>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's The Cube covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We are here covering Veritas Vision 2017, the hashtag is VtasVision. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman my cohost David Noy is here, he's the vice president of product management at Vertias. David, thanks for coming to The Cube. >> Thanks for having me, pretty excited. >> Yes, we enjoyed your keynote today taking us through the new product announcements. Let's unpack it, you're at the center of it all. Actually, let's start with the way you started your keynote is you recently left EMC, came here, why, why was that? >> I talk to lots and lots of customers, hundreds, thousands of customers. They're enterprise customers, they're all trying to solve the same kind of problems, reducing infrastructure costs, moving to commodity based architectures, moving to the cloud, in fact they did move to the cloud in Angara. If you look at the NAS market in 2016 it had been on a nice two percent incline until about the second half of 2016 it basically dove 12% and a big part of that was enterprises who were kicking the tires finally saying we're going to move to cloud and actually doing it as opposed to just talking about it. At EMC and a lot of the other big iron vendors they have a strategy that they discuss around helping customers move to cloud, helping them adopt commodity, but the reality is they make their money, their big margin points, on selling branded boxes, right? And as much as it's lip service, it's really hard to fulfill that promise when that's where you're making your revenue, you have revenue margin targets. Veritas on the other hand, it's a software company. We're here to sell software, we're able to make your data more manageable to understand that it's a truth in information, I don't need to own every bit, and I thought that the company that can basically A, provide the real promise of what software define offers is going to be a software company. Number two is that you can't buck the trend of the cloud it's going to happen, and either you're in the critical path and trying to provide friction, in which case you're going to become irrelevant pretty soon or you enable it and figure out how to partner with the cloud vendors in a nonthreatening way. I found that Veritas, because of its heterogeneity background, hey you want AIX, you want Linux, you want Solaris, great, we'll help you with all those. We can do the same thing with the cloud, and the cloud vendors will partner up with us because they love us for that reason. >> Before we get into the products, let's unpack that a little bit. Why is it that as Veritas you can participate in profit from that cloud migration? We know why you can't as a hardware vendor because ultimately the cloud vendor is going to be providing the box. >> Well, the answer is that, a couple things. One is, we believe and even the cloud vendors believe that you're going to be in a hybrid environment. If you project out for the next ten years, it's likely that a lot of data and applications and workloads will move to cloud, but not all of them will. And you probably end up in about a 50/50 shift. The vendor who can provide the management and intelligence and compliance capabilities, and the data protection capabilities across both your on-prem, and your off-premise state as a single unified product set is going to win, in my opinion, that's number one. Number two is that the cloud vendors are all great, but they specialize in different things. Some are specialized in machine learning, some are really good with visual image recognition, some are really good with mobile applications, and people are, in my opinion, going to go to two, three, four different clouds, just like I would go to contracting agencies, some might be good at giving me engineers, I might go to dice.com for engineers, I might go to something completely different for finance people, and you're going to use the best of breed clouds for specific applications. Being able to actually aggregate what you have in your universe of multicloud, and your hybrid environment and allowing you, as an administrator to be aware of all my assets, is something that as a non-branded box pusher, as a software vendor I can go do with credibility. >> You're a recovering box pusher. >> I'm a recovering box pusher, I'm one month into recovery, so thank you very much. >> And David, one of the things we're trying to understand a little bit, you've got products that live in lots of these environments, why do you have visibility into the data? Is it because they're backup customers, is it other pieces? Help us understand in that multicloud world, what I need to be to get that full. >> That's a great question and I'll bridge into some of the new products too. Number one is that Veritas has a huge amount of data that's basically trapped in repositories because we do provide backup, we're the largest backup vendor. So we have all this data that's essentially sitting inactive you know, Mike talks about it, Mike Palmer our CPO, talks about it as kind of like the Uber, you know, what do you do with your car when it's not being used, or Air BnB if you will, what do you do with your home when it's not being used, is you potentially rent it out. You make it available for other purposes. With all this trapped data, there's tons of information that we can glean that enterprises have been grabbing for years and years and years. So that's number one, we're in a great position 'cause we hold a lot of that data. Now, we have products that have the capabilities through classification engines, through engines that are extending machine learning capabilities, to open that data up and actually figure out what's inside. Now we can do it with the backup products, but let's face it, data is stored in a number of different other modaliites, right? So there's blocked data that is sitting at the bottom of containerized private clouds, there are tons and tons of unstructured data sitting in NAS repositories, and growing off-prem, but actually on prem this object storage technology for the set it and forget it long term retention. All of that data has hidden information, all of it can be extracted for more value with our same classification engines that we can run against the net backup estate, we can basically take that and extend that into these new modalities, and actually have compelling products that are not just offering infrastructure, but that are actually offering infrastructure with the promise of making that data more valuable. Make sense? >> It does, I mean it's the holy grail of backup. For years it's been insurance, and insurance is a good business, don't get me wrong, but even when you think about information governance, through sarbanes-oxley and FRCP et cetera, it was always that desire to turn that corpus of data into something more valuable than just insurance, it feels like, like you're saying with automated classification and the machine learning AI, we're sort of at the cusp of that, but we've been disappointed so many times what gives you confidence that this time it'll stick? >> Look, there's some very straightforward things that are happening that you just cannot ignore. GDPR is one, there's a specific timeline, specific rules, specific regulatory requirements that have to be met. That one's a no brainer, and that will drive people to understand that, hey when they apply our policies against the data that they have they'll be able to extract value. That'll be one of many, but that's an extreme proof-point because there's no getting around it, there's no interpretation of that, and the date is a hard date. What we'll do is we'll look quickly at other verticals, we'll look at vertical specific data, whether its in data surveillance, or germain sequencing or what have you, and we'll look at what we can extract there, and we'll partner with ISVs, is a strategy that I learned in my past life, in order to actually bring to market systems or solutions that can categorize specific, vertical industry data to provide value back to the end users. If we just try to provide a blanket, hey, I'm just going to provide data categorization, it's a swiss army knife solution. If we get hyper-focused around specific use cases, workloads and industries now we can be very targeted to what the end users care about. >> If I heard right, it's not just for backup, it's primary and secondary data that you're helping to solve and leverage and put intelligence into these products. >> That's right, initially we have an enormous trapped pool of secondary data, so that's great, we want to turn that trapped pool from just basically a stagnant pool into something that you can actually get value out of. >> That Walking Dead analogy you used. >> The Walking Dead, yeah. We also say that there's a lot of data that sits in primary storage, in fact there's a huge category of archive, which we call active archive, it's not really archive, still wanted on spinning disk or flash. You still want to use it for some purpose but what happens when that data goes out into the environment? I talked to customers in automotive, for example, automotive design manufacturers, they do simulations, and they're consuming storage and capacity all the time, they've got all of these runs, and they're overrunning their budget for storage and they have no idea which of those runs they can actually delete, so they create policies like "well, if it hasn't been touched "in 90 days, I'll delete it," Well, just because it hasn't been touched in 90 days doesn't mean there wasn't good information to be gleaned out of that particular simulation run, right? >> Alright, so I want to get back to the object, but before we go deeper there, block and file, there's market leaders out there that seems that, it's a bit entrenched, if you will, what between the hyperscale product and Veritas access, what's the opportunity that you see that Veritas has there, what differentiates you? >> Sure, well, let's start with block. The one big differentiator we'll have in block storage is that it's not just about providing storage to containerized applications. We want to be able to provide machine learning capabilities to where we can actually optimize the IO path for quality of service. Then, we also want to be able to through machine learning determine whether, if it's how you decide to run your business, you want a burst workloads actually out into the cloud. So we're partnered with the cloud vendors, who are happy to partner with us for the reasons that I described earlier, is that we're very vendor agnostic, we're very heterogeneous. To actually move workloads on-prem and off-prem that's a very differentiated capability. You see with a few of the vendors that are out there, I think Nutanix for example, can do that, but it's not something that everyone's going after, because they want to keep their workloads in their environments, they want to check controls. >> And if I can, that high speed data mover is your IP? >> That's right, that's our IP. Now, on the file system side... >> Just one thing, cloud bursting's one of those things, moving real-time is difficult, physics is still a challenge for us. Any specifics you can give, kind of a customer use case where they're doing that? A lot of times I want this piece of the application here, I want to store the data there, but real time, doing things, I can't move massive amounts of data just 'cause, speed of light. >> If you break it down, I don't think that we're going to solve the use case of, "I'm going to snap my finger "and move the workload immediately offline." Essentially what we'll do is we'll sync the data in the background, once it has been synced we'll actually be able to move the application offline and that'll all come down to one of two things: Either user cases that exceed the capabilities of the current infrastructure and I want to be able to continue to grow without building them into my data center, or I have an end of the month processing. A great case is I have a media entertainment company that I used to work with that was working on a film, and it came close to the release date of that film, and they were asked to go back and recut and reedit that film for specific reasons, a pretty interesting reason actually, it had to do with government pressure. And when they went to go back and edit that film they essentially had a point where like, oh my gosh, all of the servers that were dedicated to render for this film have been moved off to another project. What do we do now, right? The answer is, you got to burst. And if you had cloud burst capabilities you could actually use whatever application and then containerize whether you're running on-prem or off-prem, it doesn't matter, it's containeraized, if we can get the data out there into the cloud through fast pipes then basically you can now finish that job without having to take all those servers back, or repurchase that much infrastructure. So that's a pretty cool use case, that's things that people have been talking about doing but nobody's every successfully done. We're staring to prove that out with some vendors and some partners that potentially even want to embed this in their own solutions, larger technology partners. Now, you wanted to talk about file as well, right, and what makes file different. I spent five years with one of the most successful scale-up file systems, you probably know who they are. But the thing about them was that extracting that file system out of the box and making it available as a software solution that you could layer on any hardware is really hard, because you become so addicted to the way that the behavior of the underlying infrastructure, the behavior of the drives, down to the smart errors that come off the drives, you're so tied into that, which is great because you build a very high performance available product when you do that, but the moment you try to go to any sort of commodity hardware, suddenly things start to fall apart. We can do that, and in fact with our file system we're not saying "hey, you've got to go it on "commodity servers and with DAS drives in them." You could layer it on top of your existing net app, your Isolon, your whatever, you name it, your BNX, encapsulate it, and create policies to move data back and forth between those systems, or potentially even provision them out say, "okay, you know what, this is my gold tier, "my silver tier, my bronze tier." We can even encapsulate, for example, a directory on one file service, like a one file system array, and we can actually migrate that data into an object service, whether its on-prem or off-prem, and then provide the same NFS or SMB connectivity back into that data, for example a home directory migration use case, moving off of a NAS filer onto an object storer, on premise or off premise and to the end user, they don't know that things have actually moved. We think that kind of capability is really critical, because we love to sell boxes, if that's what the customer wants to buy from us, and appliance form factor, but we're not pushing the box as the ultimate end point. The ultimate end point is that software layer on top, and that's where the Veritas DNA really shines. >> That's interesting, the traditional use cases for block certainly, and maybe to a lesser extent file, historically fairly well known an understood. So to your point, you could tune an array specifically for those use cases, but in this day and age the processes, and the new business models that are emerging in the digital economy, very unpredictable in terms of the infrastructure requirements. So your argument is a true software defined capability is going to allow you to adapt much more freely and quickly. >> We've also built and we've demoed at Vision this week machine learning capabilities to actually go in and look at your workloads that are running against those underlying infrastructure and tell you are they correctly positioned or not. Oh, guess what, we really don't think this workload should belong on this particular tier that you've chosen, maybe you ought to consider moving it over here. That's something that historically has been the responsibility of the admin, to go in and figure out where those policies are, and try to make some intelligent decisions. But usually those decisions are not super intelligent, they're just like, is it old, is it not old, do I think it's going to be fast? But I don't really know until runtime, based on actual access patterns whether it's going to be high performance or not. Whether it's going to require moving or aging or not. By using machine learning type of algorithms we can actually look at the data, the access patterns over time, and help the administrators make that decision. >> Okay, we're out of time, but just to summarize, hyperscales, the block, access is the scale out, NAS piece, cloud object... >> Veritas cloud storage we call it. Veritas cloud storage, very similar to the access product is for object storage, but again it's not trying to own the entire object bits, if you will, we'll happily be the broker and the asset manager for those objects, classify them and maintain the metadata catalog, because we think it's the metadata around the data that's critical, whether it lives off-prem, on-prem, or in our own appliance. >> You had a nice X/Y graph, dollars on the vertical axis, high frequency of access to the left part of the horizontal axis, lower SLAs to the right, and you had sort of block, file, object as the way to look at the world. Then you talked about the intelligence you bring to the object world. Last question, and then let's end there. Thoughts on object, Stu and I were talking off camera, it's taken a long time, obviously S3 and the cloud guys have been there, you've seen some take outs of object storage companies. But it really hasn't exploded, but it feels like we're on the cusp. What's your observation about object? >> I think object is absolutely on the cusp. Look, people have put it on the cloud, because traditionally object has been used for keeping deep, and because performance doesn't matter, and the deeper you get, the less expensive it gets. So a cloud provider's great, because they're going to aggrigate capacity across 1,000 or 20,000 or a million customers. They can get as deep as possible, and they can slice it off to you. As a single enterprise, I can never get as deep as a cloud service provider. >> The volume, right? >> But what ends up happening is that more and more workloads are not expecting to hold a connection open to their data source. They're actually looking at packetize, get-put type semantics that you can see in genomic sequencing, you see it in a number of different workloads where that kind of semantic, even in hydoop analytic workloads, where that kind of get-put semantic makes sense, not holding that connection open, and object's perfect for that, but it hasn't traditionally had the performance to be able to do that really well. We think that by providing a high performance object system that also has the intelligence to do that data classification, ties into our data protection products, provides the actionable information and metadata, and also makes it possible to use on-prem infrastructure as well as push to cloud or multicloud, and maintain that single pane of glass for that asset management for the objects is really critical, and again, it's the software that matters, the intelligence we build into it that matters. And I think that the primary workloads in a number of different industries in verticals or in adopting object more and more, and that's going to drive more on premise growth of object. By the way, if you look at the NAS market and the object market, you see the NAS market kind of doing this, and you see the object market kind of doing this, it's left pocket right pocket. >> And that get-put framework is a simplifying factor for organizations so, excellent. David, thank you very much for coming on The Cube. We appreciate it. >> Appreciate it, thanks for having me. >> You're welcome, alright, bringing you the truth from Veritas Visions, this is The Cube. We'll be right back, right after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube! Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, everybody. We are covering Veritas Vision 2017, and this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, with Stu Miniman and Mike Palmer is here, he's the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Veritas. Mike, thanks for coming to The Cube. >> Thank you for having me here. >> Great keynote, yesterday. We see hundreds, if not thousands of these discussions, and talking head presentations, and yours was hilarious. Let's set up for the people who didn't see it, yesterday. Mike gets up there, and he's talking about the, there's a video that's playing about the end of the world. And the basic theme is that you didn't take care of your data, and now the world's coming to an end. Las Vegas was in shambles, and there were waterfalls running through the hotels, drones attacking people, and then you picked it up from there and then took it into, just a really funny soliloquy. But, where'd you come up with that idea? And, how do you think, I thought it went great, but how did you feel afterwards? >> Well, I can take only partial credit. I have an amazing creative team, and when you work at a company that's been doing, you know, large-scale enterprise data-center stuff, we know that part of our obligation for our audience is kind of making it more palpable for them, making it feel a little bit more, bringing the emotion to it. So we want to have a little bit of excitement in there. But at the same time, we have a real message, you know, and hopefully that came across, too. >> It did, and then, you know, but again, a lot of good humor, the megabytes, gigabytes, you know, up to zetabytes, yadabytes, Mike Tyson-bytes, on and on and on. (laughing) Very clever, so congratulations on that... >> Mike: Oh, thanks! >> We really enjoyed it. Mixed things up a little bit. So, and again, very transparent. We talked about the UX, not the best. You're not happy with it. >> Mike: Right. >> And again, very transparent about that, I think that's a theme of many successful companies, today. But, so, let's start with, sort of, what does it take as the Chief Product Officer, to transform a company from somebody who's been around since 1983, into a modern, you know, cloud-like, hyper-scale, you know, set of service and software offerings. >> That's a big question, but I can tell you the first thing that it takes, the most important thing that it takes, is the best engineering team in the world. You can do a lot of things around the outside, we need to fix our UX, we know that, often considered that to be the kitchens and bathrooms of our house remodel. But if your foundation's broken, if your framing isn't there, you really don't have much of an asset to put on the market. We have a great engineering team, we are releasing products at a velocity that is incomparable in the enterprise ISV space, and we're super proud of that. So I think that's the number one thing. I think number two is the other thing, that we're the envy of the industry, for, and that is, an amazing install-base of customers. Very hard to name a fortune 2000 company that isn't a significant customer of Veritas, so we have a great basis to collaborate and innovate. You know, the rest, we know we have some work to do as we bring it into the modern age. You know, we talked a lot about the fact that workloads are changing in data centers, architectures are changing, we're establishing new partnerships with some of the sponsors that you see here today, like Microsoft, like Google, like IBM, and Oracle, and others. And, you know, it takes a village and they're helping us move into the next 10 years. >> Stu: You know, Mike, talk a little bit about the transition from, you know, software that lived on servers, to now, well, cloud is just isn't somebody else's servers, I think, is the word for that. >> Mike: Right. >> You know, it definitely, we've talked many times this week, you know, Veritas was software-defined before there was such a thing, used to be the FUD from the traditional players, that it was like, oh, you can't trust stuff like that, and now, of course, they're all software-defined and, you know, talking about that, too, so, what does that mean, going to kind of, being completely agnostic, for where things lived, and some of the intricacies of trying to work with, you know, some of the big and small cloud-players? >> A lot of questions in there, and I think David Noy, who I know you guys are going to talk to later, is going to talk a bit more specifically about this, but one of the first things you have to keep in mind, is if you're building software to be software-defined, then you have to build it without considering the hardware platform that you may deliver it on. And I think that's where some of our competitors get it wrong, they can say that they're software-defined, but the litmus test is, can I really pick up this software without modification, and go run it in one of those hyper-scalers? Or put it on one of the white boxes that I went into the market and procured and integrated myself? Veritas has been doing that for a long time. In fact, if you really look at Veritas's core, we're an integrator. We've been an integrator of applications, through the protection space, in our file-system and our info-scale technologies, we are integrators of operating systems, when you look at hyper-scalers, they're just the next operating system. Someone else's hardware, as you said. So we look to protect our customers in terms of their choices, make flexibility a real part of the multi-cloud architecture they're putting together, still doing the things we do well with protection, and ultimately layer on that last little bit when we're talking software-defined and that is not just focus on the infrastructure, but really aspire to this, how do I better manage data and get value from data? >> You know, Mike, I want to dig one level deeper on that. So, the cloud providers, it's all well and good to say, yeah, I'm agnostic, but each of them have their own little nuances. It's, at least today, it's not like, oh, I choose today to wake up and this one has cheaper prices, and it's not a commodity, it's not a utility, and each one of them have services that they want you to integrate with, have to have deeper, how do you balance that, you know, integration, how much work's done, where the customers are pulling you, how does that product portfolio get put together? >> That's an excellent question and I will be fully honest, that a year ago we thought about the answer to that question very differently than we do today. You know, a year ago, I think we were somewhat naive, and thought, hey, we're going to throw a thin layer of capability on top of the clouds, and in effect commoditize them ourselves, and hope our customers just move around as if there were no underlying services. And obviously if you're a cloud-provider, that is not an approach that you're a big fan of. (laughing) And frankly, it's a disservice to the customers, because they are building some really valuable services, and they are differentiating themselves. Our approach has changed, our approach today is a very deep-level integration with each cloud provider, and the specialization they're bringing to the market, without sacrificing the portability, without sacrificing the built-in protections that the cloud providers aren't putting on their platforms and don't want to put on their platforms. And again going back to this idea of data, ultimately, if it's someone else's hardware, in effect, in some cases, someone else's application, it's always your data, and how we are servicing that data is really the key. >> So, that's really hard work. In a lot of cases, you have to interface with very low-level, primitive APIs from the cloud service providers. How do you, sort of, balance your resources, or a portion of your resources, between doing that, because you guys, I call it the compatibility matrix, all kinds of data stores, all kinds of clouds, every one of those is engineering resources. And it seems that's a key part of your strategy, but you got to be sacrificing something, which is maybe, you know, the next widget on your existing products. How do you think about proportioning those? >> You know, at Veritas, in a way, the emergence of the cloud ecosystem actually improves that situation for us. We're carrying 30 years of operating systems that have come and gone, that have incremented versions, and our customers often strand or isolate single examples of those boxes, from 20 years ago that they expect us to test all of our software against, on their behalf. (laughing) For example, right, and so when you look at where we are today, there are five or 10 cloud providers, versus hundreds of operating system versions, and application, we have no problem supporting the proliferation in cloud, we actually welcome the ability to support those... >> Stu: You're much happier with the one version of AJUR, as opposed to the old Patch Monday. >> Exactly right, and you know, they upgrade the whole thing at once... >> Yeah. >> They issue a couple new services, and we adapt 'em, no problem. >> Am I thinking about it the wrong way? Because, while that's true, and I understand that, but within an individual cloud, you could have 15 data services. I think about AWS data services, their data pipeline is increasingly complex, so. Doesn't that complexity scale in a different direction? >> Mike: It scales differently for sure, but I would give a lot of credit to the cloud providers, because they're taking a lot of the regression testing that we used to have to do, for example, with application providers and operating system providers who didn't think about us when they were building their products. The cloud providers take accountability for regression testing all of the things that they release to their customers. So when we adopt an API, we're fully confident that that API works in the context of that cloud environment. So that's off our plate. It really isolates the need for us to simply test that API against our environment. >> Dave: OK, so much more stable and predictable environment for you. I want to ask you, I've heard the term modern data protection a lot, what is modern data protection? Everyone wants to be next-gen, how do you define modern data protection? >> Mike: And this is something we're super passionate about, because our industry has been around for quite a long time, and you get terms thrown out there, like legacy or modern, and everyone's fighting for brand recognition, and kind of, end of the growth spaces in the market. For us, it actually is very simple. We recognize that there are a lot of different techniques to protect data, we think of these protection schemes like lots of different insurance policies, and lots of different tools in your toolbox. Where Veritas is going to win, and continues to win, is that we can offer our customers all of those techniques. We're not trying to convince them that one technique is so much more special than another one, that they need to diversify and create complexity in their environment, so we talk about modern data protection as the ability to choose snapshots, or back-ups, or copy data management, or workload migration, in the future there will be other ways to do this: continuous data protection, or scale-out platforms for cloud providers. These are just techniques inside of a Veritas portfolio, as opposed to stand-alone companies that create complexity for our customers. So, modernization is choice. >> Dave: OK, so you have this awesome install-base. Bill Coleman said to us yesterday, in response to a similar but related question, that it's ours to lose. And the question that we have is, as you look at that install base, you got to get them onto this modern data platform. How do you do that? Do you write some abstraction layer? You talked about that thin layer in the cloud, you must have thought about doing that. Is that what you're doing? How is that going? What does that journey look like? >> Mike: You know, that is one of the most fundamental strategy questions for Veritas. And one of the things we recognized early on, is that while we do have an amazing install base of customers, and those customers are hyper-scaled themselves, you're talking about customers with tens of thousands of servers running our software, both on the storage and the protection site, so the thing that we cannot ask them to do is continuously upgrade their environment to take advantage of new features. We will put out one-to-two major releases of our software, particularly on a protection side, annually. But we're innovating at a far greater pace than that, so we've made some conscious choices to create new architectures for our customer that are workload-specific, so Cloud Point, being a great example, coming out in July, our Object Store announcements, underpinning our next generation protection solutions. So they have modern storage capabilities, our second example. But pulling them together is where only Veritas can offer a customer a complete catalog of that data. So, combining your net back-up catalog with Cloud Point, for example, with your storage, with what you've put into cloud, provides a customer, for the first time, kind of a complete view of the secondary estate. And so, as long as we get that right, we don't have to upgrade, we don't have to seed, what we have to do is enable our customers, through simple adoption of new tools, provide that visibility over the top, and I think that they'll be good to go. >> So that's kind of like a, I think of a term, backward compatibility, is essentially what you're providing for your install base, is that right? >> Mike: That's exactly right. Providing, and this is where API-based infrastructure and service-driven architectures help us a lot. We don't have to fully instantiate a code-base every time that we want to offer a service to a customer. >> Dave: There aren't many independent, in fact there aren't any independent, is one, two-and-a-half billion dollar software companies in your space, but there are many emerging guys, who are getting a lot of attention, well-funded, some, you know, hitting that kind of, 100 million dollar revenue mark, at least it appears that way. How do you look at those guys? What do you learn from them? You know, Branson said today, you know, you learn by listening and watching, in this case. You're watching the market, obviously, what are you seeing there, it's the hottest space in the infrastructure market right now, is your space and security. Are the two, you know, smoking hot spaces. What are you observing, and what are you learning? >> And I think the direct answer to your question is probably the user. You know, and I think that's the lesson of the industry even over the last 15 years, is that when a new workload arises, it's creating a new user inside the enterprise IT department. And that user often gets to determine all of the services that they need to make themselves successful. If that is a cloud workload, and they need availability services, or they need protection services, they want that to integrate in the same place that they buy in provision their cloud workload. If it's a container workload it's the same. We saw the rise of some of our competitors that got to multi-hundred million dollar revenue streams, by focusing on a single user, and a single type of transaction, with a single type of interface. And Veritas kind of lost its way, I think, a little bit, back in that time. So what we are watching today, is who are our users? What workloads are emerging? What sort of interfaces do we need to develop for those users? Which is why we made our UX statements as strongly as we did. We're committed to those. That is going to be the future of Veritas, it's serving the broadening user-base inside of enterprise. >> Dave: You're seeing a lot of discussion in the industry around design thinking, I know we're out of time, here, but, you know, you see companies, like, for instance, Charles Phillips's company, Infor, bought a company called Hook and Loop, and they're all about design, and, how is design thinking fitting into your, sort of, UX/UI plans? >> I mean, the parlance that we use internally is jobs to be done. Right, we clearly want to create a very consistent user experience, and look and feel, we want our customers to be proud to be Veritas customers. But we have to be super cognizant of, what is the job they're trying to get accomplished? And allow the system to be designed around accommodating that. If that is, I want three workflows in three steps or less, can I do that? It could be, I have a very complicated job and I want the ability to control very granular things, do I have an interface to do that? So, if we know the user and the job to be done, we can create a consistent look and feel, I think that we are, we're going to not only ride the wave, of change inside of our particular industry, but I think we're going to wind up in a consolidation space where we're a big winner. >> All right, last question, the bumper sticker on Vision 2017, as the trucks are pulling away from the area, what's the bumper sticker? >> Mike: Secondary data is your most under-utilized asset, and a platform provider is what you need to take advantage of it. >> Dave: All right, Mike, thanks very much for coming to The Cube. Congratulations, and good luck. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, you're welcome, keep right there, buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. The Cube, live we're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (peppy digital music) >> Veritas Vision 2017 everybody. We're here at The Aria Hotel. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Vtas, #VtasVision, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman who is my cohost for the week. Stu, we heard Richard Branson this morning. The world-renowned entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson came up from the British Virgin Islands where he lives. He lives in the Caribbean. And evidently he was holed out during the hurricane in his wine cellar, but he was able to make it up here for the keynote. We saw on Twitter, so, great keynote, we'll talk about that a little bit. We saw on Twitter that he actually stopped by the Hitachi event, Hitachi NEXT for women in tech, a little mini event that they had over there. So, pretty cool guy. Some of the takeaways: he talked a lot about- well, first of all, welcome to day two. >> Thanks, Dave. Yeah, and people are pretty excited that sometimes they bring in those marquee guests, someone that's going to get everybody to say, "Okay, wait, it's day two. "I want to get up early, get in the groove." Some really interesting topics, I mean talking about, thinking about the community at large, one of the things I loved he talked about. I've got all of these, I've got hotels, I've got different things. We draw a circle around it. Think about the community, think about the schools that are there, think about if there's people that don't have homes. All these things to, giving back to the community, he says we can all do our piece there, and talking about sustainable business. >> As far as, I mean we do a lot of these, as you know, and as far as the keynote speakers go, I thought he was one of the better ones. Certainly one of the bigger names. Some of the ones that we've seen in the past that I think are comparable, Bill Clinton at Dell World 2012 was pretty happening. >> There's a reason that Bill Clinton is known as the orator that he is. >> Yeah, so he was quite good. And then Robert Gates, both at ServiceNow and Nutanics, Condi Rice at Nutanics, both very impressive. Malcolm Gladwell, who's been on theCUBE and Nate Silver, who's also been on theCUBE, again, very impressive. Thomas Friedman we've seen at the IBM shows. The author, the guy who wrote the Jobs book was very very strong, come on, help me. >> Oh, yeah, Walter Isaacson. >> Walter Isaacson was at Tableau, so you've seen some- >> Yeah, I've seen Elon Musk also at the Dell show. >> Oh, I didn't see Elon, okay. >> Yeah, I think that was the year you didn't come. >> So I say Branson, from the ones I've seen, I don't know how he compared to Musk, was probably the best I think I've ever seen. Very inspirational, talking about the disaster. They had really well-thought-out and well-produced videos that he sort of laid in. The first one was sort of a commercial for Richard Branson and who he was and how he's, his passion for changing the world, which is so genuine. And then a lot of stuff on the disaster in the British Virgin Islands, the total devastation. And then he sort of went into his passion for entrepreneurs, and what he sees as an entrepreneur is he sort of defined it as somebody who wants to make the world a better place, innovations, disruptive innovations to make the world a better place. And then had a sort of interesting Q&A session with Lynn Lucas. >> Yeah, and one of the lines he said, people, you don't go out with the idea that, "I'm going to be a businessman." It's, "I want to go out, I want to build something, "I want to create something." I love one of the early anecdotes that he said when he was in school, and he had, what was it, a newsletter or something he was writing against the Vietnam War, and the school said, "Well, you can either stay in school, "or you can keep doing your thing." He said, "Well, that choice is easy, buh-bye." And when he was leaving, they said, "Well, you're either going to be, end up in jail or be a millionaire, we're not sure." And he said, "Well, what do ya know, I ended up doing both." (both laughing) >> So he is quite a character, and just very understated, but he's got this aura that allows him to be understated and still appear as this sort of mega-personality. He talked about, actually some of the interesting things he said about rebuilding after Irma, obviously you got to build stronger homes, and he really sort of pounded the reducing the reliance on fossil fuels, and can't be the same old, same old, basically calling for a Marshall Plan for the Caribbean. One of the things that struck me, and it's a tech audience, generally a more liberal audience, he got some fond applause for that, but he said, "You guys are about data, you don't just ignore data." And one of the data points that he threw out was that the Atlantic Ocean at some points during Irma was 86 degrees, which is quite astounding. So, he's basically saying, "Time to make a commitment "to not retreat from the Paris Agreement." And then he also talked about, from an entrepreneurial standpoint and building a company that taking note of the little things, he said, makes a big difference. And talking about open cultures, letting people work from home, letting people take unpaid sabbaticals, he did say unpaid. And then he touted his new book, Finding My Virginity, which is the sequel to Losing My Virginity. So it was all very good. Some of the things to be successful: you need to learn to learn, you need to listen, sort of an age-old bromide, but somehow it seemed to have more impact coming from Branson. And then, actually then Lucas asked one of the questions that I put forth, was what's his relationship with Musk and Bezos? And he said he actually is very quite friendly with Elon, and of course they are sort of birds of a feather, all three of them, with the rocket ships. And he said, "We don't talk much about that, "we just sort of-" specifically in reference to Bezos. But overall, I thought it was very strong. >> Yeah Dave, what was the line I think he said? "You want to be friends with your competitors "but fight hard against them all day, "go drinking with them at night." >> Right, fight like crazy during the day, right. So, that was sort of the setup, and again, I thought Lynn Lucas did a very good job. He's, I guess in one respect he's an easy interview 'cause he's such a- we interview these dynamic figures, they just sort of talk and they're good. But she kept the conversation going and asked some good questions and wasn't intimidated, which you can be sometimes by those big personalities. So I thought that was all good. And then we turned into- which I was also surprised and appreciative that they put Branson on first. A lot of companies would've held him to the end. >> Stu: Right. >> Said, "Alright, let's get everybody in the room "and we'll force them to listen to our product stuff, "and then we can get the highlight, the headliner." Veritas chose to do it differently. Now, maybe it was a scheduling thing, I don't know. But that was kind of cool. Go right to where the action is. You're not coming here to watch 60 Minutes, you want to see the headline show right away, and that's what they did, so from a content standpoint I was appreciative of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, they brought on David Noy, who we're going to have on in a little while, and went through, really, the updates. So really it's the expansion, Dave, of their software-defined storage, the family of products called InfoScale. Yesterday we talked a bit about the Veritas HyperScale, so that is, they've got the HyperScale for OpenStack, they've got the HyperScale for containers, and then filling out the product line is the Veritas Access, which is really their scale-out NAS solution, including, they did one of the classic unveils of Veritas Software Company. It was a little odd for me to be like, "Here's an appliance "for Veritas Bezel." >> Here's a box! >> Partnership with Seagate. So they said very clearly, "Look, if you really want it simple, "and you want it to come just from us, "and that's what you'd like, great. "Here's an appliance, trusted supplier, "we've put the whole thing together, "but that's not going to be our primary business, "that's not the main way we want to do things. "We want to offer the software, "and you can choose your hardware piece." Once again, knocking on some of those integrated hardware suppliers with the 70 point margin. And then the last one, one of the bigger announcements of the show, is the Veritas Cloud Storage, which they're calling is object storage with brains. And one thing we want to dig into: those brains, what is that functionality, 'cause object storage from day one always had a little bit more intelligence than the traditional storage. Metadata is usually built in, so where is the artificial intelligence, machine learning, what is that knowledge that's kind of built into it, because I find, Dave, on the consumer side, I'm amazed these days as how much extra metadata and knowledge gets built into things. So, on my phone, I'll start searching for things, and it'll just have things appear. I know you're not fond of the automated assistants, but I've got a couple of them in my house, so I can ask them questions, and they are getting smarter and smarter over time, and they already know everything we're doing anyway. >> You know, I like the automated assistants. We have, well, my kid has an Echo, but what concerns me, Stu, is when I am speaking to those automated assistants about, "Hey, maybe we should take a trip "to this place or that place," and then all of a sudden the next day on my laptop I start to see ads for trips to that place. I start to think about, wow, this is strange. I worry about the privacy of those systems. They're going to, they already know more about me than I know about me. But I want to come back to those three announcements we're going to have David Noy on: HyperScale, Access, and Cloud Object. So some of the things we want to ask that we don't really know is the HyperScale: is it Block, is it File, it's OpenStack specific, but it's general. >> Right, but the two flavors: one's for OpenStack, and of course OpenStack has a number of projects, so I would think you could be able to do Block and File but would definitely love that clarification. And then they have a different one for containers. >> Okay, so I kind of don't understand that, right? 'Cause is it OpenStack containers, or is it Linux containers, or is it- >> Well, containers are always going to be on Linux, and containers can fit with OpenStack, but we've got their Chief Product Officer, and we've got David Noy. >> Dave: So we'll attack some of that. >> So we'll dig into all of those. >> And then, the Access piece, you know, after the apocalypse, there are going to be three things left in this world: cockroaches, mainframes, and Dot Hill RAID arrays. When Seagate was up on stage, Seagate bought this company called Dot Hill, which has been around longer than I have, and so, like you said, that was kind of strange seeing an appliance unveil from the software company. But hey, they need boxes to run on this stuff. It was interesting, too, the engineer Abhijit came out, and they talked about software-defined, and we've been doing software-defined, is what he said, way before the term ever came out. It's true, Veritas was, if not the first, one of the first software-defined storage companies. >> Stu: Oh yeah. >> And the problem back then was there were always scaling issues, there were performance issues, and now, with the advancements in microprocessor, in DRAM, and flash technologies, software-defined has plenty of horsepower underneath it. >> Oh yeah, well, Dave, 15 years ago, the FUD from every storage company was, "You can't trust storage functionality "just on some generic server." Reminds me back, I go back 20 years, it was like, "Oh, you wouldn't run some "mission-critical thing on Windows." It's always, "That's not ready for prime time, "it's not enterprise-grade." And now, of course, everybody's on the software-defined bandwagon. >> Well, and of course when you talk to the hardware companies, and you call them hardware companies, specifically HPE and Dell EMC as examples, and Lenovo, etc. Lenovo not so much, the Chinese sort of embraced hardware. >> And even Hitachi's trying to rebrand themselves; they're very much a hardware company, but they've got software assets. >> So when you worked at EMC, and you know when you sat down and talked to the guys like Brian Gallagher, he would stress, "Oh, all my guys, all my engineers "are software engineers. We're not a hardware company." So there's a nuance there, it's sort of more the delivery and the culture and the ethos, which I think defines the software culture, and of course the gross margins. And then of course the Cloud Object piece; we want to understand what's different from, you know, object storage embeds metadata in the data and obviously is a lower cost sort of option. Think of S3 as the sort of poster child for cloud object storage. So Veritas is an arms dealer that's putting their hat in the ring kind of late, right? There's a lot of object going on out there, but it's not really taking off, other than with the cloud guys. So you got a few object guys around there. Cleversafe got bought out by IBM, Scality's still around doing some stuff with HPE. So really, it hasn't even taken off yet, so maybe the timing's not so bad. >> Absolutely, and love to hear some of the use cases, what their customers are doing. Yeah, Dave, if we have but one critique, saw a lot of partners up on stage but not as many customers. Usually expect a few more customers to be out there. Part of it is they're launching some new products, not talking about very much the products they've had in there. I know in the breakouts there are a lot of customers here, but would have liked to see a few more early customers front and center. >> Well, I think that's the key issue for this company, Stu, is that, we talked about this at the close yesterday, is how do they transition that legacy install base to the new platform. Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." And I think that's right, and so the answer for a company like that in the playbook is clear: go private so you don't have to get exposed to the 90 day shock lock, invest, build out a modern platform. He talked about microservices and modern development platform. And create products that people want, and migrate people over. You're in a position to do that. But you're right, when you talk to the customers here, they're NetBackup customers, that's really what they're doing, and they're here to sort of learn, learn about best practice and see where they're going. NetBackup, I think, 8.1 was announced this week, so people are glomming onto that, but the vast majority of the revenue of this company is from their existing legacy enterprise business. That's a transition that has to take place. Luckily it doesn't have to take place in the public eye from a financial standpoint. So they can have some patient capital and work through it. Alright Stu, lineup today: a lot of product stuff. We got Jason Buffington coming on for getting the analyst perspective. So we'll be here all day. Last word? >> Yeah, and end of the day with Foreigner, it feels like the first time we're here. Veritas feels hot-blooded. We'll keep rolling. >> Alright, luckily we're not seeing double vision. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Vertias Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (peppy digital music)