>> 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)