from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation [Music] hi buddy this is Dave Volante and welcome to this cute conversation you know the we've been following a company called Activia for quite some time now they they've really popularized the concept of copy data management really innovative Boston based Waltham based company and with me Brian Regan who's the chief marketing officer and all 40 who's the newly minted chief revenue officer of actifi Oh guys great to see you I wish we were face to face that you're you're you're June event but this will have to do yeah you bet yeah so you know Brian you've been on the cube a bunch I'm gonna start with Paul if that's okay Paul you know just let's talk a little bit about your your background you've you've done a number of stance at a variety of companies you know big companies like IBM and others as well what attracted you to Activia in all honesty I've been a software guy and candidly a data specific leader for many many years and so IT infrastructure particularly associated around data has always been sort of my forte for fun on words there and and so Activia was just smack dab in the middle of that right and so when I was looking for my next adventure you know I had an opportunity to to meet with a shower CEO and Founder and describe and discuss kind of what activity was all about and candidly the the number of connections that we had that were the same a lot of our OEM relationships with people that I actually worked with and for and some that worked for me historically so it was almost this perfect world right and I'm a Boston guy so it was in my in my old backyard and it was just a perfect yeah it was a perfect match for what I was looking for which was really a small growth company that was trying to you know get to the next level that had compelling technology in a space that I was super familiar with and understanding and articulate the value proposition well as we're saying in Boston Paulie we got to get you back here I know I pack my cock let's talk about the let's talk about the climate right now I mean nobody expected this of course I mean it's funny I was I saw ash and an event in in Boston last fall we were talking like hey what do you expected for next year yeah a little bit of softening but you know nobody expected this sort of Black Swan but you guys I just got your press release you put out you had a good you had a good quarter you had a record first quarter um what's going on in the marketplace how you guys doing yeah well I think that today more than than ever businesses are realizing that data is what is actually going to carry them through this crisis and that data whether it's changing the nature of how companies interact with their customers how they manage through their supply chain and in frankly how they take care of their employees is all very data-centric and so businesses that are protecting that data that are helping businesses get faster access to that data and ultimately give them choice as to where they manage that data on-premises in the cloud and hybrid configuration those are the businesses that are really going to be top of a CIOs mind I think our q1 is a demonstration that customers voted with their wallets in their confidence in ectopy Oh has an important part of their data supplied nopal I want to come back to you first of all your your other people know you're next you're next Army Ranger so thank you for your service that's awesome you know I was talking to Frank's lute man we interviewed me other day and he was sharing with me sort of how he manages and and he says the other managed by a playbook he's a situational manager and that's something that he learned in the military well this is weird this is a situation okay and that really is kind of how you're trained and and of course we've never seen anything like this but you're trained to deal with things that you've never seen before so how are you seeing organizations generally actifi Oh specifically going to manage through this process what are some of the moves that you're advising recommending give us some insight there yeah so I'm it's really interesting it's a it's funny that you mentioned my military background I was just having this discussion with one of my leaders the other day that you know one of the things that they trained for in the military is the eventualities of chaos right and so when you when you do an exercise they we will literally tap the leader on the shoulder and say okay you're now dead and without that person being allowed to speak they take a knee and the unit has to go on and so what happens is you you learn by muscle memory like how to react in time suffice it or and you know this is a classic example of leadership and crisis and so um so it's just it's just interesting like so to me you have a playbook I think everybody needs to start with a playbook and then start with a plan I can't remember if it was Mike Tyson but one of them one of my famous quotes was you know let you know plan is good until somebody punches you in the face that's the reality of what just happened the business across the globe is it just got punched in the face and so you got a playbook that you rely on and then you have to remain nimble and creative and candidly opportunistic and from a leadership perspective I think you can't lose your confidence right so I've watched some of my friends and of what some other businesses crippled in the midst of this and I'm because they're afraid instead of instead of looking at this in my first commentary that our first staff meeting Brian if I remember it was this okay so what makes active feel great in disembark like not why is it not great right and so we didn't get scared we jumped right into it we you know we adjusted our playbook a little bit and candidly we just had a record quarter and we just down here the honestly date we took down deals in every single geography around the globe to include Italy I mean so it was insane it was really fun okay so this wasn't just one monster deal that gave you that record Porter is really a broad-based the demand yeah so if you you know if you dug underneath the covers you would see that we had the largest number of transactions ever in the first quarter we had the largest average selling price in the first quarter ever we had the largest contribution from our panel partners and our OEM partners ever and we had the highest number ever and so it was a it was really a nice truly balanced performance across the globe and across the size of deal sets and candidly across industries interesting I mean you use the term opportunistic and and I think you're right on I mean you obviously you don't want to be chasing ambulances at the same time you know we've talked to a lot of CEOs and essentially what they're doing and I'd like to get your feedback on this Brian you you you're kind of reassessing the ideal profile of a customer you're reassessing your value proposition in the context of the current pandemic and and I noticed that you guys in your press release talked about cyber resiliency you talked about digital initiatives you know data center transformations etc so maybe you could talk a little bit about that Brian did you do those things how did you do those things what kind of pace were you guys at how did you do it remotely with everybody working from home give us some color on that sure and you know Ashley if you were here you would probably remind us that Activia was born in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis so we we have essentially been bookended by two black swans over the last decade the and the lessons we learned in 2008 are every bit as as relevant today everything starts with cost containment in hospital and in protection of the business and so cio is in the midst of this shock to the system I think we're very much looking at what are the absolutely vital critical initiatives and what is a nice to have and I'm going to pause on my step and invest entirely in the critical mission and the critical initiatives tended to be around getting people safely working for remotely getting people safe access to their systems and their applications in their data and then ultimately it also became about protecting the systems from malicious individuals and state actors up unfortunately as we've seen in other times of crisis this is when crime and cyber crime particularly tends to spike particularly against industries that don't have the strong safeguards in place to to really ensure the resiliency their applications so we very much went a little bit back to the 2008 playbook around helping people get control of their costs helping people continue to do the things they need to do at a much more infrastructure light manner but also really emphasize the fact that if you are under attack or if you are concerned that you're infected but you don't know when you know instant access to data and a time machine that can take you back and forth to those points in time is something that is incredibly valuable so so let's >> cyber resiliency so specifically what is aekta video doing for its customers from a product standpoint capabilities maybe it's part of the the 10 see announcement as well but but can you can you give us some specifics on where you fit in let's take that use case cyber resiliency yeah absolutely so I think there's there's a staff of capabilities when it comes to cyber resiliency at the lowest level you need a time machine because most people don't know when they're in fact and so the ability to go back in time test the recoverability of data test the validity of the data is step one step two is once you've found the clean point being able to resume operations being able to resume the applications operation instantly or very rapidly is the next phase and that's something that Activia was founded on this notion of instant access to data and then the third phase and this is really where our partnerships really shine is you probably want to go back and mitigate that risk you want to go back and clean that system you want to go back and find the infection and eliminate it and that's where our partnership with IBM freezing resiliency services and their cyber incident recovery solution which takes the activity of platform and then rappers and a complete managed services around it so they can help the customer not only get their their systems and applications back on their feet but clean the systems and allow them to resume operations normally on a much safer and more stable okay so so that's interesting so Paul Paul was it kind of new adoptions was it was it increases from existing customers kind of a combination and you talk to that yeah totally so like ironically to really come clean we are the metrics that we had in the first quarter were very similar through the metrics that we see historically so the mix need our existing customer base and then our new customer acquisition were very similar to our historical metrics which candidly we were a little surprised by we anticipated um that the majority of our business would come from that safe harbor of your existing customer base but candidly we had a really nice split which was great which meant that you know a value proposition was resonating not only with our existing customer base where you would expect it but also in in any of our new customers as well who had been evaluating us that either accelerated or or just continue down the path of adoption during the time frame of Koba 19 across industries I would say that again um there was there were there were some industries I would say that pushed pause and so the ones that you can imagine that accelerated during during this past period were the ones you would think of right so financial institutions primarily as well as some some of the medical so some of those transactions healthcare and medical they accelerated along with financial institutions and then I would say that that we did have some industries that push pause and you can probably guess what some of those are a majority of those were the ones that we're dealing with the small and mid-sized businesses or consumer facing businesses things like retail stuff like that where we typically do have a pretty nice residence in a really nice value proposition but there were there were definitely some transactions that we saw basically just pause like we're going to come back but overall the yeah the feedback was just in general it felt like any other quarter and it felt like just pretty normal as strange as that sounds because I know speaking to a lot of my friends and gear companies your software companies they didn't have that experience but we did pretty well that's interesting I mean you're right I mean certain industries Airlines I'm interviewing a cio of major resort next week you know really interested to hear how they're you know dealing with this but those those are obviously depressed and they've dialed everything down but but we've we were one of the first to report that work from home pivot it didn't it didn't you know buffer the decline in IT spending that were expecting to be down you know maybe as much as 5% this year but it definitely offset it what about cloud we're seeing elevated levels in cloud demand guys you know have offerings there what are you seeing in cloud guys you want that yeah I'll start and then fall please please weigh in I think that'd be the move to the cloud that we've been witnessing and the acceleration of the MOOC table that we've been whipped over the past several years probably ramped up in intensity over the last two months The Improv been on the you know 18 to 24 month road map have all of a sudden been accelerated into maybe this year but in terms of the wholesale you know everything moves to cloud and I abandoned my on-premises estate I I don't think we've seen that quite yet I think the the world is still hybrid when it comes to cloud although I do think that the beneficiaries of this are probably the the non number one or number two cloud providers but the rest of the hyper scalers who are fighting for market share because now they have an opportunity to perhaps google for example a strategic partner of ours has a you know a huge offering when it comes to enabling work home and remote work so leveraging that as a platform and then extending into their enterprise offerings I think gives them a wedge that the you know Amazon might not have so this it's an acceleration of interest but I think it's just a continuation of the trend of seeing four years yeah and I would add a little bit if the you know IBM held their think conference this past week I don't know if you had an opportunity to participate there one of our OEM partners and oh yeah because you know when our the CEO presented his kind of opening his opening remarks it was really about digital transformation and he really he really kind of put it down to two things and said you know any business that's trying to transform is either talking about hybrid cloud but they're talking about AI and machine learning and that's kind of it right and so every digital business is talking in one of those categories and so when I look 2q1 it's interesting that we really didn't see anything other than as brian talked about all the cloud business which is some version of an acceleration but outside of that the customers that are in those industries that are in position to accelerate and double down during this opportunity didn't so and those that did not you know kind of just peeled back a little bit but overall I still I would agree with with ibm's assessment of the market that you know those are kind of the two hot spots and have a cloud is hot and the good news is we've got a nice guy operating Molloy yeah Arvind Krista talked about the the in and it has it maybe not I think but he talked earlier in his remarks on the earnings call just in Publix Davis that IBM must win the battle the architectural battle the hybrid cloud and also that he wants to lead with a more technical sell essentially which is submitted to me those those two things are great news for you guys obviously you know Red Hat is the linchpin of that I want to ask you guys about your your conference data-driven so we were there last year it was a great really great intimate event of course you know you hand up the physical events anymore so you've pushed to September you're going all digital would give us the update on on that program we're um we're eager to have the cube participate in our September event so I'm sure we'll be talking more about that in the coming weeks but awesome we love it we exactly so you can tell Frank to put that so we we've been participating in some of the other conferences I think most notably last week learning a lot and and really trying to cherry pick the best ideas and the best tactics for putting on a digital event I think that as we look to September and as we look to put on a really rich digital event one of the things that is I think first and foremost in our minds is we want to actually produce more on-demand digital content particularly from a technology standpoint our technology sessions last year were oversubscribed the digital format allows people to stream whenever they can and frankly as many sessions as they as they might so I think we can be far more efficient in terms of delivering technical content or the users of our technology and then we're also eager to have as we've done with data driven in the years past our customers tell the story of how they're using data and this year certainly I think we're going to hear a lot of stories about in particular how they use data during this incredible you know crisis and and hopefully renewal from crisis well one of my favorite interviews last year your show is the the guys from draft King so hopefully they'll be back on it will have some football to talk about let's hope I mean I want it I want to end with just sort of this notion of you know we've been so tactical the last eight weeks right I'm you guys too I'm sure just making sure you're there for customers making sure your employees are ok but as we start to think about coming out of this you know into a post probe Adaro it looks like it's gonna be with us for a while but we're getting back the you know quasi opening so I'm hearing you know hybrid is here to stay we agree for sure cyber resiliency is very interesting I think you know one of the things we've said is that that companies may sub optimize near-term profitability to make sure that they've got the flexibility and resilience business resiliency in place you know that's obviously something that is I think good news for you guys but but I'll start with Paul and then maybe Brian you can bring us home how do you see this sort of emergence from this lockdown and into the post ghovat era yeah so this is a really interesting topic for me in fact I've had many discussions over the last couple weeks with some of our investors as well as our executive staff and so my personal belief is that the way buying and selling has occurred for IT specifically at the enterprise level is about to go through a transformation no different than we watched the transformation of SAS businesses when you basically replace the cold-calling salesperson with an inside and you know inbound marketing kind of effort followed up with SDR and vdr because what we're finding is that our clients now are able to meet more frequently because we don't have the friction of airplane ride or or physical building to go through and so like that that whole thing has been removed from the sales process and so it's interesting to me that one of the things that I'm starting to see is that the amount of activity that our sales organization is doing and the amount of physical calls that were going on they happen to be online however you couple that with the cost savings of not traveling around the globe and not being in offices and and I really think that those companies that embrace this new model are gonna find ways to penetrate more customers in a less expensive way and I do believe that the professional sales enterprise salesperson of tomorrow is gonna look at then it looks today and so I'm super excited to be in a company that is smack dab in the middle of selling to enterprise clients and and watching us learn together how we're gonna buy sell and market to each other in this post public way because I I'm the only thing I really do know it's just not gonna be the way it used to be what is it gonna look like I think all of us are placing bets and I don't think anybody has the answer yet but it's gonna look different for sure they're very very thoughtful comments and so Brian you know our thinking is the differentiation and the war yes it gets one in digital how is that affecting you know sort of your marketing and your thing around that we we fortunately decided coming into 2020 our fiscal 21 that we were actually going to overweight digital anyway we felt that it was far more effective we were seeing far better conversion rates we saw you know way better ROI in terms of very targeted tentative digital campaigns or general-purpose ABM type of efforts so our strategy had essentially been set and and what this provided us is the opportunity to essentially redirect all of the other funds individually so you know we have essentially a two-pronged marketing you know attack Frank now which is you know digital creating inbounds and B DRS that are calling on those in bounds that are created digital and so it's a you know it's going to be a really interesting transition back when physical events if and when they do actually come back into form you know how much we decide to actually go back into that that been I think that you know to someone to some extent we've talked about this in the past II you know the physical events and the the sheer spectacle and this year you know audacity of having to spend a million dollars just to break through that was an unsustainable model and so I think this is this is hastening perhaps the decline or demise of really silly marketing expense and getting back to telling telling customers what they need to know to help their an assist their buying journey in their investigation journey into a new technology I mean the IT world is hybrid and I think the events world is also going to be hybrid to me nice intimate events you know they're gonna live on but they're also gonna have a major digital component to them I'm very excited that you know we're a lot of learnings now in digital especially around events and by September the a lot of the the bugs are gonna be worked out you know we've been going to it so it feels like 24/7 but really excited to have you guys on thanks so much really looking forward to working with you in in September it's data-driven so guys thanks a lot for coming on the cube oh my gosh thank you Dave so nice it's so nice to be here thank you alright pleasure you did thank you everybody thank you and thanks for watching this is Dave Volante for the cube and we'll see you next time [Music]

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to this breaking analysis in this cube insights powered by ETR I'm Dave Volante and this episode is about data protection you might be saying Dave why are you gonna bore us with the conversation about backup well it's interesting the market is actually quite hot you know over the last 18 to 24 months there's been well over a billion dollars probably 1.3 1.4 billion dollars raised just from companies like rubric Kohi City Dhruva certo and a number of other startups like clew mio is a name you might not have heard of and I'm gonna mention a couple of others so you have the situation where these upstarts particularly rubric and cohesive er really challenging the install based players and they're spending a lot of money on marketing engineering and sales and they're going to market and they're really shaking things up and I want to talk about that dynamic share with you some ETR data and talk about some of the other players like veem who was you know a rocket ship because of the virtualization trend how are they faring in this kind of new market and why is this market gaining so much attention today and what does this mean for incumbents what does it mean for customers who can achieve escape velocity and what are some of the likely outcomes that we see the market is very confused right now if you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant the and compare that to for instance the Forrester wave del EMC is not even in the Forrester wave the Gartner Magic Quadrant has rubric you know not as a leader and and it's just all over the place and so what I want to do is use some ETR data and some context from the cube to share with you our audience what we are seeing in the marketplace and kind of what it all means so let's get into it Alex if you bring up the first slide I first want to make a statement about the overall storage market the the ETR data set which is incredible doesn't drill down into backup although it does have pure play backup vendors in the data set so I want to start with storage because it's a it's the superset of the data protection market so what this chart shows is the all the sectors and it shows the net scores remember net score is they they ask every every quarter are you spending more you're spending less so he's spending the same they subtract the less from the more and that gives you net score so this is the net score for the three periods of October 18 survey July 19 survey in the October 19 survey and you can see the red line shows you know storage is kind of on the back burner yeah it's up ticking a little bit from previous surveys but it's got a next score of 18 that's crappy I mean it's not really a hot market and I've talked in previous episodes and breaking analysis as to why I really two main factors that I cited cloud guys eating away at the traditional storage array business and flash injected so much capacity and performance into the equation that data center managers are saying hey I don't really need any more storage right now so storage is kind of on the back burner you can see I blew it up here and you can see sort of how it's playing you see the hot sectors are analytics cloud computing container platforms data warehousing is is making a comeback I've talked about snowflake on previous breaking analyses machine learning and AI and new workloads robotic process automation even virtualization these are the hot sectors that are that are driving spending but I will tell you storage ultimately is going to be there it won't be down forever because people are always going to need storage these new workloads are gonna require new storage and obviously backup if you go to the next slide Alex you can see some of the vendors here so we've sort of established ok storage is is right now it's down it's not one of the hottest sectors but you can see there's some companies in here that are pretty hot rubric leads the list with a net score of 53 percent now the shared end might be a little hard for you to read here but the shared end out of the last survey 1,300 respondents from the ETR survey answered what there's you know spending intentions were and then the individuals mentioning specific companies in this case rubric 55 so it's kind of a small shared in you can see pure storage a company that we've talked about previously you know continues to to show strength you know 48.1% down slightly from you know the previous quarters but still really the only clear share gainer in the overall a primary storage market again rubric you can see Nutanix is up on the list veeam is actually quite impressive I'm going to show you some data in a minute that I think will impress you in terms of Eames continued staying power you see vcn on there sis goes on the list God knows why sis goes on the list their storage is not you know perceived as as leading but they do have offerings and Cisco so big people just kind of yeah we're buying from Cisco you see cookie City their little dip this past survey but still very strong again I'll show you some other data there you know etc so you can see that the point is even though storage is down there are a couple of shining stars like rubric like Nutanix pure storage veem Kohi City etc so let's let's dig into that a little bit before I do that I just want to share with you some trends on this slide with regard to the the backup market you know i underscore backup because it's no longer just the backup market its evolving so there's pressure on the overall storage market but but the data protection is actually really hot right now it's it's it's captured a lot of venture capital startups are moving in I'll mention a few that you might not have heard of why well several reasons one is the data explosion continues it's it's it's growing at an exponential rate and it's kind of nonlinear digital transformations are all about how you leverage data and so if you're making your business a data business in a digital business well you better have a way to protect it so things like ransomware are coming into play and people are really concerned obviously about ransomware so so data protection of evolves and expands sort of transcends back up into business continuity cloud and hybrid cloud are some other trends that I'll talk about in more detail that are driving opportunities for what we're traditionally known as backup and really now evolving into sort of these new areas last decade it was about moving from from tape to disc you know tape sucks that was kind of the data domain mantra and they were the hot company of last decade they got you know they did an IPO they reached escape velocity they sold for 2.5 billion you know but today you know the data domain platform that EMC bought and and now is Dell EMC is kind of old school right it's these new guys that are coming after that so so well well data domain pioneer data deduplication and higher performance back up moving to storage today it's a whole new conversation and people have come to the realization that the primary and active storage is only about 20% of the stored data all the all the less hot data I don't want to say inactive stuff it's not cold storage but it's files and objects and copies and replicas and and backups that's 80% of the marketplace today it's in terms of the volume of data not necessarily the spend you know OLTP stuff primary storage is expensive flash arrays expensive but huge opportunity especially in terms of data growth that's where all the data growth is happening all that unstructured data so today the conversation is evolving to data protection data management data assurance particularly with containers so you think about spinning up containers spinning down containers you know dozens hundreds thousands of containers how do you keep track of that stuff how do you protect that how do you assure that your data is not leaking that you're not exposed and so that's a really hot area that you're seeing a number of startups focus on so real focus on recovery becomes much more important for a digital business how fast can I recover security compliance this notion of data sharing CDM on this slide which is stands for copy data management a practice that was really popularized by actifi Oh DevOps really supporting DevOps through a data management platform being able to give live copies or near live copies of data so that you know tests can be tested on you know much more fresh data in that in compressing that cycle time analytics becomes more important I talked about ransomware before well you can look at the the backup corpus and do analytics on that to see if there are anomalies in anomalous behavior just in terms of bad actors coming in so all this stuff joined with cloud and hybrid cloud and is put a bridging the legacy business and it's bringing out a lot of new challengers to the incumbents so let's take a look at some of that data from ETR Alex if you go to the next slide this is the ETR data set on backup vendors so what I've done here is it is pulled out of storage the pure-play data protection folks so I can you know call in backup vendors they hate when they call them backup know we're much more than backup it's where data management now data management means a lot of things to a lot of people but but nonetheless they are expanding and transcending pure backup so so credit to them this is the net score timeline from January 2017 to the latest October survey from enterprise technology research and you can see here I've pulled our rubric cohesively veem CommVault and Veritas and rubric leads as they say with 53% net score followed by Veen 44% so you can see Veeam really hanging tough though he said he just relat relat of lis new to the survey jumped up jumped down a little bit in in this quarter you'll see that you'll see that in the et our data anyone get too freaked out about it I think he said he still got some some tailwind and cementum momentum as does rubric but look at Veen Dean's ascendancy came from really VMware they were the VMware specialists and they were all virtualized and now you know they do bare metal they're doing cloud and multi cloud and and and they backup you know office 365 and and and so that's the SAS platform but look at how well they've held up quite impressive there with Veen made have made a major push into the enterprise kind of pivoted back to SMB but still does a lot of business in the enterprise and you can see them showing up here what's relevant to me is that the the shared end in other words out of the 1,300 and the total survey how many are responding to these vendors rubric 55 relatively small veeam 155 much larger so a bigger install base cohesive 42 kind of just getting started in the ETA dataset CommVault 105 so carve-outs a 700 million dollar company and revenues on a trailing 12-month basis they get about a 2.2 billion dollar market cap they just bought hedvig they're moving toward a SAS model they launched a product called metallic they get a very very large install base you can see their net scores yeah we're there holding relatively well they're smaller obviously they're lower than those top three and then you can see Veritas Veritas is the big whale in the business they kind of mostly almost a pure play software company they do have an appliance but they really are the the leader a leader here and have had a big market they went private they got bought by semantics semantics didn't know what to do with them they fumbled around with it they did a private equity deal you know that was going okay but they had some management turnover a private equity you know squeeze them a little bit even though they made some investments in the platform and so Veritas has you know some challenges they have to serve the install base but at the same time they got to compete with the new guys and all the new guys cohesively and rubric in particular are attacking you know the veritas install base you know certainly CommVault and as well Dell and EMC you can't have a discussion really around leadership and backup and data protection without talking about Delhi and C they're so large so Alex if you go to the next slide you can see the net score for Dell EMC the N here is 348 much much larger than some of the other guys that I just mentioned I'm actually look at Veritas 97 even though I have a large install base so Dell EMC but here's the caveat this is all of Delhi MC storage so not just the pure play back up the previous slide I was showing you pure play data protection vendors this is all of Dell EMC so it includes all their primary stuff all their flash storage all their storage not the other parts of their business not the compute and analytics and other stuff just storage so I'm using this as a proxy okay so this is not Dells data protection business only and so what let me make some comments there and I'll comment on Dell data protection business you can see it came out of the downturn on the past 2009 big optic and Joe toots used to say we're gonna come out stronger we're gonna invest through the downturn we got the cash we're gonna come out stronger that's exactly what happened they came out very strong but then you know cash flow started to get squeezed they expanded their product portfolio it was like product du jour all these mega launches and it just got too confusing for customers Salesforce got confused they got less productive and any an Adele or EMC at the time was really relying on VMware it's the value in Dell and I'm sorry I keep saying Dell value in EMC at the time was really in VMware and you could see that kind of steady decline in the net score and that's what happened to Elliott management came in they squeezed EMC kind of forced him forced her hand and then Dell ended up taking in private let me make some comments about the Dell acquisition and specifically Dell emcs data protection business Dell MC took its eye off the ball in storage generally but specifically in the data protection business it fell behind it wasn't investing fast enough it had some management changes that put Beth Phelan in charge a couple years ago now and her task was okay sure she was tasked with shoring up this business so but they had to get some new products out they had to focus on you know some of the the lower end of the market and then have to refocus on the higher end of the market so they've really begun to get their act together again in in data protection and really refreshing the data domain piece of the portfolio bringing Alomar and data domain to get and becoming much more competitive having said that they lost some ground okay so they've got that same challenge challenges Veritas they've not only got the new guys coming at them with this modern you know data platform they've got to service the existing install basin it's going to manage that cash flow they're now a public company again so a lot of pressure on those guys I want to go back to the to the previous chart Alex if you will and then is the one that shows you know rubric cohesive veem CommVault and and Veritas the the pure plays there's some other dynamics that I want to talk to talk about here HPE exited the software business it's it's its course offer a business it's sold off the Micro Focus and as part of that it's sold off data protector when it did that it opened up a whole new partnership opportunity for these emerging companies particular cohesive and veeam are actually reselling through HPE HP he's got a massive channel and those two companies are doing very well there I said you can't talk about data protection without talking about Dell EMC same thing for IBM you got to talk about IBM IBM is a huge install base and IBM free but Tivoli years ago Frank Moss's company and then they served mainframes and it was this big complicated platform kind of still is and so IBM had to make a move so it it it was getting killed in the marketplace by Veeam in particular so it created spectrum protect Plus and an IBM is really gone after software-defined it's it's it's it's begun to modernize its platform going after containers as I mentioned is a hot area but it's still got that same problem it's got to service the install base and so they're sort of doing that balancing act but it definitely had to you know refresh the portfolio and it's done a good job there with spectrum protect plus a couple of the companies that I haven't mentioned Dhruva is getting into that whole data management space so cohesively and rubric kind of redefining back up into data management theme goes back to the basics really talks about backup in data protection data management as being the future so it's kind of Dee trying to deep position rubric and cohesive as as you know much more in the future and not here today and so they're sort of playing that marketing game and very effectively as you can see by its net scores again Dhruva hopping on the the data management day bandwagon certo kind of a dr replication expert Klum you know is calling BS and all these guys is saying we're going pure sass model and and Klum you know does a sass for pure sass pure software for just AWS small company but it's raised a bunch of dough it's raised about 50 million dollars I think but here's some other names you might not have heard of caste ni o Valero trillion ease guys are going hard after containers and what I referred to earlier as data assurance so the big question is who's going to be able to achieve escape velocity for the for the upstarts who's going to be able to hold serve for the the incumbents let me make a couple of comments on that I think storage eventually is going to bounce back as I say some of those hot emerging workload areas like AI they they're gonna need storage you know analytics is gonna be driving you know the need for these types of things security data surance data protection service storage will theirs don't bet against the data so storage will I think eventually you know bounce back and unlike compute where Intel makes all the margin storage is more like networking where you get really good margins it's a you know 60 Plus percent gross margin business pure storage has almost 70 percent gross margins cloud is the wild card here I predict you're gonna see the cloud vendors begin to dramatically expand you know their their portfolios and you know use beyond just gonna s3 simple object storage okay yeah we got elastic you know a block store EBS from Amazon you know Microsoft has you know the you know similar store just as Google they are gonna double down on storage they're gonna they're gonna look at storage as a bigger opportunity and that is a wild card it could you know continue to pressure the traditional storage guys but look let's face it it's a hybrid world still ton of stuff going on Prem so I think that that the the overall market will bounce back I think data protection as a subset and data management is going to grow faster it has some tailwind I think it's got an expanding Tam and those tail winds are digital data digital business security data assurance this new management capability that I talked about DevOps and contain a protection container platforms as I showed you earlier and the ETR data is one of the hottest areas going and I think you're gonna see some consolidation you saw CommVault bought Hedvig you're gonna see some exits veeam is now talking about doing an IPO it just took in a half a billion dollars in investment so its investors are gonna want an exit so are cohesive ease and rubrics which together have raised almost a billion dollars so you're gonna see some some M&A I think specialists like zero and and Dhruva are probably gonna be B targets I think you're still gonna see Dell become much much more aggressive kind of getting their act together the big incumbents IBM you know Veritas refreshing their portfolio again their challenge is the innovators dilemma so I do think you're gonna see some at least one maybe two the the favorites there would be cohesive near rubric is achieve escape velocity I don't think there's enough room for three to be like blockbuster IPOs that that that can survive long term but I think this data management thing has legs and we're gonna continue to watch it here thanks to you for watching thanks to our friends at ETR for sharing this data is Dave Volante for cube insights powered by ETR we'll see you next time