>>welcome to the session. Long live swarm with containers and kubernetes everywhere we have this increasing cloud complexity at the same time that we're facing economic uncertainty and, of course, to navigate this. For most companies, it's a matter of focusing on speed and on shipping and iterating their code faster. Now. For many, Marantz is customers. That means using docker swarm rather than kubernetes to handle container orchestration. We really believe that the best way to increase your speed to production is choice, simplicity and security. So we wanted to bring you a couple of experts to talk about the state of swarm and Docker enterprise and how you can make best use of both of you. So let's get to it. Well, good afternoon or good morning, depending on where you are on and welcome to today's session. Long live swarm. I am Nick Chase. I'm head of content here at Mantis and I would like to introduce you to our two Panelists today eight of Manzini. Why don't you introduce yourself? >>I am a van CNI. I'm a solutions architect here at Moran Tous on work primarily with Docker Enterprise System. I have a long history of working with support team. Um, at what used to be Ah Docker Enterprise, part of Docker Inc. >>Yeah, Okay. Great. And Don Power. >>I, um Yeah, I'm Don Power on the docker. Captain Docker, community leader. Right now I run our Dev Ops team for Citizens Bank out of Nashville, Tennessee, and happy to be here. >>All right, Excellent. So All right, so thank you both for coming. Now, before we say anything else, I want to go ahead and kind of name the elephant in the room. There's been a lot of talk about the >>future. Yeah, that's right. Um, swarm as it stands right now, um, we have, ah, very vested interest in keeping our customers on who want to continue using swarm, functional and keeping swarm a viable alternative or complement to kubernetes. However you see the orchestration war playing out as it were. >>Okay? It's hardly a war at this point, but they do work together, and so that's >>absolutely Yeah, I I definitely consider them more of like, complimentary services, um, using the right tool for the job. Sort of sense. They both have different design goals when they were originally created and set out so I definitely don't see it as a completely one or the other kind of decision and that they could both be used in the same environment and similar clusters to run whatever workload that you have. >>Excellent. And we'll get into the details of all that as we go along. So that's terrific. So I have not really been involved in in the sort of swarm area. So set the stage for us where we kind of start out with all of this. Don I know that you were involved and so guys said, set the stage for us. >>Sure, Um I mean so I've been a heavy user of swarm in my past few roles. Professionally, we've been running containers in production with Swarm for coming up on about four years. Now, Um, in our case, we you know, we looked at what was available at the time, and of course you had. Kubernetes is your biggest contender out there, but like I just mentioned, the one of the things that really led us to swarm is it's design goals were very different than kubernetes. So Kubernetes tries to have an answer for absolutely every scenario where swarm tries to have an answer for, like, the 80% of problems or challenges will say that you might come across 80% of the workloads. Um, I had a better way of saying that, but I think I got my point across >>E Yeah, I think I think you hit the nail on the head. Um, Kubernetes in particular with the way that kubernetes itself is an a P I I believe that kubernetes was, um, you know, written as a toolkit. It wasn't really intended to be used by end users directly. It was really a way to build platforms that run containers. And because it's this really, really extensible ap I you can extend it to manage all sorts of resource is swarm doesn't have that X sensibility aspect, but what it was designed to do, it does very, very well and very easily in a very, very simple sort of way. Um, it's highly opinionated about the way that you should use the product, but it works very effectively. It's very easy to use. It's very low. Um, not low effort, but low. Ah, low barrier to entry. >>Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I was gonna touch on the same thing. It's very easy for someone to come in. Pick up swarm. You know they don't They don't have to know anything about the orchestrator on day one. Most people that are getting into this space are very familiar with Docker. Compose um, and entering from Docker compose into swarm is changing one command that you would run on the command line. >>Yeah, very, very trivial to if you are already used to building docker files using composed, organize your deployment into stacks of related components. It's trivial to turn on swarm mode and then deploy your container set to a cluster. >>Well, excellent. So answer this question for me. Is the swarm of today the same as the swarm of, you know, the original swarm. So, like when swim first started is that the same is what we have now >>it's kind of ah, complicated story with the storm project because it's changed names and forms a few times. Originally in is really somewhere around 2014 in the first version, and it was a component that you really had to configure and set up separately from Docker Ah, the way that it was structured. Ah, you would just have docker installed on a number of servers are machines in your cluster. And then you would organize them into a swarm by bringing your own database and some of the tooling to get those nodes talking to each other and to organize your containers across all of your docker engines. Ah, few years later, the swarm project was retooled and baked into the docker engine. And, um, this is where we sort of get the name change from. So originally it was a feature that we called swarm. Ah. Then the Swarm Kit project was released on Get Hub and baked directly into the engine, where they renamed it as swarm mode. Because now it is a motile option that you just turn on as a button in the docker engine and because it's already there the, um, the tuning knobs that you haven't swarm kit with regard to how what my time outs are and some of these other sort of performance settings there locked there, they're there. It's part of the opinionated set of components that builds up the docker engine is that we bring in the Swarm Kit project with a certain set of defaults and settings. And that is how it operates in today's version of Docker engine. >>Uh, okay for that, that makes sense. That makes sense. So ah, so don, I know you have pretty strong feelings about this topic, but it is swarm still viable in a world that's sort of increasingly dominated by Kubernetes. >>Absolutely. And you were right. I'm very passionate about this topic where I work. We're we're doing almost all of our production work lives on swarm we only have out of Ah, we've got something like 600 different services between three and 4000 containers. At any given point in time. Out of all of those projects, all of those services we've only run into two or three that don't kind of fit into the opinionated model of swarm. So we are running those on KUBERNETES in the same cluster using Moranis is Docker enterprise offering. But, um, no, that's a very, very small percentage of services that we didn't have an answer for in swarm with one. The one case that really gets us just about every time is scaling state full services. But you're gonna have very few staple services in most environments for things like micro service architecture, which is predominantly what we build out. Swarm is perfect. It's simple. It's easy to use you, don't you? Don't end up going for miles of yamma files trying to figure out the one setting that you didn't get exactly right? Um yeah, the other Thea the other big piece of it that way really led us to adopting it so heavily in the beginning is, you know, the overlay network. So your networks don't have to span the whole cluster like they do with kubernetes. So we could we could set up a network isolation between service A and service B, just by use using the built in overlay networks. That was a huge component that, like I said, let us Teoh adopting it so heavily when we first got started. >>Excellent. You look like you're about to say something in a >>Yeah, I think that speaks to the design goals for each piece of software. On the way that I've heard this described before is with regard to the networking piece the ah, the docker networking under the hood, um, feels like it was written by a network engineer. The way that the docker engine overlay networks communicate uses ah, VX lan under the hood, which creates pseudo V lands for your containers. And if two containers aren't on the same Dylan, there's no way they can communicate with each other as opposed to the design of kubernetes networking, which is really left to the C and I implementation but still has the design philosophy of one big, flat sub net where every I p could reach every other i p and you control what is allowed to access, what by policy. So it's more of an application focused Ah design. Whereas in Docker swarm on the overlay networking side, it's really of a network engineering sort of focus. Right? >>Okay, got it. Well, so now how does all this fit in with Docker enterprise now? So I understand there's been some changes on how swarm is handled within Docker Enterprise. Coming with this new release, >>Docker s O swarm Inside Docker Enterprise is represented as both the swarm classic legacy system that we shift way back in 2014 on and then also the swarm mode that is curly used in the docker engine. Um, the Swarm Classic back end gives us legacy support for being able to run unmanaged plane containers onto a cluster. If you were to take Docker ce right now, you would find that you wouldn't be able to just do a very basic docker run against a whole cluster of machines. You can create services using the swarms services, a p I but, um, that that legacy plane container support is something that you have to set up external swarm in order to provide. So right now, the architecture of Docker Enterprise UCP is based on some of that legacy code from about five or six years ago. Okay. Ah, that gives us ability to deploy plane containers for use cases that require it as well as swarm services for those kinds of workloads that might be better served by the built in load balancing and h A and scaling features that swarm provides. >>Okay, so now I know that at one point kubernetes was deployed within Docker Enterprise as you create a swarm cluster and then deploy kubernetes on top of swarm. >>Correct? That is how the current architecture works. >>Okay. All right. And then, um what is what is where we're going with this like, Are we supposed to? Are we going to running Swarm on top of kubernetes? What's >>the the design goals for the future of swarm within branches? Stocker Enterprise are that we will start the employing Ah, like kubernetes cluster features as the base and a swarm kit on top of kubernetes. So it is like you mentioned just a reversal of the roles. I think we're finding that, um, the ability to extend kubernetes a p I to manage resource is is valuable at an infrastructure and platform level in a way that we can't do with swarm. We still want to be able to run swarm workloads. So we're going to keep the swarm kit code the swarm kit orchestration features to run swarm services as a part of the platform to keep the >>got it. Okay, so, uh, if I'm a developer and I want to run swarm, but my company's running kubernetes what? What are my one of my options there? Well, I think >>eight touched on it pretty well already where you know, it depends on your design goals, and you know, one of the other things that's come up a few times is Thea. The level of entry for for swarm is much, much simpler than kubernetes. So I mean, it's it's kind of hard to introduce anything new. So I mean, a company, a company that's got most of their stuff in kubernetes and production is gonna have a hard time maybe looking at a swarm. I mean, this is gonna be, you know, higher, higher up, not the boots on the ground. But, um, you know, the the upper management, that's at some point, you have to pay for all their support, all of it. What we did in our approach. Because there was one team already using kubernetes. We went ahead and stood up a small cluster ah, small swarm cluster and taught the developers how to use it and how to deploy code to it. And they loved it. They thought it was super simple. A time went on, the other teams took notice and saw how fast these guys were getting getting code deployed, getting services up, getting things usable, and they would look over at what the innovation team was doing and say, Hey, I I want to do that to, uh, you know, so there's there's a bunch of different approaches. That's the approach we took and it worked out very well. It looks like you wanted to say something too. >>Yeah, I think that if you if you're if you're having to make this kind of decision, there isn't There isn't a wrong choice. Ah, it's never a swarm of its role and your organization, right? Right. If you're if you're an individual and you're using docker on your workstation on your laptop but your organization wants to standardize on kubernetes there, there are still some two rules that Mike over Ah, pose. And he's manifest if you need to deploy. Coop resource is, um if you are running Docker Enterprise Swarm kit code will still be there. And you can run swarm services as regular swarm workloads on that component. So I I don't want to I don't want people to think that they're going to be like, locked into one or the other orchestration system. Ah, there the way we want to enable developer choice so that however the developer wants to do their work, they can get it done. Um Docker desktop. Ah, ships with that kubernetes distribution bundled in it. So if you're using a Mac or Windows and that's your development, uh, system, you can run docker debt, turn on your mode and run the kubernetes bits. So you have the choices. You have the tools to deploy to either system. >>And that's one of the things that we were super excited about when they introduced Q. Burnett ease into the Docker Enterprise offering. So we were able to run both, so we didn't have to have that. I don't want to call it a battle or argument, but we didn't have to make anybody choose one or the other. We, you know, we gave them both options just by having Docker enterprise so >>excellent. So speaking of having both options, let's just say for developers who need to make a decision while should I go swarm, or should I go kubernetes when it sort of some of the things that they should think about? >>So I think that certain certain elements of, um, certain elements of containers are going to be agnostic right now. So the the the designing a docker file and building a container image, you're going to need to know that skill for either system that you choose to operate on. Ah, the swarm value. Some of the storm advantage comes in that you don't have to know anything beyond that. So you don't have to learn a whole new A p I a whole new domain specific language using Gamel to define your deployment. Um, chances are that if you've been using docker for any length of time, you probably have a whole stack of composed files that are related to things that you've worked on. And, um, again, the barrier to entry to getting those running on swarm is very low. You just turn it on docker stack, deploy, and you're good to go. So I think that if you're trying to make that choice, if you I have a use case that doesn't require you to manage new resource is if you don't need the Extensible researchers part, Ah, swarm is a great great, great viable option. >>Absolutely. Yeah, the the recommendation I've always made to people that are just getting started is start with swarm and then move into kubernetes and going through the the two of them, you're gonna figure out what fits your design principles. What fits your goals. Which one? You know which ones gonna work best for you. And there's no harm in choosing one or the other using both each one of you know, very tailor fit for very various types of use cases. And like I said, kubernetes is great at some things, but for a lot of other stuff, I still want to use swarm and vice versa. So >>on my home lab, for all my personal like services that I run in my, uh, my home network, I used storm, um, for things that I might deploy onto, you know, a bit this environment, a lot of the ones that I'm using right now are mainly tailored for kubernetes eso. I think especially some of the tools that are out there in the open source community as well as in docker Enterprise helped to bridge that gap like there's a translator that can take your compose file, turn it into kubernetes. Yeah, Mel's, um, if if you're trying to decide, like on the business side, should we standardize on former kubernetes? I think like your what? What functionality are you looking at? Out of getting out of your system? If you need things like tight integration into a ah infrastructure vendor such as AWS Azure or VM ware that might have, like plug ins for kubernetes. You're now you're getting into that area where you're managing Resource is of the infrastructure with your orchestration. AP I with kube so things like persistent volumes can talk to your storage device and carve off chunks of storage and assign those two pods if you don't have that need or that use case. Um, you know, KUBERNETES is bringing in a lot of these features that you maybe you're just not taking advantage of. Um, similarly, if you want to take advantage of things like auto scaling to scale horizontally, let's say you have a message queue system and then a number of workers, and you want to start scaling up on your workers. When your CPU hits a certain a metric. That is something that Kubernetes has built right into it. And so, if you want that, I would probably suggest that you look at kubernetes if you don't need that, or if you want to write some of that tooling yourself. Swarm doesn't have an object built into it that will do automatic horizontal scaling based on some kind of metric. So I always consider this decision as a what features are the most I available to you and your business that you need to Yep. >>All right. Excellent. Well, and, ah, fortunately, of course, they're both available on Docker Enterprise. So aren't we lucky? All right, so I am going to wrap this up. I want to thank Don Bauer Docker captain, for coming here and spending some time with us and eight of Manzini. I would like to thank you. I know that the the, uh, circumstances are less than ideal here for your recording today, but we appreciate you joining us. Um and ah, both of you. Thank you very much. And I want to invite all of you. First of all, thank you for joining us. We know your time is valuable and I want to invite you all Teoh to take a look at Docker Enterprise. Ah, follow the link that's on your screen and we'll see you in the next session. Thank you all so much. Thank you. >>Thank you, Nick.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman, this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, the virtual event. Of course, when we talk about Cloud Native we talk about Kubernetes there's a lot that's happening to modernize the infrastructure but a very important thing that we're going to talk about today is also what's happening up the stack, what sits on top of it and some of the new use cases and applications that are enabled by all of this modern environment and for that we're going to talk about artificial intelligence and machine learning or AI and ML as we tend to talk in the industry, so happy to welcome to the program. We have two first time guests joining us from Red Hat. First of all, we have Abhinav Joshi and Tushar Katarki they are both senior managers, part of the OpenShift group. Abhinav is in the product marketing and Tushar is in product management. Abhinav and Tushar thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks a lot, Stu, we're glad to be here. >> Thanks Stu and glad to be here at KubeCon. >> All right, so Abhinav I mentioned in the intro here, modernization of the infrastructure is awesome but really it's an enabler. We know... I'm an infrastructure person the whole reason we have infrastructure is to be able to drive those applications, interact with my data and the like and of course, AI and ML are exciting a lot going on there but can also be challenging. So, Abhinav if I could start with you bring us inside your customers that you're talking to, what are the challenges, the opportunities? What are they seeing in this space? Maybe what's been holding them back from really unlocking the value that is expected? >> Yup, that's a very good question to kick off the conversation. So what we are seeing as an organization they typically face a lot of challenges when they're trying to build an AI/ML environment, right? And the first one is like a talent shortage. There is a limited amount of the AI, ML expertise in the market and especially the data scientists that are responsible for building out the machine learning and the deep learning models. So yeah, it's hard to find them and to be able to retain them and also other talents like a data engineer or app DevOps folks as well and the lack of talent can actually stall the project. And the second key challenge that we see is the lack of the readily usable data. So the businesses collect a lot of data but they must find the right data and make it ready for the data scientists to be able to build out, to be able to test and train the machine learning models. If you don't have the right kind of data to the predictions that your model is going to do in the real world is only going to be so good. So that becomes a challenge as well, to be able to find and be able to wrangle the right kind of data. And the third key challenge that we see is the lack of the rapid availability of the compute infrastructure, the data and machine learning, and the app dev tools for the various personas like a data scientist or data engineer, the software developers and so on that can also slow down the project, right? Because if all your teams are waiting on the infrastructure and the tooling of their choice to be provisioned on a recurring basis and they don't get it in a timely manner, it can stall the projects. And then the next one is the lack of collaboration. So you have all these kinds of teams that are involved in the AI project, and they have to collaborate with each other because the work one of the team does has a dependency on a different team like say for example, the data scientists are responsible for building the machine learning models and then what they have to do is they have to work with the app dev teams to make sure the models get integrated as part of the app dev processes and ultimately rolled out into the production. So if all these teams are operating in say silos and there is lack of collaboration between the teams, so this can stall the projects as well. And finally, what we see is the data scientists they typically start the machine learning modeling on their individual PCs or laptops and they don't focus on the operational aspects of the solution. So what this means is when the IT teams have to roll all this out into a production kind of deployment, so they get challenged to take all the work that has been done by the individuals and then be able to make sense out of it, be able to make sure that it can be seamlessly brought up in a production environment in a consistent way, be it on-premises, be it in the cloud or be it say at the edge. So these are some of the key challenges that we see that the organizations are facing, as they say try to take the AI projects from pilot to production. >> Well, some of those things seem like repetition of what we've had in the past. Obviously silos have been the bane of IT moving forward and of course, for many years we've been talking about that gap between developers and what's happening in the operation side. So Tushar, help us connect the dots, containers, Kubernetes, the whole DevOps movement. How is this setting us up to actually be successful for solutions like AI and ML? >> Sure Stu I mean, in fact you said it right like in the world of software, in the world of microservices, in the world of app modernization, in the world of DevOps in the past 10, 15 years, but we have seen this evolution revolution happen with containers and Kubernetes driving more DevOps behavior, driving more agile behavior so this in fact is what we are trying to say here can ease up the cable to EIML also. So the various containers, Kubernetes, DevOps and OpenShift for software development is directly applicable for AI projects to make them move agile, to get them into production, to make them more valuable to organization so that they can realize the full potential of AI. We already touched upon a few personas so it's useful to think about who the users are, who the personas are. Abhinav I talked about data scientists these are the people who obviously do the machine learning itself, do the modeling. Then there are data engineers who do the plumbing who provide the essential data. Data is so essential to machine learning and deep learning and so there are data engineers that are app developers who in some ways will then use the output of what the data scientists have produced in terms of models and then incorporate them into services and of course, none of these things are purely cast in stone there's a lot of overlap you could find that data scientists are app developers as well, you'll see some of app developers being data scientist later data engineer. So it's a continuum rather than strict boundaries, but regardless what all of these personas groups of people need or experts need is self service to that preferred tools and compute and storage resources to be productive and then let's not forget the IT, engineering and operations teams that need to make all this happen in an easy, reliable, available manner and something that is really safe and secure. So containers help you, they help you quickly and easily deploy a broad set of machine learning tools, data tools across the cloud, the hybrid cloud from data center to public cloud to the edge in a very consistent way. Teams can therefore alternatively modify, change a shared container images, machine learning models with (indistinct) and track changes. And this could be applicable to both containers as well as to the data by the way and be transparent and transparency helps in collaboration but also it could help with the regulatory reasons later on in the process. And then with containers because of the inherent processes solution, resource control and protection from threat they can also be very secure. Now, Kubernetes takes it to the next level first of all, it forms a cluster of all your compute and data resources, and it helps you to run your containerized tools and whatever you develop on them in a consistent way with access to these shared compute and centralized compute and storage and networking resources from the data center, the edge or the public cloud. They provide things like resource management, workload scheduling, multi-tendency controls so that you can be a proper neighbors if you will, and quota enforcement right? Now that's Kubernetes now if you want to up level it further if you want to enhance what Kubernetes offers then you go into how do you write applications? How do you actually make those models into services? And that's where... and how do you lifecycle them? And that's sort of the power of Helm and for the more Kubernetes operators really comes into the picture and while Helm helps in installing some of this for a complete life cycle experience. A kubernetes operator is the way to go and they simplify the acceleration and deployment and life cycle management from end-to-end of your entire AI, ML tool chain. So all in all organizations therefore you'll see that they need to dial up and define models rapidly just like applications that's how they get ready out of it quickly. There is a lack of collaboration across teams as Abhinav pointed out earlier, as you noticed that has happened still in the world of software also. So we're talking about how do you bring those best practices here to AI, ML. DevOps approaches for machine learning operations or many analysts and others have started calling as MLOps. So how do you kind of bring DevOps to machine learning, and fosters better collaboration between teams, application developers and IT operations and create this feedback loop so that the time to production and the ability to take more machine learning into production and ML-powered applications into production increase is significant. So that's kind of the, where I wanted shine the light on what you were referring to earlier, Stu. >> All right, Abhinav of course one of the good things about OpenShift is you have quite a lot of customers that have deployed the solution over the years, bring us inside some of your customers what are they doing for AI, ML and help us understand really what differentiates OpenShift in the marketplace for this solution set. >> Yeah, absolutely that's a very good question as well and we're seeing a lot of traction in terms of all kinds of industries, right? Be it the financial services like healthcare, automotive, insurance, oil and gas, manufacturing and so on. For a wide variety of use cases and what we are seeing is at the end of the day like all these deployments are focused on helping improve the customer experience, be able to automate the business processes and then be able to help them increase the revenue, serve their customers better, and also be able to save costs. If you go to openshift.com/ai-ml it's got like a lot of customer stories in there but today I will not touch on three of the customers we have in terms of the different industries. The first one is like Royal Bank of Canada. So they are a top global financial institution based out of Canada and they have more than 17 million clients globally. So they recently announced that they build out an AI-powered private cloud platform that was based on OpenShift as well as the NVIDIA DGX AI compute system and this whole solution is actually helping them to transform the customer banking experience by being able to deliver an AI-powered intelligent apps and also at the same time being able to improve the operational efficiency of their organization. And now with this kind of a solution, what they're able to do is they're able to run thousands of simulations and be able to analyze millions of data points in a fraction of time as compared to the solution that they had before. Yeah, so like a lot of great work going on there but now the next one is the ETCA healthcare. So like ETCA is one of the leading healthcare providers in the country and they're based out of the Nashville, Tennessee. And they have more than 184 hospitals as well as more than 2,000 sites of care in the U.S. as well as in the UK. So what they did was they developed a very innovative machine learning power data platform on top of our OpenShift to help save lives. The first use case was to help with the early detection of sepsis like it's a life-threatening condition and then more recently they've been able to use OpenShift in the same kind of stack to be able to roll out the new applications that are powered by machine learning and deep learning let say to help them fight COVID-19. And recently they did a webinar as well that had all the details on the challenges they had like how did they go about it? Like the people, process and technology and then what the outcomes are. And we are proud to be a partner in the solution to help with such a noble cause. And the third example I want to share here is the BMW group and our partner DXC Technology what they've done is they've actually developed a very high performing data-driven data platform, a development platform based on OpenShift to be able to analyze the massive amount of data from the test fleet, the data and the speed of the say to help speed up the autonomous driving initiatives. And what they've also done is they've redesigned the connected drive capability that they have on top of OpenShift that's actually helping them provide various use cases to help improve the customer experience. With the customers and all of the customers are able to leverage a lot of different value-add services directly from within the car, their own cars. And then like last year at the Red Hat Summit they had a keynote as well and then this year at Summit, they were one of the Innovation Award winners. And we have a lot more stories but these are the three that I thought are actually compelling that I should talk about here on theCUBE. >> Yeah Abhinav just a quick follow up for you. One of the things of course we're looking at in 2020 is how has the COVID-19 pandemic, people working from home how has that impacted projects? I have to think that AI and ML are one of those projects that take a little bit longer to deploy, is it something that you see are they accelerating it? Are they putting on pause or are new project kicking off? Anything you can share from customers you're hearing right now as to the impact that they're seeing this year? >> Yeah what we are seeing is that the customers are now even more keen to be able to roll out the digital (indistinct) but we see a lot of customers are now on the accelerated timeline to be able to say complete the AI, ML project. So yeah, it's picking up a lot of momentum and we talk to a lot of analyst as well and they are reporting the same thing as well. But there is the interest that is actually like ramping up on the AI, ML projects like across their customer base. So yeah it's the right time to be looking at the innovation services that it can help improve the customer experience in the new virtual world that we live in now about COVID-19. >> All right, Tushar you mentioned that there's a few projects involved and of course we know at this conference there's a very large ecosystem. Red Hat is a strong contributor to many, many open source projects. Give us a little bit of a view as to in the AI, ML space who's involved, which pieces are important and how Red Hat looks at this entire ecosystem? >> Thank you, Stu so as you know technology partnerships and the power of open is really what is driving the technology world these days in any ways and particularly in the AI ecosystem. And that is mainly because one of the machine learning is in a bootstrap in the past 10 years or so and a lot of that emerging technology to take advantage of the emerging data as well as compute power has been built on the kind of the Linux ecosystem with openness and languages like popular languages like Python, et cetera. And so what you... and of course tons of technology based in Java but the point really here is that the ecosystem plays a big role and open plays a big role and that's kind of Red Hat's best cup of tea, if you will. And that really has plays a leadership role in the open ecosystem so if we take your question and kind of put it into two parts, what is the... what we are doing in the community and then what we are doing in terms of partnerships themselves, commercial partnerships, technology partnerships we'll take it one step at a time. In terms of the community itself, if you step back to the three years, we worked with other vendors and users, including Google and NVIDIA and H2O and other Seldon, et cetera, and both startups and big companies to develop this Kubeflow ecosystem. The Kubeflow is upstream community that is focused on developing MLOps as we talked about earlier end-to-end machine learning on top of Kubernetes. So Kubeflow right now is in 1.0 it happened a few months ago now it's actually at 1.1 you'll see that coupon here and then so that's the Kubeflow community in addition to that we are augmenting that with the Open Data Hub community which is something that extends the capabilities of the Kubeflow community to also add some of the data pipelining stuff and some of the data stuff that I talked about and forms a reference architecture on how to run some of this on top of OpenShift. So the Open Data Hub community also has a great way of including partners from a technology partnership perspective and then tie that with something that I mentioned earlier, which is the idea of Kubernetes operators. Now, if you take a step back as I mentioned earlier, Kubernetes operators help manage the life cycle of the entire application or containerized application including not only the configuration on day one but also day two activities like update and backups, restore et cetera whatever the application needs. Afford proper functioning that a "operator" needs for it to make sure so anyways, the Kubernetes operators ecosystem is also flourishing and we haven't faced that with the OperatorHub.io which is a community marketplace if you will, I don't call it marketplace a community hub because it's just comprised of community operators. So the Open Data Hub actually can take community operators and can show you how to run that on top of OpenShift and manage the life cycle. Now that's the reference architecture. Now, the other aspect of it really is as I mentioned earlier is the commercial aspect of it. It is from a customer point of view, how do I get certified, supported software? And to that extent, what we have is at the top of the... from a user experience point of view, we have certified operators and certified applications from the AI, ML, ISV community in the Red Hat marketplace. And from the Red Hat marketplace is where it becomes easy for end users to easily deploy these ISVs and manage the complete life cycle as I said. Some of the examples of these kinds of ISVs include startups like H2O although H2O is kind of well known in certain sectors PerceptiLabs, Cnvrg, Seldon, Starburst et cetera and then on the other side, we do have other big giants also in this which includes partnerships with NVIDIA, Cloudera et cetera that we have announced, including our also SaaS I got to mention. So anyways these provide... create that rich ecosystem for data scientists to take advantage of. A TEDx Summit back in April, we along with Cloudera, SaaS Anaconda showcased a live demo that shows all these things to working together on top of OpenShift with this operator kind of idea that I talked about. So I welcome people to go and take a look the openshift.com/ai-ml that Abhinav already referenced should have a link to that it take a simple Google search might download if you need some of that, but anyways and the other part of it is really our work with the hardware OEMs right? And so obviously NVIDIA GPUs is obviously hardware, and that accelerations is really important in this world but we are also working with other OEM partners like HP and Dell to produce this accelerated AI platform that turnkey solutions to run your data-- to create this open AI platform for "private cloud" or the data center. The other thing obviously is IBM, IBM Cloud Pak for Data is based on OpenShift that has been around for some time and is seeing very good traction, if you think about a very turnkey solution, IBM Cloud Pak is definitely kind of well ahead in that and then finally Red Hat is about driving innovation in the open-source community. So, as I said earlier, we are doing the Open Data Hub which that reference architecture that showcases a combination of upstream open source projects and all these ISV ecosystems coming together. So I welcome you to take a look at that at opendatahub.io So I think that would be kind of the some total of how we are not only doing open and community building but also doing certifications and providing to our customers that assurance that they can run these tools in production with the help of a rich certified ecosystem. >> And customer is always key to us so that's the other thing that the goal here is to provide our customers with a choice, right? They can go with open source or they can go with a commercial solution as well. So you want to make sure that they get the best in cloud experience on top of our OpenShift and our broader portfolio as well. >> All right great, great note to end on, Abhinav thank you so much and Tushar great to see the maturation in this space, such an important use case. Really appreciate you sharing this with theCUBE and Kubecon community. >> Thank you, Stu. >> Thank you, Stu. >> Okay thank you and thanks a lot and have a great rest of the show. Thanks everyone, stay safe. >> Thanks you and stay with us for a lot more coverage from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, the virtual edition I'm Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE. (soft upbeat music plays)

>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue. Here's your host. Still Minutemen. >> Hi, I'm Stew Minutemen. And welcome to a special cute conversation here in our Boston Areas studio where in spring 2019 whole lot of shows where the cubes gonna be on going to lots of events so many different technologies were covering on one of the areas we always love to be able to dig into is what's happening with the users. Many of these shows, we go to our user conferences as well as the community. Really happy to Boca Burger. Believe first time on the program. Steve Methodists famous. Who is the newly elected president of the mug s. So I think most of Ronan should know the V mug organization to the VM where User group. We've done cube events at, you know, the most related events. Absolute talked about the mug we've had, you know, the CEO of the mug on the program. And of course, the VM were Community 2019 will be the 10th year of the Cube at VM World. Still figuring out if we should do a party and stuff like that. We know all the ins and outs of what happened at that show. But you know the V mugs itself? I've attended many. Your Boston V mug is one that I've been, too. But before we get into the mug stuff, Steve could just give us a little bit of your back, because you are. You're practicing your user yourself. >> Yeah, well, first thanks for having me. You know what? I've been watching the cube for years, and it's ah, it's great to be on this side of the of the screen, right? So, yes. So I'm Steve. I think I, you know, show up every day as the associate chief information officer of the University of Massachusetts. Little just for 95 here, and that's my day job. That's my career, right? But what? You know what? I'm excited to be here to talk about what I'm excited in general with the mug is it's a community organization. And so it's a volunteer gig, and that's true of all of our leadership, right? So the from the president of the board of directors to our local leaders around the world, they're all volunteers, and that's I think, what makes it special is We're doing this because we're excited about it. We're passionate about it. >> Yeah, you know the mugs, It's, you know, created by users for user's. You go to them, talk a little bit. It's evolved a lot, you know, It started as just a bunch of independent little events. Is now you know, my Twitter feed. I feel like constantly every day. It's like, Oh, wait, who is at the St Louis? The Wisconsin one? I'll get like ads for like, it's like a weight is the Northeast one. I'm like, Oh, is that here in New England that I don't know about? No, no, no. It's in the UK on things like that. So I get ads and friends around the world and I love seeing the community. So, boy, how do you guys keep it all straight? Man, is that allow both the organic nature as well as some of the coordination and understanding of what's going on. How do you balance that? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And you know, So I was a V mug member for many, many years before I ever got interested in becoming a leader, and you're right it when it started, it was 10 of us would get around with a six pack of beer and a box of pizza, right? And we'd be talking shop and that, you know, that was awesome. And that's what would that was, how it started. But you get to a certain scale when you start talking about having 50,000 now, over 125,000 members around the world. You gotta coordinate that somehow you're right on the money with that. And so that's why you know, we have, you know, a strong, um, coordination effort that is our offices down in Nashville, Tennessee, and their their role is to enable our leaders to give back to their community and take the burden out of running these things. You know, sourcing venues and, you know, working with hotels and stuff. That is effort that not everybody wants to do all the time. And so to do that for them lets them focus on the really cool stuff which is the tech and connecting users. >> Yeah. Can you speak a little bit too? You know what were some of the speeds and feed to the event? How many do you have How much growing, you know, Like I'm signed up. I get the newsletter for activities as well as you know, lots of weapons. I've spoken on some of the webinars too. >> Yeah, well, first thanks for that s o. We have over 30 user cons around the world on three continents. >> In fact, what's the user cough? >> Great questions. So user kind is user conference, you know, consolidated into user Connery. And those are hundreds of end users getting together around the world were on three continents. In fact, I was fortunate enough in March, I went to Australia and I spoke at Sydney and Melbourne on That was awesome, getting to meet users literally, almost a sw far away from Boston. As you can get having the same challenges in the office day today, solving the same business problems with technology. So that was exciting. And so we've got those all over. We also have local meetings which are, you know, smaller in scope and often more focused on content. We've got 235 or Maur local chapters around the world. They're talking about this, and so we're really engaged at multiple levels with this and like you talk about. We have the online events which are global in scope. And we do those, you know, we time so that people in our time zone here in the States could get to them as well as folks in, you know, e m b A and a factory. >> Yeah, and I have to imagine the attendees have to vary. I mean, is it primarily for, you know, Sylvie, um, where admin is the primary title there up to, you know, people that are CEOs or one of the CEOs? >> Yes. So that actually we've seen that change over the past couple years, which is exciting for me being in the role that I'm in is you're right historically was vey Sphere admits, right? And we're all getting together. We're talking about how do we partition our lungs appropriately, right? And now it has switched. We see a lot more architect titles. We Seymour director titles coming in because, you know, I said the other day I was in Charlotte talking and I said, You know, business is being written in code, right? And so there's a lot more emphasis on what it's happening with V m wearing his VM worth portfolio expands. We've got a lot of new type of members coming into the group, which is exciting. >> Yeah, And what about the contents out? How much of it is user generated content versus VM were content and then, you know, I understand sponsorships or part of it vendors. The vendor ecosystem, which vm where has a robust ecosystem? Yes, you know, help make sure that it's financially viable for things to happen and as well as participate in the contest. >> Yes, I feel like I almost planted that question because it's such a good one. So, you know, in 2018 we started putting a strong emphasis on community content because we were, you know, we heard from remembers that awesome VM were content, awesome partner content. But we're starting to miss some of the user to user from the trenches, battle war stories, right? And so we put an emphasis on getting that back in and 2018 we've doubled down in 2019 in a big way, so if you've been to a user kind yet in 2019 but we've limited the number of sponsors sessions that we have, right so that we have more room for community content. We're actually able to get people from around the world to these events. So again, me and a couple folks from the States went toe Australia to share our story and then user story, right? And at the end of the day, we used to have sponsored sessions to sort of close it out. Now we have a community, our right, and Sophie Mug provides food and beverages and a chance to get together a network. And so that is a great community. Our and you know, I was at one recently and I was able to watch Ah, couple folks get to them. We're talking about different problems. They're having this and let me get your card so we can touch base on this later, which at the end of the day, that's what gets me motivated. That's what >> it's about. It's Steve. I won't touch on that for a second. You know what? Get you motivated. You've been doing this for years. You're, you know, putting your time in your president. I know. When I attended your Boston V mark the end of the day, it was a good community member talking about career and got some real good, you know, somebody we both know and it really gets you pumped up in something very, a little bit different from there. So talk a little bit without kind of your goals. For a CZ president of Emma, >> Sure eso I get excited about Vima because it's a community organization, right? And because, you know, I've said this a bunch of times. But for me, what excites me is it's a community of people with similar interests growing together right and reinforcing each other. I know for a fact that I can call ah whole bunch of people around the world and say, Hey, I'm having a problem technically or hey, I'm looking for some career advice or hey, one of my buddies is looking for work. Do you know of any opening somewhere? And that's really powerful, right? Because of the end of the day, I think the mug is about names and people and not logos, right? And so that's what it motivates me is seeing the change and the transformation of people and their career growth that V mug can provide. In fact, I know ah ton of people from Boston. In fact, several of them have. You know, they were administrators at a local organization. Maybe they moved into partners. Maybe they moved into vendors. Maybe they stay where they are, and they kept accelerating their growth. But I've seen tons of career growth and that that gets me excited watching people take the next step to be ableto to build a >> career, I tell you, most conferences, I go to the kind of jobs take boards, especially if you're kind of in the hot, cool new space they're all trying to hire. But especially when you go to a local on the smaller events, it's so much about the networking and the people. When I go to a local user, event it. Hey, what kind of jobs you hiring for who you're looking for and who do I know that's looking for those kind of things and trying to help connect? You know, people in cos cause I mean, you know, we all sometime in our career, you know we'll need help alone those lines that I have, something that's personally that you know, I always love to help >> you. I have a friend who said it. I think best, and I can't take credit for this, right? But it's It can be easy to get dismissed from your day job, right? One errant click could be the career limiting click. It is nigh impossible to be fired from the community, right? And that that, to me, is a powerful differentiator for folks that are plugged into a community versus those that are trying to go it >> alone. Yeah, there are some community guidelines that if you don't follow, you might be checking for sure, but no, if if we're there in good faith and we're doing everything like out, tell me it's speaking. You know, this is such, you know, change. Is this the constant in our world? You know, I've been around in the interview long enough. That's like, you know, I remember what the, um where was this tiny little company that had, you know, once a week, they had a barbecue for everybody in the company because they were, like, 100 of them. And, you know, you know, desktop was what they started working on first. And, you know, we also hear stories about when we first heard about the emotion and the like. But, you know, today you know Veum world is so many different aspects. The community is, you know, in many ways fragmented through so many different pieces. What are some of the hot, interesting things? How does seem a deal with the Oh, hey, I want the Aye Aye or the Dev Ops or the you know where where's the vmc cloud versus all these various flavors? How do you balance all that out? All these different pieces of the community? >> Yeah, it's an interesting question. And to be fair with you, I think that's an area that were still getting better at. And we're still adapting to write. You know, if you look at V mug Five years ago, we were the V's fear, sort of first, last and always right. And now you know, especially is VM. Where's portfolio keeps increasing and they keep moving into new areas. That's new areas for us, too. And so, you know, we've got a big, uh, initiative over the next year to really reach out and and see where we can connect with, you know, the kubernetes environment, right? Cause that the hefty oh acquisition is a really big deal. and I think fundamentally changes or potential community, right? And so you know, we've launched a bunch of special interest groups over the span of the past couple years, and I think that's a big piece of it, which is, if you're really interested in networking and security, here's an area that you can connect in and folks that are like minded. If you're really interested in and user computing, here's what you can connect into. And so I think, you know, as we continue to grow and you know, we're, you know, hundreds of thousands of people now around the world so that you can be a challenge. But I think it's It's also a huge opportunity for us to be ableto keep building that connection with folks and saying, Hey, you know, as you continue to move through your career, it's not always gonna be this. You're right. Change is constant. So hey, what's on the horizon for >> you? When I look at like the field organization for being where boy, I wonder when we're gonna have the sand and NSX user groups just because there's such a strong emphasis on the pieces, the business right now? Yeah, All right, Steve, let's change that for a second. Sure said, You know, you're you got CEO is part of your title, their eyes, what you're doing. Tell me about your life these days and you know the stresses and strains And what what's changing these days and what's exciting? You >> sure? So you know, it's exciting to have moved for my career because I'm an old school admin, right? I mean, that's my background. Uh, so, you know, as I've progressed, you know, I keep getting different things in my portfolio, right? So it started out as I was, you know, I was the admin, and then I was managing the systems engineering team. And then they added desktop support that was out of necessity was like, I'm not really a dustup person, right? So something new you need to learn. But then you start seeing where these synergies are, right? Not to hate, like the words energies. But the reality is that's where we launched our VD. I project at U Mass. Lowell, and that has been transformative for how we deliver education. And it has been a lot of ways. Reduced barriers to students to get access to things they couldn't before. So we had engineering students that would have to go out and finance a 3 $4000 laptop to get the horsepower to do their work. Now, that can use a chromebook, right? They don't have to have that because we do that for them and just they have to have any device t get access via via where horizon. Right, So that happened, and then, you know, then they moved in. Our service is operation, right? So what I'm interested now is how do we deliver applications seamlessly to users to give them the best possible experience without needing to think about it? Because if you and I have been around long enough that it used to be a hassle to figure out okay, I need to get this done. That means they need to get this new applications I have to go to I t there and I have my laptop. Now it's the expectation is just like you and I really want to pull out my phone now and go to the APP store and get it right. So how do we enable that to make it very seamless and remove any friction to people getting their work >> done? Yeah, absolutely. That the enterprise app store is something we've talked about is not just the Amazon marketplace these days. >> In some ways, it is so not all applications rate. Some applications are more specific to platforms. And so that's a challenge, which is, you know, I'm a professor. I really like my iPad. Well, how do I get S P ss on that? Okay, well, let me come up with some solutions. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I'm curious if you have any thoughts just from the education standpoint, how that ties into i t. Personally myself, I think I was in my second job out of school before I realized I was in the i t industry because I studied engineering they didn't teach us about. Oh, well, here's the industry's You're working. I knew tech, and I knew various pieces of it and, you know, was learning networking and all these various pieces there. But, you know, the industry viewpoint as a technology person wasn't something. I spend a lot of time. I was just in a conference this week and they were talking about, you know, some of the machine learning pieces. There was an analyst got up on stage is like here I have a life hack for you, he said. What you need to do is get a summer intern that's been at least a junior in college that studied this stuff, and they can educate you on all these cool new things because those of us have been here a while that there's only tools and they're teaching them at the universities. And therefore that's one of those areas that even if you have years, well, if you need to get that retraining and they can help with that >> no, that's that to me is one of most exciting parts about working in education is that our faculty are constantly pushing us in new directions that we haven't even contemplated yet. So we were buying GPU raise in order to start doing a I. Before I even knew why we were doing and there was like, Hey, I need this and I was like, Are you doing like a quake server? Like they were mining Bitcoins? I don't think so, but it was, you know, that was that was that was an area for us and now we're old. Had it this stuff, right? And so that is a exciting thing to be able to partner with people that are on the bleeding edge of innovation and hear about the work that they're doing and not just in in the tech field, but how technology is enabling Other drew some groundbreaking research in, you know, the life sciences space that the technology is enabling in a way that it wasn't possible before. In fact, I had one faculty member tell me, Geez, maybe six months ago. That said, the laboratory of the past is beakers and Silla scopes, right? The laboratory of the future is how many cores can you get? >> Yeah, all right, So next week is Del Technologies world. So you know the show. The combination of what used to be A M, C World and Del World put together a big show expecting around 15,000 people in Las Vegas to be the 10th year actually of what used to be M. C world. We actually did a bunch of dead worlds together. For me personally, it's like 17 or 18 of the M C world that I've been, too, just because disclaimer former emcee employees. So V mugs there on dhe, Maybe explain. You know, the mugs roll there. What you're looking to accomplish what you get out of a show like that. >> Sure. So V mug is a part of the affiliation of del Technologies user communities. Right? And what I love about user communities is they're not mutually exclusive, right? You absolutely can. Being a converged and Avi mug and a data protection user group. It's all about what fits your needs and what you're doing back in the office. And, you know, we're excited to be there because there's a ton of the move members that are coming to Deltek World, right? And so we're there to support our community and be a resource for them. And that's exciting for us because, you know, Del Del Technologies World is a whole bunch of really cool attack that were that were seeing people run vm were on Ray. We're seeing via more partner with, and so that's exciting for us. >> Yeah, and it's a try. Hadn't realized because, like, I've been to one of the converted user group events before, didn't realize that there was kind of an affiliation between those but makes all the sense in the world. >> Yeah, right. And it's, you know, again, it's an open hand thing, right? Beaten and one being the other. You realize them both. For what? They're what They're great at connecting with people that are doing the same thing. There's a ton of people running VM wear on. Ah, myriad. Like you talked about earlier VM Where's partner? Ecosystem is massive, right? But many, many, many in fact, I would say a huge majority of converged folks are running VM we're >> on it. All right. So, Steve want to give you the final word? What's the call to action? Understand? A lot of people in the community, but always looking from or always, ways for people to get involved. So where do they go? What? What would you recommend? >> Yeah, thanks. So if if you are not plugged into user community now, when you're in the tech field, I would strongly encourage you to do so. Right? V mug, obviously, is the one that's closest to my heart, right? If you're in that space, we'd love to have you as part of our community. And it's really easy. Go to V mug. dot com and sign up and see where the next meet up is and go there, right? If you're not into the VM where space and I know you have lots of folks that air, they're doing different things. Go check out your community, right? But I tell you, the career advantages to being in a user community are immense, and I frankly was able to track my career growth from admin to manager to director to associate CEO, right alongside my community involvement. And so it's something I'm passionate about, and I would encourage everybody to check out. >> Yeah, it's Steve. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, I give a personal plug on this. There are a lot of communities out there, the virtual ization community, especially the VM. One specifically is, you know, a little bit special from the rest. You know, I've seen it's not the only one, but is definitely Maur of. It's definitely welcoming. They're always looking for feedback, and it's a good collaborative environment. I've done surveys in the group that you get way better feedback than I do in certain other sectors in just so many people that are looking to get involved. So it's one that you know, I'm not only interviewing, but, you know, I can personally vouch for its steeple. Thank you. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright. And be sure to check out the cube dot net. Of course, we've got dealt technologies world in the immediate future. Not that long until we get to the end of summer. And vm World 2019 back in San Francisco, the Q will be there. Double set. So for both del world del Technologies world and VM World. So come find us in Las Vegas. If you're Adele or Mosconi West in the lobby is where will be for the emerald 2019 and lots and lots of other shows. So thank you so much for watching. Thank you.

>> Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE! Covering CommVault Go 2018. Brought to you by CommVault. >> I hear the train a'comin'. It's rollin' round the bend, and I ain't seen the sun shine since I don't know when. Oh, you're watching theCUBE, and we're in Nashville, Tennessee. Yes, Johnny Cash, he played his last days here. And I'm Stu Miniman with Keith Townsend. And helping us to round up the program, he's wearing a He Wore Black shirt >> Yes I am. >> Which is a Johnny Cash tribute band. And my only guest of the day wearing cowboy boots. Friend of mine, happy to help us round this up, David Chapa, who's the founder of the CTO Group, also known as Mister Recovery in the industry. David, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. CTE Group. >> CTE Group, I'm sorry. >> I haven't made the O level yet. >> I'm sorry, I'm confusing things with the CTO Advisor here. >> I know, you got an O, you got an E, we have almost all the letters. >> We got all these TLEs, TLAs in the industry here, but thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, so my first time at the CommVault show. I've known CommVault for a lot of years. Keith's been here twice. What's your experience been at the show so far? >> This is my first time to the show. So far it's been very impressive. This show room floor is huge. I like how they set it up. They want it set up like it's a street, and they were successful. You can walk down, you can stroll down a street. You can go and see different vendors. I thought it was, as far as the design, I thought it was really really good. Information's great. >> Yeah. What I found, "engaging" is what I'd say, that's what you want with a show floor. The booths did pretty well, but there's little pavilions where they're having lots of sessions. Every time I went by, there were people there. There's labs, people going away, and there's media and podcasts, and food and beverage, and all that stuff there, but a nice dynamic and really kept it going and that's been this show itself. I found it to be engaging. There's a lot going on, a lot of announcements. What's your take on CommVault? >> Well, I think that their transformation, they've been talking about, you know, transform the company. I heard a lot about, you know, people tag us as a legacy company. We're too expensive, we're this, we're that. I heard Bob say a couple times, "What 20-year-old company is not going to be called legacy?" There's some truth to that. But they've done, I think, a pretty good job of kind of laying out what it is they plan on doing. They've tried to simplify things. I look at different companies and I often say this to clients. You know, there's four things you really want to worry about in life when you're running a business. You want to make money, that's one of them. You want to make sure you have good customer satisfaction. You make sure your people are happy, and you want to make sure you make it easy for people to do business with you. And I think CommVault's really taking a hard look at the, how do we make it easy for them to do business with us. And so they've reduced the, they put all our products on one slide, which I thought was pretty impressive. They've also simplified the pricing, which I thought was pretty impressive. So, I think, what they are doing is they are trying to make some good strides to make those things happen and they are focusing on the customers as a result. >> All right. So, Keith, I'm going to let you ask some questions. But we talked some in our opening analysis, but after talking to customers, talking to their execs, what are you walking away with from this show? >> You know what? Some companies are transformed because it's just the natural flow of business. They are forced into competition. They have to react. CommVault's transformation is not a fluke. From the top down, this is not silos. This is not individual product silos competing in their individual silo. We talked to Al Bunte, the COO, and he talked about doing the right thing by the customer because it's the right thing to do. And if you don't focus on money, money will come. I think we all like to have those idealistic views, but, I think, it's something that on the surface, at least from this show, is working for CommVault. They are transformed. I ran a backup project. One of my first major projects of my IT career almost 20 years ago. And one of the big dogs was CommVault. Needless to say with any technology, much, much different company dealing with today than I dealt with 20 years ago. And I think I'd go as far as to say CommVault was a much different company than three years ago versus the first CommVault Go. >> Coming into this show certain things I was looking for. How do they play in the cloud? Okay. Are they actually doing things with AI? Or as I saw this joke on the internet that was a zoo took a donkey and painted stripes on it and said, "Typical AI start-up VC funded." You know, not actually a zebra and the like. And I tell you, the questions that I had, I think CommVault had a good solid answer. At the open this morning we said there wasn't anything that jumped out that was like, "Wow. I've never heard of that or thought of it." But, you know, good customer base. You know, strong brand in the industry. And making a lot of the right moves to get there. The announcements this week, anything jump out at you? Anything surprise you? >> Nothing surprised me. But, you know, things that jump out cause my focus with the CT Group is on really disaster recovery, business continuity, helping customers really understand the value of the data, and how to recover that data. I shouldn't say the data because it's about recovering the mission of the business, whatever that may be. And one of the things that I liked that I heard this yesterday and today, was about their recovery readiness report. I thought that was pretty interesting. Their interface is very clean and a customer can drill into the RP that they want. And I got a demo earlier from one of the developers and that was one thing that stood out. Because for me, it's all about the recovery. Backup is great. I've been doing backup for a long time. But if you can't recover that stuff, man, they, you know, once someone said that a backup admin is a great job because no one knows your name. >> (laughs) >> Until you can't restore the data, and then they know your first name, last name, and middle initial. And my middle initial is A, so you can imagine the kind of names I was called when that stuff wasn't happening. When you can have a plan, and that's the idea, disaster recovery plan, and then you can respond and not react, that's where you want to be. And I think that's what CommVault needs to deliver to their customers to be successful in this transformation is, how can they achieve that plan, and how can they be responsive and not reactive, cause reactive is when you make mistakes. >> So I think one of the things that I had tweeted earlier was that CommVault isn't asleep at the wheel. And we asked Al a challenging question, which was, "How do you provide these new features that's expected in the modern backup data protection platform, but yet please your legacy customer? I mean, some customers don't want the change. If they didn't have to upgrade their backup software for three years, they'd prefer not to. So one of the things I thought is interesting is that their walking a tightrope. And, Dave, I'd like to hear from you on your thoughts around their ability to please their traditional legacy customer while attracting net new customers. >> There's that word again, legacy. Now it's with the customers. I think as you look at the market, and you guys know this, I had a conversation with a health care customer months and months and months ago. Actually, I think it was about two years ago. And the CTO was really a legacy minded person. Why should we go to the cloud when everything is working? Why should we do this when everything is working? Well, the conversation I had with him was, "Your business is going to be accelerating. Your competition will be accelerating. And you need to keep up with the competition by adopting some of these things that will help you move faster, smarter, and make better decisions for your business." So those legacy customers at some point will have to make a decision that we need to be competitive in the market place and we're going to need new tools. Now for those customer that are using CommVault today, well, CommVault is sitting there with their new platform, the transformative ideas that they have to help them get there. So, you know, to try to answer your question, it's really hard. There will be legacy customers, of course, but those legacy customers need to survive. And you've got to survive by responding to the market demands. >> It was interesting for me to look at this ecosystem here. Talk about the partnerships. Talk about how their playing in multi-cloud. There are, potentially, a lot of threats to a CommVault out there. Not just, you know, the start-ups that are coming directly after this space that are well funded, but, you know, the same people that are trying to partner with in the public cloud, well stop partnering with the public cloud. They are driving a lot of innovation in the industry in doing this. What does CommVault need to do to stay successful, you know, grow their customer base, and, you know, accelerate through this transformation? >> Well I saw the interview that you did with Al. And the one thing he said was, "Listen to the customers." And that is one thing I would tell them too is, you have to listen to your customers. And you have to comprehend what they are saying. Not just understand what they are saying. Those are two different things. When you can comprehend what someone is saying that means you can repeat that with the same passion in your own words. So listen to your customers, really comprehend what their challenges are and how you can help them, either with the existing product or the features that you need to develop to help them get over that hump or that challenge they have. So that to me is the biggest thing, listen to the customers. That's going to drive the market. >> Yeah, David. I'm really taken a back by the amount of change, the amount of conversation around multi-cloud. We had a great conversation with the tech field data guys a little bit earlier about data management. One of the things that I'd like to hear from you from your industry perspective from CTE and helping customers with data recovery, and not just data recovery as you mentioned, business recovery. Are customers hearing the message from the CommVaults of the world that your cloud strategy, your multi-cloud strategies, starts with data, data management, data protection. Is that actually resonating with customers? Or is that a niche, I think, awareness? >> It depends on who you're talking to. So for me, I think any organization that wants to win the hearts and minds of the mid-market and the lower end of enterprise, you have to really start thinking more business centric. That's the focus of what we do. We look at business centric IT. And what does that mean? Well that means that you throw away the lexicon that we're so used to using in IT, and you really start to try to use the terms that the business will understand and comprehend. And the way you do that is by asking a lot of questions of the business. What's important? Why is it important? What's the mission? In IT, we should not be the ones that own the data, that own the application. We are the stewards or the custodian of that. And as the steward or custodian, we do know we have to protect it, but we don't know necessarily know why. But we need to understand that. And then, when we have that conversation with the with the business, then we can start talking to them about recovering the mission of that particular business unit. It might be two servers. It might be 40 servers. So is that message resonating with companies? I think, I think CommVault needs to do a better job at communicating at that business value level. And I think that this conference, this launching pad, if you will, is the starting point for them to do that. More companies want to understand how they can solve real business problems and challenges and not hear how fast your feature is or how cool this new widget is that you have in your product. They have real business challenges. They want to solve those challenges. >> All right. Well, David, that critical analysis is one of the reasons that I asked you on the program. Keith, it's been a pleasure doing the show with you today, as always. But before I let you off the hook, David, this is our first time doing the show in Nashville. I've barely gotten to see much of the city. Keith and his wife are checking out a little bit of it. I did get some Nashville hot chicken. But for those in our audience that maybe haven't been to Nashville, what are they missing here culturally, musically, and the like? >> Wow. What are you missing? Well there's a lot of great music. You can't find a bad musician in Nashville. If you do, they're not in town very long. >> (laughing) Run them out of town. >> Yeah. But Nashville is a very, very cool town. Downtown Nashville you walk around there at 10:00 in the morning you're hearing music. Live music anywhere you walk in. The country side is beautiful. So from a Johnny Cash perspective, you can go to Hendersonville and you can drive by where Johnny Cash's house was at right on the Old Hickory Lake there. It's burned down, but it's still, the foundation is still there. A lot of rich history in Nashville. You've got to come check it out. This is one of my favorite cities, man. And there's a reason why I changed my flight to get down to this show. I was already here in Nashville last week playing a music gig. I thought I could play the CommVault gig for a little while. I could do that. >> Excellent. So when you closed the show, what was the closer for the Johnny Cash tribute band? >> For me it's The Man In Black. >> All right. Well I appreciate you joining, David. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. For the whole crew here, thanks so much for joining us. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of the coverage from this show. All the shows we'll be at the future. Feel free to hit us up through social media if you have any other questions. And once again, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

why from nashville tennessee it's the hue covering CommVault go 2018 brought to you by CommVault welcome back we're a few miles down the road from the Jack Daniel's distillery I believe there's some whiskey flowing on the show floor here but we're gonna finish a couple more interviews you're watching the cube I'm Stu minimun this is Keith Townsend happy to welcome back to the program Don Foster is the senior director of solutions marketing with Conn volt Don great to see you hey great thanks for the invite all right so been really good energy at the show these second time at the program it's my first you've got 2000 of the loyal supporters here lots of breakouts you know the pavilions been hopping labs and everything yeah how's the show been for you so far I think it's been incredible I mean first hats off to our partners and customers for coming the buzz is great this year we try to do something maybe a little bit different than in years past and really make it all about the partner ecosystem and about how solutions are more than just combo software it's CommVault together with our partners really get the outcomes what the customers want so we've really integrated everything in as best we possibly can from the content and the theaters and who's doing presentations and even how we do some of the collaboration yeah one of the themes we've been poking at a bit is like okay what's the same and what's different about CommVault you've got obviously you know trusted brand got a lot of existing customers but you know this is not the CommVault of five years ago it was a really broad set of announcements this week yeah I want want you to say what what's been anything surprise you as to kind of what is resonating which things people are getting most excited about I'm sure yesterday when you showed off that bezel and a bunch of people were booing and I you're like really the bezels it's a bunch of geeks here yeah so you know sometimes the flashy lights still you know get us going for sure well like there's always a few things that kind of surprise you and some things that really don't I mean you say what's same what's different you know there's a few terms that we use one of them being powerful simplicity the fact that the power that comma offers for customers from technology perspective you know that's always a mainstay and I think our customers know that our partners absolutely know that and the fact that we can deliver these these solutions for our customers that are really interesting an integrated way is always powerful the simplicity side I don't know even listening to Al not too long ago talking about hey we need to make things more simplified that's really resonating well and it's not just a dashboard or an interface but it's all the automation that's coming behind the scenes that's really starting to change people's idea in my and their minds and I mean we know we know the customers are expecting more me a Bob and I'll talk to battle Don look on that on the keynote stage our partners are expecting more so we need to deliver more as well so I mean those are some really interesting things on the bezel you know it's interesting appliances you never think it's like people don't want to see the equipment I mean that people see servers and their server racks every day but you bring a piece of equipment you stick in our podium and everyone wants to touch it take a selfie with it it's the new appliance look I applaud your team for not you know smoke and you know music and everything and you know here's the unveiling yeah your software company and therefore one of the deployment models might be we make it nice and easy here it is that's great and everything yeah you have little design people do their thing but at the end of the day I don't want to think about it it's most of the stuff sticking in racks in my data center or in the cloud aren't things that I need to worry about right right I mean it appliance is cool but guess what what we're doing with partners like HP and Cisco on building even larger scale and appliance that's just as school if not maybe cooler so I mean it's just it's great kind of showcase that sort of a spectrum of what we can do for our customers so let's talk about the part of the ecosystem for the size so you guys have a really big show floor great announcements with Cisco HPE but 500 partners doing a partner portion of the show what are some of the under-the-radar announcements or even trends that you've seen that customers are excited about yeah sure so actually I just before I came out here I was a TBC with one of our large worldwide partners and one of the things we were talking about they're super excited about the CommVault activate a product and then did the portfolio of applications that were launching and they basically look you guys absolutely nailed it it's kind of the duh moment you know in fact the partner said three years ago we were trying to tell our customers it's it's the data stupid like the data it's that's what's most important deer is cool but it's the data and when they heard this came out it's a whole nother route for them to talk to customers about how they can do things smarter around their data without trying to sell them on necessarily swapping out back and recovery first so let's really understand what your environment looks like and I'm hearing a lot of buzz from our partner community just on how cool what this might be able to do for them and how they're building their business but more importantly the customers are starting to realize hey GDP are just isn't in an EU thing the California just brought their own regulations we're gonna see that probably come to a state near year before you know it so you're gonna have to have a need to act and really maintain and control that data that's really what activate does right going beyond just metadata and giving giving companies a chance to really understand what they have and how they might need to act against it either to meet their compliance requirements or maybe just be smarter with data yeah I love that be smarter with data I think I was saying you know half the customers that they're starting with compliance because that's something we have to do but then there's the opportunities as to what can I do with the data a great example in the keynote it was like oh well I can actually use intelligence too how do I call the data yes you want to save a lot of data but I don't necessarily need to save all the data and that could save me millions of dollars when I do that so yeah I mean the power of data I think we are still in the early days of you know how does CommVault help customers through that that's so I mean it's it's really kind of in the breath of how we crawl information and what we sort of unlock as we do that right so you probably saw we talked about the four dimensional index the 40 index and it's real it's to call it 4d just to try to make it sound super technical but there really are multiple dimensions that we pull together from information and the meta information and where it comes from and whatnot that's all super important from a starting point but once you start working through a review process you've been vent oriented you want to be able to start adding in some tags maybe some entity detail on where and how that fits the organization and then from that you can get deeper into context and content so the content indexing adding and those are tributes being able to really start to align different different sets of data against one another and then the next piece which we do a little bit ourselves and we also work with partners like lucid works like folks like brain space we can start driving context from that information so before we've even talked about moving or storing data we're crawling this information and really giving customers the chance to solve what really is probably a top-three issue for CIOs and that's what they do do I have where is it and is there value in it or is there risk in it or what is is what I don't know about my data bigger than I realize and that's what this helps to unlock and solve for so I think now we're at the beginning of just the beginning of where infrastructure traditional infrastructure companies like con vault are bleeding into data management specifically with 4d indexing where we're providing data outside of the traditional or what's the file size the data was created centered on recover backing up recovering today that actually providing business context and value that application is v's can pick up are you starting to see any movement in is v-space to leveraging the data that's provided by index 40 so we're definitely seeing interest you know so when people think about data they tend to go down this idea of a data Lake and I've talked I'm sure you guys have heard this oh yeah we just throw the data Lake we throw the data lake well what are you throwing in the data Lake now that's a good question we don't know what's in the data Lake anymore and it becomes a data swamp you probably heard those level of stories right well if you don't know what's in there if the integrity of the information then it becomes a major challenge well a lot of the partners the is V is the folks that want to build and work on solutions outside of you know on top of the data they need to know that they have a good source of truth from what they're working from so being able to showcase that we have sort of that virtual data layer the fact that we can crawl data it's not even under our own management and then be able to offer that information back up to another another partner that really starts to you know sparks and some ideas or maybe what could be next so action we're still working through that we still have some things to do around software development kits and make it easier for our partners to build and get that ecosystem going but it's absolutely right down the alley what we were we want to take this all right so Don I hear your data Lake and the data swamp and when we go to the world of multi cloud and edge components really what we get into is the data ocean because there are currents and weather patterns and you know challenges unforeseen the edge of the map you know don't go there things like that it's one of the things you know I've been looking at the last couple of years when I look at companies like comm vault is you know how do you play in the multi cloud world we had a good chat with AWS I stopped by the Microsoft Azure booth here and as things like multi cloud and edge computing fit in you know weirdoes comm bolt fit so on the cloud space I mean it really starts with how you're actually leveraging or moving data or using data in the cloud right and it seems seems minor but if you're not really using the cloud natively if you're not storing data in a way that an s3 blob expects it and you don't have the index behind it if you're just passing it out into containers so you're not really putting that rigor to what that information is then you start to lose a lot of the downstream capability and so taking advantage of all these different services that are inside of the cloud so I mean this is back in 2008 you know 2007 when AWS was starting to really hit cloud computing you started hearing about Microsoft and Microsoft as you're starting up we realized that we wanted to work with these blob based storage devices and from there we realized all right if we're gonna let customers go to the cloud we want to make sure that once their data goes there there's never a reason for them necessarily to have to pull it back let's be able to help them orchestrate the resource utilization and in order for us to do that that data has to be natively accessible really easy right there in that cloud so that's kind of been our vision so as we've supported AWS and there are many services as we supported Microsoft Azure there many services as we're working through in supporting Google cloud platform Oracle cloud we're tying into those back-end services to make sure that that native access is always available and the red thread there is really the way CommVault indexes it very similar what the 40 index is from an activate perspective that red thread is how we can help manage and information across those clouds so it gives customers an ability to know all right it can be in cold storage but I still know where it is what it's meant for and at any point in time I can use it to drive more insight or pull it up into a production compute resource in the cloud all right don't want to give you the final word as we're coming towards the end of our broadcast here CommVault go what what main takeaway you want customers to have when they think about CommVault and think about this event great so I want them to walk away and realize okay the CommVault maybe they thought we were you know five years ago or the cow bought that maybe they're hearing from other people that isn't from us give us a chance and really take a look the things we're doing around AI the way we're working in a delivery of cloud environments the fact that we have that reliability that dependability and all the modern technologies that you're looking for I bet they will be surprised if they just give us a chance they'll see that the power in our software has become something that's really simple and will actually help them get faster to achieve their outcomes than if they looked at buying point solutions and trying to piece it together on their own so that's really well that's really what we're looking for is start to learn and understand at the new con volt is I bet will surprise them all right Don Foster really appreciate you giving us the update we appreciate the opportunity to be able to dig in with your customers in this broad ecosystem for Keith Townsend Tom's to minimas we'll be doing a wrap-up here in a second and thanks so much for watching the Q [Music]

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee. (light upbeat music) It's theCUBE. (light upbeat music) Covering Commvault GO 2018. (light upbeat music) Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee. This is Commvault GO, and you're watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost is Keith Townsend. And I am thrilled to welcome to the program, Al Bunte, who's the Chief Operating Officer at Commvault. Thanks so much for having us and pleasure to see ya. >> Thanks for having me. >> Hold on. In your keynote this morning, your CEO did a little bit of the talking. We made the joke that you might be the Teller to his Penn there. >> (laughing) >> So Keith and I will talk for a little bit, and then we'll let you get in. >> Fine. >> All right. >> I'm used to that. >> All right. So Al, we've really had a good day here. We've talked to some of your customers, talked to partners, talked to a lot of people here. The story that's coming across is Commvault's a company we know but maybe don't know the Commvault of today. So what's some of the messages you want customers to kind of come away with from the show, and then we'll get in from it from there. >> Yes, so we're focusing on trying to get the message across that we've simplified. We're in a complex world, as you guys well know. You have to do it through automation. Lots of it. Orchestration, et cetera. And we're trying to drive outcomes that are better for our IT customers out there. Almost that simple. >> Yeah, you use the word simple. Actually I liked in the keynote there was a little back and forth you had. Cloud was supposed to be simple and cheap. And when people actually got in and did it, they found out that it really was neither. >> Al: Correct. >> The word that was used in the keynote was, well you want to be smart and that might lead to things that are simpler and everything. Bring us inside a little bit to what Commvault is doing that is smarter to lead to easier, simpler down the road. >> And or better outcomes. >> Stu: Sure. >> I agree. So yeah, again as you guys know, as new technologies and or infrastructures come out like cloud, their initial use case is we're just a parking lot for data. So just write it up there and whatever works. Well it turns out that's simple, but now if you really want to use that data and those capabilities up in the cloud for cooler use cases, now you should be doing it smarter. So we talked, guys, about automation again. We talked about how you even write that data initially. Write it natively, so there isn't a conversion back and forth. That's a lot of latency. And then throughout everything we're talking about, we're adding a lot of machine learning, analytic capabilities, maybe overusing the word AI but you know leading down that path, and it makes a big difference. Cause these are big complex operations. >> So let's talk about this simple and smarter lesson. We've obviously seen a lot of change come out of Commvault. I went to Commvault GO last year. Just between this year and last year, you guys have made strides. Licensing model completely changed. As you talk to customers who are dealing with these complexities as a result of cloud and they look at simplified licensing, what have been some of the lessons learned over the past twenty years that have made you guys comfortable making which I have to say is a pretty bold decision in licensing? What has enabled that decision? >> It's a good question, Keith. I think it gets at that's what they want (laughing). >> (laughing) >> It's about that simple. >> Seems simple enough. >> Yeah we went off and talked to not just enterprise customers but midmarket customers. Remember, we're doing a lot of our activity through partners, so you have a third party. You don't want to get too confusing there. So we pushed hard on that idea, both in quoting, selling, and applying, and we just worked it a lot with our customer base and determined simplicity, by the way, is the number one criteria these days. It trumps cost, it trumps risk reduction, it trumps capabilities. People want it's got to be simple. Or I prefer simplified. Not simple dumb, simple smart. >> All right so Al, Commvault has quite a few employees. >> Yes. >> You've got quite a lot of customers. >> Al: Yes. >> You've got some very well-funded startups in this space. How does a Commvault compete? As the COO, how do you put the organizational structure in place, and how do you enable the company to be able to compete against some of these well-funded new players? >> Yeah so that's always a challenge, it really is. So I think personally, I have to have philosophies like, you have to change as a company. No resting on your laurels. You guys know that in tech industry, you can't rest on your laurels. Number one. Number two, we used to have to compete and change just a little faster than our competition. Now you have to change faster than startups. So everything we do, we're trying to drive change, we're trying to drive responsiveness, we've moved to rapid dev models. Again, I know you guys are well versed on it. We want to be able to respond to the market back to pricing, licensing, messaging, extremely fast. Back to the way Bob and I started the business, is we always, always, always believed you have to have the best technology. You can't go to sleep on that. You can't go on autopilot. And in our space you have to have the best support. So don't try to finesse those things. There may be other things to finesse, but just go all out and really drive the technology, the support, and then where you guys are going now get your act together on marketing, packaging, pricing, messaging, positioning, all those things. And that's where we're really bringing our game up. >> Well on that competition front, you guys have a, I don't know if it's an advantage, disadvantage, you can tell me, against your competitors. You have up to 100,000 customers who have used this product or a variation of this product for 20 years. So disruption may not be the word they're looking to hear. Some of these customers may be wanting to hear steady, reliable solution that I've used over the years, served me well, while you're trying to appeal to a customer that we had on earlier that said, "Man, the idea that Commvault is going to sass and having these rapid deployment cycles is what I love about the company." Brand new customer to Commvault, how do you balance those two, and is it an advantage or disadvantage? >> It's a great question, and it's tricky >> Keith: (laughing) >> is the right answer. But I think I've heard a lot of people, Keith, say as well, "Wow, in your space, "we don't necessarily want simple and limited. "It's got to be reliable, it's got to be consistent, "it's got to be," tada tada tada, all those same kind of things. Experienced people really like that level of experience. So, the real simple answer is, sorry for overusing simple, is that you got to do both. You got to try and simplify, and again that's why I distinguish between simple and simplified. So, put automation against them, make it simple, save some minutes and steps in those IT guys' day. And try to do both. We've actually used the tag line, I don't think I did today, on powerful simplicity. So you got to do both kind of idea, if that makes sense. >> Yeah taking automation and using these automation techniques to make what was a complex job simple, bottle that up, abstract it and allow customers to use services. So how are your >> Al: Yeah. >> traditional customers reacting to the new combo? >> I think very well. Gotten really a lot of great feedback, new products through the summertime, through even back to the springtime. I happen to believe enterprises are coming around more to the idea that you have to consolidate your platform. The platform idea, you guys, to automate. I'm running into customers 50% of their activity is tied to compliance. Well and that takes a ton of automation, and you don't want to be doing scripts and all that stuff everyday, cause it's repeatable. So again take those kind of ideas, simplify the environment, sorry the operations, and yet still keep a ton of capabilities and features. >> Yeah it's funny, if we dial the clock back two decades, things like intelligently managing our data and building in automation probably wouldn't have sounded that foreign. But >> I agree. >> today, it's a little bit different. We've talked about a decade ago, metadata was something I think most of us in the storage industry were like, this is critically important, but today it's actually happening. Why is today so important and is it? We would love to hear your6 viewpoint on that. >> Another great question. I don't know is the honest answer for sure, but I think it's all got to be driven with just the mountain of data, as you guys know, just tremendous data growth, I think point one. Point two is, I think a lot of organizations are seeing that it's required to run their business. I mean if you saw Steve Connell this morning, he talked about data is the new water. It's like that. So more and more people are coming to that conclusion. You know, I can't go into a business meeting and say, "Guys, I think we out to do this," and they go, "What do you base that on?" It's just an instinct. That doesn't play anymore. So, it's about the data. It's using the data. And that's been tricky in this space. I always said in the back up arena, people just backed it up because they were supposed to. It didn't even occur to them that they might need to use it. So it's like a big dumping ground, but, yep, check the box we backed it up. So all those sorts, velocity, its volume, those kind of things too, and Keith, I think is probably where it's going. >> Yeah, it's interesting. We've been hearing for a number of years now, data's going to drive everything. You must have data, you can't have opinions. But we're still early to see data-driven businesses. >> Al: Yeah, I agree. >> Do you have some kind of early exemplars, or what do you expect to see over the next couple of years that will drive things even more? >> Well we're focused right now on the operations side of it. So we're using tons of these techniques. I don't know if you saw my example today, but take a typical run, you have 48,000 events and logs. How the heck you going to do that without advanced analytics and machinery? And you saw my example, and this is all true stuff. It got it down to six issues that you needed to deal with. So, again we're focused on that side of the equation, but we have a ton of customers wanting to do, and you're hearing all the BI type-of-use cases out there, be it retail, be it security, be it the media industry. How do I capture and save and understand what bits of media clips I have. Today it's just in a big pile, right? So, want to be nicer with your user. >> So Al, you're entrepreneur, you're farm boy background. >> Good word. >> You're a COO of a company going through tremendous transformation. As you talk to your peers, whether it's peers within other technology companies, the farming community, et cetera, all these industries that are being disruptive, what advice have you given to them? Commvault GO, is a great example of Five years ago you guys didn't have a show. You're transforming the company. What advice have you given to your peers or even received that you'd like to share? >> I think it's you can't kick the can down the road, really. You got to deal with it. It's a tough question, Keith, but I think just deal with it and start investing. We go into so many places, and I'd have to be careful on how I say this but in a lot of companies the capabilities that they have within their companies of dealing with major architectural issues and data issues is: A, some of that talent has left, and B, they got other, more short term activities that are pressing 'em. So, guys, just back up, take a broad view, take a long view. Go get your foundations in place, and do this data thing right. I guarantee it's going to pay off for ya. Or you're going to be really disappointed if you don't. So just embrace it. >> All right, well Al, really appreciate catching up with you. I think, summarize what you were saying there, you can't just think about it, you need to go. >> (laughing) >> Stu: All right. >> Oh, you're tricky. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Couple more left here at Commvault GO in Nashville, Tennesse. Thanks so much for watching theCube.

>> Narrator: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE covering COMMVAULT GO 2018 brought to you by COMMVAULT. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee. This is COMMVAULT GO and you're watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program Lauren Nelson who's a principal analyst with Forrester. Thank you so much for joining us. >> My pleasure! >> Alright, our first time doing theCUBE in Nashville. COMMVAULT goes third year at the show. Have you been to the COMMVAULT shows in the past? >> I have. Not last year but the year prior, first year. >> So you skipped a year. From two years ago, just from my own knowledge COMMVAULT's changed quite a bit. I mean, they had some pressures on them. They've been going through a lot of pricing models. What's your take on what COMMVAULT's been doing in the last couple years? >> Yeah, a lot of focus on the show on pricing model changes, packages changes, emphasis on selling through partners and how to try and foster that in the actual village space. So, how do you bring partners into conversations early on and in a smoother way and just looking around, you've got white boards on tables, you've got spaces very changed in terms of collaborative space right in the middle of the booths rather than around the perimeter. So, very very interesting layout. >> Alright, so Lauren, your research, one of the things that you focus on is cloud and cloud migrations which is, of course, one of the key messages COMMVAULT talks about. When I talk to users, the multi-cloud strategy that they're figuring out, as I say, the ink's still drying and it's one of those things that's revisited quite often. What are you hearing from customers? What's your research showing of the state of cloud and how cloud migration fits in to it? >> Yeah, so you've got two really big topics right now on the cloud space. You've got the migration side and you've got the multi-cloud side and they are the conversations going on right now. First of all, you've got migration which is not SAS migration but migrating an app to an infrastructure as a service environment and that is something that is difficult. And a lot of companies that are talking about cloud migration don't always recognize that. They sum it up to SAS migration and often find that they are going to have higher performance when they move. They don't look at the challenges or the architectural changes from moving to vertical scaling to horizontal scaling and it's this conversation where, well, if we hear one company doing it, then maybe that should be our entire cloud strategy, And for a number of organizations, it is. Especially if you look at small mid-size organizations, they're looking at cloud migration as a data center replacement method. If you look at the average enterprise, that's not the typical story unless they're in a unique moment of change. Typically, what they're looking at is a few apps typically driven by location or app specific support that they're planning to get from their service provider of choice and they're moving this app for specific reasons. If you look holistically at our latest stats, survey taken in August, shows that 69 percent of enterprises in North America and Europe are actually migrating workloads to the cloud. If you then ask about how, they're methods are all over the map, the number of total apps they're moving is far less than what we're made to believe, in some of the more sensationalized or exaggerated stories or kind of unique use cases. When you look at the other side of that, you've got the multi-cloud story which is, all of a sudden with this migration topic, you get organizations questioning, "Should I be multi-cloud? "Am I doing this wrong? Am I adding needless complexity?" And we saw a bit of a drop in 2016, after GE presented at Amazon Re: Event, on associating with the term multi-cloud, that that was their specific strategy. And we've actually seen that come back in spades. In fact, we've seen a number of organizations actually say they are multi-cloud and then they have various definitions of what multi-cloud means for them. Multi-cloud is either public and private, private and some public cloud usage, multiple public, non cloud plus cloud. It's all over the map. And so, I think organizations are starting to take a step back, starting to think about, "How does my cloud strategy map to my larger organizational values?" Should seem obvious that should've been done that way from the start but for a lot of organizations it's a unique step that they're doing this year of being more pragmatic on how they should approach cloud. Not trying to force fit deployment models and look at the real opportunities that are there. And that includes all of these things. It includes private cloud and your on-prime data center for using it for specific workloads, for use cases that it just does not make sense to have that much change at once or to force the economics. The other side, you do see cloud migration. That is very much a real thing. It is not the most exciting use case to cloud. You're moving an app that you're not changing at all in terms of customer experience to an environment that is not meant to handle it that may suffer from performance. So it tends to be the less sexy side of the cloud strategies that we see today but very much apart. And it is the use of infrastructures of service for just that cheap infrastructure rather than some of it's more compelling past services. So it's an interesting time! All of those conversations are emerging, in fact, I can't tell you how many research reports we have on queue on these very topics around just the one-on-one level which I think is what we've primarily covered. Just the grazing the surface versus some of the latest conversations around, how do we have cloud neutral pass services that are obstructed from the underlying platform. Who will deliver those? What technologies will be standardized beneath that? How will we leverage kubernetes and the many different types. So, It's an interesting thing that I'm pretty passionate about as you can see. >> Well Lauren, let's talk about that step to when I'm out talking to customers about multi-cloud. One, multi-cloud or even cloud migration, that you're absolutely right, I see the same thing. They need to answer the why question like, "why are we even considering that?" And for multi-cloud I think customers are starting to look back and really wonder, "do I need that complexity?" "Is it really worth the effort?" But the second thing that I think customers underestimate the complexity of is having a data strategy unique to cloud versus their data strategy on PRIM. Are you seeing the same, that customers are realizing, wow, that I can't just take wholesale of my data strategy, my own PRIM data strategy and take that to the cloud. >> Yup, and it's the classic analyst response is, it depends. There's some organizations that are literally creating two different data hubs where they're having different access levels and different apps that you're allowed to connect to based on what classification is for that particular data. It's this theme of zero trust model of, how do you secure from the data out? And simply put, some data sets are more valuable than others. Some have security requirements that are far more expensive to meet and when you try and problem solve for this, some people try and think, well, is the easiest way just to completely segment the two, and be able to have control of how you access these two, Or, is it more complex than that? Do we need different databases that we're leveraging? Do we need to look at migrating some days or replicating some data to avoid data out fees from some of the major service providers? Do we leverage a third party like a collocation provider that can provide some ease for us in terms of movement of data? So, I think that's one of the big topics in the upcoming year is if I'm going to to multi-cloud, if I'm going to take on that effort, why am I doing that? You know, why am I taking on this as an important app? Is it because of fear of lock-in and flexibility long term? And if I do that, what are the implications in terms of data both security wise and cost wise. And a lot of organizations' challenge is, you know, you write out your cloud security, or your actual cloud strategy map and you don't really understand the proof points or where that strategy breaks until you start getting in to the details, testing out and trying to do this to try and figure out what are the actual costs of this scenario. So it's a challenging problem but it's one that I think organizations are going to be facing for the next few years. >> Yeah, it's interesting and I'm thinking through some of this. A lot of what we're talking about is infrastructure. And it's like, my private cloud, how do I modernize it? How do I simplify it? The reason we have infrastructure is to run my applications and the most important piece there is the data. How much does the cloud strategies that the data companies are working on look at data and how they are going to take advantage of data even more in the future? >> Yeah, it's a great question and there's so many different sides of this. There's one, you've got GDPR which is making them think about data in a whole new level just from a security and compliance perspective and how quickly they can react to requests that are put in by a particular citizen about their knowing what's on file for them as well as requesting it to be deleted and being held accountable for ability to complete that. On the other hand, you've got organizations that are trying to draw insights that are trying to change customer experience, design new products, market to their organizations more effectively leveraging data that they don't know where it is, they don't know how to use it or even how to start thinking about it together. They have a shortage of data scientists. They have a shortage of ... tools and solutions that can help them try and piece together this challenge. So, I would say companies have done very little of this so far. It is something that's on the road map. You get some organizations that are in the lead, that are testing the waters right now but if you look at the average organizations, they haven't even gotten to this. They're trying to use public cloud for very low end use cases at this point. >> Alright. So, I want to ask you when you talk about your research, of course, it depends. The customer by customer what they're having, but what differentiates a customer that can really start kind of moving up the stack, being more strategic, having IT really answering to the business and doing things with their data versus the laggards out there? Is there anything that you're finding in your research as to what separates those leaders from laggards? >> There's a few things and I'm not the first. A lot of vendors look for changes in executive boards. So, typically new folks coming in trying to change the way things are being done. Kind of, fresh innovative talent. That's a good flag that they're ready for it. Other organizations, there's the classic, they're threatened by others in their industry or believe they'll be threatened soon. For some organizations, it happens to be the right place, the right time. They have a leader they can trust that they believe will head this cloud strategy and that can tackle some of these challenges. For a lot of organizations, there's the desire, there is some action but often times the action is delayed. They face very stagnant cloud strategies. They face very stagnant data problems cause they're either missing cash, they're missing the ear of their executive board, or they have the wrong individuals that are trying to take the torch forward. So it takes a lot of critical self reflection as an organization that isn't easy. >> So let's talk a little about that (mumbles) within organizations. A lot of times, I'm seeing multi-cloud, cloud migration, cloud efforts being driven by, not just IT but infrastructure organizations within IT. Are you seeing successful efforts being driven from, I call that bottom up, versus whether if it's evens some VP or above, driving the effort from a business perspective? >> I think it varies. So, there some organizations where it's, our VPs are bringing a cloud first policy to our organization and then you have to figure out what that means to that particular executive. It may mean, we are going to go AWS completely all now! For a lot of organizations, it's a progress of, we're going to include all things that could be possibly labeled as cloud technologies, which, doesn't really describe much. If it does anything, it's to describe change is on the horizon. We are going to do things differently than we previously did. For a lot of companies, they have been tasked by their executives of, you need to tell me what to do for the cloud strategy and so they're trying to figure out, how do we problem solve for cloud from our perspective. I think that's been on of the biggest problems of the cloud industry for the last seven years, is this bottom up approach or top down approach with very little thinking about where's the value. So, bottom up, typically you get folks thinking about how to we have more efficient infrastructure, how do we modernize, how do we add in automation and build the best private cloud in the world? And often times over spending, often times delaying and having no self service access for developers for five years into their strategy. From that you see a lot of organizations trying to redesign their cloud strategies to deliver real business value up front early on and then look to see, how do they modernize, how do they mature, to help support and scale that effort, where as, top down approaches are very froofie, high level, shiny objects and so a lot of organizations that are trying to change that are trying to get individuals in the same room together, figure out, let's start from our business strategy and work our way in to how cloud serves that greater purpose. >> Lauren, when Forrester talks to customers, this space of data protection, secondary storage, whatever you call it, is pretty crowded. Are there specific things that, customers are calling out or that Forrester gives advices to how to differentiate in the market place or what they're looking for? And along those lines, what're customers looking for down the road to even expand more and get more value from vendors in the future? >> Yeah, I tend to focus on the cloudy questions. So, when I'm looking at data protection, I'm looking at it as a module of, how you manage multiple clouds. And when you look at the hyper cloud management space, it's a very busy space. It tends to focus on orchestration, template building, occasionally some compliance and policy, tags that can be applied, and then cost optimization. Very little has been done on the security side so far and very little has been done on data production side. So, when you look at, how do you differentiate, there's not a lot of players in this market yet. For as many security players as there are, it has not been aggressively tackled as heavily as the classic management providers have been attacking other management challenges. You look at the cloud costs optimization space, it's done very well. It's the first cloud challenge that organizations are trying to solve is, how much am I spending? Who's spending it? How do I integrate with my billing system? The next challenge is, how do I problem solve for data. They see that as a potentially huge cost escalator if they don't get this under control for many reasons, compliance, from data out costs. So, that's the next beach head. So, I would actually argue that there's not a lot that's been done specifically around cloud in this space yet. >> Lauren Nelson, we really appreciate you sharing your insight in customer views with us. >> My pleasure! Thank you. >> Alright, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more coverage here from COMMVAULT GO, in Nashville, Tennessee, Thanks for Watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live from Nashville, Tennessee. It's theCUBE covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee. You're watching theCUBE at Commvault GO. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program Lance Shaw, who's the director of Solutions Marketing at Commvault. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much, glad to be here. >> All right, so we've been having a great day here. We're talking to some of your partners. Talking to some of your customers. Solutions Marketing, of course, everything's a solution these days. That's what they're looking for. Tell us a little bit about your background and what you do at Commvault. >> Lance: Absolutely, right. So, I came from a product management and product marketing background and one of the things we're really focused on here at this show, of course, is all about customers and what their stories are and frankly, how we can improve our products and our solutions to better meet the needs of the customers, right. That's what ultimately what it all comes down to. And so, that's why we're here, the whole reason for the show. I think what's been interesting so far at this show has been the focus on, not only just cloud utilization, but the fact that customers are having to deal with multiple clouds and the fact that why they have to do that. There's a variety of reasons that drive people to say well you know maybe five years ago, you would have said, "Are you using a cloud?" Yeah, I've got one cloud provider, but now I've got lots. >> Stu: Yeah, and Lance I'd love to hear what you're hearing from customers 'cause one of the things you talk to customers and oh, they have a multi-cloud strategy and when you dig in, first of all, every customer has a totally different environment, >> Lance: Right. >> Stu: and it reminds me, I spent the last two decades trying to help customers get out of their silos, and in some ways I'm a little worried that we've just created a whole bunch of new silos, that just don't happen to live in my data center, and we called it multi-cloud >> Lance: Right. >> Stu: because the strategy is oh, well I did this application for here and then oh, there's this service over here that I needed and then I sissified a bunch of stuff. So, tell me we've got it all figured out. Customers, they have a good strategy, they're really sharp as to where they're going, and the future is bright. >> Lance: Absolutely. Now the reality of that is, (laughs) that in fact, you're absolutely right. Unwittingly or unknowingly we've gotten to a path of history repeating itself where I'm creating new silos of information and data. So, you're absolutely right. Organizations start out with a point solution for a particular application or a particular data set or acquired a company and so brought in this new thing. And pretty soon, I have no idea what I've got in the Singapore office versus the London office versus New York, right, so. And how do I reconcile that and bring it back together? So I've got that same old problem that, if you've been around in the industry for a few years, we saw 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I've got to bring my silos of information together. And so, yeah you're right. It's suddenly a new, same old challenge all over again. Alright, so and that's why it's become a focus area because I suddenly have fragmented, disconnected application and data silos. So that's really where Commvault, turns out, can really help because sometimes it's a matter of consolidation. You know what, I need to get down from three locations to two, or four to one, or whatever the case may be, some sort of consolidation. And usually there's some cost savings involved there. And or, it's I got these multiple solutions that are out there and I've got no control and I have no visibility, I know I'm exposed so, I've got a risk factor now that I didn't have before. So when you start to blend all of those together, you're absolutely right, it's the same old story again, right. >> Keith: Industry versus vertical versus use case, you've given us a couple of different ones. Use cases, reducing costs, consolidation, even multi-cloud in itself is a use case. But, if you're an enterprise software company, if you're an enterprise IT company, you're challenged as you talk to different industries about specific solutions. You got to tailor solutions to industries. Talk about some of the industries that Commvault has come to solve specific problems for. >> Lance: Right, well I think there's a lot, to be honest, right, because every company faces those set of challenges. I think where it gets really interesting is in highly regulated industries, right. So, you think about biopharmaceuticals, you think about financial services, or certainly in the government space, in the federal space. And they have a whole set of unique challenges there because you're dealing with top secret clouds and you're dealing with, you know, some special concerns there. I think where it gets of particular interest is when I've got all those fragmented or disconnected silos, is that I need to address my compliant's concerns. I need to understand the data for more than just is it protected and could I recover it in a specific amount of time? I actually need to be able to show that I have it and prove that what I've got and be able to address specific industry regulations that are unique to my particular industry. So, that's where we start to see very specific use cases that kind of get down from the generic or the general, down to the very specific how do I manage this data and how do I understand what I have? And then of course you get into, you know, can you prove what you've got? Can you go out and retrieve it? And there's all sort of, you know, regulations along that that I've got to adhere to. But that can be addressed once I have that full index, an understanding of what my environment's like. Now, I can go out and locate that information, I can retrieve it when I need to, and actually open it up from a persona based access perspective, let specific people in an organization have access just to the limited data sets that they need, alright. So that comes into play a lot, especially, for example, every organization, right, you've got database admins, you've got critical tier zero applications that you need need to manage. It's your CRM system, it's your supply chain management system. If it goes down, you know, people freak out, alright. So, and I want to be able to provide, you know, self-service access to information for those people. So I've got a well-managed understanding of my environment, but then I'm able to dole out access to the individuals that need it when they need it and they don't have to come ask us or ask IT or ask anybody else, you know, for that information. >> Stu: Yeah, Lance as we watch the cust-to-cust companies really understand that data is very valuable, we have a transition that's going on. Traditional customer for Commvault, you're talking about things like RPO and RTO and the like. And, you know, you've got the admins of the world trying to figure out how they do their jobs and things like, okay, backup Windows of the past versus recovery and all those moving pieces. As opposed to today, you talk about the value of data, these are board-level discussions. >> Lance: Right. >> Stu: You've got the C-Suite that you're working with. We talked to a few of your teams about, well, you've got the top down and the bottom up. How are you helping them and what conversations do you have with them? >> Lance: They are entirely different conversations, right. IT is serving the business, as we all know, right. You know, maybe a bit cliché, sorry. >> Stu: Hopefully, if they're doing their job right, they're responding to and actually doing what they need to. >> Lance: Why am I here? Oh, that's right! To serve the business. Yeah, let's try that. So, anyways, there's that delivery of data, but you're absolutely right. The utilization of data and how it's consumed and the understanding that I can get from it, that is an entirely different conversation and, you're right, it is. It's a business unit discussion, you know, it's a line of business discussion at the very least, and it's probably a senior executive discussion because with that additional visibility, I'm then able to make much better, at least theoretically, better business decisions and because I've got more information to draw from. So, you're right, in terms of the conversation, we're not talking about strictly data protection. It's like, yes, when your data is understood, here's what else you can do with it. And then you got to tailor that to the specific industry, specific vertical, and a little more specific to that particular conversation. >> Keith: So Lance, give us a feel for that conversation that's happening here at Commvault GO, 2,000 people, over 150 sessions, education focused event, and there's different personas. I'll let the focus on that executive persona a little bit. I got you in front of the SVP of some group, the CDO. What's the Commvault story? Why Commvault over any other data protection company? >> Lance: I like to think of it as the proverbial, killing two birds with one stone, right. So, is my data growing? Oh, yeah, right. You're never going to hear someone say, you know data is shrinking, I have less to worry about. I mean, I've been in the industry a couple years now, give or take, and it's just never going to happen, right. So, you don't have to worry about that. With that in mind, the need to be able to have the visibility is continuing to increase. So, you see the rise of a chief data officer and what are they concerned about? They're concerned about utilizing data in ways that they were previously never able to do. And so, when we have those conversations, it's one of if I'm going to kill two birds with one stone, I'm going to be able to not only protect my data, but I'm going to give you additional visibility that you didn't have before because I'm providing you visibility into all of the secondary data and the application protection and I'm allowing you to be, ultimately, more flexible because now you're able to actually move data where you need it and expand your data center in ways you previously could not. So, I want to move from one cloud to the other. No problem, I can do that. I want to finally move, finally get off of tape and consolidate my environments and move either to an on premises environment or to a cloud. Not a problem. I can come back, we see customers that are coming back to on premises from cloud in some cases just for particular use cases. So the conversations that we have with a CEO, will just stick with a CEO as an example, are around better utilization of the data and better risk mitigation around that data, alright. So I've had a number of conversations related to that where we were concerned about not, you know, everybody talks about ransomware, but in general, attacks on the business and it's not if it's when, so how do I make sure that I can keep my business up and running? And so, it's that broader perspective that you have around how I manage data and how I deliver it to the business. That's what they care about, alright. That's crazy you're protected by the way, that's sort of important too. But what I can do with it and how I deliver it to my lines of business, that's where the interest starts to lie in a CEO level conversation. >> Yeah, Lance. One of the things everybody loves coming to a show like this, you get some of those great user stories. This morning, we had the State of Colorado on talking about how they're recovering from ransomware. >> Right, right, right. >> We had American Pacific Mortgage on talking about just the scale. You talked about the growing data and how, you know, using Commvault they're able to manage that much better. Any other specific examples of kind of interesting use cases or good customer stories you might have? >> Yeah, we recently had a very large customer that was looking to consolidate their environment. It was a classic case of I got offices spread around the world and they had a number of different point solutions, right. So, without naming names, I've got different protection solutions for different areas. I've got different administrators. I've got different policies. And, you know, they hit a scenario where they were exposed from a risk perspective that that particular set of data was not covered as they thought it was because they didn't have standardization of policies, standardized policies I should say, around how they manage, access, and the retention of that data. And so that, sometimes there's that forcing event that says we have a problem here, we need to do something about this. Alright so, in their case, they we able to consolidate from multiple solutions down to Commvault where they could have predefined set of policies in place around the data and not only for what they were gathering in. So as they ingested it or moved data under Commvault's management, they were able to automatically assign policies to that, but then in their case, they were also acquiring other companies. So, they were acquiring a rather large European entity, and when they were bringing that organization in, they wanted to make sure that they did so in a way that didn't expose the risk again in the future because if we're going to grow as a business with an acquisition strategy, we've got to be able to make sure that what comes into the organization is consistent. >> So, being partner presence here, Commvault has been pretty direct and forward talking about how you're shifting from a direct sales model and having gone through partners to help provide the solutions to these challenges. Talk through, how do you enable partners, or how do you encourage partners, this is a crowded market, there's a lot of investment in the area of data protection, how do you rise to the top of the partner list and for partners putting your solutions in front of their customers? >> Lance: Right, there's two ways we do that, right. So, the first, because you're absolutely right. You know, partners are key to our growth and we can be key to their growth and success. No doubt about it. So, the first thing is give them something that's going to really make them successful. So, instead, if I'm a partner, I want the flexibility to be able to address a wider variety of demands. I want to be able to go in to a potential prospect and say yeah, I can address this, but also I have the software behind the scenes, Commvault, to be able to attack multiple other scenarios for you. Oh and by the way, it's all in one and you've got one solution to be able to address all that. So, one of the key ways that we differentiate, and you're right, in a very crowded market, alright, that says we should really have Commvault in the back of your mind, at the top of your list. If you're going in and seeing scenarios where point solutions simply doesn't do it or paints you into a corner where you're not going to be able to help them grow down the future. The other thing partners obviously want, as every business wants, is repeat business. I want to be able to go back in and expand, I want to build my footprint out, and if I can go in with a partner that enables me to do that, then I've got long term opportunity versus just going in like, hey, I made a quick sale and I'm out and good luck to you, right. >> Stu: Lance, last thing I wanted to ask you. Last year, GDPR was the talk of every single show like this. >> Lance: Yeah, I've seem to have heard about that, yeah. >> Stu: We got a good education. My boss actually read through the entire specs. I read the Cliffnotes version >> Lance: Okay, yeah, me too. >> Stu: and then talked to a lot of smart people about it. California is looking at some new legislation, but what's the latest on that? It seems like, you know, I know some of the lawsuits already happening at some of the biggest companies in Europe, you know, from a technology standpoint, but what are you hearing and how has Commvault helped customers understand kind of today and future legislation? >> Lance: Yeah, I think, you know what's interesting? When we looked at, you know, everybody was kind of marching up to the GDPR date as if it was Y2K all over again. >> Stu: Right. >> Lance: Not that I remember that of course. I'm too young for that. (Keith laughs) You know, it was like May 25th, May 25th, the sky's going to fall, and we all knew that, hey listen, that day is going to come and go and somebody's going to be made an example at some point, right. And sure enough, that's starting to happen. And you know, it's a good thing. It's building the awareness that we tried to educate people, tried to get the word out, you know, it happens longer. Why wait past May 25th? It's still going on, right. So, for a lot of customers that we're talking to, they're looking to, they've had a plan in place and they're moving there gradually, it wasn't right away, but I think sometimes when you see those things in the press about there's actually being a finesse, it's actually real and it brings it to life like, uh we should really do something here, right. So, I think, honestly, that's a process that's going to continue for years. You know, I've heard everything from we'll just pay the fine, which is a risky strategy both probably on a personal level as well as professional. (Keith laughs) You wouldn't want to bet your career on that strategy. With the advent of, we also always knew that hey, GDPR is one of these set of regulations. There will be others, there are others. And you have to be able to adhere to those no matter where you live on the Earth. So, you know, long story short, I think it's a continuing evolution. We help customers understand their data. So, you know, through our Commvault activate product, we can do it. Even if you're not using Commvault for backup and recovery, you're actually able to go out and scan your environment and get a better understanding of what personal information you've got under lock and key, what you've got in your environment, and be able to ascertain well okay, where's my risk, where am I exposed? And then I can start to put a plan in place to mitigate that. So, I think it'll be going on for quite some time in terms of especially as new laws like the California law. I always forget the letters and numbers associated with it, but it's same idea around personal privacy. And I think, you know, we've had the Patriot Act for a long time, right, where foreign governments are concerned about data sovereignty and where data lives and that's going to continue to increase, you know, for a variety of reasons. So organizations have to really know where their data is and what's encapsulated within that data and that's where the Commvault data platform, the index, actually shines to uncover that information. >> Stu: Well, Lance Shaw, I really appreciate you sharing with us where your customers are in a lot of these really important issues. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage here from Commvault Go in Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee, the home this week of Commvault GO with Keith Townsend. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE. Happy to welcome to the program a regular on our program, Patrick Osborne, who's the vice president and general manager of Big Data and secondary storage at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Patrick, great to you see. >> Great, thanks for having me. Love to be on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, so we've had you on theCUBE in lots of places, but a first in Nashville 'cause it's the first time we've been here. Keith's second time at the show, my first. What's your impression so far? >> Yeah, so this is our first major presence here at Commvault GO. I think it's going pretty well so far, certainly a great venue. We actually, we do a couple things here for our own presales folks. So first impressions, love the fact that we have a whole conference dedicated to secondary storage, certainly getting a lot of importance lately within customer conversations as well overall investment in the industry, so I'm pretty impressed, pretty lively crowd here. >> Yeah, I really liked, we started off the morning talking to Chris Powell, the CMO of Commvault, talking about how Commvault is a 20-year-old company, and therefore there were certain things that a 20-year-old company has. If you think about their pricing, you think about how people's perception of them are, you work at a company with plenty of history. HPE can partner with whomever they'd like to. >> Yep. >> Stu: Why's it important for HPE to partner with Commvault? >> Yeah, 20 years for Commvault, 78 for HPE, right, so we got a lot of chops there. For us, secondary storage is certainly becoming very important for customers, and it's being driven by new user stories, new capabilities centered around data. So what we look for is, as a technology company, we want to provide an entire solution, vertically oriented, that not only includes our compute networking, storage, secondary storage, cloud, but as well as a very vibrant ecosystem. So we've been working, certainly, with our customers and in the partner ecosystem with Commvault for a number of years, and now we've formalized that and codified it with a couple technology announcements, certainly on the go-to market side, and then some offerings we've done as a service, so backup as a service. >> So let's talk about some of these technology announcements. Talk to us about the significance of the store wants, Commvault integration. Got a great deduplication appliance the store wants, now you're bringing Commvault to the scene, to the solution. What advantage does that bring the customer, first off? >> Yeah, so we have a couple specific integrations we've done. We have our primary all-flash arrays, Nimble and 3PAR, certainly within the Intellus Map umbrella. We've worked with them in the past. We've worked with Commvault recently to deliver some support for our deduplication algorithms. We have our, what we call catalysts. It's the ability to dedupe anywhere, right, within the data center and even outside the data center. So they support that. It really helps out with, certainly, high-speed performance for backup so you can meet those aggressive SLAs. We feel like we've got pretty differentiated technology on the dedupe side, so it helps our customers save in terms of the storage that they have on disk. And then the other big thing is that they've also integrated with Cloudbank, right, so it's our ability to store archived backup data for very, very long periods of time in either Azure or out in Amazon, and essentially using Commvault as the workflow and the catalog, and being able to plug into the ability for us to federate primary, secondary in the cloud is a pretty powerful integration for customers who might already have HPE, might already have Commvault, so it definitely brings a lot of value into that. >> Yeah, Patrick, we've seen a real maturation of that, really, the multi-cloud model in the last couple of years. It seems like that's a foundational piece of the partnership between Commvault and HP. What are you hearing from customers, and what differentiates this solution from others in the market? >> Yeah, so I mean, I think that secondary storage is one that's always rife for having a multi-cloud storage, whether it's people just wanting to do something like I don't want a secondary data center, I want to use the cloud. I want to replace tape. There's a number of different reasons why. I think the differentiation part comes in the technology that I talked about before and making that very seamless for customers and being able to move workloads out to the public cloud for the purposes of long-term data retention. The other key thing is that we're providing this to customers in completely as a service style. So not only from a technology perspective, but the way you consume it now. So we're able to provide primary, secondary, your Commvault solution, the Azure capacity, for example, advisory services, and we're all able to package that up on a per-terabyte or a per-metric basis that customers consume in an elastic manner, like you would the cloud. >> Yeah, HP was one of the first, forgive me if I say legacy, 78-year-old company, people automatically assume companies like AWS and even Azure move that way, but where have you seen customers and their readiness, both from a people standpoint as well as a procurement model for that model, and as I've said, HPE's one of the first ones, the big traditional players, that helped push that model. >> Yeah, so the desire's there. We pitched this every day, ever week, and it's got a lot of legs from a customer interest perspective. We are transacting, and we'll start to build our business and it helps us financially as well, too, right? 'Cause for us to offer those as a service, that's a reoccurring revenue, it's bookings, it's not just your traditional CAPEX hardware acquisition. So it helps us. And a little known fact is that HPE Financial Services, when you talk about an established company, we have a very, very high Net Promoter Score for HPEFS, and that's one of the capabilities that allows us to provide these really, really granular, flexible services for our customers. We've got a lot of things going at HPE. Being a more established, mature company with a very large install base. Not only technology piece, but the financial aspects of it is something we can offer as well. >> Patrick, talk to me about some of the advantages as a service, from an agility perspective. When I think of consuming HPE physical hardware on-prem through HP Financial Services, and I'm consuming this as a service, how does that enable agility for your customers? >> Well, it enables agility in the financial model, number one, so a lot of customers are asking us for as a service, subscription models, moving from CAPEX to OPEX. And not just an OPEX lease, right, 'cause that doesn't count anymore. The rules are changing. So what we're able to do is we provide an actual service. The customer hands over the architecture reins to us, so we have an established methodology of how we implement this, so no snowflakes. We can build on a wealth of experience we have with a number of other customers to be able to essentially deliver a number of outcomes. So it comes very agile in the fact that at the end of the day, secondary storage, some of the user stories are pretty mundane. They're very repeatable, right? And so if you hand that over to us, we're able to help you with that, not only financially but architecturally, and from our operations perspective, and you can focus your talent that you have in your organization on differentiation for your business, right? 'Cause backups, maybe at the end of the day that's not where you're going to hang your hat on your digital transformation as a customer, but it's certainly something you need. So we could both partner together on making that a better experience. >> Stu: All right, go ahead. >> What I was going to ask, what's the interface? How do customers consume these as a service solutions, whether it's the secondary storage or if it's a service living in the cloud? >> Mm, so we have a number of examples of these. So you take a look at a service that we have, for example HPE Cloud Volumes, right? It has a portal, you log in, you can put your credit card in, you can add, let's say, your cloud credentials into that as well, and then you are essentially off and running on dollars per terabyte, and you can scale that up, you can scale that down. So at the end of the day, we're really trying to provide an experience for customers that's very similar to the public cloud. And I think the other area that we've done, we've made some acquisitions in the space, Cloud Technology Partners, RedPixie, Cloud Cruiser, so not only on the being able to use the consumption methodology and the metering that we provide, but also the advisory services, is something that you get from HPE. You actually get to talk to people that know how to do this and have done it before and can help you arbitrate and make you very successful. >> All right, so Patrick, the last 18 to 24 months, the secondary storage space has just been buzzing, almost frothy if you will. >> Yes. >> Commvault's been around for 20 years. Five years ago, there wasn't the excitement in the space. There's the startups, there's companies like Commvault and Veritas and Veen who have established a customer base in there. Why do you see so much excitement there? Is it the new AI of availability? I've got plenty of background in the storage industry, where just data is so critically important that it's right there. What do you see? >> I see it as a massive shift in thinking from TCO to ROI, right? Five years ago, you were having conversation as how can I do this as cheaply as possible, right? It's a non-differentiation life insurance policy at the end of the day. Now it's all about what can I do to maximize the return on that data? And it could be things that are not super sexy, but test verification, sandbox labs, being able to provide copies of data for your developers to get a better experience and a better quality experience for their customers at the end of the day. There's a number of things that we've been able to unlock in the secondary storage area, and some people call it copy data management, hyperconverged for secondary storage, I mean, there's lots of different names and nomenclatures applied to it. But it's essentially, from what I see, people unlocking the value of that data where it used to be captured, siloed, untouchable, but now you've unlocked a number of possibilities for this data, and it's multi-use, right? It's the new currency. >> Yeah, we always argue, at the show, Commvault's saying that data is the new water, but Dave Alante, well water often is a scarce resource and something we all have to fight for. Data, the ability to unlock the data, is we can use it multiple times in lots of different ways, and the more I use the data, the more valuable it is, not like traditional resources. >> Yeah, and also, too, some of the big bats you've seen from HPE, certainly big investment on edge-centric computing as well, too. So our Edgeline, the build out of 5G, certainly the ubiquitous wireless networks that we provide with Aruba. So there's a huge amount of capability of either moving the process outside the data center, but that data's still data. It needs to be protected, you need to be able to use it, so I think we're just getting started in some of these areas, certainly around secondary storage. >> So, let's talk about value that DotNext brings to the mix. We're talking about some pretty advanced use cases, the edge, the data center, the cloud. Stitching this together isn't quite simple. Tell us about the DotNext story and how they helped extend the capability beyond just throwing zeros and ones. >> I think there's a lot of our folks that cover customers, account teams, sales folks that really ensure our customer success, they view this area as very rife for certainly advisory services. I think one of the things is that having the capability of doing this, you guys have seen in the past couple years, people have scaled back dedicated storage admins, right? Dedicated backup admins, unless you're in a very large shop, really don't exist. You've moved towards essentially hypervisor admins, generalist, right? So I think that our capability is we have those services, we have that expertise in-house, and for us to be able to provide very good reference architectures that touch all parts of the stack, because secondary storage is, it's not just selling an all-flash array, or some capacity-optimized disk. It touches everything. It's questions around what's your SLA, what are the apps, what are you trying to do? So for us, we have a wealth of resources and knowledge in this space, and bringing in companies like Cloud Technology Partners and RedPixie into our services organization, that gives us the ability to help customers make that move to hybrid cloud as well, too, which is very important. >> Yeah, Patrick, the other message we're hearing loud and clear from Commvault is the roadmap. There's a lot of automation. There's the intelligence. You talk about all those admins. It was funny, they put up all these roles up on the board in the keynote this morning, and all of them, really, were bots (laughs) underneath. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Automation can do that. Have us look forward. How does the HPE roadmap and the Commvault roadmap, how much synergy with those visions? >> Yeah, so right now we're definitely running along some parallel lines. They'd probably fire me if I didn't get off-stage here without talking about InfoSight, because it's a huge investment for us. We think it's a huge opportunity. You guys have seen the proof in the pudding from that in terms of automated support, we've got predictive analytics now. So for us, the more that you can build in from an AI and ML perspective, we think the value is in a couple area. Certainly cross stack, so going all the way from the app down through the infrastructure, and we're providing that through InfoSight. And then we're also expanding some of the use cases to include things like secondary storage, right? So if you see, let's say we have a signature that we can see, right? A certain IO pattern, right? We'll make some predictive calls to the infrastructure to say hm, that looks like Ransomware. Maybe you should take a full clone of that and then encrypt it and shove it up in the cloud. Or the change rate on your database just elevated two orders of magnitude. Maybe I should think about moving some workloads that are adjacent to that off that system. So as we expand those and then allow that type of workflow to enable our partners as well, too, you can see where that value would head as well, too, where you start to integrate some of the telemetry from HPE, telemetry from a vendor and ISV partner like Commvault. You could do some really powerful things across the stack. >> All right, last thing for you, Patrick. You're going to be on the keynote tomorrow. Show us a little bit for our audience here what to expect from HPE. >> We talked a little bit about today, we're going to focus our talk tomorrow on some of the new consumption models, as as a service, and we're certainly going to highlight some of the things that we've done so far in AI and ML, certainly making the lives of our storage and data customers a lot easier, and a little bit of a vision as to where we're going with both of those two. >> All right, well Patrick, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks for joining us, and look forward to catching up at the next event. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage here from Commvault GO here in Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee, the home of hot chicken and Commvault GO this week. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, Keith Townsend. Keith wasn't expecting that one. >> I'm looking forward to the hot chicken. >> Absolutely. And happy to welcome to the program first-time guest, Rahul Pawar, who is the head of R&D, research and development, at Commvault. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me on this one. >> Alright, we said, like the hot chicken, I said we need to roll up our sleeves and really get into the sauce-- >> Rahul: Yes, yes. of what we're talking. Alright, enough of the puns on my standpoint. But tell us a little bit about R&D inside, what's your role, what's your team, what's your charter? >> So, we have a team of about 650 very dynamic, young engineers. And what my role, and I'm very excited about that role, is I get to talk with a lot of our customers and partners and understand their pain points. And the majority of my research comes from what the customer is really looking to do and what is hurting them, and trying to solve that and describe. And once I have a problem defined, the team is very, very intelligent at solving them and they come up with various ways to solve it. And then getting that customer satisfaction high is what gives me the high and that's really what's kept me at Commvault for over 17 years now. >> Yeah, 17 years, Rahul. I think back so, 17 years ago, I was working for a storage company. And we talked about data, but it was usually about storing data or protecting data. Now we're talking about how we can get more value out of data. One of the things I was looking at coming into this show is like, okay, you talk about the AI and the ML. Well, how does that fit into this environment? Maybe you can explain why is it different now in 2018? What can you do now that you wouldn't have been able to do 10 years or even five years ago? >> So Stu, you made a good point. Back up, especially, was make a copy, put it on tape, send it to somewhere. Iron mountain, typically. And that has changed now. Everything is available online all the time. And even our thermostat is much smarter than what it was five years back, so we really are expecting, everybody's expecting, a lot more from the retail that is available from all the information that is there and they want to make use of that. So backup can no longer be, hey, I'm backing up these five servers and go figure it out. Backup is now getting tons of VM's, tons of new application swapping in various cloud applications that are coming in. So the IT team is really, really in the middle of this data revolution and getting so much information thrown their way. So that data, and that data is the liquid gold, like Bob and I like to call it, and that has a lot of valuable information. It has information about your patterns, it has information about who is accessing what files, and should they really be accessing it, what data is really, really not needed, and what is the sensitive data that is lurking behind and it could become a problem for you? So that data is a goldmine and the systems and the hard disks are becoming so much cheaper. Storage has become so much cheaper, so having that data accessible all the time, we take it for granted. >> So Rahul, I'd like to say scale breaks things. When I was a young administrator, I literally had a spreadsheet to keep track of my tapes, of where my tapes were, what systems were backed up. So even if I lost my index and my software backup product, I could know where my tapes were at. Now, with organizations with petabytes and petabytes of data, how important is ML, AI to knowing where your data is at and how important is the index to that relationship? >> I really want to say that ML and AI has become what deduplication was five years back, and pretty much everybody is expecting you to have it. Like I said, if my car knows it, if my home knows it, my thermostat knows it, even my phone knows it, like where I'm going, like every week if I travel to a certain place and it knows it, it is something that is expected to be known. And our backup environment has become so dynamic. There's network failures and there's tons of things beyond the control of the backup admin, even the storage admin or the DB-ers or the app developers who are putting in there, that just come in place. And with all of that happening, you need a system that is learning from what is happening and being very smart about doing stuff. So, we learned from yesterday's failures or the failures that were on the backups, we look at the network load that is on right now, the disk load that is on right now, and adapt our backup schedules accordingly. So we know your SLAs. You're trying to get an SLA of a certain number of hours versus minutes, and based on that, we prioritize certain servers over others, or certain VM's that we see brand new over other VM's, and then VM's around certain data stores over others because we want to keep the load on the data storage server or even your network and the proxies minimum, but at the same time we know we are racing against the clock because we want everything to be backed up and even have a secondary copy and all of that. So there we are prioritizing and re-prioritizing our backups and schedules and everything. >> One of the challenges when you talk about automation is there's the technology and then there's the people and in the open to the keynote this morning, the poet was using the GPS analogy >> Yes. and talked about, okay, you have arrived. Well, the admins today, they kind of have their turf that they control versus do I trust that it's doing the job and can automate some of those things and I shouldn't have to worry about it. Does your team get involved in that dynamic? Because I know you listen to the customers how do you help bridge that gap and help? I think of autonomous cars, we said we will soon get to the point, sometime hopefully in the not-too-distant future, where it's not that I don't trust the computers, it's really that I trust them more than I do the people. >> Okay so I'll tell you, trust develops as you use it more. There's a reason why autonomous driving cars still have a steering wheel and a break because, I'm not sure whether I can trust it. But on the other hand, as time passes by, you really see the software in action and you want to see that its really doing the smart thing, and you yield control to it more and more. Like today, I'm like old era, so when I have something important I make an extra copy. Versus my kids, they are on Google files system or cloud files systems. They never even think about making an extra copy. The same thing is going to happen. We do have people who can take control and they can put on their priorities and all of that but we are saying, hey guys, you shouldn't be doing it we are here to help you and we are going to show you and in case you don't like it you can always put your brake on that self driving car or the self driving backup. >> So Rahul would we be remised if we had a researcher on theCUBE and we didn't talk about the art of the possible looking a few years ahead, or even a couple of years ahead. If you've ever been a backup administrator, nothing beats bandwidth. The bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. However in this modern digital transformative environment, we have to get data to the cloud as soon as possible. What are some of the unique ways Commvault is tackling getting Big Data from where it's ingested and to the cloud provider so that we can take advantage of stuff like AI, ML, base workloads, and Amazon or Google? >> One thing we have done with the cloud or anything is we have always kept data independent of where it is going. So even if I am taking data from on-print to a cloud provider we will play to their full strength, but we will still keep the data independent where, in case you want to move from one cloud window to another you have that flexibility with Commvault. As for us taking the cloud and its efficiency and using its efficiency what we have done is we always only send re-duplicated encrypted data to the cloud and we have various ways of consuming the cloud. So the cloud is where your storage has become so cheap that you don't have to think about it. In fact, I had a customer who got rid of their whole secondary DR data center, and now they are using the cloud as their DR location and every three months they do the DR test with Commvault, wherein they bring the infrastructure machines up, and its all scripted and orchestrated, they bring the infrastructure machines up, followed by all the VM's and the applications in a certain order. Like database has to come up before AD has to come before exchange anytime it has to come before web server. So all of that happens after their testing is done they have SLA's of four hours and 24 hours on certain servers. After all of that is done they power it off, they get rid of the infrastructure, and then they are back to paying only the storage bill on the cloud. That's just one usage but the cloud has made life so flexible that I don't have to think about my rack space and where does the server go and when do I order it and when does it ship, If I need something I experiment with it, I give it more memory and size and do stuff. Protecting that data and the cloud, and protecting it well, is what we do. We have taken use of all the technologies, like replicating across regions, taking it and replicating it across clouds we have done all of that. >> Keith: Well let's talk about the importance of metadata in all of that. So if I have bits and pieces of data distributed across cloud providers on-prem, how do I keep track of that data? >> That's where our furi index comes in play key because all that is happening is the data is spreading faster than some of the cloud growth because you have data with so many copies and people have made extra copies just to be safe that keeping track of everything, and knowing what is where, and who has access to what, and people change roles, some people leave, who has access after all of that is done? It's very vital and critical for an organization to function So our furi index is keeping track of not just the bare minimum of who has the files and what the files are what we have done is we have worked with several customers where we have allowed them to insert their own custom tags and custom information along with the data. So it's not just the file and file information or the file content awareness. They are able to keep third party extra data along with every piece that is automatically queried from their other databases and inserted in that file. So those are the custom properties that are tagged a lot. >> Stu: Yeah its interesting, you think about metadata I remember five or 10 years ago we were talking about the importance of metadata, but it seems like it's the convergence of the intelligence and the AI paired with that, because it used to be, oh, make sure you tag your files or set up your ontologies or things like that, and now, on our phones, it does a lot of that for us and therefore the enterprise is following a similar methodology. Did we hit a certain kind of tipping-point recently, or is it just some of these technologies coming together? >> I think a lot of that was in the making. We used to have this technology called index cards, where we were keeping track of things, who ever thinks of that, right? Now everything is by search, and that's the new normal. Searching for your thing, thinking that somebody will know what I'm trying to do and telling me ahead of time is where the future is. That's what we are trying to keep up with. >> You're saying my kids don't know the Dewey decimal system because they have Amazon and you know, and now we have a similar thing in business. >> It really to strikes you, for a calculator on a Windows desktop when the kids go and search on the web for a calculator instead of using the calculator app on the desktop, you really know that things have changed and shifted a lot. >> Keith: So thinking about that change and shift before I'm able to add these custom tags to net new data, I'm going to throw you a softball from a use case perspective, but it's a hard technical challenge is, I have 20 years of Commvault data that are data I've backed up with Commvault. Wouldn't it be great if I could teach an ML or AI algorithm to go back and tag that data based on how I tag new data, any requests for that or roadmaps to add that type of capability? >> Alright so if you are a 20 year old Commvault veteran customer, first of all, thank you. (laughing) >> Secondly, the fact that you're index is there and we have built on our existing index and added a lot more attributes to it, we already know a lot about you. If you are starting to beam to our cloud, we know a lot more about how your backups are, and how much you are backing up, and how your licensing is, and what are the typical workloads, and the top error rates, and how the health conditions are, and a lot of that. That is even on your own server dashboard. You don't have to beam it to any public cloud. You could see it on your own dashboard, all those statistics. So we already know all of that information. What we have come and started doing is we are inserting even more and more pieces of intelligence that we are finding because things have changed over the last 20 years. So what used to be just file metadata, user and all of that, now we have a lot more attributes that the file has. >> One of the biggest challenges we see is, I'm a networking person, and when I go to like the Cisco show this year, the network administrator, most of the network that they are responsible for isn't under their purview, and I think we have the same thing in data, a lot of the data that I'm concerned about in my business it's no longer in my four walls and it's spread out in so many different environments. Opportunity? Challenge? Both? >> For us it's very exciting and opportunistic. For our customers and a lot of IT admins if you are dealing with multiple tools to handle that kind of thing its a big challenge. I have met several customers and they wouldn't admit it, but they know that even though their company policy is not to use certain clouds, the people are using it. If their company policy is not to use some doc sharing, people are using it. So, there are two ways you can look at it. You could forget it and then risk. Or you could accept it and analyze everything with Commvault and go ahead. >> So let's talk about Commvault and this ability to know where your data is at with adjacent technology you know data protection is about protecting the data not just from 'oops I lost my data' or even ran somewhere specifically, but security. What is the role of the index or metadata In protecting your data from intruders? >> So as far as 'ran somewhere' is concerned, we have taken a few things. One is, and we are not a 'ran somewhere' production per se, but what we have done is because we are in there and we look at your backup, how often they happen, how much data is changing, adjusted that to seasonality we know per quarter if you have a lot of files changing versus weekends and how things change, adjusted to seasonality if we something that is out of the norm, we are going to alert you. At that point that alert is an actionable alert where you could say, hey, I want to disable data edging on this particular client, or I want to take away access of someone on that. So even data risks like a rogue admin or an accidental admin what we did is we have added almost a two-signature kind of stuff. So if somebody accidentally deletes a client or a storage policy, one admin won't be able to do that. The business workflow says: 'do you also have authentication from Stu?' That 'hey, Keith is trying to delete this'. That's to approve of this and it's and email to which you reply 'yes' or 'no'. The moment it is done, it goes ahead and it deletes it versus it may stop and 'oops' that was an accident Keith didn't really want to do that. So there's that aspect, the second thing is our own media, what we have done is it is completely protected with our drivers, wherein you can't get to it. Only Commvault authenticated processes are able to write to write to our media. When the customer came in this morning and was talking about it, all their infrastructure was affected, but Commvault really hasn't because we had it secured and the ransomer couldn't attack that because they simply were unable to write to it. >> Stu: Alright well Rahul Pawar we really appreciate you giving us an update. Look forward to catching up in the future where we'll see exactly where the research is going. Alright, for Keith Townsend I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from Commvault GO, in Nashville, Tenessee. Thanks for watching theCUBE. >> Rahul: Thank you Keith, thank you Stu. >> Keith: Thank you.

>> Narrator: Live from Nashville, Tennessee. It's the Cube. Covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Comvault. >> Welcome back to the Music City. This is the Cube at Commvault GO. I'm Stu Miniman with my Co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program one of the users of the show, actually, going to get to see her on stage at the keynote tomorrow. Ah, Michele Buschman who's the Vice President of Information Services at American Pacific Mortgage. Thanks so much for jointing us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, ah, give us a little bit about your company and your roles of responsibility there. >> Sure, so, um, as you mentioned, I'm the Vice President of Information Services at American Pacific Mortgage. Um, I pretty much am responsible, you know, in the acting role or CIO, CTO, and CISO. So, I manage all technology for the company reporting to the COO. Um, our company is a top 15 independent mortgage bank. Um, we do about 10 billion dollars in mortgages a year, and have about a 25 hundred employee user base. >> Alright, so you've just got a couple of roles there, and luckily your in an industry, not much regulation to worry about, things aren't changing, things are kind of static. You just kind of put in a couple hours at the office and go, go take a nap, right? >> Ya, right (laughing). >> Um, why don't you tell us, what are some of those dynamics that are driving your up level business that are impacting, uh, the technology side. >> Oh, absolutely, so, um, you know, the mortgage industry is somewhat cyclical, and we are in that range where interest rates are going up, um, margin pressures are high. So, you know it's all about doing more with less and saving money. Um, in traditionally in the mortgage banking world, um, you know, IT resources, you're always a little bit short? Um, and so, that, you know, drives me to look for strategies that allow me to leverage my technical resources more for business value operations, than managing infrastructure, keeping lights on, um, which has really motivated us to move to the Cloud, and adopt platform type solutions similar to Commvault to be able to be more efficient with our few resources that we do have in our technology team. >> Alright, can you speak a little bit about Cloud. What is that driver, what does Cloud mean to your organization? And ah, yeah, what is the strategy as it sits today? >> Absolutely, so, um, we're kind of unique, I guess, to an extent in that, you know, when I walked into the organization four and a half years ago. The bulk of our critical business applications were already Sass hosted applications. Um, that grew out of the need because they had such a small technical team, um, you know, for the investments to manage the infrastructure to host applications is very high. So, um, luckily enough, I already had a head start, ah, in that the bulk of our critical business applications were CSS Sass hosted, so, um, what I've done since then is to look for those solutions that are more commodities. So, you know, why manage email on Prem when, you know, Microsoft can do a way better job than we could with the small staff we have. So, you know, it's slowly been, you know, taking each application, pulling it out, putting it into the Cloud, so that my team can be better leveraged to actually work on security initiatives, and um, business value, and transformation type of solutions. So, it is part of it is a, you know accessibility as well. Um, you know, we're in a changing environment where we want to be able to deliver our, um, employee workforce to be able to work anywhere, anytime, on any device, and in order to do that, we have to have solutions that are sitting out there, and accessible to them, um, and not always just sitting behind the firewall in the data center. >> So, let's talk a little bit about data management, data protection as it pertains to the business. What are some of the drivers, especially if you are in the Sass world that make you look at data protection suites as opposed to consuming native solutions within those services? >> Oh, absolutely. So, I very much have a strategy around platform services. Uh, when I walked into the organization, there's probably 30 different applications that were out in the environment, and none of them talked to each other. Um, when you're trying to manage, you know, bringing data across the organization to compile it and aggregate it to actually have something useful to the business. You have to have connected systems, but when you have a small team, it's very difficult to do that development working, connect all those systems, and manage them. So, what I like to look for is a platform solution, um, that will allow me to grow, um, as my budget allows, to add on the different modules that that platform solution, um, offers to me. So, you know, for example, you know, today's budget, I might have a certain limited amount that I can invest, but if I pick a solution that ultimately might give me 70, maybe 80 percent of the needs, um, then I'm only having to add in maybe a couple of other solutions and that cost to integrate and manage, and so overall it reduces the overall cost and complexity of the environment. >> So, you're in a mismatch of ten billion dollars a year in mortgages issued, yet, small IT staff, Sass solutions. When you think of Commvault 20 years, enterprise less solution, you don't think necessarily simple, easy to use, initially, so, why Commvault? >> Oh, absolutely, so, um, again within the first year I was there we went through a huge market share grab and so we grew 75 percent market share, and when I walked in the door, we needed to do investment in infrastructure. So, um, the original forecasts were totally blown out of the water, so the investment we made in small to midsize business type of solutions, we out grew before our contracts were due. So, when I went into this, um, we took about an 18 months, um, to take out time to find the right solution. Uh, we looked at about 6 different vendors, um, you know, we did a little bit of POC work, uh, we did references, um, and ah, basically at the end of the day I was looking for something that had a really good vision, um, that was platform driven, so I could continue to add additional products as budget allowed. Um, that had the ability to have more of a single pane of glass and very little man power to manage, um, and then, reliability was huge. Um, you know, we had some challenges with our previous solution of feeling comfortable that our backups would work in the event we had an incident. So, you know, when we looked at Commvault, um, you know, it may have been, um, you know, it's an enterprise solution which is what I wanted. I could scale without rip and replace. Um, great reputation, great vision, good, technology, you know, bones. Um, and so, you know, when I would go to the board for that, I said, you know, the investment may be a little bit more than a lower end solution, but it's going to give us the capability to grow with the business. >> You know Michele, it's interesting, if you dialed back and said you were looking at this five years ago, I wonder if the pricing strategy that Commvault had in place would fit what you're looking for. I'm sure you've seen as a customer, um, when I hear, you know, I kind of want to be able to reach that vision, but do it incrementally. Sounds like something you might get more from a startup? Maybe give us a little bit of insight what you've seen, how you look at this relationship, and what are some of those things that you are looking to add on in the future. >> Oh, absolutely, so, you know, absolutely, financials always come into place, right? You've got to be able to afford what you're putting into place. Um, you know, I will say that, um, their pricing model did change, you know, cause we had looked at that previously, and it was a pretty high price point to get in with the licensing under the perpetual licensing models. Um, so, with the change of how Commvault kind of moved with the times, more subscription style, made it a little more affordable for some of the smaller businesses to take advantage of. Um, and so, you know, that's how I kind of looked at it for, plus at the end of the day, if you're looking for a quality product around security, and recovery, and backup, it's worth the money to invest in something you feel comfortable that's going to meet that need. Um, and grow with you without, again, having you know, who wants to go through a migration every three years when your contracts up, right? Um, and then, as far as the other products, I'm looking, you know, at some of the new products that they've officially announced. It was really exciting to hear the CEO and COO talk today about the automation that they are building cause that plays absolutely into what we're trying to do in our organization. As we need stuff, you know, again, acception processing is what I always talk about. I only want to have to touch things when it's not working, and, you know, when there's some sort of exception. Um, and, so, I'm really excited about the way Commvault's headed down that path with the automation. Um, and then, also the data piece. Being able to really categorized the data, know if it's outdated or not. I mean, this is a very well known industry issue that we have, we are data hogs in the mortgage business. Um, and our users are as well. Uh, and so being able to identify the data that I have, I mean, you know, I walked into a situation where there's been no purge of data. You know, being able to really identify what is valuable date to not purge vs. the data we want to purge to reduce that footprint to reduce the risk for any kind of potential breech, or security incident. You know, the more you have out there, the more the chance you are going to get hit. >> So, you wear a bunch of hats that seem kind of in conflict especially, seeing that you report up to the COO. Security being the most interesting one. >> (Michele) Uh huh. >> How does your role as the CISO and your selection of the data protection suite, data management, impact your decision to go with a Commvault. >> Oh absolutely, that's huge as well, right? Um, you know, in our industry, we obviously are responsible for um, being custodians to a lot of personal information to consumers, so we have NPI, PI all over, and it's not even just with my critical business system vendor, you know, caus I rely on them heavily, they're much larger, they have, um, larger security teams, and larger budgets to typically protect our data. But, we also have that data internally into our own data warehouse. So, um, data protection is key. Um, so looking at products that will allow us to simplify that, have visibility into it, you know, that's another area I'm really looking forward to expanding my Commvalt use into as we start to actually, Um, you know, one of the other projects we're going to be working on potentially is moving our data warehouse to Microsoft Azure. So, um, you know, really having that, um, security plan figure out before the data is up in the cloud. >> Michele, I wonder what your experience has been with recovery. Is that something you test? Have you had to actually do a recovery? What is your experience been? >> Yeah, so, you know, knock on wood, I'm not sure if there's wood under here, but, you know, knock on wood. We haven't had a major incident, um, however, what we do, have done, now that we've actually deployed Commvault fully, um, is in, you know, it's too bad it's not a couple weeks from now because we're actually going to do a full DR exercise with our new backups now that are fully deployed with Commvault. >> So, you'll take a vacation the week after (laughing). >> So, we're going to actually test that out. That's one of the things that I task my team with is once my backups and everything was in place that we're going to, you know, do a tabletop exercise, but actually try to do a full recovery of some systems with the new backups to make sure we are all in good shape. Uh, but with that being said, I can already tell you just from a, um, you know, our old system to our new system, you know, with the features sets that we have available in Commvault compared to what we had in our other solution. The time to recover individual files is exponential. You know, our other solution, we had to recover an entire folder, not just individual files. And then, we're really excited also of being able to eventually being able to push out some self service file restoration capabilities that Commvalt allows us to do as well. >> So, as a natural consumer of, as a service, offering a mission critical businesses. How important is Commvalut role map to, as a service, for enterprise class solutions. >> Oh, I think that's great. I actually can't wait to see what they have to offer around that. Again, you know, um, I might be a unique use case, I don't know, because that's really how we manage our business from the IT side because of limited budget, limited resources is leveraging vendors. Um, so, I'm really excited to see how that evolves actually. Um, you know, from a service perspective. >> Okay, Michele, it's your second time coming to this event. For audiences that didn't come, what did you get out of it, what excites you the most coming to an event like this? >> I think there's two key things that I really enjoy going to conferences about. Um, one of course, is always the networking opportunities. I always, meet other people who have the same challenges that I do, and you know, they're looking at the same products, and being able to exchange ideas, um, and how you solve problems, and, you know talking to other people about real life issues, um, is so valuable. Uh, the other piece is always getting myself out of the office and getting more education. So, you know, really seeing what's evolving, what's changing, um, you know, what are the partners doing that work with Commvault, what's Commvault, you know, doing? Really, getting out of the office to have a chance to really get educated around that and what's really unique to about Commvalt GO to, is that a lot of it is customer based. Uh, you have customers up talking about their use cases and how they've implemented the product, so it's real life, ah, education, and not just, you know, um, a vendor up there talking about their product and selling it, right? >> Absolutely, we appreciate you sharing your story, Ah, with our audience here, and uh, congratulations on all the progress, ah, American Pacific Mortgage. And ah, boy, you know, tired of thinking of all the hats you've been wearing for those of us that wear a few hats, ah, we can definitely, ah, you know, appreciate that, alright. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more programming here at Commvault GO. Thanks for watching The Cube. >> Michele: Thank you.

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO, 2018. Brought to you by, Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee, this is Commvault Go and you're watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host, Keith Townsend And we're going to get a little cloudy. Happy to welcome to the program, Sabina Joseph, who's the Global Segment Director with Amazon Web Services, welcome back to the program. >> Thank you very much for having us here, >> Miniman: And also welcome to the program, first time, Jeanna James, who's the Worldwide Cloud Alliances Leader with Commvault, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Alright, so, we're looking at the ecosystem that Commvaults have, Sabina, why don't you give us a little bit on the history, and what's going on, between Amazon, and Commvault. >> I think I'm going to have Jeanna kind of kick that off, and then we will >> sure! Yeah! >> Add some comments! >> I'll take that, so we started our relationship over five years ago, and it's been a strong and growing relationship since that time. We started off with S3 integration, and we write natively to Amazon S3, and now our integration points have just become deeper and wider, so, S3, S3IA, Glacier, Snowball, we have full support across the Amazon services, and, about three years ago, Amazon started the storage Competency Program, and Commvault is a storage Competency Partner, and so with that launch, we started to do more on the go to market side, so we started off with that integration, and the technology side, and now today are expanding more on the go to market, and Sabina you want to talk a a little bit about that? >> Absolutely, thank you, Jeanna. Thank you for that question. So our collaboration indeed started five years ago, and Commvault has always embraced our best practices around technology and go to market. They've always focused on getting the technical integrations with our services right, prior to engaging on go to market and sales initiatives. They have launched a joint practices website on their webpages, which talks about our collaboration, our solutions, and also jointly validated reference architectures. We engaged early on in the channel. In addition, when AWS is about to launch services and new features, we engage Commvault's technical team early on, and wherever possible, Commvault has always participated in our beta launches. This is actually one of the reasons why Commvault has a wide integration across Amazon S3, S3IA, Glacier, Glacier Vault Lock, and different versions of Snowball. >> Yeah, so, Sabina, those of us that watch the industry, watching this storage segment, and how AWS relates to it has been one of the most fascinating stories there. At this conference, we're really enjoying getting to talk to some of the customers, we know that Amazon's always listening very much to the customers, what can you tell us about what you're hearing from the customers, and how is that impacting the focus of what you're doing together? >> Well, as you know, AWS is very focused on the customer, and Commvault has always embraced this vision, making sure to launch solutions that mutually delight our customers. Every year, our technical and our executive teams meet, to set the initiatives for the year, both on the business and the technical front. This is on of the reasons why solutions such as data disaster recovery, healthcare data protection solutions, and AIML solutions, really speak to Commvault's commitment to the Cloud, and we are also very open with each other on recommendations. They have given us recommendations on our services, and we have done the same with Commvault, and we very much welcome these suggestions. All of this has laid a very strong foundation for our collaboration, and we look forward, and we will expect to see continued strong growth in the coming years. >> So, data, we've heard it said time and time again, the new currency, super important, Amazon obviously a leader in Cloud storage, talk to us about what's happening around data protection, data management, at AWS Cloud. >> Well, when we talk to our customers, one of the very first workloads, there in fact moving into the Cloud is backup of data, and with this cloud-first initiative in mind, they are embracing cloud-based solutions around data protection and data management. As you might be aware, the amount of data that customers are needing to protect is growing two-fold every two years, and challenges around ransomware means that traditional industries, and heavily regulated industries, like financial services, healthcare, are moving data into the Cloud because of our collaboration for over five years, Commvault has a wide array of solutions to address these customer needs available on AWS globally. >> Yes, and just to add to that, with AWS over the last two years, we've seen 100% growth year over year, and we continue to expect additional growth >> absolutely >> with AWS and our customer base, and typically, what we see, is customers will start with backup and recovery and sending backup data into the could, and then once they get that data into the Cloud they start to use it. Let's test disaster recovery incident, and see if it works? Wow, it worked, great! Once it works, then they start moving more clothes into the Cloud, and protecting the data across regions, and all over the world, and so that's one of the great benefits that we have with Amazon and Commvault together. >> Congrats on the progress that you've been making, sounds like you've got some good proof points. As this is maturing, what feedback are you getting from customers, what are they asking you to do, to expand this partnership even further? >> Thank you for that question, as Jeanna knows, customers are always looking for a wide integration of Commvault solutions across our services. They want to use the rich features that Commvault has on premises, in the hybrid architecture model, and also for workloads that are running completely on AWS, and once this data moves into the Cloud they want to do more with this data. This is actually one of the reasons why we are working together, to have Commvault integrate across our machine learning services, like transcribe, translate, which means that customers can extract more value from this data, improve their time to market, and potentially even create net new solutions using this data. >> So from a Commvault perspective, we see, just like Sabina said, more and customers going through digital transformations, and when they go through those digital transformations, they've been sold on things like, we want to lower cost, and we want to have more agility with our business, and one of our big customers that's here today, Dow Jones, talks about that story, where they've gotten rid of a lot of their data centers, moved a lot of their infrastructure into the Cloud and so they've been able to become more agile as a business because of moving to the Cloud with Commvault and AWS, so, we hope that you'll take some time and hear some of the customers' stories out there, while you're here. >> Yeah, we'll listen to customers, and as customers are making that digital business transformation, what have you been hearing, or what are some of the trends you're seeing, and what are customers thinking about, and specifically in this collaboration, what are you guys thinking about when it comes to digital transformation and the impact on data protection? >> You want to start with that? So, again, lowering cost, scalability, global infrastructure, those are the big things for the digital transformation that we see customers wanting to embrace, and with Commvault, one of the big differentiators, I think, for the enterprise customers out there who are global, is they typically do have both an on-prem environment as well as an in Cloud environment, and even if they have an all in strategy, there is time between that, moving all into the Cloud where they need to be able to cover both the on-prem and in the Cloud workloads, and so Commvault really brings that together, we also work together with our HyperScale Appliance for those customers who want to have on-prem and in the Cloud so overall, it's simplicity, the ability to manage the data, wherever it needs to be, that's where Commvault and AWS really do well and shine. >> Alright, so, for people that are at this show, what flavor are they getting of AWS, or their sessions, or their labs, what's that kind of Cloud experience at this show? >> Well, we have a number of sessions that we are jointly presenting together at, focus around AIML, future SAAS solutions, and also healthcare data protection solutions. And in fact, at this show, we are launching over 2100 EC2 instances, every day at this show, through the hundreds of labs that Commvault has running. For customers and partners, you can come and try out the Commvault solutions on AWS for free at these labs, and for those of you listening out there, we are giving away two Alexas at each of our sessions. >> Wow. So, I think, still we're about eight weeks out, right, from the big show? >> Oh, my team's deep in planning already, I mean, this is a great show, but Amazon is one of the biggest shows that we do every year. What should we expect to see, this year? >> Well as you said, our team is preparing very hard, to make sure that we are providing value to the customers, and partners, attending re:INVENT, and there will be a number of announcements, we're looking forward to having our advanced technology partner and our storage competency partner, Commvault, at re:INVENT again this year. >> And we're excited to be there, so I hope that everybody who's here with us today, will join us at re:INVENT in November, and it's sure to be a great show. >> Alright, yeah, be sure to join theCUBE and over 50,000 of your closest friends >> (laughs) >> in the Cloud in Las Vegas the week right after Thanksgiving, if you haven't already, register quickly, because it will sell out, >> Townsend: That's right >> get your hotel, because they will sell out, what I'm saying is, it's a big show, so, we're excited to be there, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be be back here with more coverage, from Commvault GO in Nashville, Tennessee, thanks for watching theCUBE. >> Jeanna: Alright. 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>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee. This is Commvault GO, and you are watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman, with my co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program, this is a user conference, so we love digging in with the users. I've got David Mccurdy, who's the CTO from the great state of Colorado. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Great to be here. It's a great event, I'm happy to be here. We're here to evangelize the great work Colorado's been doing, with Commvault, and just in general. >> Alright great, so we're from Chicago, Boston, and Colorado, Denver. So we're not going to talk football, but tell us a little bit about, you know, you're CTO, love talking to the CTOs. What's your technology charter? Give us a little bit of the thumbnail, as to kind of, you know, what divisions you support, how many people you have, that sort of thing. >> Yeah, so the way the state's set up is I work underneath the Governor. We're an office of the Governor, so it's actually the Governor's Office of Information Technology. We support all the traditional branches of government, that people think of, in terms of agencies, like the Department of Health and Human Services, Medicaid, Department of Corrections, DMV, Department of Revenue. So all the big agencies all fall under our department. And then about 800 of the 900 staff inside of OIT report to me directly. And that's all the infrastructure and application stacks, all the strategy. Chief Data office, Chief Transformation office. A lot of responsibility, lots of fun, lots of long weekends, but it's been a good row for the last four years. >> David before we dig into some of the data protection stuff, I love, you talk about innovation. You talk about technology transformation. First of all, IT in general, and government specifically, often get, you know, labeled with the, oh well they do things the old way, and they've got no budgets, and they never make any changes. I've had some great case studies. I've talked with people in roles like yours, so give us a little bit of, what's it like to be working under state government this day and age, with 2018, with technology. >> It's very exciting. It's very exciting to work for Colorado specifically. I don't know if it translates to all other states. I've talked to other CIOs and CTOs around the country, but we have a very supportive governor. He just announced his campaign to run for president, maybe, we'll see how that goes. But outside of that, he's very innovative. He took a business trip to Israel, came back, and set up a cyber security lab in the state, because he thinks there's a major need for more cyber security and those disciplines. In Colorado, today, we're running negative 14% unemployment for security jobs, so it's just, huge opportunity. Outside of that, my boss, Suma Nallapati, is state CIO. Right underneath him, is all about innovation. How can we make Colorado number one in everything we do. And that's really the goal. What the governor said, the way he talks about technology, he wants technology to be elegant. That's not word you hear a lot. But when you think about that and apply it to technology, there's a very specific outcome you're trying to get out of that. >> Alright, well David, at this show, we're all talking about data. And everybody's, you know, it's what can I do with my data? And how do I make sure that things don't get wrong? Well, anybody that's been in the IT for a while is, Murphy's Law sometimes does play out. So you've actually had a couple of experiences. Some good things you've learned, but some challenges that you had, maybe share with us what happened. >> Yeah, I mean one of the things I'm here to talk about is we kicked off an initiative called Backup Colorado. And what it was is, it was consolidating all the backup and recovery services for all those agencies I just named, plus some more, right. Monster project, monster task. It was all born out of a major data failure the state had. We were a fairly new organization. We were immature. We were still running things in a siloed environment. Most of the country, most large organizations have gone down the IT consolidation path. We were a few years down the road, and we got hit with a major data loss event. And it was specific to marijuana data, which makes some people smile, some people frown, but it's a very interesting topic. It wasn't interesting to lose customer data though. I don't care if you're a private organization, or a public organization, this was real data loss. And it highlighted the need for a focused approach to solving those problems. So we went about just kind of transforming the whole space. First, put a proposal on the table. Going to the general assembly. Going to the Governor saying, this is what we need to do. They signed off on it, and then we implemented it, right. We got tens if not hundreds of people together around the state. We coordinated agencies. We got people on board that didn't want to be on board. They liked the silo approach. They liked their agencies doing their own thing. But you can't do anything right 16 different ways. You don't have to do it one way, but it can't be 16. But we took a standardized approach, and we worked with Commvault as our partner to deploy a complete backup and recovery system for the state. Highly successful project. Rolled out, standardized. Everything you could want. While we're doing that, we are completely changing our application and infrastructure stacks. We are consolidating all of our servers into three data centers in the state. We're bursting into the cloud. We're replatforming on software, the service. You know, all those. I'm responsible for each one of those stacks. My guidance was just go and change the world, right. In a very non-senile way, we went out there, and we were like, how can we do this thoughtfully. How can we do it, but push, blaze new trails, that type of thing. And the story that I've been sharing is, we got to see the end results of that. What kicked it off, was a public disaster, but the state was hit with a ransomware attack. Very targeted, very coordinated. They hit one of our larger agencies. We had good security in place, but there's always stuff that can happen, as you've kind of eluded to. And because of this project, because of the team coordinated effort, because of the technology, because of the stuff we were leveraging, we were able to bring that agency back whole. Which a lot of organizations cannot say. A lot of the technologies cannot say, with as many systems that were impacted for the time period they were, to bring that agency back whole, and actually have the executive director of that agency, doing very similar conversations as we're doing now. How can dots around the country, roll out a plan very similar to this? >> Well David, people process technology, you guys are changing processes, you're changing technology, extremely disruptive. Talk about the impact on your people. What mindset, or what changes did you have to make organization wide. 800 people was a lot of people to get in line. What did you start, what did you do? What was successful, well not so much. >> Well first I had to get my customers on board, right. And compelling events helped bring customers on board. I don't think that's the best way of doing it, but always leverage a compelling event. In this case, we had a compelling event. We had the onus from our executive branch and a legislative branch. So we had the hammer if we needed it to get it done. The team actually came together. We ran a very successful RFP. We baked off competitors in the space. And it was a beautiful thing to see all my server engineers, all my desktop guys, all my database guys and gals comin' in and working together to make this project happen. I didn't have to sell them on it. They came to me and said, we think this is the best technology stack for the state. When I recognized, when I heard them, they all got on board and we were able to roll it out. And so I think it was that team approach, not top down, but you know, let's all come together and find the right thing for the state. I think that was why it was so successful. It was a team approach, and we had executive buy in, we were able to get it done. >> You talked about how Commvault helped with that transition, 16 different backup products, if the state was like any other organization, there's at least 15, 16 different backup products, people like what they use. And transitioning to something new requires training, support. How did Commvault help you guys in that transition? >> You know, they were a great partner, all the way through the RFP process, to bringing it in and doing training. We have a big thing at the state, the technology stack, we do luncheon learns, so there's lots of training. Commvault brought a lot of resources. We had engineers specifically assigned from Commvault to help with the project, the roll out, and then the transition. So a very effective partner, in terms of helping us along the way. It never helps to have that kind of hammer, as I said before, to push it forward. I really couldn't have asked for anything more. I spoke a little bit about this the other day. When we had this compelling event with the ransomware this year, I picked up the phone, and I got an answer right away. And I said we're going to need you once again. And they showed up. Commvault showed up. The great thing was, we didn't need them, right. My engineers had an effective turnover and training. They got the initial alerts before anybody did, before any of our security groups, anybody, Commvault detected this ransomware really before any of my tool suites because of the way it came into our organization. Which was kind of cool. But just in general, a great partnership. They were there all the way through the recovery of CDOT as support for our team. Really weren't needed just because of the effective transition. >> That's an interesting point. You talk about, you would think it would be the security tool that would be alerting you. Commvault and companies like it, sit in an interesting position. You've got data, you've got metadata. That surprise you that that was the tool that helped alert you in the first? >> Shocked me, shocked me, right. I mean we spent a lot of money building stacks of tools to protect the state, and very effective tools. There's nothing against those tool suites specifically. We were actually rolling out another tool that week that ultimately would've prevented it. That being said, stuff happens and the way this ransomware came in, bypassed that visibility. But Commvault, looking at our backups every night, taking differentials of 'em, saw encrypted files on disk, sent out an alert. The teams knew exactly what to do. Got executives on the phone. Got security ops on the phone. And it kicked off from there, so yeah, shocked, you know, happy that we caught it. Not the way I would have wanted, but that's why you've got layers of security. That's why you've got layers of teams to support each other. >> So specifies, outside of the support capability that Commvault provided and one, helping you guys get alerted to the event, and then the support reacting to the event, talk to us. What did they take to recover from the event? Was this a multi-month thing? Multi-week, multi-hour? How did you guys recover and how much did you recover? >> It took us a little over a month to recover. It's actually a great conversation maybe for another time. But building a structure in an open attack. Like when you have a coordinated resources from other countries, trying to do the United States, or the state of Colorado harm, the first thing you're going to do is make sure they're outside of your environment. So for about the first two weeks, we had everybody from the National Guard to the Defense Department there, helping us evaluate the situation. Getting it to a place where we felt comfortable bringing the department back up. Once we reached that point, and there is never a clear line in the sand. There's a role for the CIO and the CTO in that place to say, hey, now's time we've done everything we can and then we've very methodically started bringing desktops online and servers online. And Commvault played a huge role in that as well as some other vendors. But, in all, we restored about 192 servers. Some were infected, some weren't, but just from a sensibility stake, we wanted to go back to clean backups, clean restores, a place where the customer felt comfortable. We were able to do it in a way that there was no data loss to the customer or at least manage data loss. Meaning, in some cases, their systems, they wanted to go really back on, because their data didn't change very much in there. My biggest pinpoint in this whole process is, I want to bring that department up much faster, right. There's two sides that you're looking at: How do you protect the department in the short term? And how do you protect them in the long term? So I had to look at both sides of it. Very interesting experience. Don't wish it on anybody. >> David, last thing I want to ask is, the role of data, how do you, inside the state of Colorado, look at the role of data and the changing role of data? And if you look at Commvault, they are really expanding where they play. They're playing in multi-cloud. They've got artificial intelligence helping them. They're helping with governance and compliance. How do you see them lined up? Where do you see your relationship going with them in the future? >> Well, obviously, I like to stay with partners that take care of me, so there's obviously an affinity there, in terms of how they've helped the state in the last year. The data is really two parts, the agencies data, and then the resident, and the customers of the state of Colorado's data, right. So you first got to look at who owns and who is the steward of the data. And as IT for the state, our role is protecting that data, both in the short and long term. But as it becomes more and more of an asset, and we all know data is an asset today, it's almost the most critical asset. So protecting it is just as important as how you're going to innovate with it. So we are very excited about how we're going to be leveraging data in the future. Some of the issues we're talking about, the Department of Transportation wants to take their data for Road X and change how people drive. You know, very similar as to how you may use Waze and stuff like that. The DOTs around the country want to take that data and leverage it all over the place. So you're not only taking an asset that was leveraged for a very different purpose 10 years ago and completely transforming industries, you're doing that all across state government, right. The impetus, the need for protecting it, using it, I'm very excited with where they're going and how they look at data, Commvault specifically. I had a great conversation with our CTO last year about, I'm storing all this data on FASTDISK anyway. Why can't I use this as a data lake? How can I get metadata for your customers? How can I take this in places where maybe the founders of this company didn't even envision 20 years ago. It's very exciting how they're looking at the technology and where they can take it. AI is one of my focus areas for the year. I'm going to listen to everybody's pitch and I'm going to choose the right ones, because I do think it's transformative. If they can do it correctly and ultimately lessen the burden on IT, that's what we're looking for, right. That's what AI should bring to the table, is the ability for IT to do more with less. So that's what we're looking for and I'm excited what they're going to do with it. >> Alright, well David Mccarthy, we really appreciate you joining us, sharing your story. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage here from Commvault GO in Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks for watching theCUBE. >> David: Thank you. (lively tech music)

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

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO 2018, brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville. You're watching theCUBE at Commvault GO. Our first year at this show, the third year of the show. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host, Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program Chris Powell, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at Commvault. Thanks so much. >> Thanks, Stu. >> For inviting us to the Music City, and your party. >> We're glad to have you guys, thanks for being here. >> All right, so Chris, Commvault... I really like what I've seen at the show, so far. You made a statement that really resonated with me yesterday. You said, look, this is a 20 year old company, but it's very different than it was. We know cloud and AI and all these things are kind of changing. >> Yeah. >> Things like ransomware and GDPR are hot in the data world. When we look at our research, data is at the center of everything. So, you know, what's the brand of Commvault? If we think of a company that has lots of customers, but going through its own transformation, how should we be thinking of the company? >> I think what we're trying to do with Commvault is make sure that we, there's some times in marketing, where you end up in a place where it's either, it's perception is driving reality or reality is driving perception, and Commvault's in that transitional period where it's more about reality that we need to use to drive that perception, because there's some old perceptions. And as you said, in any company, especially in the tech space, that's 20 years old, you end up in a place where there's a lot of different perceptions of you from days gone by. Those can be about pricing. They can be about the usability of the products. The different technology innovations that you've had because you have such a long history, so we, sort of, need to continue to shift that and shape that as we go forward. For us, the Commvault brand has really evolved into Commvault is about being data experts and helping our customers be data experts. As you said, data is the new oil. Data, as we said at the show this morning, the new water, and it's definitely, sort of, this space where everybody's recognizing what's happening, but it's such early days in this world of data that's changing everything around us. >> Well, we have a friend of the program, Alan Cohen, that said, here's the challenge in IT, used to be that IT was the, always the no, and then you go to the procurement people and they're really slow. And, Chris, do you know what we need everybody to do? We need them to go. (laughs) I really like the branding of the show. Probably not where you came up with the term, but you've got 2,000 people here. The show floor, I've been to five or six thousand person shows that have a smaller expo hall here. You've got customers, with booths. You've got partners with booth. You know, Nashville's got a great energy. So, for people who haven't come here in person, give us a little bit about, why Nashville, what you hope to accomplish with the expo, the flow and then the show? >> Well, the why Nashville, and a lot of what we were trying to get with is, we've all been to probably one or two too many conferences in other cities, that we won't name here because I love those other cities too, but what we've done in our partnership with the Gaylord Hotels, which is a great customer of Commvault's as well, is trying to find just venues that are a little bit more interesting, and unexpected and different. That it was all part of the plan, as we were coming up with this, is to really project Commvault in a way that we believe, really, was more about our image. Towns like Nashville, last year we were in Washington, D.C., it's, they're great representations of what we're trying to do in the market. I was with people last night and they said so many people said they'd never been to Nashville, and this is a great town, and it really represents our brand well. >> So Chris, 20 years, 20 years of data. There's companies that are just waking up, realizing that they have this asset locked away in their, whether it's on tape, on media that's sitting aside in some random storage facility, but they have this asset that they can now unlock. What's the central message you want these customers to know about Commvault and your ability to help them to unlock that data. >> Keith, the... it's so true in that when you talk to people who are more on the data scientist side of things, it's this, it's this understanding that the... usually, the very well-paid data scientists struggle with just a couple of very basic things that they don't want to struggle with and it's not even what you pay them for. It's, can I get access to the data? Is the data all brought together in a form that I can really now serve it up, use it, get value from it? And as Commvault's been, sort of, developing and expanding our overall portfolio, it's really trying to address both of the issues of, if you're someone who's responsible for data in your organization, you have a bit of a challenge on an ongoing basis. You need to make sure the data is protected so it's secure. It's available when you need it. But it's also that you can serve it up and you can get value from it. The portfolio that Commvault's really been refining and introduced this past July, and continued to introduce things just this week, is made up of products that both enable the protection of that data but also serving that data up. The Commvault Activate product line and the portfolio that we're starting to introduce now is all meant to try to drive value out of the data. You're so right, in that, I was talking to some of our... we have a great expert in AI that's going to be with us tomorrow, Y.Y. Lee, who's also one of our board of director members, and she was just talking about how so many companies, as you've said, have locked that data away. It's not... it's not available to them and now they're bringing in these data scientists and their job is to try to find value in that data but they can't get access to that data. So this is a, this is a very straight-forward challenge that we're trying to help our customers with. >> Chris, I'd like you to take us inside your customers because when I think about five or ten years ago, backup, there was usually a storage person. It's like, okay, how do I have it? Do I have a backup window? Got to worry about recovery, something we would look at, but when you talk about data, you talk about data scientists. We're going up the stack. How do I use analytics and everything? Is this... >> Yeah. >> Is there a C.D.O. in my organization, worries about that? Governance and compliance are board-level discussions. So, bring us through where are you talking to the customers? Is there, kind of, the traditional customer, and the new customer? How'd that impact your whole field? It's a, it's a big, broad question. We don't have a ton of time but, yeah. >> Chris: Well, the way that I usually look at it is you can almost come at this from two different directions but you end up telling a very similar story. It's just almost the order of operation that you tell it. What I mean by that is, in the world of the folks who were really responsible for their virtual environment, their physical environment, and backing it up, you can talk to them about what they need and their desires in terms of the strongest backup and recovery, but then eventually you pretty quickly find yourself talking about a better understanding of what that data is so that you can apply your policies against it, so that you can show your compliance, and then eventually, to be able to serve that data up for more higher-value needs of your organization. And if you end up speaking to someone often, it's a more senior IT person in an organization or even all the way into the CEO's office. It's sort of just almost a different direction you go. It's you want to talk about how you can get value out of your data, and in order to get that value out of your data, you need to be able to understand truly what it is, where it is, who created it, who has access to it, and then eventually, you find yourself to: Is it protected? So it's a very similar story but if you go to a CEO and you start with backup, they don't really want to talk to you. And, if you go to a backup administrator and start talking about the value of data, they don't really want to talk to you. So, but what we've come to realize is that it's the same story, just told in a different direction. >> So talk... talk to us about bridging that gap. We're at Commvault GO, two thousand people, over 150 sessions, guys have been pretty clear this is an educational event. How did you help bridge the gap with such a large... difference of users? You have over five hundred partners attended the, the Partners Session. You have customers from the backup, admin, all the way up to the data scientists, and even executives that have to make these decisions. How does Commvault GO help bridge that gap? >> So, in a lot of ways, we use data so we're... we're as the old saying goes, eating your own dog food, kind of thing. We're using data from the previous conferences and always refining this. It's a... there's 182 Break-Out Sessions that occur over two days. There's, what we call, 30 and 30. It's 30 structured labs and 30 hands-on labs that you can, sort of, experience while you're here at the show. There's a lot of mini sessions, so there's the theaters that hold 120 people and then there's the theaters that hold 15 people. And through a lot of the technology of the shows now, the mobile apps, you can really refine what you want to experience at the show. The Meet the Experts Sessions, we have our developers here. The first year we did this, I wasn't sure how this would work, but we brought about, I think we brought about 10 developers for a Meet the Experts Sessions. The next year, we ended up bringing 20, and this year, we brought 40. 40 developers and engineers are here to have whiteboard sessions and just sit and talk to people. So, it's a... we've really divined, defined, sorry, this show in a way that looks at the audience first and, from a marketing perspective, I can tell you that when we came into this, nobody wants to be marketed to in this, in this industry. They, they want real information and what Commvault GO has been about is real information. It's, you talk about the reality driving the perception. Commvault is strong in reality. You know, it's, that's our reality. We just need to be able to communicate that and we use this show to make sure we're doing it, and not selling to people. We're here to provide real information. >> Chris, one of the things that actually surprised me, the portfolio is actually broader than I expected and part of that, you had quite a bit of hard news. What I mean by that, you announced quite a lot of products, everything from the ASA service through the Commvault Activate. >> Yeah... extended appliances. >> There's a whole lot of things there. We're going to have a lot of your, your team on to go through that, but give us what, when you, people walk away from the show, what you want them to know about Commvault, announcements. >> Yeah, so I think the big... there's so many different pieces, you're right, that have come from the show, very tangible, specific things, new product line around Commvault Activate, what you can utilize that... solution for, in terms of, understanding your data, things like, for sensitive data governance, then you get into the Commvault appliance and the extended appliance offering. We've taken the start of the appliance that was just in its initial forms last year at this time, at the last GO Conference, and then extended that this year with a larger appliance offering, as well as a smaller. And that's just a testament to how these things are being adopted in the market and the amount of customer uptake we're beginning to see on it. And then, when you look within our product portfolio, we've tried to make sure that some of our foundational products, like Commvault Complete Backup Recovery, that's been a big change for us recently. In terms of offering what we consider to be, and in terms of the name, the most complete backup and recovery solution, and what that was, is an answer to the market. Over the last 20 years, and it's not just Commvault, the whole market started to disperse their backup and recovery products. If you wanted backup and recovery, you had to go out and buy 10, 15 different products. You had to piece all these different things together, and what we realized is that what customers were really... longing for was something that really brought this together, so that they stopped spending all their time trying to figure out how to piece together a backup and recovery solution, and started spending more of their time about how to get value out of that data. >> As your CEO and COO said on the stage this morning, there's the difference between simple and smart, >> Chris: Yeah. >> And often, smart will end up being easier than, than doing this in part. >> Yep. >> Chris, I really appreciate you helping us to get a flavor for the show at the beginning. We've got lots more interviews to dig through all the product announcements, talk to the customers, talk to the partners. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (light electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome to the Music City. You're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. This is Commvault GO. 20-year-old company, Commvault, the third year of their show, and the first time we have theCUBE here, and the first time we've been in Nashville, Tennessee. I'm Stu Miniman, your host for one day of coverage and joining me to help unlock the Commvault is the CTO advisor, Keith Townsend. >> Good to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, Keith, so you've actually been to this show before. It's my first time. I've known Commvault for a long time, but, you know, we talk about companies, they're all going through some kind of digital transformation and Commvault is no exception. I love the energy that I'm seeing at this show. They've got great puns around data. Data is at the center of everything, and really comes to what we see. You know, we know that data is so important. All the tropes out there. It's the new oil, it's the new currency, it is one of the most important things, not only in IT, but in business. So what's your experience been, so far? >> So far great. You know, they did a great job, second go for me. Last year, they had Captain Sully, great inspirational talk. This year they had a comedian, Connell on it, did a fabulous job of fast-paced multimedia sessions, talking about the connection of data, our everyday lives, lives as a technologist. Really high-powered show, a lot of great conversation around data and its applicability. >> Yeah, I did love that. Steve Connell, he is a poet, and some humor, and a lot of geeky things in there, talking about, right, how data fits into all of our lives, and what we do. And then that's one of the reason's why we're here, why the customers are here, and that's what it's about. You look at a company like Commvault. They've got 10s of thousands of customers, and as the big wave's coming in, what is Cloud Mead? I like some of the messages. I know we're going to dig in, both in our analysis, as well as with the guests, how cloud is impacting this, as well as things like the wave of AI. How is that changing the product? How can I access the information? I hear things like ransomware and GDPR, and hacking. It's a dangerous time in technology, whether you're talking social media, or talking in business. So give us a little bit of background, what you're hearing. Keith, you're talking to customers in your day job all the time. How important is data? And things like backup and data recovery, where do they fit in their world? >> Well, you know what? Customers are still learning this journey. I've talked to plenty of customers that have used Commvault, competing products, and a lot of, at the low level, a lot of these guys are still thinking about it as backup, but great, great testimony from one of the larger customers, out there, Merck, who talked about using backup or data protection, as part of their data management strategy, moving workloads from worker mobility, moving workloads from cloud to cloud, location to location. Every customer is dealing with multi-cloud challenges. Stu, we've talked about multi-cloud and the keys to multi-cloud data is absolutely the most important part of getting your multi-cloud strategy, or even cloud strategy, straight. So, I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation I've had out in the field, which is customers challenged with how do I simply identify a data management strategy? To hearing Commvault's message today and throughout the guests that we'll have on, customers, partners, the entire ecosystem, about how Commvault enables multi-cloud through data management. >> Yeah, I was curious what I would see coming in. Would this be, kind of, a hard core, let's get in to the product and understand things like backup and recovery. As you know, backup's important, but recovery is everything. We heard some of the customer stories about how fast they can recover. Those are great stories. How does cloud fit into it? You had the CEO and the COO on stage talking about do you go, when you go to the cloud, do you go simple or do you go smart? And there's some nuance there that you'll want to unpack as to understanding. You know, as we look at cloud, it's not just take the way we were doing things and throw them up there. I mean Keith, they talked about tape and virtual tape. You know, I remember back when, like, the VTLs were first being a thing, I was working at a storage company back then. You know, it was a huge move. Backup, those processes, are really hardened into an environment. What do the admins have to do? What do they have to change in the way they're doing things? Let's look at the news a little bit. So, you know, there was the, Commvault did a good job, I think, of checking all the check boxes. While there was nothing that jumped out at me as, like, wow this is the first time I've heard it, it's what I'm hearing from customers. So, moving to, and as a service portfolio, they've got a full line of appliances, but it's not only hardware. If you'd like to buy the software from them, of course you could do that. Got a number of big partners. We're going to HPE on the program. We're going to have Cisco on the program. NetUP is another big, big partner here. As well as, I think that the product that they're most excited to talk about is Commvault Activate, which is really looking a lot of the governance, which, when you talk in a cloud world, is one of the biggest challenges. By the way, if people in the background hear these cheering, the Commvault employees are really excited, everybody's starting to walk on the show floor. We're in the center of it all, Keith. So, we got a preview yesterday, they actually announced it to the tech field day crew, which you and I sat in with. So, give me your thoughts as to what you saw in the product line. How does that line up with what you're hearing from customers in a competitive nature? >> So, I think I tweeted out yesterday, doing the tech field day session, Commvault does not sleep at the wheel. As you said, Stu, there's nothing amazingly new about what they announced, but a 20-year-old technology company is definitely keeping pace with the innovation that we've seen in the field. Customers want options when it comes to consuming backup and recovery. From a storage layer, they want the storage bricks, they want a hardware solution, they want to consume it via subscription, or perpetual license. They want this cloud-type capability. More importantly, they want, and they talked about it on stage today, this analytics capability. The ability to extract intelligence out of your data. Commvault calls is 4-D indexing. Other vendors just call it, simply, meta-data. But taking advantage of 15, 20 year-old data, to drive innovation in today's society, while keeping compliant with GDPR and other regulations that are coming up, sprouting up as it seems, every other week. >> I did like that terminology that you used. The 4-D innovation, because of course the fourth dimension is time and we're using intelligence. The challenge we have, as we know, is we have so much data and what do we the analytics for? They said we can use the analytics, first of all, compliance. I need to understand that I take care of that. Secondly, what if I want to cull data? What data don't I need anymore? What can I get rid of? There's huge cost savings that I can have there. And lastly, what can I get from analytics? How can I get value out of that information? And more. So, the use of analytics is something I was looking for, obviously want to talk to some of the product people, some of the customers, about what I've heard so far and talking to people. People were excited. I was actually talking to one of the partners of Commvault, they said one of the reasons they partnered deeper and are looking to work with Commvault, is they've got good tech. There's a reason they've been around for 20 years. They're a publicly traded stock. They've been doing well. They have been growing. Revenue wise, I looked, the last three years, I think they're at 700 million, they've been growing in the kind of eight to 9% year over year for the last couple years. Which, as a software company, it's not taking the world by storm, but for, in the infrastructure space, that is good growth. I do have to mention, there was some activist investor activity that came on. We actually we're going to have the CMO, we're going to have the COO on the program. We won't have the CEO, they are in the midst of going through a change there. And, you know, look, say what you will about activist investors. The reason they're getting involved is because they believe that there is more value that can be unlocked in Commvault with some changes and with product line and the things happening that's what we're starting to see here. That's why were excited to dig in and kind of understand. >> Yeah, we can see that even in some of the tech customer's testimonials. The state of Colorado net new customer. This is amazing in an area that we've seen 90 million, 250 million, easily a half a million dollars of investment in the data protection space. Commvault, 20-year-old company, still gaining traction with net new use cases and if I was an activist investor, I'd look at that. I'd look at the overall industry and thinking what can we do to unlock some of the potential of a fairly large customer base? Pretty stable company, but a very, very exciting part of the industry. >> Yeah, and Keith, you brought up meta-data. Meta-data's something that, you know, in the industry we've been talking about for a long time. It's really that intelligence that's going to allow the systems to gather everything. I know, when I get my brand new phone now, I can search my 4,000 photos by location, by date, everything like that. It's auto-recognizing information. The same thing we're getting on the business side. It used be oh okay, let's make sure when you put your photo, your file, in there that you tag it. Come on. Nobody can do this. Nobody's thinking when I'm doing my job, well I really need to think about the meta data 'cause five years from now, I might want to do it. Oh, I can search by person or project or things like that. But it's the intelligence in the system to be able to learn and grow and the more data we have, actually the more that the intelligence can get there. >> And that's critically important for even compliance. Again, culling data. You know, Bill Nye got up on stage and talked about being able to use data, or I'm sorry, AstraZeneca got up on stage and talked about using data that was 15-years-old to rerun through today's algorithms and trials. If you were to cull the wrong data, then they could not have the innovation that they've created by having 15-year-old data. So, the meta data, the ability to go back again, search your repository for key words, content, surface up that data and leverage that data. This is why we say data is the new currency, it's the new oil, it's the most critical. I even heard on stage today, data's the new water. I don't know if I'd go quite that far, you know I like my old-fashioned glass of water, but this is why we hear these terms because companies are reinventing themselves with the data. >> Alright, so Keith, what Dave Allante would point out is water is a limited resource. Data, we can reuse it. We can take a drink of data, we can share it. Data helps complete us. It's the shirts that they have at the show. We've got AstraZeneca, we've got the state of Colorado, we've got other users. The key partners, key executives. We're going to bring you the key data to help you extract the signal from the noise here at Commvault GO. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for joining theCUBE. (upbeat music)