>> 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 wrap for Veritas 2017. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Mindeman. And Stu, two days where we're witnessing the evolution transformation of Veritas. Veritas used to be the gold standard for what wasn't known at the time as software design but just software function to deliver storage capabilities, no hardware agenda and now you're seeing investment under the leadership of new management. Some innovation, a cycle that's quite rapid. It's hard to tell how much of that is really taking shape in the customer base. Seems like the channel, partners are picking up on it. Customers are still sort of trying to figure out how to move beyond so their existing legacy situation, it's like Heath Townsend says. The vendor community tends to move at the speed of CIO. It's a great quote. But overall, I think very good show. Some surprises here in terms of specifically the breadth of the Veritas portfolio not just a backup company. Really focused on data management, focused on information management which obviously is relevant in the digital economy. What were your takeaways? >> So Dave the big strategy is the 360 data management. And I think one of the things we teased out in here is first of all, nobody thinks the cloud is simple. Multicloud, where customers are and when you dig into it and what Veritas has learned in the last year is that there's a lot of work to be done. Where are their deeper integrations that they need to have. There's different requirements from the different partners here. See Microsoft, the top level sponsor. Russinovich up on stage, giving kind of his usual hybrid cloud with a lot of open source pitch there but seems a good fit from the customers and partners that we talked to here to say Microsoft aligns well with what Veritas is doing. Amazon big player here. Lot of integration is happening behind the scenes to make sure that Veritas can work there. And then you follow Google of course, big focus around data, good to see where Veritas is going. We had a nice conversation with Google. Google seems very open on a lot of these not as much focus on some of the functionality that Veritas has so it's a good natural fit and then IBM and Oracle kind of rounding out the big players here. The thing I've come in, I think every show I've gone to this year Dave, is where do companies that have been around for more than a couple of years fit in this multicloud world and absolutely that's where the puck's going as Bill Coleman said that's where they're betting the company and putting it forward and we wondered coming in would it be like ah, yeah. This is a net backup and Veritas foundation suite with a new coat of paint on it? And no, I mean they really brought in a lot of new management team sure there's engineers here with a lot of expertise and experience to build on to know how to do this but I was pretty impressed with what I saw this week Dave. >> So no hardware agenda is evolving to no cloud agenda. That's one of the things we learned here and we had a good discussion. Got a little bit awkward at times but good discussion about why Veritas relative to the other players here. And what the answer we got back which we had to tease it out a little bit was essentially the upstart guys, the Rubrics, the Cohesity's to a certain extent Zerto I think they tried to put Veeam in that category we'll come back to Veeam it's kind of interesting Maybe not big enough to deliver on that multicloud vision. And they're really not even trying. Cohesity and Rubric I don't know. >> They've added a lot of cloud recently, actually Rubric's been doing it for a while, Cohesity definitely seen there. They understand that cloud but I think what maybe I'd say Dave, they tend to start from an on premises piece as opposed to you say this Veritas strategy is it doesn't matter and what many of the player, right, where is there natural gravity? Is it on premises or is in the public cloud and Nutanix, they partner with Google, they're doing the cloud. But absolutely, most of their >> Dave: They make more money. >> Stu: Most of their revenue is, you know, is found there. >> So the upstarts I kind of buy the Veritas argument that there maybe doesn't have the Gravitas and the heft to attack that multicloud other than pick at it and grow and they'll do hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and maybe get to a billion and have a great exit. I think that'll happen. And then the other guys, the big guys, HPE, Dell EMC, IBM, they certainly have the capabilities to do that. But is it going to be the main focus of those companies? HPE maybe. We'll see. HPE and Veeam are an interesting partnership. My information suggests that Veeam is driving many tens of millions of dollars through Hewlett Packard Enterprise now that the microfocus deal has been done and they got rid of data protector. IBM they're kind of re-invigorating the storage business, data production is part of that. Dell EMC is I think challenged to invest They can't invest in as much as they used to certainly not in acquisitions. The acquisition pipeline is basically dried up. >> Stu: Dave, Dave, look at the DataMain was a great acquisition by EMC at the time now under Dell EMC. I mean, you're probably closer to it than me. I don't hear a strong cloud message coming out of that group when we talk about backup and the like. Dell corporate, of course they've got Microsoft partnerships Veeam has Amazon partnerships but it very much is tied to appliances or arrays or servers at the main piece, it's not a software message which is where Veritas is. >> Dave: If you look at Dell EMC's acquisitions recently, Isilon a couple billion, two and a half billion I think, Data Domain two and a half billion, DSSD a billion, which really hasn't turned into much at this point in time anyway. Extreme IO, not sure what they paid but you know you're hearing ebbs and flows on that but that my point is that is how under Joe Tucci EMC innovated. They would incrementally add on to their existing platforms. You were there. You saw it. And then they would invest in what Joe Tucci used to call tuck in acquisitions. And all that was well and good and they were able to sort of keep, not sort of, they were able to keep pace with the industry. That's basically stopped. That strategy. We've seen cuts and layoffs but still a financial windfall I think is coming for Dell. And VMware is a secret sauce there so we don't have to dig into that too much but my point is that services is going to be the lynchpin for that company in terms of attacking multicloud services and VMware. So now you >> Stu: And pivotal of course too. >> Dave: And pivotal as well, that's right. Great point. Now you come back to Veritas. Focused on that strategy of information management. Investing apparently in RND. Seemingly patient capital with Carlyle so you know me, I like to unpack the numbers. From what I can tell, my sources and got to do some more digging on this but when Veritas was acquired by Carlyle it was about 2.3 billion dollar company, wouldn't surprise me if on an income statement basis it's actually shrunk. It wouldn't surprise me at all. In fact, Bill Coleman kind of hinted to that. And especially if you start looking at rateable revenue models, maybe bookings could be up and I've heard numbers as high as 2.6, 2.7 billion but who knows. I've also heard now, the evaluation at the time of the acquisition was 7 billion and change. I've heard numbers as high as 14, 15 billion now, maybe a little inflated but I think easily over ten. And I think this company has an opportunity to get to three billion, get the evaluation up to 15, maybe even 20 billion. Big win for the private equity investors and the key to that, I think, is going to be a continuous investment. Go to market that aligns to those new areas that they're talking about and very importantly the ecosystem. I want to see this thing start exploding. The big highlights here were the cloud guys. What else would you highlight? You know, you walk around the shows a lot of smaller partners here Really would like to see that ecosystem grow. That's something that we're going to watch. And the audience grow. I think this show is up from last year next year I believe it's in Las Vegas again moving to the Cosmopolitan little bit better venue, bigger venue we'll see if they can get up to where the big boys go over time but overall I'd say pretty good second year for Veritas Vision. >> Yeah, you know Dave, when you look at the different areas Veritas has a full suite of software to find storage. The analogy I've used all the time storage industry is a knife fight in a dark alley. So you've got some big players out there that all have their software defined storage messaging out there of course Veritas would say they all have the hardware agenda. There's some truth to that but Veritas also has to partner with a bunch of these players to get there so where did they get the reach, how does the channel help them punch above their white, the differences there a two and a half, 2.6 billion dollar run rate company, revenue company that is private. So you know, they're trusted because they have history. They're not a small startup can this innovation and all the new team members come in and definitely the cloud piece is pretty interesting, Dave we see, we'll be back at Reinvent with the Cube and Veritas will have a presence there. Amazon, huge ecosystem, where do they play where do they show up, data, we've said so many times on here it becomes repetitive data is the new oil and customers need to take advantage of them. Can Veritas' message get them at the table and in a conversation where so much, it's about infrastructure and I love the message here at the show. It's not infrastructure technology it's information technology and we want to put a highlight on that so like the message, like where it's going, here are the customers but can they get at the table when there's so many different there's the startups, there's the big players everybody pulling at where the customers are and the GDPR was an interesting angle 'cause it was the crispest, the most crisp conversation I've heard on GDPR. I know you've been talking about it at least the last six months on some Cube interviews, I've done a number of interviews. But it really crystallized for me this week at the show. >> I'm glad you mentioned that because I've done a couple shows where GDPR has come up and I was like okay, yeah we get it. It's coming. It's nasty. How are you going to help me again? And I think Veritas did a really good job this week of saying look, we are here to help. We're going to start with Discovery and they sort of laid out the journey and I think they made a good case for their portfolio aligning well with solving that problem. So this could be a nice little kicker there. One of the things I wanted to sort of riff on a little bit was the tam, the data protection space. It reminds when ServiceNow went public I know it was a story about Gartner Antlis was very negative on and saying a helpdesk is a dead business and then Frank Sluman did a masterful job of expanding the tam, explaining that tam, guiding the company to a massive opportunity. And I see a similar dynamic here. On the one hand I say wow. Got a lot of companies in this data protection space even though it's exploding lot of VC money coming in, you're seeing new entrants like Datrium now gets in the space even though they're not just backup, that's not their primary but I mean you certainly saw SimpliVity with what's kind of their specialty. But guys like Datos.IO and some of these new guys coming in like we talked about Rubric, etc there's a lot of players here. Is the market big enough to support those? Part of me says ehh, I don't know but then I think back to that ServiceNow example. I think the tam is going to explode because it's not about backup. And it's not even just about data protection. It is about information management and I think Veritas got that right. What I like about their chances is they're big. They've got a big install base and I think their vision is right and they don't have that cloud agenda. They're a pure software company even though they do sell some appliances sometimes. And they got what seemingly is good management. I think I'd like to see them attract even more management as they grow and as they start executing this and as I say, the ecosystem has got to grow. >> Yeah, so Dave, IT has to deal with information governance. That's the defense they need to play. There's going to be money thrown at that. Some of the conversation we had this week IT operations becomes one of those tail winds that should lift companies like Veritas to be able to have further discussion and grow those budgets to be able to be a much more important piece. >> Alright good, Stu. Thank you. Good working with you again. It's been a long few weeks here but we're at it again next week. The Cube is at Big Data NYC which is done in conjunction with Strata in New York City. We've got a big party on Wednesday night. Actually we've got a presentation, Peter Burrows, Neil Raden, Jim Cubillas and we got a panel. Talking about software eating the edge. That's on Wednesday at 37 Pillars. Tweet me at @dvellante if you don't have an invitation I'll get you one although I heard there was a waitlist last week but we'll get you in, don't worry. And then we're also at Splunk next week, I'm going to be at Dotconf in DC. We've done Dotconf since I think 2011 was the first year we did Dotconf. >> And I'll be keeping a big eye on Microsoft Ignite next week while we don't have the Cube there. Obviously pretty important things like Aster Stack expected to roll out and got so many shows Dave. >> So the Cube, we love digital content creating content, sharing with you our community. Follow @thecube that handle for the Cube gems, you'll see a bunch of videos. Go to thecube.net, that's where we host all the videos from all of our shows. And then siliconangle.com is where we write up our news and analysis of these events and news of the day and of course wikibon.com is our research site. A lot of really good deep work going on there. So thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Mindeman. We're out from Veritas Vision 2017. We'll see you next time. (music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (rippling music) >> Welcome back to The Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stuart Miniman, who's my cohost for the week. Bob Swanson is here, he's the head of sales for dcVAST out of Chicago. Bob, thanks for coming on theCUBE! >> Thanks for having me, guys. >> So, well first of all, the show, how's it going for you? We've now got enough data, it's been a couple of days, a few days perhaps for you. What's the vibe like, what are the conversations like? >> Yeah, it's been a great week. This is the very tail end of the event, so a little exhausted. But it's been exciting, there's been a good buzz at the event and we get a lot of our customers here, and just kind of seeing the buzz and the pace of innovation that's goin on here with Veritas, you know, it has been exciting. >> Tell us more about dcVAST. You're focused on IT infrastructure services, but dig a little deeper. Right, yep, so we're headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and you're right, we do infrastructure and cloud services. So we do support-type services with a seven by 24 call center, have different managed service offerings, different cloud offerings, and certainly do consulting and project work as well. >> Yeah, and Bob, so what does multi-cloud mean to your customers? (chuckles) >> It's only natural that if they're not there today, then they're going to be multi-cloud at some point. So, Veritas here is pretty uniquely positioned. to be able to get customers there. It's all about flexibility and data portability. So, I think where infrastructure and storage and data protection is sometimes not that exciting of a conversation, now kind of changing the conversation, the data management, 'cause everybody needs their data to become more productive for them. It changes the conversation, has a little more sizzle. >> Okay, but you know, your primary area of focus is infrastructure services, so that means first and foremost, every year you got to help me lower my costs, right, you've been hearing that, I'm sure, for years, and help me improve my operational efficiency. And you do that, and really attack my labor problem, IT labor problem so I can focus on my business, right? Are those still the big overriding themes? Oh, yeah, there's no question. I mean, I think the public cloud has been probably the most disruptive thing in our space since the internet. And it's making customers re-evaluate all cost and really how they're doing things, and different consumption and financial models. So, the technology is cool, and we like that conversation, but it naturally brings a big financial and cost savings, and do-more-with-less element to all the conversations. >> So what are the big trends that you're seeing in marketplace, what are the conversations like with your customers? >> Yeah, and I'll give you an example. I think customers have different approaches to cloud, right, some cloud-first, everything's got to go. Others maybe want to keep more of their workloads on premise. And in one customer example, where they said, hey, we want to move all non-production out to the cloud and it was a single cloud provider. And they got about 40% of what they were looking to move out there and they reached what they thought their estimated budget was going to be. So at that point, having that portability and having the tool sets to be able to move those workloads around becomes very important from a financial standpoint. >> So, I wonder if we can unpack those. Cloud first, and then these other guys on-prem. The motivation for cloud first, and the type of company. Do they tend to be a smaller companies, or do you see larger companies saying hey, we're going all in? I mean, you've seen some stories in the press, you know, large company, GE's going all to the cloud, okay I'm sure there's still a lot of on-prem going on there. What do you see? >> Yeah, you're right. A lot of small business is certainly, it makes sense for them, any startups too are pretty much born in the cloud now. You're not going to have too many financial backers that are going to want a startup to be spending too much money on data center, or buying hardware. But the established large enterprises, too, are kind of all over the map, but there are already some of them that are taking this cloud first approach. But, the large enterprises and companies that have been around, where it's not kind of a clean slate, naturally it's going to be hybrid and ultimately there's probably a lot of predictable static workloads that are, at the end of the day, going to be cheaper to run on-prem than they are out in the public cloud. Public cloud's great for the stuff that's not predictable, or is very dynamic, so we're seeing, and I am from Chicago and so we say the coasts move faster, maybe, than the Midwest does as well, but we're seeing varying degrees of adoption and strategy. >> But the business in the data center's good right now, I mean, the market's sort of booming, but if you roll back a few years, you guys must have thought, and maybe you're still thinking it, okay, see this cloud that's coming. Like you said, it's one of the most disruptive, if not the most disruptive in a while, and it's aiming right at the heart of your business, infrastructure services. So how have you responded to that, you must be riding the wave now of data center growth and investment, but strategically, what are you thinking about in your firm? >> Yeah, I mean, there's no question. We've had to pivot. But it does create opportunity. And we do need to help our customers be able to be most cost-effectively managing their workload, right, helping them with that. So where there's challenge and change, there's certainly inopportunity. And we've seen it. >> So, but my understanding, your firm also offers managed cloud offerings. That's been one of the things we've looked at is the channel, can they get on board, can they offer that, how is it working with the big cloud providers, and yeah, let's start there. >> Yeah, that's a good question, and a lot of people have a misperception that the cloud is kind of the easy button. (laughter) But at the end of the day-- >> Stu: Maybe 10 years ago we thought that-- >> Dave: You have your hoodie. >> Right, but I mean, people need to realize the same architecture and security considerations are there as they are for on-premise, so it's not the easy button, and you can just kind of set it and forget it. So some people that are underestimating that still need help from a third party like ourselves to be able to help them manage it. >> Could you speak about the maturation of your support services? >> Yeah, we started doing a lot of hardware support years ago when the business was founded in 1989. And at that time, it was a lot of Unix-based engineering workstations and kind of morphed into servers and storage and other data center equipment, and then started doing a lot more software support, which all can be delivered remotely, for the most part. From time to time, you may need to be onsite for something, so that kind of changes the logistical model, and now with the cloud as well, we've just kind of evolved in that direction. >> And how about the Veritas relationship? What's that been like, you know, the Symantec sale, any comments on how that's evolved, and where do you see that going? >> Yeah, we've been a long-time Veritas partner, and really the reason why we first got started with them was because they were relatively platform-agnostic, and supported and endorsed heterogeneity. And in the old Foundation Suite days, which now their InfoScale product, it's obviously had some name changes, it didn't matter what operating system, didn't matter which array vendor you used. And it's good to have friends in the industry and alliances, but there's also some benefit of staying relatively agnostic like Veritas has, and that message resonates now more than ever with all the different cloud providers out there, and just being able to be interoperable with a lot of different technologies. >> What's your customer's reaction been to all the announcements that Veritas has been making here? >> Yeah, yeah, everyone's excited. Now it's getting the word out. And I mentioned pace of innovation earlier, and it seems to have gone from zero to 100, really, really fast. So, that's exciting. It shows commitment, I think, from the new executive leadership team at Veritas, and their backers at Carlyle as well. So, you know, I think it's an exciting time for Veritas, and for us as a partner as well, and our customers. >> And anything you want to see out of those guys? From your perspective, in the partner standpoint, in the voice of the customer, what's on their to-do list? >> Yeah, and I mean, the concept of data management, looking at it holistically is important. After people and intellectual property, data's the most valuable asset a company has, and a lot of the intellectual property resides in the form of data as well. So, it's an exciting place to be as we kind of see the industry shift. >> Dave: Cubs or White Sox? >> Bob: Cubbies! >> Hey, well, congratulations on that! >> Yeah, it's been a-- >> Really, really Cubbies, not just White Sox, oh, the Cubbies won it? >> No, Cubbies all the way. >> Hardcore Cubbies fan. >> Diehard, absolutely, yep. >> Well, you're welcome for Theo Epstein. We gave Theo, and Lester, you know. And Lackey. (laughs) >> You know, Theo seems to have the Midas touch, you know, and it's interesting too, you can use sports analogies for a lot of things, and Theo's a guy who was a little disruptive by using data and analytics in his approach to managing a baseball team. >> Right, right, well, good. That's great. It was an exciting World Series last year. Hope it can be as exciting again. Must have been insane in Chicago. >> Absolutely, yep, getting ready for another run this year, hopefully. >> Excellent, well, Bob, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks again, gentlemen. >> You're welcome, all right, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back to wrap up Vision 2017. This is theCUBE. (rippling music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision, 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. This is Veritas Vision, 2017, #Vtas at theCUBE. We like to go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stuart Miniman, my cohost for the week. Alex Sakaguchi is here, he's a senior director of global Cloud solutions marketing at Veritas, and he's joined by Ian Wood who's the head of business practices and media for Veritas. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> So Ian, I noticed a number of EMEA badges here at the event. It's quite a presence, come a long way. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think we have a great customer base out in EMEA. EMEA for us is Europe, Middle East, and Africa. I know some people get a bit confused with the acronym. We've got a great deal of customers from Europe, the Middle East, and in fact a whole bunch of customers that made it all the way from South Africa and that's one heck of a flight. So showing some good commitment to come out here to our vision conference. We're excited. >> Yeah, that's excellent. What's the narrative like in Europe and how does it compare to the U.S.? Is it equivalent? Is it different? Maybe more of a focus on GDPR, maybe you could summarize. >> Absolutely. Similarities about multi-Cloud is pretty much the same but multi-Cloud or Cloud means different things to different countries. There's a ton of diversity so you can go into Germany, multi-Cloud means something different out in the Middle East as opposed to the U.K. There's a lot of diversity in multi-Cloud but multi-Cloud as a concept is resonating. Customers are understanding that they need a multi-Cloud strategy and that's bubbling up. For them it's not going to be necessarily the big multi-Cloud service providers, they'll have more local Cloud providers that they're looking to include. Spices it up. Then, as you mentioned GDPR is just taking off. It's one of the number one topics on any CIO's agenda right now is GDPR. What do I do? How do I get compliant? How do I make sure by the 25th of May next year I'm ready for GDPR? >> Alright Alex, so what is a multi-Cloud solution? What is it to you guys? >> I think before you get to solution it really takes some understanding and some discussion around what multi-Cloud is. I think we do a lot of ABCs at headquarters, having customers come in and we're kind of on the forefront of that whole multi-Cloud discussion. But many of these customers, many enterprise customers, have multi-Cloud environments meaning that they have lots of different Cloud players: private Cloud, public Cloud, open stack Clouds. Lots of different types of Clouds but they don't have strategies yet. They're in this situation where they've gotten here by virtue of circumstance. The fact that their dev team decides to deploy their resources somewhere. Some other business unit somewhere else or some other engineering team decides to spin up some resources somewhere else and they find themselves in this situation where they have multiple Clouds. Now they're trying to figure out what to do. How do I make a wrapper over that? How do I get some organization? How do I simplify the operations? How do I take a lot of this to production environments from your test dev labs? It's really about enabling those customers, no matter the mix of infrastructure they have, no matter the mix of Cloud providers they decide to employ, giving them the data management capabilities they need to stay in control. The same exact challenges have existed since the beginning of the data center. It's the same problems. >> Alex, you bring up some great points because multi-Cloud for a lot of customers it wasn't the strategy, it's where they are because they just kind of ended up there. Too often in IT it was like I have an application let's spin something up. Then, I spin something else up and I have my temples of excellence for each of them. Things like that and, unfortunately, we've ended up with a lot of that in Cloud. One of the messages I've really liked hearing this week is Veritas is helping customers kind of get their arms around it, not only how do I manage pieces but how do I understand what I have, how do I manage that visibility into a lot of that. >> I think it actually goes back to one step before that because what you're actually talking about is how do I take care of these challenges. That assumes the customer even knows that they have challenges to take care of. What we've found through research, through customer meetings there are many common misconceptions about what a customer's responsibility is from a data management standpoint and what the Cloud provider's responsibility is from an infrastructure as a service provider. That disconnect is where things can go wrong, where they're at increased risk. They think the Cloud provider is offering them some service or some protection or some level of compliance when really, they're not. Part of it is educating the customer. >> And I'd go even further not just infrastructure service but SASS. A lot of customers are like I don't need to worry about back up or security when I'm doing SASS right? That's all taken care of by the platform. >> I had a CIO once come to me it was a fantastic saying he said what I'm doing now is paying the bill for what shadow IT have created. Therefore, there's a shift that shadow IT went rogue deploying Cloud like crazy. IT are now trying to gain control and trying to sort out quite a mess that shadow IT created. >> We've been doing this Cube since 2010 and we started one of the key Cloud shows was the M world. That's where we started. I want to lay out a timeline and you guys, I'm sure I won't get it exactly right but fill in the holes. My argument is we're entering the fifth phase of Cloud. That's how fast things are moving. Phase one was like kick the tires, in 2006, 2007. During the economic downturn, it was a cap-ex to op-x thing. Then, we came out of that and it was like speed. Shadow IT go, go, go, go. Spend, spend, spend. We've got to get to market fast. It was like there was a couple years there 2013, 14, maybe 15 where it was like wow. IT said this is real, we've got to get control. Now there's still a lot of that going on, to your point Ian, but it seems like the next phase that we're about to enter is a deeper level of business integration. Where Cloud is a strategic capability and a platform for these organizations. In seven years, that many phases and they seem to be somewhat distinct. What do you guys think about that? Is that a reasonable timeline? How would you adjust that? >> I would agree generally speaking. The one difference is I think there are many organizations that haven't even gone through stage one. There are other organizations that have gone through that same set of stages multiple times. Think of especially our core set of customers these are large enterprise customers. Many of them grow by acquisition. They inherit the IT environments of whatever company they've acquired. That creates a whole new set of challenges. They might be using different platforms, different Clouds, etc. So really, they kind of go through that process over and over again. What I think is unique is in many cases I think you articulated this in phase one but also in the latter stages, many have looked at, at least in terms of the public Cloud, they've looked at the public Cloud as a way to offset cost, as a low cost alternative. I think what many people find is, it's not. That's not where the value ends. That's not to the extent that they should be looking for value there either. It's really about data agility. It's really about agility of their organizations. It's really about how they can get more from their environments, be more agile, meet their customers' needs better and as they look to accomplish those types of goals then they also realize that hey we need a different set, a different way to manage the resources, manage the applications that sit on those platforms, manage the data that's involved. I think in many cases the cycle repeats itself. I think in many cases they're starting to realize that they need to go beyond even what was typically just sort of a cost argument. I don't know what you're seeing with customers. I know you meet a lot with them. >> Yeah, I think what you mentioned made sense in the phases. I would actually rather look at it as evolution. I think what happens is in the beginning, do I buy or do I rent was the Cloud argument. What happened with that is that's now incremental to I want to drive agility or more security which is incremental to which workload should I go put to the Cloud. I see it as an evolution and I think they're gaining traction and gaining value as you go along. Giving more option and more choice, rather than distinct phases that sort of start end and reboot themselves to something else. It's definitely incremental. >> To that point though, in the earlier stages there was all this fear about the Cloud not being secure. I think we're largely past that. In many cases organizations realize that at least in terms of even SASS players but even public Cloud providers they're way more secure than you can possibly even build your own data center to. They meet all the regulations that you don't have time spin up and manage and adhere to on your own. Having said that, even a lot of the research that we see, security still comes up as the number one concern. Even though people recognize that the Cloud is much more secure than in many cases what they could do on their own. I think we're largely past that for the most part but some of the other areas maybe not so much so. >> Part of that too is this realization that and we've talked about this Stu a lot not necessarily here but on other shows. CIOs realize that they can't just reshape and reform their business and stick it in the public Cloud. Rather, they have to bring the Cloud model to their data. As a result, it creates discontinuities in security practices. I mean, Amazon, it's like here's our security and it's good but it may not be like your private Cloud security so you have to figure that out. That's a challenge for customers. Do you see that? >> Yeah, but it doesn't stop at security. It's really consistency across everything. >> All the edicts of the organization, absolutely. >> For us especially, things like service level agreements. When you're managing SLAs and as an IT organization you're expected to meet certain SLAs but yet your architecture, your environment is one that's distributed. Where you have different pieces of that environment that sit in different platforms, in different Clouds, on prev different technologies. The level of SLA consistency across that is like gone. So how do you ensure things like your business service up time like those SLAs are being met or that you're able to service that or adhere to when you have such a distributed environment and those are challenges that Veritas aims to solve. >> We talked to Mike Palmer earlier and he said a year ago we thought maybe we could just kind of put a thin layer on top and make all the Clouds look the same and when you get into it. Nope. That's not what's going to happen. There's very different reasons and different services. Some of those things, absolutely. It's heterogeneous. How do we focus on the data? How do we help customers through to get the best of why they're buying all these pieces yet get their arms around all of it? >> Yeah, it could be a world of maturity where customers look at a I would say horses for courses. It's an English statement. So look this Cloud provider is going to be just as cheap as anything. Let's go there. That Cloud provider going to be fantastic in analytics like we know who could be pretty good in analytics. That Cloud provider could be good in front office or back office applications. So it's going to be selecting the Cloud providers that provide the best service. That really I think will be the multi-Cloud world. >> So we only have a few minutes left and I want to get into the why Veritas because multi-Cloud is like there's a land grab going on. There's a big opportunity for the vendor community. It's complicated. People are trying to figure out why Veritas. >> A number of reasons. Especially in the enterprise, these are environments that, quite frankly, are too large for many of our closest competitors to even hope to address. These are very, very heterogeneous environments. Lots and lots and lots of data. Multiple types of platforms and Veritas has always been sort of that middle, that heterogeneous layer software defined, software driven provider that enables that sort of layer over all of that stuff basically that sort of disparity and sort of up-level it up to a more simple management capability. That's one. The second thing is and probably this is equally, if not more important is the fact that we're proven to do that. Not just in the multi-Cloud world that we're talking about now but where the customers have come from. What's happening is we're not seeing the customers eliminate the rest of their architecture. They're not eliminating the data centers. They're just adding to it. You can't just provide a solution that only addresses the new, forgets about the old. You have to provide a solution that covers the entirety of the customer's environment. There's not many organizations that can do that and Veritas is one of them that can and that we've built up a level of trust with these enterprise organizations. We're having done that for many, many years. >> Okay. So you just knocked off the upstarts. Well done. Check. But now you're head-to-head with guys like IBM, HPE, Dell, EMC. What's your advantage relative to those guys? Because they're big enough. They can get money, they get breadth. Why you over them? >> I don't know if the appropriate question is Why you over them? Because all of them are here at this conference and there our partners. IBM's a strategic partner for us. >> Dave: Cloud guys though. But there's other parts, okay? >> Certainly, but I think we love these partners. We compete with them in many cases. They also use our technology in other cases. They also partner with us to deliver combined value to our customers. I think it's really not about why us over them. They certainly see the value that we bring to the table and we inevitably... >> Customers have choices, right? How about the evil machine? >> Alex: You're going to press this aren't you? >> I am. I am I've got to press it. No, because people ask us all the time Why Veritas over a company with this large portfolio? I know you don't want to name them but I mean I have an answer but I would... >> I think we look at it as data management, right? Ultimately, multi-Cloud data management's where we sit. That's sort of the category I think we focus in on solving for customer problems and then you go into perhaps the key competitors. I think if I look at the breadth and scale of what we deliver, you narrow it down to a small scale of organizations that compete with us. All of them, especially the EMCs of the world, they have a hardware agenda. Ultimately, at the end of the day, their business is backed on selling hardware and they're going to struggle to get away from that whereas Veritas what we've always sold for is a true software defined or a data management layer which is really what we're going to look at which is Clouding the pages. >> My analysis I would add to that, that you wake up every day thinking about this problem. That's what your company is, old Scott McNeilly, all the wood behind one arrow. They got not only a hardware agenda, they've got a financial agenda, a got to pay off the debt service agenda, a VM ware agenda, a lot of different agendas. They're like the government. Now there's some strengths on the positive side of the ledger but it seems to me in this multi-Cloud world that the focus that you guys have is an advantage because you're designing for that. >> I think we're actually being helped in many regards. Interesting conversation I had a while back about IT. We know information technology, what IT stands for and what has become and evolved over many, many years to be almost like infrastructure technology. I think what we're seeing now is a revert back to the information first. Use any infrastructure you want, it's going to be a combination of a bunch of different things. Who's going to help me get the value out of the information? To your point, that's where Veritas is focused. >> The other thing I'd add is not only do you not have a hardware agenda but you don't have a Cloud agenda. >> Alex: No, yeah. >> Whereas, okay IBM's a partner. They've got a Cloud so that's cool. Take Delhi MC, they don't have a Cloud, a clear agenda even though they won't say it is to keep stuff on prim. You don't care. >> Yeah. >> That is a clear message that I'm hearing here. Again, I see a number of advantages. At the end of the day, it's who's got the better product, who can execute, who can service and deliver. That's what's fun about our industry and you guys have demonstrated that you can do that over a long period of time. Excellent. Good. Thanks for getting into it with me. Guys I'll give you the last word on Vision 2017, each of you a bumper sticker as the trucks are pulling away. >> Vision 2017 has been a fantastic event. It's been true that we've demonstrated that we can exercise in the multi-Cloud world and look at all the Cloud partners that are part of the Veritas world that we're in, in the Vision conference right here. >> I think last thing is you've seen a ton of innovation and product capabilities, technology announced at this conference. What you should probably look forward to in the next six to 12 months before we get to our next Vision conference is the complete maniacal focus and attention given towards a positive and an improved user experience. Across all the products, across all the 360 data management technologies, you're really going to see the UX, and in particular the UIs, improve. >> I love the fact that you guys are transparent about that and you know Mike Palmer. You guys got a spring in your step. The old Veritas mojo looks like it's coming back so congratulations. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Keep right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. It's theCUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> And we're back at Veritas Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Valanti and I'm here with my co-host, Stuart Miniman, and we've been unpacking the innovations and the evolution of Veritas at Veritas Vision over the past two days. Shahin Pirooz is here, he's the CTO of Data Endure. >> Shahin: Thank you for having us. >> Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Digitally resilient. That's an interesting and powerful and loaded phrase. [Shahin] Sure. What does it mean to be digitally resilient? >> Ultimately, we're trying to get our customers digital resilience, and what that means to us is that your people have access to their data whenever they need it, wherever they need it, in a secure and protected manner. >> I got to follow up on that, but before I do, give us an overview of your company, what you guys do and what your specialty is. >> We're a system integrator and we happen to resell stuff as well, including Veritas, and we're about 32 years old. We evolved from very early days in the tech space, and continue to evolve the company and today, have four practice areas. Those practice areas include security and compliance, data center and cloud, the information management practice, which is where Veritas clearly falls into, and finally, we have a systems and storage practice, which is primarily one of our biggest practice areas in terms of revenue. We have, go ahead. >> [Dave} Go Ahead, please, carry on. >> We have customers. All of the biggest names you'd imagine in the Silicon Valley. Cisco, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and then a series of customers below that tier as well. >> Really, those customers are relying on you to do their integration? To help with their deployments, get value faster? >> Yep, CenturyLink is the largest Veritas net backup appliance deployment in the world, and we implemented that platform for them. >> Interesting. You've got these heavy engineering driven companies, and they just what? They just don't want to waste time on stuff that's not their main business? >> So typically, it's like any IT organization. You've got a series of projects and those projects are spread out across the engineers that you have. Then you have something that you have to get done that's more urgent and more critical. You've got to re-vamp your backup infrastructure, for example, or you got to build out a new backup as a service offering, in CenturyLink's case. And while the engineers have the skillset to do it, they're also doing 60 other things during the day. So they bring companies like us in to get it done quickly, get it done accurately. Then, there's a level of reliance on not only our technical depth, but the access to visibility of what we see in other places as well. Whereas, your engineers might be focused on a single thing within a company, we see a lot of different environments. So when we run into problems, it's not the first time we've run into it, and we can get through it much more quickly. >> So this idea of digital resilience is really interesting to me. They say you should skate to the puck. I think you're really skating to the puck as most customers haven't transformed digitally even though everybody's talking about it, but what I said, it's really a rich and loaded phrase, what I'm inferring from it is if you're going to go digital, you better not bolt on resilience. You better design it in. I mean, that's sort of my inference. >> Shahin: That's exactly right. >> Well, talk about it a little bit. >> Typically, there's a, we look at the consumption and cloud is a big part of this journey for both our Veritas and ourselves. We look at cloud consumption as a journey that happens in five phases, or maturity levels, as we like to call them. So the cloud maturity model that I talk about often is level one is usually companies that start consuming backup to the cloud. The first step is we're going to backup our data to the cloud target and remove tape from our environment. Second step is consumption of storage. Then, you start moving some virtual machines, doing lift and shifts to the cloud at Level three, and Level four is when that digital transformation starts to happen. Where you're starting to build consumed cloud native data bases instead of just migrating your database to the cloud. Then, Level five is typically the startups of the world, which are building cloud native applications and companies will eventually get to the point where they're building those cloud native applications. >> It's an interesting model. Cloud's getting more and more complicated. We said some of those companies that started up, out, cloud native, everything built there. >> Shahin: Yes. >> Sometimes, they're pulling things to another cloud or building their own data centers. We're finding, you know, they hyperscale companies look and sound a little bit more like some of the enterprise vendors and some of the enterprise vendors are going there and you've got companies like Veritas that are going to play everywhere. What's that dynamic? Especially Silicon Valley tends to be early on these. What's kind of that macro level? There is no typical customer. What are some of the dynamics you're seeing with the customers in cloud? >> It's a simple scale calculation. There's a point, there's a tipping point, where cloud becomes too expensive, and it's cheaper to have some fraction of your infrastructure running in house. It's that hybrid cloud model we've been talking about for the last decade and nobody really has a good handle on what it is. Run some of the cloud in-house, some of it in a public or multiple public clouds. What you're seeing in the Netflix's of the world who went all in and then back out is exactly that. They got to a point where they realize the amount of money that they're paying on a monthly basis to the public cloud providers is outpacing what they could do themselves internally. So they cut back to that tipping point. There is definitely sense in having infrastructure in the cloud, but there is that point where it doesn't scale out, work very well financially. >> Did you have any guidance that you can give people as to when they're going to hit that? I mean, we look at everything. You know, you talk to Amazon, they'll say no, no. We're always the cheapest, we can use reserve entities. Heck, they just gave, you know, by the second pricing. It's always kind of it depends, but what has your experience been? >> Shahin: It really is and it depends. But the short answer is that that tipping point is different for every single company. If you're a company who's never going to get two billions of users accessing your infrastructure, you're probably never going to hit that tipping point. You can be all cloud and you can be cloud native and be happy. Whereas if you're a Dropbox or a Netflix or somebody like that, who built all in or work day, for example. All of them are now looking at we need to build our own infrastructure to support that scale that can't keep up with us financially. >> I wonder if you could talk about some of the big picture. We touched on cloud, what are the big picture trends that you see driving customer behavior and how is it affecting their IT and how are you responding? >> I would say that there's two primary things that we're focused on to help customers address what is coming. Number one is compliance. Our security and compliance practice, we lead with compliance as opposed to all the other managed security providers. We effectively go to market with this notion that no matter who you are, you have some sort of regulatory concern, whether it's enforce by yourself or you have a third party or a government that's enforcing some regulatory concern on you. There's not a company out there that doesn't have something that they have to deal with on a regular basis. Our positioning is get your head around your compliance and that dictates what your infrastructure looks like, what your application consumption looks like, what your cloud consumption looks like. But you have to start from that place of here is how we have to deliver services and here's the controls we have to have in place. Then, do we have the right tools, technologies, people, and policies to do that. That's our approach to market. That's one side of the answer. The other side of the answer is storages continuously growing in leaps and bounds. We have this ridiculous amount of data that's stockpiling. We're all hoarders of storage, if you will. We don't know what to do with it. We're running out of storage places. We're throwing it in Amazon, we're throwing it in Google. We're throwing it in all these places and just paying monthly storage fees. That data is critical business data that if you can get and analyze it, you can make important business decisions about what your customers are doing, how they're buying things, what products they're buying, what products are not selling, and make fundamental business shifts and changes and all you have to do is put a layer of analytics above this massive hoards of data that we're just continuing to pile and pile. >> Where does Veritas fit in to this equation? >> In all of that. The 360 offering that Veritas has brought to market, a big part of that is compliance. If you look at the messaging on GDPR, that's just one compliance that they're focusing on. That applies across the board. Having visibility into all your data with their data insight platform, for example, who's accessing it, where they're accessing it, what types of data it is, the classification of data. That's the first level of being able to understand your unstructured data and know does it meet all the controls that I have to adhere to in order to deliver health information controls, or personal information controls, whatever your industry control might be. Whether it's PCI or GPR or HIPAA, you name it, it gives you the, you apply the compliance onto the data and have reports that let you know if you're in compliance or not. On the storage side, there's analytics within the backups as well as the data that give you visibility into what you've been protecting and what you've been backing it up and where that data resides on a global level so not only what but where is it and who's accessing it. It's giving you all that visibility to try to get a handle on what it is, where it is and what valuable information is in there. >> And so you're bring this to market today. >> Shahin: We did. >> I mean, you got some pretty advanced customers. >> Shahin: Yes. >> Do you feel like you're on sort of the leading edge of the bell curve? >> We have customers that are on the leading edge of that bell curve, and we have customers that are starting that journey. They are starting to realize, GDPR is a perfect example, not everybody's sure what it's going to mean to them. It's like when HIPAA and PCI came out way back when. Everybody was like, "That's not my problem." And now everybody has to deal with it. I had many hospitals back then who wouldn't do anything, wouldn't do anything, and then the fines came, and they're like, "Okay, hurry. "Let's do something." >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> So similarly, the compliance aspect of this, we're seeing a lot more traction on because GDPR's only about six months away. >> I mean, it's a two sided coin, right? Because on the one hand, it's this sort of boondog for all the guys that can service those accounts, but on the other hand, it takes dollars away, potentially, from other more strategic initiatives, and in the case of HIPAA, you can't even get your own information out of the hospitals let alone other people's. What's your thought on GDPR? Is it as big as these other initiatives? It feels that way, but we don't really know yet, right? >> The risk, where GDPR is different than all the other regulatory concerns is that any individual in any of the European Union can come and say, "I want you to delete all the information "you have about me." And you have to. >> Dave: You have to prove it. >> You have to prove that you did it and that you don't have any of it. The control structures are making it difficult for companies to say, "How am I going to do this?" That's where products like the 360 solution that Veritas is bringing to market help give visibility into the data and so, you know, I see Joe Smith across my unstructured data. I see it in these file servers and this place and the other place. So you have visibility into where Joe Smith is and can take action to, actually, delete the data and show it's not there anymore with audits. It could be very real. Whether it's going to kick in and go live in July as it's supposed to or they're going to continue to extend it as they did with HIPAA and PCI, it's unclear at this point. >> Talk about that a little bit. Is that, sort of, what happened with HIPAA and PCI? But that was the U.S. government. >> Shahin: Yeah. >> It wasn't the EU. You know, again, we don't really know. You've seen some of the crackdowns by the EU on Google and others and so maybe they won't be as forgiving, who knows. >> They may not be as forgiving and I think it'll get dialed in a little bit more. I think, when it comes out and they realize the expense in trying to do this, is going to hamper business. I think it'll get dialed back a little bit. Not that you have to delete the data, for example, but you have to prove that you have it controlled and secured and somebody can't get to it. >> Dave: I mean, do you think that's really ultimately what it's going to be is the processes around it? >> Shahin: Yeah. >> It's going to be as important as everything else. >> Shahin: At the end of the day, All any of these audits and the regulatory concerns can do is tell you you have to have these processes. That's the best they can go hope for. It really is nothing more than a process conversation. But process without technology can be really burdensome and expensive on a company. >> Dave: Yeah, because the risk is that you say, "Okay, we got these processes in place. "Yes, we did it and here's the information." And then if you get hacked, and there's Joe Smith is still in there, oops. And then that somehow gets published on Wikileaks. >> Rut-roh. >> Exactly. >> So Shahin, as an industry, we've been talking for a while about how important data is, how we can leverage data. When we're talking GDPR, it's like well, you know, your data can be dangerous for you. Where are your customers? How do they, actually, do they value data? Is data still a challenge for them, or maybe give us a little bit of the spectrum of where you're seeing customers. >> It's a wide range. We've got customers that are in the research space, and they're doing, for example, genomics research, and their data is everything to them. We've got customers in the semi-conductor space, and they're building chips and their designs and they're information about how each chip design is improving from version to version. All that data is important to them and when they go back to do new chip designs, they have to be able to look back at that data and they do a lot of analytics. But then, there's industries that just keep the data because they think it's going to be important and they don't use it, they don't take advantage of it. They don't realize the risk associated with it either. It's the number one thing I used to, I've been a CECO for over 15 years, and the one thing I used to say to customers is, "If you're going to keep your data, "if you have a policy for data retention, "make sure that it's not longer "and creates an exposure for you "than it needs to be." Because keeping data too long can be, because you have to present it if you're in a litigation. So that's the challenge with these piles of data we keep keeping. The reality is customers are all the way to the extreme of using it heavily in deep analytics to I have no idea what I have, I just have piles of data. >> Dave: The variation on the Einstein quip, keep data as long as you need to but no longer. >> Shahin: Exactly. >> All right, Shahin, we have to go. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> We appreciate it. >> My pleasure. >> All right. We're in a rapid sprint to the end of day two here at Veritas Vision 2017. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Veritas Vision, #VtasVision. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and this is our second day of Veritas Vision 2017. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman, my cohost, Jim Livingston is here. Here's the world-wide Vice President of Global Services at Veritas. Good to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Ah, I appreciate the opportunity. >> So we love talking services. We've been talking off camera, and to me it's where the value is when you talk to customers. It's really, I mean, yeah, product is great, features are great, but it's services, at the end of the day are what keeps 'em coming back, keeps 'em happy, solves their problem. It's where the rubber meets the road. So, tell us about-- >> So Dave, I need you to be one of my top sales reps. >> Dave: Right, I mean, you know! >> That's outstanding. >> Well, because you know, services doesn't get the attention I think it deserves. It's sort of undervalued, certainly, in the trade press. I mean, I'm sure you'd agree with that. But when you talk to a customer and say okay, you have 100 points to allocate, how much would you place on service? It's oftentimes well over 50%. Is that what you've seen? >> Eh, so I'd say it varies by solution. You know, I will tell you that from my perspective, running a services business inside a product company is a little bit different. I, first and foremost, I believe my charter is really to ensure that our customers get the most value from the products. They're able to explore and utilize any of the features and functions that really are applicable to the objectives they're trying to solve, the outcomes they're trying to drive towards. And that's a critical piece. And then we just want to make sure they have a great experience. So from my perspective, what I really want to focus on is making sure that we really drive that. What's interesting, though, is I will tell you one of the challenges with that is if you look at, as we ramped up our innovation engine which is phenomenal, all the product launches, all the new products, a lot of which we talked about this week at the conference, is then coming on me to make sure that we've done all the things to continue to refine and redevelop and retrain our people to make sure that they're aligned to those. But also aligned to not just the skills and the new products, and skills necessary to extract the value from those products, but all the things associated with the new environmental aspects, all the cloud platform attributes, container-based complications or things like that. So, it's been phenomenal to build and align to that journey. >> So, we spoke to Bill Coleman yesterday, and he talked about putting in the leadership to help drive not only the innovation, but kind of the culture, the vision, and where you're driving it. What do you see as the opportunity, and how much change needs to happen inside the services organization compared to when it was a piece of Symantec? >> So I think the very first thing we have to do is we have to continue to recalibrate around thinking outcomes. It's a very simple thing to say. It's a very difficult thing to do. It really, what it requires first and foremost is trying to engage earlier in that lifecycle, earlier in that process of engaging and talking to customers and trying to identify, ultimately, what are the objectives they're trying to solve for, what are the outcomes that they're looking for, what's their imperatives? And so for me that's a large piece of this is to engage early. And then focus all those discussions around outcomes versus, fundamentally, that's the basic difference between a product sales motion and a solution sales motion, is really aligning to those outcomes. So it's a cultural shift, no doubt. >> And there's a lot of emerging tech that we're talking about this week. How much is consulting, how much is services, what's kind of the makeup of your organization look like in your engagement with customers? >> So I'd say right now, it's about 50-50. Where about 50% of those services we're trying to engage, and I'm trying to move that to more and more earlier in the process. You know, if I think about, as we develop skills not just around our platform but around the things that are ancillary, cloud, containers, all the different things that are adjacent or add complexity to our world, and most importantly to the customer's world. For me, the earlier we can bring those in so that we can align and ensure that we start their journey, we align to the things that they want, the things that they need in terms of their environment, of serving their customers, aligning to their strategy. So that's a big piece of it, is shifting earlier and driving much more of a consulting base versus just the traditional deployment services. >> So people, process, and technology. We always talk about that on theCUBE. Technology execs always tell us, the practitioners, generally we got that covered. You've been around long enough to know, see different evolutions of technology, and how that technology's applied. The industry's getting so much more complex, things are happening much, much faster. But in thinking about not the technology, but the people and process pieces that have evolved, I wonder if you could comment on what you've seen over your years. Describe kind of where we are today, and where you see it all going? >> Great question. So the rate of change, has been phenomenal. And, it absolutely, it creates challenges every day, which are actually, typically every challenge is an opportunity from my perspective. For me personally, what we really try to focus on is first and foremost develop the skills that are closest, in closest relation to us, so that we can apply those skills and the knowledge and expertise of our engineering team, our consulting team, is ultimately aligned to the customer's. So if you think about things that are happening, for example, without a doubt the one that's happening to virtually all of our customers is a proliferation of cloud. What it really means to them is their information fabric, where their information lies, their charter as an IT organization, our traditional customer, their charter's become much more complex. Just the challenge to identify where all the information assets are is a big opportunity for us to come in and assist them in that process. And then ultimately, to be able to take their strategies around data protection, business continuity or disaster recovery, whatever it is around how they protect and secure that data, to be able to take that into something that has proliferated into so many different areas, both in the infrastructure base and then driven by applications and other cloud deployment methods, so. >> So you guys were both at EMC, where Tucci was always famous for saying we're a products company, not a services company. Veritas, obviously, great engineering team, product company. Talk about services inside of a products company? >> So I'll go back to what I said first and foremost. I believe service is the first charter, although it doesn't have to be the only charter. The first charter that you have to do well is that you have to ensure that you have the skills and capability to guarantee a great customer experience. That for me is the very first piece. So typically that doesn't rise to the occasion of saying it's a services company. It really rises to the occasion of we have a great customer experience, we have a loyal customer base, and we have a customer base that ultimately is so rewarded with the capabilities of the product because they're enjoying them, it's well-integrated in their environment, et cetera, it becomes a sticking customer as well. And that's, I believe that's our first charter. Go ahead? >> Just take us inside some of those customers. What are the real, some of the maintain points you're seeing what are the areas that you find that your team is able to help them the most? >> That's great. Multiple areas. You know, you get started with the very basics, what I would consider very infrastructure-oriented, and very basic around storage. You know, customers are constantly, as clouds are proliferating, so is their storage base. And all of them are ultimately looking for ways that they can lower their costs and still maintain access to the information that they need and protect in the same manner. So, going in and design or architect a solution that allows them to leverage commodity storage, cloud-based storage, et cetera, and still have a lot of the functionality that they're used to, it aligns right into their existing data protection strategy, is one good piece. Monster ROIs on that. Then you get into more complex things around compliance. You know, most notably GDPR being six, seven, eight months out, and it's driving a lot of interest and demand, but in reality if you go around the globe, the vast majority of the countries are driving some level of increased focus on regulations that drive a level of protection of privacy, personal data privacy, et cetera. And again, having the technology is one thing, and Mike does a phenomenal job of building the products that the customers need to be able to locate, classify, protect, et cetera. My job and my charter is to make sure the customers can actually take that technology and use it in that manner, so we're doing, to your question, I'm seeing a huge uptick in that just in the short time I've been here. Tremendous amount of interest, and customers wanting to engage and leverage in that fashion. >> Talk about where Veritas picks up and leaves off relative to some of the SI partners that you have. What's that relationship like? >> So, I'd say we tend to stay fairly focused on our technology, and how we work and partner and align to those types of partners. As a matter of fact, compliance and regulatory activities are a great example of that. If you really think about a typical customer's concerns around how they protect their customer data, their employee data, their supplier data, et cetera. We provide a lot technology and the infrastructure behind that. The overarching process and the business process go much wider. And that's where alignment with systems integrators and things like that that have a much more robust, in terms of breadth and lots of business units, et cetera, becomes an important partnership on our part. We can focus on our piece, really create a solution that's beneficial first and foremost to the customer, and helps complete their solution. >> One of the things Stu and I have been talking about this week is you've got this massive Veritas install base. You're moving towards this vision of modern data protection and information management. Service is going to be key there. How do you get the customer from Point A to Point B, Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." that means pressure's on your organization to make it happen. So what's the conversation like, what's the journey you're taking customers through there? >> A lot of those, what we try and start those journeys first and foremost with assessments or things that are really driven around identifying what the transformational event is. That's all about engaging, bringing the breadth of knowledge around not just the products, but how the products are used and how they can be deployed early in the process. >> And that's a for-pay service? >> That's a for-pay service. But it's something that we really focus on the deliverable, so it's a for-pay service that says hey, we're going to come out with a roadmap, a specific solution, et cetera. >> But that's important, because the customer has skin in the game. >> Jim: They do. >> You know, if it's a freebie, that's nice, but then a lot of times they don't show up for the meeting. >> And that's so true, Dave, and that's a big piece, honestly. And in some cases, candidly, the challenge or the opportunity in terms of for-pay, is to ensure there is skin in the game. I think further down, further into the journey, around what I consider things around driving operational efficiency or optimizing the customer's environment, that actually becomes another great point of entry. And sometimes you go in and just want to ensure that the customers are getting maximum value for their product, that they're continuing to have a great experience, et cetera. But in all cases, ultimately, there's always changes in the environment around, not just environmental changes, changes within the customer around new priorities, new objectives, new imperatives for next year, the following year. And to the extent that we can take that opportunity through assessments and health checks and things like that to identify those, map them up to their business imperatives, and ultimately go in and be sure that they continue down that journey with our solutions is a big piece. >> Jim, one of the things we're also looking at, you sell point products. And then it was kind of a suite, and now we've been talking a little bit about a platform. What's the impact on the services for moving to that integrated platform? >> So it's actually, I'd say, twofold. The first piece is really, first and foremost we want to make sure the customer's are getting maximum value for the solution. And I'd say that's probably charter number one. The other piece is, in many cases, a little bit going to the transformational or the assessment-type services, or more traditional consulting services. In many cases, you buy a platform and you engage and you have three or four pieces of functionality and you're really looking for three. And we just gave you four. One of the opportunities from my perspective is how do we actually ensure that the customer understands the value that they have on that fourth, and then we can deploy it in a manner that they get the most value for it, and it becomes a benefit for us and most importantly a benefit for our customers. >> Feedback from the customers at the event? What have you been hearing? I mean you guys are a year into this 360. What are they telling you? >> It's been phenomenal. Both from customers and partners. I've spent time really probably equally with both. It's been a lot of excitement around the product launches, a lot of excitement around the innovation, not just of the launches for this week, but really the innovation, the changes that have taken place over the last year, even before I joined. I'd say one of the ones that actually has resonated and I've heard most often is when people talk about modernizing data protection. Mike Palmer in yesterday's general session used this slide, it was actually the first time I had seen it as well, and like I got to get a copy of that, because it actually just, it shows with any customer of ours the breadth of change that's taken place in their environment from cloud and hybrid and all the different things. Which is a challenge, and the opportunity for me, to go in and ensure that we continually align to those and we ensure that they're aligned. >> Jim, Veritas has a long history working on lots of different solutions. From a services standpoint, though, I got to think cloud's a little bit different. We've talked to customers. If you're a big customer, you probably get good support. Some smaller ones, well, you're a little bit more on your own. What's your experiences, how is it to work with those hyper-scale partners? >> Uh, so from, one of the things I'd like to do, is I like to ensure that, candidly, we can establish an environment that we can improve and level out the consistency, in some cases, of some of the cloud experiences our customers have. And by the way, I'm also a big fan, and we're really putting a lot of our focus around automation. Which actually takes the burden off of the customers, in many cases. And we'll have a lot of focus in the second half of our fiscal year in the next six months, really around driving automation so that as cloud touches any type of deployment, or interaction with our products, there's all the work, obviously, that Mike and the product teams are driving themselves. There's areas that really fall below that that are really much more aligned to the business process that the customers perform, where I can actually, I believe I can do a lot to improve their service across all the platforms. Whether it's Amazon, Azure, IBM, Google, et cetera. >> We'll give you last thoughts. You talked a little bit about some of the feedback, but Veritas Vision 2017, what's your takeaway? >> Exciting event, great opportunity for me personally to meet a lot of customers in one location. I think a great demonstration of the excitement around the company, where we're at in terms of our evolution as a company, most importantly, where we're at with regards to our product roadmap. >> All right, Jim, we'll leave it there. Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE! >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Thank you, good luck. All right, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Right back. (rippling music)

>> 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 and we're here covering, wall-to-wall coverage of Veritas Vision 2017, hashtag: VtasVision. I'm Dave Vellante, with Stu Miniman. Lynn Lucas is here. She's the CMO of Veritas; welcome to The Cube. >> I am so excited to be on The Cube for the first time. Thank you for joining us. >> Well, thank you for having us. We're really excited to have you. We were talking off camera and this morning, in our open, about Richard Branson, the keynote. Very inspiring, so interesting, and then you got an opportunity to interview him and it was really substantive. So what was that like, what was it like meeting him, what was he like backstage? Share it with our audience. >> Absolutely. So, first, I, it really was an honor. The man has, when you do the research on him, the number of businesses he's created and disrupted is really amazing when you go back and look at it. The record industry, phone industry, airline industry. I mean, it goes on and on and he's still doing it. What I was most struck with, though, is that he's really humble and approachable. So we spent about 20 minutes with him in the backstage, and he was just a very genuine person. Very concerned, as you and your listeners may have heard, in the keynote, about the impact of the hurricanes. Really committed to philanthropy now, and what I loved is that he really understood what Veritas is doing with data, and he was able to really quickly connect that with how it might help on important issues that he's concerned about, namely climate change, making communities part of businesses, and so forth. It was fantastic. >> Well, I thought he did a really good job, and you guys did a really good job, because he's like, wow, Richard Branson, big name. But why is he at Veritas Vision? And he came, he talked about his agenda, he talked about the hurricane, he connected it to data, to climate change, and he very, like I said off camera, in a non-self-promoting way, let us know very quietly that yeah, of course the fee that I'm getting here I'm donating to the cause, and you should donate too. Right, and it was just really, congratulations on such a good get. >> Well, we were thrilled to have him and really honored to have him, and I truly felt that he understands the importance technology is playing. He actually told us that they were without cell phone and any kind of internet connection right after the hurricane for about, I think what he said was about seven days, and he said it was a very weird, disconnected feeling, because it's become so prevalent in our lives, and then when they all left and got on his plane to go back to London to mobilize aid for the British Virgin Islands, he said that he looked back in the plane, and he said every single person is on their phone like this. And it's such an interesting and powerful tool though, for generating interest in, unfortunately, the very horrible events that have happened, and so the social media, the connectivity that we all experience and getting that word out, I think he really connected with what we do as technologists here, and he had a really fascinating conversation with us about his interest in flying cars, so he's seeing potential for flying cars in the next few years and as a way to perhaps help us reduce carbon emissions and he's excited about technology. So I think he had a lot of fun. >> And we should mention, I think, Bill Coleman and Veritas is matching contributions and then you have extended that through his non-profit? >> Correct, so Bill Coleman also is a great philanthropist like Richard is, and ever since he's arrived here at Veritas he's been very lean-forward with making sure that Veritas is giving back. It was part of the culture, but I really feel that Bill has augmented that, and so for these recent set of disasters, hurricane Harvey, hurricane Irma, Veritas has set up a funding, and then we are doing double matching, and what we did after the unfortunate hurricane Irma came through is Virgin Unite is donating to the BBI's. We've added that to the list of charities and double matching that, as well. >> So people can go to Virgin Unite and donate, or they can donate through your website as well? >> They should go to Virgin Unite and donate, they should go to the, there's also the American Red Cross in the Houston area and the Miami area that are doing donations. Donate, you know, direct through them. >> So please, take a moment, if you can. Donate often, you know, every little bit helps for sure. Okay, so let's get into it. Quite a show, second year of Veritas. It's the rebirth of Veritas, and Veritas, in our view, how do you feel, give us the sort of rundown on the show. >> Oh, I, ah, fantastic. The feedback from the customers, which is what I'm really most concerned about here has been, this year, last year was a great coming out, but this Veritas is much more innovative than we ever thought you could be. We heard the predictions around 360 Data Management last year, but wow, you've delivered. You've got a new set of exciting announcements around what we're doing to move to the cloud. Clearly, the partnership with Microsoft is a huge part of that. New innovations in SDS. And so we've seen a great rise in attendance this year, in terms of our customers, and we've had a fabulous new set of sponsors, which I'm just thrilled to have here. Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, which I think shows the strength of what we're doing to help customers as they move to the cloud, and they really are transforming their datacenter environment. >> So, talk a little bit about digital, as a marketing pro. Every customer we talked to is going through, if you talk to the C-level, they're going through digital transformations; it's real. As a CMO, you're living in a digital transformation. What does it mean from a marketing perspective? How are you addressing, you know, these trends and taking advantage of them? >> It's crucial. I spend most of my time with my staff thinking about: how do we advance our own digital expertise and take advantage of the data that we too have. Really, CMOs are in command of so much data around customers, or should be in command of so much data around customers, in a good way, to provide more content that is directed at what their problems are. I think we've all experienced the uncomfortable feeling where maybe you Google something and suddenly you're getting ad after ad after ad from a company, and it might have been an accidental Google search, right? So we can use it for good in that way, understanding our customers. We're on a real digitization journey. It's a big word, but what it means for me in marketing at Veritas is really advancing and investing in our marketing infrastructure. One of the new things that we've just done is a complete underpinning reboot of Veritas.com, which the audience can see has gone live right here, for Vision. Making the site more personalized and more relevant to those that are visiting it. >> Yeah, Lynn, one of the things we've been digging into a little bit is you have a lot of existing customers with, you know, a very strong legacy. There's all these new trends, and you threw out lots of, you know, really interesting data. You know, the IOT with 269 times greater data than the datacenter, ah, how do you balance, kind of, helping customers, you know, get more out of what they have but bringing them along, showing them the vision, you know, helping them along that path to the future? Because, you know, change is difficult. >> It is, but you know, I have to say, and I think Mike Palmer said this as well, at one point, actually, when I've visited customers, I've been in, this year, I've been to Australia, I've been to France, been to Germany, London, Singapore, all over in the US, and talking to a lot of our existing customers, and what they're telling us is really that: we want your help in moving forward. So, we really embrace our existing customers. We're not in the business of trying to go around them. But they're our best advocates, and I think as a marketer, it's really key to understand that, is your existing customers are your best advocates. So we're helping them understand what we're doing for them today and also helping them learn how they can be advocates and heroes maybe to other parts of the business with some of these new technologies. >> Yeah, that's a great point. I'd love for you to expand on, you know, in IT it was always: up, the admin for my product is kind of where I'm selling, and how do I get up to the C-suite? Conversations we've been having this week, there's a lot of the, you know, cloud strategy, the GDPR, you know, digitization. It's, you know, the person who might have boughten that backup is pulling in other members of the team. Talk to us a little bit about, you know, the dynamics inside the company, where Veritas is having those conversations. >> Yeah, I think actually you brought up GDPR, and that's a perfect example. So GDPR is a regulation that is going to impact any company that is holding data about a European Union citizen, and it's an area that Veritas can really solve problems in, but we didn't know a lot of the legal and compliance buyers, which often are the ones making the purchase decisions in this case. We have been so thrilled to see that our existing advocates in the backup space have been bringing us into conversations and in Europe, what we've done so successfully now is actually bring the two groups together in roundtables and have our current customers bring us into conversations with legal and compliance. And it's creating, for them, stronger connections within the business, and that makes them more relevant to their bosses and those other lines of business, and there's a lot of proactive or positive feedback around that, that I think is what marketers and sales should be thinking about. It's not about how to go around, it's about how do I bring you with me. >> So, as you go around the world, I wonder if, again, another marketing, marketing to me, is very challenging; you've got a hard job. Marketers, I don't have the marketing DNA. But you want to maintain your relevance. You're a 30-plus year old company. Take something like GDPR. How do you think about the content that you serve up your audience? You can scare 'em to death, you know? That's what a lot of people are doing. You can educate them, but it's kind of deep and wonky. How are you thinking about that transfer of knowledge, you know, for the benefit of customers and obviously, ultimately, for the benefit of Veritas? >> So the way I think about that is B to H. Business to Human. So at the end of the day, you know, we talk about B to B marketing or B to C marketing. It's B to H, now, and what I mean by that is: at the end of the day, we're all human, individuals, we have a lot coming at us, as you've pointed out, with information and data, so what we've done is definitely not a scare tactic. Yes, GDPR is coming. But I think that in marketing, my philosophy is: let's work on how we can help you in the positive. I don't believe in the fear, uncertainty and doubt. And what we've done is approach it as we would hope to be approached, which is: let's give you some practical information simply, in amounts that you can absorb. And let's face it, I think Josie was the one that said this, our attention span is about that of a goldfish. I can't remember if it was plus or minus one second. And so, what we've actually gotten great feedback on is that we've broken the GDPR regulation down into very simple parts, and we've said: hey, here are the five parts. Here's how we're relevant and can help you. And we've done that in pieces that are as simple as a one-page infographic. We can obviously go a lot more complex, but at the beginning, when you're researching a topic, you're not looking for the 40-page white paper anymore. You're looking for what we call "snackable" pieces of content that get you interested. >> Yeah, that was good. I remember that infographic from the session yesterday. It was sort of, you know, discover and then four other steps and then, you know, made it sound simple. Even though we know it's more complicated, but at least it allows a customer to frame it. Okay, I think I can now get my arms around these. I understand there's a lot of depth beneath each of them, but it helps me at least begin to clock it. Another topic we want to talk about is women in tech. We had a great conversation with Alicia Johnson from Accenture about WAVE, which is Women and Veritas Empowered. Right? Talk about, again, the relevance of those programs generally and I want to ask you some follow-up questions. >> Sure, so I'm a big believer in those types of programs. We want to sponsor those here and bring together our own Veritas female engineering community, but also our customers that are here. I think that while we would all like it to be a world where we were at a neutral, bias-free, we're not quite there yet. And I think programs that bring people together, whether it's gender or any other dimension, are important to get people to connect in a community, share with each other, learn from each other, and so, I do hope one day for my daughter, who's 11, perhaps that this is a non-topic, but until it isn't, I think the power of sharing is important, and so I'm really pleased to have WAVE. It's our second year having WAVE. It was a bigger program with Accenture sponsoring it. And we look forward to continuing to do that. Veritas also will have a big presence at the Anita Borg Institute, which is coming up next month, as well. >> Yeah, and The Cube will be there, of course. It'll be our, what, fourth year there, Stu? So it's a big show for us and we're obviously big supporters of the topic; we tend to talk about it a lot. And I think, you know, Lynn, your point is right. Hopefully by the time our daughters are grown up, we won't be talking about it, but I think it's important to talk about now. >> Lynn: It is. >> And one of the things that Accenture laid out is that, by 2025, their objective is to have 50 percent, you know, women on staff, and I think it was 25 percent women in leadership positions. I was impressed and struck, and I wonder if you can comment as a C-level executive, struck by the emphasis on P&L management, which, you know, tends to be a man's world. But, thoughts on that and you, as a C-level executive, you know, women in that position? >> Yeah, and again, it's one of these things where I'll have to say it's a little both uncomfortable, but obviously I feel that it is still important to talk about because I wish we were at a place where we didn't have to. I'm really proud of Veritas, because we have myself and Michelle Vanderhar on Bill's staff. So Bill has been a promoter of having diversity on his own direct staff, and I think that top down approach is super important in Silicon Valley and any business that there's real support for that. And Michelle Vanderhar is our chief council, which has, in many cases, not been a position where you would have seen a lady leading that. So we work on that at Veritas, and I personally believe it and I think Mr. Branson said that, as well, in his keynote as well this morning. When we have diversity, we have a breadth of ideas that makes it just a better place to work, and frankly, I think, leads to better innovation in whatever field that you're in. >> Lynn, last question I wanted to ask you, the tagline of the conference is: the truth in information. So much gets talked about, you know, what's real news? You know, what's fake? What do you want people, as the takeaway for Veritas and the show? The truth in information is our rallying cry, and you're right, I think it couldn't be more timely. We're not here to take a particular political stance, but what we find is in the business world, the companies are struggling with: where do I find what's really relevant? Let me give you a story. I was in France earlier this year, sitting with a CIO of one of the very largest oil and gas companies in France. Happens to be a lady who was formerly the chief data officer and she'd moved from that position into the CIO position. And when we talk about the truth in information, the example that she gave us which was so striking is that they've been doing the scans of the Earth, and actually the streets of Paris, for 50, 60 years, to understand the infrastructure, what they may have, and so forth, and at this point, with all of that data, they literally are having a hard time understanding what, out of all of these pieces of information, these topographical scans that they have, is relevant anymore. And this is the same story that I've heard in pharmaceutical companies that are doing drug tests. This is the same story that you would hear in, frankly, media companies that are doing filming, and are trying and all of this is digitized. So, when we talk about that with our customers, it really resonates, is that with so much coming at us, it's hard, in business as well as it is in our consumer lives, to really know: what do I have that's relevant? And I think the opportunity Veritas has is to help customers with a single data management platform, start to get a handle on that and be able to be much more efficient and productive. >> Alright, Lynn Lucas, we have to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on The Cube. We really appreciate it. >> Thank you! I really enjoyed my first time. I can't wait to be back on again, and hope to have you guys here next year, Vision 2018. >> We'd love to be here. Alright, bringing you the truth, from Veritas Vision, this is The Cube. We'll be right back. (uptempo musical theme)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you be Veritas. (light music) >> Welcome back to the Aria Hotel and Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stewart Miniman. Rama Kolappan is here, he's the Vice, worldwide Vice President of Product Management and Global Alliances. Rama, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. So, 360 is a big topic of conversation. It's a fundamental, strategic evolution for Veritas. Why is 360 Data Management needed? >> So, 360 Data Management is an integrated set of products and solutions, if you will, that helps you with data protection, also with copy data management use cases. If you want to move the data and workload for some of the resiliency services as well, and if you, if a customer is also looking for any of the data visibility, which is a very important part of the 360 Data Management. So, we can offer all of it as part of one platform. So it is a very powerful integrated solution set, if you will. >> So we should think of it as a platform, not a product. Everybody talks about platforms today, the API Economy, Platforms beat Products is sort of the mantra, right? Is that the right way to think about it? >> Correct. And, also, we make sure that the different solutions, which is part of 360 Data Management Suite, works with each other, right? For example, if you actually back up your data, you should be able to use the same copy to do a DevTest. So we have a solution called Velocity that is part of our copy data management solution. It should be used, you should be able to use the backup data to do your disaster recovery if you can, right. >> So how does that resonate with customers? I mean, I get the platform perspective, certainly from a vendor view, you got to have the platform. Do the customers see it the same way? Or do they just want to buy products? >> No, so it is a suite, right? And what customers want, especially enterprise customers, they're looking for, to partner with a vendor, like, for example, us. One is for data protection, primarily, in many cases. Once you protect your data, they're looking for instead of finding the products to use, I can use the same data and how can I get value out of it? So I need to have the visibility about the data itself, so we have our InfoMap solution as part of 360 DM suite, to give you the visibility of what that data is with all the metadata information through that, and once they back up the data, they also have other things to do with respect to moving your data, moving your workload, and especially with the cloud adoption, many of them are going through the transformation. There are some pre-consolidation cloud adoption, and so on, so forth, and they need to move their data and workload, say, from on-prem to cloud, and you can also do it from cloud to cloud also, which is coming soon. So, some of those challenges are very critical, and they are looking for someone like Veritas who can offer that solution for them, which is essentially protect it, move your data, workload, be able to do copy data management on it for DevTest use cases, be able to provide visibility, and the digital compliance is a big factor, which I haven't even gone deeper into. There are lot of solutions to offer for the customers. >> Rama, take us inside how 360 Data Management fulfills the vision that was laid out a year ago. I think back to early in my career it was, like, it was the hardware, you know, you follow the Tick-tock of Intel. Today, software, we can usually talk a little bit further about the roadmap but, you know, customers are going to hold you well, "Can I use it now?" Do you have all those pieces, you know? What kind of pieces have been filled in this week, and, you know, where are the pieces where it's more aspirational than where we are today? >> I'm surprised you remembered the Tick-tock Model, which is essentially go through the process and architecture change, alternating with Intel, right? That's the model, I was there for like nine years or so. >> Marching to the cadence of Moore's law, that's what we used to do as an industry. >> Exactly. So, for 360 Data Management, we announced it last year at Vision and at that point, we are putting in the solutions and the use cases together. And what we did, we worked really hard the past one year to make sure that we put these solutions together. One, they should work with each other. Two, we have a tighter integration. And three, we should be also adding more solutions together and we made it also easier for a customer to buy, it's one SKU, right? So, you don't need to have multiple SKUs to do 10 different things. It's much easier to buy. It'll do all the things that an enterprise customer want with all the stuff that I talked about earlier, and from there on, they should be also, we should be able to also cater to some of the newer problems that customers have, which is, essentially, we launched CloudPoint, for example, which does a snapshot management, and we're adding more capabilities to it, and going forward, you will see that the 360 Data Management will evolve to cater to the customer needs. We always place customer in the forefront and make sure that their needs are met first, and that's the stuff that will design the solution, based on their needs. >> We spoke to Mike Palmer this morning and one of the things he said that kind of matured a little bit is, "That interaction with the cloud, when you get down into it, it's nice to talk about public clouds and people use many clouds but they're all a little bit different." So, maybe take us inside, there's a couple announcements you made, maybe give us a little bit of color on that and, you know, come on, tell us how is it working with all these big players? >> So, I run the technology alliances team here as well, so my team works with the various cloud vendors, which is essentially Azure through IBM to Google, AWS, and so on, so forth, right? So we are already working with AWS on multiple product integration, deeper integration. With Azure we are making sure that from some of the roadmap, like when recently we launched EnterpriseWorld, to make sure that it supports Azure, and then also we launched the VIP release that happened very recently. Support for Azure, as well. And we make sure that the other products that I talked about have the cloud as a significant piece of it, part of the roadmap. We have other vendors that are, we have partners that we are working with like IBM, Google, et cetera. They have their own strengths and we are initially going to go, we already sell on a backup as part of our, with IBM. We've been doing that business with them for more than 10 years, right? So there's a lot of moving parts in the sense that they are coming up with a lot of innovation. We are coming up with a lot of innovation and we make sure that we deliver what the customers want with those cloud vendors. And a very simple example is that if you want to do a data and workload migration on-prem to cloud, we can help with that very critical use case for anyone who's going through, looking at cloud transformation and journey to cloud. And, likewise, basic use cases also like backup to cloud, backup in cloud, disaster recovery, migration, DevTest, and these use cases is what we target, and it is part of the 360 Data Management suite itself. >> Can I ask you, it's kind of a wonky question, but it's something I'm curious about, and we talked to Mike Palmer a little bit about it, the challenge of integrating to various cloud services, in the non-trivial nature that, his answer was actually quite interesting. He said, "Listen, it was a lot harder "when we had a gazillion OS's, a lot easier now." But I want to understand that better. So, when you look at, and I am going to pick AWS only because I know it a little bit better and their services, but when you look at the myriad of data, sort of services that they have, are you just targeting the data stores? Like, an S3 or an EBS or a Glacier, or do you have to also think about integrating with other data types, DynamoDB, Kinesis, RedShift, Aurora, et cetera, et cetera. How far do you have to go, and what are the complexities of doing that? >> It's a very interesting time, right. There are various cloud service providers who are there, and each of them have their own services and their own storage, right? So, there's no one standard. S3 has been a standard for last one or two years or so. What we are doing is that we're looking at the portfolio, and we look at the use cases for what we are trying to solve for the customers in the cloud and based on that, we actually have some basic use cases which you don't need a full integration. You need some integration with some of those services, which is where we have people that are doing a lot of closer integration with AWS, and other service providers as well. Going forward, we will be using some of those, you mentioned about many DynamoDB, and other services that they have, machine learning services that they have. >> Stu: Sure. >> And different cloud providers have their own strengths and where they, what they offer. So, we will be looking to integrate with our existing portfolio with some of those services so that it is beneficial for customer. For example, if a customer wants to use only AWS, we are tightly integrated so that they get the best experience in AWS, same thing with Azure, same thing with Google cloud, same thing with IBM cloud, same thing with Oracle public cloud. So, that's our direction. First things first, get all of these basic use cases catered to for the customer. Going forward, have a tighter integration with their services. >> And your value in that chain is visibility and management. It's not so much optimization of that service, is it? >> So, I wouldn't call it as optimization of services. We focus a lot on the data visibility. I think in the keynote, and in my keynote, you might have heard also, is that some of the things that customers, we talk with customers a lot and we find that many of the, many times, they don't know what they have it. Everyone knows that it's called dark data, right. We provide the visibility so that they know what data they have before they do any migration. They know what needs to be migrated. And, as you all know, there are different storage tiers in cloud, like your S3, S3IA. You have your Glacier and it is expensive to bring data back from, say, Glacier to any other storage tier all on-prem. So, you need to have the visibility before you send the data out, right? So, we helped with that as well. So, visibility plays a very critical role in so many areas, not even just cloud but also on-prem as well. >> Rama, 360 Data Management's vision was laid out a year ago. A lot of the pieces are in place now. How are you tracking success, you know? Can you give us how many customers you're doing or just kind of growth, adoption, and how should we be looking forward to kind of measure and say how good this is doing? >> So, we actually launched 360 Data Management not too long ago. In the sense we put the package together, program together, and, as part of it, we saw extremely a lot of good traction not just from one geo, we actually saw a lot of traction in Asia Pacific, in MER, in Americas as well. A lot of the customers are looking for, I mean, there are three tiers to it, as well. We have bronze, gold, silver, right? And we see equal traction across the board. And, right now, I can't give you the numbers numbers, but, having said that, we see a lot of traction from customers on adoption and we have a huge pipeline where customers are very interested. These are backup customers who are looking to do many other things like resiliency services, like copy data management, and so on, so forth. So, the 360 Data Management really solves the problem, what they're looking for. >> Yeah. Can you give us a little color to that packaging and pricing? It's a subscription model to my understanding. >> It is a subscription model but-- >> Which is a little different than if you have a traditional and, you know, what are you seeing, what's the feedback been from customers? >> So, it is a subscription model when we went to market. We are going to be offering as a perpetual as well. So there is a gold, silver bronze tier, I had mentioned it. We have a Backup, InfoMap, and also EBFile as part of the bronze. And then you have, we have P as part of the silver plus bronze together and then in the gold, we have Access, also, as part of the solution. So, they can pick what they want and from our... Going forward, we do hear feedback from customers that they want perpetual as well. So, we already, we heard them. We'll make it happen. >> How about the small, midsize business, what are you, what are you doing for them? And can you talk about that a little bit? >> I'm glad you asked that because a lot of the 360 Data Management is centered around net backup, right? And with net backup, adark, all the good releases. There are also a lot of SMB and mid-market customers, and we have a solution called BackupExec, and I'm sure most of you are aware of BackupExec, it's been there for many years. So, BackupExec solves their problem and within BackupExec, we make sure that there are a lot of SMB customers who have like three or four backup products. And we want to make sure that there's one product that can protect the physical, virtual, and cloud environments. So, BackupExec does that. >> Last question. So, the ecosystem, it's evolving. You guys have great ambitions. Microsoft was here, had a big, big presence. Maybe just general thoughts on the ecosystem and, specifically, your relationship with Microsoft and other cloud suppliers. >> So, we work very closely from a strategic level with the CSPs. We call them the Cloud Service Providers. With Microsoft, we are doing a lot of, not just product integration for Azure, we'll also be supporting many things for AzureStack going forward. We're working with them on that. Also, I mentioned about BackupExec, we're also going to market. We are spending a significant amount of money to define the goal, to go to market with them, with their partners, and so on, so forth. Not just for BackupExec but across for all other products. That said, we also have other partners from the Cloud Service Provider point of view. There is a lot of effort happening from product integration, defining goal market, and as we define that, we're also engaging with their channel partners, who are also our channel partners, to help with the goal market. >> Cool, alright. Well, listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, Rama. Really great to meet you and great to talk to you. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back. (light music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back the the Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman. Angelo Sciascia is here, big Tom Brady fan, Senior Vice President of NetX Information Systems, from Brooklyn, New York, I don't think so. >> Not a Tom Brady fan. >> Thanks for coming on theCUBE do you think it matters, how much it airs at a football. >> No, not at all, Tom Brady doesn't care about that. >> No, well, listen, thanks for coming on. We have a great conversation, we love talking sports on the Cube. So welcome, how's the show going for you? >> Ah, it's fantastic, you know, lots of great material Veritas has been talking about. 360 Data Management, obviously we all know the benefits of that by now. So we have a lot of customers here so I'm glad they they got to see it from a senior leadership perspective, rather than our sales guys and sales engineers going in there and talking to them, and seeing Veritas executives really getting behind what we're talking about. So it backs up our story and, you know, our customers are pretty excited about it, actually. >> What's the nature of your relationship with Veritas. I know you have a relationship, and maybe still do, with Symantec. How's that all, how did it all evolve? >> Yeah, so we are a Veritas Platinum Partner, we would be, what we consider, a solution-provider type partner. A lot of our business today is either directly or indirectly tied to Veritas, which was kind of funny because we started as a security company, so our roots are systems management, you know. That's where we were in 2005 when I joined NetX, that's where we were for many, many years after Symantec acquired a company called Altiris. We just stayed in that vein, you know, managing endpoints, securing endpoints, encrypting data. And then, somewhere in 2013, we said hey, you know, let's try to diversify the portfolio a little bit. And we used to manufacture an endpoint management appliance for Altiris so we said hey, Symantec's got these things called NetBackup Appliances, let's check it out. It's a formed fact that we know how to sell and, shoot, four years later it's been a great partnership for us, great partnership, I'm sure, for Veritas, and for our customers and that's a lot of our business today. >> So, I mean, it's hot market, you know. Data protection is exploding, and security. I mean, you're in two of the sweet spots in the market right now. So how do you approach the business with customers? Do you, are you a specialist around data protection? You deliver services around them. Maybe you can explain it on the model? >> Yeah, you know, that's actually a good question, because it's evolved quite a bit, right? So, you know, when you had a limited portfolio of just one or two products that you can sell to a customer, you're really doing a product sale, right, which, I would say that was probably the most difficult transition from the split from Symantec to Veritas, because at Symantec we had thousands of products in the portfolio, or hundreds of products in the portfolio that we could actually talk to. And for a little while, really we had a handful, you know, we had NetBackup Appliances, Enterprise Vault and ancillary things to bulk on to that, like Clearwell. I think one of the most exciting things for us, as a reseller, is to now be able to go have a discussion with our customers that we were never able to have before. And rather than sit there and try to sell them a backup product or a storage solution, we could sell them a platform that solves many problems for them, right? Rather than sitting there and trying to sell one-off. So, our conversations are significantly more strategic now then they've ever been, and frankly I speak for myself and my whole team, I know everyone enjoys the conversation more now that we have a portfolio to talk about, than just a handful of products. >> Angelo, you've got an interesting viewpoint on this split off of Aritas from Symantec. What have your customers said about it? What's been your interaction with the organization? What can you tell us about kind of the inside going on? >> Yeah, look, I've lived firsthand on a Symantec acquisition of a company, okay. I was, we were not a Symantec partner when they acquired Veritas. Funny enough, I was actually doing Veritas consulting, you know, on my own on the side prior to Symantec purchasing Veritas. So I really, I'd made my career on two products; Veritas for backup and Altiris for systems management. Symantec bought Veritas and I was like okay, you know, I'm just going to stay with Altiris. Symantec bought Altiris and here we are now, so we can talk about all of them. The thing I noticed was Symantec was always going to be a security company, right, and they weren't going to change that no matter how much they try to integrate it. It's two radically different stories. You know, and for many, many years, things that we look at as new products today were kind of already there in the Symantec portfolio, but buried underneath other products that really never saw the light of day because when you have hundreds or thousands of products, like I said earlier, you know, the ones that are going to move the most are the ones that are going to get the attention. So I think the benefit of the split is that it really allowed Veritas to focus on what they do well, which is managing data, and Symantec to do what they do well, which is securing your infrastructure and securing your data. From my perspective, our customers really appreciated that. Sure, a couple of them were a little annoyed that they had to now split contracts and deal with that kind of stuff, but I think that was a momentary blip and for the most part, it's been well-received from everyone we've spoken to. >> Angelo, you said you're having, your conversations are evolving. Who are you talking to? And maybe take us inside some of those conversations. What are the big challenges they're having? >> Yeah, a year ago, a year and a half ago I was talking to either somebody who was on the messaging side and needed to archive emails or IMs, or on the backup side and they just wanted to be able to meet their backup windows and maybe to get some better d dub rates, right. Fun conversation to have, bit mundane. It's not really solving problems as much as backing up data or archiving data. Today, we're having overarching conversations at a C-level, or a senior VP level, or a director level, and talking about dramatic changes to the way they do business, and how we can do business with them. Six months ago, NetX, we weren't doing anything in the Cloud, you know. We were selling to some customers' Vdub space to the Cloud, and that's about it. We weren't talking Cloud strategy with them. Today we're talking to our customers about moving workloads to the Cloud, doing it in a way that's predictable for them, and doing it with Veritas. >> That's a really interesting point. I have to imagine that changed who you're talking with inside the company. Can you walk us through kind of a typical customer's, you know, and how you kind of move up into a more strategic discussion for Cloud strategy? >> You know, so for full transparency, that whole thing's still evolving, right. 360 Data Management is still fairly new. So what we're seeing, the conversations turned, it would start, again we're talking to somebody that we've been talking to historically in the backup side or architecture side, and we talk to them about wanting to do better things than what their backup is, and start to talk about, hey this is what 360 Data Management is. What's relevant to that person he's going to want to talk about but then there's going to be things in there that are not relevant to him. So he'll make that introduction and he'll get other stakeholders in the boat with him. And that's something we've really appreciated because the people you used to talk to are now bringing in stakeholders to offset their own desires and their own budgets, so want to bring in other technology. And typically, when we get to that point when we're starting to talk about strategic pricing, is when you're getting that C-level person to really have that aha moment, and say wow, we're offsetting costs here, we're doing things like truly getting rid of tape, or moving to the Cloud and things like that, and it's a conversation that really evolves and it's still starts at the bottom. But we're figuring out ways to start it at a higher point. >> Well, those strategies are still evolving for most customers; the roles of those people that might have had one role definitely are changing. I'm curious, one of the big transition points, especially for a company like Veritas, is going from licenses to some kind of more of a subscription model. Any commentary you have on your customers; their embrace, or like, dislike of some of those transitions? >> I think the one thing the Cloud has done is it's opened up a different avenue of how people consume IT, right. Cloud is very much consumption-based billing, and while that can complicate our lives from a reseller perspective in terms of how to collect and track monthly billing and things like that, they like it because they feel like, and it's the truth, they're only paying for what they're truly using, rather than paying for products or infrastructure that they're only using part of the day, or software that they're only using for a particular project. A lot of our healthcare systems might have a research project that their going on, and they might like to scale up for some backup licensing and scale back down once that project is done. Consumption licensing allows that, versus having to go to them and saying, hey, well now you got to buy 200 terabytes of perpetual licensing, and justify that capital expense, rather than having an operational expense on just that one particular workload that you have to back up for that one period of time. >> Angelo, Stu and I are always interested in the human capital management aspects of things, and you talked about, you went from sort of talking about having a conversation around email archiving or backup, to one about the Cloud, Cloud strategies. From your internal organization perspective, how did you manage that? Are you rescaling, are you retraining? Is it just you got really supersmart people that can adapt? >> We definitely have supersmart people, because they're all over there, that's right. But I definitely have supersmart people. But, you know, it's a little bit of both. It's a little bit of, you know, you take one of our data protection projects; see Christian Muma, you know, he's been in the data center for god knows how many years, he has seen technology evolve. It was a natural fit to look at Cloud infrastructure. Started taking some classes, consumed it, all the information he could, and now we're out there actively selling it. In some other respects, we had to hire from outside and bring in some services ourselves to actually use, maybe some third party partnerships to help us better understand how we price out Cloud for our customers. So it's a little bit of everything, and I think that that's what's exciting about it, because I think for the first time in a long time, everyone's learning something new at the same time, because, I don't care what anyone said about the Cloud years ago; it's different today, it's going to be different in six months, it's going to be different in nine months. And I think that that's exciting, and I've been in this industry since 1996. I've seen a lot of really cool things come and go. I just think that there's still infancy in the Cloud and I think it's exciting because everyone's still learning. And any time you can still learn, I think that's, I think an important part of your job. >> So when you think about your, sort of, near-term and midterm and long-term plan for the company, how do you sort of describe that? Where do you want to take this thing? >> Near-term, I want to have a solid end of the quarter. >> Business is good, right, I mean market's booming right now. >> Business is very good. Veritas will tell me it's not good enough but they're just never happy. No, business is, business is very good. I think, near-term for us, you said hey, how do we get our head around it? Near-term for us is, as we're absorbing all this information, is start to really figure out what our path is going to be. So near-term, I think we still have to identify other ancillary partners that we need to bring to the table. We've got our partnerships with Azure, Microsoft Azure, and our partnerships with AWS. We'll probably have to look at Google and IBM and see what they're doing, and then we have to look at other partnerships that are not related to Veritas but still drive that home. We maybe look at a different colo partnership or partnerships around outsourcing billing, things like that, that we can make where it's easier for our customers to consume the technology. So I think six to nine months from now if we were to have the same conversation, everything that we're doing today is probably going to be somewhat different. But I just think that there's still a lot of planning to do. >> Angelo, any feedback from your customers on what there's still on the to-do list from the vendors? We talked, you know, the strategy, Cloud's changing a lot, you know. What are some of the pinpoints that they said hey, if we could get this into the offering from Veritas or some of the others it would make our lives a lot easier. >> I mean, that's a tough question, because we're going to them now and changing the conversation already. You know, obviously they're always asking for different features, but I don't like to get into a feature conversation with the customers. I try to solve the problem. >> Dave: You're leading that conversation, is what you're saying. >> Yeah, I don't want to get into the weeds of talking about well, this widget does it at 50% and you do it at 48%. You know, I try to sit a little bit more macro. I think that one of the things our customers have asked us to do a better job at is figure out better ways to make it easier to consume the technology from budget perspective. So we're trying to figure that out now; 360 Data Management is a subscription, Veritas would like them sold in three years, we're trying to figure out ways to get creative with our customers on that. What's the right bundle, what's not the right bundle. One thing that I've noticed, and Veritas have been great at it, is we have to have some flexibility in terms of adding things in and make it seem like it's all part of that bundle. There's been some flexibility and I think that, because of that, we haven't hit that roadblock yet where, well, we really want this product in the bundle. Reality is that we'll work through that and try to add it in there, some way, shape or form, even if behind the scenes. >> The customers see you as the experts, and what we often see is that technology is the technology; it's pretty much understood. What's not understood by the customers is how to apply it to their business, and their business is changing so fast that it seems like they're looking to organizations like yours saying okay, here's our business challenge. How can you help me? You tell me, and then the best answer is somebody he'll be able to work with. Is that a valid, sort of, premise? >> Yeah, it is, it certainly is and I think we're really uniquely positioned in the fact that, here we've got, we've got our partnership with Veritas and we're 100% focused to everything in the Veritas portfolio so we don't compete from within. That's the same thing that we could say, basically, on Symantec and some of our traditional storage partners as well. That'll change most likely, on our storage partners, especially because of what Veritas have been releasing with Access and some of the other software providing storage technology. When we're brought in, we're brought in as the experts in that finite area, so we're not brought in as a generalist-type of reseller. We're brought in as, hey, I've got a data management problem, I've got a data security problem, or I'm trying to do some high-performance workloads on storage. So yeah, we are the experts, but at the same time we're being brought in for those handfuls of things, so we're not having these, hey, can you maximize my span on anti-virus software because I want to sell you commoditized software. It's just not us, it's not our thing. We're not adding any value to the customers, or the poor owners for that matter. >> Angelo, curious that there's a lot of startups in the data protection space. What do you here, your customers asking you about them? You know, what's your thoughts there? >> I guess I got to be nice, right? Because I'm being streamed everywhere. >> Stu: They're not listening, go ahead, be a New Yorker. >> Listen, I challenge Rubrik at any point of time, you know, those guys, Rubrik, Cohesity, those guys, they're new, they're the shiny new toy. The problem, the problem is they have their messaging out there, and the problem we have is that they're the shiny new toy. But when the rubber hits the road and when it's time to actually go and prove out what the technology can do, we'll win all the time. We will win ten out of ten times if we get the seat at the table, right. The problem is is because we were a limited portfolio, a limited product, limited integration type of company before, we weren't getting that seat at the table. I think they see it now, I think they're starting to get a little concerned about, hey, you know what, if this 360 Data Management is what it's going to be, and we all know it is, I think they're going to be concerned. They're new, and they're going to get attention. My honest opinion: I'm glad they came out, I'm glad that Rubrik and Cohesity and all these guys came out and did all this different ways to go to market, because I think it really forced all of us to say hey, we got some real tough decisions to make here, the competition has caught up, in certain ways. Let's change the game, and 360 Data Management does that. I think they should take as much business as they can right now, because it's going to be short-lived. >> You said it makes you rethink your strengths, and like you said, change the game. >> Yeah, it changes the game. >> Yeah. Uh, okay, predictions on the MLB? Yankees won their getaway game today to put the pressure on the Red Sox, two and a half to two and a half games back. You know, the Indians are looking good, my man, Terry Francona. What's your prediction for it? >> The Sox fan's outnumbered two to one here, so go ahead. >> You know, so I shouldn't say that the Yankees are going to win the World Series? >> No, he's a Yankees fan. >> I'm a Yankee fan, too. >> Honestly, as a Yankee fan, I think we all know that they weren't supposed to be this team, so I think this is, that's the team to look out for. >> Dave: Maybe this is their year. >> I think this is the year that they're going to challenge people, I mean, are they going to win? It's Cleveland, do you really think Cleveland's going to win anything? They won one thing in the last, what, 30 years. >> That's what they used to say about us in Boston. Angelo, thanks so much coming on, really appreciate it. Keep right there, buddy, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live from-- (electronic music)

>> Announcer: 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, and this is our second day of Veritas Vision in 2017. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Jason Buffington is here, good friend of the Cube, Senior Analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group, otherwise known as ESG. Jason, good to see you again. >> Thanks for having me back. >> We've been bumping into each other a lot lately, a lot of storage stuff going on and you you gave a panel discussion today. You had, you know, three of the four big Cloud guys up there, no Amazon, Stu. They weren't up on the panel, but that was good, you had an interview with those guys. >> Jason: Yeah. >> So, congratulations on that and welcome again. >> Yeah, everyone wants to talk about data protection, right? So, there's... >> Dave: Hottest topic, isn't it? >> It is, every time you go to a show, the last show that I was at, it seemed like over half the booths were talking about data protection. So, to come here, you know, Veritas kind of owns that as a name. And so it's been fun to just be part of the participants. >> Yeah, Jason, you know, you cover this base, and you know Veritas well. There are people I talked to getting ready for this, and they said, "We remember Veritas back in its hay day." You know, back pre-acquisition. During the virtualization era, it kind of got quiet. I mean, they got acquired by Semantic, things went down, but now they're an independent company, and one of the shows that, you know, we've been at VMWorld, absolutely. Data protection is super hot, you know, product of the year was one of those companies, whole lot of startups there, a lot of investment. What's your take on kind of the new Veritas, you know, where they fit in that ecosystem with all those startups and everybody else? >> No, that's a good read, so let's talk about the market first, and then I'll put Veritas in it, right? So, I think you're spot on that when the virtualization wave came through, most of the really big established data protection vendors were not first market, right? And in fact, every time that we see this, I've been doing this for 28 years, I've been backing stuff up, right? And for most of it, every time the platform shifts, the traditional dominant data protection vendors are not the first ones to jump on that new gear, right? Windows versus NetWare, now we're into virtualization. So, we saw Veeam, and PHD and vRanger, and a few others that barely get an honorable mention in that line, right? We're in a really interesting time, though, this time around because every time, in the past, when you moved off of the old platform, the presumption was, you turned it off, right? This time around, we're on the, here's a fancy word, we're on the precipice of a new shift again because we're looking at Cloud as the new platform to move to. But here's the fun part. We're not leaving the old stuff behind, right? We're not turning off all the virtual servers and the physical servers are on their way out the door as we go to Cloud. We're embracing Multicloud as the new destination, not this mid-step along the way. And I think that's really interesting because, just like in every time past, it means we're going to get a reset of the leader board when it comes to data protection. And, just like in times past, the secret sauce that made you dominant on the last platform, doesn't necessarily give you an edge technology-wise on the next platform. All it really does is give you momentum, right? So, yeah, there's a few other folks that we could list that they've got some momentum going for one reason or another along the way, but for the marketplace, if physical and virtual and Cloud are all going to be together, Veritas has been doing some of those for 20 some odd years. They've made some announcements around the rest of the suites. I think they're in a good place here. The thing I'm excited about from Veritas, and I do, I'm a fan, you want to root for them, right? I mean, 25 years on the bench, you want to see them keep going. I think the opportunity is that, since the divestiture from Semantic, they have a lot more focus, right? You know, it's really hard to tell a story that's everything from Malware and cyber security, all the way through to a breadth of data protection. But if you look at how they're talking about things now, and I really like the 360 narrative that kind of pulls it all together. Every part of their portfolio kind of pulls the other parts together, right? It doesn't matter, in data management, whether you want to start with backup, or you want to start with storage, or you want to start with availability, anywhere you look on that circle, it's going to pull the rest of the line in, and these are all the things that folks are asking for from a customer base. So, I like the tech that they've got. I like where the market is headed, and I think they've got a real shot to be one of those top three dominant names that we talk about moving forward. >> Yeah, so, I mean it's a 30 plus year history. >> Jason: Yeah. >> And pretty amazing, I mean this is an amazing story, this company. I mean, they came out, kind of a small company, and then there was that relationship which they bought Seagate. You know, Seagate's backup business. Seagate actually had a piece of the company for a while. >> Jason: Yeah. >> You know, Al Shugart, when he sold that stock, basically saved Seagate cause of the cash infusion. So, it was a long history, and then they kind of went dormant... >> Jason: Yeah. >> For a while under the Symantec Governance. And now, so the big question is, can Veritas get its mojo back in the space and become that super hot company again? >> So, by the way, sidebar, you talked about Seagate. I actually have a copy of Seagate Backup Exec sitting on a shelf in my office. (Dave laughing) And one of these days, I will open up the data protection museum, cause I think I've got most of the pieces and parts laying around. So, can Veritas get is mojo back? The thing that Veritas has to consistently remind people, one, we are not your daddy's or your granddaddy's backup company anymore, right? So, they're working on things like, they announced this week a new UI coming for NetBackup 8.1, and I thought they were going to crowd mob out of affirmation for that. People were so excited for, you know, finally we're going to get a contemporary UI that doesn't look like 1995 coming in, in that backup. So, certainly, some of the cosmetics, the sterilization of that UI going across as many of those products as possible in order to provide more of a contemporary feel. That's an easy place to dig on, right? But I think what Veritas really needs to think about is, they need to remind folks that, while they are not the stodgy presumption of what people might think, this is not their first rodeo in any of these areas, right? We had new announcements on software to find storage this week. Things like storage foundation and VCS, they've been doing that for 25 years, right? I mean, they've been doing to software to find storage before it was a thing, right? Availability, right? So, we talk about, I like the VRP product. I think it's a cool architecture, and something certainly that powers a lot of the Cloud mobility type capabilities that are there. And the idea of a heterogeneous platform to enable higher levels of availability, I think the market is just now growing into that, right? So, the trick is, we're not the old folks, but, oh by the way, we have reams of experience like you can't imagine. Let's put those things together and have an enterprise level conversation. >> So, let's lay the horses out on the track here. I mean, we were all at VMWorld, and we saw the, it was the hottest... That and security, backup and security are the two hottest spaces in the business right now. We saw the startups, the Cohesity's, the Rubrik's, the Zerto's, and sort of, the upshots. The Veeams, you know, a lot of action at their booths. Obviously, Veritas getting its mojo back. Where's Commvault in all this, so how do you lay out the horses on the track, what's the competitive landscape look like? Paint a picture for us. >> Yeah, so, first and foremost, I always go back to what ESG calls the data protection spectrum, right? So, the behaviors of archive, backup, snapshot, replication, availability. They are not interchangeable mechanisms. We call it a spectrum as a rainbow kind of feel. You know, when is the last time you went outside, saw a rainbow in the sky, and one of the colors was missing? You know, these colors do not replace each other. Snapshots and replications, etc. When you look at where the market's going, imagine a capital Y. In fact, if you go look up on your favorite blog site, I have a blog on, why does data protection have to evolve? This is the answer to your question. The base of that Y is just backup. Can you make copies of all of your stuff? And even that, I think a lot of folks have a challenge with. The next step up is that idea of data protection. So, backup plus snapshots plus replications, single set of policies. Where the market's going, and how it kind of lays out the horses, is now we're at that fork in the road in the capital Y, right? And some of the folks are moving down the availability path. And think about that word for a second, you can remember the vendors who like to go that direction. We're going from reactive recovery to proactive assured productivity, right? Because all the backup folks are just as down until somebody hits the restore button. That's the thing that no one really wants to talk about, as opposed to, if you have monitoring, if you have orchestration, if you have failover and rapid recovery mechanisms. Now, you really do have an availability story that comes out of that. And not all the vendors that you mentioned have that. >> Dave: Well, who are the leaders? >> Yeah, so, certainly, from a momentum and brand perspective, Veeam is definitely on the front line of that, you know, I think car racing is more easier... >> Dave: Cause they've got growth and... >> Yeah, they have momentum, they have, certainly virtualization is still a sweet spot for the data centers... >> Obviously, Veritas is... >> Veritas is absolutely... >> They said 15 years in a row in the Gartner Upper Right... >> Yeah. >> Okay, check. >> Dell EMC, broad portfolio there. Those are kind of the biggest three from, who has all the checked boxes they need to make sure they have a dialogue for the next conversation. >> And Commvault, you wouldn't put in that? >> So, well, I always think of three, you know, bronze, silver, gold, not in that order. >> Yeah, it's like baseball playoffs. Who's going to get in, who's the wild card, you know. >> So, Commvault checks all the right boxes, right? They have all the right narratives along the way. I think the challenge is, organizationally, they're a little siloed in how they tell the stories, and so sometimes it's hard to remember that they're actually the only ones who have a single code base. The ones that, you know, one set of tech that can check all the boxes. Everyone else actually has some myriad of pieces and parts that have to be assembled along the way. >> Dave: So, that's both a strength and a weakness... >> Yeah. >> Dave: For Commvault, right? >> Yeah, the opportunity is there to increase the marketing to tell one narrative. >> Kind of Tivoli, same thing, right? >> Yes, same kind of idea there. And by the way, I don't count, let's call them Spectrum Protect now, but I don't count them out. So, Spectrum Protect took a facelift a couple years ago and really got virtualization savvy. They took the, they had the same gap that everyone else that you mentioned had, and, what is it, six, four, a couple years back, they finally got around to that. And then they just announced Spectrum Protect Plus, which is really built for that V-Admin role. So, certainly we've got a good lens there. On the other side, just like in every other generation, you've got some upstarts that are looking pretty good. >> Well funded, some of them paid 100 million. >> Yeah, well funded, some of them I think have kind of a little bit of a puffer fish, right? They feel bigger than they are for the moment, and yet, the tech looks really good. They want to have a dialogue that says, don't start with backup and try to grow forward. Start over, right? Reimagine what storage might look like in the broader range of things. And by the way, data protection is one of the outcomes for that. And so, you put the Actifio, Cohesity, Rubrik, kind of mix, along the lines for that. You also get the... Catalogic stuff that goes into, that's OEM by IBM, kind of gets on the other side. I think that's going to be probably the coolest thing to watch in 2018. So, you hear the buzz words of copy data management. Everybody wants to talk about some version of those three words. We think that the market's going to go either evolution versus revolution. So, evolution is, start with the data protection folks that you know, and those technologies are going to grow into data management type folks. Here at the show, right, so we saw Veritas Velocity. It's their first foray into that. Cloud Point starts to come into that mix as well. So, the idea of keeping all you need, getting rid of it when you don't, and enabling, and here's the fun part, enabling those secondary use cases so that you can get more value out of that otherwise dormant data. Mike talked about that during the day one keynote. I thought he was spot on for that. So, that's the evolution approach. Revolution, start over, better storage, gets you the same results. Those other guys are old anyway... >> So, Bill Coleman's saying, "It's ours to lose." He said that to us on the Cube. They're obviously an evolution play. >> Jason: Yep. >> I've also heard, they've got, they've made the claim, "We've got the best engineering team in the business." Comments? >> So... >> Dave: It's a very competitive market. >> Yeah, it's hard to say best. I never like ultimate superlatives, but here's what I will say. I meet an amazing number of engineers at Veritas who have been doing this 15, 20, 25 years. There's a lot of wonderful institutional knowledge that comes out of that, that you don't get when you're three, five years, even if you come from multiple vendors, and you kind of pop along the way. There are folks that their initials are still in the source code of NetBackup, and I think that gives them an edge from that perspective if they have a vision from an architecture and from a message perspective on carrying it forward and growing beyond just backup. >> Yeah, Jason, want to get your commentary on the customers. So, one of the things we're trying to reconcile here is, they've got a lot of NetBackup customers. >> Jason: Yeah. >> And then they're pitching this new Cloud hyper-scale, distributed architecture world. Are the customers ready for that? Are they, you know, Bill Coleman told us, five years, ten years, maybe five years from now, every single product that's selling today will be obsolete. So, are the Veritas customers today ready to make that move? What are you hearing? Or are they just going to, you know, go to Microsoft and Amazon and, you know, come in that way? How does this, you know, it goes that kind of revolutionary, evolutionary, discussion you were having. >> Good read, so working backwards, I don't think the answer for better backup for the enterprise is clouding. Cloud managed, absolutely. Disaster recovery as a service, as a secondary tier for the people who don't want to have dormant data centers, yeah probably. But we're still going to have a significant majority of infrastructure on-prem that's going to demand for current SLAs to have recoverability on-prem as well. So, I don't think it starts from a Cloud angle. What I do think, from the Veritas customer perspective is, certainly, you know, Veritas is, their homies are the NetBack of admins. That role is evolving. Or maybe I should say it's devolving. You know, you're not going to have backup admins in the same way. Honestly, more and more, we see that data protection should be part of a broader system's management platform management conversation, right? Cause if I'm an IT generalist, that means I don't have a Ph.D. in backup, and I don't want one. I'm an IT generalist, and I'm the one who's responsible for provisioning servers, and patching servers, and providing access to servers. When those green lights turn red, I want to be able to be part of that process and not wait on somebody else. And if I want to be part of the recovery process, it means I better be part of the protection process as well. So, certainly, Veritas is going to have to grow into some new personas of who they're going to be adding value to. IT ops is the big one, right? So, the backup admin is starting to decline a little bit, the V-Admin for the virtualization role is starting to decline a little bit. That IT operations role is really taking a much more dominant share. That said, Veritas's best route to market is to go through the backup admin, and not in spite of because you can turn that backup admin into a hero by saying, "Look, you have a certain set of problems." "Your adjacent peers have a wider set of problems, "and aren't you going to be the smart one "to walk in somebody who can fix "the rest of the problems while we're at it." And that's that 360 story... >> Well, to your point, evolve or devolve, that role. So, we're out of time, but how about a plug for some recent research, what's hot, what's new, anything that you've worked on that you want to share with the audience. >> Yeah, so ESG, we just finished research on real world SLAs and availabilities. So, how are people doing that proactive lens, as opposed to just reactive? Today, earlier today, I kicked off research with the research team on copy data management, so all that evolution/revolution, we're in that right now. And then the next two projects we're working on, GDPR readiness and data protection drivers in Western Europe. Appliance form factors for data protection, so turnkey versus dedupe, is kind of the next one. And then we're going to refresh our Cloud Strategy Data Protection intersection, so BaaS, DRaaS, STaaS, IaaS, and SaaS, and how the protection traction moves. >> Awesome, sounds like a good lineup. I'd be interested to see that GDPR readiness. We'll have to forecast that and... >> That'll be fun. >> And then hit you up after that comes out cause there's going to be some big gaps going on there. >> Yeah. >> Hey, thanks very much for coming back in the Cube, good job. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, you're welcome. Okay, keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back. This is day two, Veritas Vision. You're watching the Cube.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you by Veritas. (upbeat techno music) >> This is the Cube, the leader in live coverage and we're covering Veritas Vision 2017, Veritas the tagline here is Truth and Information. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman and we're excited to have Tom Shaffstall here, he's the storage network analyst at Exelon energy company and we love, Tom, having practitioners on because we get the truth, so welcome, good to have you. >> Thanks, good to be here. >> Set it up for us, your role, start with Exelon. Tell us about your interest in energy and what you guys are doing and of course your role at the company. >> We are a utility company that deals with both wind, solar, natural gas and nuclear generation. We have multiple, Exelon has multiple companies that are providing electricity in Chicago area and Philadelphia area, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland. We are a pretty big company, employee wise and we have tons and tons of data and I'm in charge of making sure that that stuff gets backed up and stored properly. >> You saw the Richard Branson keynote this morning I presume? >> Tom: Yes, I enjoyed that, that was very good. >> It was very good, providing a little tailwind for much of your business, certainly the wind and solar parts of it. Okay, let's get into it. You're looking after that portion of the infrastructure, maybe paint a picture for us as to what it looks like in your environment, the applications that you're supporting and actually, let me check that. Before we get into that, what's happening in your business that is affecting your IT strategy? You hear a lot about digital transformation, obviously costs, pressures, what are your priorities from the business and how does it affect IT? >> Of course there's cost pressures from the management, but we also have, we're moving into the cloud as of the last couple years, we're also starting to look at data center as a service for our customers, for the businesses, so I'm involved in several different things in regards to the data centers, the service, cloud infrastructure and managing and monitoring all that stuff. >> What is that, data centers as a service? >> Unpack that a little bit for us, cloud strategy, how's that coming about? >> It's actually been done very well for us. We've gone through a whole set of stages and proof of concepts but we've also worked well with Microsoft Azure because that's where we're putting all our stuff and we have a production side, we have a development side and we also have now a sandbox which is pretty interesting for testing. We're putting all those in together with the infrastructure that we already have in regards to making sure things are done properly, the security is done properly, the ownership of the accounts are done properly, so everything is done in a real precise manner through our process. >> Data center as a service is essentially your hybrid cloud strategy that encompasses the public piece which is Azure, your private cloud on prem and all the associated corporate edicts and security and compliance, stuff that goes with that, is that correct? >> Correct and we also have remote sites that we're going to be doing, we have a lot of energy plants around the country that are really small, they don't have real big pipe so data center as a service really works for them as well, that's the things we're starting to look into as well. >> Part of that is the service catalog, getting that house in order, is that right? >> Tom: Yes. >> Do you do chargebacks or showbacks? >> Tom: Yes we do. >> You do chargebacks. >> Yeah so that's all included in that. >> Have you always done chargebacks? >> Over the past several years, we've really built it up more and been more precise in our chargebacks. >> I've always wondered, I wonder if you can comment from your experiences and your peers, you know 10 years ago you would ask folks if they're doing chargebacks they say no, it's just too complicated, we just put it out there. Sometimes we do showbacks but as cloud has come into prominence, people seem to be doing more and more chargebacks to be more cloud like and more precise. Maybe that's tooling, maybe that's culture, what's your experience been? >> We actually started doing more and more reporting on our physical and virtual environments about two years before we actually started into the Azure cloud. I think that was in preparation for that because they saw that that kind of technology was already there in the cloud and we wanted to be prepared for that and make sure that the accounting side of things was a little bit more precise in what we were doing, in charging back. >> Okay let's get into it, Stu. >> Can you maybe sketch out for us a little bit, how much data does your engineering team cover how many sites, what's the purview and how do we, give us this thumbnail sketch. >> We have three main data centers right now in Chicago and in the Baltimore area. Currently we're taking one of those data centers and we're consolidating into the sister data center which is about 20 miles away from each other. We're dwindling it down and our utilities for instance, are managing their own data centers as well. We have multiple data centers all over the country. We're putting most of our corporate stuff into two major data centers so we're in the process of moving those and we have about nine petabytes of data that we're actually backing up and managing, storage wise. That's just on the corporate side, that's not even on our nuclear side, we have more on that side. >> And the primary applications that you're supporting, you don't have to do an application portfolio, we only have 15, 20 minutes, but generally speaking, maybe talk about some of the more critical ones from a backup perspective. >> Backup perspective, we have Just Net backup, both on the nuclear side and on the corporate side, we are also using Data Insight as well on the corporate side and we just I believe got our nuclear guys interested in Data Insight stuff. >> But in terms of the applications that you're, the data that you're protecting, what applications are they supporting, if I could ask it that way. >> We have HP applications, suites, we have R Man, we have Oracle databases, we have SQL databases, and I'm at a loss. >> A lot of the core database stuff, so pretty high SLA. Tight RPO, RTO requirements on those or they vary? >> They vary depending on the categorization of the actual database or the actual application. >> And how do you deal with the variability of those service level agreements? Are you able to provide granular levels of service or is it one size fits all? >> We go down to the granular level. We don't try to do one size fits all, that just didn't work in the starting of things when I first started in the company, we saw that they were trying to do that and it just doesn't work. >> Predominantly or exclusively a Net Backup shop in terms of your data protection, is that right? >> Yes, we also have snap falding and stuff with our net apps our shares so we are backing those up and snapping them off to the other data center and vice versa. We have that capabilities as well. >> You've been at this position for over a decade and you've seen the end of the client server era, not the end, but the tail end of the curve, internet era, obviously now seeing the cloud, virtualization and into the cloud, how have those changes affected your data protection strategy over the years? >> With our virtual side of things, we've actually migrated most of our virtual backups just to VM ware. They are actually handling all that within our infrastructure where we hold all the VM ware servers. That's all done outside of Net Backup all together. We do take care of the production side of the VM ware servers that we have through Net Backup and we treat them as physical servers, but all our test and dev, all that stuff, that's done and held for 14 days and then it's gone. >> We talked a little bit about, off camera, you said you were very happy with Net Backup so you really haven't brought in alternatives. What about the product and the company is appealing to you? >> There's been a history with me because in a previous life if you want to call it, I was in the financial business, working in the data center and I had the opportunity to get into the early stages of Veritas Net Backup four I think it was and then I got out of the financial industry and got into the utility industry and it was automatically Net Backup, I was familiar with it, it's very easy to use, it's just pretty reliable for restores and all that kind of stuff, good management. >> Tom one of the things we've been poking at this week is, of course Veritas has a lot of Net Backup customers, you're a loyal one, talking about this digital transformation and software defined multicloud, hyperscale world, some of those things I think resonating, what are you hearing, what interests you from some of the new products that they're announcing and how do you see the relevance of what Veritas is saying in your world? >> What has interested me so far in our sessions and in the keynote sessions and all, I'm looking into possibly talking to our architects about Infomap and getting that maybe possibly in house and/or the data resiliency because we're already got most of our stuff in the cloud that we're pushing out there. We don't have to push any extra data out there right now, but we may still do that, we may be still migrating some data like for archiving and that kind of thing. That's a possibility but we will probably look to Veritas for that when we go to do those things. >> Thinking about what you've heard this week, you hear a lot from Veritas about modern data protection, cloud, application mobility, things of that nature. As a practitioner, how do you look at those things, those capabilities, are those things that you're considering actually actively architecting or building a plan around. Maybe you could talk about the futures a little bit. >> With our data, we have to make sure there's accountability somewhere, we have to make sure that we know who the owners of these things are and we have to coordinate with them in regards to moving anything, of course. With sip infrastructure and all that kind of stuff, all those regulations, we had to make sure that all our data is held properly and going into the cloud, we want to make sure that what we're putting out there is going to be put out there and held securely. There's still some trepidation in regards to that but I believe our company is moving forward and wanting to do more and could get less of a footprint in our data centers for hardware and all that kind of stuff. For the governance of this stuff, we have the Data Insight software out there, it's helping us to recognize what kind of files are out there, who's using them, who has access to them, and we are starting to use that more as well. We're currently doing a POC to try and get ownership to that actual data because we really don't other than what Data Insight already gives it, this is the number of people that have been using this data, I'm giving you ownership is the way it was before, but now we're able to actually classify, this is the owner, he's going to be the one that takes care of that side. >> Tom I'm just curious, we talk a lot about there's the opportunity of data. Is data for your business, is it a challenge to keep up with the growth and manage it and govern it or is your business turning that into an opportunity? >> It's my full time job and my boss's full time job to make sure that we have enough room for all the data that we're doing. We are trying to do some neat things in regards to managing it better and keeping data, especially for us, our upper management decided to ask us the question recently is are we doing replication between data centers to keep our DRs and all that kind of stuff viable? We were like, yeah and then we started going into that perspective and actually got it so that we can definitely say yes, we have everything here and here, we are DR safe. >> Do you test that? >> Yes. In fact we just recently did a full test of our corporate financial DR data and it went off without a hitch. >> Excellent, all right Tom, we'll give you the last word on the conference, Veritas Vision, how do you like it, why do you come to this, shows like this, what kinds of things do you learn, what's of interest to you? >> I like to get more information as to what Veritas is offering. They're a very good company, I've had a very good rapport with our salespeople and with the engineers, with the help desk people that come in and talk to you and make sure that if we're having issues, they're right on, I've just had a real good experience with Veritas and the whole realm of things. >> Things at the show, anything interesting that pops out to you? Things that you've learned, the take aways? >> We're looking more now into some of the cloud capabilities that you guys have, especially with the resiliency program with the Infomap and again, more information with the Data Insight, all the capability's there, it's going to start bringing out. Just the beauty of all that stuff actually working together and being more cohesive, because before you had Data Insight you had Infomap, you had, and they weren't really communicating properly to really help each other report. It's really good stuff that's happening. >> Tom Sheffstall, thanks very much for coming on the Cube, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. Keep right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest, this is the Cube, we're live from Veritas Vision 2017, we'll be right back. (upbeat techno music)

>> 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)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Veritas Vision, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is Day One wrap of the Veritas Vision conference. Veritas, as we said earlier, is a company that has gone through a number of changes, Stu. I mean, I remember when the company launched in 1983. It was sort of, you know, it was focused on backup. It was Veritas and Legato. And they kind of grew through the PC era and the client server era, really started to take off. And then they exploded in the internet era. Their evaluation went through the roof. They ended up buying C8's backup business. They really drove that and then got purchased by Symantec for a big number. I mean, I think the number was 15 billion. I mean, it was in the teens as I recall. Really never did much under Symantec, or, Symantec never did much with Veritas. I think they had a vision of information management and that never really panned out. Spun the company back out, devested it, sale to Carlyle and some other investors for, I thought the number was 8 billion, somebody told me 7 billion today. That must be net of cash. 2.3 billion dollars in revenue. My understanding from sources is that valuation is way, way up, nearly double from 2015. Now, maybe that's an inflated number, but I'm not surprised. The market's been booming. So that's sort of the inside organizational issues. We're here at The Aria, what do you say, Stu, a couple thousand people, 2500? >> Yeah, it's about 2000, Dave, and it's interesting, I talked to some people that had gone to the old Veritas Vision, years ago, and gotten up to about 4000 or 5000 people. But, grown since last year, good energy at the show. We got to talk to the Vox community people. They've got 10,000 people online contributing to their forums, participating, launched the VIP program for some of the super users they have here. Definitely good crowd in the keynote. Good people clapping and participating, getting excited. It surprised me a little bit the number one topic of conversation is GDPR. As you said in our last interview, we're going down the deep abyss of how you're going to get litigated out of all of your money if you don't follow this. It's like way worse than Y2K, ah, some stuff's going to break and maybe turn off for a bit. >> Well, you know what I liked about the GDPR discussions though, they had answers. >> Yeah. >> Other events where I've gone to GDPR, it's been scary, scary, scary, scare you, scare you, scare you, and then call us. >> Yeah. >> And we'll give you some services. What I liked about, what I'm hearing from Veritas is, they've got at least a quasi-prescription as to what to do. So that's good. But the more interesting part to me Stu is you've got this enterprise backup legacy, I'll say it, legacy backup install base, enormous. A leader, they've mentioned many times, 15 years in a row leader in the magic quadrant. And I believe it, you talk to customers, what are you running, NetBackup, everybody's running NetBackup. But how they're transitioning into this vision of multi-cloud, data protection resilience across the Enterprise, across clouds, hyper scale. What I'm not fully clear on yet is how they get customers from point A to point B. And we heard from the keynotes this morning and Bill Campbell. We invested a bunch of dough in R&D, we're writing stuff that's cloud-native, container-based, micro services. So sort of all the right application development buzzwords and I believe that they're developing there. But I don't understand how they migrate that install base. Is there some kind of abstraction layer? Is there some kind of new UI? We heard them jokingly say today in the keynotes that, we hear you, customers, we know our UI sucked, we're working on that. I didn't see any announcements on that, but, that's something that, presumably, is a promise they're putting forth. But, I wasn't clear, maybe you could help clear it up, on how you get from point A of legacy install backup software to this nirvana of multi-cloud hyper scale micro services. >> Yeah, I mean, Dave, when we talked to Bill Coleman, his three Vs, value, vision, and that values of the company itself, clearly has got a compelling vision. He said not only ten years from now, but probably five years from now, every product I'm selling is going to be obsolete. And it's an interesting thing to hear because 15 years of experience, we're trusted, but we know that every product that you bought from Veritas in the past is going to be replaced by new things. And, right, how do we get, say okay, I've been buying that backup for a decade, do I get this visualization product, and if I'm looking at AWS, is Veritas the company I turn to? So really it gets down to, Dave, that blocking and tackling. Talked about the consultants, the partners, both on the go to market side as well as the technology side. Can Veritas get in there, can they have compelling differentiated products that solve a need in the market? We've talked to a number of companies this last year where I've looked at is this hybrid multi-cloud world. If you're software, how do you play in this market? Because isn't Microsoft, Google, Amazon, aren't they going to just do this? Information governance invisibility, absolutely. Amazon has a solution for you. Google has a solution for you. Microsoft has solutions. But, if I'm going to be across those environments, we haven't had a solution that goes across all of those environments. So, there's a hole in the ecosystem, and Veritas, along with many other companies, are trying to put that big elephant on the table and eat pieces out of it, so, it's interesting. >> And Coleman's background, from BEA, started at BEA, I think he took the thing up to half a billion dollars, sold it to Oracle for a big number. But you look at what BEA did, they were sort of the application integration glue. And that's a lot of, you hear a lot of similar messaging modernized around multi-cloud, around hyper scale, around micro services and the like. So, Coleman obviously has experience doing that. I thought he's a very clear thinker. I had not met him before. Furrier knows him pretty well, from his VC days. But I thought he laid out a pretty clear direction. So he's got street cred on this. SEEP com, done it before, I think this company has a decent balance sheet. They seem to have some patient capital in Carlyle. It doesn't appear that Carlyle's trying to suck all the money out. They don't have the 90-day shot clock. He basically, Bill Coleman basically said, look, we're fine shrinking to grow. We're shifting from a upfront license model, perpetual license model, to a ratable model. We could never do that as a public company. So it's going to be very interesting to see if and when they emerge as a public company, what that looks like and where they come from. >> Yeah, and Dave, one of the things I've been poking at is where do they sell to? If this was the backup administrator, that's not somebody that's going to help them with the transformation. It's digital transformation, it's my cloud strategy. It's things like GDPR where I'm going to need to get up the stack to the CIO, to the C-suite, prove the value that Veritas has, and therefore they can then get all these new products in where everything, the 360 data management, really at the core of what they're doing, and whole lots of other products. I mean, Dave, we didn't even dig into some of the object and file storage pieces that are in here. I know we've got their chief product officer on the Cube tomorrow. But a lot of products, pretty broad software suite. And for an infrastructure company, it's always interesting to hear them say, really, infrastructure doesn't matter. The no hardware agenda, but it's your data that matters, and we've got a vision here at Veritas Vision to bring you forward and lots of plays on the name of the company. Veritas, the show is the truth in information. >> Yeah, so, let's talk about the lineup tomorrow. A lot of product stuff tomorrow. Mike Palmer's coming on, he gave a great keynote this morning. Very funny, he gave a scenario of the world ending because basically people didn't have their data act together. They had these images of Las Vegas hotels in chaos and waterfalls running through the hotels and drones attacking and just total chaos. So we're going to get into a lot of the portfolio stuff and I think try to answer, Stu, some of those questions that I raised about how do you get customers from point A, where they are today, to point B. Are you going to, how are you going to transition them. Are there financial incentives? Is there some kind of abstraction layer that you're developing? What is that framework that brings us to that nirvana? So, give you the last word here, Stu. >> Yeah, so looking forward to digging in more with some of the customers, some of the partners. Good energy at the show. It's exciting to be here for the first time. And looking forward to Day Two. >> All right, good, good wrap, Stu. Thank you, and thank you for watching. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news. We saw some Oracle news today. Hitachi changed its name or Pentaho changed its name, we're not really sure about that. But all the news on siliconangle.com, go to wikibon.com for all the research. And of course, thecube.net to see this show, replays, youtube.com/siliconangle is where we archive all this stuff. Lot of websites. >> Yeah, and make sure to subscribe on our YouTube channel. >> Yeah, please do subscribe on that YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter, @thecube, @stuminiman, @dvellante. That's a wrap Day One, this is The Cube, we'll see you tomorrow from Veritas Vision from Vegas, take care. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody, this is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day one of two day coverage of Veritas Vision #VtasVision. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Zach Bosin is here. He's the director of information governance solutions at Veritas. And Anna Simpson is a distinguished systems engineer at Veritas. Which Anna means you know where all the skeletons are buried and how to put the pieces back together again. Welcome to theCube, thanks for coming on. >> Thank You. >> Thank You. >> Let's start with, we've heard a little bit today about information governance, Zach we'll start with you. It's like every half a decade or so every decade, there's a new thing. And GDPR is now the new thing. What's the state of information governance today? How would you describe it? >> I think the primary problem that organizations are still trying to fight off, is exponential data growth. We release research every year called the Data Genomics Index, and what came back this past year is that data growth has continued to accelerate, as a matter of fact, 49% year over year. So this problem isn't going anywhere and now it's actually being magnified by the fact that data is being stored, not only in the data center on premises, but across the multi-cloud. So information governance, digital compliance is all about trying to understand that data, control that data, put the appropriate policies against it. And that's really what we try to do with helping customers. >> I always wonder how you even measure data. I guess you could measure capacity that leaves the factory. There's so much data that's created that's not even persistent. We don't even know, I think, how fast data is growing. And it feels like, and I wonder if you guys agree or have any data suggestions, it feels like the curve is reshaping. I remember when we were talking to McAfee and Brynjolfsson it feels the curve is just going even more exponential. What's your sense? >> That's typically what we see. And then you have IoT data coming online, faster and faster and it really is a vertical shot up. And all different types and new files types. One of the other really interesting insights, is that unknown file types jumped 30-40%. Things that we don't even recognize with our file analysis tools today, are jumping off the charts. >> It used to be that PST was the little nag, it looks trivial compared to what we face today, Anna. What's your role as a distinguished systems engineer? How do you spend your time? And what are you seeing out there? >> I definitely spend my time dealing with customers around the world. Speaking to them about information governance. Particularly around risk mitigation these day. In terms of the issues we see in information governance, data privacy is a big one. I'm sure you've been hearing about GDPR quite a bit today already. That's definitely a hot topic and something our customers are concerned about. >> Are they ringing you up saying, "Hey, get in here. "I need to talk you about GDPR?" Or is more you going in saying, "You ready for GDPR? How does that conversation go? >> It's definitely a combination between the two. I think there is definitely a lot of denial out there. A lot of people don't understand that it will apply to them. Obviously if they are storing or processing data which belongs to an EU resident, containing their personal data. I think organizations are either in that denial phase or otherwise they're probably too aware, so they've probably started a project, done some assessment, and then they're buried in the panic mode if we have to remediate all these issues before May next year. >> What's the bell curve look like? Let's make it simple. One is, "we got this nailed." That's got to be tiny. The fat middle which is "we get it, we know it's coming, "we got to allocate some budget, let's go." Versus kind of clueless. What's the bell curve look like? >> I would say that there's 2% of companies, maybe, that think they have it nailed. >> Definitely in single digits, a low single digits. >> I think maybe another 30% at least understand the implications and are trying to at least but a plan in place. And the rest, 66% or so, still aren't very aware of what GDPR means for their business. >> Dave: Wow. >> Can you take us inside? what's Veritas's role in helping customers get ready for GDPR? We talked to one of Veritas's consulting partners today and it's a big issue, it crosses five to ten different budget areas. So what's the piece that Veritas leads and what's the part that you need to pull in other partners for? >> Sure thing. So in terms of our approach, we have what we refer to as a wheel. Which sort of attacks different parts of the GDPR, so various articles step you through the processes you need to be compliant. Things like locating personal data, being able to search that data, minimizing what you have, because GDPR is really dictating you can no longer data hoard, because you can only keep data which has business value. Further downstream it's obviously protecting the data that has business value, and then monitoring that over time. From a Veritas approach perspective, we tying those articles obviously to some of our products, some of our solutions. There's also definitely a services component around that as well. When you think about e-discovery of regulatory requirements, when the regulators come in, generally they're not necessarily going to be questioning the tools, they're going to be questioning how you're using those tools to be compliant. It is sort of a combination between tools and services. And then we're also partnering with other consulting companies on that process piece, as well. Zach, at the keynote this morning, there was a lot of discussion about there's dark data out there, and we need to shine a light on it I have to imagine that's a big piece of this. Why don't you bring us up to speed. What are some of the new products that were announced that help with this whole GDRP problem. >> In to that point, 52% of data is dark, 33% is rot, 15% is mission critical. Today we announced 23 new connectors for the Veritas information map. This is our immersive visual data mapping tool, that really highlights where you're stale, and orphaned, and non-business critical data is across the entire enterprise. New connectors with Microsoft as your Google Cloud storage, Oracle databases, so forth and so on, there's quite a number that we're adding into the fold. That really gives organizations better visibility into where risk may be hiding, and allows you to shine that light and interrogate that data in ways you couldn't do previously because you didn't have those types of insights. >> Also we heard about Risk Analyzer? >> Yes, that's right. We just recently announced the Veritas Risk Analyzer, this is a free online tool, where anyone can go to Veritas.com/riskanalyzer, take a folder of their data, and try out our brand new integrated classification engine. We've got preset policies for GDPR, so you drop in your files, and we'll run the classification in record speed, and it will come back with where PII is, how risky that folder was, tons of great insights. >> So it's identifying the PII, and how much there is, and how siloed it is? Are you measuring that? What are you actually measuring there? >> We're actually giving you a risk score. When we're analyzing risk, you might find one individual piece of PII, or you might find much more dense PII. So depending on the number of files, and the types of files, we'll actually give you a different risk tolerance. What we're doing with the Risk Analyzer is giving you a preview, or just a snapshot of the types of capabilities that Veritas can bring to that discussion. >> Who do you typically talk to? Is it the GC, is it the head of compliance, chief risk officer, all of the above? >> Yeah, it's definitely all of the above-- >> Some person who has a combination of those responsibilities, right? >> Yeah, exactly. It's usually, if we're talking GDPR specifically, it's usually information security, compliance, legal, and particularly in organizations now, we're definitely seeing more data privacy officers. And they're the ones that truly understand what these issues are; GDPR or other personal data privacy regulations. >> Let's say I'm the head of compliance security risk information governance, I wear that hat. Say I'm new to the job, and I call you guys in and say, "I need help." Where do I start? Obviously you're going to start with some kind of assessment Maybe you have a partner to help you do that, I can run my little risk analyzer, sort of leech in machine, and that's good but that's just scratching the surface. I know I have a problem. Where do we start? What are the critical elements? And how long is it going to take me to get me where I need to be? >> I think visibility is obviously the first step, which Zach already spoke to. You really have to be able to understand what you have to then be able to make some educated decisions about that. Generally that's where we see the gap in most organizations today. And that's particularly around unstructured data. Because if it's structured, generally you have some sort of search tools that you can quickly identify what is within there. >> To add on to that, you actually have 24 hours. We can bring back one hundred million items using the information map, so you get a really clean snapshot in just one day to start to understand where some of that risk may be hiding. >> Let's unpack that a little bit. You're surveying all my data stores, and that's because you see that because you've got the back-up data, is that right? >> The backup data is one portion of it. The rest is really coming from these 23 new connectors into those different data stores and extracting and sweeping out that metadata, which allows us to make more impactful decisions about where we think personal data may be, and then you can take further downstream actions using the rest of our tool kit. >> And what about distributed data on laptops, mobile devices, IoT devices, is that part of the scope, or is that coming down the road, or is it a problem to be solved? >> It's a little out of scope for what we do. On the laptop/desktop side of things, we do have e-discovery platform, formally known as Clearwell, which does have the ability to go out and search those types of devices and then you could be doing some downstream review of that data, or potentially moving it elsewhere. It's definitely a place we don't really play right now. I don't know if you had other comments? >> You got to start somewhere. Start within your enterprise. This has always been a challenge. We were talking off camera about FRCP and email archiving. I always thought the backup ... The back company was in a good spot. They analyzed that data. But then there's the but. Even these are backed up, kind of, laptops and mobile devices. Do you see the risk and exposures in PII really at the corporate level, or are attorneys going to go after the processes around distributed data, and devices, and the like? >> I think anything is probably fair game at this point given that GDPR isn't being enforced yet. We'll have to see how that plays out. I think the biggest gap right now, or the biggest pain point for organizations, is on structured data. It kind of becomes a dumping ground and people come and go from organizations, and you just have no visibility into the data that's being stored there. And generally people like to store things on corporate networks because it gets backed up, because it doesn't get deleted, and it's usually things that probably should not be stored there. >> If I think back to 2006, 2007 time frame with Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which basically said that electronic information is now admissible. And it was a high profile case, I don't want to name the name because I'll get it wrong, but they couldn't produce the data in court, the judge penalized them, but then they came back and said, "We found some more data. "We found some more data. "We found some more data." Just an embarrassment. It was one hundred million dollar fine. That hit the press. So what organizations did, and I'm sure Anna you could fill in the gaps, they basically said, "Listen, "it's an impossible problem so we're going to go after "email archiving. "We're going to put the finger in the dyke there, "and try to figure the rest of this stuff out later." What happened is plaintiff's attorney's would go after their processes and procedures, and attack those. And if you didn't have those in place, you were really in big trouble. So what people did is try to put those in place. With GDPR, I'm not sure that's going to fly. It's almost binary. If somebody says, "I want you to delete my data," you can't prove it, I guess that's process-wise, you're in trouble, in theory. We'll see how it holds up and what the fines look like, but it sounds like it's substantially more onerous, from what we understand. Is that right? >> Yes, I would 100% agree. From an e-discovery standpoint, there's proportionality and what's reasonable relative to the cost of the discovery and things like that. I actually don't think that that is going to come into play with GDPR because the fines are so substantial. I don't know what would be considered unreasonable to go out and locate data. >> Zach you have to help us end this on an up note. (group laughs) >> Dave: Wait, I wanted to keep going in to the abyss. (group laughs) We've talk about the exponential growth of data, and big data was supposed to be that bit-flip ... of turned it for, "Oh my God, I need to store it "and do everything, I need to be able to harness it "and take advantage of it" Is GDPR an opportunity for customers, to not only get their arms around information, but extract new value from it? >> Absolutely. It's all about good data hygiene. It's about good information governance. It's about understanding where your most valuable assets are, focusing on those assets, and getting the most value you can from them. Get rid of the junk, you don't need that. It's just going to get you into trouble and that's what Veritas can help you do. >> So a lot of unknowns. I guess the message is, get your house in order, call some experts. I'd call a lot of experts, obviously Veritas. We had PWC on earlier today, and a number of folks in your ecosystem I'm sure can help. Guys, thanks very much for coming on theCube and scaring the crap out of us. (group laughs) >> Thanks a lot. >> Alright, keep it right there buddy, we'll be back for our wrap, right after this short break. (light electronic music)