>>From Miami beach, Florida. It's the queue covering a Chronis global cyber summit 2019 brought to you by Acronis. >>Okay. Welcome back to the cubes coverage. Everyone two days here in Miami beach at the fountain blue hotel for kronas cyber global cyber summit 2019. I'm John furrier, our next guest, Phil, she founder of structured research, do an industry analyst firm doing analysis of what's going on here. And the big story is cyber protect as a category emerging from data protection, but a lot of infrastructure going on under the knee. Phil, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. So they got this platform, but underneath the platform they got a hyper converged stack. A lot of stories, lot of networking involved, abstraction layer, platform layer to enable Cisco services. ISV is whatnot. Um, pretty compelling. And you're seeing with cloud computing, cloud 2.0 modernization. These kind of white spaces can become categories. So I kinda like the cyber protection angle. We'll see how it's kind of developed, but you got to make it work under the hood. >>What's your take of their infrastructure, the platform, what's underneath? What's, what's going on there in your opinion? >> Yeah, I mean, I look at the world from the angle of service providers or infrastructure service providers. They come in all shapes and sizes. Uh, typically the crowd here is probably what most would classify as small to mid size. And those kinds of organizations are typically challenged when it comes to resources you have, they have, uh, you know, smaller staffs, you know, less resources to acquire development talent. And so when it comes to approaching, you know, innovative products and services to drive their business, you know, they often have to look to a third party like Acronis, >> they'll talk about them. The evolution of service providers, the deputies has changed over the decades, right? I mean, Cisco Sarvis targeted service providers, what does that means and tell goats what's a, you know, MSP, managed service providers. >>So the word service providers kind of evolving as these platforms start to become more relevant. How do you, how do you, how do you shape the market? How would you talk about the evolution of what a service provider is? >> Yeah, I mean I like to think of it as infrastructure providers, infrastructure service providers. So those that are managing third party infrastructure that lives, uh, typically in some kind of off premise, not on premise environment. Uh, that's certainly a big chunk of the audience here. Uh, those people will run data centers or they'll run multiple data centers. They might run some of their own data sets and they might run some stuff on the public cloud. Uh, and then they manage that for an end user, which could be a small business, mid size enterprise or large enterprise. >> What are the top stories in that market dynamic that you're seeing involved? >>Is it IOT? Is it the SLA, is the required for latency? What are some of the dynamics going on and then that serves provided market? I mean, I think the big thing today is a boil it all down is the impact of hyperscale and what that does to market that these service providers playing. So you have hyperscale just grabbing huge chunks of the infrastructure and it real estate out there. And how that affects MSPs or service providers is that Hey, there's probably a little less market than you would have, like pre hyperscale. And so what that forces them to do is to do two things, I think, uh, which is a specialized focus, uh, and try to drive value from the infrastructure you do get to host or manage or run on, on the public cloud. So that brings the punchline here to be, you know, it's all about value add. >>What is the value add? Well, you know, this is how kind of a kronas came there. They understood that, you know, organizations that are a little more specialized like to work with service providers, they need to backup up infrastructure. They have security requirements, they have compliance requirements, and then, uh, they have to deliver that to the customer. Uh, and being able to do all that is sometimes can be difficult. But if you work with a third party like, what they've done is, you know, package that for you, hence the cyber platform so that people can basically, you know, turn the key and be able to deliver those kinds of services. And get back to focusing on what they're good at, managing customers and dealing with them. What's been the reaction, your opinion on what's happening with the crunch value proposition? Because again, like you said, these they want to differentiate ed services to around it seems like a good opportunity. >>Is it resonating well with um, infrastructure service providers? No, no, I think so because of where, as I mentioned where we are in the marketplace, you know, hyper scale is maybe 10, the public cloud, maybe 10, 12 years old. Uh, and you know, it took some time for, you know, to MSP server the feel it, uh, and now they're reacting, right? The market is changing, customer requirements, becoming more sophisticated and they're saying, Hey, listen, we've got to get out there and do something. So absolutely anything that drives value add on top of, let's call it commodity. Come on. I don't want to use that word. Plain vanilla infrastructure infrastructure. Uh, yeah, anything above value add. I mean, we saw the global service providers like Assensure and these guys doing the same thing because their days were numbered on the consultant and they're building their own sets of services. >>Why wouldn't they? I mean, it's a whole nother cloud expansion opportunity for people with expertise. Why wouldn't they want to increase their gross profits would deliver services on top of something like this. So, so I've got to ask you, um, on the, on the research section, how big is the Tam and you're in this market that, that's in there? I mean, what's it, what's a size? Is it changing? Is it shifting or is it more than saying no, it's definitely, I like to think of, you know, the world, like there's many ways to look at it. Uh, you know, some people throw around the word, sorry, the number $1 trillion a night to spending. Um, but what I like to do is look at, at least for a lot of the guys here, what they're doing is they're managing infrastructure or hosting infrastructure on a third party basis. >>And that means the customer, the end user letting go, not running it themselves in house, in server closets and their own it, their own data centers. Yeah. Uh, and in terms of going from that model, which is a traditional model to outsource infrastructure and all its flavors, you know, we're still not, you know, we use the baseball analogy. Uh, you know, we're not, we used to say that we're in the first or second any further along now, but we definitely haven't hit the seventh inning stretch. So we're middle innings, we're like middle innings of this game. I would argue maybe only the third or fourth. Anyway. Yeah. Um, and not only that, if you think so you can think of that as, Hey, if you put a number on the total value and we're only 30% of the way there, there's still all that addressable market left. >>But you also have to think about all the new workloads, content applications that are being built and created. They are invariably moving to either the public cloud or something that an MSP or a third party or third party provider would touch. So it's a big one. Yeah, it's a big market and the, and, and this channel businesses are very efficient. I was talking earlier with, with the sales guys here who runs growth, it's like they don't mess around. Like they're pretty efficient and if it works they can take it and they run with it doesn't as feedback comes back pretty quick. Yeah. So I can see MSPs liking this kind of approach. The question that I have is that, you know, the adding tier at this show, one of the top stories is they're opening up API APIs. They are doing some developer reaction questions. >>Does that develop our action translate down into like say storage and these other areas? What's your take on the ecosystem and developers specifically opportunity cause ecosystems. The nice to Acronis they have some success there. Now they have a developer piece to it. What's your assessment of that developer angle? No, absolutely. It's important, uh, because they need everybody to get together. They need the ecosystem come together to try to innovate. Uh, if you're looking at, if you're managing infrastructure, you're competing against some pretty innovative platforms. And, and we know the names of those, uh, and the resources they can put at, they can throw it that are just, they're, they're unbelievable. So smaller providers have to team up, they have to work together, they have to work in an ecosystem, you have to encourage each other. And what Kronos I think is doing a great job of is creating a venue and a platform for them to say, Hey you guys, you can be part of this channel. >>You can also work. We're going to open up our platform so that you can innovate and build cool tools that we haven't thought of of building that are specific maybe to your use case and maybe another provider can use them as well. Platforms are hard to figure out and hard to, easy to say, hard to do. But I think one of the validations that I always look for for platforms is, is there an enabling technology angle? Is there a disruptive enable that's gonna create some enablement and then true, what's the valuation value validation from an ecosystem. So I can talk platform, it's like a dance floor. How many people are on the dance floor, you know, if the music is good here, the platform's good, the ecosystem rises up and you can see it. Absolutely. That's a key thing. Feel. Take a minute to talk about the structure research. >>Okay. What do you guys do and what's your, what's your focus, um, how long you've been doing it and what do you see evolve and give a quick plug for what you're working on. Yeah, we're a eight year old firm. We were founded in 2012. Uh, we're based in Toronto. Uh, we yourself as a smaller focused, uh, boutique research firm. Uh, so we cover, uh, we don't cover multiple sectors. We covered infrastructure services, what some people call internet infrastructure, uh, but we live and breathe on a daily basis. The life of the service provider and that service provider could be one, you know, a 10 man shop that's walking around here. There are many of those all the way up to, to a Rackspace, uh, to, uh, the hyperscale clouds as well as the underlying data center infrastructure, uh, encompassing real estate facilities. You guys are laser focused absolutely. >>Service rider is what we all the vote. You know, we have six man analyst team. So yeah we only have time to focus on this. I mean, yeah, what we do is what we've taken with it is try to take a, a global approach to, so we're, we're based in North America. Uh, but we uh, we, we do a lot of research and food just feels to me, I mean I'm not in the, in the weeds of details that you guys are, cause you're laser focused on that. But Dave a lot and I always talk on the Q about how the rich are getting richer, the bigger getting bigger and it's really been sucking in the like that title waves of the beach wave from South and there's a tsunami of, of the hyperscalers dominating. But it's interesting that with the IOT opportunity you start to see him with machine learning and AI kind of really out front you seeing a Renaissance of what I call domain specific apps and services. >>And we think that this is going to create a massive innovation around what I call tier one be or two clouds. Why not build on Google, Amazon or Azure and create a unique service provider model for something that's very domain specific. I mean, that's seems like a great business opportunity. Why? I mean, it's a been a part of the space and I think more so we're headed there faster. And, and you know, to your earlier question, you know, where the impact of hyperscale cloud, how it's taken out certain parts of the more commodity parts of the business and then it's driven service riders who go to pockets of value. You know, we did a panel earlier on, you know, that featured for service providers that had decided to take a vertically focused strategy. So get into areas where their specific expertise with certain platforms or certain software packages, uh, you know, targeted that. >>And then the kind of customers they use, those have specific security and compliance requirements, certain backup NDR requirements that obviously Acronis is more than happy to enable and then these service miters deliver that. So yeah, you absolutely could see, you know, people popping up. Yeah. Doing kind of have an entire business focused on just serving the specific requirements on financial services, uh, for even the dental sector. Uh, and yeah, and they can run on, on private infrastructure, but they also can run on the public cloud. There's a lot of marketplaces popping up too. I had the Ingram micro on Amazon's got a market Wade's, Google's gonna have one. They ever going to have these marketplaces for their clouds. How does multi-cloud fit into your world? First of all, I think multicloud is just BS. Me personally, but I think everyone has multiple cloud providers. If you've upgraded with office three 65 you technically have Azure. >>It doesn't mean that you're using Azure. That's like you might have an Amazon and Google, but know people might have multiple clouds, but hybrid seems to be the operating model. How does hybrid and this hype around multi-cloud impact your research area in any way or? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, we care about how people deploy their infrastructure and we closely track how, you know, the way they do it and how those patterns change. You know, I would say I would slightly disagree. I think multicloud they starting, I would probably agree that it's not very pervasive. Yeah, it's not, it's not very pervasive, but it is a model we've tracked, uh, and sorry and uses. We've seen, uh, I have definitely, you know, taken a liking to that or at least are putting that on the roadmap and saying, Hey, listen, you know, if we're going to build, you know, most of the architectures that are being built are hybrid. >>Uh, but how w I think the question is in what way? Or how are they hybrid? Does that mean I'm running exclusively on the public cloud and running on AWS and Google for other stuff? Am I running private infrastructure on premise? And then in a private cloud and on backing that up to say the public cloud, there's so many different ways to do it. So, you know, it's interesting. Fill your brain. First of all. I agree. Well, we could debate, I love to have debates, but to me, I think you're right. I look at multicloud in terms of the hype. Hype is good, but you've always gotta be careful of it. Not over, you know, overplay their card on that. But yeah, I would see that multi-cloud basically to me is multi-vendor. I've got I got it. So as that shakes out, that's going to be an operational dynamic. >>And I think that's going to be interesting to see how a company will operationalize their tech stacks to deal with the multi-vendor or multi-cloud case because the workload shouldn't care. Ideally, if it's true multi-cloud, none of my workload, I mean she should run right. And so I haven't seen a lot of that across multiple clouds and some peoples have use case analytics. I get that. But like running a workload on any cloud, probably not there yet. Not there yet. All right. What's the coolest, coolest thing that you're covering right now that you think is important for folks to know that in your space, what's the top burning issues of your sector? Yeah, I mean, I would say that, you know, just the global build out of the cloud, the hyperscale clouds, you know, that short list of very big platforms. He's going, you know, global at a rapid speed. >>Uh, and also just the pace at which they are expanding is just incredible. And that's not just the infrastructure but also just the product and service development. Just the tool sets have gone from dozens to hundreds to probably thousands. You know, as we're speaking right now, just the pace at which this is growing is just, you know, pretty tough to comprehend and it's tough to comprehend because not that long ago we were debating, you know, what is the cloud? Or yeah, running, I as, yeah, I'm running a few things on the cloud, but now people are making much bigger bets. There are businesses now out there that you use on your phone that are run completely on the cloud. I mean, that's, that's big. And I mean, just go back with the, has been around for 10 years riding this wave and covering it. Remember OpenStack? Yeah, of course. >>Hold up a second. Just a hyperscaler just blew that away, just, and then found his place. No, that's just crazy. Great time. Yeah. And I think it's, it's, it's the, you're right, the, the pace at which things are changing is incredible. And we're, the other thing, you know, to answer my second part to the question was not only going to, we're following the global buildup, but at the same time almost kind of paradoxically, like we're talking now and I think it's a really exciting part of RV searches. He's the edge. So the decentralization, you know, everything is building out really rapidly into the, you know, compute as an it infrastructure is consolidate around centralized locations, you know, but now how do we hit mobile eyeballs are eyeballs in kind of more distant locations. And so yeah, edge infrastructure or the decentralization, uh, is we're really excited about, I think edge is beautiful thing. >>It's gonna open up. And by the way, we were talking last night, bunch of the sales guys here, I always like to debate them. Their edge is a box, but there's the deeper edge. There's also deep edge or outer edge, right? This human's right. So there's edge edge, so it's just so many surface points now. It's just manageable challenge. Yeah, there's edge on a kind of like on a geographic basis and then there's edge, you know, how close to the user's device can you get. And that device may not be static. Right. They'll be moving around. So yeah. Well, Phil, thanks for the great insight of structured research. Is there a URL for your site? Yes. Structure research.net structured research.net check it out. Hyper focused on service providers and infrastructure. Super important area as the clouds continue to grow as hybrid multicloud. Certainly IOT is going industrial IOT from national security and physical security to digital security. All big a part of it. Data as the pay is going to be there. Storage and compute. Phil, thanks for coming. I appreciate it. Thanks for having coverage here. Miami beach. I'm John furrier back with more coverage after this short break.

>>From Miami beach, Florida. It's the cube covering a Cronus global cyber summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >>So Ron, welcome back to the keeps coverage of kronas cyber global cyber summit 2019. I'm John furrier here in Miami beach. Our next guest is Pat Hurley, vice president, general manager of the Americas in sales and customer relationships. Get Debbie Juan. Hey, thanks for having me. Welcome to Miami beach. Lovely place to have an event. So I hear ya. You got a lot of competition going on between the U S America's in the AMIA teens and it's very competitive group. >> The European team is very confident. I think we'll show them tomorrow what we're made of. We've been recruited very hard for some players that are Latin American. I think we'll show them a finger too. You've got a big soccer story there. We do. Yeah. We've, uh, we've got a few sports partnerships that we have across the globe. Uh, some of the first partnerships we had were actually within formula one. >>And we really try to correlate the story of the importance of, uh, data protection and cyber protection in the sporting industry because a lot of people don't think about the amount of data that's actually being generated in the space. A formula one car generates between, you know, two and three terabyte through three gigabytes of data on every lap, tons of telemetry devices that are kicked, collecting information from the car, from the road service, from the, the general environment. They're taking that data and then sending it back to the headquarter, analyzing it and making very small improvements to the car to make sure that they can qualify faster, run a faster lap, make the right type of angle into a turn, uh, which can really differentiate them from being, you know, first, second, third, 10th in a qualifying session. On the soccer side. We do have some partnerships with uh, arsenal, Manchester city, inter Milan, and we just signed a partnership as well with Liverpool. >>So we are very popping in that space here in the U S we have some other sports that we're big fans of. I'm personally a big Boston red Sox fan, being a Boston native and we do have a sports partnership with the red Sox, which has been an unbelievable partnership with them. And learning more about the use cases that they solve and using our technology has been really cool. >> You know, Patty, you bring up the sports thing and we were kidding before we on camera around the trading, you know how people do sports deals and they trade, you know, merchandise for consumer benefit or customer benefits. But really what is happening is sports teams encapsulate really the digital transformation in a nutshell because most sports franchises are, have been traditionally behind. But now with the consumerization of it and digital can go back to 2007 since the mobile phone. >>Really, I mean it's iPhone. Yeah. Since that time, sports and capsulates every aspect of it, consumer business fan experience. And it really has every, every, almost every element of what we see now as a global IOT problem opportunity. So it really encapsulates the use case of an integrated and and needed solution. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about the amount of data that's, that's out there today and the fast way that it's growing, you know, the explosion of, uh, of data in the, in the world today, sports have different unique challenges. So obviously they have large fan bases that need to be able to access the data and understand what's going on with their favorite sports teams. Um, for us it's really, you know, these technology partnerships that we have with these guys, it runs through all these different areas of, you know, in many cases we didn't really understand that they were using it for. >>So, you know, the red Sox for example, they've got Fenway park and iconic stadium, you know, the Mecca of baseball. If you haven't been there yet, I suggest all your viewers that they go and check it out, give me a call, we'll try and get you set up there. But, um, you know, the, the, the experience that the fans have there is all around their data experienced there. Right? And it's not just baseball games. It could be hockey games that Fenway park, it could be a concert that they're having. A phone buys a lot of different events. These stadiums are open year round and the ability to move, share access, protect the data in that stadium is really important to how they're functioning as an organization. We talked to their I-Team quite regularly about how they're using our solutions. They're talking about uh, different aspects of artificial intelligence, different ways they can use our products and machine learning. >>Obviously with the new solutions that we have in the market today around cybersecurity or helping them to address other challenges that they face. Um, as an organization, these are realtime challenges in their physical locations, national security issues, terrorist attacks could happen. There are venues, there are public gathering places too. Absolutely. We announced our partnership with them back in may and I was shocked to hear them on the main stage announcing that they had this great partnership with the Kronos was talking about their unique cyber security needs. They started talking about drone technology and I'm thinking, all right, a drone flies in the stadium. Maybe at breaks and it falls on a player and we're paying $20 million for one of these pitchers to be out there on the Hill or an interest, a fan or maybe they're collecting some video data to then share it out. >>And that's red Sox IP. No, they're talking about cybersecurity threats in the sense that a drone, a remotely controlled device could come in and lightened incendiary device in the, in the stadium and that to them as a real security server. And that's frontline for the it guys. That's what keeps them up at night. Yeah. And that's really an attack take time. Oh yeah, absolutely. What are the use cases that are coming out of some of your customers, cause you guys have a unique integrated solution with a platform as an end to end component too. You have a holistic view on data, which is interesting and unique. People are kind of figuring this out, but you guys are ahead of the game. What are some of the use cases that you've seen in the field with customers that highlight the benefits of taking a holistic view of the data? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we look at it as kind of backups dead, right? We have, we've combined the old world of backup and disaster recovery with the new world of cybersecurity and we combine that to a term we're calling cyber protection because it really requires an end to end solution and a lot of different things need to be working properly to prevent these attacks from happening. Uh, you need to be very proactive in how you're going about that. We address it with what we call 'em, the Kronos cyber platform. And what this is, is a unique, multi-tiered multi-tenant offering that's designed specifically for service providers. We have just under 6,000 servers, providers actively selling our cyber protection solutions today and they use this for are for a multiple different aspects. And usually the beachhead has something like backup. Every company needs backup. It's more of a commodity type solutions, a lot of different players in the game out there, but they take it a step further, use that same backup technology to then do disaster recovery. >>They can do files, they can share, they can do monitoring. We have notary solutions based on blockchain technologies. Now, this whole suite of cybersecurity solutions, all of this is with a single pane of glass, one platform that of a service provider can go in and work with their customers and make sure that their data is protected, make sure that their physical machines are virtual machines, they're PCs, their Macs are all protected, that data's protected, it's secure, but it's also accessible, which is an important part of you can take your data wrapping a nice bow buried a hundred feet underground, but then you can't use it, right? So you want to be able to make sure that you can actually, uh, leverage the technology there. Um, we've seen explosive growth, especially in, in my market. I think the numbers are pretty crazy. It's something like 90% of the market today in the U S has served in some capacity by a service provider. >>And this could be a small to medium size business that's served by local service fire to those really big guys that are out there. Let's on with how large your target audience, you mentioned search probably multiple times when you're out selling your target persona, your target audience, and you're trying to reach into, so we touch, everybody know, you equate it to kind of what we do with the red Sox, right? You walk into that city and the 38,000 people that, well, some of those people are just, you know, regular Joe's, right? They, they go to work every day. They have a computer at home, they have a mobile device. They probably have multiple mobile devices. We protect that for them. We call them a consumer. Slash. Prosumers. We work at a lot of very large retail organizations. If you walk into some of those shops today, you'll be able to see our software on a shelf there. >>You work with one of those tech squads where they're starting to attach services to it and you get more of a complete offering there. We then scale up a little bit further to some OEM providers. You work with companies like Honeywell and Emerson that are manufacturing devices that embed our software on there. They white label it and deliver it out. These are connected devices. You think about the, you know the, the explosion of IOT devices in the market today. We're protecting that stuff as well. We work with very large enterprises, so some of the, the major players that you see in the manufacturing space are standing up standardizing on Acronis process control process automation vendors are using our Chronis and we can deliver the solution because of the way it's so flexible in a very consumable way for them. Those enterprises can actually act as a service provider for their employees so we can actually take our technology, deploy the layer in their infrastructure where they have complete control. >>They might not want to be in an Uber cloud, they might not want to work with Chrome OS data center. They want to have and hold that data. They want to make sure it's on site. We enable that type of functionality and then the fastest growing area for us is what I hit on earlier within the service provider community. We're recruiting hundreds of service providers every quarter. We've got some great partners here. Give you an example of a service provider. You mentioned the red size, I'm assuming is that a vendor that might be working within that organization, but still it sounds like that's a supplier to the red Sox. How, how broad is that definition? It gives us many points. Yeah, it's a really good point. So we work with hosting providers. Look, can be regional hosting providers to multinational hosting providers. Some of the very big names that you've, you're probably familiar with. >>We work with, uh, we work with, uh, telco providers who work with ISV providers or sorry, ISP providers, um, kind of regional telco providers that provide a myriad of different services all the way down to your kind of local mom and pop type service providers where you've got a small business, maybe they've got 30 to 50 employees, they're servicing probably 200 to 300 customers and they want to provide a very secure, safe, easy to use complete solution to their customers. Uh, those could be focused on certain verticals so they could be focused on healthcare, financial services, construction, et cetera. Um, we have some that are very niche within like dental services or chiropractice offices, small regional doctor's offices. Uh, and the, the beauty of that, and I was getting the partners earlier, is we have partnerships with companies like ConnectWise where those are tools that service providers are using on a very daily basis. >>So essentially the platform gives you that range and that's the typical typical platform. So you have that broad horizontally scalable capability and the domain expertise either be what solution from you guys or can ISV or someone within your ecosystem is that they get that. Right? Absolutely. And that's what really differentiates us is our ability to integrate into that plat, into our platform, into their platform and make those connections. So you don't need to learn 12, 14, 15 different technologies. You've got a small suite of offerings in a single pane of glass, very easy to use, very intuitive. Um, the integrations that we have with these partners like ConnectWise, like Ingram micro, really differentiate us because what they do is they provide open API capabilities. They provide software development kits where these partners can go ahead and build it the way they want to sell it. >>You know, it's interesting when the cloud came out and as on premise has changed to a much more agile dev ops kind of mindset that forced it to think like a service provider. I think like an operating system, it's an operating environment basically. So that service provides an interesting angle and I want to get your thoughts on this because I think this is where you guys have such a unique opportunity to just integrate solution because you could get into anything and you got ISV to back that up. So I guess the question I would have is for that enterprise that's out there that's looking to refactor and replatform their entire operation, or it could be a large enterprise, it has a huge IOT opportunity or challenge or a service provider is looking at having a solution. What's the pitch that you would give me if I'm the one of those customers? >>Say, Hey Pat, what's the pitch? So you need a, you need a trusted provider that's been in the business for a number of years that understands the data protection and security markets that Kronos has that brand. We've been doing this for about 16 years. We were founded in Singapore, we're headquartered out of Switzerland and we've got a lot of really smart guys in the back room. Was building good technologies that our partners were able to use. Um, we look at it a lot of different ways. I mentioned our go to market across a lot of different verticals and a lot of different um, kind of routes for those. The way we deliver our solution. It provides the flexibility for an enterprise to a classic reseller to um, you know, a VAR or a service, right? It's delivering services. It can be delivered to those guys how they want to consume it. >>So as an example, we may work with a smaller service provider that doesn't have any colo capabilities. We provide data centers so they could have a very quick turnkey solution, allows them to get up and running with their business, selling backup within minutes to their customers. We can also work with very large enterprises where we can deliver the complete platform to them and then they have complete control over it. We sprinkle in some professional services to make sure that we're giving them the support that they need and then they're running the service for themselves. What we've really seen in terms of a trend is that a lot of these VARs, we have about 4,500 of them in North America and they're starting to look at their businesses differently. Say, I gotta adapt or die here. I gotta figure out what my next business model is. >>How am I going to be the next one that's in the news flash that says, Hey, they've been acquired, or Hey Thoma Bravo made a big investment in me. Right? They need to convert to this services business or Kronos enables that transformation to happen. I mean, I can see you guys really making money for channel partners because they want solutions. They want to touch the customer, they want to maybe add something they could bring into it or have high service gross profits around services. Absolutely. So, yeah, our solution is unique in the sense that allows partners to sell multiple offerings to, you're getting an additional layer of stickiness providing multiple solutions to a customer. You're using the same technology, so your it team is very familiar with what they're using on a daily basis. Um, you're reducing the amount of churn for your customers because you're selling so much additional there that they're really stuck with you. >>That's a good thing. Uh, and beyond that, your increasing ARPU, average revenue per user is a key metric that all of our partners are looking at. And these guys are owner operators, right? They're business owners. They're looking at the bottom line. I mean, it's interesting the operating leverage around the consistent platform just lowers, it gives them software economic model. They can get more profit over time as they make that investment look at at the end of the day, channel partners care about a couple things, money, profit and customer happiness. Absolutely. And it helps to have them want to have a lot of one offs and a lot of, you know, training, you know, anything complicated, anything confusing, anything that requires a lot of resources, they're not going to like a, it's also great to have events like this where you're able to, to press the flesh with these guys and, and being face to face and understand their real world challenges that they're dealing with on a daily basis. >>How has the sport's a solution set that you've been involved in? How has that changed the culture of Acronis? Is that, has that, has that changed as, you know, sports is fun. People love sports, they have real problems. It's a really great use case as well. How's that change the culture? It's been amazing. I, so one from a branding perspective, we are a lot more recognized, right? Um, the most important thing about these partnerships for us is that they're actually using the technology. So, you know, we've got the red Sox here with us today. We've got arsenal represented, we've got Williams, we've got Roush racing, we've got a NASCAR car back here. Um, they use our technology on a daily basis and for each one of them we solve different types of use cases. Whether it's sending them large amount of video data from an essence studio over to Fenway park, or if it's a scout out in the field that needs to send information back and their laptop crashes, how do they recover? >>A lot of these different use cases, you can call them right back to a small business owner. You don't have to be a multibillion dollar sports organization with the same challenge. Well, I'm smiling because we've been called the ESPN of tech to they bring our set. We do let the game day thing. We certainly could love to come join you in all these marquee events that you have. We'd love to have it. Yeah, so if you follow us on social, we're out there and that, that's a big part of it. You mentioned one of ours looking for what our partners looking for. They want a personal relationship too. A lot of that goes away with technology nowadays and being able to really generate that type of a, of a personal relationship. These partnerships enable that to happen and they're very anything, I don't know anything about cars. >>We started partnering with formula one. All of a sudden I know everything about 41 I go to these races. I tell everybody I don't know anything about cars and I ended up being the, the subject matter export for him over over the weekend. So we'd love to have you guys join us. We'd love all of our partners. They get more engaged in the sports aspect of it because for us, it really is something that, um, again, they're using us in real life scenarios. We're not paying to put a sticker on a car that's going 300 miles. It's not traveling as a real partnership. Exactly. Pat, congratulations on your success and good luck on people owning away the numbers. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Just the cube coverage here at the Chronis global cyber summit 2019 I'm John furry. More coverage after this short break.