessarily get to learn, 'cause you're always just zoned into your day-to-day work that you're doing so you don't always get to see what the new features may be or you miss it. These type of events are generally good to come see that. >> So what's the day in the life like these days for data protection manager and really I'm interested in how it's changed over the last five or six years, as you see things like, the buzzwords, digital transformation, big data, cloud, multi cloud, all the vendor buzzwords, but you actually have to live that. So how has that changed the role of data protection and data protection managers specifically? >> It's definitely a lot more complicated. Before you were just backing up om prem, you had tape, pretty much made it simple. Now you have all these different workloads, you're sending out to clouds, multi tenant as they keep calling it, the hybrid, which is another buzzword. Trying to manage the different workloads is a lot more complex than it was five years ago. You have various cloud vendors, you have various storage vendors, so managing all of that, obviously the data growth from the smaller backups to now, big data which could be terabytes, petabytes, to try to back that up has been a bit of a challenge. >> But that's a challenge for someone like you who's, you know, RPO and RTO is not getting relaxed. >> Right. >> Right. And you know people always talk about getting my weekends back so, but now you have to keep up with all of these other technologies so what is it? Is it a lot of reading, is it just going to sessions like this, having vendors come in, how do you keep up with it all? >> I think it's a big mix of both. It's going out to these events, but also having vendors come to you. Doing your own research, so it's a combination of just constantly keeping up. So, I would say it's a combination of all. >> One of the things that I would be concerned about in your roll is to have just more stove pipes. Are you able to just conceptually, not technical, deep technical anyway, I love tech, but are you to create, let's call it a abstraction layer for your data protection. Is that kind of your vision or where you're headed, so that you don't have to have 10 different formats and methodologies and processes around data protection? >> Yeah, I think that's the goal that I think every company's trying to go to, is consolidate, simplify. Whether that's vendor, whether that's hardware. I think that's really the goal of any organization now. And that's kind of where we're headed also. >> So if it's a baseball game analogy, and you're nine inning game, where are you in terms of that journey? Is it early days, kind of first inning, are you kind of warmin' up in the bullpen, are you sort of well into the game? >> I think we're well into the game. We're probably into the middle innings I would say. >> Okay. So you can see sort of that vision becoming a reality. And what are the priorities then in terms of getting to that point? Is it skill sets, is it technology, is it people? >> I would say it's technology. I would say that consolidation is probably the big word. We're all trying to consolidate while trying back up the large data sets. And I think that's where we are right now. That's where we're starting to get to, and see the plan forming, seeing where our methodologies, our strategies on how we're going to go forward. >> As you move toward the cloud, Vishal, whether or not it's even pushing data to the cloud, a lot of times you just can't. But it seems like that cloud operating model is something that's alluring to folks. Simplifying, agility, self service, are those initiatives that you guys have enacted? >> In terms of that, yeah we're I think in that phase, I think we're in our beginning to form that plan, because once you get to a cloud, you have to really have a good plan. Otherwise, your data is going to be all over the place. You're not going to know where it is, and managing that's just going to become that much harder. So I think in terms of that, we're trying to really come out with a good plan of how you migrate to the cloud. 'Cause once you get to the cloud, there's a whole different set of complexities that you have in managing it. >> Like what? Maybe tick off a few, so we can paint a picture. >> So once you get to the cloud, migrating, so you've formulated your plan how to get to, what cloud to use, what vendor you're using. How do you migrate from your on prem to the cloud is I think one of the big complexities, which I think kind of stumps a lot of people. You know you want to go to the cloud, just don't know how to get there. >> Is that just because the volume of data and you got to move data and it just takes so long? I mean to back up your iPhone takes forever and it fails left and right. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So okay. It's the amount of data and the time it takes? >> Right, and you also have legacy applications, which may not be cloud ready and how do you deal with that? So you have that hybrid model you still want to keep some stuff om prem but you want to go the cloud. What goes to the cloud, which cloud do you go to? All of that is where I think we're really at and I don't think it's any different than any other organization, so that's kind of where. >> And how about this notion of multi cloud? I mean is that something that is real in your business? >> Yeah, I think it definitely is. I think our end users are trying to take advantage of where to go best? Some places Azure might work best. Some places AWS might work. There's also Google now that's coming up, so I think you have to kind of consider where the workload would be best to go to. >> Is Shadow sort of IT and cloud creep problematic for you and in other words, you know, lines of businesses saying, it's easy, I can swipe a credit card and I'm up and running in minutes. And then, oh I got to protect this data, it's got to be compliant. Has that been a challenge for you, do you feel like you have that under control? >> No, that has definitely been a challenge area. Different groups that have kind of tried to do their own thing and then found out, oh wait, this is way harder than we thought. Let us go back to our central team. But by then it's kind of all over the place, right so that's definitely been interesting. >> Yeah it's hard, because thinking about that you probably might have done it differently. You might have put in processes and procedures in place and now you've got to clean up the mess so to speak. But okay, so I want to get into Veritas, and you're a Veritas customer? >> I am. >> So how does Veritas help you with all these solutions? I mean a lot of the things I've just asked you, I think are part of either their road map or they're making claims that they can currently help solve some of these problems. Can they, what do you do with Veritas, and how legitimate is their ability in terms of being able to solve some of these problems? >> So we've been able to use Veritas to kind of, as a central location, management of everything. One of their tools as such is CloudPoint. So our biggest thing is if you don't have a central management tool like CloudPoint, which can manage your various cloud backups, then you're left with managing each cloud on its own. So as an operations standpoint, that's like a nightmare. So having a tool such as CloudPoint, right, and then that getting integrated back into NetBackup, which now gives us a central location for all my backups, for reporting, for audit purposes, any of that has been great. And I've been using Veritas since 3.1 so I've been a Veritas customer for a long time. I've seen the evolution of when it was 3.1, a lot of it was manually operated, a lot of scripts, where now a lot of it is automated. So that's helped a lot. We're automating VM policies, we're automating SQL backup policies, all of that has been great. >> Where are you today in terms of these. >> I'm sorry? >> Where are you at today in terms of the release? >> We're, I know they just released eight one two, we're on eight one one. >> Okay so close to current. Yeah I've seen some videos on eight one two. It looks like they've really put a lot of time and effort in to refreshing it. It looks like a microservices architecture, they're talking about containers and certainly you know, saying all the right things. From your perspective have you dug into it yet or is it still early? >> It's still early. I did deploy it on a test environment. Haven't fully played around with it but some of the cool concepts obviously are, you're going away from that Java console eventually, getting to that web based, able to access it from anywhere, the manageability, like a central tool to manage all of that. That I think they're finally gearing towards that and. >> And you guys are a VMware shop? >> We are a VMware shop. >> So when we were at VM World last August, this past year, and even the year before. Data protection was one of the hottest topics, you know, on the show floor. Were you there, I don't know if you were there. >> I was not there. >> I mean it was really a lot of buzz there, sort of a lot of new entrance in that space, and would I imagine a lot of people coming after you for your business, because that's a very large install base. So when you look at the vendor landscape, how do you look at it? Where do you position Veritas, relative to some of the other upstarts? Your thoughts on the competitive landscape, why Veritas? >> Well, my point of view has always been, if it's not broke you don't fix it. There may be other that may be doing something better, but at the end of the day if it's not drastically different, it's a lot of work to move away from one product to another. They'll always come to you and say, hey, we do this better, we do this better. But then when you compare it, to me, Veritas is that all encompassing. It doesn't only do virtual, it does physical well also. It doesn't only do big data, it does all the traditional databases as well. They're always constantly evolving and adding new workloads that it can also be compatible with. >> Yeah so, I would imagine it would be a little difficult to go to your CFO and try to justify a huge migration project given the other priorities that you have. Give me some insight there. I mean what kinds of things do you want to focus on, I mean obviously nobody wants to migrate anything, it's like moving a house. >> Yeah. >> You really don't want to do it, I mean sometimes you get a bigger house or a nicer house or a smaller house, but it's, moving is always a pain. So you'd rather put your effort in your shop somewhere else. Where are you putting that effort? What are some of the priorities that you have either personally or professionally? >> I would say in this sense I think it's I don't want to work the weekends, right. So how do we automate? How do we make operations easier for everybody, the engineering, the solution, the operations. I want to make it simple. I think Veritas allows us to do that 'cause they're an open source, they work with many vendors which makes it nice. So you can, such as VMware, it works with vRealize. All those plugins with VMware and you can eventually just automate and make it simple. >> And kind of get rid of a lot of the scripts which tend to be fragile, they take a lot of maintenance, they tend to be error prone, so if you can through a set of APIs automate programmatically move towards sort of infrastructurous code or a DevOps environment. I'm sure you guys do that internally. And what a difference it makes, from the sort of classic waterfall in terms of speed, agility, quality. I presume that you're seeing that in your shop? >> Yeah, we definitely are and something like a flex appliance would allow us to move towards that. It simplifies, gets us to where we are, but also helps us with our goals of simplifying, reducing our footprint, but still being able to be agile enough to go to cloud, to keep a hybrid model. So something like that is I think where we're seeing. >> Well Vishal, we love the customer perspective, Thank you for coming on. We like to hear the truth, Vertias, truth in Latin, of course. And really appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome. All right keep it right there everybody. We're here at Vtas Vision, #VtasVision, Veritas Vision Days in New York City, Central Park, Tavern on the Green, beautiful location. My name's Dave Vallante. We'll be right back, right after this short break. (upbeat music)