>> 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 the beautiful Tavern on the Green, in the heart of Central Park. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name's Dave Vellante. We're covering Vertias Solution Days, #VtasVision. Veritas used to have the big, single tent, big tent customer event, and decided this year, it's going to go belly to belly. Go out to 20 cities, intimate customer events where they can really sit down with customers across from the table; certainly, this beautiful venue is the perfect place to do that. Harish Venkat is here as the VP of Marketing and Global Sales Enablement at Veritas. Thanks for coming on, Harish. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> So, we're going to change it up a little bit. Let's hit the Escape key a few times and talk about >> Yeah. >> some of the big mega trends that you're seeing. You spend a lot of time with customers. You had some intimate conversations today. What do you see as the big trends driving the marketplace? >> So at my level, what I observe with the highest thing is simplicity, instant gratification, is two things that customers love. Forget about customers, even we as individuals, we love simplicity and instant gratification. Examples around that, you know, think about back in the days where you had to take a picture, process the film, and then realize, "oh my god, the film's not even worth watching." Now you have digital photography, you take millions of pictures, and instantly you view the picture, and keep whatever you want, delete whatever you don't want. A small example of how simplicity and instant gratification is changing the world. In fact, if you listen to Warren Buffett, he'll say, "Invest in companies that is making your life a lot easier," so, if I spread that across the entire industry, I can go on with examples like Netflix disrupting Blockbuster because it made it easy for customers to watch movies at their time, and making it easy for consumption. You look at showrooming concept, where you go to Best Buy's of the world and many others, and look at a product, but you don't buy it right there. You go to your phone and say, "okay, do I do a price compare?" And then order it on the phone, where someone delivers it to your house So the list goes on and on, and the underpinning result as a result of this is disruption, all right? You look at Fortune 500 companies, just in the last decade. Over 52% of those companies have been disrupted and the underpinning phenomenon is all about instant gratification and simplicity. >> And Amazon is another great example of, I remember when my wife said to me, "Dave, you got to invest in this company." It was like... 1997. >> Yeah. >> Invest in this company, Amazon? >> Yeah. >> At the time, it was mostly books, but they started to get into other retail, so right-- >> We missed that boat, didn't we? >> I actually did, but I sold, ah! (laughs) >> I never lost money making a profit, so okay. So, at the same time, customer... Customers just can't get there... >> Yeah. >> Overnight, so what are some of the challenges that they have in getting to that level of simplicity? >> Yeah, so you look at IT spend, and when you look at the breakdown of IT spend, you'll see that about 87%, and in many cases, even greater than 90%, they spend just to keep the lights on and these are well-established companies that I'm talking about. In fact, I was doing a Keynote in, in Minneapolis one time and a CIO came and said, "Harish, I totally disagree." "In my company, it's 96%." >> (Dave laughs) >> Just to keep the lights on! So you're talking about less than 10% of your IT spend gone towards innovation, and then you look at emerging companies who are spending almost 100% all around innovation, leveraging the clouds of the world, leveraging the latest and greatest technology, and then doing these disruptions, and making things simple for consumption, and as a result, the disruption happens, so I think we have an opportunity to re-balance the equation in the enterprise space, and making it more available for innovation than just keeping the lights on. >> So part of that... the equation of shifting that needle, moving that needle, if you will, just eliminating non-value-producing activities that are expensive. We know, still, IT is still very labor-intensive, so we got to take that equation down and shift it. Are you seeing companies have success in shifting, re-training people toward digital initiatives and removing some of the heavy lifting, and what's driving that? >> Yeah, so I think it's a journey, right? So, I mean, the entire notion of journeying to the cloud is one of the big initiative to take out heavily manual-intensive, data center-intensive, which is costing a lot of money. If I can just shift all of those workloads to the cloud, that'll help me re-balance the equation. I view the concept of data intensity, which is really two variables to it. Back to your point, if I can take the non-core activity, rely on my partner ecosystem to say what is best in class solutions that I can use as my foundation layer, and then innovate on top of it, then yes, you have the perfect winning formula to really have a lot of market share and wallet share. If you're trying to do the entire stack by yourself, good luck. You'll be one of those guys who will be disrupted. There is no doubt. >> So well, okay, that says partnerships are very important. >> Without a doubt. >> You're not too alone. >> Channel is very important. >> Yes. >> So, so what do you see, in terms of the ebb and flow in the industry, of partnerships, how those are forming? Hear a lot about "co-opetition," which is kind of an interesting term, that is now, we're living. >> Yeah. >> What's your, what's your observation about partnerships, and how companies are able to leverage them? What's best practice there? >> Yeah, so just as Veritas, we're a data protection leader company. We have incredible market share and wallet share, amongst the Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies, but even within our incredible standing, we have to rely on other partners. We don't do everything on our own. We have incredible relationship with our cloud service providers, with the hyper-converged system to the world, like Nutanix. We just announced Pure today, so when we combine those partnerships, we can offer incredible solutions for our customers, who can then take care of the first variable that I talked about, and then innovate on top of it. So I think partner ecosystem is extremely important. For customers, it's very important that they pick the right players, so they don't have to worry about the data, and they can continually focus on innovation. >> We were talking to NBC Universal today, and one of themes in my take-aways was he's trying to get to the... he's a, basically a data protector, backup administrator, essentially, but he's trying to get to the point where he can get the business lines to self-serve. >> Yeah. >> And that seems to me to be part of the simplicity. Now... an individual like that, got to re-skill. Move toward a digital transformation. Move that needle so it's not 90% keeping the lights on. It's maybe you get to 50/50. >> Yeah. What are you seeing in terms of training and re-education of both existing people and maybe even how young people are being educated, your thoughts? >> Yeah, I think the young people coming out of college, they're already tuned to this, so to me, those are the disruptors of the world. You got to keep an eye on those millennials of the world because you don't have to train them more, because they're coming out of college, you know. They don't have the legacy background. They don't have the data centers of the world. They are already in the cloud. They're born in the cloud, sort of individuals, so I think the challenge is more about existing individuals who have the pedigree of all the journey that, you and I, we have seen, and how do you re-tune yourself to the modern world? And I think that presents an opportunity to say, "Okay look, if you don't adapt real quick," "you don't have a chance to survive" "in this limited amount of time you have in the IT space," but having said that, we're also seeing that you have some time window, and that time window will continue to shrink, so when we talk about this transformation journey, you can see year after year, the progress that, that's been made in the transformation, this leap and bound, and that's all related to Moore's Law. You think about computer and storage, it's becoming a lot cheaper, and so the innovation rate is continuing to go up. So you have very limited window: adapt or die. >> So, Harish, we were talking about, we've talked about digital transformation. We talk about simplifying; we're talking about agility. We're talking about shifting budget priorities, all very important initiatives. How is Veritas helping customers achieve these goals, so that they can move the needle from 90% keep the lights on to maybe 50/50, and put more into innovation. >> So four major themes: one is data protection. If you don't have your core enterprise asset, which is your data protected, then you can't really innovate anything on top of it. You'll constantly be worrying about what happens if I have a ransomware attack, what if I have a data outage, so Veritas takes care of it, back to the notion that you pick the best players to take care of the fundamental layer, which is around the data. The second thing that I... I would say Veritas can help is the journey to the cloud. Cloud, again, is another instrument for you to take out cost out of your data center. You're agile, you're nimble, so you can focus on innovation. Do you see the trend? So again, Veritas helps you with that journey to the cloud. It allows to move data and application to the cloud. When you're in the cloud, we protect your data in the cloud. The third thing I would say is doing more with less. I talked about the IT equation already. Software-defined storage allows you to do that. And the last thing I would say is compliance. We can't get away from compliance, the fact that Veritas has solutions to have visibility around the data. You can classify the data. You can always be compliant working with Veritas. You take care of these four layers, you don't have to worry about your data asset. You can worry about innovation at that point. >> So it, to me, it's sort of a modern version of the rebirth of Veritas. When Veritas first started, I always used to think of it as a data management company, not just a backup company. >> Right. >> And that's really what we're talking about here today, evolving toward a data-centric approach, that full life cycle of data management, simplifying that, bringing the cloud experience to your data wherever it is. Could be "on-prem." >> Yeah. >> Could be in the cloud, sort of this API-based architecture, microservices, containers... >> Yep. >> All the kind of interesting buzzwords today, but they enable agility in a cloud-like experience, that Netflix-like experience that you were talking about. >> Absolutely, right, so we're super excited. The one thing I would also say is what our latest net backup, 812, the other thing that I talked about, which is simplicity and ease of use: we are addressing both of that in addition to the robust brand that we have around protecting data. So you now you have simplicity, ease of use, instant gratification, all the basic ingredients, and Veritas is here to protect them. >> Harish, it's been a great day. Thanks for helping me close out the segment here. This venue is really terrific. It's been a while since I've been at Tavern on the Green. Some of you guys, I don't think you've ever seen it before. Seth's down here; he's, he's a city boy but we country bumpkins up in Massachusetts, we love coming down here, in the heart of Yankee country. So thanks very much-- >> Of course. >> For helping me close out here, great segment. All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We're out here, from New York City, Tavern on the Green. You've been watching theCUBE; I'm Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (light 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. (robotic music) >> We're back in the heart of Central Park. We're here at Tavern on the Green. Beautiful location for the Veritas Vision Day. You're watching theCUBE, my name is Dave Vellante. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we got the CEO of Veritas here, Greg Hughes, newly minted, nine months in. Greg, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> It's great to be here Dave, thank you. >> So let's talk about your nine. What was your agenda your first nine months? You know they talk about the 100 day plan. What was your nine month plan? >> Yeah, well look, I've been here for nine months, but I'm a boomerang. So I was here from 2003 to 2010. I ran all of global services, during that time and became the chief strategy officer after that. Was here during the merger by Semantic. And then ran the Enterprise Product Group. So I had all the products and all the engineering teams for all the Enterprise products. And really my starting point is the customer. I really like to hear directly from the customer. So I've spent probably 50% of my time out and about, meeting with customers. And at this point, I've met with a 100 different accounts all around the world. And what I'm hearing, makes me even more excited to be here. Digital transformation is real. These customers are investing a lot in digitizing their companies. And that's driving an explosion of data. That data all needs to be available and recoverable and that's where we step in. We're the best at that. >> Okay, so that was sort of alluring to you. You're right, everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. It changes the whole data protection equation. It kind of reminds me, in a much bigger scale, of virtualization. You remember, everybody had to rethink their backup strategies because you now have less physical resources. This is a whole different set of pressures, isn't it? It's like you can't go down, you have to always have access to data. Data is-- >> 24 by seven. >> Increasingly valuable. >> Yup. >> So talk a little bit more about the importance of data, the role of data, and where Veritas fits in. >> Well, our customers are using new, they're driving new applications throughout the enterprise. So machine learning, AI, big data, internet of things. And that's all driving the use of new data management technologies. Cassandra, Hadoop, Open Sequel, MongoDB. You've heard all of these, right? And then that's driving the use of new platforms. Hyper-converged, virtual machines, the cloud. So all this data is popping up in all these different areas. And without Veritas, it can exist, it'll just be in silos. And that becomes very hard to manage and protect it. All that data needs to be protected. We're there to protect everything. And that's really how we think about it. >> The big message we heard today was you got a lot of different clouds, you don't want to have a different data protection strategy for each cloud. So you've got to simplify that for people. Sounds easy, but from an R&D perspective, you've got a large install base, you've been around for a long, long time. So you've got to put investments to actually see that through. Talk about your R&D and investment strategy. >> Well, our investment strategy's very simple. We are the market share leader in data protection and software-defined storage. And that scale, gives us a tremendous advantage. We can use that scale to invest more aggressively than anybody else, in those areas. So we can cover all the workloads, we can cover wherever our customers are putting their data, and we can help them standardize on one provider of data protection, and that's us. So they don't have to have the complexity of point products in their infrastructure. >> So I wonder if we could talk, just a little veer here, and talk about the private equity play. You guys are the private equity exit. And you're seeing a lot of high profile PE companies. It used to be where companies would go to die, and now it's becoming a way for the PE guys to actually get step-ups, and make a lot of money by investing in companies, and building communities, investing in R&D. Some of the stuff we've covered. We've followed Syncsort, BMC, Infor, a really interesting company, what's kind of an exit from PE, right? Dell, the biggest one of all. Riverbed, and of course Veritas. So, there's like a new private equity playbook. It's something you know well from your Silver Lake days. Describe what that dynamic is like, and how it's changed. >> Oh look, private equity's been involved in software for 10 or 15 years. It's been a very important area of investment in private equity. I've worked for private equity firms, worked for software companies, so I know it very well. And the basic idea is, continue the investment. Continue in the investment in the core products and the core customers, to make sure that there is continued enhancement and innovation, of the core products. With that, there'll be continuity in customer relationships, and those customer relationships are very valuable. That's really the secret, if you will, of the private equity playbook. >> Well and public markets are very fickle. I mean, they want growth now. They don't care about profits. I see you've got a very nice cash flow, you and some of the brethren that I mentioned. So that could be very attractive, particularly when, you know, public markets they ebb and flow. The key is value for customers, and that's going to drive value for shareholders. >> That's absolutely right. >> So talk about the TAM. Part of a CEOs job, is to continually find new ways, you're a strategy guy, so TAM expansion is part of the role. How do you look at the market? Where are the growth opportunities? >> We see our TAM, or our total addressable market, at being around $17 billion, cutting across all of our areas. Probably growing into high single digits, 8%. That's kind of a big picture view of it. When I like to think about it, I like to think about it from the themes I'm hearing from customers. What are our customers doing? They're trying to leverage the cloud. Most of our customers, which are large enterprises. We work with the blue-chip enterprises on the planet. They're going to move to a hybrid approach. They're going to on-premise infrastructure and multiple cloud providers. So that's really what they're doing. The second thing our customers are worried about is ransomware, and ransomware attacks. Spearfishing works, the bad guys are going to get in. They're going to put some bad malware in your environment. The key is to be resilient and to be able to restore at scale. That's another area of significant investment. The third, they're trying to automate. They're trying to make investments in automation, to take out manual labor, to reduce error rate. In this whole world, tape should go away. So one of the things our customers are doing, is trying to get rid of tape backup in their environment. Tape is a long-term retention strategy. And then finally, if you get rid of tape, and you have all your secondary data on disc or in the cloud, what becomes really cool, is you can analyze all that data. Out of bound, from the primary storage. That's one of the bigger changes I've seen since I've returned back to Veritas. >> So $17 billion, obviously, that transcends backup. Frankly, we go back to the early days of Veritas, I always thought of it as a data management company and sort of returned to those roots. >> Backup, software defined storage, compliance, all those areas are key to what we do. >> You mentioned automation. When you think about cloud and digital transformation, automation is fundamental, we had NBCUniversal on earlier, and the customer was talking about scripts and how scripts are fragile and they need to be maintained and it doesn't scale. So he wants to drive automation into his processes as much as possible, using a platform, a sort of API based, modern, microservices, containers. Kind of using all those terms. What does that mean for you guys in terms of your R&D roadmap, in terms of the investments that you're making in those types of software innovations? >> Well actually one of the things we're talking about today is our latest release of NetBackup 812, which had a significant investment in APIs and that allow our customers to use the product and automate processes, tie it together with their infrastructure, like ServiceNow, or whatever they have. And we're going to continue full throttle on APIs. Just having lunch with some customers just today, they want us to go even further in our APIs. So that's really core to what we're doing. >> So you guys are a little bit like the New England Patriots. You're the leader, and everybody wants to take you down. So you always start-- >> Nobody's confused me for Tom Brady. Although my wife looks... I'll stack her up against Giselle anytime, but I'm no Tom Brady. >> So okay, how do you maintain your leadership and your relevance for customers? A lot of VC money coming into the marketplace. Like I said, everybody wants to take the leader down. How do you maintain your leadership? >> We've been around for 25 years. We're very honored to have 95% of the Fortune 100, are our customers. If you go to any large country in the world it's very much like that. We work with the bluest of blue-chips, the biggest companies, the most complex, the most demanding (chuckling), the most highly regulated. Those are our customers. We steer the ship based on their input, and that's why we're relevant. We're listening to them. Our customer's extremely relevant. We're going to help them protect, classify, archive their data, wherever it is. >> So the first nine months was all about hearing from customers. So what's the next 12 to 18 months about for you? >> We're continuing to invest, delighted to talk about partnerships, and where those are going, as well. I think that's going to be a major emphasis of us to continue to drive our partnerships. We can't do this alone. Our customers use products from a variety of other players. Today we had Henry Axelrod, from Amazon Web Services, here talking about how we're working closely with Amazon. We announced a really cool partnership with Pure Storage. Our customers that use Pure Storage's all-flash arrays, they know their data's backed up and protected with Veritas and with NetBackup. It's continually make sure that across this ecosystem of partners, we are the one player that can help our large customers. >> Great, thank you for mentioning that ecosystem is a key part of it. The channel, that's how you continue to grow. You get a lot of leverage out of that. Well Greg, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on your-- >> Dave, thank you. >> On the new role. We are super excited for you guys, and we'll be watching. >> I enjoyed it, thank you. >> All right. Keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante, we're here in Central Park. Be right back, Veritas Vision, be right back. (robotic music)

>> From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Hi everybody, welcome back to Tavern on the Green. We're in the heart of Central Park in New York City, the Big Apple. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at the Veritas Solution Day #VtasVision. Veritas used to have a big main tent day where they brought in all the customers. Now they're going out, belly-to-belly, 20 cities. Dave Raffo is here, he's the editorial director for TechTarget Storage. Somebody who follows this space very closely. David good to see you, welcome to theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's great to be on theCUBE. I always hear and watch you guys but never been on before. >> Well you're now an alum, I got to get him a sticker. So, we were talking about VMworld just now, and that show, last two years, one of the hottest topics anyway, was cloud, multi-cloud, Kubernetes of course was a hot topic. But, data protection was right up there. Why, in your view, is data protection such a hot topic right now? >> Well there's a lot of changes going on. First of all, couple years ago it was backup, nobody calls it backup anymore right. The whole market is changing. Data protection, you have newer guys like Cohesity and Ruberik, would come out with a, you know, architecture. They're basically, from scratch, they built scale-out and that's changing the way people look at data protection. You have all of the data protection guys, the Dell EMC, CommVault, Veeam, they're all kind of changing a little. And Veritas, the old guys, have been doing it forever. And now they're changing the way that they're reacting to the competition. The cloud is becoming a major force in where data lives, and you have to protect that. So there's a lot of changes going on in the market. >> Yeah I was talking to a Gartner analyst recently, he said they're data suggested about 2/3 of the customers that they talk to, within the next, I think, 18 months, are going to change they're backup approach or reconsider how they do backup or data protection as it were, as you just said. What do you think is driving that? I mean, people cite digital transformation they cite cloud, they cite big data, all the buzz words. You know, where there's smoke, there's fire, I guess. But what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, it's a little bit of all of those things, because the IT infrastructure is changing, virtualization containers, everything, every architectural change changes the way you protect and manage your data, right. So, we're seeing a lot of those changes, and now people are reacting to it and everybody's figuring out still how to use the cloud and where the data is going to live. So then, you know, how do you protect that data? >> And of course, when you listen to vendors talk, data protection, backup, recovery, it's very sexy when you talk to the customers they're just, oftentimes, drinking from the fire hose, right. Just trying to solve the next problem that they have. But what are you hearing from the customers? TechTarget obviously has a big community. You guys do a lot of events. You talk personally to a lot of customers, particularly when there are new announcements. And what does the landscape look like to you? >> So they're all, you know like I said, everybody's looking at the cloud. They're looking at all these, how they're going to use these things. They're not sure yet, but they want data protection, data management that will kind of fit in no matter which direction they go. It's kind of, you know, we know we're looking at where we're going to be in five years and now we want to know how we're going to protect, how we're going to manage our data, how we're going to use it, move it from cloud to cloud. So, you know, it's kind of like, it's a lot of positioning going on now. A lot of planing for the future. And they're trying to figure out what's the best way they're going to be able to do all this stuff. >> Yeah, so, you know the hot thing, it used to be, like you said, backup. And then of course, people said backup is one thing, recovery is everything. You know, so it was the old bromide, my friend Fred Moore, I think coined that term, back in the old storage tech days. But when you think about cloud, and you think about the different cloud suppliers, they've all got different approaches, they're different walled gardens, essentially. And they've got different processes for at least replicating, backing up data. Where do you see customers, in terms of having that sort of single abstraction layer, the single data protection philosophy or strategy and set of products for multi-cloud? >> Well, where they are is they're not there, and they're, you know, far from it, but that's where they want to be. So, that's where a lot of the vendor positioning is going. A lot of the customers are looking to do that. But another thing that's changing it is, you know, people aren't using Oracle, SQL databases all the time anymore either. They're using the NoSQL MongoDB. So that change, you know, you need different products for that too. So, the whole, almost every type of product, hyper-converged is changing backup. So, you know, all these technologies are changing the way people actually are going to protect their data. >> So you look at the guys with the big install base, obviously Veritas is one, guys like IBM, certainly CommVault and there are others that have large install bases. And the new guys, the upstarts, they're licking their chops to go after them. What do you see as, let's take Veritas as an example, the vulnerabilities and the strengths of a company like that? >> So the vulnerabilities of an old company that's been around forever is that, the newer guys are coming with a clean sheet of paper and coming up and developing their products around technologies that didn't exist when NetBackup was created, right. So the strength is that, for Veritas, they have huge install base. They have all the products, technology they need. They have a lot of engineers so they can get to the board, drawing board, and figure it out and add stuff. And what they're trying to do is build around NetBackup saying all these companies are using NetBackup, so let's expand that, let's build archiving in, let's build, you know, copy data protect, copy data management into that. Let's build encryption, all of that, into NetBackup. You know, appliances, they're going farther, farther and farther into appliances. Seems like nobody wants to just buy backup software, and backup hardware as separate, which they were forever. So you know, we're seeing the integration there. >> Well that brings up another good point, is you know, for years, backup's been kind of one size fits all. So that meant you were either over protected, or under protected. It was maybe an after thought, a bolt-on, you put in applications, put it in a server, an application on top of it. You know, install Linux, maybe some Oracle databases. All of the a sudden, oh, we got to back this thing up. And increasingly, people are saying, hey, I don't want to just pay for insurance, I'd like to get more value. And so, you're hearing a lot of talk about governance, certainly security, ransomware is now a big topic, analytics. What are you seeing, in terms of, some of those additional value, those value adds beyond that, is it still just insurance, or are we seeing incremental value to customers? >> Yeah, well I think everybody wants incremental value. They have the data, now it's not just, like you said, insurance. It's like how is this going to, how am I going to use this data? How's it going to help my business? So, the analytics is a big thing that everybody's trying to get in. You know, primary and secondary storage everybody's adding analytics. AI, how we use AI, machine learning. You know, how we're going to back up data from the edge into and out of thing. What are we going to do with all this data? How are we going to collect it, centralize it, and then use it for our business purposes? So there's, you know, it's a wide open field. Remember it used to be, people would say backup, nobody ever changes their backup, nobody wants to change backup. Now surveys are saying within the next two years or so, more than 50% of people are looking to either add a backup product, or just change out their whole backup infrastructure. >> Well that was the interesting about when, you know, the ascendancy of Data Domain, as you recall, you were following the company back then. The beauty of that architecture was, you don't have to change your backup processes. And now, that's maybe a challenge for a company like that. Where people are, because of digital, because of cloud, they're actually looking to change their backup processes. Not unlike, although there are differences, but a similar wave, remember the early days of virtualization, you had, you're loosing physical resources, so you had to rethink backup. Are you seeing similar trends today, with cloud, and digital? >> Yeah, the cloud, containers, microservices, things like that, you know, how do you protect that data? You know people, some people are still struggling with virtualization, you know, like, there's so many more VMs being created so quickly, and that you know, a lot of the backup products still haven't caught up to that. So, I mean Veeam has made an awful great business around dealing with VM backup, right? >> Right. >> Where was everybody else before that? Nobody else could do it. >> We storage guys, we're like the cockroaches of the industry. We're just this, storage just doesn't seem to die. You know the joke is, there's a hundred people in storage and 99 seats. But you've been following it for a long time. Yeah, you see all the hot topics like cloud and multi-cloud and digital transformation. Are you surprised at the amount of venture capital over the last, you know, four or five years, that has flooded in to storage, that continues to flood in to storage? And you see some notable successes, sure some failures, but even those failures, you're seeing the CEOs come out and sell to new companies and you're seeing the rise of a lot of these startups and a lot of these unicorns. Does it surprise you, or is that kind of your expectation? >> Well, I mean, like you said, that's the way it's always been in storage. When you look at storage compared to networking and compute, how many startups are there in those other areas. Very few, but storage keeps getting funded. A couple of years ago, I used to joke, if you said I do Flash, people would just throw hundreds of millions of dollars at you, then it was cloud. There always seem to be like a hot topic, a hot spot, that you can get money from VCs. And there's always four or five, at least, storage vendors who are in that space. >> Yeah, the cloud, the storage cloud AI blockchain company is really the next unicorn right? >> Right, yeah, if you know the right buzz words you can get money. And there's never just one right, there's always a couple in that same area and then one or two make it. >> Yeah, or, and or, if you've done before, right, you're seeing that a lot. I mean, you see what the guys like, for instance at Datrium are doing. Brian Biles he did it a Data Domain, and now he's, they just did a giant raise. >> Qumulo. >> Yeah, you know, Qumulo, for sure. Obviously the Cohesity are sort of well known, in terms of how they've done giant raises. So there's massive amount of capital now pouring in, much of which will go into innovation. It's kind of, it's engineering and it's you know, go to market and marketing. So, you know, no doubt, that that innovation curve will continue. I guess you can't bet against data growth. >> Right, you know, yeah, right, everybody knows data is going to grow. They're saying it's the new oil, right. Data is the big thing. The interesting thing with the funding stuff now is the, not the new companies, but the companies that have been around a little bit, and it's now time for them to start showing revenue. And where in the past it was easier for them to get money, now it seems a little tougher for those guys. So, you know, we could see more companies go away without getting bought up or go public but-- >> Okay, great. Dave, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Alright. >> It was great to have you. >> Thanks for having me on. >> Alright keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from Veritas Vision in Central Park. We'll be right back. (theCUBE theme music)

from Tavern on the Green in Central Park New York it's the to covering Veritas vision solution day brought to you by Veritas welcome back to New York City everybody we're in the heart of Central Park at the Tavern on the Green beautiful location here a lot of customers coming in to see and hear veritas solution days we talked to Scott general earlier about sort of why these solution days very intimate customer events around the world David Moyes is here he's the vice president of software to find storage and appliances at Veritas David thanks for coming on oh thanks for having me you're very welcome so wait appliances you guys were software company what what's going on we are we are a software company and we have been a software company for a very long time and we will continue to be a software company for a very long time but what we find is that you know customers oftentimes they want to deploy software but then they find that there's a lot of additional challenges that come with that there's the maintenance of the actual server infrastructure there's patching of the operating system there's vulnerabilities that show up those additional operational costs sometimes outweigh the benefits of just buying a purpose-built appliance and those purpose-built appliances can sometimes you know how workflows built-in to them that just make them so easy to use that you know one person could potentially operate petabytes of an appliance versus a whole army of people trying to maintain hundreds or thousands of individual servers so you put out a stat this morning which I wasn't aware of you guys have more than half the market I think it was an IDC stat maybe was Gartner more than half the market for integrated the purpose-built backup appliances is that right that's right so for backup appliances purpose-built back of appliances that actually hosts the backup software we have more than 50% market share people have that much trust in the appliances that we build and find that simplicity so compelling that they want to buy it and that form factor from us you know about a decade ago I wrote a piece in the early days of wiki bond talking about services oriented storage and and when we think about software-defined storage what you described today was actually sets of granular services that I can invoke when I need them or not if I don't need them very cloud like I mean I could replace the s in Software Defined with s and services and that's your kind of philosophy and approach isn't it it is in fact what we find is that people want data services on top of that data when you're reporting enterprise data and you protecting exabyte so that apprise data the way the Veritas does having it just sit there and do nothing is is kind of wasteful to a large extent unless you're just waiting for a disaster to occur or data corruption or something like that if we can support to think about what are the governance capabilities lineage audit all of the different things that we could potentially build as services that are then can be downloaded onto that purpose-built backup appliance those all become added value to the customer but you you did what you described was not just another you're not just dropping in another stovepipe appliance you talked about having visibility across the entire portfolio you really stress that a lot you said several times you can't get this from any other backup vendor or any other vendor really talk about that a little bit well what's interesting is that look from the moment that data is actually born from a primary application and then it's protected its protected into a backup solution and then it's probably put into some sort of a storage solution either maybe at a duplication storage solution then it's moved to an even cheaper tier and eventually off to the cloud or somewhere else each of those are disparate if we can actually build a connector framework that can actually extract that information and bring it all together so that we can start to make assertions about hey how did this data flow how did it originate what kind of information do I have do I even need it anymore after seven years should I purge it or should I delete it is it even a risk to my organization to keep it you can only do that when you can make those associations across the lifecycle of that data and so we tracked the data through its entire lifecycle and that's only through the integration of all that product portfolio and that's something that you're not going to see with the small point solutions that are being built by startups and it's even very rare to see in some of the larger companies that build these solutions you know dude I'm glad you mentioned that about getting rid of data because so often today in the in the news media and you here in vendor presentations people talk about keeping data forever yeah that's that's dangerous in a lot of case a lot of general councils out there don't want to keep data forever there's data that you want to delete if in fact you can because of the compliance risks that it brings to your company you don't want to keep working process or some rogue email that floats around the organization get rid of that keep what you have to and get rid of the rest right and then the problem is if you don't know what you have and also you don't know how many places that that data is propagated how can you possibly delete it all we've helped customers in some cases that I'm not going to mention who they are but we've helped them delete up to 50 percent of their data after it's aged out and I've talked to banks before and I've asked them like hey after seven years what do you do with your data they say well we just keep it because we don't know what it was originated for we don't even know what's in it and therefore it's too risky for us to go and delete but at the same time to your point it may be even too risky to keep in some cases especially a liability to keep that deal and what's the what's the technology enable are there is that your catalog you're sort of copy data management self so it's a combination of things the catalog is what helps us understand what we have and where it is and how it's actually moved through that lifecycle and then we have a component called the Veritas information classifier and that component allows us to crack open the data and actually determine what's inside whether it's personally identifiable information social security numbers there's a number of different patterns we can look for actually document types and we can actually tag that data and say hey this data has information that's pertains to a specific individuals so for example if I'm following gdpr rules I can now find out all the data where it's propagated specific to an individual who said now I want all my stuff deleted and that's a very powerful technique so such as the data it's the metadata associated with that taste well that's a that I think it's a unique capability in terms of being integrated into a solution and so that's that's cool I also want to talk about Acme financial services yeah is artificial company or a real company but but an anonymized company that you talked about moving to your system your appliance based system they were able to reduce TCO by 40% shave two thirds of their hardware infrastructure away come back to that is I have sort of a tongue-in-cheek there get rid of tape at least we're possible no new tape I think is what you that's right and then save 20 million dollars a year in reduced downside downtime costs so my tongue and cheek is who everybody remembers the the no hardware agenda of signs you know bhai live in Massachusetts that we used to see those right next to the EMC facilities and you're only a hardware agenda it seems with your appliance is to get rid of hardware is exactly right look we we are actually putting out technology that allows you to take ten heads or ten servers and consolidate it down to two or three to make the total cost of ownership for your product less because at the end of day it's in our benefit right we're a software vendor we want to maintain ourselves as a software vendor we want to take Hardware out of the equation to the extent that's possible but we don't want to do it at the expense of simplicity and so striking that balance is what's most important yeah and and you also have talked about a little you showed a little leg if you will on a road map that's right I'm one of the things that struck me and it's sort of there today but but even more in the future is the ability to scale compute and storage independently and more granular chunks explain what that is and why that's important to customers well you know if you think about it the way that these integrated backup appliances work even back up people just dismiss backup appliances they just grow and grow and grow to a certain capacity they scale up and scale up and at some point the performance just starts to tank and taper off so what if you could actually grow them almost in a node-based architecture think about its compute and storage that you grow together and as you add more compute you add more storage and so that means that I can do more micro services or I can provide better deduplication but my deduplication doesn't slow down when I go from two petabyte to four petabyte because my compute has actually grown in lockstep with my storage you made a big deal about eliminating tape where possible and you also and I want to push it this a little bit talked about the economics of solution relative to tape I was somewhat surprised because the conventional wisdom would say tape is you know pennies on the dollar come here to to disc based solutions how is it that you're able to make that claim well there's a couple of different things that come to play number one is that again through the cloud catalyst capability of net backup we can actually keep data deduplicated before we send it to our disk based solution which means that it stays in some cases 50 to one deduplicated and you're not necessarily gonna get that capability on tape you'd have to rehydrate don't have to rehydrate so if you talk about about pennies well multiply that by 50 because if your data duplicates that much that's the kind of thing you're talking about the second part is the operational cost of actually maintaining tape now if I'm keeping data for seven years thirty years the lifetime of a patient that tape infrastructure age is out and I'm doing tape migrations all the time those are not cheap and sometimes though tape infrastructures not even available anymore the other compatibility is not there that's right the other thing is well the other thing is is the network costs right if you're going to be pushing stuff over the network absolutely your network and your and you pushing bigger things over the network you have more network infrastructure just for the purposes of moving data from one here tier to another tier it's wasteful David talked about the Flex appliance what I took away from that is it sort of allows for services oriented deployment fast migration it allows you to sort of test out new services to see whether or not you like it what what is that what does the customer have to do to exploit that capability today the customer would buy our high-end backup appliance which is the 53:40 they would buy the Flex software which is a software package that allows them to basically augment that's appliance so that it can actually maintain that catalog and then quickly deploy them those services as I showed in the demo in three minutes or less we can deploy a service on from the service catalog in the future you should expect that we should we will begin to build that into all of our appliances that's just the way of doing things it becomes a service-oriented architecture and that catalog is just going to be a natural way of us operating ok I want to also ask you about another capability that you discussed which was your ability to look across the portfolio and identify predictive failures yeah everybody talks about machine intelligence being used you know in that use case IOT you hear about that along what are you guys doing what's unique well you know in some cases what we're doing is not completely unique I mean there are some companies that have done this pretty well they've done it for their own point solutions I think where it gets interesting is when you say look we're not just building a point solution we have a number of different products again for the entire lifecycle of data from the moment it's born and if I can integrate all of the telemetry that I get from those different products I can now start to get predictive about things that might have happened not just at one stage within one product but might happen down the road when I go to move it into my long-term retention as my long-term retention ready for it is it going to impact the performance of my long-term retention solution and so therefore should I think about scaling on my long-term retention solution independent of you know so or ahead of the actual growth of my purpose-built Beco appliance right so it's that portfolio view that makes it so powerful right it's okay two things actually the portfolio view and also the full lifecycle view as well that's right something you've been hitting on not just a point product all right David I know you Jam it a lot of a lot of customer conversations here in New York so I gotta let you go but thanks so much for stopping by the cube appreciate my pleasure I really appreciate your time thank you welcome all right keep it right there everybody you're watching the cube live from Veritas solution days in New York City right in the heart of Central Park we'll be right at right back after this short break [Music]