(upbeat music) >> From Tavern on the Green, in Central Park New York, it's theCUBE; covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome to the heart of New York City. We're here in Central Park the Tavern on the Green. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're covering the Veritas Solution Day; hashtag Vtasday. So, Scott Genereux is here as executivee president of world wide field ops for Veritas. Scott, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you good to see you. Thank you. >> So, I love the location. A lot of our crew, they've never been here before; I said wait until you see Tavern on the Green, it's sweet. Customers love it. So, why this location? What are you guys doing with the Solutions Days different than the big tent event? You guys have gone to a more intimate format, explain that. >> Yeah, so last year we did the big event. We also did regional events, and it was interesting. And when we looked at the regional events; the input from our customers was; they loved the idea of doing something local, a little bigger, so they didn't have to travel. You know it's just difficult to get somebody to come out fly across the country to spend a week. And so, we decided to do 20 of these around the world. We also found out last year that the number of people who were coming to the regional events; was very very large. I mean some of our events we had four, 500 people coming. So it just made a lot more sense to us is; how do we get close to our customers, make sure they didn't have to travel; and be able to touch 'em so. >> So, collectively you're probably hitting as many if not more people. >> A lot more. >> Probably a different type of audience too when you go. So, you're doing a bunch in the US and a bunch in overseas right? >> Correct, yeah, so we've got New York, Chicago, San Francisco, we got one in Washington D.C. focus on the Fed, and we have one up in Toronto in North America. And then we've got 'em in Latin America. >> So you've been a kind of customer success executive all your life; you spend a lot of time in New York City. A lot of customers down here. A lot of the more advanced and sophisticated customers here. So, what are you hearing as you see digital transformation, big data, cloud, multi cloud; people are changing the way in which they think about data, and protecting data and getting more value out of data. What are they telling you here; the challenges that they're facing and where do they want to go with Veritas? >> You know the exciting is that look, we're still the market leader, right? Well, people say what's going on with Veritas? We're the market leader, we have been for the last 15 plus years. And, the people we're doing data protection for today, are the largest of the largest. You know, 95% of the Fortune 100 use our technology. 85% of the Fortune 500 use our technology. So, we get a lot of information knowledge experience from what you would argue and I would too. The customers here; which are the toughest of the tough too, right? I mean, they're not always nice, they tell you what they think. And they're thinking you know, two three years out of what we have to go do to support those environments. So it's interesting; you know the big thing going into this year, there was a lot of conversation around compliance. You know, GDPR in Europe was huge. And really, I kind of narrow it down to P.I.I. Regardless if you're banking, healthcare, whoever. The whole question around how do you protect data? Where is my data located? Who's touching my data? Has just become a bigger and bigger issue. And then you throw in the word cloud and as you said multi clouds, no one's using one cloud. All of a sudden your data is spread out all over the place. So, how you focus on that, how do you have visibility on that, becomes more and more important. And obviously that makes data protection, center of what's going on with customers now. >> So there are a couple of vectors now there that I'd like to explore. One is the idea that we're now looking at data protection to get more value out of it. You talked about GDPR, privacy, things of that nature. So, I want to talk about that. But also, the last thing customers want that I talked to; they don't want yet another stove pipe of data protection. And as you go, every cloud has it's own back up approach. So, I'm curious what you guys are doing. Let's start there. Are you putting in some sort of a extraction layer to be able to service all of those different multi clouds. Which cloud companies are you working with? >> Yeah, so first of all we serve all major cloud providers. For us, we're very agnostic in the sense of we don't care where your data is located; it can be behind your Firewall, it can be in Amazon, it can be Microsoft, it can be in Google, it can be in a pseudo what we would call more of a regional, you know, a sass type cloud that you support based on something uniquely in your environment. So we don't really care on where it's located. And that's actually one of our big positives. But you're right, one of the big issues customers have today is okay they start out and they might use Amazon for test development. Amazon has their own way of moving data into the cloud. And what do you do and how do you protect it? And then you go all of a sudden Office 365 because that's the you know, the Microsoft way of getting into the cloud. And so now you've got two clouds. Oracle's pushing you to do clouds. So you've got an Oracle cloud probably right? And we can go down that whole list. So everyone is driving a cloud strategy. But the problem customers have today is; they don't want to have six or seven different ways of on boarding data applications into the cloud, and they also do not want to have different ways of moving data or protecting data. And I think, so for us what we do that's very different is that, we have software that allows you to move data and applications into any one of those clouds the exact same way. I mean, if you think about it today. When you think about data replication, or protecting data; a lot of customers use hardware replication to move data. Well, the problem you run into today, when you think about it, is that the traditional cloud vendors, we just listed who they were, they don't use traditional hardware. No one's using EMCSRDF in the Amazon cloud. No one's using Hitachi's products. So, you need a software based replication tool and a data mover I'll call it, to be able to do that. And that's an area we've invested a lot of time and money on to be able to do it. And more importantly, even though I don't hear this a lot from customers any more, there was a fear for a while of cloud lock in; I don't want to be too into one cloud. We could move data between clouds also. So, you know, you don't have to bring it back and bring it back forward. So, that also makes customers at ease of how do you manage it. But it just creates a whole different environment of what to do and how to do it. >> So you're not in a technical role at the company but when you're in this business and you talk to a lot of technology people, you have to be conversant in technology. So I'm curious, so you've mentioned the high speed data mover that's something that's always been fundamental to the Veritas architecture. But you've done some other things. I've got briefed and seen some of the videos of what you guys done on 8.1.2. There's components of that are really different. I mean, modern software, micro services based architecture. >> Yep. >> That have allowed you to actually create this multi cloud sort of affinity. Maybe talk about what's the conversation like with customers with regard to modernizing your platform. >> Right. I think two things; you know it's interesting, the two things that customers always have asked us for is a new U.I. interface. You know now it's interesting like anything, customers have used us for 10 years. There's customers who love the old interface right? >> Right. >> But today, when you think about cloud or think about particular work loads, which is probably more important. You know, it's no longer the back up administrator who might have to do everything. When it used to be just the back up person, you know, having the way we used to do it, made a lot of sense. But now, you're basically grabbing someone who could be the virtual machine administrator. It could be the cloud person administrator. It could be security. And those people don't have a background in data protection. So the question is, how do you give them an interface that makes it easy for them to understand and use to be able to administrate that. So now the back up administrator can actually create groups inside of net back up. And allow those organizations to be able to look at their environments and be able to manage it very differently. So, and it's the same thing with work loads. When you think about it today, most of the data growth that we're seeing, it's traditionally not, it's not the Oracle work load, SAP work loads. 60 70 plus percent of our largest customers are creating new data based applications on non sequel stuff. It's Mongo, it's Casandra. So the new 8.1.2, supports all those environments. We didn't do that before. So that's a great interface for us. Because those data bases don't natively do back up well. The Hadoop, data analytics; huge amount of data being created there. It used to be that it used to be a sandbox; a playground. But those applications have gotten to become you know important in these customers. And so it used to be you just used to take a snap shot of this stuff and you would have about 20 copies of peta bites of data. Now you can do point in time back ups using those types of products. So 8.1.2 has that type of support in it too. And we've done a lot of stuff around VM ware specifically, focused around new innovative things that we needed to do to modernize the products. >> So those emerging work loads like not only sequel but you know, Mongo, Hadoop, etc cetera. That's now native to your stack, correct? >> Completely, yup. >> Okay, that's different. Because you've hardened that. A lot of companies in your business; maybe the some of the newer guys have to go to a partner to find those capabilities. >> Right. >> So, that's I think, big. The other thing I heard was, cloud like I think I heard self-service essentially for some of the liza business folks. Or whomever that you don't want to send them necessarily back to the back up admin. Do it on your own. Here's some policies they'll make it kindergarten proof. >> Right. >> Okay, so that's a trend you're seeing as well. >> Yes, yes, completely. >> Okay. I want to come back to something you said before, this other vector, which is other uses for back up or the back up data then just insurance. Because people don't want to pay for insurance. >> Right. >> So, you've mentioned a compliance, GDPR. I would imagine as well; when you get things like ransom ware, there's also analytics. I know you guys are applying a lot of A.I. >> Correct. >> You've got the corpus of data, just so happens that the back up data contains the data of the company. >> Correct. >> So presuming we do other things with it. So what are some of the things the customers are doing? How are they getting additional value out of the investment that they are making at Veritas? >> I think, you know, it's a couple of areas. Before we leave compliance, let me focus on one thing that's been really important is the whole question about where my data is located. This whole visual-ness of data; who's touched it last, all of that has become a really really important thing for customers because even in the natural cloud, sometimes you don't know that maybe one of the cloud providers moved your second copy of data in to a data center that is a problem for you, right? >> Physically it's in a place it shouldn't be. >> Right, yeah. It shouldn't be in a data center. It moved out of a country boundary for compliance reasons right? So, you know, we've spent a lot of time and energy creating a software technology that gives you that visibility. And not just with net back up. We also plug in all the cloud providers; we also plug in Oracle, we also plug in box.net. You know I mean, so a lot of these other companies are also plugged in. So, back to your point, we've created this huge data repository of information that now allows us when you look at our future, and we talked about a little on this session earlier; data analytics, some capabilities that we should be able to go do because we have meta data to be able to give customers that visual capability. The other thing that's interesting is that visualization software, is it also tells, it finally gives customers a proof point of what we've always known. That probably roughly about 50% of their data. And I'm being kind when I say 50. Probably hasn't been touched in three, five, four, 10 plus years, right? And we've always known that. But now we actually show a customer. Hey, using this visualization software, that you're using for compliance has also now told you where the data is located and who's touched it last, and by the way it hasn't been touched forever. It allows the customer to have two conversations; one, do they need to save it? And if they do, do they move it into a glacier type environment? Or three, do they move it to a software defying storage on the customer's floor? We can help the customer migrate it after we showed them who hasn't touched it. But we also have a software defying storage solution. That Gardener just came out and said that we're number one in this space, right? So, it's one of our fastest growing pieces of our business. Because customers all the time say to me, Scott our data protection cost is going up. And the reality is, it isn't. The reality is data is growing dramatically. Storage is going up, and oh by the way I got to back up my data that sits on the storage, right? So it all kind of combines together. >> So data protection is the percentage on the spend is not necessarily increasing but everything is growing. >> Everything is growing, yes. >> So the other thing, just a couple of points that you made me think of, the other cloud that you support is on prime. >> Yes, yeah, it's still big by the way. >> So that's another piece of it. Because you got the three laws of the cloud right? It's the law of physics. You can't necessarily put everything into the public eye. Then you got the law of economics, and you got the law of the land, in which you were talking about before, >> Right. >> If you're not supposed to leave Germany, >> Correct. >> You can't leave Germany, okay. And then, so you're using analytics to help customers to determine this. And the other thing, some of the general counselors out there don't want to keep data forever. >> Correct. >> I hear a lot from vendors, oh you could now keep it forever and GC says no, we don't want to keep it forever. >> Exactly, right. >> Okay, so you're using analytics to sort of sift through that data and surface these clues. >> Yes. >> And actions to customers. >> Yes and the new thing also at 8.1.2 is we've come out with a smart meter type technology which will let customers know how much data they're using, where they're using the data? Any hot spots in the data. And it's very file based, you know, data focused. It obviously helps customers really understand who's using what where, you know. And to be fair, they can use that to help go drive costs, figure out you know maybe someone's using something they shouldn't, maybe people are storing stuff that they don't want to store. It's not just a benefit to figure what they're doing but it's also could help and drive cost out. >> Big customer base obviously, probably the largest in the business. >> Yup, over 50,000. >> 50,000 customers? >> Yup. >> You've modernized the software. Just rap it up, the competitive customer differentiation, a lot of noise in the market place. >> Yup. >> Where do you stand? What's your position relative to the competition? Why Veritas? >> Yeah, well, so for us, when we walk in to a large customer, as you can appreciate, they don't want three or four different products; back to the cloud conversation, they don't want three or four ways of moving data in to cloud, right? They really want one. And the other issue they all ran into is this compliance conversation. You, know not everybody does everything the same. And they don't all talk together. Having a single platform, to be able to give customers the capability of backing up everything from traditional work loads of Oracle, and SAP to Mongo DB, to Casandra, to Hadoop, to containers, to open source; we're the only company out there that can do all those work loads. There are start ups. And they may do one or two things really really well, or so they say they do, we don't think they do, but they say they do, and that's what they focus in on. That's not what a large enterprise customer wants. They want capabilities to be able to scale high performance, ease of use, and 8.1.2 gives that to them. And we do more work loads than any body else in the industry. >> Excellent, well Scott thanks for coming on. We are here in the heart of New York City, at Tavern on the Green. A lot of customers, I've been talking to some of those customers today, those customers, they're as tough as Yankee fans I could tell ya. (laughing) So Scott thanks agan, good to see you. >> Alright, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. Thank you for watching theCUBE from Veritas Solutions Days in New York, right back. (upbeat music)

>> From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE covering Veritas Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome to New York City, everybody. We're here in the heart of Central Park at the beautiful location, Tavern on the Green. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. And this is our special coverage of the Veritas Solutions Day. The hashtag is VtasVision. Veritas Vision last year was a big tent customer event, several thousand customers at that event and Veritas decided this year to go out to the field. 20 of these solution days, very intimate events, couple hundred customers, keynote presentations from Veritas, breakout sessions, getting deep into the product but also talking strategy, and intimate conversations with executives, CxOs, CIOs, backup admins, and of course, New York City is one of those places where you get very advanced customers pushing the envelope, very demanding. I often joke they're as demanding as New York sports fans, and so they have high expectations. But they also have a lot of money, and so the vendor community loves to come to New York, they love to get intimate with these customers in New York, as do we at theCUBE. So we're going to be talking to customers today, we're going to be talking to executives of Veritas, some partners. So I want to talk a little bit about what's going on in the marketplace, in this backup and recovery space. It's transforming quite dramatically. For those of you who follow theCUBE, you know last year at VMworld, last two years, actually, data protection was one of the hottest topics at the event. Of course, multi-cloud, of course there was a lot of AI talk and containers and Kubernetes. But staid old backup, old, reliable data protection was one of the hottest topics. We're seeing VC money pour into this space. We're seeing upstarts like Cohesity and Rubrik trying to take aim at the incumbents like Veritas and Commvault, and IBM, and Dell EMC, so those traditional companies, those enterprise companies that have large install bases are trying to hold onto that install base and migrate their platforms to a modern software-defined platform, API-based, using containers, using microservices, building on top of the code that they've developed, simplifying the UI, and at the same time, allowing for an abstraction layer across clouds and multi-clouds. So what are the big drivers that are really pushing the trends, the megatrends of this space? Well, certainly digital transformation is one of them. The last 10 years of big data, people have gathered all this data, and now that data is in this place and people are now applying machine intelligence to that data. They're doing a lot of this work in the cloud. So digital transformation, data, big data, cloud, multi-cloud, simplification. People want a much simpler experience, so bringing the cloud experience to their data, wherever the data might live. Because of course, you get the three laws of cloud. You've got the law of physics, right? Physics says you can't just shove everything into the cloud. It just takes too long. If I have big bog of data, if I have a petabyte of data, you know how long that's going to take to put into the cloud? So I may not just move it in there unless I stick it on a Chevy truck and it cart it over on a bunch of tapes and nobody really wants to do that. So there's the law of physics. There's also the law of economics. It's very expensive to move that data. You need a lot of network bandwidth, so, you know, you might not necessarily put everything into the cloud, you might keep stuff on-prem. And of course, there's a law of the land. And the law of the land says, well, if I'm in country X, let's say Germany, that data can't leave that country. It's got to be physically proximate inside the boundaries, the borders of the country, by local law. So these three laws are something that was put forth to us by Pat Gelsinger in theCUBE at VMworld this year. We've evolved that thinking, but it's very true when we talk to customers about this. These are trends that are driving their decisions about cloud and multi-cloud and where to put it. We talked in theCUBE about the stat that the average enterprise has eight clouds. Well, we're a small enterprise and we have eight clouds, so I think that number's actually much, much higher, especially when you include SAS. So lots of data, lots of copies of data, so you need a way to abstract all that complexity and have a single place to protect your data. Now, a big part of this, digital transformation is driving more intense requirements on recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives, RPO and RTO, what do those words mean? Recovery point objective, think about... Ask a businessperson, how much data are you willing to lose? And they go, oh, what are you talking about? I don't want to lose any data. But if you think about it and you ask the next question, how much are you willing to spend so that you lose no data, and if they have to spend millions and millions of dollars to do that, they might relax that requirement a little bit. They might say, well, you know, if I lose 15 minutes of data in any given time and have to recreate it, not the end of the world. So that's what RPO is, is essentially the point in time that you go in to recover and how much data loss you're exposed to. And the way this works is you take, let's say, snapshots to simplify the equation, you push those offsite away from any potential disaster, and it's that gap between when you actually capture the data and when that disaster might happen that you're exposed. So to make that as close as zero as possible, that gap as close to zero as possible, is very, very expensive, so a lot of companies don't want to do that. At the same time, digital transformation's pushing them to get as close to zero as possible without breaking the bank. The other part of that equation is recovery time objective, how long it takes to get the application and the data back and running. And because of digital transformation, people want to make that virtually instantaneously. So because of digital transformation, people are re-architecting their data protection strategies to have near-instantaneous recovery. This all fits into the megatrend of cloud. People want it to be simpler, they want it to mimic the cloud-like experience, almost as if I'm on Amazon or I'm on Netflix, so simplifying the recovery process and the backup process is something that we're going to hear a lot more of. Automation is another big theme. People tend to automate through scripts. Well, scripts are fragile, scripts tend to break. When changes are made in software, scripts tend to have to be rewritten and maintained. And so it's a very high maintenance type of activity to do scripts, and over time, they just fade away, or don't, they stop working. So automation through API is very, very important, something that you're hearing much more, is much more thematic in this world of data protection. The other is getting more out of the corpus of data in my data protection infrastructure, because, let's face it, backup and recovery, it's like insurance. I hope I never need it, but if I do need it, it's very valuable at that point in time that I do need it. But it's an expense. It's not driving bottom-line revenue. It's not necessarily cutting cost. It is indirectly in the form of reducing the cost of downtime, but that's harder. That's kind of viewed oftentimes as a soft dollar benefit. So what you're hearing is a lot of the vendor community and the user community are talking about getting more out of the data that they have and out of the backup and recovery infrastructure by bringing analytics, and machine intelligence, or AI and machine learning to the equation. Studying analytics to identify anomalous behavior, maybe identifying security breaches, creating air gaps such that I can potentially thwart ransomware or other malware infections, analyzing the corpus of backup data because it holds all the company's corporate data, it's accessible. If you can analyze that data and look for anomalies, you might be able to thwart an attack. So getting more out of that data through analytics. Predictive maintenance is another example of data analytics that's driving some of these trends beyond just backup and recovery. And also governance. Governance and privacy are kind of, security and privacy are two sides of the same coin, so with GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation that came out, that went into effect in terms of fines going into effect this past May, very, very onerous and expensive fines, people are using their data protection corpus and the analytics around that to reduce their risk and to better govern their data. So these are some of the big trends that we're seeing. So Veritas is a leader here, we're going to be covering this all day. Veritas and some of its other brethren that have been around for decades are getting attacked by a lot of the upstarts, but they got the advantage that the install vendors have the advantage of a large install base. The incumbent vendors have the advantage of a large install base. The upstarts have the advantage of they're starting with a clean sheet of paper. We're going to talk to customers and find out what are they thinking in terms of their backup approach. Industry data suggest that over half of the customers that you talk to are rethinking their backup strategies because of digital transformation. Well, we're going to talk to some customers. Are they thinking about sticking with Veritas or they thinking about migrating? Why or why not? What are some of the advantages and considerations there? So Veritas, a long, rich story going back to the '80s when the company was founded, was a hot IPO, really super hot company, got sold to Symantec for about 13.5 billion, and then Symantec spun it out to private equity several years ago in an eight billion dollar go-private sale, and subsequently, Veritas got off the 90-day shot clock. We heard this from companies like Dell where they didn't have to report and get abused by the street for either missing a number or having one little metric that was off. So they could write their own narrative. They could invest in R&D, they could have more patient capital. And so you saw this from the Carlisle group that took Veritas private and has been sort of this march toward a new platform, spending money on R&D, and now, really going to market very aggressively. Another thing you're going to hear about is partnerships, partnerships with AWS and some of the other cloud-providers. There's a partnership that's being announced with the flash storage company, Pure, today. So we're going to dig into some of that. So we'll be here all day, Tavern on the Green. You're watching theCUBE and we're here in New York City. Keep it right there, we'll be right back. I'm Dave Vellante, back shortly. (digitalized music)

>> From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day, brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to New York City everybody. We're here in the heart of Central Park at Tavern On the Green, a beautiful facility. I'm surrounded by Yankee fans so I'm like a fish out of water. But that's okay, it's a great time of the year. We love it, we're still in it up in Boston so we're happy. Dave Vellante here, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Nathan Hall is here, he's the field CTO at Pure Storage. Nathan, good to see you. >> Good to see you too. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. >> So you guys made some announcements today with Veritas, what's that all about? >> It's pretty exciting and Veritas, being the market leader in data protection software. Now our customers are able to take Veritas's net backup software and use it to drive the policy engine of Snapshots for our FlashArrays. They're also able to take Veritas and back up our data hub, which is our new strategy with FlashBlade to really unify all of data analytics onto a single platform. So Veritas really is the solution net back up that's able to back up all the workloads and Pure is the solution that's able to run all the workloads. >> So what if I could follow-up on that, maybe push you a little bit? A lot of these announcements that you see, we call them Barney deals, I love you, you love me, we go to market together and everything's wonderful. Are we talking about deeper integration than that or is just kind of press release? >> Absolutely deeper integration. So you'll see not just how-to guides, white papers, et cetera, but there's actual engineering-level integration that's happening here. We're available as an advanced disk target within that back up, we've integrated into CloudPoint as well. We certify all of our hardware platforms with Veritas. So this is deep, deep engineering-level integration. >> Yeah, we're excited about Pure, we followed you guys since the early days. You know we saw Scott Dietzen, what he built, very impressive modern architecture, you won't be a legacy for 20, 25 years so you've got a lot going for you. Presumably it's easier to integrate with such a modern architecture, but now at the same time you got to integrate with Veritas, it's been around for about 25 years. We heard a lot about how they're investing in API-based architectures, and microservices, and containers and the like, so what is that like in terms of integrating with a 25-year-old company? >> Well I think, from Pure's perspective we are API first, we're RESTfull APIs first. We've done a ton of integrations across multiple platforms whether it's Kubernetes, Docker, VMware, et cetera, so we have a lot of experience in terms of how to integrate with various flavors of other infrastructure. I think Veritas has done a lot of work as well in terms of maturing their API to really be this kind of cloud-first type of API, this RESTful API, that made our cross-integration much easier. >> You guys like being first, there were a number of firsts, you guys were kind of the first, or one of the first with flash for block. You were kind of the first for file. You guys have hit AI pretty hard, everybody's now doing that. You guys announced the first partnership with NVIDIA, everybody's now doing that. (laughs) You guys announced giving away NVME as part of the Stack for no upcharge, everybody's now doing that. So, you like to be first. Culturally, you've worked at some other companies, what's behind that? >> Well culturally, this is best company I've worked at in terms of culture, period, and really it all starts with the culture of the company. I think that's why we're first in so many places and it's not just first in terms of first to market. It's really about first in terms of customer feedback. If you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant we're up, we've been at leaders quadrant for five years in a row. But this year, we're indisputably the leader. Furthest to the right on the X-axis, furthest north on the Y-axis and that's all driven by just a customer-obsessed culture. We've got a Net Promoter Score of 86.6 which is stratospheric. It's something that puts us in the top 1% of all business-to-business companies, not just tech companies. So, it's really that culture about customer obsession that drives us to be first. Both to market, in a lot of cases, but also just first in terms of customer perception of our technology. >> You guys were a first at really escape velocity, the billion dollar unicorn status, and now you're kind of having that fly-wheel effect where you're able to throw off different innovations in different areas. Can you talk more about the data hub and the relevance to what you're doing with Veritas and data protection? Let's unpack that a little bit. >> Sure, sure, the data hub, we had a great keynote this morning with Jyothi the VP of Marketing for Veritas and he had an interesting customer tidbit. He had some sort of unnamed government agency customer that actually gets penalized when they're unable to retrieve data fast enough. That's not something that many of our customers have, but they do get penalized in terms of opportunity costs. The reason why is 'cause customers just have their data siloed into all these different split-up locations and that prevents them from being able to get insight out of that data. If you look at AI luminaries like Andrew Ng or even people like Dominique Brezinski at Apple, they all agree that you have to, in order to be successful with your data strategy, you have to unify these data silos. And that's what the data hub does. For the first time we're able to unify everything from data warehousing, to data lakes, to streaming analytics, to AI and now even backup all onto a single platform with multidimensional performance. That's FlashBlade and that is our data hub, we think it's revolutionary and we're challenging the rest of the storage industry to follow suit. Let's make less silos, let's unify the data into a data hub so that our customers can get real actionable information out of their data. >> I was on a crowd chat the other day, you guys put out an open letter to the storage community, an open challenge, so that was kind of both a little controversial but also some fun. That's a very important point you're making about sort of putting data at the core. I make an observation, it's not so much true about Facebook anymore 'cause after the whole fake news thing their market value dropped. But if you look at the top five companies in terms of market value, include Facebook in there, they and Berkshire keep doing this, but let's assume for a second that Facebook's up there. Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon, top five in terms of US market value. Of course markets ebb and they flow, but it's no coincidence that those are data companies. They all have a lot of hard assets at those companies. They've got data at their core so it's interesting to hear you talk about data hub because one of the challenges that we see for traditional companies, call them incumbents, is they have data in stovepipes. For them to compete they've got to put it in the digital world, they've got to put data at their core. It's not just for start-ups and people doing Greenfield, it's for folks that are established and don't want to get disrupted. Long-winded question, how do they get, let's think of traditional company, an incumbent company, how do they get from point A to point B with the data hub? >> I think Andrew Ng has a great talked-point on this. He basically talks about your data strategy and you need to think about, as a company, how do you acquire data and then how do you unify into a single data hub? It's not just around putting it on a single platform, such as FlashBlade. A valuable byproduct of that is if you have all the stove-piped data, though you probably in terms of your data scientist trying to get access to it, now have to, they have 10 different stovepipes you've got 10 different VPs that you have to go talk to in order to get access to that data. So it really starts with stopping the bleeding and starting to have a data strategy around how do we acquire and how do we make certain or storing data in the same place and have a single unified data hub in order to maximize the value we are able to get out of that data. >> You know when I talked to, I'll throw my two cents in, I talk to a lot of chief data officers. To me, the ones that are most insightful talk about their five imperatives. First of all, is they got to understand how data contributes to monetization. Whether it's saving money or making money, it's not necessarily selling your data. I think a lot of people make that mistake, oh I'm going to monetize my data, I mean I'm going to sell my data, no, it's all about how it contributes to value. The second is, what about data sources? And then how do I get access to data sources? There's a lot implied there in terms of governance and security and who has access to that. And in the same time, how do I scale up my business so that I get the right people who can act on that data? Then how do I form relationships with a line of business so that I can maximize that monetization? Those are, I think, sensible steps that aren't trivial. They require a lot of thought and a lot of cultural change and I would imagine that's what a lot of your customers are going through right now. >> I think they are and I think as IT practitioners out there, I think that we have a duty to get closer to our business and be able to kind of educate them around these data strategies. To give them the same level of insight that you're talking about, you see in some chief data officers. But if I looked out at the, there's a recent study on the Fortune 50, the CXOs, and these aren't even CIOs, they're actually, we think as IT practitioners that the cloud is the most disruptive thing that we see, but the CEOs and the CFOs are actually five times more likely to talk about AI and data as being more disruptive to their business. But most of them have no data strategy, most of them don't know how AI works. It's up to us as IT practitioners to educate the business. To say here's what's possible, here's what we have to do in order to maximize the value out of data, so that you can get a business advantage out of this. It's incumbent on us as IT leaders. >> So Nathan, I think again, that's really insightful because let's face it, if you're moving at the speed of the CIO, which is what many companies want to do, because that's the so called, fat middle and that's where the money is. But you're behind, I mean we're moving into a new era, the cloud era, no pun intended, is here, it's solid but we're entering that data of machine intelligence and we built the foundation with the dupe even, there's a lot of data now what do we do with it? We see, and I wonder if you could comment on this, is the innovation engine of the future changing it? It use to be Moore's Law, we marched to the cadence of Moore's Law for years. Now it's data applying machine intelligence and then, of course, using the cloud for scale and attracting start-ups and innovation. That's fine because we want to program infrastructure, we don't want to deploy infrastructure. If you think about Pure, you got data for sure. You're going hard after machine intelligence. And cloud, if I understand your cloud play, you sell to cloud providers whether they're on-prem or in the public cloud but what do you think about those? That innovation sandwich that I just described and how do you guys play? >> Well, cloud is where we get over 30% of our revenue so we're actually selling to the cloud, cloud service providers, et cetera. For example, one of the biggest cloud service providers out there that I think today's announcement helps them out a lot from a policy perspective actually used FlashBlade to reduce their SLAs, to reduce their restore time from, I think, it was 30 hours down to 38 minutes. They were paying money before to their customers. What we see in our cloud strategy is one of empowering cloud providers, but also we think that cloud is increasingly, at the infrastructure layer, going to be commoditized and it's going to be about how do we enable multicloud? So how do we enable customers to get around data gravity problems? I've got this big, weighty database that I want to see if I can move it up to the cloud but that takes me forever. So how do we help customers be able to move to one cloud or even exit a cloud to another or back to on-prem? We think there's a lot of value in applying our, for example deduplication technology, et cetera, to helping customers with those data gravity problems, to making a more open world in terms of sharing data to and from the cloud. >> Great, well we looked at Pure and Veritas getting together, do some hard core engineering, going to market, solving some real problems. Thanks Nathan for hanging out, this iconic beautiful Tavern on the Green in the heart of New York City. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, keep it right there everybody, Dave Vallante. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Veritas Solutions Day, #VeritasVision, be right back. (digital music)