(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to the CUBE's day one coverage of VMware Explorer 22, live from San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin. Dave Nicholson is back with me. Welcome back to the set. We're pleased to welcome William Bell as our next guest. The executive vice president of products at Phoenix NAP. William, welcome to the CUBE. Welcome back to the CUBE. >> Thank you, thank you so much. Happy to be here. >> Talk to us a little, and the audience a little bit about Phoenix NAP. What is it that you guys do? Your history, mission, value prop, all that good stuff. >> Absolutely, yeah. So we're global infrastructures as a service company, foundationally, we are trying to build pure play infrastructure as a service, so that customers that want to adopt cloud infrastructure but maybe don't want to adopt platform as a service and really just, you know, program themselves to a specific API can have that cloud adoption without that vendor lock in of a specific platform service. And we're doing this in 17 regions around the globe today. Yeah, so it's just flexible, easy. That's where we're at. >> I like flexible and easy. >> Flexible and easy. >> You guys started back in Phoenix. Hence the name. Talk to us a little bit about the evolution of the company in the last decade. >> Yeah, 100%. We built a data center in Phoenix expecting that we could build the centralized network access point of Phoenix, Arizona. And I am super proud to say that we've done that. 41 carriers, all three hyperscalers in the building today, getting ready to expand. However, that's not the whole story, right. And what a lot of people don't know is we founded an infrastructure as a service company, it's called Secured Servers no longer exists, but we founded that company the same time and we built it up kind of sidecar to Phoenix NAP and then we merged all of those together to form this kind of global infrastructure platform that customers can consume. >> Talk to us about the relationship with VMware. Obviously, here we are at VMware Explore. There's about seven... We're hearing 7,000 to 10,000 people here. People are ready to be back to hear from VMware and it's partner ecosystem. >> Yeah, I mean, I think that we have this huge history with VMware that maybe a lot of people don't know. We were one of the first six, the SPPs in 2011 at the end of the original kind of data center, whatever, vCloud data center infrastructure thing that they did. And so early on, there was only 10 of us, 11 of us. And most of those names don't exist anymore. We're talking, Terramark, Blue Lock, some of these guys. Good companies, but they've been bought or whatnot. And here's plucky Phoenix NAP, still, you know, offering great VMware cloud services for customers around the globe. >> What are some of the big trends that you're seeing in the market today where customers are in this multi-cloud world? You know this... I love the theme of this event. The center of the multi-cloud universe. Customers are in that by default. How do you help them navigate that and really unlock the value of it? >> Yeah, I think for us, it's about helping customers understand what applications belong where. We're very, very big believers both in the right home. But if you drill down on that right home for right applicator or right application, right home, it's more about the infrastructure choices that you're making for that application leads to just super exciting optimizations, right. If you, as an example, have a large media streaming business and you park it in a public called hyperscaler and you just eat those egress fees, like it's a big deal. Right? And there are other ways to do that, right. If you need a... If your application needs to scale from zero cores to 15,000 cores for an hour, you know, there are hyperscalers for that, right. And people need to learn how to make that choice. Right app, right home, right infrastructure. And that's kind of what we help them do. >> It's interesting that you mentioned the concept of being a pure play in infrastructure as a service. >> Yeah. >> At some point in the past, people would have argued that infrastructure as a service only exists because SaaS isn't good enough yet. In other words, if there's a good enough SaaS application then you don't want IaaS because who wants to mess around with IaaS, infrastructures as a service. Do you have customers who look at what they're developing as so much a core of what their value proposition is that they want to own it? I mean, is that a driving factor? >> I would challenge to say that we're seeing almost every enterprise become a SaaS company. And when that transition happens, SaaS companies actually care a lot about the cost basis, efficiency, uptime of their application. And ultimately, while they don't want to be in the data center business anymore, it doesn't mean that they want to pay someone else to do things that they feel wholly competent in doing. And we're seeing this exciting transition of open source technologies, open source platforms becoming good enough that they don't actually have to manage a lot of things. They can do it in software and the hardware's kind of abstracted. But that actually, I would say is a boon for infrastructure as a service, as an independent thing. It's been minimized over the years, right. People talk about hyperscalers as being cloud infrastructure companies and they're not. They're cloud platform companies, right. And the infrastructure is high quality. It is easy to access and scale, right, but it's ultimately, if you're just using one of those hyperscalers for that infrastructure, building VMs and doing a bunch of things yourself, you're not getting the value out of that hyperscaler. And ultimately that infrastructure's very expensive if you look at it that way. >> So it's interesting because if you look at what infrastructure consists of, which is hardware and software-- >> Yeah. >> People who said, eh, IaaS as is just a bridge to a bright SaaS future, people also will make the argument that the hardware doesn't matter anymore. I imagine that you are doing a lot of optimization with both hardware and stuff like the VMware cloud stack that you deploy as a VCPP partner. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> So to talk about that. >> Absolutely. >> I mean, you agree. I mean, if I were to just pose a question to you, does hardware still matter? Does infrastructure still matter? >> Way more than people think. >> Well, there you go. So what are you doing in that arena, specifically with VCPP? >> Yeah, absolutely. And so I think a good example of that, right, so last VMworld in person, 2019, we showcased a piece of technology that we had been working with Intel on for about two years at the time which was Intel persistent memory DC, persistent memory. Right? And we launched the first VMware cloud offering to have Intel DC persistent memory onboard. So that customers with the VMs that needed that technology could leverage it with the integrations in vSphere 6.7 and ultimately in seven more, right. Now I do think that was maybe a swing and a miss technology potentially but we're going to see it come back. And that specialized infrastructure deployment is a big part of our business, right. Helping people identify, you know, this application, if you'd have this accelerator, this piece of infrastructure, this quality of network can be better, faster, cheaper, right. That kind of mentality of optimization matters a lot. And VMware plays a critical role in that because it still gives the customer the operational excellence that they need without having to do everything themselves, right. And our customers rely on that a lot from VMware to get that whole story, operationally efficient, easy to manage, automated. All those things make a lot of difference to our VMware customers. >> Speaking of customers, what are you hearing, if anything, from customers, VMware customers that are your joint customers about the Broadcom acquisition? Are they excited about it? Are they concerned about it? And how do you talk about that? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that everyone that's in the infrastructure business is doing business with Broadcom, all right. And we've had so many businesses that we've been engaged with that have ultimately been a acquiree. I can say that this one feels different only in the size of the acquisition. VMware carries so much weight. VMware's brand exceeds Broadcom's brand, in my opinion. And I think ultimately, I don't know anything that's not public, right-- >> Well, they rebranded. By the way, on the point of brand, they rebranded their software business, VMware. >> Yeah. I mean, that's what I was going to say. That was the word on the street. I don't know if there's beneficial. Is that a-- >> Well, that's been-- >> But that's the word, right? >> That's what they've said. Well, but when a Avago acquired Broadcom they said, "we'll call ourselves Broadcom." >> Absolutely. Why wouldn't you? >> So yeah. So I imagine that what's been reported is likely-- >> Likely. Yeah, I 100% agree. I think that makes a ton of sense and we can start to see even more great intellectual property in software. That's where, you know, all of these businesses, CA, Symantec, VMware and all of the acquisitions that VMware has made, it's a great software intellectual property platform and they're going to be able to get so much more value out of the leadership team that VMware has here, is going to make a world of difference to the Broadcom software team. Yeah, so I'm very excited, you know. >> It's a lot of announcements this morning, a lot of technical product announcements. What did you hear in that excites you about the evolution of VMware as well as the partnership and the value in it for your customers? >> You know, one of our fastest growing parts of our business is this metal as a service infrastructure business and doing very, very... Using very specific technologies to do very interesting things, makes a big difference in our world and for our customers. So anything that's like smartNICs, disaggregated hypervisor, accelerators as a first class citizen in VMware, all that stuff makes the Phoenix NAP story better. So I'm super excited about that, right. Yeah. >> Well, it's interesting because VCPP is not a term that people who are not insiders know of. What they know is that there are services available in hyperscale cloud providers where you can deploy VMware. Well, you know, VMware cloud stack. Well, you can deploy those VMware cloud stacks with you. >> Absolutely. >> In exactly the same manner. However, to your point, all of this talk about disaggregation of CPU, GPU, DPU, I would argue with it, you're in a better position to deploy that in an agile way than a hyperscale cloud provider would be and foremost, I'm not trying to-- >> No, yeah. >> I'm not angling for a job in your PR department. >> Come on in. >> But the idea that when you start talking about something like metal as a service, as an adjunct or adjacent to a standard deployment of a VMware cloud, it makes a lot of sense. >> Yeah. >> Because there are people who can't do everything within the confines of what the STDC-- >> Yes. >> Consists of. >> Absolutely. >> So, I mean... Am I on the right track? >> No, you are 100% hitting it. I think that that point you made about agility to deliver new technology, right, is a key moment in our kind of delivery every single year, right. As a new chip comes out, Intel chip or Accelerator or something like that, we are likely going to be first to market by six months potentially and possibly ever. Persistent memory never launched in public cloud in any capacity but we have customers running on it today that is providing extreme value for their business, right. When, you know, the discreet GPUs coming from the just announced Flex series GPU from Intel, you're likely not going to see them in public cloud hyperscalers quickly, right. Over time, absolutely. We'll have them day one. Isolate came out, you could get it in our metal as a service platform the morning it launched on demand, right. Those types of agility points, they're not... Because they're hyperscale by nature. If they can't hyperscale it, they're not doing it, right. And I think that that is a very key point. Now, as it comes in towards VMware, we're driving this intersection of building that VCF or VMware cloud foundation which is going to be a key point of the VMware ecosystem. As you see this transition to core based licensing and some of the other things that have been talked about, VMware cloud foundation is going to be the stack that they expect their customers to adopt and deliver. And the fact that we can automate that, deliver it instantaneously in a couple of hours to hardware that you don't need to own, into networks you don't need to manage, but yet you are still in charge, keys to the kingdom, ready to go, just like you're doing it in your own data center, that's the message that we're driving for. >> Can you share a customer example that you think really just shines a big flashlight on the value that you guys are delivering? >> We definitely, you know, we had the pleasure of working with Make-A-Wish foundation for the last seven years. And ultimately, you know, we feel very compelled that every time we help them do something unique, different or what not, save money, that money's going into helping some child that's in need, right. And so we've done so many things together. VMware has stepped up as the plate over the years, done so many things with them. We've sponsored stuff. We've done grants, we've done all kinds of things. The other thing I would say is we are helping the City of Hope and Translational Genomics Research Institute on sequencing single cell RNA so that they can fight COVID, so that they can build cure, well, not cures but build therapies for colon cancer and things like that. And so I think that, you know, this is a driving light for us internally is helping people through efficiency and change. And that's what we're looking for. We're looking for more stories like that. We're looking... If you have a need, we're looking for people to come to us and say, "this is my problem. This is what this looks like. Let us see if we can find a solution that's a little bit different, a little bit out of the box and doesn't have to change your business dramatically." Yeah. >> And who are you talking to within customers? Is this a C level conversation? >> Yeah, I mean, I would say that we would love it to be... I think most companies would love to have that, you know, CFO conversation with every single customer. I would say VPs of engineering, increasingly, especially as we become more API centric, those guys are driving a lot of those purchasing decisions. Five years ago, I would've said director of IT, like director of IT. Now today, it's like VP of engineering, usually software oriented folks looking to deliver some type of application on top of a piece of hardware or in a cloud, right. And those guys are, you know, I guess, that's even another point, VMware's doing so much work on the API side that they don't get any credit for. Terraform, Ansible, all these integrations, VMware doing so much in this area and they just don't get any credit for it ever, right. It's just like, VMware's the dinosaur and they're just not, right. But that's the thing that people think of today because of the hype of the hyperscaler. I think that's... Yeah. >> When you're in customer conversations, maybe with prospects, are you seeing more customers that have gone all in on a hyperscaler and are having issues and coming to you guys saying help, this is getting way too expensive? >> Yeah, I think it's the unexpected growth problem or even the expected growth problem where they just thought it would be okay, but they've suffered some type of competitive pressure that they've had to optimize for and they just didn't really expect it. And so, I think that increasingly we are finding organizations that quickly adopted public cloud. If they did a full digital transformation of their business and then transformation of their applications, a lot of them now feel very locked in because every application is just reliant on x hyperscaler forever, or they didn't transform anything and they just migrated and parked it. And the bills that are coming in are just like, whoa like, how is that possible? We are typically never recommending get out of the public cloud. We are just... It's not... If I say the right home for the right application, it's by default saying that there are right applications for hyperscalers. Parking your VMware environment that you just migrated to a hyperscaler, not the right application. You know, I would love you to be with me but if you want to do that, at least go to VMC on AWS or go to OCVS or GCVE or any of those. If that's going to go with a Google or an Amazon and that's just the mandate and you're going to move your applications, don't just move them into native. Move them into a VMware solution and then if you still want to make that journey, that full transformation, go ahead and make it. I would still argue that that's not the most efficient way but, you know, if you're going to do anything, don't just dump it all into cloud, the native hyperscaler stuff. >> Good advice. >> So what do typical implementations look like with you guys when you're moving on premises environments into going back to the VCPP, STDC model? >> Absolutely. Do you have people moving and then transforming and re-platforming? What does that look like? What's the typical-- >> Yeah. I mean, I do not believe that anybody has fully made up their mind if exactly where they want to be. I'm only going to be in this cloud. It's an in the close story, right. And so even when we get customers, you know, we firmly believe that the right place to just pick up and migrate is to a VCPP cloud. Better cost effectiveness, typically better technology, you know service, right. Better service, right. We've been part of VMware for 12 years. We love the technology behind VMC's, now AWS is fantastic, but it's still just infrastructure without any help at all right, right. They're going to be there to support their technology but they're not going to help you with the other stuff. We can do some of those things. And if it's not us, it's another VCPP provider that has that expertise that you might need. So yes, we help you quickly, easily migrate everything to a VMware cloud. And then you have a decision point to make. You're happy where you are, you are leveraging public cloud for a certain applications. You're leveraging VMware cloud offerings for the standard applications that you've been running for years. Do you transform them? Do you keep them? What do you do? All those decisions can be made later. But I stress that repurchasing all your hardware again, staying inside your colo and doing everything yourself, it is for me, it's like a company telling me they're going to build a data center for themselves, single tenant data center. Like no one's doing that, right. But there are more options out there than just I'm going to go to Azure, right. Think about it. Take the time, assess the landscape. And VMware cloud providers as a whole, all 17,000 of us or whatever across the globe, people don't know that group of individuals of the companies is the third or fourth potentially largest cloud in the world. Right? That's the power of the VMware cloud provider ecosystem. >> Last question for you as we wrap up here. Where can the audience go to learn more about Phoenix NAP and really start test driving with you guys? >> Absolutely. Well, if you come to phoenixnap.com, I guarantee you that we will re-target you and you can click on a banner later if you don't want to stay there. (Lisa laughs) But yeah, phoenixnap.com has all the information that you need. We also put out tons of helpful content. So if you're looking for anything technology oriented and you're just, "I want to upgrade to Ubuntu," you're likely going to end up on a phoenixnap.com website looking for that. And then you can find out more about what we do. >> Awesome, phoenixnap.com. William, thank you very much for joining Dave and me, talking about what you guys are doing, what you're enabling customers to achieve as the world continues to evolve at a very dynamic pace. We appreciate your insights. >> Absolutely, thank you so much >> For our guest and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the CUBE live from VMware Explorer, 2022. Dave and I will be joined by a guest consultant for our keynote wrap at the end of the day in just a few minutes. So stick around. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. I think I just saw Don Johnson running by. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at VeeamON 2019. This is day one of our wall-to-wall coverage. Ian McClarty is here. He's the president of PhoenixNAP, Ian thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So PhoenixNAP, service provider based in the southwest. Tell us more about the company. >> Yeah so we started on the Southwest, hence the name Phoenix, and NAP stands for network access point. So we focus on the connectivity side, on the telecom. But we really have moved more to infrastructure services, and that's been more of a world wide deployment. Last year we did about six global locations that were new to us, so today we're at about on 15 locations. >> So I always ask guys like you, you know, the Cloud was suppose to put you out of business, and then the Cloud has been this huge tail wind. >> Yeah. >> Why, what was it that everybody missed about the cloud and how have you able to exploit it? >> Yeah, so we come from a hosting background. So the Cloud has been around for us forever, right? Before it was termed Cloud, we believed in OpEx model for infrastructure services. That's what the Cloud is. Scalable, easy to absorb. So for us, what the Cloud did was make us mainstream. Because hosting was very boutique back in the day, back in the 90's. Now today we're a very mainstream brand, very mainstream products. So Cloud has really made our lives easier, actually. >> So it opened up everybody's eyes. >> Yeah. >> Sort of ... The guys like Amazon and Azure did a lot of market development for you. >> They did, a lot. And a lot of market development that we ourselves cannot do because we are smaller companies. >> Right. So talk a little bit about what your unique value proposition is, how you guys, you know, compete in the market place. Why PhoenixNAP? >> Why PhoenixNAP? So its really about the suite of infrastructure products. So our spectrum really starts with co-location on one end and it ends to bare metal dedicated Cloud systems. And then in between we have all the virtual station cloud platforms, more standard BMR deployments. So really its about our spectrum of services that we cover and we really are really good at that spectrum of services. So we have developed a lot of depth also around these different offerings. >> And your facilities, as you say you started in the Southwest, but where are you guys located? Are you? ... >> Yeah, so we're, So we own and operate out of Phoenix, Arizona, 120,000 square foot of facility. With the I-T usable space, um, and we have expanded now to other, with other partnerships with taking on large location spaces to basically seed our different locations and put us in point we are building those locations. Ashburn is one we are getting very close with actually. >> Uh-huh. So you're data centered guys right? I mean, you know - >> We're data, We're hosting guys that went into the data center business, and became infrastructure people. >> Okay, so it sort of evolved, this is act 3 for you >> Yes, this is act 3. >> We've been talking about act 2 all day. So how have you evolved your, you skillset, your customer base, talk about the evolution of the, of the company and where you see it going. >> Yeah so I mean, today we're focusing very much on mid-market enterprise, that's where our, and again, how do you define that? We define that by $50 to $500 million in revenue that's out definition of mid-market enterprise. So we're not going after the Fortune 500, and we're not going after S&B. And we have really tapped into the space. It's a very hard space for, for the, for the public clouds to, um, to act in today. >> So what's different? So obviously, the difference between mid and large enterprises is the mid-size guys, they're more generalists, they don't have, you know, all kinds of specialists, they don't have the resources, >> They do not. >> That the large guys do. But they're more advanced than the S. >> Yes. >> S and M are different, >> Yes, they are. >> Than the large. So what are the unique attributes of M that really uh, you try to focus on delivering? >> So M has budget, but M doesn't want to outsource. That's key. They know enough, but they don't have expertise. So what they're looking at, they're looking for supplemental I-T, and really what we focus on. >> So they don't want to outsource their strategic jewel, the family jewels, but they need help. >> They need supplemental help. And they don't want to go to consultants either. >> But M also wants to be L and I think that's the big issue, M wants to be L, typically M wants to be L, So they're looking for, they have budget, they have plans, >> Yeah. >> They want to scale, but they have to be very careful about how they invest to get there. >> And then like to (mumbles) still, they like (mumbles), infrastructure, they want to know you, they want to build a relationship. That's what I'm saying, it's very hard for the public clouds to tap into that space because of that. It had a lot of nuances. >> M wants to scale they want to act like a real business, >> Yes. >> They want, they want to know their suppliers, because they want to know if they're going to be able to go with them. >> (Ian) They want to have control over their suppliers as well. >> Exactly. But come back to that, because that becomes, that becomes more increasingly a services play. >> Yes. >> As M gets more experiences, these medium-size companies get more experience, they are starting to acknowledge and recognize the new classes of services that they need because they have that sophistication. So how is your business changing? And specifically thinking about what Veeam's doing here, to become more of a service-provider, of, at a higher level than just the underlying infrastructure. >> So I'll tell you what we're doing right now. On the surface-side, we're really focusing more on manage-infrastructure, right? That's the moniker we use. But what infrastructure means is really changing. So today we're (mumbles), right? What are we going to do have a managed (mumbles) stack, that is deliverable in an A-P-I model? That's our vision for the company. >> So, um, you're a platinum partner of Veeam, uh, can you talk a little bit about where they fit in your stack? I mean, you've got a whole security layer. >> (IAN) Yep. >> I think you were saying to us earlier that, you know, the data protection piece, the backup is sort of the last-- >> It's a lifeline. >> Resort, yeah. So describe that infrastructure and what you guys have built up. >> Yeah so when we started the company, we started at the edge, right? Plus folks on the (mumbles), those folks on network protection, let's start there, and let's work our way down. And so now then we've built a V-M-R stack that basically is, um, it's third-party audited, it follows compliance rules. When you go to the, um, (mumbles) it works on PCI, when you go to the PCI website you can see PheonixNAP listed as E-S-S provider there, and it abstractly outlines what we protect on the cloud side. So very clear in where we transferred on that side, so it's been layered for us, a layered approach of protecting services. But there will always be a breach, and you have to count on that. It's unfortunate, but it's a reality, right? And once you embrace that, you can build products around that, and so really V-M-R has become a very key part of that equation with both backup and recovery services, and then if there is a breach, then you need to be able to recover those services somewhere, so the (mumbles) recovery services for us is big. So it really fills that missing piece that we had in the equation. >> Yeah I mean you've made that point Peter, many times, is that the breach is inevitable, it's how you repsond to that breach that's really critical. >> Yes. >> And that's, I mean not brand-new thinking, but it's certainly over the last ten years has evolved, you know Peter-- >> (IAN) You've got to embrace it. >> People used to not talk about breaches, oh no, don't talk about it, now it's like at the board level, yeah we acknowledge that it's going to happen, and we're putting more and more resources into our response, is that sort of what you're seeing? >> Yes, that is exactly what I'm seeing. And this year alone fifteen-thousand breaches that were reported right? And again, who reports those breaches? It's not the S, not the M, it's the large enterprise that reports those breaches. So those numbers are even worse in the S and M market right? >> (DAVE) Right, right. >> Although the M guys have, are now getting large enough When-- >> They have to report. >> They have to start reporting. You're coming back to this notion, that, and it used to be that when there was a breach, it was always discussed in terms of hardware, it was discussed in terms of network. >> Yeah. >> But now it's data! >> It is. >> Because that's where the asset is, and that's where people after, >> Exactly. >> So again, coming back to that notion of higher-level services, backup used to be something that you kind of, checked off as you were leaving the customer's location, taken the order, has it become something that's increasingly one of the reasons why customers are bringing you in? >> I will tell you, the easiest way for us to (mumbles) another part where Veeam falls into our equation, is customer acquisition. Like Veeam to me is not the highest revenue, product, period, right? But from a customer acquisition perspective, it's the best product that we have. It's an easy conversation, because it is. Historically it's been a checkbox, but once the customer figures out, "hey, okay so I've got backups, now how do I recover these backups? How do I restore them? Where do I go?" that's where we can have a much more complex conversation with them. >> A lot of these M customers, to become L, are now realizing "I'm not going to get there, if I don't use data in ways that the L guys have hard time using it. So I need to focus on data assets, I need to focus on my digital transformation", which means it's essential that they start thinking about how data protection is going to operate within their business, because increasingly, they're becoming digital businesses. And data protection becomes digital business protection. Are you having those conversations? >> All the time. On day-to-day basis. That's the bulk of our conversations now, for new customer acquisition. >> (DAVE) Why Veeam? >> Yeah. >> You know a lot of companies out there, a lot of new startups entering the marketplace, you've got big wheels like, you know, Dell EMC, and some established companies like Veritas, IBM, you got the big blue blanket, why Veeam? >> Why Veeam for us? Well for us, part of it is culture, right? That was very critical for us. First, the technology piece, obviously solid, works right? The "it does work" moniker that was used, it's true right? And the simplicity of it, too. As a service provider, we know what to expect with Veeam, so we built a lot of competency around Veeam as a product line. Obviously we've played, we've used other products, but we always go back to Veeam. Because, again, it's evolving in a place that we like. We see where they're going for the recovery piece, right? The restoration piece. We like that as a vision piece also, that it's not talked about a lot. It's coming right? It's always the upcoming. But for us it's good to (mumbles) another vendor. The second that comes out, it's a (mumbles) vendor for us. So we like the vision of the company, we like where they're heading, we also like from a corporate culture perspective, what they're doing for channel-centric. For us it helps us mature as an organization tremendously. You know Ratmir hit the nail on the head when he said, "Not the best product wins in the market", right? You have to have, the company that has the best sales and marketing along with that as well. So for us you know, we have pretty decent sales. Marketing we're weaker on, and Veeam has really coached us along the way to make our marketing efforts even stronger. >> Yeah Veeam knows how to market! >> Yeah they do, they are marketing geniuses. And I love them for that, right? And I have a lot of respect towards them for that, so. >> Ian, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it was great to have you. >> You as well. >> All right keep it right there everybody, this is Peter Burris and Dave Vellante, we're live at Veeamon 2019 from Miami. You're watching theCUBE, we'll be right back. (poppy electro music)

>> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE covering VeeamOn 2017 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to VeeamOn in New Orleans, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host for the week, Stu Miniman. We're going to talk cloud service providers. Cloud is obviously a very hot topic this week at VeeamOn. Matt Chesterton is here. He's the CEO of OffsideDataSync and he's joined by William Bell who's the vice president of production development for cloud and enterprise services at PhoenixNAP. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> So, let's start. What's happening at VeeamOn? You heard what I said about, you know, cloud seems to be a major theme here. What are you guys seeing this week? >> We're seeing the same thing. So today is officially cloud day at VeeamOn and some great announcements that are going on so new product announcements with B10, so we're excited about that. >> William, anything you'd add? >> Yeah, I mean, the general session this morning covered so much around cloud and what's that's going to mean to the end user at Veeam. Right, and how the ecosystem is being built and working both with the hyper-scalers and guys like us. >> So, so much talk in the industry about the big, really the big three. Maybe you throw a China cloud in there, a Japan cloud in there, how is it that folks like you all can differentiate from the likes of AWS and Azure and Google. Maybe you can start, Bill, and share with us. >> Yeah, sure, and service. I think that's really the key is that customers need a help. >> Dave: You mean I could talk to you? >> You could talk to me. We can actually help you achieve an outcome that you're looking for with your business. That's not something that you're going to get from a hyper-scaler, period. >> You don't have a little device I can put in my house that I talk to instead? >> No, no new devices, no books, no operating systems to install, just help. >> So your value property is really high-touch. >> High-touch, high-touch for us, it's high-touch global, right? So we can help you do the same things that you're trying to accomplish anywhere in the world talking to the same people, alright? And that's our kind of commitment. >> And yet you've also got infrastructure behind that. >> William: We do. >> So why wouldn't you, for example, could a viable strategy be, say, I'll put that high-touch in front of AWS or Azure? Why not? >> Well, for us, it really comes down to margins, right? At the end of the day, it's that we derive margin from infrastructure just the same way we do from the service angle of that. So if it's only service and there's no margin on the infrastructure it's a tougher business to scale, right? We also can capture markets that are uncapturable. This isn't a cloud business for us, right? We're data center owner-operators. We're doing things that customers need that are not cloud-centric. >> How about you guys, Matt? Little different story here. You guys are more specialized. >> Yeah, little bit, little bit different. So service is always important. We've taken the approach with the public clouds of kind of going with the tide. So layering products and services that go with that. Example, today or yesterday, I think it was announced with the scale-up backup repositories being integrated with storage like Glacier. I'm sure there's a product plan there for a service provider like us so that we can offer that as a service, too. So kind of taking that momentum and working with it. So integrating with what's already going on. It's going to be a tough tide to fight if we don't kind of direct it in the way we want, so we're kind of taking that and going in the direction of how can we use it and how can we benefit from it. >> Matt, can you build on that Veeam as a partner. I think it was Peter McKay told us 30% of their business is to the, you know, thousands and thousands of service providers they have. You know, where do you find opportunity, products, growth when it comes to Veeam? >> Good question, Stu. What Veeam's doing, they make it very easy for us as partners, in the cloud of course, so that when something's delivered, they make a cloud available, as well. So as you can see, users of Veeam can direct their backups and archives to the cloud, private, public, but they've also made that available and are going to make that available for us so they're a great partner. They always think about cloud and cloud first so they don't just develop a product that can be used in and around service providers but that we can take and capitalize from it as well. >> William, what I want to add on there, you're also a VMware partner. Maybe tell us what it's like being a VMware and Veeam and do you go beyond the VMware piece too with Veeam or? >> Yeah, so I mean, in Veeam's ecosystem, VMware and Microsoft are very important to both of them, right? And because of where Veeam started, hyper-V's a large part of their business and growing still very rapidly part of their business, right? And so we're forced to address both sides of that. When we go to build our own infrastructure, when we're going to offer our own services, we've made a commitment to VMware today, right? And we're building services around that ecosystem including the stuff that's happening with Veeam. But let me talk about Veeam as a partner, right? Veeam has been singularly the best manufacturer partner that we've worked with up until this point. Maybe it doesn't mean that somebody else maybe not tomorrow, but at least up until this point, they've help both of our businesses really grow. >> Matt: I couldn't agree more. >> And grow in branding and grow in product diversity and grow all over the place. >> Explain that more. >> Is it simplicity? Is it pricing? Is it, you know, community? >> It's their dedication to us as a partner. So you hear of partner relationships in the community. Veeam has taken it to a new level. They're truly a partner with us. They care about how our business is doing and how they can develop us and how they can find out what we don't have experience with and then help us. So design a program or introduce us to the right folks or make the right alliance relationships. So they genuinely look at it >> So are they a channel for you or are you a channel for them? >> William: Both. >> Yeah, sometimes you don't know. The lines are not exactly clear. And that's good. >> Yeah, I think that those unclear lines means an increase in all kinds of things for both of our companies mutually, right? We're here. We started together in this Veeam ecosystem, you know, three and a half years ago I guess now, and you know, as the first five service providers that were teamed up with Veeam, and we're also both standing here with gigantic platinum sponsorships at their show because it's become that important to us and our business. >> And you guys, I mean, you sell to, your customers are doing everything. They got one of everything in their floor. They're, I'm sure, diverse. You've seen a bunch of folks on stage this week. We saw Microsoft today, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We saw Cisco yesterday. What kind of relationships do you have with the big whales? >> So we align very well with Cisco. In fact, that's what we power our networks with, and we use their Cisco UCS series for everything we power in our data centers, too. So it's great to see them here and interact with the team. They're a great partner for us. >> And HP Nimble Storage is our other clear-cut top partner, right, in this ecosystem. And there's a great marriage there, both on the integration side, but from a powering these Veeam powered cloud services like offsite backup and Zas recovery requires a lot of storage, right, to take that data in and hold it and replicate it and do things with it. And so our partnership with HP Nimble's large. 6- In some of the expansion that we're seeing Veeam talk about, the kind of new ten years where they're going, some of that is as a service. How do they talk about that dynamic of potentially being a competitor now to the 18,000 great partners that they've had? >> You know, I think a lot of it's got up in a bit of semantics problems, right, semantic issues. Veeam is doing a lot of things that are going to enable services and as a service, I don't see them building solutions that would compete, right? They have a great example of what it looks like to do that with vCloud Air being such a VMware-centric partnership, that was a headwind that they were unable to overcome even the size of VMware, right, going out and building and being a service provider and building an infrastructure service, trying to take their software company and become a service provider, it doesn't work. The same for us, I'm not going to go start building backup software. (laughs) >> So, if you think about the mega phases of cloud. We've been doing this for a long time, and I think back to the early VMworlds that we did, we had so much discussion around cloud, and back in the early days, it was kind of, you know, after Amazon announced AWS and cloud sort of got coined, it was an experiment, it was for startups, and that was pretty clear. And then in sort of 2008 when the economy tanked, a lot of CFOs said, "All right, shift capex to opex." And that was sort of the next phase. And then coming out of the downturn, a lot of lines of business said, "Hey, we got cash. We need speed. Let's go," and started to invest. And then after that IT sort of embraced it. And now seems to be whatever term you want to use, cloud broker or just, they've sort of captured a religion in a nut to hang it onto lun provisioning anymore as a practice. Now I'm wondering if that is a reflection of your world or because you in your case are specialists and you guys are more service oriented, did you ride those waves, was it different ways. Maybe William we can start with you. >> So, our first product line was a 250,000 square foot facility in Phoenix, Arizona, right? Building a kolo, a network access point, that's the heritage of the PhoenixNAP, right, the name, and so we were relying on capex. People to go in and buy equipment and stick it in our facility. Everyone had already decided they didn't want to build data centers. Right, in 2010, everyone's like, "You know what, ten million dollars to get my data room up? No thanks." Right? But they were committed to buying hardware. And we took advantage of that and grew that business and we started to address the opex side in 2012 kind of moving forward. At least we believe we're prime positioned because at the end of the day, it's going to be both. All opex is not the answer, right? I truly believe that. And that's part of that hybrid story, as well. >> And Matt, what about you guys? Again, being specialists in all kinds of things, DR, recovery, etc, did you take a different journey? >> Yeah, Dave, we did. And I heard the term even this week, born in the cloud. If it makes sense, we're a cloud company that had that vision from the beginning. So we didn't build a facility, but that's certainly what we do, leverage space power bandwidth that we partner with Switch and Supernet facilities for our data centers. And we believe that customers are and will continue to move into the opex model into the cloud, so both production work loads and DRAs backup as well. It's interesting to see that mix, too, especially as things from Veeam are announced that really becomes one. So the workloads of DRAs are soon within, you know, 15 minutes or 15 seconds can become a production work load. So if customers aren't necessarily moving their infrastructure to the cloud, it's going to happen one way or the other, whether it's the model of they don't want to purchase hardware any longer or they've had some sort of failure, disaster, and they're going to move that way. >> I want to let you speak a little bit more about your customers. There was a great line, I thought, from Mark Russinovich which said that the C-suite doesn't come asking for infrastructure as a service, they want to figure out how to take their business to the next level. Where are you customers in that kind of cloud strategy and how are you helping them along that journey? >> We have a discussion with them. We try to understand what their business objectives are and what they're trying to achieve by either pushing to the cloud or understanding what the cloud is. And there's a spectrum there from as I mentioned before, backup, disaster recovery as a service, infrastructure as a service, and not all things line up to one single service or way you can put it in the cloud. So we try to understand what their business objectives are and say, "It's going to make the most sense to put some of the work load in the cloud, but some applications stay onsite and you have DRAs replication to get them offsite." So really engaging and understanding what their business needs are and getting under the hood of what they're trying to achieve. >> Yeah, I think that at the end of the day, we are focused on a hybrid future. We truly believe that customers will search for the cloud experience, the business optimization for a period of time where they're saying, "You know what? I don't care. I want this outcome. Go get me this outcome." At some point, it will come back. They will be like, "We have the outcome. How can we optimize this outcome? Are we spending the right amount of money to achieve this outcome?" And the moment they do that, they will find that opex purely and blatantly, if you just say, "I'm all in. I'm always on. I'm only opex." You will spend more money on that over time. If you pick and choose the things that you are incapable of doing or would cost you more to do through capex and staffing, then you can basically position both of those things to maximize value. >> Horses for course, gentlemen, we have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, 'preciate it. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from VeeamOn 2017. This is theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE at VMworld 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost is John Troyer. It's our 10th year at the show, we've been going three days, wall to wall, on two sets and really happy to welcome to the program, a first time guest, Geoff Tudor is the vice president, general manager of Vision.AI, inside Panzura. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Yes, you best suit things John. >> All right, so, we've known Panzura for quite a number of years, the founder of the company's someone we've talked to a bit. I believe this is the first time we've talked about Vision.ai, so maybe set the table with us, of Panzura Today, and the value of the sharing app. >> Sure, absolutely, so, Panzura is known predominantly for its file services, of which we can provide a global collaborative name space, across multiple different locations. So, entities that are in the design, engineering, manufacturing, anything where you're working with a lot of distributed groups that need access to the same kind of working set files, and big data files have been using Panzura for file services for a number of years. We're in 33 countries, 7,000 deployments, and largely in the Fortune 100. And that's kind of where we started to see that the growth of data is not only in user-generated content like PowerPoints or data-based backups, but it's the machine-generated data, and that's what brought us to Vision.ai. >> Okay, so great. The layout, that was an internally created product. How long has it been available, what's the key IP in there that differentiates from others in the marketplace? >> So, great question. Well, the thing with machine-generated data is there's a lot of it, right? And as you know, it's growing at 60% compounding growth rate, all these great statistics, but in order to drive value of machine data, especially when you're looking at ML and AI, the larger the data set, the larger the training data set, the better the prediction models, and one of the problems with today's storage platforms for machine data, is that you're taking data, you're indexing it, then you're putting it on Flash, which is a phenomenal storage platform, but if you're looking for petabytes of Flash for just retaining a couple months worth of data, it becomes very expensive, very fast so a couple of years ago, we took some of the core IP that we had and creating file to object mapping, and said, look, let's build a new cloud native architecture to manage cloud native digital machine-generated data, and be able to transfer that not only for the block storage to put in the object storage. So we created something called VBOS, Vision Block Object Storage, that allows us to take, index this data, and then write it to object but still, while it's an object, have it still searchable, and that really unlocks a value of these very large data sets, so you no longer have to push this off on a tape, or push it off into object storage where it's no longer available, it sits in object storage, but it's always on, it's always available. >> And is this a software offering, does it sit in my bucket somewhere, or does it sit in yours, and then actually are we, machine-generated data, that's a pretty wide term. Are we talking log files, or? >> Well, certainly log files is a core starting point because that's something everyone here at VMWorld, you know, has in common, right? As our systems and records are creating and running virtual machines, it's generating digital data about who accessed what, when, where, when and how, for IP address security information, dashboards, et cetera. So, we've created this as a service because, in a multicloud world, you need one platform where you can ingest these data feeds and these log feeds, and then store that and search it. People have been generating and deploying on-site log files for some time, but we've seen a large interest among our customer base, in a hosted service that can securely store and make their logs accessible. >> All right, Geoff, bring us inside a customer. What is some of the typical use cases, outcomes, that customers, if you have any example that might illustrate it, I'd love that. >> Sure, so we'll take a customer that is in the publishing business and as you know, in the publishing busines, we were going from paper into digital right? So it's just digital transformation and as their industry changed, they became now a web hoster, so the sites and their papers that used to advertise and their classifieds and by-print ads, they're now managing their digital experience, well, as they were doing that, they came into a situation where some of their sites were having unpredictable performance lows, and they're just sophisticated enough to have one IT person managing, you know, 50 different, to about 50 different servers, virtual machines, running these, hosting these sites. So they needed help, like is there a platform that can come help me create dashboards so I can visualize this log data that came in to us so our partner, one of our key partners here is phoenixNAP at the show, and Intel's demonstrating our Octane Accelerated Technology, so we went into this particular customer, onboarded him in five minutes, created the dashboards for him, and now their logs are coming in a number of gigabytes per day, and that can visualize and find out any points of their operations that are creating problems and slow access time for their customers. >> You know, I love the storage data aspect of it, right? The searchable object store sounds very neat, I bet there's some very cool computer science there, storage and data geeks love that. It's also got AI in the name, and we talked about ML and AI, so where does that come into the picture? >> Absolutely, sir, great question. The AI and ML aspect of this is because as you get primarily the large data set sizes, then you can start putting machine generated algorithms on top of it, right, so creating large data stores, and then the first machine generated analytics that we've run on top of it, are things such as storage prediction costs, it's actually one where we've saved one of our customers in financial services, tens of thousands of dollars a month, because we can look at their bucket, their bucket sizes and the access times to their S3 buckets and say look, you know, you're actually not accessing it. You can drop it down in the infrequent access and you're not going to get a higher bill, so we can run these analytics for them, provide that data to them. >> Geoff, we're here at VMWorld. >> Yes. >> VMworld's talking a lot about multicloud, and microservices, cloud native, VMware cloud pieces, help us understand the intersection between what you're doing, and how that ties into VMware and their customers. >> Absolutely, well, in a multicloud world, VMware is obviously one very important component of it. But there's also components that are non-Vsphere based, right, and so, we have to be cognizant of this, and need a platform that can support any data feed from any data source, so that's certainly one of them. But number two, as you mention it, microservice. Traditional log platforms or machine data platforms such as Elastix, or Archer Splunk or things like that, is where you go and you create your architecture, and your infrastructure, and you manage that infrastructure as you're putting that data into it so it puts operational burden on the customer to go manage all this. In our view of the world, it needs to be completely serverless. You need to be able to consume machine data, log data, as a microservice in a complete service mythology, so you send your data into this URL, it goes into your bucket, it's encrypted, it's dropped into your object service where it's searchable. >> Yeah, it's funny, I've been looking at the serverless space for a couple of years now, functions, really interesting stuff, Kelsey Hightower actually put out, he said, isn't most of networking serverless by definition? Maybe just clarify that for us. >> Yeah, so serverless is just like the cloud. It's just somebody else's data center, okay? >> I actually have the T-shirt for serverless, it updates that there is no cloud, it's a computer, it's just a microservice that you pay a little bit for when you need it, things like that. >> Right, when you need it, but really, it gets into if I want to spin up elastic searches, talk about that, because that is one of the key workloads that's running in our platform, when you talk about elastic search service, if you want to spin that up, you need to go literally spin up virtual machines, assign block storage to those virtual machines, and hope that you assign enough storage for your data ingestion, otherwise your performance is going to go down, your data is going to become blocked, then you're going to need to assign storage. So, you're still managing stuff, even though it's in the cloud, in our world, we're kind of trying to turn machine generated data and democratize it into simple as a Gmail account right? I create, I request a microservice endpoint, then you write to that endpoint. Now, of course, we're managing servers, and we're managing clusters and virtual machines, and all that funness, but it's transparent to you, and most importantly, you're not hit with any cost for the infrastructure. You're only charged for what you're consuming, and that means it's a complete consumable base bottle from that standpoint, which saves customers a lot money from otherwise having to buy and host a lot of infrastructure. >> So, Geoff, you have a big presence here at the show, A nice booth, I hope it's been a good week, I'm curious about what you thought the energy was, I think you all had an announcement, talk a little about that and how that works with the ecosystem in the audience here. >> Yeah, we actually have two announcements, and let's take the first from the file services, because from our file service platform, we're announcing Vsense certification, which is coming in the fall, we've gone through that process, so that anywhere you're running VMware, on any of the cloud providers on top of SAN, vSAN, you now have a file services platform on top of that that can expand beyond just your NVMe, and also leverage that object storage for this kind of infinite filer, if you will, for that, but the other announcement we have is the log analytics service. >> All right, yeah, tell us a little bit about customer meetings you're having. What are the things that are bringing customers to you, is there a certain thing that, you know, when you hear it, you're like ah, this is a perfect Panzura customer. >> Well, yeah, certainly, I would think that any data and storage is just a universal problem, and people can't get enough of it, and ultimately they want to get out of the business of managing storage a lot, in this case so in that particular instance, being able to offer them a software defined file system platform for our traditional filer environment, is something that's going to, it's just a evergreen forest, right, it's going to continue to grow, you know, the performance of file and flash at the price of object, that's a pretty clear value proposition. In the machine generated data analytics space with Vision.ai, it is how do I make sense of my data? I need to take all of these data streams, and actually put some intelligence on it, and create alerts, visualize this data, so our big proposition here is five minutes to visualize your data, and that resonates. I can walk these customers that are traditionally having to go build their own log service environments, and I'm saying here, let me onboard you. We can actually start sending their data up and having visualizations and alerts in five minutes, and that's revolutionary to them, right? The simplicity of it is key, and I think that's making IT simple to consume and democratizing is something we're focused on doing. >> Geoff, last thing I have, tell us a little bit about what we should expect going forward. Obviously, the AI and ML stuff is continuing to grow, what should customers be looking for from Panzura in the near future? >> No matter how sophisticated a customer in an enterprise is, they don't have enough smart people, right? And data scientists are very expensive, and they're very scarce so what we're doing and focused on doing and we will be doing more of, is we've built a marketplace, a marketplace where data applications, data analytics applications, can be created by the community, can be published into and be consumed by an enterprise, so that they have their account, they add in this application, they can immediately start utilizing and experiencing and unlocking the power of their data. >> Geoff Tudor, really appreciate the update on Panzura. Congrats on the progress of Vision.ai, and hope to catch up with you in the near future. >> Great, thanks so much, I look forward to next year. >> For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, getting towards the end of our coverage from Vmworld 2019, but as always, thanks for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)