>> Commvault was an idea that incubated as a project inside of bell labs, one of the most prestigious research and development organizations in the world, back in the day. It became an official company in 1996, and Commvault just celebrated its 25th anniversary. As such, Commvault has had to reinvent itself many times over the past two and a half decades. From riding the waves of the very early PC networking era, to supporting a rich set of solutions for the evolving enterprise. This includes things like cloud computing, ransomware disaster, recovery, security compliance, and pretty much all things data protection and data management. And with me to talk about the company, its vision for the future, with also a voice of the customer. Three great guests, Isabel Geese is the Chief Marketing Officer of Commvault, Manoj Nair is the GM of Metallic, and Tim Carben is a principal systems engineer with Mitchell International. Folks, welcome to the Commvault power panel. Come inside the cube. It's awesome to have you. >> Great to be here Dave. >> All right. First of all, I got to congratulate you celebrating 25 years. That's a long time, not a lot of tech companies make it that far and are still successful and relevant. So Isabelle, maybe you could start off. What do you think has been the driving factor for your ability to kind of lead through the subsequent technological waves that I alluded to upfront? >> So well, 25 years is commendable but we are not counting success in number of years we're really counting success in how many customer we've helped over those years. And I will say what has been the driving mater for us as who that has been innovating with our customers. You know, we were there every step of the way, when they migrate to hybrid cloud. And now as they go to multi cloud in a post COVID world, where they have to win gold you know, distributed workforce, different types of workloads and devices, we are there too. We have that workload as well. So the innovation keep coming in, thanks to us listening to our customer. And then adding needs that change over the last 25 years and probably for the next 25 as well. You know, we, we want to be here for customer who think that data is an asset, not a liability. And also making sure that we offer them a broad range of use cases to book why things simple because the word is getting too complex for them. So let's take the complexity on us. >> Thank you for that. So Manoj, you riffed on the cube before about, you know putting on the, the binoculars and looking at the future. So let's talk about that. Where do you see the future for this industry? What are some of the key driving factors that matter. >> Dave it's great to be back on the Cube. You know, we see our industry no different than lots of other industries. The SAS model is rapidly being adopted. And the reason is, you know customers are looking for simplicity simplicity not just in leveraging, you know the great technology that Commvault has built but in the business model and the experience. So, you know, that's one of the fastest growing trends that started in consumer apps and other applications, other B to B apps. And now we're seeing it in core infrastructure like data management, data protection. They're also trying to leverage their data better, make sure it's not fragmented. So, how do you deliver more intelligent services? You know, securing the data insights from the beta, transforming the data and that combination, you know our ability to do that in a multi-cloud world like Isabel said, now with increasing edge work loads. Sometimes, you know, our customers say their data centers are the new edge too. So you kind of have this, you know, data everywhere, workloads everywhere, yet the desire to deliver that with a holistic experience, we call it the power of bank. The ability to manage your data and leverage the data with the simple lesson without compromise. And that's really what we're seeing as part of the future. >> Okay. Manoj I to come back to you and double click on that but I want to introduce Tim to the conversation here. You bring in the voice of the customer, as they say. Tim, my understanding is Mitchell has been a Commvault customer since the mid two thousands. So tell us why Commvault? What has kept you with the company for more than 15 years? >> Yeah! It was what, 2006 when we started and really when it all boils down to it, it's just as Isabel said, innovation. At Mitchell we're always looking to stay ahead of the trend. And, you know, just to like was mentioned earlier data is the most important part here. Commvault provides us peace of mind to protect and manage our data. And they do data protection for all of our environments, right now. We've been a partner to help enable our digital transformation including SAS and cloud adoption. When we start talking about the solutions we have, I mean we of course started in 2006. I mean, this was version six, if I remember right, this predates me at the company. Upgraded to seven, eight, nine. We brought in 10, brought in 11, brought in hyper scale and then moved on to bring in the Metallic. And Commvault provides the reason for this. I guess I should say is, Commvault provides a reliable backup but most importantly, recovery, rapid recovery. That's what gives me confidence. That's what helps me sleep better at night. So when I started looking at SAS, as a differentiator to protect our 036 environments or 065 environments. Metallic was a natural choice, and the one thing I wanted to add to that is it came out cheaper than us building it ourselves. When you take into account resources, as well as compute and storage. So again, just a natural choice. >> Yeah. As the saying goes, back up is one thing, recoveries everything. Isabel you know we've seen the SAS suffocation of the enterprise, particularly, you know from the app side. You came from Salesforce. So you, the company that is the poster child for SAS. But my question is what's catalyzing this shift and why do you think data protection is ready to make the move? >> Well, there's so many good things about SAS. You know, you remember when people started moving to the cloud and transforming their CapEx into OPEX, well SAS bring yet another level of benefits. I.T, we know always has to do more with less. And so SAS allows you to, once you set up you've got all the software upgrades automatically without you know, I think it's smart work. You can better manage your cash flow because you pay as you grow. And also you have a faster time to value. So all of this at help, the fast adoption and I will tell you today, I don't think there is a single customer who doesn't have at least one SAS application because they have things of value of this. Now, when it comes to backup and recovery, everybody's at different stages you still have on premise, you have cloud, they have SAS and workloads devices. And so what we think was the most important was to offer a raw choice of delivery model. Being able to support them if they want software subscription, if they want an integrated appliance or easy one as SAS. As a service model, and also some of our partners are actually delivering this in a more custom and managed way as well. So offering choice because everybody is at a different stage on this journey when it comes to data management and protection, I actually, you know I think team is the example of taking full advantage or this broad choice. >> Well, you mentioned Tim that you leaned into Metallic. We have seen the SAS everywhere. We used to have a email server, right? I mean, (laughing) on prem, that just doesn't happen anymore. But how was Mitchell International thinking about SAS? Maybe you could share your, from your customer perch, what you're seeing. >> Well, What's interesting about this is Mitchell is been providing SAS for a long time. We are a technology company and we do provide solutions, SAS solutions to our customers. And this makes it so important to be able to embrace it because we know the value behind it. We're providing that to our customers. And when I look at what Commvault is doing I know that Commvault is doing the same thing. They're providing the SAS model as a value to their customers. And it's so important to go with this because we keep our environments cutting edge. As GDPR says, you need to have a cutting edge environment. And if you don't, if you cannot check that box you do not move forward. Commvault has that. And this is one less thing that I have to worry about when choosing Metallic to do my backup of O365. >> So thank you for that, Tim. So Manoj, thinking about what you just heard from Isabel and Tim, you know kind of fitting into a company's cloud or hybrid cloud, more importantly strategy, you were talking before about this. And in other words, it's not an either or, it's not a zero sum game. It's simpatico, if you will. I wonder if you could elaborate. >> Yeah. The power of band Dave I'm very proud of that. You know, when I think of the power of band I think of actually folks like Tim, our customers and Commonwealth first, right. And, really that need for choice. So for example, you know customers on various different paths to the cloud, we kind of homogenize it and say, they're on a cloud journey or they're on a digital transformation journey but the journey looks different. And so part of that, and as Isabella was saying is really the ability to meet them where they are in that journey. So for example, do you, go in there and say, "Hey, you know what I'm going to be some customers 100% multi-cloud or single cloud even. And that includes SaaS applications and my infrastructure running as a service." So there's a natural fit there saying great all your data protection. You're not going to be running software appliances for that. So you've got to data protection, data management as a service that Metallic is able to offer across the whole estate. And that's, you know, that's probably a small set of customers, but rapidly growing. Then you see a lot more customers were saying I'm going to do away as you're talking about with the email server, I'm going to move to Office 365 leverage the power of Teams. And there's a shared responsibility model there which is different than an on-prem data protection use case. And so they're, they're able to just add on Metallic to the existing Commvault environment whether it's a Commvault software or hyper-scale and connect the two. So it's a single integrated experience. And then you kind of go to the other end of the spectrum and say "great" customers' all in on a SaaS delivered data protection, as you know and you hear a lot from a lot of your guests and we hear from our customers, there's still a lot of data sitting out there. you know 90 plus percent of workloads in data centers, increasing edge data workloads. And if you were to back up one of those data workloads and say that the only copy can be in the cloud, then that would take like a 10 day recovery SLA. You know, we have some competent users who say that then that's what they have. Our flexibility, our ability to kind of bring in the hyper-scale deployment and just, you know dock it into Metallic and have a local copy instant recovery, SLA, remote backup copy in the cloud for ransomware or your worst case scenario. That's the kind of flexibility. So all those are scenarios we're really seeing with our customers. And that's kind of really the power of mandates. Very unique part of our portfolio. Companies can have portfolio products but to have a single integrated offering with that flexibility, that kind of depending on the use case you can start here and grow into a different point. That's really the unique part of the power event. >> Yeah, yeah. 10 day RTO just doesn't cut it, but Tim, maybe maybe you could weigh in here. Why, what was the catalyst for you adopting Metallic and maybe you could share what was the business impact there? >> Well, the catalyst and impact obviously two different things. The catalyst, when we look at it, there was a lot of what are we going to do with this? We have an environment, we need to back it up and how are we going to approach this? So we looked at it from a few different standpoints and of course, when it boils down to it one of the major reasons was the financial. But when we started looking at everything else that we have available to us and the flexibility that Commvault has in rolling out new solutions, this really was a no brainer, at this point. We are able to essentially back up new features and new products, as soon as they're available. within our Metallic environment we are running the activate. We are running the, the self-service for the end users, to where they can actually recover their own files. We are adding the teams into it to be able to recover and perform these backups for teams. And I want to step aside really quick and mention something about this because I'd been with, you know, Metallic for a long time and I'd been waiting for this. We've been waiting for an ability to do these backups and anyone I know, Manoj knows that I've been waiting for it. And you know, Commvault came back to me a while back and they said, we just have to wait for the API. We have to wait for Microsoft to release it. Well, I follow the news. I saw Microsoft released the API and I think it may have been two days later that Commvault reached out to me and said, Hey we got it available. Are you ready to do this? And that sort of turned around, that sort of flexibility, being on top of new applications with that, with Salesforce, that is, you know just not necessarily the reason why I adopted Metallic but one of those things that puts a smile on my face because I adopted Metallic. >> Well, that's an interesting story. I mean, you get the SDKs and if you're a leader you get them, you know, you can put the resources on it and you're ready when, when the product comes to GA. Manoj, I wonder if we could talk about just the notion of backing up a SAS. Part of the announcements today included within Metallica included backup and, and offerings for dynamics 365. But my question is why support dynamics specifically in in SAS apps generally? I mean, customers might say, doesn't my SAS provider protect my data. Why do I need a third party? And, and the second part of that question is why Commvault? >> Dave, a great question as always. I'll start with the second part of the question. It's really three words, the shared responsibility model, and, you know, a lot of times our customers, as they go into the cloud model they really start understanding that there is something, that you're getting a lot of advantages that certain things you don't have to do. But the shared responsibility model is what every cloud and SAS provider will indoctrinate in it's in desolate. And certainly the application data is owned by the customer. And the meaning of that is not something that, you know some SAS provider can understand. And so that requires specialized skills. And that's a partnership where we've done this now very successfully with Microsoft and LG 65. We've added support for Salesforce, And we see a rapid customer adoption because of that shared responsibility model, If you have a, some kind of an admin issue as we have seen in the news somebody changed their team setting and then lost all their chat. Then that data is discoverable. And you, the customer, responsible for making sure that data is discoverable or ransomware attacks. Again, covering that SAS data is your responsibility because the attack could be coming in from your instance, not from the SAS provider. So those are the reasons dynamics is, you know one of the fastest growing SAS applications from a business applications perspective out there. And as we looked at our roadmap and you look at at the right compliment. What is arriving by the agency, we're seeing this part of a Microsoft's business application suite growing, you know, millions of users out there and it's rapidly growing. And it's also integrated with the rest of the Microsoft family. So we're now, you know, proud to say that we support all three Microsoft clouds by Microsoft 365 dynamics. Those applications are increasingly degraded so we're seeing commonality in customer base and that's a business critical data. And so customers are looking to manage the data, have solutions that they can be sure they can leverage, it's not just protecting data from worst-case scenarios. In the case of some of the apps like dynamics we offer a support, like setting up the staging environment. So it's improving productivity off the application admins and that's really kind of that the value we're bringing able to bring to the table. >> Yeah. You know, that shared responsibility model. I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's oftentimes misunderstood but when you talk to CSOs, they understand it well. They'll tell you the shared responsibility is my responsibility. You know, maybe the cloud provider who will secure the the object storage bucket for the physical space, but it's, it's on me. So that's really important. So thank you for that. Isabelle, last question. The roadmap, you know how do you see Commvaults, Metallic, SAS portfolio evolving? what can you tell us? >> Oh, well, it has a big strategic impact on Commvault for sure, first because all of our existing customer as you mentioned earlier, 25 years, it's a lot of customer will have somehow some workload as SaaS. And so the ability without adding more complexity without adding another vendor just to be able to protect them in one take, and as teams, they bring a smile to his face is really important for us. The second is also a lot of customer come toCommvault from Metallic. This is the first time they enter the Commvault community and Commvault family and as they start protecting their SaaS application they realize that they could leverage the same application to protect their on-premise, data as well. So back to the power of hand and without writing off their past investments, you know going to the cloud at the pace they want. So from that perspective, there is a big impact on our customer community that quickened that Metallic brings. I don't know Manojs' way too humble, but, you know he doubled his customers every quarter. And, you know, we have added 24 countries to the portfolio, to the product. So we see a rapid adoption. And so obviously back to your question, we see the impacts of Metallic growing and growing fast because of the market demand because of the rapid innovation. We can take the Commvault technology and put it in the SaaS model and our customers really like it. So I'm very excited. I think it's going to be, you know, a great innovation, a great positive impact for customers and our new customer will welcome it, which by the way I think half, Manoj correct me but I think half of the Metallic customer at Commvault and the other half are new to our family. So, so they're very bullish about this. And it's just the beginning, as you know we all 25 year old or sorry, 25 year young and looking forward to the next 25. >> Well, I can confirm, you know we have a data partner, survey partner ETR enterprise technology research, and I was looking at the Commvault data and it shows within the cloud segment, when you cut the data by cloud, you're actually accelerating the spending momentum is accelerating. And I think it's a function of, you know some of the acquisitions you've made some of the moves. You made an integration. So congratulations on 25 years and you know you're riding the correct wave. Isabel, Manoj, Tim thanks so much for coming in the cube. It was great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you Dave. >> I really appreciate it. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Volante for the Cube. We'll see you next time.

(Upbeat Music) >> Commvault was an idea that incubated as a project inside of Bell Labs, one of the most prestigious research and development organizations in the world, back in the day. It became an official company in 1996, and Commvault just celebrated its 25th anniversary As such, Commvault has had to reinvent itself many times over the past two and a half decades from riding the waves of the very early PC networking era to supporting a rich set of solutions for the evolving enterprise. This includes things like cloud computing, ransomware, disaster recovery, security compliance, and pretty much all things data protection and data management. And with me to talk about the company, its vision for the future with also a voice of the customer are three great guests. Isabelle Guis is the Chief Marketing Officer of Commvault, Manoj Nair is the GM of Metallic, and Tim Carben is a Principal Systems Engineer with Mitchell International. Folks, welcome to the Commvault power panel. Come inside theCUBE. It's awesome to have you. [Isabelle] Great to be here today. >> All right. First of all, I got to congratulate you celebrating 25 years. That's a long time, not a lot of tech companies make it that far and are still successful and relevant. So Isabelle, maybe you could start off. What do you think has been the driving factor for your ability to kind of lead through the subsequent technological waves that I alluded to upfront? >> So well, 25 years is commendable but we are not counting success in number of years. We're really counting success in how many customers we've helped over those years. And I will say what has been the driving matter for us as who that, has been innovating with our customers. You know, we were there every step of the way when they migrate to hybrid cloud. And now as they go to multi-cloud in a post COVID world where they have to win gold you know, distributed workforce, different types of workloads and devices, we all there too. We assess workload as well. So the innovation keep coming in, thanks to us listening to our customer and then, adding needs that change over the last 25 years and probably for the next 25 as well. You know, we want to be here for customer was thinking that data is an asset, not a liability. And also making sure that we offer them a broad range of use cases to quote why things simple because the world is getting too complex for them. So let's take the complexity on us. >> Thank you for that. So Manoj, you've riffed on the cube before about, you know putting on the binoculars and looking at the future. So, let's talk about that. Where do you see the future for this industry? What are some of the key driving factors that matter? >> It's great to be back on theCUBE. You know, we see our industry no different than lots of other industries. The SaaS Model is rapidly being adopted. And the reason is, you know customers are looking for simplicity, simplicity not just in leveraging, you know the great technology that Commvault has built, but in the business model and the experience. So, you know, that's one of the fastest growing trends that started in consumer apps and other applications, other B to B apps. And now we're seeing it in core infrastructure like data management, data protection. They're also trying to leverage their data better. Make sure it's not fragmented. So how do you deliver more intelligent services? You know, securing the data, insights from the data, transforming the data, and that combination, you know, our ability to do that in a multi-cloud world like Isabelle said, now with increasing edge work loads. Sometimes, you know, our customers say their data centers has a new edge too. So you kind of have this, you know, data everywhere workloads everywhere, yet the desire to deliver that with a holistic experience, we call it the 'power of bank'; the ability to manage your data and leverage the data with the simple lesson without compromise. And that's really what we're seeing as part of the future. >> Okay. I don't know if all want to come back to you and double click on that, but I want to introduce Tim to the conversation here. You bring in the voice of the customer, as they say. Tim, my understanding is Mitchell has been a Commvault customer since the mid-2000s. So, tell us why Commvault, what has kept you with the company for more than 15 years? >> Yeah, we are, it was what, 2006 when we started. And really what it all boils down to it, it's just as Isabel said, innovation. At Mitchell, we're always looking to stay ahead of the trend. And, you know, just to like was mentioned earlier, data is the most important part here. Commvault provides us peace of mind to protect and manage our data. And they do data protection for all of our environments right now. We've been a partner to help in navel our digital transformation including SaaS and cloud adoption. When we start talking about the solutions we have, I mean we of course started in 2006. I mean, this was version version 6 if I remember right. This predates me at the company. Upgraded to seven, eight, nine, we brought in ten, brought in eleven, brought in HyperScale, and then moved on to bring in the Metallic. And Commvault provides the reason for this. I guess I should say is, Commvault provides a reliable backup but most importantly, recovery. Rapid recovery. That's what gives me confidence. That's what helps me sleep better at night. So when I started looking at SaaS as a differentiator to protect our 036 environments or 065 environments, Metallic was a natural choice. And the one thing I wanted to add to that is, it came out cheaper than us building it ourselves. When you take into account resources as well as compute and storage. So again, just a natural choice. >> Yeah. As the saying goes back up as one thing, recovery's everything. Isabelle. Yeah, we've seen the SaaSification of the enterprise. Particularly, you know from the app side. You came from Salesforce. So you, the company that is the poster child for SaaS. But my question is what's catalyzing this shift and why do you think data protection is ready to make the move? >> Well, there's so many good things and that's that. As you know, you remember when people started moving to the cloud and transforming their CAPEX into OPEX. Well SaaS bring yet another level of benefits. IT, we know always has to do more with less. And so SaaS allows you to, once you set up, you've got all the software upgrades automatically without you know, I think it's, why it works. You can better manage your cash flow, because you pay as you grow. And also you have a faster time to value. So all of this at help, the fast adoption and I will tell you today I don't think there is a single customer who doesn't have at least one SaaS application because they have things of value of this. Now, when it comes to backup and recovery everybody's at different stages. You still have On-Premises, you have cloud, there's SaaS, there's Workloads devices. And so what we think was the most important was to offer a broad choice of delivery model being able to support them if they want a software subscription, if they want an integrated appliance, or if they want SaaS as a service model, and also some of our partners actually delivering this in a more custom and managed way as well. So offering choice, because everybody is at a different stage on this journey. When it comes to data management and protection, I actually, you know, I think team is the example of taking full advantage of this bold choice. >> Well, you mentioned Tim that you leaned into Metallic. We have seen the SaaS everywhere. We used to have a email server, right? I mean, you know, On-Prem, that just doesn't happen anymore. But how was Mitchell International thinking about SaaS? Maybe you could share your, from your customer perch, what you're seeing. >> Well, what's interesting about this is, Mitchell is been providing SaaS for a long time. We are a technology company and we do provide solutions, SaaS solutions, to our customers. And this makes it so important to be able to embrace it because we know the value behind it. We're providing that to our customers. And when I look at what Commvault is doing I know that Commvault is doing the same thing. They're providing the SaaS Model as a value to their customers. And it's so important to go with this because we keep our environments cutting edge. As GDPR says, You need to have a cutting edge environment. And if you don't, if you cannot check that box you do not move forward. Commvault has that. And this is one less thing that I have to worry about when choosing Metallic to do my backup of O365. >> So thank you for that, Tim. So Manoj, thinking about what you just heard from Isabelle and Tim, you know, kind of fitting into a company's cloud or hybrid cloud, more importantly, strategy, you were talking before about this. "And", in other words, it's not an either or it's not a zero sum game. It's simpatico, if you will. I wonder if you could elaborate. >> Yeah, no The Power of And, Dave, I'm very proud of that. You know, when I think of The Power of And I think of actually folks like Tim, our customers and Commonwealth first, right. And, and really that, that need for choice. So for example, you know, customers on various different paths to the cloud we kind of homogenize it and say, they're on a cloud journey or they're on a digital transformation journey, but each journey looks different. And so part of that, "And", as Isabella was saying, is really the ability to meet them where they are in that journey. So for example, you know, do you, go in there and say, Hey, you know what, I'm going to be some customers 100% multi-cloud or single cloud even. And that includes SaaS applications and my infrastructure running as a service. So there's a natural fit there saying great all your data protection. You're not going to be running software appliances for that. So you've got to data protection, data management as a service that Metallic is the able to offer across the whole S state. And that's, you know, that's probably a small set of customers, but rapidly growing. Then you see a lot more customers were saying I'm going to do away as you're talking about but the emails are where I'm going to move to office 365, leverage the power of teams. And there's a Shared Responsibility Model there which is different than an On-Prem data protection use case. And so they're, they're able to just add on Metallic to the existing Commonwealth environment, whether it's a Commonwealth software or HyperScale, and connect the two. So it's a single integrated experience. And then you kind of go to the other end of the spectrum and say, great customers all in on a SaaS delivered data protection, as you know, and you hear a lot from a lot of your guests and we hear from our customers, there's still a lot of data sitting out there, you know, 90 plus percent of workloads and data centers increasing edge data workloads. And if you were to back up one of those data workloads and say that the only copy can be in the cloud, then that would take like a 10 day recovery isolation. You know, we have some competitors who say that then that's what they have. Our flexibility, our ability to kind of bring in the Hyper-Scale deployment and just, you know, dock it into Metallic, and have a local copy, instant recovery, SLA, remote, you know, backup copy in the cloud for ransomware, or your worst case scenario. That's the kind of flexibility. So all those are scenarios we're really seeing with our customers. And that's kind of really the power advantage. A very unique part of our portfolio, but, you know, companies can have portfolio products, but to have a single integrated offering with that flexibility, that kind of, depending on the use case, you can start here and grow into a different point. That's really the unique part of the power event. Yeah, 10 day RTO just doesn't cut it, but Timmy, maybe you could weigh in here. Why, What was the catalyst for you adopting Metallic and maybe you could share what was the business impact there? >> Well, the catalyst and impact, obviously two different things. The catalyst, when we look at it, there was a lot of what are we going to do with this? We have an environment, we need to back it up, and how are we going to approach this? So we looked at it from a few different standpoints, and of course, when it boils down to it, one of the major reasons was the financial. But when we started looking at everything else that we have available to us and the flexibility that Commvault has in rolling out new solutions, this really was a no brainer at this point. We are able to essentially back up new features and new products, as soon as they're available. Within our Metallic environment, we are running the activate. We are running the the self-service for the end users to where they can actually recover their own files. We are adding the teams into it to be able to recover and perform these backups for teams. And I want to step aside really quick and mentioned something about this because I'd been with, you know, Metallic for a long time and I'd been waiting for this. We've been waiting for an ability to do these backups and anyone I know Manoj knows that I've been waiting for it. And you know, Commvault came back to me a while back and they said, we just have to wait for the API. We have to wait for Microsoft releases. Well, I follow the news. I saw Microsoft released the API, and I think it may have been two days later. Good. Commvault reached out to me and said, Hey we got it available. Are you ready to do this? And that sort of turned around that sort of flexibility being on top of new applications with that, with Salesforce, that is, you know, just not necessarily the reason why I adopted Metallic but one of those things that puts a smile on my face because I adopted Metallic. >> Well, that's an interesting story. I mean, you get the SDKs and if you're a leader you get them, you know, you can put the resources on it and you're ready when, when the product, you know, comes to GA. Manoj, I wonder if we could talk about just the notion of backing up SaaS, part of the announcements today included within Metallic included backup and offerings for Dynamics 365. But my question is why support Dynamics specifically in SaaS apps generally? I mean, customers might say, doesn't my SaaS provider protect my data? Why do I need a third party? And, and the second part of that question is why Commvault? >> Dave a great question as always. I'll start with the second part of the question. It's really three words the Shared Responsibility Model. And, you know, a lot of times our customers as they go into the cloud model they really start understanding that there is something that you're getting a lot of advantages the certain things you don't have to do, but the Shared Responsibility Model is what every cloud and SaaS provider will indoctrinate in its S&As. And certainly the application data is owned by the customer. And the meaning of that is not something that, you know, some SaaS provider can understand. And so that requires specialized skills. And that's a partnership. We've done this now very successfully with Microsoft and LG 65, we've added support for Salesforce, and we see a rapid customer adoption because of that Shared Responsibility Model. If you have, some kind of, an admin issue as we have seen in the news somebody changed their team setting and then lost all their chat. And then that data is discoverable. And you, the customer is responsible for making sure that data is discoverable or ransomware attacks. Again, recovering that SaaS data is your responsibility because the attack could be coming in from your instance not from the SaaS provider. So those are the reasons. Dynamics is, you know, one of the fastest growing SaaS applications from a business applications perspective out there. And as we looked at our roadmap, and you look at at the right compliment, what is the right adjacency, we're seeing this part of Microsoft's Business Application Suite growing, you know, as millions of users out there and it's rapidly growing. And it's also integrated with the rest of the Microsoft family. So we're now, you know, proud to say that we support all three Microsoft clouds, Microsoft Azure, or 365, Dynamics. Those applications are increasingly integrated so we're seeing commonality in customer base and that's a business critical data. And so customers are looking to manage the data, have solutions that they can be sure they can leverage. It's not just protecting data from worst-case scenarios. In the case of some of the apps like Dynamics, we offer a support, like setting up the staging environment. So it's improving productivity of the application admins, and that's really kind of that the value we're bringing able to bring to the table. >> Yeah. You know, that Shared Responsibility Model. I'm glad you brought that up because I think it's oftentimes misunderstood but when you talk to CSOS, they understand it well. They'll tell you the shared responsibility is my responsibility. You know, maybe the cloud provider will secure the object storage bucket for the physical space, but it's on me. So that's really important. So thank you for that. Isabelle, last question, the roadmap, you know, how do you see Commvault's, Metallic SaaS portfolio evolving? What can you tell us? >> Oh, well, it's, it has a big strategic, you know, impact on Commvault for sure on the first portfolio first because of all of our existing customers as you mentioned earlier, 25 years, it's a lot of customers are somehow some workload as SaaS. And so the ability without, you know, adding more complexity without adding another vendor just to be able to protect them in one take, and as teams they bring a smile to his face is really important for us. The second is also a lot of customers come to Commvault for Metallic. This is the first time enter the Commvault community and Commvault family. And as they start protecting their assessed application they realize that they could leverage the same application to protect their own premised data as well. So back to The Power of And, and without writing off their past investments, you know, going to the cloud at the pace they want. So from that perspective, there is a big impact on our customer community the thing is that Metallic it brings I don't know Manoj is way too humble, but, you know, he don't go to this customer every quarter. And, you know, we have added 24 countries to the portfolio, to the product. So we see a rapid adoption. And so obviously back to your question, we see the impacts of Metallic growing and growing fast because of the market demand, because of the rapid innovation we can take the Commvault technology and put it in the SaaS model and our customers really like it. So I'm very excited. I think it's going to be, you know, a great innovation, a great positive impact for customers, and our new customers we're welcoming, which by the way I think half, Manoj correct me, but I think half of the Metallic customer at Commvault and the other half are new to our family. So, they're very bullish about this. And it's just the beginning, as you know, we are 25 years old, or sorry, 25 years young, and looking forward to the next 25. >> Well, I can confirm, you know, we have a data partner survey, partner ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, and I was looking at the Commvault data and it shows within the cloud segment, when you cut the data by cloud, you're actually accelerating, the spending momentum is accelerating. And I think it's a function of, you know, some of the acquisitions you've made, some of the moves you made in integration. So congratulations on 25 years and you know, you're riding the correct wave, Isabelle, Manoj, Tim, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you Dave. >> I really appreciate it. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (Upbeat Music)

from around the globe it's thecube with coverage of kubecon and cloudnativecon north america 2020 virtual brought to you by red hat the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners and welcome back to thecube's coverage of kubecon cloudnativecon 2020 virtual i'm john furrier your host of thecube we are thecube virtual normally we're in person this year with the pandemic we have to do the remote interviews and uh wish we could be there but it's gonna be a great conference a lot of learning a lot of great conversations a lot of great community a lot of great companies who are riding the cloud weight native wave and doing it right one company pleased to have the gm here on from commvault ventures metallic io monognaire gm metallic dot io commvault ventures is it a spin out no it's great to see you first welcome welcome back to thecube great to see you thank you thank you good to be here good good to be back with you guys so you're a cube alumni i've been on many times you're now heading up this venture um metallic io which is doing extremely well good you know case of great timing and good good savvy business planning and strategic vision um and execution um but i want to just kind of get something straight real quick is it a spin out of com commvault is it a separate company what's the relationship with metallic io and commvault yeah so it's set up as a you know as a complete startup um it's uh incubated and fully owned by commvault uh but you know we have our you know full full company just like running my separate startup you know metallic is set up as a startup and uh you know it's uh some people joke right you know it's like one of those millennial kids you know i get to have a deep pocketed parent commvault and access to a lot of ip and great customers at the same time be a startup and drive fast in this cloud native sasquatch yeah we also have the microsoft you know deep partnership so that's the other angle here with metallic having a deep strategic partnership with microsoft you know the theme this year and all the shows especially kubecon in particular is modern application but speed speed and relevance right that's critical congratulations good to have a boss sanjay over there looking over your shoulder but you got freedom you're running hard as a startup and you got a good track record take me through real quick give a quick business update before we get into some of the container conversations you guys really caught the tailwind of covid kind of like the zoom caught a big tail because everyone's doing video now cloud endpoint protection i mean come on everyone's at home everyone's at the edge edge point protection i mean tell us give some quick updates absolutely you know a year plus since we launched it um i think initially the company was thinking metallic would be really good fit for the mid market and maybe the low end enterprise was always built to be enterprise grade and you know come march all of us get you know stunned by what's happening in the world we decided to make our endpoint offer available free for our customers jointly with microsoft and all it was not mid market i mean i had fortune 15 companies signing up we had the biggest of the big several of them have now become you know customers of our spa paying customers of us one of the world's largest insurance company came in that way and signed up for all their users to end up being paying customers and you think about like protecting endpoints right that's uh you know all the bad things kind of happened in droves so you have covet happening people going remote and ransomware and cyber attacks taking off 400 as the fbi is saying and that kind of becomes a very high risk point so to be able to have not just data protection but ransomware detection on those edge devices i think companies are really starting to see the the value of uh having that kind of a you know data protection as a service model well congratulations on on the timing on that i'll say there's no such thing as luck as preparation meets opportunity as the expression goes but i get why it makes sense with the pandemic but can you explain why cloud-based container protection is good for customers beyond the obvious you just mentioned what else is there what are some of the downs down downstream benefits as people come out of you know it uh you know the the uh things that people are accelerating right it's uh okay we've got to take care of the basics we talked about endpoint then it's cloud adoption um productivity suites like o365 with teams you know took off as you were talking about zoom and how do you protect that you know how do you protect all that data being created now in a platform that uh you were not protecting so that was kind of that next immediate wave and now what we're seeing is the hybrid cloud adoption is taking off now containers in my mind are intricately linked with in this hybrid cloud journey right these are the apps that people build this is your sensitive most important ip and you know how as enterprises adopt containers it's one of the paths to the cloud and it is really the most recommended plan is you take microservices you re-platform re-architect use containers to deliver microservices and these are enterprise applications so they have state and so with stateful applications you know how do you make sure that you have a cloud-native data protection available for them the second issue is the developers who are adopting and deploying containers in production they don't want to be going out deploying software to protect you know these things they want a i just want an api a service call in the cloud and they should do what i you know i do like any other cloud native service so you know cloud native protection that we're delivering for containers with our announcement today for metallic is is huge in that it behaves like a native cloud service just like you know a developer wants an api call with a cloud target no setup nothing and it's up and running yeah i mean cloud native is clear this year at kubecon this is the tipping point of you know full mainstream adoption of kubernetes and microservices so that means it's going to be impacted right so that means you know we're all early adopters let's face it we're at a point now where it's it's gone beyond test and dev and cluster testing you know kubernetes has now reached a point where it's penetrating and proliferating rapidly so i got to ask you the announcements about metallic for kubernetes as part of the broader portfolio expansion explain how that fits in because you mentioned hybrid cloud you got um back up as a service you got recovery i mean the world's changed who would have thought everyone's gonna be working at home how do you back that up that's service disruption so you know non-disruptive operations always been kind of a cliche but now you got a complicated operation how does the kubernetes fit into the broader portfolio absolutely so so it is part of a three new announcements uh the new new solutions we're announcing today all connected to this hybrid journey and you think about that hybrid journey and part of what happens with hybrid you know got all these paths rewrite re-platform re-host and uh part you know you got this whole desegregation of data and compute also happening so our offerings are you know there's a metallic for virtual machines and kubernetes uh as a service uh we've got metallic for database uh delivered as a service and metallic for unstructured data file an object and all of those are key parts of a you know cloud native stack you'll have some you know rds some some you know azure managed sql some blob storage and we had to protect all those patterns in different ways at the same time virtual machines are not going away they're going to be there and you know a lot of people say that container is a new virtual machine so what we have done is we have introduced the vm and kubernetes module but anyone who buys that gets container protection for free so anyone who buys that for the next six months for the lifetime of the subscription they get unlimited kubernetes backup as a service uh for free the reason we're doing that is just we want to make sure especially our early adopters are taking full advantage and and they're not compromising on the data protection for this cloud native application as they think through this transition you know that's a good business model also i mean you're in the cloud right so this is leverage you've got some leverage there yeah that's the new freemium we'll give you a full protection you know what's the gimmick here there's no there's no trick you get it for free it's good because you're going to make money on other air again this is the whole benefit of the new kind of freemium sas you're in an enterprise model so yeah you take care of people you make it up on the critical infrastructure i get that is that kind of how it's working it's exactly you know what uh we're thinking you know look today um you know i saw saw some stats out there 75 percent of the people who are adopting containers are not yet thinking about you know data protection for containers has to be container optimized you can't just say okay you know the data is in the vm i'll just do a snapshot and it'll be fine now what about all of the container specific you know namespaces tags the config maps pod you cannot recover this cluster if you don't have a real container native solution and so that you know for part of the thought leadership and education process we said let's let's start by just making it available take all the excuses out and that really you know i think over time our customers are going to really benefit from our approach there well while i got you here i want to just grab you uh for a quick definition master class so we see b-a-a-s not to be confused with sas or p pass platform as a service b stands for backup as a service right everything's as a service these days that's what cloud's great for could you can you define what that is from with a cloud standpoint because i mean backup as a service it could mean many things but for as you guys are doing because you have success it's working what is baas that's as a what is backup as a service what is definition yeah so backup as a service in my mind and some people call it cloud native backup really includes delivering you know turnkey experience turnkey consumption model i should be able to go sign up like any other as a service free try it if i like it immediately do an online experience to you know acquire it and be up and running our design goal was first backup even for a complex enterprise workload should be less than 15 minutes from from transaction today we're able to do it in a matter of minutes all the way from acquisition to being up and running so i'd say that's part of the definition part of the definition is never having to maintain your backup software ever that's not your responsibility we take care of that it's always updated we're using the best of uh cloud you know capabilities to do sre ops and maintain that in a very scalable 24 7 way security of the service you know between us and all the security capabilities we provide ransomware detection and all that and building on top of azure's foundation of 3500 security engineers you know that's the key component you should not have to worry this is your data your most critical the last part is cloud adoption is complicated enough for customers they shouldn't have to worry about things like egress costs and you know am i going to get nickel and dime for the service over ages and so just price transparency is a big part that we have focused on so you know our customers are double 365 they don't have to ever pay for any storage unlimited storage no egress costs and the whole thing is a turnkey service so that's the kind in my mind that's backup as a service yeah and pay as you go it's classic and i love that love the the hidden cost thing you mentioned this demand obviously out there earlier in the interview what's driving the demand besides kovid what are some of the architectural shifts that you're seeing and does it have um the same characteristics in all geographies because remember you're talking cloud you're talking regions right so you know what's the driving the demand besides covid and what's the regional impact around the world no they were seeing a global impact uh you know we had a plan to have a multi-year global rollout plan and in the last six months we have now in 14 countries around the globe and that just maps to the interest uh you know we're we're in australia and new zealand where we just launched 10 european countries last month in the u.s canada of course and that global journey is what we're seeing with our customers so you know that the pain points you know the covet crisis the economic shift uh the need to be as a service those are the things that are really driving um we we talked about remote work we talked about teams adoption really driving o365 and people think oh 365 you know there's some you know folks who just think mailboxes but you know you've seen news stories out there with what happens with config changes to teams that just blows out all the all the chat sessions and so people understand the need for data protection there hybrid i.t containers rapid cloud adoption probably the biggest one is ransomware you know we launched this metallic cloud storage service that is an air gap ransomware cloud storage that can connect to any commvault customer they don't even have to be a metallic sas customer and that's had a you know on day two we had two and a half petabytes on up and running you know our first customer and it's just taken off so you know all of those are the trends that that are today driving uh you know customer adoption uh off uh you know of our solution uh along with everything else that customers are trying to do mineos i got to ask you a personal question you're the gm which basically means you're the ceo of the commvault startup but we'll call you a gm are you having fun well i'm having a lot of fun i mean this is uh probably the most fun i've had in a long time uh and look when you are doing things that are really impactful for me you know that's uh you know i'm sitting in my startup uh you know garage here in the bay area yeah and you know touching customers around the world we have a global team uh and it's it's been uh it's a challenging year right from a human uh perspective for for all the you know all of the folks who are impacted by this and our teams are part of that journey and so their personal lives that that are difficult but we're all you know working on this very very interesting and i think you know disruptive but impactful uh offering that we can see how it touches our customers wells and i think that's partly what's kept the team and all of us doing so yeah we're having a lot of fun well we're fellow travelers we're not on site anymore i mean we did an interview in 2015 you and i were talking with docker back in 25 years ago and you're still on point now you're on the wave you got to be mindful of the current situation around you and understand reality and it's a chance to do things differently from the customer you know backwards in not inside out so you know it's it's fun to have a new category but also it's it's a big wave you don't want to be as pat gelsinger said driftwood if you make the wrong move so well keep keep keep plugging you're on the right track thanks for coming on thank you john really appreciate the time maneuver gm of metallic dot io check it out it's a it's a separate company from commvault that funded it doing cloud as a service back backup as a service in the cloud very innovative very smart thanks for coming on my notes i'm john furrier with thecube virtual for kubecon cloudnativecon 2020. thanks for watching [Music] you

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> As we reported last week, we believe that in the next decade, there will be changes in public policy that are going to restrict the way in which big internet companies are able to appropriate user data. Big tech came under fire again this week with the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google going toe to toe with several U.S. senators. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, however, was not one of those CEOs in the firing line. Microsoft doesn't heavily rely on ad revenues, rather, the company's momentum is steadily building around Azure, which by my estimates is now roughly 19% of Microsoft's overall revenues. It's surpassed, maybe nearly got to $7 billion for the first time on a quarterly basis. I'll come back to you on that. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll respond to the many requests we've had to dig into the business of Microsoft a little bit deeper and provide a snapshot of how the company is faring in the ETR dataset. Let's take a quick look at Microsoft's financials, and the scope of Microsoft's business is actually mind-boggling. The company has roughly $150 billion in revenue, and it grew its top line 12% last quarter. It has more than $136 billion in cash on the balance sheet. Microsoft generates over $60 billion annually in operating cashflow. And last quarter alone threw off more than 19 billion in operating cash. Its gross margins are expanding across virtually all of its major business lines. So let's look at those business sectors. Microsoft, it doesn't suffer from the nagging problems that we've talked about with a lot of older tech companies. Companies like IBM and Dell and Cisco and Oracle and SAP, they struggle with growth sometimes because their growth businesses are not yet large enough to offset the declines in their traditional on-premises business segments. Now at the highest level, Microsoft breaks its business into three broad categories, and they're all growing quite nicely. Let me add some color here. Let's start with the productivity and business process line of business. LinkedIn, which is growing at 16%, is in this category as is Office. This business is shifting from one of on-prem licenses, which are really headwinds right now from Microsoft, to the cloud, in the form of SaaS with Office 365, which is growing at a 20% clip within its commercial market base. Even the consumer side of O365 is growing in the double digits. Dynamics is Microsoft's ERP and CRM business, and that falls into this slice of the pie, that's growing at 18%. And then the newer Dynamics 365, that's growing at 37%. So you can see, Microsoft is easily able to show growth despite the transitions from its legacy business. Intelligent cloud is the next segment. It's kind of the kitchen sink category, meaning there's stuff in there that includes a bit of cloud washing in my opinion, but Microsoft is not nearly as egregious as IBM with the liberties that it takes around its cloud categorization. For Microsoft it's a $13 billion quarterly business. And it's growing at 19%, as we show in the pie chart. Azure is an increasingly large portion of this segment. Azure is the most direct comparison with AWS. And I have said in the past quarter, I'd say it's around 50% of the intelligent cloud, and that it's approaching by my estimates around $7 billion a quarter. Azure grew at 47% annually this past quarter, the same growth rate as last quarter. Ironically, both AWS and Google Cloud grew at the same year over year rate this quarter as they did last quarter. AWS is 29% GCP in the high 50s by at my estimates. AWS revenue was 11.6 billion this past quarter, and I have GCP still well under 2 billion. We'll be updating our cloud numbers and digging deeper next week into this topic. So consider these estimates preliminary for Azure and GCP, which the respective companies don't break out for as Amazon, as you know, breaks out AWS explicitly. Now, back to Microsoft's intelligent cloud business. It includes on-prem server software, which is a managed decline business from Microsoft. They also include enterprise services in this category. So as you can see, it's not a clean cloud number for comparison purposes. Now finally, the third big slice of the pie is more personal computing. I know, it's kind of a dorky name, but nonetheless it's nearly a $12 billion business that's growing at 6% annually. The Windows OEM business is in here, as is Windows 10 and some security offerings. Surface is also in here as well and it's growing in the mid-thirties. Search revenue is in this category as well. It's declining per my earlier statements that it's not a main piece of Microsoft's business. Now, one of the most interesting areas of this sector is gaming. Microsoft's gaming business is growing at 21% and they just acquired ZeniMax Media for seven and a half billion dollars. Let me land on gaming for a minute. The gaming experts at theCUBE are really excited about Microsoft's XBox content services, which grew at about 30% this past quarter. Game Pass is essentially Microsoft's Netflix, or you can think of it as maybe like a Spotify model. You can get in for as low as $5 a month. I think you can pay as much as $15 a month and get access to a huge catalog of games that you can download. In November of last year, Microsoft launched its xCloud beta service, which allows you to download to a PC or a game box. Now eventually with 5G, the box goes away. All you'll need is a screen and you know, controller with the joysticks, no download. In fact, this is how it works today for Android. Now, interestingly, Apple is blocking Microsoft and some others like Google's Stadia, saying that they don't allow streaming game apps like Microsoft's xCloud service, because they don't follow the company's guidelines. What Apple's not telling you is that its adjacent offering, Apple Arcade, is considered subpar by hardcore gamers. And while Apple allows the streaming of movies and music from any service on the iPhone, it's decided not to allow streaming games. Now, the last thing I want to stress about Microsoft is its leverage point around developers. Developers is a big one here, we all remember the sweaty Steve Ballmer running around the stage like a mad man, screaming, "Developers, developers, developers!" Well, despite his obsession with Windows, he sure got that one right. The GitHub acquisition was Microsoft's way of buying more developer love. It does concentrate power with a tech giant, but you know what, if it wasn't Microsoft that bought GitHub, it would have been Facebook or Amazon or Google or one of the other tech giants. Now, despite some angst in the developer community over this, GitHub, it really is a linchpin for Microsoft to more tightly integrate GitHub with its pretty vast developer tool set. All right. Let's look deeper into the Microsoft data and focus on the enterprise. We'll bring in the ETR as we always do. We said last week that Google needed to look to the cloud and edge and get its head out of its ads. Well, Microsoft recovered from its Windows myopia after Satya Nadella took over in 2014, and by all accounts from the ETR survey data, Microsoft is killing it across the board. Let me start by putting Microsoft in context with some of the most prominent companies that both compete with, and sometimes partner with Microsoft. So this xy graph, it's one of our favorites. I show it all the time and it shows net score on the vertical axis, which is a measure of spending momentum from ETR, and the horizontal axis shows what we call market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the survey. Now in the upper right hand table, you can see the data for each of the companies. There's an ETR survey taken in October and it had more than 1400 completes. Several points stand out here. Microsoft is by far the most pervasive in the dataset, and yet its net score or spending velocity is right there with AWS, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Workday. Only Snowflake, which I put in there for context, because of its consistently strong net scores, shows a meaningfully higher net score, of course from a much smaller base. Now what makes this so impressive is it represents a pan-Microsoft view across its entire portfolio. And you can see where companies like IBM and Oracle struggle from a momentum standpoint compared to Microsoft, which is a much, much larger company. It's that problem that I referred to earlier regarding the smaller size of their respective growth businesses. Also called Cisco and SAP, which despite some earnings challenges lately, are able to maintain net scores that while not in the green, they're not in the red, either. Green essentially means your overall install base is expanding. Red indicates contraction. Now let's look at the spending patterns for Microsoft customers. This chart shows the granularity of ETR's net score for Microsoft. The green represents increased spend and the red decreased spend. What's impressive is that Microsoft's red zone, I mean it's essentially negligible at 6%, when you add two reds up, the pink and the bright red. Their customers, they're all spending more, or the same, and very few are leaving the platform. Now I made the case last week that Google should double or triple its efforts and focus on cloud and the edge. Microsoft has already made that transition in its business and is the, that's the premise really of my discussion today. Specifically, Microsoft Azure is powering the company across all of its products and services. It's giving Microsoft tremendous operating leverage and steadily improving marginal economics. You can see that in the gross margin lines this quarter, across all of its businesses. And here's a graphic showing its position within cloud computing in terms of net score. Microsoft Azure functions, which is the first bar on this chart, and Azure overall, which is the third set of bars, shows momentum that's as strong as any cloud category, including AWS Lambda, which as we've talked about many times is killing it. Now five over from the left, count them over, one, two, three, four, five, you can see AWS overall. So that's a really important reference point. And while its levels are still elevated, Azure overall, which again is number three from the left, has meaningfully more momentum with 65% net score versus 52% for AWS overall. Now reasonable people can debate the quality of these respective clouds and you could argue over feature sets, who's got the most features, who's got the most regions, which regions are most reliable, who's got the most data centers and all that stuff, but it's really hard to argue against Microsoft's "Good enough" strategy. It's working in the cloud, and it has been working for the company for decades. Now another Microsoft strategy has been to be a late comer to a category and then bundle multiple capabilities into one suite. We saw this at first, really in the late 1980s with Office, and it's continued in a number of areas. The latest example, Microsoft Teams. Teams combines features like meetings, phone, chat, collaboration, as well as business process workflows that leverage tools like SharePoint and PowerPoint. I mean, it's a killer strategy, and you can see the results in this chart. I mean, it's essentially competing with Zoom, it's competing with Slack and all the sort of productivity plays there in that space. And this graphic compares net scores from the year ago October survey for reference, the July survey from this year, and the most recent October survey, as I said, 1400 respondents. Look at the lead that Teams has relative to the competition. There's a story across Microsoft's portfolio. Look at Microsoft's products in the ETR taxonomy. Video conferencing with Teams, productivity apps, RPA, cloud, cloud functions, machine learning, artificial intelligence, containers, security, end point, analytics, mobile, even database. The only signs of softness are really seen in the company's legacy businesses like Skype or on-prem licenses business, which I said were a headwind for them. And while PCs and tablets are weaker, that's what you'd expect from this mature industry relative to some of these other categories. Now, again, the premise here today is that by pivoting to the cloud and going all in competing with infrastructure as a service, Microsoft has created a platform for innovation for its business, and its developer chops are really credible, so it's evolving its install base very successfully to Azure. It's got a very solid hybrid and multi-cloud strategy and story with Microsoft Arc, which eventually it can take to the edge. You know, we think its edge strategy needs some work, but nonetheless, the company is really, really well positioned. Microsoft has a huge partner ecosystem, heck, it even partners with Oracle and database, as well as using Azure to enter new markets, including vertical clouds like healthcare, which it talked about on its earnings call. I mean, there's really not much on which you can criticize Microsoft. You know, sure, they've had some high profile failures in the past. The Nokia acquisition, the Windows phone, you remember Zune? Mixer, you know, Bing. Is Bing a fail? I don't know. Maybe not really. I guess the fail is, you know, what I was talking about last week with antitrust, Microsoft was distracted by the DOJ and maybe that caused it to miss search, give it to Google, and in that sense, maybe it was a failure, but overall, pretty good track record from Microsoft. Yeah, maybe you can say Microsoft is somewhat of a copycat, you know, the graphical user interface that they copied from the Mac, but hey, even Steve Jobs stole that. Surface, okay. The cloud? But so what, ideas, they're plentiful, execution is the key, really. No matter how you slice it, the data doesn't lie. Microsoft's financial performance, its pivot to the cloud, and the success of its adjacent businesses, make it one of the most remarkable rebirths in the history of technology industry. Now I didn't use the word turnaround because the company was never really in trouble. It just became irrelevant and kind of boring. Today, Microsoft is far from immaterial. Okay. That's it for this week. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. So please subscribe. I publish weekly on Wikibon.com and Siliconangle.com. And don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey data and analytics. I appreciate always the comments on my LinkedIn posts or you can DM me @DVellante, or email me at David.Vellante@SiliconAngle.com. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching everybody, be well, and we'll see you next time. 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(royalty free music) >> Woman's voice: From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman coming to you from our Boston area studio and this is a special cube conversation. I have a special announcement from our friends at Commvault. So welcome back to the program. We have two of our cube alumni. First, we have Manoj Nair, he's actually the general manager of Metallic, which is a Commvault venture. First time Manoj on the program in your role with, with Commvault, welcome back. And also welcoming back Ranga Rajagopalan who's the vice president of products at Commvault. Ranga, caught up with you recently at the FutureReady event that we had over the summer. Thanks so much for joining us again. >> Sure. >> Alright. So Manoj, let's start. Metallic obviously was, you know, the standout you know, thing that everybody talked about last year at Commvault GO. Really helping to, you know, put Commvault clearly into the SaaS marketplace out there. Talking about how, you know, all the wonderful features for managing my data in a cloud environment. So there is an expansion to the portfolio that we're announcing today. Why don't you share the news? >> Yeah, absolutely Stu, you know, it's great to be back here with all of you and Metallic has come a long way from the launch. Just less than a year ago, we announced the creation of Metallic multiple different offerings whether it's protecting SaaS workloads like O365, remote endpoints and a hybrid cloud workloads. You know, the context that we're getting from our customers, especially in the last six months, increased cloud adoption and, you know, remote working collaboration suites being adopted. All of that has been a great accelerator for adoption of SaaS data protection, which is really what the Metallic is offering. We have gone to global countries and expanded to our Commvault customer base who was, you know, using both Commvault software and Metallic now. One of the key things that we're not, you know, today's announcement is focused on a Metallic cloud storage service that as a new service available for Commvault customers are looking to get a, you know, fully managed secure cloud-based SaaS target for protecting all of the data as an air gap copy and this is, you know, is more relevant than ever. >> So Manoj, using the cloud for data protection, for backup isn't new? Ranga, help us understand. I heard in there air gap, I heard, you know, leveraging the cloud. Absolutely, we've seen a huge tailwind for cloud adoption but there's that gap for making sure customers, you know, protect their data, secure their data. Do they have the skillset to be able to leverage that, so help help us drill in and understand what's different about this new service >> You're right Stu. Cloud is absolutely not new but what is really unique about today's announcement with metallic cloud storage service is that we are bringing cloud even closer to our Commvault customers. So thinking from a data management perspective, our customers want to more easily and securely get the benefits of cloud storage. What we are doing today is integrating Metallic cloud storage service as a cloud storage target into our Commvault software as well as our HyperScale X plans. And that lets our customers to seamlessly use cloud storage for their data protection, backup and archival use cases without needing to understand a lot about the cloud, without needing to get through any of the complexities. Think of it as the easy button that is now introduced into the Commvault software and HyperScale X. >> All right, so, if I heard you right, this is a managed service that Commvault is offering. Did I get that right? >> That's fast. >> Yeah >> So, you know, it's a managed service. It's public cloud storage. It's, as Ranga said, the easy button to be able to create your air gap copies in the cloud. And, you know, with everything that we keep hearing about ransomware, and we believe this is one of the, the, the most important steps in ransomware readiness, a lot of our customers are already doing it by bringing their own cloud storage on all the clouds we protect, but it's still not easy. And this is a skills gap, you know, the procurement process and all of that, you know, the management of the credentials, the setting up of the networking, all of that is encapsulated. So now, it's just, you know, it's like a built-in feature, just, you know plug it in and now you've got an on-ramp to the cloud. Make sure you have your air gap copy. >> Yeah, maybe it would help if you'd, if you'd talk about the easy button, give us a little compare contrast 'cause, right, I could go, I could spin up instance of the cloud, but, you know, who has access? What are the security settings? There's a whole litany of things that I need to make sure I've got the right identity management. It's kind of easy, but not necessarily simple to, to be able to do that. So from what you're describing I don't even need to really think, you know, yes, it's in the cloud, I'm leveraging all the wonderful things of the cloud, but I don't have to have that, that ramp up of skillset if I don't already have that in house as... Ranga, sounds like I'm understanding that. >> Yeah >> You know. >> Yeah, you're perfectly understanding and that's all there is to it. And let me expand on the PC part there, right? For us, simplicity is into end-customer experience. So I'm going to break this down from a customer life cycle perspective. Think of a Commvault customer who's backing up pretty much all the workloads in the data center. The first question they have is, you know, "For security reasons "for easy, or because I'm in a transformation project "I need to make, I need to start using cloud storage." So the first complexity they would face is understanding which cloud provider to use, what kind of cloud profile to use? or who their cloud or chasing model, which is very different from how they normally procure their hardware and software. So that's really the first dimension of simplicity that this Metallic cloud storage offer. Our customers can procure their cloud storage along with any other Commvault software and hardware just like they would do any other Commvault software. So that's the first level of simplicity. The second one is "How do I bring "that into my data management life cycle." And again, as I mentioned before, MCSS is fully integrated into Commvault software. So through the simplicity of command center, which is the one UI that brings all our products together, customers can just click to the cloud storage target and start backing up, moving copies, archiving, doing all the data management use cases, the second dimension of simplicity. And the third one really is the predictability. You know, cloud is beautiful, It brings a lot of flexibility, but it also brings in a lot of new terms. What are the egress charges? What does ingress mean? What does egress mean? What happens when I have the V store? What happens when I have the Ricola? So all of that complexity is taken away. We handle all of that in the backend. From the customer's perspective, just like they use CAP, just like they use the Desk, now, they can use cloud. We handled all the egress and all those kind of stuff in the backend. From the customer's perspective, they get a simple, predictable price point. So from the time of choosing, procuring it, using it and continuously getting the best benefits out of it, the easy button extends across that entire dimension. And the beauty in all of this is customers getting all the benefits of cloud without having to really understand much about cloud. So that's really the benefit we bring to the table with MCSS. >> Yeah. Manoj, Commvault has a long history of being able to live on, you know, various infrastructures that customers have. Are you able to share who the, I'm assuming there's a cloud partner for part of this, so who is the, the underlying IS? >> Yeah, so still, you know, end of June doing, we announced the next phase of our strategic partnership with Microsoft. So this is a, you know, one of the first big, new things that is coming out of the giant partnership between Commvault and Microsoft around Metallic and Microsoft Azure. There's a lot of things that, you know, we're jointly doing that are unique that make all of the simplicity Ranga, you know, just mentioned, come to life and, you know, that's, you know, power of the end as I call it. It's Commvault and Metallic and Microsoft, you know, coming together to make this really easy for our customers to start getting the value out of leveraging cloud for the data protection. Yeah. >> Well, Manoj, it seems natural extension of what you've already talked about for what Metallic can protect. Of course, you've got the, you know, the business suite from Microsoft, can you help frame it for us, you know, where this new, the MCSS fits in the Metallic portfolio today? >> Yeah absolutely. So if you look at, you know, what... I'll give you a customer journey and what's been happening. If you are not a Commvault customer today and you're looking at "What's my best 0365 data protection option," if you go to microsoft.com, you'll actually find Metallic in there as the recommended offer. And they, they might start the journey there or you're an existing Commvault customer and you start rapidly adopting teams and O365, you know, post COVID. The, the, you know, Metallic is the default option. So it doesn't matter how you enter in, you're now getting a full, you know, SaaS actual backup as a service, no storage costs, no egress costs. And so our Commvault customers have been asking, "We love that part of it, why not make that available "for all of the other data that is being protected "by Commvault, either appliance or software on-prem?" and, you know, in a very simple way, it's, you know, the best things are driven by customers. And in this case, our customers came to us and said, "We love the simple button "not just what's included in the Metallic service, "we would like that that to be available, even for, "you know, the existing software you're protecting on-prem "for the air gap copy use case is kind of the biggest one." And you know, all of the things that Ranga said in terms of simplicity now comes to bear. And it's something that we were including inside the Metallic SaaS offerings. Now, it's available for software and appliance customers. >> Yeah. I definitely, I've heard of the industry now. Microsoft seems a little bit more amenable to, you know, not charging for egress, with some of their partners, when they put together these solutions. Ranga, Manoj has mentioned air gap a couple of times, can you help us frame, you know, what that means today? You know, I even think back, you know, ape that most people are familiar with. Even, I think about, you know, Google, you know, use ape for many years even in the public cloud to give that air gap. Of course, we've talked to your customers lots about how to protect against ransomware. So how does, how does this fit in the new solution? >> You know, unfortunately, Stu today. It's, it's important reality for us to discuss the ransomware readiness. Number of attacks are going up depending on, you know, which your source you are listening to. So security is a very important concern in top of our customers' minds. Now, MCSS is cloud storage, so it is off site storage. So it comes with all the natural layered security that it's built into cloud storage. Additionally, Commvault brings a complete ransomware protection, protection and recovery framework, which becomes inherently available with the MCSS. And let me explain that in a few very simple quotes. Now, the entire journey from on-prem to the cloud storage is completely encrypted. So that's, you know, a very important part of the order on security mechanism, but here is where it really becomes cool Commvault software is managing the cloud credentials, the cloud keys. So the entire access to MCSS as a cloud storage target is managed to Commvault. So there isn't an independent cloud admin accessing that storage, which opens it up for any kind of an intentional or unintentional access. Anything can happen when you allow that access. So Commvault completely manages that access the keys are owned by the customer, but managed by a Commvault. So it's a really air gap security, layered security mechanism that you get in combination with the entire framework of air gap isolation, anomaly protection, the authentication, everything that is built into the Commvault framework. So when you, when you bring in the simplicity that we talked about earlier, you can apply that to the security angle as well here. Instead of making the customer manage yet another piece in the jigsaw, we are managing it for them. So from their perspective, it is a seamless extension to their data management strategy while it also adds an extra layer of security and a readiness to recover from ransomware attacks. >> While it's being launched today, we already have customers that have, you know, we have accelerated into adoption of MCSS and it's coming exactly for the scenarios Ranga just said. You know, they, they have a requirement for a cloud copy. If you have seen that on the Metallic SaaS side that some of the customers might be in pilot mode. And because they were in pilot mode, they were quickly able to recover from attacks that happened. Unfortunately, those, those things are reality. And we have had customers who after the attack go and say "I want to make sure it's much easier to recover from that." And so we already have our first customers who are starting to adopt the service even as we launch it today. >> Well. I'm so glad you brought up the customer examples. Manoj, give us a little bit just the high level view, you talked about the growth and adoption of Metallic overall, and you just talked about kind of the, the single management. You got any SaaS for us, you know, how much data do you have in the cloud now and, you know, what's the growth looking like? And talk a little bit about, you know, what we can expect going forward from this portfolio. >> Yeah, I, you know, I don't know how many people disclose this or not, but we have disclosed it in the past, we have over an exabyte of data today in the cloud that, you know, our customers are, you know, either using a Metallic or bringing their own cloud with Commvault and writing to the cloud. So, you know, that's probably, you know, best in class out there. What we are also seeing is the acceleration of that, you know, so we look at it's, you know, it's exponential growth over a hundred percent, you know, we're, we're seeing that, that rise in leverage yet it's something that when you look at the overall industry percentages, it depends on whose stats you use, it's probably only 5%, maybe 10% that are leveraging the cloud for anything, whether it's, you know, in this case, it's data, cloud data as a secondary target. So there's a lot of untapped potential. And the things that Ranga said I think really are the ones our customers are telling us as we tested this out. And those are the biggest reasons. Right cost, you know, I'm concerned about it. I've heard that it's unpredictable. It goes up, people start spinning up other things that they shouldn't be. And so I want predictable costs, you know, security and the whole model around it, the, the governance of the keys, and finally skills, everyone's busy, no one's trying to not be, you know, upping their cloud skills yet it's not something that is very, you know, very easy for most people to, you know, become an expert. And if you're not an expert while you're protecting your data, that's not, you know, that's not something you want to do, so you kind of hold back. And I think this is really the biggest thing that customers are looking at, like our cloud expertise packaged in an offering solving all those things? >> And Stu, we discussed this at FutureReady of how the Commvault portfolio continues to come closer and closer together in order to deliver that increased value to our customers. In July, when we were having a similar conversation, we saw how Hedvig came in as the scale load storage in our HyperScale X integrated data protection plans. And we can see that we have Metallic Cloud Storage Service coming in as a cloud extension to our software, as well as HyperScale X. So it's kind of bringing the best of both worlds, customers who want to continue to stay on for them, protect their on-prem workloads with on-prem footprint. You have HyperScale X as a very nice scale, which integrated our plans. And as the capacity needs increase, as the security needs increase, you have MCSS now as a managed storage extension, bringing together those pieces of the portfolio. Now, the thing that is now available already as of September 15 is our ability to manage Metallic as part of command center. So while you want that SaaS flexibility and you're using Metallic to protect the SaaS workloads let's also realize that there are a bunch of other workloads that you might be protecting using Commvault software all through HyperScale. We can now bring all of them together into the simplicity of command center. So it, again, takes away another point of complexity for the customer. Just one UI, go ahead, do protect the workloads the way you want. With the form factor you want. SaaS software, or our plans, and we bring it all together into a single management framework for you. So you're going to continue seeing the portfolio coming closer together because our prime concern is to provide flexibility of choice to customers. Flexibility of choice in so many different ways, you know, you can use software, our plans or SaaS. You can bring your own on-prem storage, cloud storage, or if you want to hit the simple button, use Metallic clouds for it. So, so you're going to see that happen as we move forward. >> Well. Manoj, Ranga, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the launch. Love little tagline leading it. We're we're making the cloud just a little bit closer to us. >> It is, >> It is a lot closer. >> Thank you. Thank you Stu for your time. >> Thank you. >> I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (royalty free music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are here at the Orange County Convention Center in the middle of the show floor, one of Microsoft's biggest shows, 26,000 people from around the globe. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost, Stu Miniman, and we're joined by a third cohost, but he is also the Principal CTO Advisor, Keith Townsend. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, guys. >> It's a pleasure to have you. So, you come to a lot of these shows, I'm interested in your thoughts and impressions of Microsoft Ignite 2019. >> So, I'm part of the V community, which is a pretty close knit community, very focused on one part of the whole IT pitch, which is infrastructure. It is amazing coming to a show like Microsoft Ignite where the breadth of content is so wide, and the conversation, so wide and, surprisingly, deep. This is been one of my, I think, favorite shows of the year so far. >> Talk about the content, you're absolutely right, we had so many product announcements, it felt like an Amazon Show, we were saying, because of the number of products that were being announced and demoed here. 87 pages from the Comms Team, so, does this feel like a different era for the company itself? >> You know what, Microsoft announced, I think UiPath has some crazy over billion dollar evaluation. Microsoft wildly announced that they're entering RPA, Robotic Process Automation, they're challenging SAP when it comes to data warehousing and data analytics. And then, they just happen to announce that, oh, yeah, by the way, we're making Kubernetes easier. Then, there's still the Teams announcements. The amount of content and the areas that Microsoft is going in, just to highlight it, Azure Arc replicates data, one of the jobs is replicate data, and they said they'll replicate data to AWS Cloud. Microsoft, great position. >> Keith, as you're alluding to, Microsoft has a large portfolio of applications. If you think business productivity, you're probably using Microsoft. Everything from Teams, that we're hearing a bunch about, to, of course, O365 is the solution that gave everybody the green light to go SaaS-ify as many of your applications as you will, and Arc, very much from what I've seen so far, takes that application specific view of Kubernetes, we know Kubernetes is supposed to help be that platform to build on top of, but, I've tended to hear a very infrastructure view of here's what you'll build in your data center and the compute network and storage that you need to think about, here's the IAS that it might live on. But, when you talk about Arc, they're talking about it's about SQL and databases and how those pieces go together. And this is a view for Microsoft, but, if you want to go do open shift, if you want to do spring with a Pivotal VMware or Tanzu with there, Microsoft, of course, is saying that that's your option but would love your view point so far as your Arc and where Microsoft sits in this broader ecosystem today. >> So, I'm coming off fresh a conversation with David Armor, the PM for Microsoft Arc for Azure stack, and their attention to detail is amazing. You know, I'm not the world's biggest Kubernetes fan, for some of the very reasons that you mentioned. It's too much attention to the details in order to provide a Kubernetes experience that developers will accept. Microsoft, a big developer focused company, so when you look at Arc and what it does for Kubernetes on Azure stack, it makes the provisioning, the storage networking, et cetera, invisible so that you can take Microsoft's cognitive services, deploy them on Azure stack, and just consume those services. Microsoft, again, when you look at it from a different angle, when you're not taking the infrastructure angle added and you're doing the whiz bang features of making sure that Kubernetes can do X, Y, and Z, more importantly, can I use it to build applications is Microsoft's approach, and you can see it in the Arc and how they approach it in the Azure stack. >> Absolutely, and you're talking, right now, about this app development for everyone. We had Satya Nadella, yesterday, talking about democratizing computing, anyone can do it, AI for all, too. What are the most exciting new tools that you're seeing, and what are the kinds of conversations that you're having with developers around these new tools? >> So, I just talked to a professional services architect, or an architect for professional services, one of the global big four's, and he was telling me that they've deployed RPA to the entire organization of over 100,000 consultants and end users, so that they can build robots to power the next phase of productivity increases within their organization. No rules, no constraints, just here's the tool, go out and do. Microsoft talked about 2.5 million non-technology focused developers, it is, I think, a key theory of the CTO advisors that their future of enterprise IT is that companies, like Microsoft, then, will push AI, machine learning, these robotic automation processes down to the end users so that they're creating the content. There's just not enough of Keiths and Stus in the world to do this by hand. So, great vision. >> And Keith, you brought up the SIs, and you've worked for some of the big SIs in the past. How is Microsoft doing out there? We've seen with Cloud and AI, the biggest guys, rolling out armies of people to help integrate this, to help customers adopt this. Cloud and AI, Cloud, specifically, was supposed to be cheap and easy and we know it's neither of those two things. So, if you look at Cloud and AI, how is Microsoft to be a partner with and I would love a little compare and contrast to the Vmwares and AWSs of the world. >> So, if you look, let's take a look at VMware, I'm a big VMware fan, but one of the things that if you're a VMware VAR, or you're in VMware period, if you go outside of your lane, that infrastructure lane, you go to have conversations, the technology is there. You can use VMware, vRealize, automation suites, the CloudHealth, the Heptio, they have the individual components, technology components, but they absolutely need the Pivotals of the world to go in and add credence to their talking points around these products because they don't have that reputation to come in and have the conversation with the CMOs or the application developers. Microsoft on the other hand, developers, developers, developers. And then, they also have Microsoft Dynamics, we ran into a customer, who was desperately just searching out, she came to the conference expecting to see Dynamic experts, and I'm sure she found them. Microsoft has the ecosystem to support their vision. >> One of the things we've been talking about on theCUBE this week, at Ignite, is that it seems like a different kind of Microsoft, it seems like one that is, not only embracing customers who choose Microsoft in addition to other companies, but championing them and supporting them and saying, "whatever you want, "we're meeting you where you are." Have you found that, and is that striking to you, based on the Microsoft of Yore, which was more proprietary about where it's customers went for it's technology. >> So, we mainly cover enterprise tech, but, I think today or tomorrow, the Surface Pro X gets released, which is an arm based device, that runs full version of Windows. I was in one of the Lightning talks, Microsoft Lightning talk, on a completely different topic, and at the bottom, they had a logo for UiPath, Automate Anywhere and Blue Prism, three of the, I think, leaders in a space of RPA. And they were talking about the integrations that Microsoft has gone on with these companies, and their own power automate was not even mentioned as part of that session. So, Microsoft is meeting customers where they're at. I think the AWS, the example for Arc, replicating to AWS, customers have AWS, they're the biggest Cloud provider, Microsoft isn't closing their eyes to it. >> Yeah, well, we noticed the biggest thing repeated over and over again in the key note yesterday was trust. And while the Microsoft of old days was you're going to buy my OS, and my apps, and everything Microsoft on top of it, and we're going to maximize our licensing, the Microsoft today is those choices. We talked to UiPath yesterday, they're not worried about their relationship with Microsoft. When I talked to the ecosystem of partners here, they trust that they can work with Microsoft. Compare that to some others out there in the industry, and the big Hyperscalers, there might not be as much trust. What I'm curious about, from you Keith, is do customers see that? Do they understand that today is a different Microsoft than the one that we grew up with? >> So, some of the conversation on Twitter, just remotely, people not here, this is the best Ignite I've ever seen. People who are not even here, this is from the keynote yesterday. I think customers are starting to embrace Microsoft and trust Microsoft. I think there's still some hold out, some people who remember this sting of forced to use Microsoft management suites on products that probably didn't integrate well with those suites. But, as that sting starts to subside, you have to look at it objectively and say, "Microsoft is a different company." This is not a show I think I would have enjoyed three years ago. >> What's driving it though? This is something we're seeing in the technology industry at large, this understanding of customers needing different things and wanting best in breed. But are there other elements that we're not privy to, would you say? >> I think it's the democratization of technology via Cloud. I talked to a just regular, small business owner. She runs a trucking business, she uses her computer as a tool, it was a five year old device, she really didn't care, did the job that she needed to do. We talked a business challenge that she was having, and I described Cloud in general and she never even considered Cloud as a thing. She just said, "you know what, "I want this solution and if it's Microsoft AWS or Google that provides it, or even VM Works." She didn't care, she wanted to buy it. And that relationship wasn't a traditional ISV, MSP, these are, I think, business owners and business leaders are being approached with, whether it's ISVs or consultants and business advisors, and they're being advised to adopt these technologies, regardless of the source. There's no loyalty anymore to just Microsoft. Remember when you bled blue? Whether it was IBM blue or Microsoft blue. I read an unfortunate article on one of the big ERP providers had a 100 million dollar failure, and the company just decided, you know what, we're not going to go with just one provider anymore, we're just going to go with best of breed across these business processes. >> So what does that mean for the competitive landscape? I mean, we talked a lot about this. Does Microsoft really have a shot at taking on AWS or will it always be number two. Well, Microsoft won a 10 billion dollar JEDI contract from the US. I wrote about this in my newsletter last week, is that one billion dollars over 10 years will make Microsoft Azure better. You can't help but to have that type of discipline that comes from a contract like that impact Azure. Will they catch up with Microsoft, I mean, with AWS? AWS is still a very, very small fraction of the overall IT landscape. That business owner I talked to never heard of AWS. 50,000 person conference in a month, she only knew Amazon as a book seller. So, to say that Microsoft won't catch up with AWS is a very, very short view of the landscape. >> We're just scratching the surface when it comes to Cloud. >> Keith, what other thing have you seen at the show jumping out at you? You said you might not have enjoyed the show three years ago so what are some of things that make this show enjoyable? I know for me, it is a different community than the V community out there, there are a lot of overlaps, a lot of friendly faces that I know here, but community, diversity, inclusion, super strong here, would love your comment on that and any other takeaways. >> So, someone pointed out to me that I didn't notice and I'm happy I didn't notice it, was that there is a lot of women at this show, and I looked up and I'm like wow, the lines for men's bathroom aren't as long. And that's a nice thing because I don't think it's just facilities. It is a massively diverse show, not just from a ethnicity and gender perspective, but from career levels and age groups. There's Millennials all the way up to Boomers, and the conversations, the conversations that I've had, I'm really surprised with. Straight on business conversations, to deep and dirty, you know what these are the Cloud providers Azure provides for Kubernetes. That's super geeky, and that conversation's all around best. Infrastructure, application, business, and then even social, I had that social conversation about diversity, and for a change, I wasn't the one that brought up the conversation. >> You know, that's a really good point, and even just even here, I mean, I know you made the schedule, which I salute you, because we are having many more women, many more people of color on our stage, which is reflective of who's here. >> And it's easier at this show than it is at most, as opposed to please find me some more underrepresented or diversity there. And luckily, there is a lot of options at a show like this. >> Yeah, the pool just hasn't, and other shows, the pool just isn't very big. Normally, I can usually say at a show, I'm the tall black guy with the beard, and hey, I'm the tall black guy with the beard, and this show is not that case. >> No, there's more, there's more, exactly. >> Well, Keith Townsend, thank you so much for coming on, a pleasure having you. >> Thank you, Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman and Keith Townsend, you are watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are wrapping up a three, the first day of a three-day show. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Scott Lowe. He is the CEO of ActualTech Media. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having us. >> And also David Davis, director of events at ActualTech Media. Thank you so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> So, you are a former CIO that started ActualTech Media in 2012, tell our viewers, a little bit about Actual, what was the vision and what did you set out to create? What kind of content were you setting out to create? >> You know what we started and what we have today are actually very, very different things. We started off to create sort of an empire of websites that provide content to people. What we do now is we're helping connect enterprise IT vendors with buyers, that's really what we've settled on over the years. We've found our path about six years ago, five years ago, and we've been executing on that ever since. And that's our mission, is to help buyers find the right enterprise IT solutions. >> So how do you do that? I mean, what's the lead generation that it takes? >> Sure. I mean we basically for our clients who are companies including Cohesity and companies like it, we do event series we call MegaCast, EcoCast, virtual summits, webinars, things like that. We have a significant audience that we draw from to drive those events. And we also created our own content series, we call Gorilla Guide, which is a series of books to help educate IT buyers about solutions on the market about different technologies and try to help them understand the lay of an ever-evolving landscape that seems to be changing faster than it ever has before. >> Yeah, and actually one of the reasons I invited the two of you is, you both have deep background in this environment. Scott, before the Gorilla Guides, you wrote big books about Microsoft, and David, you've been training people on this ever environment but the pace is faster. You're talking about it's changing all the time. So I'd love for both of you, just here 2019 Microsoft Ignite, first impressions, how you think of Microsoft in the ecosystem. David, let's start with you. >> I mean, it's my third Microsoft Ignite and every time I come here I'm really blown away by kind of the scope of the show compared to the typical infrastructure shows that I go to. Those shows are more you know, the plumbing of the data center. This show is the keynote, is like using AI and ML to cure cancer and provide food for the world and it's just, like, really empowering and exciting and I find it very personally exciting. And Microsoft Azure just seems to be on a breakneck pace to catch up with AWS and Office 365 and all these innovations they keep coming out with, have been really impressive so I've been excited about the show, what about you Scott? >> Same, I mean, I think that when we talk about other shows, we are really looking at plumbing. That's a good word. When we're here we're looking at real solutions that are helping solve big problems. And because Microsoft has such a wide ecosystem from which to, in which it participates, from productivity and enterprise to driving quantum computing, to artificial intelligence to help tractors talk to the internet. I mean just, it does everything and it does it increasingly well. Microsoft hasn't always been thought of as the most innovative company in the world but I think in the last few years we've seen a different Microsoft and I think that has a lot to do with Satya, and the leadership change but it also has to do with just a renewed vision for what the future looks like in the terms of IT. >> And what does that future look like? I mean it is interesting because Microsoft is a middle-aged company compared to all these young upstarts that really, that much more DNA of innovation, of course Microsoft has innovation in its DNA but how would you describe what is driving the change at Microsoft? This is not your father's Microsoft. >> Honestly, the Microsoft we see today and the Microsoft we saw 10 years ago are not the same company. This is, I feel like Microsoft is almost a startup again. And I think if you look at Microsoft as a company, it has its hands in so much that each individual silo is almost a startup feel in the way it's brought to market. Let's just look at Azure. I mean, Azure has been playing catch up in a lot of ways to AWS for a lot of years just like a lot of smaller companies are playing catch up to some of their bigger cousins in the market. But Azure has proven itself, it's still not quite as capable as its bigger, you know, its bigger sibling AWS but it's more capable than GCP for example. But as Microsoft continues to iterate that service, it gets ever more capable, it gets ever deeper into the organization and I think it's something that I see that across Microsoft and everything that it's doing. It's not just Azure that's like this. It's like this with, you know, we've been looking at Windows virtual desktops. That's not all that sexy and exciting on the surface, no pun intended on surface, sorry. But it's something that the world needs at this point. And how we're trying to handle computing in the enterprise as we move into 2020. >> There's so much, you know, there's a few shows I go to every year where you just drink from the fire hose when you go to the keynote. This absolutely is one. Amazon absolutely is one where you come through in the breath and depth of what they offer. So we've spent a lot time saying something like Azure Arc, it is early. And still trying to understand exactly where that fits, by the end of the day, I'm like, wait, it's management but actually it's highly tied to the application, which really is the strength of Microsoft if you talk about what Microsoft knows. Microsoft knows your apps, you're running so many of those apps, not just Office but SQL and some of the various pieces. I'd love to hear what, give me one or two things that jumped out at you either that you want to dig into or that you've been saying "Oh I've been waiting for that." >> I mean I was really impressed with the technical keynote where they talked about Azure Stack Edge and they have this mini server that can be ruggedized or even put in a backpack, and he had the demo going with the server, a person sitting next to him using the server and he said "It has battery power," so he pulled the power plug on it and it kept working and then he said "And it's rugged," and he just dropped it on the ground and it bounced on the ground and he said "See, the demo just keeps on running." So I was like okay, that's cool, that's pretty impressive. >> Yeah we actually had the HPE, an HPE representative on the program. They're super excited to have their gear in the keynote and those of us with a hardware background do like to wrap our arms around some sheet metal every once in a while and touch this thing, software might be eating the world. >> We call you server huggers too. >> Exactly, am I an Edge hugger now? >> I guess you probably are. >> Yeah it's free shruggs. >> When it comes to, in my opinion, Arc and Edge, I'm sorry, Azure Stack, I think it shows some incredible opportunity for Microsoft moving forward. I mean Microsoft has a formidable presence in the enterprise and not just the enterprise, from the SMB to the mid-market to the enterprise. Everybody, almost, has something Microsoft. So there's an opportunity for Microsoft to further that incursion into the enterprise that can help them be a driver for Azure. Because when you think about a lot of the challenges people have with cloud it's around adoption and integration. That's not quite a soft problem but close enough when you start thinking about the myriad of technologies that Microsoft is bringing out. >> Yeah, so Scott I think your background, you worked in some of the commercial markets, you talk about the education space, areas where Microsoft had a strong history. Are they still as prominent today as they might've been back in the days when you were a CIO? >> Yes and no, it depends on the organization. If I look K12, I think Google's had a lot of inroads there because of Google Apps for Education, whether that's good or bad is really a different opinion but I think Google's taken a lot of Microsoft's market share there. And higher education, we still see a lot of Google colleges and universities of course, but we see a lot with O365. And a lot of that is because of the pricing which you can't beat free. But it also has to do with the capability that the Stack brings to bare. So I think that Microsoft is playing differently than they used to, not necessarily, probably a little bit more strongly in some ways and weaker in others. >> Another, I'd love to hear you say, think about is, the Microsoft of old I think of as rather proprietary and you will do all Microsoft. We had one of the Microsoft partner executives on the program today and he was talking about embracing VMware, embracing Red Hat, not something that you would've thought of Microsoft in the past. How do you think of Microsoft just as a trusted partner in the ecosystem today? >> Yeah, you bring up that word trust and in fact we were talking about that at lunch, Microsoft, we feel like has so much more trust when it comes to our data, when it comes to our applications. I mean there's another cloud provider that starts with a G that's well-known for selling data, selling data that they own, you know. And he talked about in the keynote today, we protect your data and the security around your data and I feel like trust is going to be a big factor in the future when people think about which cloud should I trust? Microsoft seems like they have a leg up on some other competitors. >> I may be naive but I actually trust Microsoft and I have for a long time. There's other companies I don't trust. And Microsoft I actually do trust because for Microsoft, our data is not their resource to mine. They're using it to give me things but they're not using it to sell things to other people. Does that make sense? I mean, that is we're not the product of Microsoft. And it might be a little more expensive because of that in some ways but I think it provides that layer of trust that you're not necessarily going to get from other providers in the near term. >> So we're nearing the end of 2019, what is on deck for IT pros in 2020? I'll start with you, I want to hear both your impressions but I'll start with you. >> That's a great question, we're actually doing a big event this week. In fact and that's the topic is the pillars of IT for 2020. >> I might've done some research. >> Yeah, yeah. So I mean, in fact, I was at a local user group recently and I was asking IT professionals that very question. You know, where are you going to spend your budget in 2020? What are you going to re-architect? And there was a lot of answers around security. That was I think probably the most popular one that I heard. Automation, some people were interested in that and improving the efficiency of their infrastructure I think overall. No matter how they do it, hyperconvergence or something like that, just overall improving things to make their life easier. >> For me, I look at the role of the CIO and to look into 2020, I think we see a lot legacy challenges that are still not solved. Some new opportunities is probably a good word. Some of the legacy challenges are what's the role of IT? That's the age old question. I think we saw the next phase of IT business align with digital transformation and now we're going to look for what's next, right? 'Cause that phrase is now going out of style. But we're still looking for ways that we can do more with technology than we ever have. And as I look at some of the things that happened at the show this morning that were announced, I see a lot opportunity for CIOs and for organizations as a whole to do more than they ever have before without having to bring a whole lot more complexity to the organization. But I also think to see some of the things that have to be addressed. Security is a board level issue and it's a top issue for the CIO, it's a make or break your career type issue at this point. And I think going into 2020 as we look at some of these technologies, it becomes even more important because it's going to all require new focus on security. We have an opportunity around to actually solve the data analytics problem at some point here in the near future. That hasn't always been possible and now we have the tools to do it. And we have tools that can do it without having to hire a whole bunch of IT experts through some of things like companies like Microsoft can bring into market. >> Would love to get your viewpoint on the future of work. We've been saying what is the role of IT? And we say in its best light, IT helps drive innovation and actually can be a leader inside the business. But we know that the roles have been changing inside a company. Microsoft talks rather aspirationally about citizen developers, and we're going to empower everyone to be their best out there. But what does that mean to the person that has been a Cis Admin or going through certifications or trying to learn the latest on hyperconvergence infrastructure and Kubernetes and the latest buzzword that they heard of? >> I mean, I think that's exciting, especially for people who are new in IT or people who have the time to invest in learning development, they were talking about power apps in the keynote. I was excited, I wanted to try it for myself, it looks fun and easy. But in reality, in the real world of IT organizations, things take time. I mean I talked to a CIO at a large bank and he said "Hey, I have 10 stand administrators "and we're going to move to hyperconvergence "when they die or retire." So things take time, that's my take, Scott. >> For me, I think it's the enabling new ways to work. If you look at ActualTech Media, we're 100% virtual. We don't have, people ask where we're headquartered, we have a PO box in North Charleston, South Carolina and the rest of us work in Microsoft Teams. For me one of the most exciting things I've looked at in the last year is Teams. I absolutely adore the tool. >> I've heard a couple of people talking about you know people thought Teams was dying and Slack was killing it but Teams is really good. What is it about it that drives your business? >> So we used to use Slack, we used Skype, and then we used Slack. And Slack was good for what it was, it's an instant messaging tool that makes sure that you can get in touch with people right away and you can share a file. What it lacks is context. Once something is scrolled off the screen, that's it, you don't ever look at it again. And what we get with Teams is an ability to provide context for the work we do. So we were working on one of our Gorilla Guide books this week collaboratively inside Teams. We had the document open in one window and we were chatting about it in a chat in Teams in the other window. But the document lived in the same channel that we were having the conversation. So enabled a great degree of collaboration that we just couldn't get with Slack. That's not to say Slack's not a great tool, for what it is, it's a great tool and I still use it for other teams, which sounds weird. But I love the ability that we've had to bring additional tools into Teams that we didn't have before. When we bought, when we bought, when we deployed Teams, we got rid of Slack, we got rid of Smartsheet and we're in the process of getting rid of Dropbox. And it wasn't 'cause we wanted to save money, I mean it's nice, but at the end of the day it's about improving workflows especially when you don't live in the same office. You don't get to talk to each other over the water cooler. >> So particularly for distributed virtual teams, Microsoft Teams. >> It's a beautiful thing >> It's a beautiful thing. >> And also even with clients, now that Teams has guest capability, we have guest teams that we work on, work with clients in the same way we work internally. So it's become a central hub for just about everything we do. Literally Teams is open on my laptop and on my phone 24/7. It's an app that never closes. >> That's a powerful endorsement. >> It is. >> Scott, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, David thank you so much. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will see you tomorrow for more of theCUBE's live coverage from Microsoft Ignite.

>> Narrator: Live from Denver, CO, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO 2019, brought to you by Commvault. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault GO '19 from Colorado this year. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and we are excited to welcome a couple of new guests to theCUBE. One of them brand new to Commvault. We have Mercer Rowe, VP of Global Channels and Alliances. Mercer, welcome to Commvault and TheCUBE. >> Thanks so much. >> Lisa: And we've got Carmen Sorice III, pinky out, GTM Chief of Staff for Commvault. You're the veteran here. You've been there for a year. >> A whole year, yes. >> Lisa: Exactly. Guys, so much excitement in the last, you know, nine months since Sanjay Mirchandani took over. Analysts saying, hey Commvault, you've got to upgrade your sales. You've got to upgrade your marketing. You've got to shift gears and expand the market share, and we're seeing a lot of movement in all three of those directions. The channel is really critical for Commvault, Mercer. It's responsible for a significant portion of revenue. You guys have made some strategic changes there with respect to channels and alliances. First of all, before we get into that, you're brand new, brand, brand new to Commvault. What attracted you to this company that's 20 years old that, as Sanjay was telling us, it's like the new Commvault. >> So, if I look back at my career in the last 10 years or so, I've been in IT for about 20 years, for the last 10 years or so, I've been a part of launching cloud businesses for a number of some upcoming and some new vendors, such as VMware, IBM, SoftBank and others. And a lot of that, in that process, what I've been working on is helping existing customers to move their workloads into the Cloud. We know that the market is evolving to a hybrid Cloud type of deployment model. I mean we can see that across the board with the way our customers are behaving, with the way that the Cloud vendors are behaving. But that's been a challenge because of the technology matching, right? Figuring out how to essentially put the same technology stack in the Cloud as you do on-prem to be able to move those apps over. I really started to look for companies that could bridge that gap and it could really operate in a hybrid Cloud scenario. Commvault is absolutely positioned perfectly for that in my mind, and so it's such an opportunity as we shift from our kind of act one as a great data protection company to a true hybrid Cloud data platform or data plane. >> Yeah, Carmen, maybe give us a little bit of your insight as to some of those change in roles as Mercer was just saying. Cloud is having a huge impact. You know, we've watched, you know, for years the shifting role of the traditional VAR or SI or the like, so bring us a little bit of insight as to what, today, is important to your go-to-market. >> Yeah, so what's important to our partners, especially the VARS is continuing to be relevant with our customers, right? Change is the only constant, and it's, the rate of change is just accelerating. So partners are looking for vendor partners like us to help them be relevant, to come out with the solutions that are going to be more relevant, even tomorrow. And, from a Commvault perspective, if you think about everything we've done from a data backup and a data management perspective, we've been the best in the industry, as we've just seen with Gartner and Forrester. All right, so we're proud of that. But what our partners were looking for is, where are we taking this next? Where's the innovation going to come from? So when you weave in things like Metallic that now gives our partners a consumption option. So if they have customers that want to buy software as a service, they now have that option. And then when you add software-defined storage, it takes us in to a completely different area, and you had asked Stewart about the Cloud, when you think of Cloud native applications and you think of containerization, that's changing the way backup data and primary storage data is being managed and the lines are blurring. Now with Hedvig software-defined storage, we have an opportunity to come out with integrated offers to help our partners be even more successful. >> So from a go-to-market perspective, in the last year, there's been a lot transformation, right? Not just in terms of leadership changes, but this big focus on ensuring that, as customers' environments change in this hybrid multicloud world that they are living in whether it's by design or its by acquisition or different types of growth, right? Talk to us a little bit about how Commvault foundationally is set up to really make some big shifts and big bets in new routes to market. >> Yeah, I can take that from where we were a year ago 'til now and then feel free to expand. So when you look at, we've always been a partner business, a partner friendly business. A significant percentage of our revenue, like north of 90% goes through our partners. What our partners were asking for is, hey, you guys are partner friendly, but we need you to be partner driven. So, when you come up with solutions, make sure they're channel ready, make sure they're partner ready, make sure we have our eyes on the market so that we're not just trying to sell software to our partners. We need to better understand their go-to-market models, how can we help them grow their business by offering a different variety, a variety of different services. So I think the evolution you've seen is a year ago the company made significant investments on becoming partner-first. So we've invested in channel leadership, partner leadership, not only at the corporate level but also in the field, and since Sanjay came on board, as you referenced, in February, that change is just continuing. So we're making our next level of investment in channel executives, in executives period, who have context about what channel is. And when you've lived in the channel, you've dealt with channel conflict, you bring that to the table, you bring that experience to the table. So I think you're seeing an evolution of us in our next phase of investments, helping our partners be successful, and becoming partner-first, and we've done a lot of new things with our programs that I can get in to. Financial incentives, rebates, making it easier on our partner portal to interface with us. And we're going to continue to do that, so that's we're not only just the right product choice, we're the right financial choice for our partners going forward. >> And I think, to add to that, if you look at our Metallic launch, obviously the reason we work with partners is in service of our customers. Right, that's the whole reason we partner, it's 'cause we want to great a better value proposition for our customers. And when we launched that product, a little tid bit, the company did a lot of research. Went out and talked to non, not-current Commvault customers, so potentially new greenfield customers and consistently got the feedback that they wanted to buy softwares and service applications that like that through a partner, because they could have a conversation about their entire IT environment. So it's really exciting to be in a spot where we are not only partner-first, partner-led but we're in a position where we know that this is the way our customers want to interact with us. That's number one. Number two is as we start to make some of these transitions into SaaS as we move into adjacencies like we're doing with Hedvig, it's so important to have our partners be the tip of the spear to help our customers through that journey. You know, innovation is great, but innovation also creates complexity. That's where partners help us move our customers through that journey and be successful. >> You know, we were talking to one of your launch partners earlier today and they were very excited about Metallic. On the same hide they did recognize that there is a significant change as to how they have to engage, you know, what part of the organization. You know, it's a good thing they have a Microsoft practice that this plugs into for the O365. So, bring us a little bit as to how you're helping the channel transform. >> Oh, absolutely. So, as you can see, a lot of the partners, you can see a lot of them that are here today, have moved from being pure, say in the solution of outer space, just to use as an example have moved from pure solution providers to also having MSP offerings, or other kind of services offerings, because they realize that customers want the flexibility of consumption economics while also, you know, being able to work with their trusted partner. So whether it's them, whether it's service providers who we want to drive into more of a, as a service model, and obviously we're planning to release all of this technology to our service providers to allow them to offer Commvault-based or Commvault-powered services in the market, or whether it's our great alliance partners. Companies like Nedap and Hitachi, where we have OEM relationships or other kind of very deep, collaborative relationships in the market. Adding some of these features and functions and capabilities as we move, as we help our customers to move into the Cloud, as we help them to give them more options for these multicloud or hybrid deployment models. This opens up additional apertures, additional opportunities for services, for wholistic end-to-end solutions from these partners that actually increase their ability to be relevant with the customers but also the share wallet. >> I want to get your perspective, Mercer, on differentiation, because partners, your partners work with a lot of your competitors. We know that there's a lot of coopetition, right, in technology but what is it about some of the things that Commvault is putting in place or some ideas that you have to really differentiate how you're enabling partners, whether we're talking about a VAR or a Disty or all the way up to a global services systems integrator that can deliver massive enterprise scale. >> Yeah, I can start with that if you're okay. So, it's all about listening to partners, right? Listening to what they need and what they're asking you for. Because many times a vendor becomes vendor-arrogant, right? And you're not listening to the partners. So our partners have been clear. They said we want a predictable financial model with Commvault. What translates to a program that's a full year program that gives them financial incentives so they don't have to guess what we're going to do in any given month or any given quarter with some kind of SPIF. So we've delivered on that. They've asked, number two, they said, they've said to me, and you're going to be hearing this, is you've always had great products, please, that has to continue. That's like a ticket for entry. And we've seen that we continue to lead in that space. And then I mentioned earlier about innovation. They want to know that we're going to take them into the future. So those three things are really critical for our partners. And then the last thing they ask for, which is basically a foundation across that, is field engagement. We need to be more tightly engaged with your sellers, so that we go in on joint sales calls. That we're bringing each other opportunities, and I think with the new sales leadership we have, Riccardo Di Blasio, our new CRO, our boss knows full well how to grow businesses with partners and through partners and it's by engaging in the field. And that's why we're going to have more people in the field, so that we can engage with partners and create opportunities together. So those are kind of the four foundational elements that we see. >> Mercer, I was wondering if I could get your viewpoint just in general about the channel. There was a lot of fear for a number of years about, you know, the Cloud, coming in and that readjustment. How do you think it's going? What's the general, you know, feel of the channel today, and how their interaction is with, you know, that ever-changing interaction with the big public clouds. >> You know, it's a great question, and I remember when we were first launching the cloud business as VMware. I used to go to, I built our channel model but I would introduce myself in the partner meetings with, Hey, I'm from VMware Cloud. We're here to kill your business. (laughter) Because there was a fear. And that fear, I think, in a certain way, has kind of dissipated as the market has realized as partners and mostly from the customers have realized that there is not a one size fits all strategy. The Cloud is not the solution to all IT needs. It is certainly an important part of most customer's strategy, in fact, I don't think that there are many customers that don't have Cloud as a part of their overall IT strategy, however, it's not the entire environment, and it certainly doesn't solve all needs. So, from a general perspective, the savvy partners have embraced the Cloud, they've embraced services, and they've look at it as a wholistic part of how they do business with their end customers. 'Cause as we think about, you know, to the last question, as we think about partner profitability, I think about it in two main vectors. There's margin, field engagement, revenue, and so forth, which is very, you know, this is the financial element of working with a partner like Commvault to make money. And that's obviously a very important part and that's something we will continue to invest in. Programs, and so forth, to support our partners to be profitable working with Commvault. But the other is in the practices, in how they build services, in how they build end-to-end solutions. Which, another tidbit on Metallic that some people picked up on was that we've released the telemetry APIs. Meaning that partners who are working with Metallic can see exactly what their customers are using. How are they growing? Oh, they've all of a sudden backed up a new workload. Hey, maybe they have a new project. Maybe I should call them, so I'm not waiting until renewals. I'm not waiting until the sort of forcing events to have an opportunity to place a call into my customer and say, hey, I noticed you're doing something new. How can I help? >> That insight, and sorry Carmen, we were talking about that a little bit earlier, I think with maybe with Rob Kaloustian. That was really interesting, because it really it changes the word partner, right? It can't. Because if they're actually able to follow along and maybe even make some educated predictions or suggestions to the customer, then the customer feels like, okay, you're not only selling me this, you're actively helping me optimize my deployment, learn from it and plan for what's next. So that definition of partner changes for the better. >> And I think the whole SaaS model is like the next step beyond Cloud. So you were asking me about Cloud. Very briefly, the way I've seen it over the last probably seven to nine years is, I had billion dollar VARS tell me nine years ago, don't ever try to come in here and sell me a multi tenant cloud service, 'cause I'm selling hardware. That moved to, hey, you know what? We see the customers changing. I was with a service provider. Why don't you come help us? And then a couple of years later they said, you know what? We're kind of building our own service now, so we don't need your services anymore. So, in a few, you know, three to five years, they went from stay out, I'm never going to sell a multi tenant service to quickly, well maybe not so quickly, some not as quick as others, realize that they have to get there. I think SaaS is like the next step beyond that. >> Well in this business I think if that teaches anybody anything it's never say never. Right? >> That's right. >> Well guys, thank you so much for joining Stu and me, sharing with us how things are really transforming here, but also what you're doing for global alliances and channel to really catalyze Commvault's business. We appreciate it, and we say best of luck as you enter week three? >> Yes. >> Lisa: Or day three? >> Day three, day three. >> Lisa: Gentleman, thank you for your time. >> Great, thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watchin' theCUBE from Commvault GO '19. (fast tempo music)

>> From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are in Austin, Texas for Pure Accelerate '19. And we're excited to be talking with another one of Pure's happy successful customers. We've got Scott Pedram, the storage architect from One Gas. Scott, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> So One Gas. Give our audience a little bit of an overview of what One Gas is, what regions you serve, and then dig into your role as a storage architect. >> Of course. So One Gas, we're a natural gas utility company. So we're the downstream, the inline. So we actually deliver the natural gas to our customers, residential and commercial. We operate across Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, and various regions including Austin. In my role as storage architect, I help, I mean, basically a one-man show. So design the storage, implement the storage, run the storage. And I also help out in other areas such as the servers, the DBAs, networking, kind of a little bit of everything. >> So you've been a Pure customer for about three years. We were talking before we went live. Give us an overview of your storage infrastructure, your IT environment three years ago, and what the impetus was to evaluate Pure. >> Sure. So we were previously an IBM storage shop. I had IBM SAN volume controller backed by DS 8000, FlashSystem 820s, Storwize V7000s, so different tiers of storage all being managed by VSPC. As is common, the warranty runs out on the DS 8000. So it's time to look at a forklift upgrade or whatever the case may be. I had a plan all in place to replace it with IBM, but we are a fully regulated utility company. So I did my due diligence and brought in some competitors. EMT and Pure Storage. Heard Pure's story, especially the Evergreen storage model, and the five and six year total cost of ownership was actually pretty close, but once you went beyond that, there was no contest. Pure won hands down. And again, as a utility company, we like predictable, flat costs. So the fact that we could do that and not have to have this multi-million dollar expense again in just another three or four years. >> So I got to ask you, so TCO, done a lot of TCO studies, and the biggest component of total cost of ownership is labor, humans. So presumably, you did a full TCO, you looked at it. I'm surprised to hear you say that the five-year TCO was about comparable because Pure is, the Kool-Aid injection says it's simpler. It's more modern. Wouldn't that save head count or at least FTE? >> It could if we were a more complex environment, but as it stood, there's me and one other guy kind of as my backup. So, you still have to have somebody to run it, right? >> So that's what I asked so sometimes CFO's will go, Wait a minute. If we're not going to reduce head count, I'm not going to accept that as part of the cost reduction. Is that what's going on here? Because we're going to shift labor to more high value activity so, oftentimes the CFO doesn't count that in his or her business case. Was that the case or did you find that because you're so small it really didn't matter in terms of the management complexity? I'm interested in your thoughts on that. >> We didn't background management complexity when we were calculating TCO. It was purely the cost to acquire the storage and then the maintenance. >> Oh, so there was no management cost? No human capital, okay. >> No. >> And so it's you and somebody else. >> Scott: Correct. >> Have you now spent less time managing the Pure than you did previously with the IBM? >> Oh, for sure. >> Okay. >> And when I first got it I was afraid, am I going to work myself out of a job? >> The Pure? >> 'Cause it was so easy. >> Okay, so, you had two FTE's managing storage. >> Scott: Yeah. >> What percent of your time, prior to Pure, did you spend managing storage versus doing other stuff? (Scott sighs) I mean a rough ballpark. >> Yeah, rough ballpark. >> Dave: Was it 50/50? >> I would say, I was maybe doing 60 to 70% doing just Pure storage before. And now it's 20? >> So you've gone from 60 to 70, let's call it 65% of your time was spent managing storage tuning, troubleshooting, provisioning LANs, provisioning more capacity, planning, all those things that, we love it. Down to 20%. >> Probably. >> Roughly. I'm not going to hold you to it, but. Well I guess we're live TV, so I will hold you to it. (Scott laughing) But that's a significant savings. You can calculate that over five years, right? Take your fully loaded costs and boom, that adds up. What have you done with that time? What are you now doing? I presume you're not just hanging out. >> No, my boss is watching. >> Publicly traded, regulated utility, somebody's watching right? >> No, of course not. No I've been able to be a lot more proactive. So helping out, like I said, with the server teams, the inward teams. Consulting them on looking further. What is our longterm goal or strategy? What's the five year plan, type of thing. Instead of just fighting fires all day. Or, you know, next week we have to deal with this performance issue that's going to be coming up. >> Dave: So you've been able to be more strategic. >> For sure. >> And one more question on this whole, there's intangibles there that everybody always overlooks, but actually when you live them they make a big difference. Has there been a quality effect? In other words, instead of putting out fires you're doing thing that are more strategic. Do you feel like you have better quality infrastructure? And does that affect your business? >> I would say better quality in the fact that it's more consistent. So we ended up sweeping the entire floor with all Pure Storage. So all of production and non-production, in our case, is all on Pure. So the consistency of the latency and the response times and the performance that you get out of the storage. There is no more performance problems. It doesn't exist. >> And in terms of workloads, I know you're running Splunk on FlashArray. Give us some picture of that infrastructure, the workloads that you're running on it. And the stakeholders I can imagine them in different departments and different functions within One Gas that are using this system and not even realizing it because it's just available, it's there. >> Before Splunk, real quick, we had one application, we went to Flash. They thought their processing was broken because it completed so quickly. (Lisa laughing) >> That's a good thought to have. >> Yeah. So they finished so fast they came back to us, it's broken, I'm like, no it's not. (he laughs) >> What's your use case with Splunk? >> With Splunk it started out as cybersecurity and that's kind of what brought it in, but it has since expanded to monitoring, analytics. We actually use it when we roll out our trucks to the field to ensure that we're meeting the SLAs. There's so many different areas where we use Splunk, I'd have to refer to my notes. >> So infrastructure ops has become this big thing, right? And automation and things of that nature? Or not quite there? >> Not so much automation yet. But we do have a plan, a project to start doing more automation. >> And other analytics, I presume? I mean, they're all about analytics, right? >> A lot of our application teams, like our web development team, they use Splunk a lot for their application monitoring and trying to be proactive on that. >> Thinking about the security use case. Security practitioners often tell us, well, we get inundated with incidents. We don't have the time to sort through them all. Does having Splunk on an all FlashArray, high performance all FlashArray, does it affect the response of the security team? Or how does it affect the business, the security side of the business? >> I'm not able to answer that directly, but I can say that I have seen them do a lot of select all type queries, where they're just searching for a needle in a haystack, type of thing. And previously when we had multi-tiered storage those queries took forever, but now that it's all Flash, it's really quick. >> So they spent more time waiting than they do now. I mean that could be a two edge sword. Maybe they more stuff to sift through now. (he laughs) That's somebody else's problem. >> Well the data security is critical because your dealing with customers' data, right? And almost every month we hear about data breaches in the public. Whether it's a bank, or it's a social media platform. Unfortunately they're becoming quite common. But when you're dealing with personal customer data that's a big concern. Some of the things we're hearing Pure talk about is what they're doing with data protection and data security. And also kind of this sift from not looking at data protection as an insurance policy as much as it's an asset because you have so much information, you're storing it for longer, more and more customers, more data. How is that that being reflected up the chain, even up your chain of command and to the executive folks in terms of being confident that what they have your customers data running on in those three states that you talked about, is on a very solid secure platform? >> Well, security, it requires multiple layers. So Pure having always-on encryption is a big help. So if we do have, you know, a failed module that has to be replaced. I don't have to worry about making sure that it's securely erased, destroyed, and all that. 'Cause without the encryption key it's virtually crypto erased. And then of course we have all the security agents on the servers and the applications and our security cyber team managers, all of that. >> And what about cloud? What do you do in cloud? What's the strategy? >> We do cloud where it makes sense. For instance ServiceNow and O365 we're customers to both of those. >> Dave: So SaaS stuff. >> And mostly SaaS. In my opinion doing cloud is doing a lift and shift. And using cloud as infrastructure as a service doesn't make a whole lot of sense. For us anyway. As a utility company we're very pro-capital. So if we just shift that to another provider that's all operational. >> Whereas, take ServiceNow for example and change the operational model. Right? And you had a clear business impact where it wasn't a lift an shift. It was a transformation really. >> Exactly. >> Where do you want to go with Pure and storage infrastructure? It's just like, I just want it to work. I want it to be rock solid, dirt cheap, highly available, you know, high performance, or are there things that you would like to see Pure do that can help drive your business? >> Well I think the announcement today of the FlashArray//C is what I'm probably most exited about, in that I've already asked my business partners to get me some pricing, some quotes on, can I use that for my backups as a back up target? Instead of, you know, the underlying SaaS datadisks. So that's exciting for me. The fact that it's going to be the same software that I'm used to, that's all a plus. >> How are you protecting your Flash arrays today? >> We're implementing Commvault right now So we do leverage Commvault. It's called IntelliSnap. So basically it does a Pure level snapshot and then we can mount that on our media agents. >> Okay, so, using FlashArray//C, that's the right model number, I think. So obviously you want to use Flash, if it's cost effective, for everything. If it's cheaper than spinning Disk why not use it? Do you see any advantage, in theory, for recovery speed? For sure, yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you need to do a fast recovery, I mean, it's on Flash. But with what I'm looking most forward to though is even the ingest of the data, the initial backups. If there's a lot of, you know querying and trying to figure out what's changed and what's not, that can be a lot of disk thrashing on traditional spindle drives. >> So let's look into the future a little bit before we wrap here. You've been a Pure customer for three years now. Presuming you've done some upgrades and swap outs of controllers in that time? >> Not quite yet. In the coming months we will have our first ever green controller swap. I've actually had a failed controller. So effectively the same process. Where one controller's down and didn't have any issues with performance or, >> No downtime, no disruption. >> No downtime. Absolutely not. Even upgrades where they, you know, take one controller down and upgrade it. I'll do those during business hours. >> Are you comfortable with the, go ahead, sorry. >> Just because there's no performance degradation whatsoever. >> So you're obviously comfortable with the architecture. You seem like a pretty happy customer. Some of the critics will say, it's a duel controller architecture, that doesn't bother you? >> No, not at all. (he laughs) >> I had to ask with a straight face. What would you like to see Pure do? If Charlie G. and Carl are sitting right here, what's the one thing that I could do to make your life easier, what would it be? Besides cutting price, you can't say cut price. >> Yeah. You know what, that's a great question. I think what I would have been asking for, top of mind, would have been the lower tier, what they came out with today, the C. >> You know, another criticism from some of the competitors is they don't have tiering. And when you talk to Pure about it they go, oh, we don't need tiering, we don't believe in tiering. What are your thoughts as a practitioner? Would you want to have a tiered array, like high performance Flash, lower in the same array? Or is this not something that is necessary? >> I don't think so. I go back to the consistency. You know we have all of production on Flash now and it's, I don't have to worry about performance. Whereas before I was constantly having to monitor and manage you know, is all the right stuff on the right tier, and it was a headache. >> So automated tiering wasn't so automated? Is that a fair statement? >> It worked fairly well, but there were some cases where it didn't. >> Yeah. So you're better just throwing it at Flash and it'll take care of itself. >> Yeah. >> Dave: Cool. >> So you've got a foundation now that's going to allow One Gas to evolve continually and we look forward to hearing in the next year or so when you go through that first big evergreen upgrade, how that goes. But it sounds like you've made the right choice and the foundation that you've got is pretty strong. And so many other layers of the business are benefiting and they don't even know it. Because as you said before, on of the constituents thought something was broken, it was that fast. >> Correct. >> So well done on your decision. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Scott, for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Dave and me about what One Gas has been doing how you're succeeding and we look forward to hearing more of your success. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Great to have you, thanks. >> Scott: Appreciate it. >> For Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, from Pure Accelerate '19. (upbeat electronic music)

>> From Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Covering WTG Transform 2019 brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're at WTG Transform 2019 here in Boston, Massachusets. Happen to welcome back to the program the CTO of Winslow Technology Group. Rick Gouin spoke to the customers this morning, threw in a bunch of data points, got us all thinking about where we are today and where we're going tomorrow in the cloud. Rick, thanks so much for joining us >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> All right, so rick, you and I, we've known each other for a few years now, we have these great debates as to kind of where we are and where we're going. I attended a Nutanix event a couple years ago, and Nassim Taleb, who is the author of a number of books including Black Swan and Antifragile, he worked on Wall Street and he said look, we all try to make these predictions, but we think it's going to be a line, or maybe they'll be slow adoption, but the black swan that he said is something, just the quick thing is you've never seen a black swan, you'd think that all swans are white, and once you've seen a black swan, you're like, oh my god, everything that I thought I knew I have to think any questions. Predicting the future, especially in a never changing world where we don't have all the facts and when we can't predict, is really challenging. So understanding whether cloud will take 80% of the market or 30% in the next five years is a little bit of a complex thing. It's like trying to predict the weather here in New England where we're watching the clouds and the rain roll in and roll out. Start with us as to Winslow Technology, your customers, where they are with cloud, and how that conversation goes with them today. >> Yeah, so I think you make a great point about these statistics, these assertions, these predictions. We're getting bombarded with them without context, and I think that it leaves a lot of our customers feeling like they're behind the curve a little bit because have bandy about the, you'll hear 80% of cloud, of companies have a cloud strategy, and there's never the follow up to see did it change two weeks later, was it actually implemented. And so, I think what we can all agree on is that one, all of these technologies are going to continue to grow. Their adoption is going to continue to grow. We're going to continue to figure out different ways to extract value from those services, but the other part of this, and I think it's really where Winslow fits in, is that we want to help our customers position themselves to take advantage of that. So I want to help our customers transform what they're doing today. If we look out at that three, at that five year mark, we know that we're going to have a lot of workloads out there. I don't know what the percentage is going to be, I'm not going to throw a fake number out there, but we know that it's going to be bigger than the one today. And we also, I would assert, that there are things we can help you do in your on-prem environment today that will help you make you better prepared for that transition and allow you to attack that, hopefully, in a more strategic and well considered way. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well rick, I am very sure 87% of all statistics lie, and beyond that, I would poke and prod at any numbers that I see there because look, numbers are numbers, and as you said, things do change all the time. >> Context. >> When I look at some of the tailwinds that have been driving your business the last few years, hyper convergent infrastructure, some of the services wrapping around, help customers with their security journey, with their cloud journey. You've got a number of partners that are there. The bombardment that your customers get, it doesn't stop. If they open up, they open up the news today, it's like oh, AWS just unleased their latest on outpost, and VMware is partnering with all the clouds, and therefore you better be ready for it. The thing I'll poke a little bit at, I don't mind that customers think they're a little bit far behind because what they need to be doing is being that change mindset because the worse thing they can do is just say, well, I've got it the way I want it and I'm not going to change. And I think that that's something you would agree with and that Winslow's helping them to try to keep up because nobody can keep up by themselves, so they've got to be able to turn to partners like yourself to keep up. >> Yeah. I think one of the think one of the things that was telling that I touched on earlier today a little bit was the number three reason that we heard from our customers for why they weren't leveraging the public cloud was because they didn't know how. And I think that that's telling, I think that sort of response to the whole notion that they're feeling behind the curve, but I also feel like you mentioned hyper converged, you mentioned some of these other partners we work with. These guys all have some great stories that will allow our customers to take a first step. What we're not talking about is saying hey, customers, you've got to re-platform everything. You've got to re-write everything to leverage all these different cloud services and cloud platform. That's a big lift for a lot of our customers, but what might not be such a huge lift is leveraging some of those cloud services, cloud connectivity capabilities that are built into those platforms from those partners like Nutanix, like VMware, like Dell EMC. >> So rick, I really liked your line that most customers, many customers end up hybrid by accident. And unfortunately, I think that's where we are when you go talk to them, they might not understand hybrid cloud, multi cloud, they're just like oh, that's vendor terminology, but do you have SAS? Oh, absolutely, they've all got O365 and Salesforce, and a whole host of other ones. Three which probably IPO today. And are they using a public cloud? They definitely are. Most of them at least understand they're using it as opposed to five years ago it was like oh, wait, we actually checked all the IPs and we had three groups that we didn't realize that were doing the old stealth IT. So what is the advice, how do we make sure we get everybody talking in, what are some steps to move forward on that strategy to actually have a coherent cloud offering, not just the pieces that I put together because that's what different groups did. >> Sure, yeah. I think the hybrid by accident scenario is one that we're seeing more and more often from our customers and also just from other folks in the industry. And I guess just to kind of expand on that a little bit, what we're talking about there is when somebody that we're working with perhaps goes into a project, goes into a cycle with the notion that they're going to be all of one or all of the other. I'm going to put everything in the cloud or I'm going to put nothing in the cloud. And what happens is you find a workload that doesn't fit where your whatever your direction is. And so all of a sudden, if you're one of those people who say oh the cloud is just somebody else's computer. Next thing you know, you're on O365, next thing you know you're consuming Dropbox or who knows what. You've got all of these different public services and you have no integration between your on-prem environment and all these public services you're leveraging. And so, you find yourself in a scenario where you're in a hybrid by accident, and which means that you didn't build in the sort of management that would be able to consider these different silos of information. And so, what we kind of advocate is that when you're approaching these strategic decisions, recognize upfront that you may very well end up in hybrid scenario, at least in the next few years this is probably what it's going to look like, at least that's what I think. Recognize that upfront and build that into your plan. If you plan to end up in a hybrid end state, you're whole environment is going to be such much more cohesive, you're going to have that app mobility, you're going to have so much more flexibility than if you end up there by accident by moving half your workloads out, lift and shifting some things over here, some stuff gets left behind, different groups are managing different things 'cause they're different skillsets. If you plan to be in that state at the end, you're going to be in much better shape, but you're also going to be well positioned to continue to move things out as those services become more robust and as you can extract more value from those for your business. >> I think if you've looked at the history of IT, it's very rare that we get one thing to rule them all. >> Right. >> And it's like, well, Ethernet's done a good job at networking, and the mainframe had it's time there, but at the end of the day, five years from now, it might just be all my solutions are cloud, but it's just, as you said, that location matters a little bit less because by the way, it's not just public and private, that edge computing thing is a huge draw that most companies I talk to have some kind of IOT and censure strategy that they're picking out. How can users be data driven to get to the right things in the right place and really make smart decisions? >> Yeah. So I think that there's two facets here to being able to make data driven decisions. The first is that you have to collect the data. We have to put in the diligence, so certainly, that's one of the places that we're able to help our customers in collecting and in quantifying it, attaching dollars and cents. Here's what the services will cost, here's what the professional services, the re-platforming will cost. Let's wrap some numbers around this. If you're trying to make those decisions, if you're creating a strategy, and you haven't taken a look at what your costs are going to be, what your level of effort is going to be, that's a super incomplete strategy, and it's one of the frustrating things for me as a customer facing resource to walk into one of those situations where a customer is dead set on their strategy, but really doesn't understand it themselves. We really welcome the opportunity to help those kind of do their diligence to be able to create more informed and data drive strategies. Leveraging information from their own environments. >> All right. Rick, last thing is we know things are changing all the time. What's the last thing you want people to know about Winslow Technology 2019 that they might not have understood if they looked at the company a year or three years ago? >> Yeah, so I think that some of the big changes that have really come to us in the last couple years is we're adding technical firepower at alarming rate. Our growth is really focused on the services delivery, and the engineering talent we've brought in high end security resources, high end VMware resources. We're able to deliver those cloud connectivity capabilities from all those different products that you mentioned. We're able to deliver a fairly robust security portfolio today, not to mention, the highest level of VMware expertise that there is out there. So we put a lot of focus into the services, into professional services, into helping our customers sort of understand and make that journey, straddle that public, private, hybrid, multi sort of thing. And we think that services is going to drive a lot of this for us going forward. And so our capabilities are growing leaps and bounds, year over year in the services and engineering talent perspective. >> All right, well, Rick Gouin, CTO of Winslow Technology. Always a pleasure to catch up. My prediction, next year I think we'll be another five to 10% in our agreement as to what the future looks like. >> I like it. >> Just because it will be today as opposed to tomorrow >> Yes. >> in the viewpoint. Be back with much more here from WTG 2019. I'm Stu Miniman. And thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego, California. It's theCUBE. covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to San Diego, everybody. You're watching Cisco Live 2019. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante. Stu Miniman is here. Our third host, Lisa Martin is also in the house. Dave Malik is here. He's a fellow and Chief Architect at Cisco. David, good to see you. >> Oh, glad to be here. >> Thanks for coming on. First of all, congratulations on being a fellow. What does that mean, a Cisco Fellow? What do you got to go through to achieve that status? >> It's pretty arduous task. It's one of the most highest technical designations in Cisco, but we work across multiple architectures in technologies, as well as our partners, as well, to drive corporate-wide strategy. >> So you've been talking to customers here, you've been presenting. I think you said you gave three presentations here? Multi-cloud, blockchain, and some stuff on machine intelligence, ML. >> Yes. >> Let's hit those. Kind of summarize the overall themes, and then we'll maybe get into each, and then we got a zillion questions for you. >> Sure, excellent. So multi-cloud, I think one of the customers, we're clearly hearing from them is around, how do we get a universal policy model and connectivity model, and how do you orchestrate workloads seamlessly? And those are some of the challenges that we trying to address at this conference. On blockchain, a lot of buzz out there. We're not talking about Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, it's really about leveraging blockchain from a networking perspective, or an identity and encryption, and providing a uniform ledger that everything is pervasive across infrastructure. And then ML, I think it's the heart of every conversation. How do we take pervasive analytics and bring it into the network so we can drive actionable insights into automation? >> So let's start with the third one. When you talk about ML, was your talk on machine learning? Did it spill into artificial intelligence? What's the difference to you from a technology perspective? >> Machine learning is really getting a lot of the data and looking at repetitive patterns in a very common fashion, and doing a massive correlation across multiple domains. So you may have some things happening in the branch, the data set, or a WAN in cloud, but the whole idea is how do you put them together to drive insight? And through artificial intelligence and algorithms, we can try to take those insights and automate them and push them back into the infrastructure or to the application layer. So now you're driving intelligence for not just consumers or devices, but also humans as well to drive insight. >> All right. So Dave, I wonder if you'd help connect with us what you were talking about there, and we'll get to the multicloud piece because I was at an Amazon show last week from Amazon, talking about how when they look at all the technologies that they use to get packages, their fulfillment centers, everything that they do as a business, ML and AI, they said, is underneath that, and AWS is what's driving that technology from that standpoint. Now, multicloud, AWS is a partner of yours. >> Yes. >> Can you give us how you work in multicloud and does ML and IA, is that a Cisco specific? Are you working with some of the standards out there to connect all those pieces? Help us look at some of the big picture of those items. >> So we believe we're agnostic, whether you connect to Amazon, Azure, Google, et cetera, we believe in a uniform policy model and connectivity model, which is very, very arduous today. So you shouldn't have to have a specific policy model, connectivity model, security model for that matter, for each provider. So we're normalizing that plane completely, which is awesome. Then, at a workload level, regardless of whether your workload is spun up or spun down, it should have the same security posture and visibility. We have certain customers that are running as single applications across multiple clouds, so your data is going to be obviously on-prem, you may be running analytics in TenserFlow, compute in EC2, and connecting to O365, that's one app. And where we're seeing the models go is are you leveraging technology such as this? Do you offer service mesh? How do we tie a lot of these micro-services together and then be able to layer workload orchestration on top? So regardless of where your workload sits, and one key point that we keep hearing from our customers is their ungovernance. How we provide cloud-based governance regardless of where their workload is, and that's something we're doing in a very large fashion with customers that have a multicloud strategy. >> So Stu, I think there's still some confusion around multicloud generally, and maybe Cisco's strategy. I wonder if we could maybe clear it up a little bit. >> Dave, it's that big elephant in the room, and I always feel like everybody describes multicloud from a different angle. >> So let's dig into this a little bit, and let's hear from Cisco's perspective. So you got, to my count, five companies really going after this space. You got Cisco, VMware, IBM Red Hat, Microsoft, and Google with Anthos. Probably all those guys are partners of yours. >> Yes. >> Okay, but you guys want to provide the bromide or the single pane of glass, okay. I'm hearing open and agnostic. That's a differentiator. Security, you're in a good position to make an argument that you're in a good position to make things secure. You got the network and so forth. High-performance network, and cost-effective. Everybody's going to make that argument relative to having multiple stovepipes, but that's part of your story as well. So the question. Why Cisco? What's the key differentiator and what gives you confidence that you can really help win in this marketplace? >> So our core competencies are our networking and security. Whether it's cloud-based security or on-prem security, it's uniform. From a security perspective, we have a universal architecture. Whether it's the endpoint, the edge, the cloud, they're all sharing information and intelligence. That's really important. Instead of having bespoke products, these products and solutions need to communicate with each other, so if someone's sick in one area, we're informing the other one. So threat intelligence and network intelligence is huge. Then more importantly, after working with Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, we have on-prem solutions as well, so as customers are going on their multicloud journey, and eventually the workload will transition, you have the same management experience and security experience. So Anthos was a recent announcement, AWS as well, where you can run on-prem Kubernetes, and you can take the same workload and move it to AWS or GCP, but the management model and the control pane model, they are extremely similar and you don't have to learn anything new from a training perspective. >> Okay, but I used the term agnostic, oh, no. You did agnostic, I said open. But you don't care if it's Anthos or VMware, or OpenShift, you don't care. >> Don't care. >> And, architecturally, how is it that you can successfully not care? >> Because the underlying, fundamental principles is you can load any workload you want with this, bare metal, virtualized, or Kubernetes-based containers, they all need the same. For example, everyone needs bread and water. It's not different. So why should you be able to discriminate against a workload or OpenShare if they're using Pivotal Cloud Foundry, for example? The same model, all applications still need security, visibility, networking, and management, but they should not be different across all clouds, and that's traditionally what you're seeing from the other vendors in the market. They're very unique to their stovepipe, and we want to break down those stovepipes across the board, regardless of what app and what workload you have. >> Dave, talk a little bit about the automation that Cisco's delivering to help enable this because there's skill set challenges, just the scale of these environments are more than humans alone can take care of, so how does that automation, I know you're heavily involved in the CX beast of Cisco. How does that all tie together? >> So we're working on a lot of automation projects with our large enterprises and SPs, I mean, you see Rakuten being fairly prominent in the show, but more importantly, we understand not everyone's building a greenfield environment, not everything is purely public cloud. We have to deal with brownfield, we have to deal with third-party ecosystem partners, so you can't have a vertically tight single-vendor solution. So again, to your point, it's completely open. Then we have frameworks, meaning you have orchestrators that can talk down to the device through programmatic interfaces. That's why we see DevNet surrounding us, but then more importantly, we're looking at services that have workflows that could span on-prem, off-prem, third-party, it doesn't really matter. And we stitch a lot of those workloads southbound, but more importantly, northbound to security at ITSM Systems. So those frameworks are coming into life, whether you're a telecom cloud provider or you're a large enterprise. And they slowly fall into those workflows as they become more multi-domain. You saw David Goeckeler the other day, talking about SD-WAN, ECI, and campus wired and wireless. These domains are coming together and that's where we're driving a lot of the automation work. >> So automation is a linchpin to what business outcome? Ultimately, what are customers trying to achieve through automation? >> There's a couple of things. Mean time to value. So if you're a service provider, to your internal customers or external, time to value and speed and agility are key. The other ones are mean time to repair and mean time to detect. If I can shorten the time to detect and shorten time to react, then I can take proactive and preemptive action in situations that may happen. So time to value is really, really important. Cost is a play, obviously, 'cause when you have more and more machines doing your work, your OPEX will come down, but it's really not purely a cost play. Agility and speed are really driving automation to that scale as we're working with folks like Rakuten and others. >> What do you see, Dave, as the big challenges of achieving automation when customers, first of all, I was talking like, 10, 15 years ago people, they were afraid of automation. Some still are. But they I think understand as part of a digital transformation, they got to automate. So what are the challenges that they're having and how are you helping them solve them? >> So typically, what people have thought about automation has been more network-centric, but as we just discussed multicloud, automation is extending all the way to the public cloud, at the workload or at the functional level, if you're running in Lambda, for example. And then more importantly, traditionally, customers have been leveraging Python scripts and things of that nature, but the days of scripters are there, but they cannot scale. You need a model-driven framework, you need model-driven telemetry to get insight. So I think the learning curve of customers moving to a model-driven mindset is extremely important, and it's not just about the network alone, it's also about the application. So that's why we're driving a lot of our frameworks and education and training. And talent's a big gap that we're helping with with our training programs. >> Okay, so you're talking about insights. There's a lot of data. The saying goes, "data is plentiful, insights aren't." So how do you get from data to insights? Is that where the machine intelligence comes in? Maybe you can explain that. >> There's a combination. Machines can process much faster than humans can, but more importantly, somebody has to drive the 30 or 40 years of experience that Cisco has from our tech, our architects and CX, and our customers and the community that we're developing through DevNet. So taking trusted expertise from humans, from all that knowledge base, combining that with machine learning so we get the best of both worlds. 'Cause you need that experience. And that is driving insight so we can filter the signal from the noise, and then more importantly, how do you take that signal and then, in an automated fashion, push that down to an intent-based architecture across the board. >> Dave, can you take us inside a little bit of your touchpoints into customers? In the old days, it was a CCIE, his job, his title, it was equipment that he would touch, and today, talking about this multicloud and the automation, it's very dispersed as to who owns it, most of what I am managing is not something that's under their purview, so the touchpoints you have into the company and the relationship you have changed a lot in the last three, five years or so. >> Absolutely, 'cause the buying center's also changing, because folks are getting more and more centric around the line of business and want the outcome we want to drive for their clients. So the cloud architecture teams that are being built, they're more horizontal now. You'll have a security person, an application, networking, operations, for example, and what we're actually pioneering, a lot of the enterprises and SPs, is building the site reliability engineering teams, or SRE, which Google has obviously pioneered, and we're bringing those concepts and teams through a CX framework, through telecos, and some of their high-end enterprises initially, and you'll see more around that over the coming months. Our SRE jobs, if you go on LinkedIn, you'll probably see hundreds of them out there now. >> One of the other things we've been watching is Cisco has a very broad portfolio. This whole CX piece has to make sure that, from a customer's standpoint, no matter where the portfolio, whether core, edge, IOT, all these various devices, I should have a simplified experience today, which isn't necessarily, my words, Cisco's legacy. How do you make sure, is software a unifying factor inside the company? Give us a little bit about those dynamics inside. >> Absolutely, so we take a life cycle approach. It's not one and done. From the time there's a concept where you want to build out a blueprint, but there's no transformation journey, we have to make sure we walk the client through preparation, planning, design, architecture optimization, but then making sure they actually adopt, and get the true value. So we're working with our customers to make sure that they go around the entire life cycle, from end to end, from cradle to grave, and be able to constantly optimize. You're hearing the word continuous pretty much everywhere. It's kind of the fundamental of CICD, so we believe in a continuous life cycle approach that we're walking the customers end to end to make sure from the point of purchase to the point of decommissioning, making sure they're getting the most value out of the solutions they're getting from Cisco. >> All right Dave, we'll give you the last word on Cisco Live 2019. Thoughts? Takeaways? >> I think there's just amazing energy here, and there's a lot more to come. Come down to the CX booth and we'll have to show you some more gadgets and solutions where we're taking our forward customers. >> Great. David, thank you very much for coming to The Cube. >> Pleasure, thank you. >> All right, 28,000 people and The Cube bringing it to you live. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Lisa Martin is also in the house. We'll be right back from Cisco Live San Diego 2019, Day 3. You're watching The Cube.

>> Narrator: Live, from San Diego, California, it's The Cube, covering Cisco Live, US, 2019. Brought to you by Cisco, and it's Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to San Diego, everybody, you're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Volante. I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman, we're covering day two here of Cisco Live, 2019. Anand Oswal is here, he's the Senior Vice President of Enterprise Networking Engineering at Cisco, and John Apostolopoulos. The Italians and the Greeks, we have a lot in common. He is the VP and CTO of Enterprise Networking at Cisco. Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube. How did I do? >> You did awesome. >> Dave: Not too bad, right? Thank you. (chuckles) All right. Anand, let's start with you. You guys have had a bunch of news lately. You're really kind of re-thinking access to the network. >> Anand: Yeah. >> Can you explain what's behind that, to our audience? >> Yeah. If you think about it, the network is running more and more critical infrastructure. At the same time, it's increasing modern scale and complexity. What we expect, is that you always need wireless on. The workspace is on the move. You're working here, in your office, in the cafe, in the soccer field, everywhere. You want an uninterrupted, unplugged experience. For that, it's wireless first, it's cloud-driven, and it's data-optimized. So, we had to rethink how we do access. It's not just about your laptops and your phones on the wireless network, in the enterprise it's digital management systems. IOD devices, everything's connected wirelessly. And we need to rethink the access, on that part. >> So John, this obviously ties in to, you know, you hear all the buzz about 5G and WIFI 6. Can you explain the connection and, you know, what do we need to know about that? >> Okay, so 5G and WIFI 6 are two new wireless technologies, which are coming about now, and they're really awesome. So, WIFI 6 is the new version of WIFI. It's available today, and it's going to be available predominantely indoors. As we use WIFI indoors, in high-density environments, where we need a large database per square meter. And the new WIFI 6, the coverage indoors. 5G is going to be used predominately outdoors, in the cellular frequency. Replacing conventional 4G or LTE, and it'll provide you the broad coverage as you roam around, outdoors. And what happens though, is we need both. You need great coverage indoors, which WIFI 6 can provide, and you need great coverage outdoors, which 5G will provide. >> So, the 4G explosion kind of coincided with mobile-- >> Anand: Yep. >> Obviously, and that caused a huge social change-- >> Anand: Yep. >> And of course, social media took off. What should we expect with 5G, is it, you know, I know adoption is going to take a while, we'll talk about that, but it feels like it's more, sort of, B-to-B driven, but maybe not. Can you, sort of, give us your thoughts there. >> Well think about it, if you see WIFI 6 and 5G have actually been on some similar fundamental technology building blocks. You know, you've all been at a ball game. Or the Warriors game, like a few weeks ago, when they were winning. And, after a great play, you're trying to send that message, a video to your kid or something, and the WIFI is slow, latency. With WIFI 6, you won't have that problem. 'Cause WIFI 6 has four times the latency, sorry, four times the throughput and capacity as existing WIFI. Lower latency. And also, the battery life. You know, people say that batteries are the most important thing today, like in the Maslow Hierarchy Chart-- >> Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Three times the battery life, for WIFI 6 endpoints. So, you're going to see a lot of use cases where you have inter-working with WIFI 6 and 5G. WIFI 6 for indoors, and 5G for outdoor, and there'll be some small overlap, but the whole idea is that, how do you ensure that these two disparate access networks are talking to each other? Exchanging security, policy, and there is some visibility. >> Okay, so, well, first of all, you're a Warriors fan, right? >> Anand: Yeah, I am. >> Awesome, we want to see this series keep going. >> Game six, baby! >> That was really exciting. Now of course, I'm a Bruins fan, so we're on the plane the other night, and the JetBlue TV shut down, you know, so I immediately went to the mobile. >> Yeah. >> But it was a terrible experience, I was going crazy. Texting my friends, what's happening? >> Anand: Yeah. >> You're saying that won't happen-- >> Anand: Yeah. >> With 5G and WIFI 6? >> Anand: Yeah. Exactly. >> Oh, awesome. >> So, John, help connect for us, Enterprise Networking. We've been talking about the new re-architectures, you know, there's ACI, there's now intent-based networking, how does this play into the 5G and WIFI 6 discussion that we're having today? >> Okay, so one of the things that really matters to our customers, and to everybody, basically, is that they want the sort of end-to-end capability. They have some devices, they want to talk through applications, they want access to data, they want to talk with other people, or to IoT things. So you need this sort of end-to-end capability, wherever the ends are. So one of the things we've been working on for a number of years now, is first of all intent-based networking, which we announced two and a half years ago. And then, multi-domain, where we try to connect across the different domains. Okay, across campus, and WAN, and data center, all the way to the cloud, and across the service finder network. And to add security, as foundational across all of these. This is something that Dave Goeckeler and Chuck Robbins talked about at their keynote yesterday. And this is a huge area for us, 'cause we're going to make this single-orchestrated capability for our customers, to connect end-to-end, no matter where the end devices are. >> All right, so Anand, I have to believe that it's not the poor, you know, administrator, saying, oh my God, I have all these pieces and I need to manage them. (laughing) Is this where machine learning and AI come in to help me with all these disparate systems? >> Absolutely. Our goal is very simple. Any user, on any device, should have access to any application. Whether it's sitting in a data center, in a cloud, or multiple clouds. Or any network. You want that securely and seamlessly. You also want to make sure that the whole network is orchestrated, automated, and you have the right visibilities. Visibilities for ID, and visibility for business insights. Talk of AI and ML, what's happening is that as the network is growing in complexity and scale, the number of alerts are growing up the wazoo. So you are not able to figure it out. That's where the power of AI and machine learning comes. Think about it. In the industrial revolution, the industrial revolution made sure that you don't have the limitations of what humans can do, right? You had machines. And now, we want to make sure that businesses can benefit in the digital revolution. You're not limited by what I can pass through the logs and scrolls. I want to automate everything. And that's the power of AI and machine learning. >> Are there use cases where you would want some human augmentation, where you don't necessarily want the machine taking over for you, or do you see this as a fully-automated type of scenario? >> Yeah, so what happens is, first of all, visibility is really, really important. The operator of a network wants to have visibility, and they want end-to-end across all these domains. So the first thing we do is we apply a lot of machine learning, to take that immense amount of data, as Anand mentioned, and to translate it into pieces of information, to insights into what's happening. So then we can share to the user and they can have visibility in terms of what's happening and how well it's happening, are they anomalies, or is there a security threat, so forth. And then, we can provide them additional feedback. Hey, this is ananomaly, this could be a problem. This is the root cause of the problem, and we believe these are the solutions for it. What do you want to do? Do you want to actuate one of these solutions? And then they get to choose. >> And if you think about the other way, our goal is really to take the bits and bites of data in the network, convert that data into information. That information into insights. That insights that lead to outcomes. Now, you want to also make sure that you can augment the power of AI and machine learning on those insights, so you can drill down exactly what's happening. So, for example, you want to first baseline your network. What's normal for your environment? And when you have deviations. That's anomalies. Then you narrow down exactly what the problem is. And then you want to automate the remediation of that problem. That's the power of AI and ML. >> When you guys, as engineers, when you think about, you know, applying machine intelligence, there's a lot of innovation going on there. Do you home-grow that? Do you open source it? Do you, you know, borrow? Explain the philosophy there, in terms of from a development standpoint. >> Yeah. From a development point of view it's a combination of all the other aspects. We will not reinvent what already exists, but there's always a lot of secret sauce that you need to apply, because everything flows to the network, right? If everything flows to the network, Cisco has a lot of information. It's not just a data lake. We're a data source as well. So taking this disparate source of information, normalizing it, harmonizing it, creating a language, applying the algorithm of AI and machine learning. For example, we do the model learning and training in the cloud. We do inference in the cloud, and you push the rules down. So it's a combination of all of the aspects we talked about. >> Right, and you use whatever cloud tooling is available. >> Yes. >> But it sounds like from a Cisco engineering standpoint, it's how you apply the machine intelligence, for the benefit of your customers and those outcomes-- >> Anand: Yeah. >> Versus us thinking of Cisco as this new AI company, right? >> Anand: Yeah. >> That's not the latter, it's the former, is that fair? >> So one of the things that's really important is as you know, Cisco's been making, we've been designing our A6 for many years, with really, really rich telemetry. And as you know, data is key to doing good machine learning and stuff. So we've been designing the A6, to do do real time at wire speed telemetry. And also to do various sorts of algorithmic work on the A6 to figure out, hey, what is the real data you want to send up? And then we've optimized the OS, IOS XE, to be able to perform various algorithms there, and also to host containers where you can do more machine learning at the switch, at the router, even in the future, maybe, at the AP. And then with DNA center, we've been able to gather all of the data together, in a single data lake, where we can perform machine learner on top. >> That's a very important point John mentioned, because you want layer one to layer some of the analytics. And that's why the Catalyst 9120 access point we launched has the Cisco RF ASIC, that provides things like clean air for spectrum, we've also got the analytics from layer one level, all the way to layer seven. >> Yeah, I really like the line actually, from Chuck Robbins yesterday, he said, the network sees everything and Cisco wants to you know, give you that visibility. Can you walk us through some of the new pieces, what people, either things that, they might not have been aware of, or new announcements this week. >> So, as part of the Cisco AI network analytics, we announced three things. The first thing is automated baselining. What that really means is that, what's normal for your environment, right? Because what's normal for your own environment might not be the same for my environment. Once I understand what that normal baseline is, then, as I have deviations, I can do anomaly detection. I can correlate and aggregate issues. I can really bring down apply AI and machine learning and narrow down the issues that are most critical for you to look at right now. Once I narrow down the exact issue, I go on to the next thing, and that is what we call machine reasoning. And machine reasoning is all about automating the workflow of all you need to do to debug and fix a problem. You want the network to become smarter and smarter, the more you use it. And all of this is done through model learning and training in the cloud, inference in the cloud, and pushing it down, the rules as we have devices online, on plan. >> So do you see the day, if you think about the roadmap for machine intelligence, do you see the day where the machine will actually do the remediation of that workflow? >> Absolutely. That's where we need to get to. >> When you talk about the automated baselining, I mean there's obviously a security, you know, use case there. Maybe talk about that a little bit, and are there others? Really, it depends on your objective, right? If my objective is to drive more efficiency-- >> Yeah. >> Lower costs, I presume a baseline is where you start, right? So... >> When I say, baseline, what I mean really is like, say if I tell you that on this laptop, to connect to the WIFI network, it took you three seconds. And I ask you is that good or bad? You'll say, I don't know. (laughs) >> What's the baseline for the environment? >> Dave: Yeah. >> What's normal? And next time, if you take eight seconds, and your baseline is three, something is wrong. But, what is wrong? Is it a laptop issue? Is it a version on there, on your device? Is it an application issue? A network issue? An RF issue? I don't know. That's where AI machine learning will determine exactly what the problem is. And then you use machine reasoning to fix the problem. >> Sorry, this is probably a stupid question, but, how much data do you actually need, and how much time do you need, to actually do a good job in that type of use case? >> Well, what happens is you need the right data, okay? And you're not sure where the right data is. (chuckles) >> So originally what we'd do, a lot of our expertise, that Cisco has for 20 years, is figuring out what the right data is. And also, with a lot of the machine learning we've done, as well as machine reasoning, where we put together templates and so forth, we've basically gathered the right data, for the customer, and we refined that over time. So over time, like, this venue here, the way this venue's network, what it is, how it operates and so forth, varies with time, and we need to refine that over time, keep it up to date, and so forth. >> And when we talk about data, we're talking about tons of metadata here, right? I mean, do you ever see the day where there'd be more metadata than data? (laughs) >> Yeah-- >> Rhetorical question. (laughs) >> All right, so-- >> It's true though, it's true. >> Right? (laughing) >> We're here in the DevNet zone, lots of people learning about building infrastructures, code, tell us how the developer angle fits into what we've been discussing here. >> Oh, yes. So what happens is, as part of intent-based networking, a key part's the automation, right? And another key part's the assurance. Well, it's what DevNet's trying to do right now, by working with engineering, with us, and various partners, other customers, is they're putting together, what are the key use cases that people have, and what is code that can help them get that done? And what they're also doing, is they're trying to, they're looking through the code, they're improving it, they're trying to instill best practice and stuff, so it's a reasonably good code, that people can use and start building off of. So we think this can be very valuable for our customers to help move into this more advanced automation, and so forth. >> So, architecture matters, we sort of touched upon it, but I want you to talk more about multi domain architecture. We heard Chuck Robbins, you know, talk about it. What is it, why is it such a big deal, and how does it give Cisco a competitive advantage? >> Think about it, I mean, multi domain architecture's nothing but all the components of a modern enterprise network behind the scenes. From giving access to a user or device, to access to an application, and everything in between. Now traditionally, each of these domains, like an access domain, the WAN domain, can have hundreds of thousands of network nodes and devices. Each of these are configured, generally manually, the the CLI. Multi domain architecture's all about stitching these various domains into one cohesive, data-driven, automated, programmable network. So, your campus, your branch, your WAN, your data center and cloud, with security as an integral part of it, if at all. >> So, it's really a customer view of an architecture, isn't it. >> Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. >> Okay. It's good, I like that answer. I thought you were going to come out with a bunch of Cisco-- >> Anand: No. >> Mumbo-jumbo and secret sauce-- >> No. >> But it really is, you guys thinking about, okay, how would our customers need to architect their network? >> Exactly. Because if you think about it, it's all about a customer use case. For example, like, we talked earlier, today we are working everywhere. Like, on the poolside, in the cafe, in the office, and always on the go. You're accessing your business-critical applications, whether that's Webex, salesforce.com, O365. At the same time, you're reading Facebook, and WhatsApp, and YouTube, and other applications. Cisco's SD-WAN domain will talk to Cisco's ACI domain, exchange SLAs and policies, so now you can prioritize that application that you want, which is business-critical. And place the right part, for the best experience for you. Because you want the best experience for that app, no matter where you are. >> Well, and the security implications too, I mean-- >> Anand: Absolutely. >> You're basically busting down the security silos-- >> Yeah. >> Dave: And sort of the intent here, right? >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> Great. All right, last thoughts on the show, San Diego, last year we were Orlando, we were in Barcelona earlier this year, your thoughts about that. >> I think it's been great so far. If you think about it, in the last two years we've filled out the entire portfolio for the new access network. On the Catalyst 9100 access points, with WIFI 6, the switches, next generation campus core, the wireless LAN controller, eyes for unified policy, DNA center for automation, analytics, DNA spaces for business insights, the whole access network has been reinvented, and it's a great time. >> Nice, strong summary, but John, we'll give you the last word. >> What happens here is also, everything Anand says, and we have 5000 engineers who've been doing this over multiple years, and we have a lot more in the pipe. So you're going to see more in six months from now, more in nine months, and so forth. It's a very exciting time. >> Excellent. Guys, it's clear you, like you say, completing the portfolio, positioning for the next wave of access, so congratulations on all the hard work, I know a lot goes into it >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much for coming on The Cube. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, keep right there, Dave Volante with Stu Miniman, Lisa Martin is also in the house. We'll be back with The Cube, Cisco Live 2019, from San Diego. (fast electronic music)

(energetic technological music) >> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019 brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend day two of theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. We're in Atlanta, Georgia welcoming back one of our CUBE alumni, Lee Doyle, Principal Analyst at Doyle Research. Lee, it's great to have you back on theCUBE. >> Thanks, for having me. >> So we were chatting away all day yesterday with Citrix execs and analysts. We talked to one of their customers from the Miami Marlins. Excited about day two today. We talked a lot about some of the key tenets that Citrix addressed yesterday: digital workspace, the intelligent experience, analytics, security. We want to talk about networking with you. I was looking at a stat the other day that said over 80% of businesses believe the ability to migrate apps to the cloud is hindered by network infrastructure complexity. Talk to us about that and what Citrix is doing to help reduce that complexity. >> Sure. So we're now in an environment where data is everywhere, employees are everywhere, partners are everywhere, data is flowing. You're going to be using in-house applications. You're using SaaS-based applications. You're using applications on AWS or Azure or Google, and there's no good control of that information, but there also isn't a good way necessarily to deliver the appropriate quality of user experience or quality of service that those applications need. So the network, that's where the network sits. It's handling all the traffic. It sees the traffic. It can help with security. So that's why the network becomes so important here. >> So, Lee, SD-WAN has come so far. I remember back when I managed networks and trying to come up with policy-based routing to send voice traffic one way, send, you know, FTP traffic another way, and now we have a robust market. I thought the market would collapse. It's 20 plus, last time I looked, 20 plus significant SD-WAN solutions out in the market. Where is Citrix and the customer mindsets when it comes to SD-WAN? >> Right. So I'll start with SD-WAN and the broad picture which is, you know, SD-WAN is a great technology at the right place, at the right time. It's the example of SDN, broadly, that's had very good adoption. And it solves a real problem, which is that you need to link the user and the application with each other. And that application can be in a variety of places. So you're not, no longer just simply going from the branch via MPLS to the data center. Great, now you're going to Amazon. Now you're going to Salesforce. Now you're going to Microsoft. And the idea of having a hybrid WAN with internet connections, MPLS, 4G LTE, cable, like, whatever you want. So SD-WAN technology sits at that nexus and providing the intelligence and the management and the ease of use to enable the remote workforce in the remote branches. >> So, can you go on a really interesting combination? Identity, Citrix is really into identity management. SD-WAN. What's possible? Talk to us about the "what's possible" when you can tie identity to your network. >> Right. Yeah, so Citrix is a solid SD-WAN supplier. They're able to identify the traffic. They have partnerships with all the major cloud guys. And, one of the critical aspects of SD-WAN is how you tie in the security aspect. So you have network security and partnerships, maybe with a Palo Alto or Zscaler or some other folks, but then you also have the identity because there is no fixed perimeter anymore, right? >> Right. There is no more four walls. >> So, the bad, the bad guys can get access at any different point. So authentication and understanding, you know, that identity is a critical aspect. And Citrix has some excellent partnerships and programs to help that out. >> Especially, >> So, >> I'm sorry. Go ahead. >> Go ahead. >> Especially when you think of Office 365 and these services where, you know, when I think of Office 365 I think about my consumer version of Office 365. I can share data with anyone in the organization. I can access it from anywhere in the world. Right before we started recording, you know, we talked a little bit about the ability of Citrix, with the partnership with Microsoft and Office 365, to improve access to Office 365. When we think about that from a consumer perspective that kind of, you know, it doesn't, it kind of doesn't register. "Wait, I need to. When I use Office 365 it just works." >> Right. >> What are some of the challenges enterprises are facing as they adopt solutions like O 6, O365 and SaaS in general? >> Right. So, you've got the quality of experience, quality of service issue, right? Making sure that the remote user or remote office is hitting the right path on the internet to the right on-ramp, is sort of one aspect of it, right? >> Right. >> So identify that as 0365, get me to the right on-ramp, but have a nice, you know, seamless, quick experience. The other is, from a security standpoint, understanding that, you know, who the user is. What data are they accessing? What data are they sending around? Is that part of the normal behavior or is that something that looks a little strange and maybe we should flag that. I mean, clearly, people do do a lot of sensitive things on Office 365. >> When you're out in the field, Lee, talking with customers, you have to transform digitally. There's so many steps involved in that. We, you know, we talk about cultural transformation and security transformation. Network transformation. How do you advise, especially like, we'll say, legacy organizations. Maybe like a peer of Citrix's whose been around for decades. How do you advise them to start that network transformation process so that they can deliver, for example, you know, facilitate collaboration via 0365 globally, what is that process like to transform a network? >> Right. It's obviously very complex and highly dependent on where you are and where you're starting, but there's no question that these organization are not going to throw the network that they have today. They've got switches and routers, wifi, and applications over controllers and all sorts of different things. So, one of the reasons why SD-WAN has been successful is it's able to slide into the network relatively seamlessly as an overlay. So you don't have to rip and replace. And then, gradually, as you bring up new sites or small locations or temporary sites, you may find that the actual router isn't as important over time. And then you can start to evolve that to a more simplified branch network operation. Instead of having five different boxes at a given branch you can move to two or three and, you know, ultimately I think we're going to a more unified SD branch type solution, but that might be a few years out still. >> So, and as we talk, you know, kind of the few years out, one of the great benefits, productivity wise, from using the SaaS services, destroying the walls, so to speak, the perimeter, is that we can get frictionless transactions. The, Citrix is, you know, touting the employee experience. If I need to share a document with you that shouldn't there shouldn't be a ton of friction in that. But in that comes the, the scare of employees. We've been talking all week, or both days, about employees are the weak link in security. If I can't trust my employee to not have their post-it note with the password on their, on their monitor then all the security in the world can't, won't help. How is Citrix making security easier and frictionless so that, one, we're ensuring all Dr. Albright talked about, "We need to be able to trust who we're talking to." >> Right. >> So, at the beginning we need to be able to trust who we're talking to is actually who we intend to talk to. How is Citrix going about enabling that? >> Right. So, it goes back to, you know, identity and end-point management. Is that the device that we expect it to be? Is it the person that we expect it to be? Are they doing the things that they normally do, right? And then, you have the network can analyze, "Well, is that a strange traffic? Is there something being inserted? Is there malware? Is there an attack?" So you have, security can not only degrade the performance of the network, but it also can be used to take out data that you don't want to have leaving the premises as it were. So, >> Or even if the data hasn't been opened and peeked at. >> Right. >> So, you know, the SSL security keys that when it left the premises the same as the when it was received on the other end. Are those things still in tact? >> Right. Very complex, though. But, it's not a, >> Yeah. >> Now, we haven't solved the security problem yet. But, Citrix is certainly making some good headway. >> I wanted to get your opinion, speaking of Citrix and headway. As I mentioned, 30-year-old company, maybe they consider themselves 30-years-young. I noticed last year at Synergy 2018 rebranding, messaging changes, positioning. One of the first things David Henshall showed the audience yesterday in his keynote was a big, great eye chart that just showed how much they've been focused on delivering. And they've delivered new solutions faster than they ever have before. We're hearing now about, they've really elevated their technologies to not be for power users, but for the general user which is most of us. I'd love to get your, your perspective on, not just the last year of Citrix's evolution, but over the last few years and how you think their, where they are now, is a competitive advantage to their business. >> Right. So, I focus mostly on the networking side of what Citrix is doing. And they've rebranded the networking. They've made some very significant enhancements both in SD-WAN and the ADC and intelligent traffic management. And I think the next evolution for Citrix is really integrating these solutions together and, you know, moving even to, to easier to consume bundles. They, what they've done in the last, in this cycle of announcement is given a lot of different options in terms of ways to consume. You can consume it on the major cloud platforms. You can consume it as a box. You can consume it as a license or as a usage-based. Over time I'm interested to see how Citrix migrates to more network-as-a-service offerings which would make it even easier to consume. And, you know, as a workspace user you, that, those tools might be in the background. You might not even know that they exist. And in some cases that's already here today, but there's a lot more that the industry and Citrix can do there. >> Do they have the foundation to eventually get to network-as-a-service? Maybe the right ecosystem of partners to do that, in your opinion? >> Yeah. I mean, I think that's the, that's where they're headed and I think they have some good technology, and good partners, and obviously always more work to do. But, >> So as you talk to combine Citrix and your own customers, I would like to get some insights. That, we, we've heard several times over the past couple days, me and Lisa, that there's five generations of workforce in the workforce. Which also means there's five generations of leadership. So when I saw the stat in yesterday's show, when all the changes that happened in a year at Citrix, one part of me was like, "Oh, that's great. That's the consumerization of IT, enterprise IT." Then another part of me was like, "Whoa, that's a lot of change." You know, if I set up a, if I spent a year and a half, two years deploying a network, I want that network to be very stable for the next five to seven years. How have customers embraced the consumerization, or the pace of change inside of Citrix and in the industry as well? >> Sure. So, I think the network issue a little bit separate because it's not at really consumerization of the network, right? >> Right. >> And so that's still, you know, you still need network professionals and, that being said, you know, Citrix SD-WAN is very easy to install and, you know, has good operational tools and, you know, improved management. So you're network management is now back in vogue and making it, you know, making life easier for IT administrators. You know, the whole consumerization, I mean, that's just like there's so many tools and so many channels. And, you know, the the issue of being overwhelmed by the seven different ways that we might communicate with each other is a very real, you know, challenge. And I'm glad to see Citrix, you know, addressing that because each generation or types of will have their own favorite, you know, ways to go about it. >> Oh, yes. Even, you can think about it in your family. Somebody might be an email person. Somebody might be a text person. Somebody might be a WhatsApp person. It's hard enough to manage, to try to meet everybody. So somebody might be a phone person? >> I know, like, real-time >> Who talks on the phone? Voicemail? >> Real-time communication. >> Right. Creepy. But in terms of, you're saying you know that we talked about consumerization, and not consumerization of the network. But those network expert that you talked about are influenced as consumers at home. And we all as consumers have these expectations of everything on-demand. I want to be able to use the tools that I'm most familiar with to become the most productive. So, how are the network engineers and their own consent of consumerization potentially going to impact consumerization of the network? >> Right. I mean I really look at the, you know, the two things of, you know, is the network, is my application available and is it responsive, right? Obviously the first one's a deal breaker. The second one is incredibly frustrating. And then of course the third area from an IT or SecOps standpoint is, you know, is it secure? Right? And then, you know, from an IT or network professional I need to enable those things so give me more tools. So, I mean I think that the buzzwords of, you know, machine learning and artificial intelligence as applied to networking are still a little early for that. But there are, you know, Citrix is using, you know, its vast intelligence that it gathers through its traffic management system to to look at, you know, where where to best route the traffic. It's deploying new tools to make things easier to deploy and easier to troubleshoot. So anything that the industry and Citrix can do there makes the life easier for the network guy and the IT guys. >> Making life easier. I think that's what we all want, right? >> Right. >> Well, Lee, thank you so much for coming back to theCUBE and talking with Keith and me at Citrix Synergy. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks. >> Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Atlanta, Georgia, Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (energetic technological music)

>> Live from Miami Beach Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody, we're here at the Fontainebleau hotel. You're watching theCUBE, the leader of live tech coverage. This is day one of our coverage of VeeamON, the third year that we've covered Veeam, they've selected this great location here in Miami. I'm Dave Vellante, with my co-host Peter Burris. Ratmir Timashev is here, he is the co-founder and executive vice president, world-wide sales of Veeam, business guru, sales and marketing maven, a very successful entrepreneur, welcome to the theCUBE and thanks so much for having us. >> Thank you Dave, thank you Peter, thanks for having us. Thanks for doing this at our event. >> You're very welcome, so first of all congratulations, you hit that billion dollar milestone. You predicted it back in 2013, you missed it by about six months Ratmir, you know, (laughs) but really, great. Trailing 12 months, a billion dollars in revenue that includes of course your Ratable revenue, the subscription revenue, which who could have predicted that back in 2013, so amazing milestone, congratulations. And great venue here, you must be really pleased with the turnout, couple thousand people, your thoughts? >> Yeah absolutely, I personally love Miami, this is the best city. Always sunny, always ocean, always blue sky, awesome. And always sand, like that's the best place. So I've always had the dream to have VeeamON in Miami, so the dream comes true, we have over 2,000 people here and many more are watching livestream online. Very excited, very excited. >> Well, Veeam's always been a hip company, always a lot of fun, this is obviously a hip place, good fun part of the country. Let's talk about act one and act two. Act one was, you guys really rode the virtualization wave and you talked today about act two really being cloud and hybrid cloud data management. What are the similarities and the differences between act one and act two? >> So like we discussed during the keynote session, every 10 years or so there is a major industry transformation shift from one platform to another platform, so Veeamware 10 years ago created this technology visualization that dramatically fundamentally changed the way modern data centers are built and managed. And Veeam was very lucky to be at the earlier stage of that virtualization revolution that changed the whole data center. that changed the whole data center. So we were at the right time at the right place. We created the new market, Veeamware backup, and then we extended it to hyperV and HV. So we dominated that mode of data LAE share. But in the last few years we expanded our platform. So beyond just the virtualization, we added the physical support, the Unix support, the cloud support. So now Veeam represents broad, what we call Veeam Availability Platform that supports LAE clouds, virtual, physical clouds. That was act one, we dominated it. We grew from zero to 1 billion within 10, 12 years. We added 350,000 customers over that timeframe. And now it's act two, what is act two? Act two is the, again, the new major industry transformation to a hybrid cloud. What are the similarities? Again, Veeam is in a great position because we're at the right time at the right place with a brilliant product. We have the broad LAE system of our channel partners. We have a broad customer base, 350,000. And we have great technology partnerships with HP, Cisco, NetUP, Nutanix, Pure, and others, so as well as AWS, and Microsoft, and Google, and IBM cloud. So we are in extremely great position to dominate this second wave, what we call second act, which will be the next decade of hybrid cloud. >> Yeah, so optionality was a key, being able to support multiple use cases and supporting different environments. You're well positioned, you're saying, in act two. Act one you really didn't have a lot of competition, you kind of schooled the competition, I think Dell took out some of your early competition then you ran circles around everybody else. A lot more money pouring into this space now, you showed the slide, 15 billion, you've got a 15th of it. Tell us again why you feel like you can, you just used the word, dominate, with all this competition. You got the big guys now sort of learning from you and trying to copy some of your moves and maybe pre announcing some stuff to try and freeze the market. What gives you great confidence that you will dominate act two. >> Again, we have a history of innovation, so we know that there are new requirements for the hybrid cloud. People not only want to protect the data, they want to make sure that when they move to a hybrid cloud, when they put the workloads in a public cloud, that that data is protected, is secured and protected. So that's one capability that customers are looking for. Another capability, they want to be able to move the data back on-prem, or between the clouds, what we call cloud mobility, so they want to have this flexibility and freedom, be cloud agnostic or avoid that cloud lock-in. So they want to also make sure that from compliance standpoint, they are able to move the data if needed. In other use cases they want to leverage the cloud for different data protection capabilities. They want to leverage the cloud for backup, for disaster recovery as well as for long term retention, what we call cloud tier, so they want to, instead of tape, they want to replace tape with the public cloud low storage. So they want to use the cost and the skill ability of the public cloud for long term retentions. So all these use cases, extension of our platform. So we already have the, we own the one component of the hybrid cloud which is on-prem, modern data center, what some people call private cloud. We already own one component and we have 350,000 customers. Most of these customers are going to deploy hybrid cloud. In fact, according to our survey, 73% of our customers are deploying or planning to deploy a hybrid cloud. So most of them I think, in how to leverage the performance, the skill ability, and the elasticity, of the public cloud. So we own this component, we have the capabilities and we're developing product capabilities for the public cloud and with our orchestration on top of it and monitoring and analytics capabilities. So it's a complete solution. >> So Ratmir, I want to build upon this notion of act one and act two because good for you guys over ten years but the industry also is going through an act one to act two when you come right down to it. Where data, for the first four years of this industry, was about recording events that have happened. And now data going forward is becoming a strategic asset that's actually shaping the events that are happening or will happen. And it requires a new approach. It requires that data be regarded as a strategic asset and capabilities have to be established to support that data. I'm especially itched in with the introduction that you made because it suggests that you guys are going to look to an ecosystem to bring that degree of specialization and uniqueness and invention, on top of your platform, to serve a rapidly expanding range of strategic capability requirements when we think about data protection, data assurance. Do you see it the same way? >> Absolutely yeah, I 100% agree. I talked about that briefly during my keynote. We see that there are this four technology superpowers what Pat Galson from Veeamware calls technology superpowers. And those are the cloud, the mobile, artificial intelligence and age in internal things. So all this four technology superpowers. The biggest producers and consumers of the data. So it has to be both in the cloud and on the age so the new product and services are built on that data. Either we are talking about self driving cars, or we are talking about breakthrough in DNA research or cancer research. It's all built both in the cloud and on the age. And Veeam has this technology called data lapse. So when we've actually provide the access to the data, to a field party, either security or compliance or analytical tenders. So they can build more solutions on top of our data lapse. >> So talk a little bit about how you planned to deploy capital going forward, particularly as you try to leverage the opportunities in cloud two. You're seeing all kinds of new emerging technologies. We talk about coup berneties and containers all the time. You've made some acquisitions in the cloud area. Should we think about your emanate strategies as just sort of advancing your ability to either form ecosystems or actually bring in more cloud like capabilities, beyond act one into act two? >> Yeah I mean, first of all, we have a very powerful product and RNZ group. Partially we have this mentality not invented here so in other words we want to invent more in house. However, there are some cases where we need to extend our platform and we might not have the bandwidths or time through market so we're looking at some adjacent in the cloud management space, in the cloud optimization, course optimization, analytics. Those areas are very interesting for us to expand our platform to. >> I'm guessing that NIH mentality, acquisitions you make have to fit into that platform, that architecture. How do you evaluate? You say okay, can we do this ourselves? You say do we have the bandwidth? Is that technology here now? >> Does with Veeam help? >> Yeah with Veeam that's a great problem that we announced today as well. Yeah so the way we evaluate is that, is this adjacent market to what we're doing? For example, AWS or Asur, how close the buyer is. Or Office 365 backup we evolved in house. Or Office 365 backup we evolved in house. Azureware developed in house. Some technologies we are looking to acquire. The question is, is that the same buyer? If the buyer is the same, we prefer to develop in house. If the buyer, for now, is different, we would like to acquire the company and let it grow, and then merge into Veeam later. >> So your co founder runs RND correct? >> Correct >> And you run sales and marketing? So you guys fight over how you're going to allocate the dollars. But as a specialist in data protection, you're allocating all of your RND funding toward data protection. Presumably that helps you compete against the guys who are doing primary storage, secondary storage, all kinds of other software. So when you think about that road map, you told the story about how you got inspiration. You went to Silicon Valley and you were flying back and your partner said, well you know the best product just doesn't always win but you said, whoa so what, do we not invent the best products? You want to have the best products. Talk a little about that sort of organic development. How you guys think about that approach. Where the ideas come from. Is it obviously the customer input? Your knowledge of the space? Where do you see that going? >> So Veeam we believe is very different from other companies. First, we don't build long term road map because the technology is changing so fast that we want to keep that flexibility and agility to change our roadmap. We only disclose our release that we're imminent. Within the next six, nine months we already know. Beyond that, we don't provide the roadmap. We have the vision but we don't have the roadmap with the exact specific dates. >> But it's not a waterfall thinking. It's more agile applied to our-- >> Exactly, agile and flexibility that's what's, agility and flexibility that's what's most important. For example, a year ago or even two years ago when we announced version 10. We didn't know that object storage will become such a needed hot thing that all our customers are asking for. Including the on-prem object storage and the cloud object storage. So we changed our plans and we put lots of resources into object storage. And we finally released the best capability to use the object storage. We believe that object storage is the next cool thing in cloud data management because it will provide 10 times more capacity at the 10th of the course and 10 times faster performance. So it's like it's the next cool technology. That's just one example. Another thing is that, what differentiates Veeam in terms of RNZ and product strategy is that, if we release the feature, we don't do it as a marketing check box, we do cloud storage or we do object storage or we do this or we support Azure. When we design the feature, we think about is it going to be really really valuable? So that our customers, when they get it, they say wow, that's exactly what I needed. So we don't do as a marketing check box, we do provide and our customers really value that. They expect from Veeam that when Veeam releases something, it's going to be useful. >> And easy to use. >> Easy to use and very useful. >> That's important because when you're on offence, you don't have to do check box marketing. We know that a lot of times companies will do check box marketing 'cause they'll hear it in the field. The innovater has it, oh we have it too. And when you really peel the onion you see the differences and start to move forward. Okay so let's talk a little about customers. You had United Health on today. What are you hearing from customers? What are the customers saying that are inspiring you and your team? >> Today's conversations with the customers they start with the modernizing the, continue modernizing their data. A lot of customers still use the legacy backup solutions. They want to modernize. But the conversation quickly shifts to the hybrid cloud. How Veeam is going to help me not only modernize the backup data management on-prem, but how Veeam is going to help me to move to the cloud, manage the data, orchestrate the data movement in the cloud and maybe if needed, bring the data back for compliance reasons. So that conversation always occurs with any size companies. In fact, according to our survey, 73% of our customers say that they have a hybrid cloud strategy. Only 10% say no, we will always stay 100% on-prem. And about 15% say I will move everything to a public cloud. The huge majority is in the middle. 73% have the hybrid strategy. >> Yeah that sort of answers my next question but I'm going to ask it anyway. So an observer might well aren't the cloud guys just going to do their own backup and recovery. Why wouldn't that supplant Veeam? You sort of addressed it with the hybrid approach but I want to hear your answer. All the cloud guys have some form of replication or snapshotting, granted it's not as robust, you and I know that. But for the audience, explain to them why the cloud doesn't put you out of business. >> In fact cloud represents the biggest opportunity for the next 5-7-10 years. It's just historically, the platform vendors they don't provide the good tools, security tools or backup tools. We've been in this business over 25 years. Our first company was specialized in Windows Enterprise Management so we developed lots of tools around Microsoft platforms for managing active directory exchange server, share points, equal server. We always were afraid maybe Microsoft will come up with the similar solutions but they never did. The same is for today's world. Customers want to have the independence from the platform and the vendor, like AWS or Microsoft, they will never provide the capability to move the data outside of AWS. But for the true compliance security, a vendor like Veeam you need the capability not just backup AWS to AWS but you want to be able to backup AWS to on-prem and on-prem to AWS. Or AWS to Azure. So only Veeam can platform vendors, they are not looking to do that. So they want to move the data to the cloud. They're not necessarily providing more capabilities. Move the data outside of their cloud and that's where Veeam comes in, with the cloud mobility capabilities. >> One of the things that our researchers strongly pointed out, is that there are few places within a technology set of capabilities that they must control. And data protection is one of them. So they have to have an approach for managing data protection within their business that's their approach. And there are a few companies in a position to actually provide that. >> Yeah, I absolutely agree. Some customers they think that if I put the data into AWS or Azure or Office 365, Microsoft is going to protect it or AWS. No, it's your data, microsoft protects the infrastructure. So it's a off time service. That's where Microsoft or AWS are responsible. The data is yours. You are responsible for protecting the data recovery. If you delete an email, it's not Microsoft's fault. If you need to do an e-discovery on your email system, that's not Microsoft's problem. >> If you're out of compliance, Microsoft executives aren't going to jail. >> Exactly. That's your responsibility. Your data, Your responsibility. In fact we have a white paper that talks about the shared responsibility model. So there is a shared responsibility. AWS, public cloud providers, they're responsible to keep the service up and running. So therefore resilient infrastructure. Not the data, the data is yours. That sits on top of that resilient infrastructure. >> Yeah you've gone after Office 365 as the starting point for SaaS. Maybe there's other opportunities down the road. Right now it's probably a small market but I think it could emerge over time. But the overall time, you showed $15 billion. Today you have 1/15th of it. Lot more competition today. You see some of your competitors risk $250 million you have to one up them with a $500 million risk. You told me years ago Ratmir, we're probably not going to do an IPO. Give us an update there, same stance on that? >> No we've actually very open to the idea about IPO and we're exploring different opportunities. But we believe that we can continue growing organically because the company is very profitable. So we're reinvesting money into RNZ and we have good foundation for the next act two. But speaking about Office 365 by the way, it's the fastest growing product in the history of Veeam. >> Really? >> Of backup for Office 365 is the fastest growing because we have 350,000 customers, most of them are using Office 365 and they need to protect that data. So and they love Veeam, they are buying. But also we'll actually need new customers just buying Office 365. 23% of our customers for Office 365 are new customers. Also a little bit surprising for us. >> So O365 OneDrive is another opportunity that you guys have gone after. >> It's all part of the same product, yes. >> Salesforce maybe not quite there yet but you could potentially see that emerging as an opportunity? Do you see that? >> Yes we are looking at Salesforce. We are looking at G's width. We are looking at other SaaS applications that are popular among the business customers. >> One point really quickly Dave, is that 1/15th of that $15 billion TAM is just Veeam. Your ecosystem is increasingly going to use the Veeam services to expand the Veeam share of that, the virtual Veeam share of that, even as you grow. I think that's what's particularly interesting is how will that ecosystem add additional services on top of that, to grab more of that overall share. >> And I think, and please comment on that, that's unique to Veeam and the data protection space. You have your own events. You have premier partners that come in. Some of your competitors don't, they're not quite there yet. Some of the other larger competitors it's a small little piece of their whole business so the focus really is accentuated. >> Veeam has always had a channel part in ariant stretch. From day one we were 100% channel, 100%. We don't take the deal directly. Also, we build the broad service provider system network. So we have over 20,000 what we call Veeam cloud and service providers that provide the services to our customers based on Veeam platform backup in the cloud, disaster recovery, manage backup. Finally today we announce with Veeam that's another new initiative that we are expanding our ecosystem with Veeam APS where we want our partners, together with us, build this secondary storage systems that provide a single solution because some customers they want to buy in the form of the hardware appliance, our solution. So it's going to be pre installed, similar experience, out of the box functionality, easy to deploy, easy to manage with a single interphase. All provided and with a single support wise. So those systems will be created together with our partners. Like we announced one with Nutanix as well as with ExaGrid. We are working, Nutanix is one of the most innovative companies in our industry and we were very happy to partner with them because we believe that we will develop the right solution and we will be able to take this APS and offer our other partners to Build a secondary storage system, together with us. >> Well we've seen this little company, years ago, called Veeam, what a great name, superglue itself to the virtualization trend and really ride that wave now going onto act two, which is a cloud rapid timid shift. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Thank you Dave. >> Keep right there everybody. This is theCUBE, we're here at VeeamOn2019 in Miami. We'll be right back after this short break.

>> From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Open Systems, the future is crystal clear with security and SD-WAN. Brought to you by Open Systems. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody, you're watching the CUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here covering the open systems networking event. Two Gardner events this week in Las Vegas. Big month. Last week, of course, was AWS re:Invent, 53,000 people. Talking security, cloud, all kinds of cool stuff going here at the Cosmopolitan Hotel. Matt Creeg is here, he's the chief revenue officer at Open Systems. 36 hours in Matt-- >> 36 hours in. >> You're an expert. >> And I'm in Vegas. >> Like, lay down the plutonium. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, it's good to see you. >> Thanks for having me, thanks for having me. >> So, first question. Why did you join Open Systems? >> You know, that's a great question. I asked myself that a lot over the past three months in discussions with the Open team. And really, it's a different offering. It's a complete offering. It's not a product, it's really a solution and a service. And I really feel like it's something that the market really needs and really wants and has really been asking for from a SD-WAN perspective, from a security perspective, from a sock perspective. It's really a solution or an offering that the market has demanded. So when I started in discussions with the Open team, it became clear, it became compelling to me, that this was something that customers wanted, customers needed, and customers have been asking for for five, eight, 10 years, really. >> Awesome. We're going to come back and unpack some of those things-- >> Okay. >> A little bit. But before we do, a little bit on your background. You're brand new here. >> 36 hours. >> Just left Cisco via the Vintela acquisition. The company we've tracked closely for V Nacarazhu, good friend of theCUBE. Tell us about your journey. >> Yeah, so-- >> Who is Matt Creeg? >> Matt Creeg was, I will claim I was the first field sales guy of Vintela. The VP of sales hired me just prior just pre-product launch. So I really started Vintela from zero customers, zero revenue, SD-WAN didn't exist when I started there, to an acquisition by Cisco and 18 months with Cisco post-acquisition continuing to build that team, continue to build that market. >> So Cisco is pretty renowned for its acquisitions, it certainly chambers big part of him building Cisco was through acquisitions. >> Absolutely. >> Made a lot of good ones, they weren't all great, but most were really quite good. The Vintela acquisition, as I understand it, when you guys plugged in to the Cisco model, you really scale to me. First of all, you had to get to the point where you were an interesting acquisition target. You had to prove some success. And then my understanding is things exploded. So you were part of that? >> It was a crazy ride. It was four and a half years later, I can't believe it's been four and a half years. It was simultaneously the longest and shortest time of my life. It was the blink of an eye. >> Awesome. So you're obviously trying to bring some of that magic to Open Systems. Let's come back to the differentiation. So, you gave us some sort of high level overview of what was different. When you look at the market, what are some of the trends that you see that this company is vectoring into that attracted you? >> So, there's a very clear trend around network architecture, WAN architecture, WAN traffic patterns changing, based on everything moving to the cloud. Really based on workloads moving around, workloads moving out of corporate data centers into AWS. You said you were at re:Invent last week. >> Yep. >> AWDS as your GCP. So we're really seeing workloads move around. We're seeing workloads move out of a corporate data center, which has changed traffic patterns substantially. That's what SD-WAN really came to the market to address those changes in traffic patterns. What Open offers over a traditional SD-WAN player is really a fully managed, full white glove network solution. So it's not just, as I said earlier, it's not just a product, it's not just an SD-WAN product. It's really a true solution and a true white glove offering. >> So one of the things we talk about a lot is the transition from north/south traffic to east/west, what people are talking about, as you just described, moving from various clouds, on-prem, SaaS is another major force. I heard a stat the other day, the average company, average global 2,000 has eight clouds. Siglo Media has eight clouds. And when you throw in SaaS, >> Eight might be a little low. >> 80, right. As I was saying, it's small companies. So, you have all this data that's now distributed. So SD-WAN helps what? Fill in the blank. >> Helps connect securely and seamlessly connect to all of those different clouds. To all of those different areas of data. And really gives customers the ability, gives IT departments the ability to provide a rich, very high user experience for connectivity to all of those different types of clouds. >> Well we used to be, we didn't realize at the time, but it used to be relatively simple. Secure the perimeter, build a moat, and we'll be good. >> And everything was in your data center. Just protect that data center and you don't have to worry. >> Control it all, I could see it all. Now that notion of perimeter is gone. Security has to be fundamental to what you do. If you're moving workloads around and data around, security is paramount. So talk about the ethos of security. Why is it a priority for you guys? And what is it about Open Systems that makes you guys qualified to be that leader? >> So it's interesting. I don't know where I heard it, but somebody quoted, or somebody said a while ago, our generation work has become something we do, rather than somewhere we go. And that really speaks to that moat experience. That everything is within those corporate walls, right? So, as we move outside of that, as we work from the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, security becomes paramount. Securing that workstation, securing that endpoint that your customer, that your end user is leveraging to connect to all of your data becomes paramount. So making sure that not only is that end station secure, but the connectivity in between that end station and all of your different sources, all of your different applications, all of your your different data sources is encrypted, is authenticated. Everything is secured and controlled is key. The other thing that we're seeing is with the move to SaaS, with the move to O365, with the move to Workday and Salesforce, the ability to securely connect directly to those applications becomes key. Not traversing through a corporate data center or a corporate DMZ to get to those services is key. So really extending security all the way down to that edge or to that endpoint becomes key. And providing a full service, a full manage service, a full monitoring service around all of those endpoints becomes key. >> So performance becomes critical. And so, again, I know you're early in, but in the conversations that you had leading up to you taking this position, you probably talked to some customers, you're at the Gardner event today. What kinds of things, performance, et cetera, are customers asking for in this space? >> That's a great question. That's a very good question. So everybody is asking for the best performance, the best user experience that they can possibly get. Right? And interestingly enough it's almost become corporate IT is getting compared to consumer IT. How come when I'm at home and I'm on my Verizon Fios connection, access to Office 365 is so much better than when I'm in the corporate office? So really we're being compared to that kind of metric. We're really being compared to that always on, always accessible, instant access type of user experience. >> In a manage service though, it's almost like you bring in the cloud experience to wherever your data lives. Whether it's in a public cloud, in a SaaS, on-prem, we were just talking to hill & brand, might be IoT at the edge at some point in time. And it sounds like, if I understand it correctly, that you want to be the most secure, the highest performance, the best user experience, fully managed for those different types of installation environments. >> That's a very good, yeah, you got it. You need a job? >> I got one, but thank you. (both chuckling) Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> My pleasure. >> Best of luck. We'll be watching. High expectations, but you've done it before. Good luck in doing it again. >> Good to do it again. >> Alright, take care. >> Thanks for the time. >> Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from Cosmopolitan Hotel at the Open Systems networking event. We'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's The Cube! Covering Smartsheet ENGAGE 18. Brought to you by, Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to the Cube's continuing coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGED 2018, their second now annual event, our first one here. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick and Jeff and I are pleased to be joined right off the keynote stage, the SVP product Gene Farrell. Gene, welcome to the Cube! >> Well, thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here today. >> So, packed house, this event has doubled in size from your first one last year. It's about a couple thousand people here representing 1100 companies from 20 countries and you had a really cool interactive keynote this morning where you clearly showed very, I thought, organically how much Smartsheet is collaborating with your customers to drive the innovation of Smartsheet technology. Tell us a little about some of those enhancements and how you got the crowd to burst into applause at least three times. >> Well, I, thank you, I would tell you that Smartsheet, our whole product development process is driven by the customer. 95% of what we decided to build in our roadmap is grounded in customer feedback. And so, for us anytime we can engage with customers to learn not just what do they want, but what is the problem they're trying to solve. And that's really the art of great product management is going beyond just the suggestion to how are you going to use it? How does this help your business? Because, many times there's a better way to do it than what they come up with. And so, for us, coming to this ENGAGE conference, I think we announced over 20 new capabilities that are going to be available either now or in the next couple of months. And it was really easy to know we were going to get that applause because they pretty much told us what to build. So, we looked really smart but it's actually we're just listening. And so today we launched a number of great things like multi sign to, new automations, multi-step workflow, bunch of new connectors, a really cool dashboard widget for all sorts of web content. And we just can't wait to see how customers use it. >> It's pretty interesting when you're up there because we see this at a lot of little shows, when they're just getting started and, I'll still call you guys one of the little shows, where kind of the intimacy is so much tighter and really the knowledge sharing is very, very different than when you go to a big giant show that's got tens and tens of thousands of people. And you can feel that it was palatable, I thought that was pretty brave of Mark to walk out into the crowd and stick a microphone in somebody's face, the guy responded and he had an answer to the question of the way Smartsheet has helped him and I think he had two other people. But, what's really critical, we talked about automation a lot and processes a lot but it's the scale of the simple that becomes a big challenge and that's something that squarely right in your guys' roadmap. >> Well, it's definitely what we focus on and one of the things we have as a value as a company is being authentic. And for us, regardless of however big we get we know it's important to show up and be, you know, the best of who we are and engage with our customers in a real and authentic way and so, I think that really helps us have that connection and I hope when we're a billion dollar plus revenue company that we have that same feeling. And this conference hopefully will grow to tens of thousands but I think staying grounded in customers is just critically important. And I think how we differ from maybe some other folks in the technology space is we really focus on that every day user. How do we provide practical innovation that has the power they need without all the complexity that turns them off or scares them? And that's not, it's something that nobody else really focuses on and you hear a lot from technical companies about their powerful new innovation and these great breakthrough ideas but too many times it's engineers building for technically minded folks. And we've just chosen to go after a different group. >> I'm just curious how the people usually come into Smartsheet because, you know, the workflow space and, you know, there's just so many things out there that are all about the new way to work and you know, competing for my screen that I'm working on the majority of the time. So, I'm just curious where do people find you? How do they usually enter? 'Cause you got a pretty broad suite of applications and you integrate with a lot of different desktop tools so what's kind of that process do you see? >> I would say it's probably two primary ways. First is, we still have over a 100 thousand people every month that show up at our door and sign up for a free trial. Because they're looking for a better solution. They've been living hand to mouth with email and spreadsheets and they're just kind of overwhelmed by the velocity of work that's happening, the pace of change, and the old way isn't working for them anymore. And so, a big part of how people find Smartsheet is just they go out on the internet and say I'm looking for a better way to be more effective or I'm looking for a new way to manage a workflow or a project. The other way, and about 40% of our new customers that sign up for licenses come through our collaboration model. And it's actually kind of unique for us at Smartsheet. When you buy a Smartsheet license you are entitled to share your work with an unlimited number of collaborators both inside and outside your company. And those collaborators can view the work but also participate in the process. They can update sheets, they can provide input to the flow, and they actually get to engage and be part of that. And what we find is when people see the power of how other people manage and they participate they realize, hey, I want to use this for some of my work. >> So, it's not read-only? They can actually engage in my project that I've invited them to participate in? >> Absolutely, and the great they for you as the license owner is you never have to worry, hey, I want to share this with Sue. Does she have a license? Or do I have to go let her know ahead of time? You can share freely and not worry about people being able to participate. >> Well you have a big pipeline 'cause I was reading over the weekend that there's about 650,000 active individual users but about 3 million collaborators. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> Is that a differentiator for Smartsheet in terms of enabling that waterfall of demand generation? >> Well, we certainly think it's unique, right? There's lots of folks that kind of go down the free tier path. Where they say I'm going to give you all the capabilities in a free tier but I'm going to try and ratchet it down so you run into these pay walls at every turn where you then have to kind of license the organization wall to wall. And we just feel that doesn't really work for us. For us, we think it's important that anybody that's creating value in Smartsheet should have to pay for the value that they're using it to go create things with. But, the people that they enroll in that process, until they actually are creating their own stuff they should be able to participate for free. We think it really fits nicely with how modern work is evolving with a lot of teams and frankly a lot of teams across organizations. So, interesting fact is almost 40% of sharing in Smartsheet is with people that are outside of the company sharing. So, if you're sharing with all those folks in different companies and working across different organizations, trying to figure out who has what licenses and how to do things is just going to be a nightmare. So we want to make that just completely frictionless. >> So one of the things that is interesting about Smartsheet is that this is designed for the business user. You know, whether you're in sales, IT, finance, engineering, lot of different use cases you talked about kind of the breadth earlier, Jeff. Walk me through, if I'm at a large enterprise organization and I need to launch an omnichannel marketing campaign, but I use email, I use Slack, we got SalesForce, CRM. Maybe some of my, maybe I'm going to be collaborating with a different function that's using a competitive solution. How do you help me, I need to mange this campaign and I need to launch and I need to measure it. How do you help me connect my Slack, my teammates that aren't using it, that are on email. You're smiling big, walk us through that, what does that integration look like? >> Well, I think the first thing to remember is we really focus on the 60% of work that's unstructured and dynamic. So, this is the work that's constantly changing, and many times left to the business user to figure out how to get things done. And we recognize that in managing that unstructured work there are kind of different tools for different parts of the job, right? Just like if you go to any good mechanic's toolbox he's got more than just a hammer in there. And so for the business user they need messaging tools, like Slack or email to communicate. They create new content with document tools, whether it's G-Suite or O365. When they bridge the old world to the new world in the cloud they need file, sync, and share. People still have files, ironically, that sit on desktops and so they need to able to manage those in the cloud. None of those solutions is going to go away. You still need those for different things. Where we play is really helping people manage the what, when, and by whom. How do you actually execute the work? And today there's not a great platform to do that outside of Smartsheet. And so what we try do then is work seamlessly with all the tools that they're using today. So, to answer your question. If you're a Slack user, to get started with integrating Slack with Smartsheet it's as simple as from Slack, turning on the Smartsheet bot. That Smartsheet bot that enables you to receive signal directly from Smartsheet into Slack on update requests, notifications, approval requests that you can then action without ever leaving Slack. You can actually approve an invoice, you can update a Smartsheet directly from that Slack channel. It's the same type of integrations with file, sync, and share where you can attach documents from a Dropbox, or a Onedrive or a Box directly to a row or a sheet. And have a connection to the other work. >> So you're not driving the user back to do everything through the Smartsheet app, I can share things through Slack but I can also be right in Slack having a conversation with a teammate, >> Absolutely. >> And share everything through that directly. >> Absolutely. In fact, our integrations with our messaging platform, which is a core part of our strategy to kind of support how people work today in these modern platforms, really involves two types of integration. There's a channel integration. So, let's so you have a group of folks that are collaborating on some work, you've got a common sheet that you're using to actually manage the details of how you're going to get stuff done and then you have a Slack channel set up for them to engage, communicate, make decisions, collaborate. You can actually send signal directly from that sheet into the channel where everybody sees it in real time. >> What about mobile? >> Totally, works on mobile and on desktop. And then we actually have the bot, intelligent bot based integrations that are more personal. So, that's really your signal and the actions that you need to take. So, we're trying to really cover all bases and how teams want to engage with messaging. >> Just curious, as you've been rolling this out for a couple years, some of the crazier applications that you had no idea that people would use. This application for this type of use case, you can share us a funny, some great stories. >> There's certainly a broad array of use cases and there's a lot of times when you'll hear about a story and then you're like, well, yeah, I guess Smartsheet would be pretty good for that one. But, I would tell you, the ones that to me I get most excited about are the situations where the customer needs to do something really quickly because they're reacting to a signal or something that's happening in the market. And, so, one of the ones that I thought was really cool was actually last year's hurricanes, with Harvey and Irma. One of our large customers, Starbucks, actually used Smartsheet as a tool to connect with their teams and then manage the recovery. And, what they realized going in was they're team members are going to be on the ground in these areas that have been devastated by the hurricane. And they're not going to have internet connectivity, they're probably not going to have power, they got to reach them through mobile. And so they set up a really simple process where every morning they pushed a mobile form in Smartsheet to all of their crew members in those markets. And, the first thing they asked them was, are you okay, do you need help. And then once they knew that they were alright they then said, hey, are you available to work? Your store's going to be re-opening we want to know if you can work? And then with the managers they would poll on what's the state of the physical location and can we actually get open and start serving this community that's been devastated by this disaster? They literally came up with that idea and deployed in a couple of days. And they were getting, if you talk to their CEO, he would tell that he was getting reports every day on the status of who was available and how things were coming together. And then, the funny part of that is, they actually then were able to use that same Smartsheet mobile app to capture all the damage in store and my understanding was it was the first time they were actually able to get full recovery on insurance claims after an event like that. >> Oh, wow, alright. >> That's not really funny but a I really love that. >> Very impactful. >> But it's super important. But so we'll lighten it up a little bit before we let you go. In a prior life, your worked at Coca-Cola. >> I did. >> And you worked on the Freestyle. And for those who aren't familiar, Freestyle is the really cool vending machine when you go to McDonald's or Wendy's or whatever with all the push buttons. And what I find so interesting about Freestyle, it comes up at all the tech conferences. It was really a digital transformation of brown sugar water >> Absolutely. >> Into a phenomenal data stream that provided all types of transformational stories. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about that story and add a little color 'cause I think it's just a fantastic example of digital transformation of something that probably most people didn't think was possible. >> Sure, oh no, I'd be happy to. It's one of my favorite stories to tell, actually. It was an amazing six year run for me and really what got me into wanting to be in product. I had spent the first half of my career at Coke really in Sales, Marketing and General Management. And, the Freestyle opportunity really came up because our engineering team at Coke had come up with an idea that was really designed to save money on the supply chain. They thought, let's take the water out of all these, the syrup that we ship all over the country and we can make a lot lighter and we'll save all this money. >> All kinds of benefits from not drying the water out. >> And our leadership looked at that and said, hey, we think there might be something more here. And so, the President of the Food Service division at the time invited me to come back to Atlanta and he showed me this prototype and he said, we're not really sure what this is going to be but we want to put a business leader on this to see if there's something here. He said, it can be three months or three years, you never know. So I uprooted my family from Seattle, moved back to Atlanta kind of a little bit on a whim. Like, we could've been over. And the funny thing is he said, there's lots of jobs in Atlanta. What he didn't say was there's lots of jobs at Coke in Atlanta. So, I'm not sure if he was trying to tell me something. But what was really fun about that was that Coke took a completely different approach. For a 125 year old company, completely different approach to innovation than what they traditionally would've done. Which would've been, hey, let's give it to the innovation group. Let's have senior meetings every three months to decide what to do next. >> Kick out new Coke and that didn't work out very well. >> Yeah, well, kick out new Coke. But what they did was they empowered a small team. I basically ran like a little startup. I reported to a board, I had no line reporting and we kept it totally confidential. We isolated the team away from the rest of the organization and we were allowed to just go run. And my board gave us everything we needed as far as resources and money. And we started with the consumer. And we said, hey, what is it that, if we could transform drinking soda away from home what would that look like? And what we found was people wanted a lot more variety than what they were getting at that time. Used to be six choices, right? Five of them brown, one of them caffeine-free, one of them diet, no caffeine-free diet, I mean it was just like we were missing the boat, right? If you went to a 7-11 there's 3,000 choices. You go to McDonald's, six. And so they wanted a lot more choice and they wanted to be able to pour the drink themselves. And so we thought that was a really powerful insight. What was interesting about that is they didn't trust the kid behind the counter to get it right. Which, I think is kind of ironic but at the end of the day, we invented the technology around this idea of providing almost unlimited choice and really rolling the consumer in the process of creation and it was amazing. When we delivered that to our end users we saw 50% increases in volume, remember this is a brand that's growing 2%, 3%. >> Super mature market. >> Yeah, super mature market, complete game changer. And it really unleashed this sense of creativity with consumers around what's possible, right, on the drink side. Now, on the business side, what was transformative for the company was that this was a completely wired experience. And it had had to be, frankly, to pull off delivering a 125 different choices in a restaurant. You got to arm that customer with lots of information about what do they need, how to configure, how to service. And so those machines were all connected. And they provided tons of great data on what consumption was happening inside the restaurant. But, also air logs on the equipment, how everything was performing and so it really led to a completely rethinking. How do you actually manage a network of connected devices? And it was kind of funny because we were really kind of pre-cloud. >> Pre-cloud, pre IoT. >> When we first started we had the machines called home every night using a wireless modem. We actually started, we did a contract with a IT service provider to provide servers to actually house the data. And we did this contract, oh these will hold you for three years. Within a month we were running out of server capacity because all of the data we were getting. And so it was really, it was super, super fun and we iterated that I spent six years on that and really it was one of the coolest experiences of my life. >> Probably one of the most relatable digital transformation stories and you guys are also doing that at Smartsheet. Gene, I wish we had more time. Thank you so much for stopping by the Cube and one of the things I like that you said in the beginning, and we'll leave it with this, is that Smartsheet is authentic. I think authenticity is contagious. So, thank you for your time. >> Well, thanks for having me, it's a pleasure. >> Thanks. >> And for Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Smartsheet ENGAGE in Bellevue, Washington. Stick around, Jeff, and I'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)