>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. >>Hi. Welcome to the Cube. Virtual and our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 with special coverage of a PM partner experience. I'm John for your host. We are the Cube. Virtual. We can't be there in person with a remote. And our two next guests are We have pure storage. Michael Slotnick, VP of Worldwide Alliances, Pure storage. And Robert Czarnecki, principal product manager for a U. S. Outposts. Welcome to the Cube. >>Wonderful to be here. Great to see you. And thanks for having us, >>Michael. Great to see you pure. You guys had some great Momenta, um, earnings and some announcements. You guys have some new news? We're here. Reinvent all part of a W s and outpost. I want to get into it right away. Uh, talk about the relationship with AWS. I know you guys have some hot news. Just came out in late November. We're here in the event. All the talk is about new higher level services. Hybrid edge. What do you guys doing? What's the story? >>Yeah, Look, I gotta tell you the partnership with AWS is a very high profile and strategic partnership for pure storage. We've worked hard with our cloud block store for AWS, which is an extensive bility solution for pure flash array and into a W s. I think the big news and one of things that we're most proud of is the recent establishment of pure being service ready and outpost ready. And the first and Onley on Prem storage solution and were shoulder to shoulder with AWS is a W s takes outpost into the data center. Now they're going after key workloads that were well known for. And we're very excited Thio, partner with AWS in that regard, >>you know, congratulations to pure. We've been following you guys from the beginning since inception since it was founded startup. And now I'll see growing public company on the next level kind of growth plan. You guys were early on all this stuff with with with flash with software and cloud. So it's paying off. Rob, I wanna get toe Outpost because this was probably most controversial announcements I've ever covered at reinvent for the past eight years. It really was the first sign that Andy was saying, You know what? We're working backwards from the customers and they all are talking Hybrid. We're gonna have Outpost. Give us the update. What kind of workloads and verticals are seeing Success without post? Now that that's part of the portfolio, How does it all working out? Give us the update on the workloads in the verticals. >>Absolutely. Although I have to say I'd call it more exciting than controversial. We're so excited about the opportunities that outpost opened for our customers. And, you know, customers have been asking us for years. How can we bring AWS services to our data centers? And we thought about it for a long time. And until until we define the outpost service, we really I thought we could do better. And what outpost does it lets us take those services that customers are familiar with? It lets us bring it to their data center and and one of the really bright spots over the past year has just been how many different industries and market segments have shown interest. Outpost right. You could have customers, for example, with data residency needs, those that have to do local data processing. Uh, maybe have Leighton see needs on a specific workload that needs to run near their end users. We're just folks trying to modernize their data center, and that's a journey. That transformation takes time, right? So So Outpost works for all of those customers. And one of the things that's really become clear to us is that to enable the success that we think L Post can have, we need to meet customers where they are. And and one of the fantastic things about the outpost ready program is many of those customers air using pure and they have pure hardware and way. Send an outpost over to the pure lab recently, and I have to tell you a picture of those two racks next to each other looks really good. >>You know, 20 used to kind of welcome back my controversial comments. You know, I meant in the sense of that's when Cloud really got big into the enterprise and you have to deal with hybrid. So I do think it's exciting because the edges a big theme here. Can you just share real quick before I get in some of the pure questions on this edge piece with the hybrid because what what's the customer need? And when you talk to customers, I know you guys, you know, really kind of work backwards from the customer. What are their needs? What causes them to look at Outpost as part of their hybrid? What's the Keith consideration? >>Yeah, so? So there are a couple of different needs. John, right? One, for example, is way have regions and local zones across the globe. But we're not everywhere and and their their data residency regulations that they're becoming increasingly common and popular. So customers I come to us and say, Look, I really need to run, for example, of financial services workload. It needs to be in Thailand, and we don't have a reason or local zone in Thailand. But we could get him an outpost to to places where they need to be right. So the that that requirement to keep data, whether it's by regulation or by a contractual agreement, that's a that's a big driver. The other pieces there's There's a tremendous amount of interest in the that top down executive sponsorship across enterprise customers to transform their operations right to modernize their their digital approach but there, when they actually look a look at their estate, they do see an awful lot of hardware, and that's a hard challenge. Thio Plan the migration when you could bring an outpost right into that data center. It really makes it much easier because AWS is right there. There could be a monolithic architecture that it doesn't lend well toe having part of the workload running in the region, part of the workload running in their data center. But with an outpost, they can extend AWS to their data center, and that just makes it so much easier for them to get started on their digital transformation. >>Michael, this is This is the key trend. You guys saw early Cloud operations on premise. It becomes cloud ified at that point when you have Dev ops on on Premises and then cloud pure cloud for bursting all that stuff. And now you've got the edge exploding as well of growth and opportunity. What causes the customer to get the pure option on outputs? What's the What's the angle for you guys? Obviously storage, you get data and I can see this whole Yeah, there's no region and certainly outpost stores data, and that's a requirement for a lot of, you know, certainly global customers and needs. What's the pure angle on this? >>Yeah, I appreciate that. And appreciate Rob's comments around what AWS sees in the wild in terms of yours footprint in the market share that we've established his company over 11 years in business and, you know, over eight years of shipping product. You know, what I would tell you is one of the things that that a lot of people misses the simplicity and the consistency that air characteristically, you know very much in the AWS experience and equally within the pure experience and that that's really powerful. So as we were successful in putting pure into workloads that, you know, for for all the reasons that Rob talked about right data gravity, you know, the the regulatory issues, you know, just application architecture and its inability to move to the public cloud. Um, you know, our predictability are simplicity. Are consistency really match with the costumers getting with other work clothes that they had in AWS? And so with a W S outposts that's really bringing to the customer that single pane of glass to manage their entire environment. And so we saw that we made the three year investment in Outpost. Is Rob said Just having our solution? Inp Yours Data center. It's set up and running today with a solution built on flash Blade, which is our unstructured data solution and, you know, delivering fantastic performance results in a I and ML workloads. We see the same opportunity within backup and disaster recovery workloads and into analytics and then equally the opportunity toe build. You know, Flash Ray and our other storage solutions, and to build architectures with outposts in our data center and bring them to market >>real quick just to follow up on that. What use cases are you seeing that are most successful without post and in general in general, how do you guys get your customers to integrate with the rest of, uh, their environment? Because you you no one's got. Now this operating environments not just cloud public, is cloud on premise and everything else. >>Yeah, you know what's cool is, and then Rob hit right on. It is the the wide range of industries and the wide range of use cases and workloads that air finding themselves attracted to the outpost offering on DSO. You know, without a doubt there's gonna be, You know, I think what people would immediately believe ai and ml workloads and the importance of having high performance storage and to have a high performance outpost environment, you know, as close to the center as possible of those solutions. But it doesn't stop there. Traditional virtualized database workloads that for reasons of application architecture, aren't candidates to move. AWS is public cloud offering our great fit for outpost and those air workloads that we've always traditionally been successful within the market and see a great opportunity. Thio, you know, build on that success as an outpost partner. >>Rob, I gotta ask, you last reinvent when we're in person. When we had real life back then e was at the replay party and hanging out, and this guy comes out to me. I don't even know who he was. Obviously big time engineer over there opens his hand up and shows me this little processor and I'm like, closes and he's like and I go take a picture and it was like freaking out. Don't take a picture. It was it was the big processor was the big, uh, kind of person. Uh, I think it was the big monster. And it was just so small. See the innovation and hard where you guys have done a lot, there s that's cool. I like get your thoughts on where the future is going there because you've got great hardware innovation, but you got the higher level services with containers. I know you guys took your time. Containers are super important because that's going to deal with that. So how do you look at that? You got the innovation in the hardware check containers. How does that all fit in? Because you guys have been making a lot of investments in some of these cloud native projects. What's your position on that? >>You know, it's all part of one common story, John right customers that they want an easy path to delivering impact for their business. Right. And, you know, you've heard us speak a lot over the past few years about how we're really seeing these two different types of customers. We have those customers that really loved to get those foundational core building blocks and stitch them together in a creative way. But then you have more and more customers that they wanna. They wanna operate at a different level, and and that's okay. We want to support both of them. We want to give both of them all the tools that they need. Thio spend their time and put their resource is towards what differentiates their business and just be able to give them support at whatever level they need on the infrastructure side. And it's fantastic that are combination of investments in hardware and services. And now, with Outpost, we can bring those investments even closer to the customer. If you really think about it that way, the possibilities become limitless. >>Yeah, it's not like the simplicity asked, but it was pretty beautiful to the way it looks. It looks nice. Michael. Gotta ask you on your side. A couple of big announcements over that we've been following from pure looking back. You already had the periods of service announcement you bought the port Works was acquisition. Yeah, that's container management. Across the data center, including outposts you got pure is a service is pure. Is the service working with outpost and how and if so, how and what's the consumption model for customers there. >>Yeah, thanks so much, John. And appreciate you following us the way that you do it. Zits meaningful and appreciate it. Listen, you know, I think the customers have made it clear and in AWS is, you know, kind of led the way in terms of the consumption and experience expectations that customers have. It's got to be consumable. They've got to pay for what they use. It's got to be outcome oriented and and we're doing that with pure is a service. And so I think we saw that early and have invested in pure is a service for our customers. And, you know, we look at the way we acquired outposts as ah customer and a partner of AWS aan dat is exactly the same way customers can consume pure. You know, all of our solutions in a, you know, use what you need, pay for what you use, um, environment. And, you know, one of the exciting things about AWS partnership is its wide ranging and one of the things that AWS has done, I think world class is marketplace. And so we're excited to share with this audience, you know, really? On the back of just recent announcement that, pure is the service is available within the AWS marketplace. And so you think about the, you know, simplicity and the consistency that pure and AWS delivered to the market. AWS customers demand that they get that in the marketplace, and and we're proud to have our offerings there. And Port Works has been in the marketplace and and will continue to be showcased from a container management standpoint. So as those workloads increasingly become, you know, the cloud native you know, Dev Ops, Containerized workloads. We've got a solution and to end to support >>that great job. Great insight. Congratulations to pure good moves as making some good moves. Rob, I want to just get to the final word here on Outpost again. Great. Everyone loves this product again. It's a lot of attention. It's really that that puts the operating models cloud firmly on the in the on premise world for Amazon opens up a lot of good conversation and business opportunities and technical integrations or are all around you. So what's your message to the ecosystem out there for outposts? How do I What's the what's the word? I wanna do I work with you guys? How do I get involved? What are some of the opportunities? What's your position? How do you talk to the ecosystem? >>Yeah, You know, John, I think the best way to frame it is we're just getting started. We've got our first year in the books. We've seen so many promising signals from customers, had so many interesting conversations that just weren't possible without outposts. And, uh, you know, working with partners like pure and expanding our outpost. Ready program is just the beginning. Right? We launched back in September. We've We've seen another meaningful set of partners come out. Uh, here it reinvent, and we're gonna continue toe double down on both the outpost business, but specifically on on working with our partners. I think that the key to unlocking the magic of outpost is meeting customers where they are. And those customers are using our partners. And there's no reason that it shouldn't just work when they move there. Their partner based workload from their existing infrastructure right over to the outpost. >>All right, I'll leave it there. Michael saw the VP of worldwide alliances that pier storage congratulations. Great innovation strategy It's easy to do alliances when you've got a great product and technology congratulated. Rob Kearney Key principle product manager. Outpost will be speaking more to you throughout the next couple of weeks. Here at Reinvent Virtual. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Okay. So cute. Virtual. We are the Cube. Virtual. We wish we could be there in person this year, but it's a virtual event. Over three weeks will be lots of coverage. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live from Nashville, Tennessee. It's The Cube, covering Commvault Go 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville. You're watching The Cube, and this is Commvault Go. Third year of the show, 2,000 people here. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, Keith Townsend, and we're happy to welcome to the program two first-time guests. To my immediate left is Robert Brower, who is the vice president and chief-of-staff, and sitting next to him is Wenceslao Lada, who is the president of Worldwide Alliances, new to Commvault, recently. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> All right, so when we talk about alliances, partnerships, it's about the ecosystem, and first of all, you guys have an impressive show floor here. I was talking to your CMO on the open here. We go to quite a lot of shows. We love when we're in the center of the energy here. People were clapping, getting excited. You've got partners showing what they're doing. You've got the technology partners. You've got go-to-market partners. So, Robert, maybe we'll start with you. Tell us a little bit about what you look at the ecosystem, and what brings everybody together for a show like this. >> What brings everybody together is the opportunity for us to be able to create joint success for our customers. We have taken an act in the last 18 months to really pivot towards our alliance partners, with the idea that we should approach with humility. When Hewlitt Packard Enterprise, or when Hitachi or when NetApp or when Cisco is transacting with us, we're a part of a much larger transaction, and it's our responsibility to create joint value, understanding that in that eight-figure deal, we may be six or seven figures of that transaction. We want to create value acceleration through attachment for our partners, create value for our customers, but we want to do so with the understanding that we go into this partnership as an enabler for our success, and the customer's success. And that's really been a strong positive for us, and a big pivot in our corporate emotional stack, if you will: how do we work together more collaboratively to create success for our prospects customers, and ultimately, the alliance partner? >> All right, Wens, since I've talked to some of your partners here, one of the big partners, and I was talking to him offline, and he's like, "Look, one of the reasons we partner "deeply with Commvault is they've got good tech. "And that's why big, traditional companies "want to partner together." You're new to this company. >> Wenceslao: Absolutely. >> What brought you in? What was exciting you? Hopefully something was exciting you about bringing you inside. >> It's a great question. I think that the most important thing is that on my past 25 years in the industry, I've been in several companies. This is the first time I joined a company with a product portfolio. It's so robust, so simple to use, and so appealing to the customers that I think, "That's not a problem." We're here to really accelerate our business through our alliance partners, who are go to market, and really address more and more customers in our day-to-day business. >> So, the business is changing. Digital transformation, digital business. How has that affected the alliances? As you guys are starting to have different conversations with a different part of the business, the focus of your existing customers are changing. How has the conversation changed? >> Great question, if I might start? >> Yeah. >> So, when we look at our traditional partners and traditional partnerships with Hitachi as an OEM, Cisco, Hewlitt Packard Enterprise, those are big infrastructure organizations, and those big infrastructure organizations look at the Cloud with a certain degree of anxiety. Two, three years from now, that concept of raised-floor data center and Rax and Rax and servers, and secondary storage may not exist in the same light that it exists today. We can almost certainly say that. So, the great benefit that we can bring to these partners is helping them with that hybrid IT strategy, where we can provide better software, better movement, less cost and infrastructure into the Cloud, and keep people from learning that Cloud is that expensive place to learn, but rather that we can be part of their Cloud-enabling strategy in a manner that helps them feel like they've got confidence to go into the next three to five years and understand that they can create value on the data layer that says, "Today my secondary storage exists in Rax. "Next year, or two years or three years from now, "It may exist in the Cloud, but I've been part of "the data attach and valuation and control-plane creation." That makes them feel like, "Great, I've got "a long-term play with Commvault, with value, "no matter where the storage resides, "in data center, omnicloud, or back to the data center." >> Yeah, and to add to what Robert was saying, I think that this is also, if you are looking at the customer perspectives, they are demanding more. They are demanding nothing less than that the solution is going to optimize the IT resources, or is going to accelerate their outcomes. But even more important is that they want to have an ecosystem of partners, or alliances, that are going to be able to really help them to navigate and to create that journey that they are moving into the vision that they will have in the future. And I think that is where we are really excited, on creating that ecosystem of partners. >> Yeah, one of the things that's interesting when I look at not only technologies parts but the go-to-market is you're starting to help customers move toward that as a service-consumption model. Certain partners, people obviously would know, okay, AWS, that's how they do things. Companies like HPE have been helping customers move that way. >> Right. >> The channel ... I'd be interested to hear your feedback because they are right in the middle of going from boxed or shrink-wrapped software to subscription models. So, maybe you can give us a little color on how that's going from both sides. >> You want me to start? >> Yeah, start. >> Outstanding. Good question. Thank you, Steve. So, in that context, you're absolutely right. That traditional reseller that worked in the raised floor, that's really started to pivot over the last few years into a service-provider given construct. And that was almost that traditional SP role of "I can be your app layer, I can be your "host to storage layer, I can move your data around." And now, it's becoming much more consumption-based. As they look at the models that have been really pioneered by Amazon, really pioneered by the folks with Microsoft and Azure, that I want the outcome. I don't necessarily want to design a whole plan that says, "I've basically taken data center operations "and given them to you." I just want the outcome, and so being able to help our partners with the playbooks that we're creating around as a service, and being able to work inclusively with those partners that want to make that pivot, we can go there. And for those partners that don't want to make that pivot, they can resell us. And for those customers that are coming to us for the first time, but saying, "You know what? "My unique needs case might be "I only can connect to a data center that's "close to Frankfurt because I'm a German financial concern." Great, we've got a partner in that market that runs our playbook, that can help you. So, as a service for Commvault, it is really about helping to facilitate a channel, to be able to move to that next level without having to be the pioneer taking all the arrows. >> And I think ... I'm sorry. Just to add what Robert was saying. It's not only social as a service, but also in a traditional business. If you are considering the cycles that our traditional partners has been using to put all these solutions together, they've been using many of the most expensive resources that they have when doing testing, doing configuration, doing installation and things like that. And what we are doing is helping them from a technology standpoint, bringing those solutions faster to market, so that we'll be able to be much quicker when bringing that to the customers. Also that we'll be able to redeploy those very expensive resources when something more productive, like professional services, that will help more the customer in terms of the adoption of the solution. Many of you are thinking about, as a service, and also being able to expand all these different solutions through all these different branches of the customer. >> Good point. >> So, big announcements around partnerships with HPE, doing a show, the Callus and Commvault integration, great work from a technology perspective. Great example of the power of alliance. But let's talk about, you mentioned, professional services. How important is professional services, or what role does professional services play at the partner level, now that you guys have more tightly integrated with HPE and your other partners on delivering the technology? Talk to us about professional services. >> Outstanding, happy to do so. So, you could look at the different partners and their needs around professional services and construct a go-to-market model with them. Again, it's about value creation that is better together, with that partner. So, as a for instance, with HPE and Green Lake. And what they do with Point Next. They're very doubled down in terms of, "Hey, we'd like to create value around our services "on the Commvault product, integrated with our "different solution stacks." Perfect, not a problem. If you look at NetApp, NetApp said, "You know what, we're not in that service's business. "We've pivoted away from that. "We want to make sure that your solutions "can actually stand the trial test of "can a customer buy this and use this "without having to leverage in a lot of advanced services?" We had a great meeting yesterday with Cisco, who said the same thing. We're in different theaters where we don't necessarily have a services stack. Can we have our customers buy and successfully consume our joint solutions without having to rely on services to be able to do that? And so, to that end, as the partners that we work with say, "I need this stack," or, "I need this capability "or this go-to-market," our product is versatile. Our depth is sufficiently solid that we can provide that for them and align with what their GTM is. That's one of the reasons why, with the NetApp announcement that you've seen, they've come back and said, "We'd love to have you take on the entire portfolio." Because they did that hard test. Can your product sustain without a large court array of services along with it? We could; they said, "Great, we're in." >> Yeah, and also, if you think about, so they start to show the customer. The customer already have installed this. They already are using some of the software. And what those professional services can help is in two sense. One is how they are going to do the immigration for when you are thinking about hybrid IT, how much of the workloads are going entail, how much are going into secondary, and so on and so forth. So, helping the customer in that, you need to move him from one place to the other and execute and operate that. >> All right, you bring on customers having to make change. Wonder if we could unpack a little bit the appliances because that's one thing that from what I hear, and you can validate for me, Commvault, you want to buy the software from Commvault, or you want to buy the software and the hardware, Commvault, you guys are pretty agnostic 'cause you have a lot of partners that can help do that. Well, when you get into the field and you say, "Okay, wait, I started down with one partner, "and I was buying this server platform of choice, "and now I want to make a change," how easy is it? I'm sure the software is pretty much the same, but the devil's always in the details there. So, help us understand first of all big announcement to expand and mature, number of partners and the number of different options that you have, so walk through that a little bit. And then, how do you deal with the field engagement and the various hardware and software models. >> Got it. So if I can just ... I'm going to restate the question a different way to make sure I've got it. So, if we're talking about alliances and appliances, it's one of those questions of if we're both approaching a prospect, how do we establish an appropriate swim lane so that we don't find ourselves in co-opetition with that particular partner? The secret in the sauce, if you will, is create better together. Keith, you said earlier, the store wants integration with catalysts, and the ability for us to be able to create a really strong value proposition with HPE around their value creation, with both an existing customer base and then new customers they want to acquire. That better-together mantra was something that we worked out with them, and we said, "We will integrate more deeply into your technology stack "than other partners to create success for you." With NetApp, we're working on something quite similar with a specialization around where they're go-to-market is because they have a fantastic story on primary storage, as you know. SolidFire's been a great acquisition for them, and they're saying, "Boy, we'd sure like to see "the attach rates on secondary that we have on primary." One of the reasons being that potential flight to Cloud. How can we create a value solution structure with Commvault? And we're doing that now. Can't go into all of the details, but there's something really exciting happening there. With Cisco, we've aligned with both UCS and HyperFlex for some really neat solutions that, again, create better together swim laning, so that as we talk to that customer, and the customer says, "I like an X, and I need to have a Y pivot," maybe it doesn't have services attached to it, maybe it does, we can create that channel that allows us to not have to find ourselves in that co-opetition sort of a scenario with that partner. And that works not just when we're talking about two sets of direct sellers, selling to a named account, but it also works really well in the channel, too, because we've got mutual channel parters that are transacting on our price book and/or Cisco, HPE, NetApp, and creating that degree of swim-laning, it works. It helps to keep the structure so that 90 percent of those transactions have velocity, and the other 10 percent, we work through. >> So, we've talked a lot about the technology, professional services on top of the technology. Let's talk about support. Day two. There's these alliances. They can get complex, especially as you play across so many different partners. What is the day-to-day relationship between the customer and Commvault, when it comes to supporting backup and recovery? >> Got it, do you-- >> You can take it. >> Okay, I can. Great question, and I appreciate that. And I ran the customer support organization for a number of years, so it's near and dear to my heart. That's a very passionate team. They're very invested in customer success. We've structured our relationships with these alliance partners so that we are that first point of entry for that customer experience around our software. And we have a huge amount of versatility within those different storage stacks. The integration with catalyst, as a for instance, was precipitated by a long and involved enablement and training cycle for our support members throughout the world to be able to understand that software-hardware integration and the stack, so that when a customer is calling in and saying, "I've got this thing, where do I go?" It doesn't turn into vendor-vendor pointing. It rather turns into we will own the problem, and we work the solution. I can speak on experience that the support organization has any number of different JSA, Joint Support Agreements, with the vast variety of tier-one and tier-two infrastructure providers. So, we can interact very seamlessly. We own the solution. We own the customer challenge until it's resolved. And we work and solve actually a large number of hardware issues, even though the first call came into Commvault because it is the customer experience that we want to own and make sure it's successful. >> And I think that importance as well, is that we are yes reporting any of the way of how the customer is going to consume our software. So it can be directly from us. It can be through one of our alliance partners. It can be through one of our partners, or it can be also as a service. So, the most important thing, and relevant, is that the customer who's reported, we understand how the infrastructure is used, and we obviously can, as Robert says, basically fix all the different problems at the first call. >> And Robert, thank you so much for joining us-- >> Sure, Keith, thank you. >> Congratulations on the announcement and the expanded partnerships that you have here. All right, Keith and I will be back with lots more coverage here from Commvault Go. Thank you for watching The Cube. >> Robert: Thank you, gentlemen. >> Wenceslao: Thank you. (upbeat techno music)