live from Miami Beach Florida Biman 2019 brought to you by beam welcome back to sunny Miami everybody you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we like to go out to the events extract the signal from the noise and we're here at Vemma on 2019 I'm Dave Volante with my co-host this is day 2 Peter Burris and I have been covering wall-to-wall coverage with the cube folks from net APIs are here Jeff McCullough who's the vice president of Americas partner sales for net app and our good friend Keith Norby who runs alliances for net up guys great to see you thanks for coming on thanks for having us so Keith let's start with you V has been a partner of yours for a while now you guys go to market together year you have always been very partner friendly particularly when it comes to data protection but what's the state of the partnership today yeah this is something that we'd looked at a couple years ago and got into a very much more strategic relationship with veem over a year ago kind of work through a lot of ways to reconnect and establish a better together and this is something that we think is a strategic opportunity is kind of backed by a lot of the data you see at this show talking about you know organizations are gonna change roughly 60% of the organization is going to change their platform because of cost complexity reasons and together we've been working with Veeam to figure out how to deliver data protection for a data fabric and and IDC validates that in a number of ways that we can unpack here on this on the show or in the conversations with customers and and we've gotten great reaction to it and Jeff you lead America's partner sales from North America South America the whole kit and kaboodle talk more about your role sure well my responsibility is net at partners I am I'm successful when our partners successful are successful so everything I do is all around putting our partners in the position of you know executing being successful within that brand certainly being profitable right having profitable strong businesses and and growing right growing and taking taking market share and and helping them expand and grow their respective business law you guys have dramatically increased the percentage of your sales that come through the channel over the last you know 10 10 12 years yes pretty significantly and there's a fundamental part of your strategy stager at this executive level so yeah for sure you know channel is its core to what we do you know when we go to market you know with developing our products or executing our marketing plans it's all around how do we go execute with partners right whether it's the tools the partners need the pricings the programs to help them go engage in the market that leads to man generation and we're at various stages in all these but you know what I think you'll see consistently from the partners that you know certainly will talk and talk about their net businesses we generally lead in profitability across our partner base and we absolutely lead in terms of total profitability when you include things like services attached and how we go and execute on us partner delivered services strategy so you know from I always say NetApp is it's not just a product category it's a whole economy for our channel and it puts people to work it allows them to expand and grow their teams and it's it's a critical part of many many of the partners that are here today at veeneman certain v-mon and and certainly in the marketplace and your partner friendly and assess that you don't have a huge services organization that's competing with your channel i mean that's a jerk yeah we put partner services in the forefront of everything we do Keith you talked about better together yeah what does that mean just in terms of engineering integration go to market I mean how did you sort over the last two years you know get better together what specific actions were you guys taking I think you got to look at it first from kind of the customer in the markets in and you got a look at what's the dynamic that requires change right that sort of shapes what your PRD and your Mardis are to make a product in this case you know we've got platforms that have incredible snapshot technologies so to me it really starts there with simplifying the way that you get the first copy of data and then simply working with the strengths that veem has and their platforms and making sure that we have great option ality between our replication and other snapshot technologies their replication tech to be able to give a level of flexibility for this data fabric to come to life you know no matter if you've got the traditional data center that's got these enterprise apps like at sa P Hana or others or you built the next generation data center like on that FH CI and you're building up scale out via more private cloud or you've got the hyper scalar cloud you know with our cloud volumes you know we have options on how we get data throughout the copy process of primary to secondary to you know cloud and tertiary data so you know to us it was about really making that as simple and as pre-wired as possible via the api's and then really making that easy for partners to go and grab on to to make it easy for someone to buy us because you always want to build something that people want to buy no one wants to be sold any of this stuff and so building the right thing that people want to buy the next step then with Jeff and reason why is so critical to this is getting that ready for the partners be able to have an easy process with their customers that frankly they love people hate to be sold they love to buy yeah let's talk about they love to buy one of the challenges that the entire industry has is we move through the significant transformation is customers user organizations or themselves in the midst of huge transformations institutional transformations technology transformations relationship with their business transformation mission transformation just starting with this whole role that the channel is has been playing it's going to play how will the channel be an increasing source of value add in the deal yeah how's that playing out to help these customers you know smooth their changes yeah and I think you know I was just watching the news this morning right target announced their earnings and a big part of their earnings announcement was the improvement they made in customer interaction through digital platforms right the ability to order online pick up in the store or order online and have it delivered same-day right and these are and it's just you know one example you can go down the list of customers that have really used transformation to change their business right and you know Chipotle who's trans you know they've transformed burritos now and a lot of their successes come through digital transformation platforms so you know the evidence is overwhelming that digital transformation drives better results and we've done a lot of study at this right we we have lots of detail around customers that know how to use data and you know that the basic fact is one out of ten customers is in a position to actually leverage data effectively right this is all of the research we've done along you know with partners with with other companies the other nine need help and this is where channel partners come in this is what I tell partners all the time is this digital transformation wave is real the results are real and the customers need to move is is real and so they play a role in can play a role in helping customers accelerate that digital transformation and so our portfolio is all around accelerating customers and their ability to leverage data to transform their business and partners through both of the portfolio that they sell but then the partner driven services that we promote and drive you know really stand out in the forefront of being able to help a customer execute these these really tough strategies and in you know the thing that reason why customers love partners is partners bring choices right and you know for us as vendors we have to deal with the other side of that which is partners have choices and who they sell so we represent a portfolio that is forward thinking it aligns to where the market is going the lines to the tough problems that customers have and it's you know in its a position that allows partners to be profitable and and make money helping customers transform and deliver their own success but it's got to be more than just partners cat create choices and here's one explain what I mean by that it's increasingly your typical CIO medium-sized company large size company which is where we spend most of our time is thinking in terms of what is going to bring me value today and also generate a stream of value for me in the future so I need choice now but options for the future that are relevant and meaningful and so partners increasingly have to be part of that options equation how are they going to create options for customers and you know one of the nice things about the relationship that you have the theme is that you are a partner to veem and presumably you're going to help Veen customers create additional types of options through this expanding folio of value that you guys have so so talk about that dynamic because it really requires an even greater dependency on that customer partner engagement including you know the dependency the beam has on on you guys yeah doing it maybe start with just the veem partnership partnership yeah I think you know which we create the conditions with which I think a partner comes to life with what we've tried to do in in the product building solutions and then trying to develop the go-to-market around the partners ability to go meet the market and what the market is asking for in such you know the partners have natural services on the front side of the assessments a bit like trying to help you plan your 401 K they help you like see what kind of data you don't even see we have a wealth of partners that just have incredible skills there and then as they take that through our solution we do everything we can to make that process easy to match our technology to that design requirement and then afterwards the partners always have these these great capabilities for things like you know a one call or a managed service to help take even more complexity off the table for people to just live with the ability to have data protected across all spectrums of where they have data live so the partner equation is definitely getting more complicated right if you dial back you know half a decade decade you had guys who sold hardware boxes they livox sellers we love them but and they moved a lot of a lot of product and they worked with you okay now the cloud comes in you guys they're going you know software-defined so you can run your services in the cloud you know or you run it on Prem you've got hybrid so it's a complicated equation much more so than it was in the past so how are you seeing the partners evolve and transform you know beyond the sort of box selling mentality of course you know VMware specialists you get those guys at sa P maybe Oracle but yeah but it's even more than that now with cloud isn't it oh yeah yeah you know cloud is you know kind of the third big disruptive wave in the channel right if you think of kind of client-server is the big first disruptive way of virtualization the second disruptive way to now cloud just purely from a channel perspective the third big one and maybe the biggest right because it is completely changing the dynamics and the economics of how partners operate and you know and we've been looking at this for you know for a long time and certainly as we move our portfolio as we transition our portfolio to be cloud enabled and native to the cloud it creates options but but you know the market is moving from you know deal based revenue to reoccurring revenue and what I see partners moving to is various various degrees of reoccurring revenue strategies whether they're setting up their own MSP business and they're opening up shop and they're doing data protection on demand or they are doing managed services on premise and they're charging customer or they're buying out the infrastructure I'm charging a customer once a month or they're selling services in the cloud and in what I think is also interesting and you can see the kind of the direction where the industry of a channel is going is when you look at the acquisitions that partners are making not only of each other but of software development right IP there are going out and buying software development because the the the long term opportunity is not just selling the infrastructure it's selling a solution solving a big problem right which could be this digital transformation opportunity but it's it's more than just sure I can I can upgrade your servers it's their digital transformation right it is you know you know kind of clouds not really a destination right everybody thinks clouds the destination I got to get to you know it's not a destination it's a tool in the bag that you know customer is going to use and certainly a partner is going to leverage cloud to create a money stream write a business model that is sustainable and can grow but it's super dynamically different than what we do you know what they're doing today so you guys talk about profitability before you had a point go ahead and I say balance all that against I think we're the volume the mass of the volume is even though the hyper scalars have a tremendous amount of growth it is still VM based it is still kind of on-prem based and so there's still in this two-year window of change the vast majority of the opportunity is going to be on Prem but you also have to factor in how you involve the cloud and that strategy as what ratmir would called second wave right of beams strategy and we're right in the heart of that I mean there isn't any greater strength than what we're doing as a company with NetApp than what we're doing with cloud and it's just a natural way for us to extend you know a partner's capability a customer's ability to buy what they what you'd want to get from NetApp and beam together well and what the hyper scales have done is they've changed the way in which people consume technology absolutely understand and NetApp is a great case study of a company that's moving through that process from a product orientation to a services orientation the key I want to come back to this notion of how the NetApp relationship with Veen creates new classes of options for Ravine customers as they thought try to think about data protection differently because precisely because it's Dave said you have expanded your portfolio you are going to market with a different value proposition than a couple years ago how is that playing out in your conversations with customers as they think about moving from a data protection that's focused on devices to a data protection that's focused on delivery of digital services yeah well it's not a great topic to talk about where do you start with that organically I think you look at the way people try to operate and deal with the operations of data protection you know it really starts there because you know cloud is really about IT operations what we've done is really try to simplify that stack to get beyond it being one single endpoint of technology so it's not just about how we take data sets you know from say a net F as or a net of HCI and bring it through Veeam to another thousand or eseries and then off to the cloud you know it's beyond just the basic technology it's much more operational and it's in its nature so if you look at all the stuff they're talking about here with VOA and all the discovery elements that they're doing to help make it easier one of the one of the areas that IDC caught particularly in one of our benefit statements on taking complexity off the table is our ability to have autodiscover of yemm's you know it's it's ways that you could make much more autonomy and orchestration of operations kind of come to life as a way of you doing this technology together that's only just one of the example points that we have on this better together with veem taking the heart of their core technology and where they're being you know pervade of in in not just a VM centric crowd but also hyper-v and some of the other things they talked about that's kind of the top of their rationalize stack and then bringing that down through the heart of our data fabric portfolio and saying you know any one point at which you're at we were able to put these things together at the heart of the first step and we kind of mapped this customer journey out in our presentation to the attendees here was this customer journey from the current form of complexities you have you know and moving that all the way through to snapshot integration platform selection of which ones would make sense for what scenario how we work through veem x' data replication and management technologies our data replication our data fabric technologies to get from one endpoint to the other so and then ultimately you gotta be able talk about the ability to restore or you really shouldn't be talking about backup all right we got a wrap but I'm gonna ask you guys each question Jeff from trip reports so from your standpoint you talkin sales momentum with partners what are you gonna tell your colleagues and Keith obviously the partnership with Veen what what are you gonna tell your colleagues when you get back home yeah so so for me it's you know this is we've talked about transformation this you know I think our relationship with Veeam and the strategies that we're executing is all around transforming data protection right and it's really around this concept of simplification and I think as we were chatting before before we started taping the you know simple simple matters right simplification or simple is really attractive feature and you know our ability to simplify data protection for customers in partnership with Veeam deliver solution that's you know clearly world-class and you know NetApp bringing world-class technology to the table it's a great partnership it creates an opportunity for us to go and have conversations with customers that made me never thought of NetApp before and and it's you know an opportunity for us to open a lot of doors and certainly for me what I care about it's an opportunity for our partners to open a lot of doors yeah I would just say listen we worked from our joint CEOs together so George and ratmir starting this like joint bond of alignment all the way down through product solutions feel Geo's channels we're gonna have explosive growth together you know we're gonna go address this market that is looking to change we've got something we're bringing together and it's absolutely better together great power players aligning at the top all the way down through the channel to the partners into the cloud bringing you all the data here the cube Jeff and Keith thanks very much for coming on the cube keep it right to everybody Peter Burris and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break we're live from Miami at Vemma in 2019 over a pack

>> (Announcer) From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube! Covering LiveWorx 18. Brought to you by PTC. >> Welcome back to the Seaport in Boston, everybody. This is day one of the LiveWorx show, PTC's big IoT user conference, but it's much, much more than that. My name's Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. You're watching the Cube, the leader in LiveTech coverage. It's really our pleasure to have Devin Cleary here, he's the Director of Events at PTC. Dev, thanks so much for coming on The Cube, and thanks for putting together such a great show. >> Oh, thank you so much for having me. This is great. >> You're welcome. So, I say it's a user conference, but it's so much more. I mean, talk about what your intent was and what you've created, you and your team at LiveWorx. >> Absolutely. So for us, we take a step back in corporate events. And we're really trying to bring sort of a unique flair to the corporate events world. In a nutshell, we at PTC have a 25 year legacy of doing really powerful user events, and it was really an inspiration two years ago to kind of shake the mold. And again, no pun intended, be disruptive in the marketplace. So for us, we sort of coined a new term or strategy that we call Industry Inclusiveness. And this is something where we wanted to sort of break down the four walls of the company, and invite industry influencers, individuals who are leading the charge, inclusive of actual competitors, 'cause for us, it's better together. And the whole story and talk track around LiveWorx is collaboration accelerates innovation. So for us, we want to make sure we embrace a lot of different people, walks of life, and diversity, and the intent is to create a one time a week a year, successful program that focuses and profiles nine of the most disruptive technologies on the planet. So this is everything from robotics to AI, to IoT, to AR, blockchain, and so much more. And for us, this is really the essence of what LiveWorx has become, which again for us, we want everyone to know that this event is sort of the world's most respected digital transformation conference. >> So, couple things I want to point out. Well, so over 6,000 people here, the kickoff was in the theater-in-the-round I've only seen that-- We do over a hundred events every year, I've only seen it done twice, and it's worked both times. I think it's a home run when you do the theater-in-the-round. The intro was like, I tweeted out this morning, it was like an Olympic opening ceremony. I mean really, where do you get your inspiration from that? >> So, you know what, for us, I have a really amazing team that works with me and collaboratively. And for us, we really want to sort of challenge the status quo. So, we always look for things actually outside of the tech bubble, if you will. We look at music. We look at fashion. We look at art. We look at a lot of pop culture sort of references and that sort of stems our ideas of how we sort of nurture and create what we call the apex, or LiveWorx or what you saw this morning. And for us, I'm all about what I call delight moments. So these are moments that frankly are sort of above and beyond the core content of what the conference offers and just making people have a great time. Showmanship and entertainment is just as much important as the core again content that we offer at LiveWorx. >> Dev, you've got a big tent here with a lot of different topics. There's a show I go to, we talk about the random collision of unusual suspects, which this reminded me of. Can you talk a little bit about how in these diverse communities, yet we should see some overlap and some bumping together. >> Yeah. Absolutely. So, again with LiveWorx, and sort of again profiling these nine to ten most disruptive technologies out there, we're always trying to recruit people that are very diverse from various backgrounds. You know, one specific goal that we have, just from a geographic persepective is making sure that over half our audience is from international markets outside of the United States. So again, when you're bumping shoulders or walking the halls everywhere around us, you're guaranteed to hear someone that comes from a different walk of life, a different experience, a different educational background and that adds a lot of value to the overall conference. Now, again, we target everyone from administrators to engineers, developers and more because really this show runs the gamut on everything from product design and sort of the ideas of what you want to do, all the way through service, manufacturing, it is the full scope of industry 4.0. So, to your point, there's a lot of intersection and a lot of overlapping because every company, every person, every individual, wants to experience and learn how to embrace what we call disruptive tech. >> You know, again, we do a lot of shows and the vast majority, when someone like you guys brings us to a show, they want to showcase their products and basically pimp up their own stuff. You chose a different approach. First of all, thank you for that. So, this today has been all about thought leadership. Stu and I were saying it reminds us of some of the stuff we do with MIT. Where you have professors, you have thought leaders, talking about not, kind of frankly, some boring products. >> And it's not a sales pitch. >> Right, it's not a sales pitch. But, why that decision and what's your vision for where you want to take this thing? >> Yeah, so again, I would say that a lot of conferences, and this is no offense to my brothers and my sisters in the events world out there, but people are so sick and tired of going to the standard trade show. The days of pipe-and-drape and aisles of just being pitched to and receiving free stress balls, and hiring staff that might not even be employed by the company, but they just frankly look good, those days are completely over. In our audience, the technologists who really matter in this world, who are doing a lot of great work, they want that substance and that core content. So, for us, it's really a vision about that's embraced and sort of evolved into give back and let the content lead your success. And that is going to help amplify the voice and further the mission. We look at LiveWorx as a catalyst well beyond the company that employs me and the people that work for just these companies. We have a vision to make Boston an epicenter, a headquarters, a world-renown attraction for technologists world-wide knowing this city for IoT and for AR. And for us, we embrace the innovation district as that pallet, that backdrop, that environment to allow us to really accomplish that. So, LiveWorx is growing exponentially. We experienced double digit growth this year, which was amazing. Starting where I was only with this company two years ago and less than 25 hundred attendees and we're at 6,100 right now live on the show floor at LiveWorx. So the future is really bright for us, and we're embracing this notion of the convention center is only going to be constricting for so long. It's time that we also implode those four walls and we embrace the outside. And what our plans are going for, which I'm really excited to sort of announce, is we're going to be now becoming more of an industrial innovation week in Boston, and taking our plans mainstream. So, that means taking the content that we focus on, and the partners that we work with, and the industry thought leaders and now you start to actually replicate these events throughout the entire seaport. So, think of it, and again most of you know South by Southwest, I'm a big fan and an avid follower, think of it South by Southwest meets Industrial, and that is the future of this show. >> Love it, and you know, we're thrilled to be part of it. And it's palpable. You actually see now, in the seaport... You know, we were talking off camera, you can't compete with Silicon Valley or on terms with Silicon Valley does. You shouldn't even try. We're bicoastal, we have an office in Palo Alto we know it well. It's a unique vortex. But certainly, IoT, Blockchain, VR, there really is some clear innovation going on here so, if you can focus on that, you can actually really blossom an ecosystem and that's really what you're doing. >> Oh, absolutely. And, again, PTC has been headquartered here for over 25 years, they're a leader in industrial innovation. They're a company that believes in giving back. We have curated and nurtured through partnerships with Harvard Business School, with MIT Innovation Lab, etc. We have cultivated some of the greatest startups of our time right now, who are creating groundbreaking technology in IoT, in AR, that is changing the world. We're even actually doing work right now in our backyard with Boston Children's Hospital, for example. Doing incredible work with our Vuforia product in AR that's helping actually find a cure for Alzheimer's. So, again, the possibilities are endless, and the innovation is limitless. >> Well, you're the hot company right now, obviously growing very rapidly, you're kind of like the Comeback Kid. You're clearly punching above your weight. The Scott Kirsner article in the Globe was unbelieveable. >> (Devin) Thank you I know we're very... Shout out to Scott. >> And so, you got to be thrilled with that. But, what's interesting to me, Dev, is you're not... You could ride that wave, and just pump up PTC but you're doing things that will allow you to sustain this as a community member, paying it forward, you know, it's kind of a cliche, but that's what I see. Thoughts? >> A hundred percent. And, again, the way that we sort of frame LiveWorx is I want you to think of PTC as the presenting sponsor. They are an investor in the vision that this team has to carry forward the community and the movement all around industrial innovation. And again, we feel that Boston being sort of our headquarters in our backyard, it's important that we're giving back and again, furthering that opportunity to further solidify our right as a rightful heir of IoT and AR, as a city, as a community and as the state of Massachusetts. >> Dev, wondering if you could give our audience that didn't come to this event a quick flavor of what's going on, flavoring and I loved you had the Boston food trucks all right outside. They're a little warm. My friends from the west coast are like, "This isn't warm." But for Boston, it hit summer. But, give us a quick tour around what people missed. >> Yeah, so we're all about an immersive experience at LiveWorx. Again, you're going to have sort of a checklist of what you absolutely need to have at an event to sustain someone's expectations. So, the content, the networking, the value. But again, we like to take it a step further and things that I call delight moments. So, for example, this year in Extropolis, and Extropolis, for those of you at home, that is our sort of expectation shattering, ground-breaking, playground for adults in technology. So, every corner, every ounce, every inch of this show floor has something to engage, ignite the 5 senses and tell our story. And one example specifically that I love to highlight this year is I've actually created the vision with a whole slew of individuals from PTC and partners and whatnot. Something we call the X-factory. Manufacturing is one of the biggest industries in business in the world. Mostly every company at an enterprise level has some sort of manufacturing component to it. And what we wanted to do this year is create the factory of the future. Meaning, working with the leaders like McKinsey, and again HeroTech and global brands in Germany who are defining manufacturing and who founded manufacturing in our history, we have partnered with them to say, "What does that factory of the future look like? What are companies going to be doing five, ten, fifteen years from now and what can we expect?" You're getting that first at LiveWorx, which is awesome, and the whole process is "Let's not have a standard kiosk. Let's not do a laptop with a video. Let's actually build out a 20,000 square foot industrial factory with multiple stations from digital engineering to service to again, AR induced digital twins and everything else in between. And let's actually have every single attendee create, design and manufacture a smart connected product. We're working with our partner, Bell and Howell, from a shipping, service and supply chain perspective, and again, we are blowing the roof off this show on that one activation, and there's over a hundred in total throughout this entire show this week. So, that's a little bit of a flavor of LiveWorx. And beyond that, we do things, everything from a puppy daycare hour to sort of do a high tech low touch feel. We do incredible food presentations and we're going to be ending with a big bang tomorrow with our closing party called the Mix-It Six, which is one of my favorite programs the entire week. And that is actually a superhero themed event where we're actually having a guest host and a personal friend, Paul Rudd, who was the Ant Man for Marvel, he'll be hosting our event. And the whole notion around superheroes is that we tell everyone this week "Unleash your inner superhero". Take advantage of the technology that is on display, and realize how it can enable and empower you to now have superhuman powers. So, everything from AR giving you the power to see the invisible, to IoT helping you get the power to predict the future. Everything is possible and everything is creative at LiveWorx. >> Well, it's obviously working. And so, I'm sure the execs are seeing this going, "Great. Good Job. Way to go. We've got some momentum. Let's double down." But, you back up two years ago, how did you sell this to the folks? Cause we see a lot of guys like, "Alright, how many leads we going to get out. How much revenue we going to drive" How'd you get through that knothole? >> So, let's put it in this perspective. There's a lot of intrinsic and intangible ways to measure the success of a show, and the value and the impact brought to a company. One thing I would actually say, I've worked in the tech industry for over six years now, I've been in the events business for over a decade, I've worked for some of the most incredible and impressive, and media-driven startups in the world right now. PTC, though, is a very interesting ecosystem. Their executives actually embrace the notion of what I presented first and foremost, about again, industry inclusiveness as we call that term. And for us, we have a vision at PTC to be disruptive, to be ground-breaking. If we do not embrace that ourselves, as our culture and our business model, how do we hope someone else to believe in the product, and the vision and the mission that we set forth in the marketplace. >> And from that, you got a response of, "Yeah, let's do it." >> So, again, am I going to be a hundred percent honest and transparent? Was everyone embracing that a hundred percent? No. But again, I think the proof is in the pudding and I think again it's a leap of faith in saying, "Listen, take a chance. Be disruptive, and see what the product of our fruits of our labor could be." And again, here you have it three years later, triple the size of the audience, tripling the size of the success, seeing multiple customers, multiple partners multiple industry leaders now attaching themselves to this brand. So for us, LiveWorx is nothing greater than a record breaking success this year, and I'm so excited for the rest of you at home to experience on the live stream, or again check out 2019 June 10-13. >> June 10, right here. Right? >> (Devin) Right here again. >> Dev, first of all thanks so much for having The Cube here and making us a part of this awesome event and look forward to working with you in the future. Congratulations on all your success. >> Thank you so much. >> You're very welcome. By the way, check out thecube.net that's where all the videos here will be. Check out siliconangle.com all the editorial coverage. Wikibond.com is where the research is. We're a wrap here from LiveWorx day one. Dave Vellante, for Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching, we'll see you next time.