(upbeat music) >> 2020 was the most unpredictable year of our lives, a forced shutdown of global economies left everyone have the conclusion that the tech industry spending would decline and of course it did, but you'd hardly know it if you watch the stock market and the momentum of several well-positioned companies. Those firms that had products and services that catered to the pivot to work from home, SAS based solutions were focused on business resiliency and cloud saw huge growth. The forced match to digital turned a buzzword into reality overnight, where if you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. And one of the companies participating in that growth trend was Veeam. Veeam virtual is scheduled to take place on May 25th and 26th. And it's one of our favorite physical events and the Cube will be there again as a virtual participant. One of our traditions prior to VeeamON has always been to bring in an executive into the Cube and talk not only about what to expect at the show, but what's happening in the market. And with me is many times Cube alum Danny Allan is the chief technology officer at Veeam. Danny welcome is always great to see you. >> I am delighted to be here again. Disappointed it's virtual, but excited to talk with you. >> Yeah, me too. You know, it's coming. It's getting jabbed but you know, you look at the surprises here. I mean, look at the chip shortage, you know everybody thought, Oh, well stop ordering chips. I mean furniture, et cetera, cars. And it's just kind of crazy. What was your expectation going into the pandemic and what did you actually see looking back? >> Well, it's funny, you never know what's going to happen. And for the first few weeks I would say there's a lot of disruption because all of a sudden you have people who've been going into an office for a long time, working from home and you know, from an R&D perspective at Veeam those people weren't used to working from home. So there's a lot of uncertainty I'll say for the first three or four weeks but what very quickly picked up was the opportunity. I'll say to focus more specifically on delivering things for our customers. And one of the things obviously that just exploded was use of digital technologies like Slack and Microsoft teams. And as you say, Veeam was well positioned to help customers as they move towards this new normal, as they say. >> So what were some of the growth vectors that you guys saw specifically that were helping your customers going to get get through this time? >> Yeah well, people always associate Veeam with knowing data protection for the virtual environment but two things really stood out last year as our emerging markets. One was Office365, and I think that's due to the uptake of Microsoft teams. I mean, if you look at the Microsoft results, you can see that people are doing SaaS. And we were very well positioned to take advantage of that. Help customers move towards collaborating online. So that was a huge growth vector for us. And the second one was cloud. We had more data moving to cloud than ever before in Veeam history. And that continues on into 2021. >> You guys, well, yeah, let's talk more about that set SAS piece of your business. You were very early on in terms of SAS data protection. You kind of had to educate the market. People are like, well, why do I need to back up my SAS doesn't the cloud provider do that? And then you sort of you had to educate, so it was you were early and but it's really paid off. Maybe talk about how that trend has benefited some of your customers. >> Yeah. So if you go back four years, we didn't even have data protection for Office365. And over the last four years, we've emerged into the market leader the largest in protection for Office365. And as you say, it was about education. Early on people knew that they needed to protect exchange when they ran it on premises. And when they first went to the cloud there was this expectation of, Hey Microsoft or my provider will do that for me. And very quickly they realized that's not the case and there's still the same threats. It might not be hardware failure, but certainly misconfiguration or deleted items or ransomware in 2021, sorry, 2020 was massive. And so we do data protection for Exchange, for SharePoint online, for one drive, and most recently for Microsoft teams. And so that data protection obviously helps organizations as they adopt Office365 and SaaS technologies. >> I sent him my last breaking analysis. When you look at the ETR data, Veeam has been really steady. You know, some competitors spike up and come down, others, you know, maybe aren't doing so well or the larger established players don't have as much momentum. It just seems like Veeam even though you cross the billion dollar revenue mark, you've been able to keep that spending momentum up. And I think it's, I would observe it's a function of your ability to identify that the waves and ride those waves and anticipate them. We just talked about SAS, talked about virtualization. You were there cloud, we'll talk about that more as well, plus your execution. It seems like since the acquisition by insight you guys have continued to execute. I wonder if you could help the audience understand how do you think about the phases that Veeam has gone through in its ascendancy and where you're headed? >> Yeah. And so I look at it as three things, it's having the right product, but it's not just enough to have the right product, the right product it's the right timing and it's the right execution. So if you think about where Veeam started, it was all in data protection for vSphere, for the hypervisor. And that was right at the time when VMware was taking off and the modernized data center was being virtualized. And so that helped us grow, I'll say into a $600 million company, but then about four years ago, we see the ascendancy of SaaS and specifically Office365. And so, you know, we weren't first to market but I would argue the timing with the best product, with the right execution has turned that into a massive a very significant contribution to our bottom line. And then actually the third wave through 2020 is the adoption of cloud. We moved last year, 242 petabytes into cloud storage and already in the first quarter of 2021, we've moved to 100 petabytes. So there's this massive adoption or migration of data into the cloud. And Veeam has been positioned with the right product, at the right time, with the right execution, to take advantage of that. >> So I wonder if you could help us quantify that IDC data you know, the IDC did a good job quantifying the market. Maybe you could share with us sort of your position there, maybe some of the growth that we're seeing. Can you add some color to that? >> Yeah. We have some very exciting results from the recent IDC report. So in the second half of 2020, we saw 17.9% year over year growth in our revenue. That was actually triple the closest competitor. And our sequential growth was over 21%. So massive growth and all of that is in the second half of the year, 563 million in revenue. So over a billion dollar company. So these aren't just, you know, 20% growth on small numbers. This is on a very significant number. And we see that continuing forward, we'll be announcing some things I'm sure at VMR coming up in a few weeks here, but that trend continues. And again, it's the right product, right time, with the right execution. >> Cloud continues to roll on. You're seeing, you know, solid weather. If you add them all up the big four 30 plus percent growth you're seeing Azure, even higher growth. You know, AWS is huge, Google growing, Google cloud, probably in the 60 to 70% range. So cloud still hot, it's kind of gone mainstream but there's still feels like there's a long way to go there. What's happening in cloud? You guys, again, leaning in, riding that wave. What can you tell us? >> We are leaning in, you're going to see some things coming up at Veeam related to that. But two things I would say, one is we're in the marketplace of all three of the major hyperscalers. So there's a Veeam backup for AWS, Veeam backup for Azure, and a Veeam backup for GCP. And not only is there products that are purpose-built for those clouds in the marketplace, all three of them have integrations to the core Veeam platform. And so this isn't just standalone products while it is in the marketplace, it's integrated into the full strategy around modern data protection for the organizations. And so I am thrilled about some of the things that we're going to be showing in there but we're leaning in very closely with those. We think we're in early days, like I say maybe first, second year, and it will be the next decade as they truly emerge into their dominant position. But even more than cloud if you asked me what I get excited about looking forward certainly cloud adoption is massive, but Kubernetes, that's what's enabling some of the models of both on-prem and cloud hosted. And we're clearly doing some things there as well. >> So I'm glad you brought that up because I think the first time I ever sort of stumbled into a company that was actually doing data protection for containers was out of a VeeamON event. It was one of your exhibitors. And I was like, Hmm, that's an interesting name. And yeah, of course he ended up buying the company. But so, you know, it's funny, right? Because containers have been around forever. And then when you started to see Kubernetes come to for, containers are really ephemeral they really didn't, you know, they weren't persistent but they didn't have state, but that's changing. I wonder if you could give us your perspective as to how you're thinking about that whole space. >> I truly believe that the third big wave of technology transformation, the first was around physical systems and mainframes and things. And then we went into the virtualized era. I think that the third world is not the cloud. I actually think it is containers. Now why containers? Because as you mentioned, Dave, they're a femoral, they're designed for the world of consumption. Everything else is designed for you, install it. And then you build to the high watermark. The whole thing about containers is that they're a femoral and they're built for the consumption model. The other thing about containers is that they're highly portable. So you can run it on premises with OpenShift but then you can move it to GKE or HKS or EKS or any of the big cloud platforms. So it definitely aligns with organization's desire to modernize and to choose the infrastructure of best choice. Now, at the same time, the reason why they haven't taken off I would argue as quickly as they could have is because they've been really complex, in early days the complexity of containers was very difficult, but the model, the platform or ecosystem is evolving, they are becoming more simple. And what is happening is IT operations teams are now considering the developer, their customer and they're building self-service models for the developers to be more productive. So I think of this as platform apps and certainly backup and security is a part of this but it is moving and we're seeing traction actually faster than it would have predicted in early 2020. >> Yeah. We've been putting forth this vision of a layer that abstracts the complexity of the underlying clouds whether it's on prem, across clouds, eventually the edge and containers are linchpin to enabling that. Let's talk about VeeamON 2021. Show us a little leg, give us a preview. >> So we always come with the excitement and we always come with showing a sneak peek of what's to come. So certainly we're going to celebrate some of the big successes. We brought version 11 to market earlier this year that had security capabilities around ransomware type, continuous data protection it at a whole lot of things. So we're going to celebrate some of the products have already recently launched but we're also going to give a sneak peek of what's coming over 2021. Now, if you ask me what that is, we talk an awful lot about cloud. So you should expect to see things around Veeam backup for AWS and Azure and GCP. You should expect to see things around our Kubernetes data protection with our casting Cape 10 product, you should expect to see evolution of capabilities with our SaaS data protection with Office365. So we're going to give a sneak peek of lots of things to come. And as always, we bring lots of innovation to the market. It's not just another checkbox theme has always said, how can we do it differently? How can we do a better? And then we're going to show that to our customers at VeeamON. >> Well, we're always super excited to participate in the Veeam community. We've always had a lot of fun. They're great events. Yes, it's virtual, but you guys always have an interesting spin on things and make it fun. It's May 25th and 26th. It starts at 9:00 AM Eastern time. You go to Veeam V-E-E-A-M.com and sign up, make sure you do that and check out all the content. The Cube of course will be there. I will be interviewing executives, customers, partners. There's tons of content for practitioners. And, you know, as always you guys got the great demos and always a few surprises. So Danny, really looking forward to that and really appreciate your time and the Cube today. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. Again, May 25th and 26th 9:00 AM. Eastern time, go to veeam.com and sign up. We'll see you there. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of VeeamON 2020, brought to you by Veeam. >> Hi, everybody, welcome back to theCUBE's ongoing coverage of VeeamON 2020, it's Veeam online 2020. I'm Dave Vellante. And Rick Vanover's here, he's the senior director of product strategy at Veeam. Rick, it's always a great pleasure to see you. I wish we could see each other face-to-face. >> Yeah, you know it's different this year, but yeah, it is always great to be on theCUBE. I think in 2018, it had a eight-year gap and a couple of times we've been back since, and yeah, happy to be back on theCUBE. >> So how's it going with you guys with the online format? Breakouts are big for you 'cause you're profiling some new products that we're going to get into. How's it all working for you? Well, it's been different. It's a good way to explain it in one word, different. But the reality is, I have a, pardon the language, a side hustle here where at Veeam, I've worked with the event team to bring the best content, and for the breakouts, it's an area that I've been working a lot with our speakers and some of our partners and external experts, users, and people who have beaten ransomware and stuff like that. But I've worked really hard to aggregate the content and get the best blend of content. And we kind of have taken an interesting approach where the breakouts are that library of content that we think organizations and the people who attend the event really take away the most. So, we've got this full spectrum from R&D deep level stuff to just getting started type of stuff, and really all types of levels in between. We want the breakouts to focus on generally available products, right? So I've worked pretty diligently to bring a good spread across the different products. And then a little secret trick we're doing is that into the summer, we're going to open up new content. So there's this broadcast agenda that we've got publicized, but then beyond that we're going to sneak in some new content into the summer. >> Well, I'm glad you're thinking that way, because what a lot of people are doing, they're just trying to take their physical events and mirror it to the digital or the virtual, and I think so often with physical events, people forget about the afterglow, so I'm glad you guys are thinking about it upfront. >> Yeah, it has to be a mechanism, that we've used it a couple of different ways. One to match how things are going to be released, right? 'Cause Veeam, we're always releasing products across the different set. We have one flagship product, but then the other products have their own cycles. So if something works well for that, we'll put it into the summer library. And then it's also a great opportunity for us to reach deep and get some content from people that we might not have been able to get before. In fact, we had one of our engineers who's based in Australia, and great resource, great region, strong market for us, but if we were to have the in-person at that, I can't bring somebody from Australia for one session. But this was a great way to bring her expertise to the event without having the travel burden and different variety of speakers and different varieties of content. So there's ways that we've been able to build on it, but again, the top level word is definitely different. But I feel like it's working for sure. >> So, Rick, give us the helicopter view of some of the product areas that we should really be aware of as it relates to what you guys are doing at VeeamON 2020, and then we'll drill in. Give us the high level though. >> So for people attending the event online, my advice really is that we're spread across about 75 to 80% of the content is for technical people. 20% of the content in the breakouts is going to be for decision-makers or executives, that type. And then within the context of the technical content, we want to have probably 10 to 15% be presenters from our R&D group, so very technical low-level type discussions, highest level architect type stuff after that. Generic use case is a nice in-the-middle area, because we have a lot of people that are getting started with our products, so like maybe they're new to the Office 365 backup or they're new to backing up natively in the cloud. We have a lot of context around the virtual machine backup and storage integration and all those other great things, but when the platform is kind of spread out at Veeam, there's a lot to take in. So the thought is wherever anyone is on their journey with any of the products, and that's a hard task to do with a certain number of slots, we want to provide something for everyone at every level. So that's the helicopter view. >> So let me ask you a couple of followups on that. So let's start with Office 365. Now, you guys have shared data at this event, talking about most customers just say, "Oh, yeah, well, I trust Microsoft to do my backup." Well, of course, as we well know, backup is one thing (chuckles) but recovery is everything. Explain the value that you guys bring. Why can't I just rely on the SaaS vendor to do my backup and recovery? >> Well, there's a lot to that question, Dave. The number one thing I'll say is that at Veeam, we have partnerships with Microsoft, VMware, HPE, all the household brands of IT, and in many of these situations, we've always come into the market with the platform itself providing a basic backup. I'll give Windows, for example, anti-backup. It's there, but there's always a market for more capabilities, more functionality, more portability. So we've taken Office 365 as a different angle for backup, and we lead with the shared responsibility model. Microsoft as well as the other clouds make it very clear that data classification and that responsibility of data, that actually sits 100% with the customer. And so, yes, you can add things to the platform, but if we have organizations where we have things like, I need to retain my content forever, or I need a discovery use case, and then if you think about broader use cases, like OneDrive for business data, especially with the rapid shift of work from home, organizations may now be not so much using the file server, but using things like OneDrive for Business for file exchanges. So, having the control plane open that data is very important, so we really base it on the shared responsibility. And Microsoft is one of our strongest partners, so they are very keen for us to provide solutions that are going to consume and move data around to meet customer needs in the cloud and in the SaaS environment for sure. So, it's been a very easy conversation for our customers and it's our fastest growing product as well. So this product is doing great. I don't have the quarterly numbers but we just released in the mid part or the Q4, we just released the newest release, which implemented object storage support, so that's been the big ask for customers, right? So that product's doing great. >> Yeah, so that notion of shared responsibility, you hear that a lot in cloud security. You're applying it to cloud data protection, which you know security and data protection are now, there's a lot of gray area between them now. And I think security or data protection is a fundamental part of your security strategy. But that notion of shared responsibility is very important and one that's oftentimes misunderstood because people hear, oh, it's in the cloud, okay, my cloud vendor's got it covered. But what does that shared responsibility mean? Ultimately, isn't it up to the customer to own the end result? >> It is, and I look at especially Microsoft. They classify their software four different ways, on-prem software, software as a service, infrastructure as a service, and I forget whatever the third one is, but they have so many different ways that you can package their software, but in all of them, they put the data classification for the customer. And it's the same for other clouds as well. And if I'm an organization today, if I'm running data in a SaaS platform, if I am running systems in IAS platforms, in the hyperscale public clouds, that is an opportunity for me to really think about that control plane of the data, and the backup and restore responsibility, because it has to be easy to use. It has to be very consumable so that customers can avoid that data loss or be in a situation where the complexity to do a restore is so miserable that they may not even want to go do it. I've actually had conversations with organizations as they come to Veeam, that was their alternative. Oh, it's just too painful to do, like, why would you even do that? So that shared responsibility model across the different data types in the cloud and on-prem as well and SaaS models, that's really where we find the conversations go pretty nicely. >> Right, and if it's too complicated, you won't even bother testing it. So, I want to ask you something about cloud data. You mentioned cloud native capabilities, and I'm inferring from that, that you basically are not just taking your on-prem stack and shoving it into the cloud. You're actually taking advantage of the native cloud services. Can you explain what's going on there, and maybe some product specifics? >> Sure, so Veeam has this reputation of number one VM backup. I'm here in my office, I have posters from all over the years, and somewhere down here is number one VM backup. And that's where we cut our teeth and got our name out there. But now if you're in Azure, if you're in Amazon, we have cloud native backup products available. In fact, the last time you and I spoke was at Amazon re:Invent where we launched the Amazon product. And then last month, we launched the Azure product, which provides cloud native backup for Azure, and so now we have this cloud feature parody, and those products are going to move very quickly. As well, we've had this software as a service product for Office 365 where we keep adding services. And we saw in the general session, we're going to add protection for a new service in Office 365. So we're going to continue to innovate around these different areas, and there's also another cloud that we announced a capability for as well. So the platform at Veeam, it's growing, and it's amazing to see this happen, 'cause customers are making cloud investments and there's no cloud for all. So some organizations like this cloud, that cloud, or a little bit of these two clouds combined. So we have to really go into the cloud with customer needs in mind, because there's no one size fits all approach to the cloud, but the data, everybody knows how important that is. >> To that end though, each cloud is going to have a set of native services, and you've got to develop specific to that cloud, right, so that you can have the highest performance, the most efficient, the lowest cost data protection solution backup and recovery possible. Taking advantage of those native cloud services is going to be unique for each cloud, right? 'Cause AWS' cloud and Azure cloud, those are different technically underneath. Is that right? >> You're absolutely right, and the cost models have different behaviors across the clouds. In fact, the breakout that I did here at the event with Melissa Palmer, those who are interested in the economics of the cloud should check that out, because the cloud is all about consuming those resources. When I look at backup, I don't want backup to be a cost-prohibitive insurance policy, basically. I want backup to be a cost-effective, yet resilient technology that when we're using the cloud, we can kind of balance all these needs. And one of the ways that Veeam's done that is we've put in cost estimators, which it's not that big of a flashy part of the user interface, but it's so powerful to customers. The thought is if I want to consume infrastructure as a service in the cloud, and I want to back up via API call snapshots to EC2 instances only, nice and high performance, nice and fast, but the cost profile of that if I kept them for a year is completely different than if I used object storage. And what we're doing with the Veeam backup for Azure and Amazon products is we're putting those numbers right there in the wizard. So you could say, "Hey, I want to keep two years of data, "and I have snapshots and I have object storage," totally different cost profiles, and I'll put those cost estimates in there. You could make egregious examples where it'll be like 10 and 20 x the price, but it really allows customers to get it fast, to get it cost-efficient, and more importantly at the end of the day, have that protection that they need. And that's something I've been trying to evangelize that this cost estimator is a really big deal. >> It provides transparency so that you're going to let the business drive sort of what the data protection level is, as opposed to sort of whether it's a one-size-fit-all or you're under-protected or over-protected and spending too much. I ask Anton, "How do you prioritize?" Basically his answer was we look at the economics. And then ultimately you're giving tools to allow the customer to decide. >> Yeah, you don't want to have that surprise cloud bill at the end of the month. You don't want to have waste in the cloud, and Anton's right, the economics are very important. The modeling process that we use is interesting. I had a chat with one of the product managers who is basically in charge of our cloud economic modeling, and to the organizations out there, this is a really practical bit, is think about modeling, think about cloud economics, because here's the very important part. If you've already implemented something, it's too late. And what I mean by that, the economics, if they're not right when you implement it so you're not modeling it ahead of time, once you implement, you can monitor it all you want, but you're just going to monitor it off the model. So the thought is this is all a backwards process. You have to go backwards with the economics, with the model, and then that will lead you to no surprises down the road. >> I want to ask you about the COVID impact generally, but specifically as it relates to ransomware, we've had a lot more inquiries regarding ransomware. There's certainly a lot more talk about it in the press. What have you seen specifically with respect to ransomware since the pandemic and since the lockdown? >> So that's something that's near and dear to my heart. On the technology team here at product strategy, everyone has a little specialization, industry specialization. ransomware is mine, so good ask. Whew, so the one thing that sticks out to me a lot is identifying where ransomware comes in, and I have one data point that indicated around 58 or so percent of ransomware comes in through remote desktop. And the thought here is if we have shifted to remote access and new working models, what really worries me, Dave, is when people hustle, when people hurry. And the thought here is you can have it right or you can have it right now. In mid-March, we needed to make a move right now. So, I worry about incomplete security models, people hurrying to implement and maybe not taking their security right, especially when you think about most ransomware can come in through remote desktop. I though phish attacks were the main attack vector, but I had some data points that told me this. So I have been, and I just completed a great white paper that those watching this can go to veeam.com and download, but the thought here is I just completed a great white paper on tips to beat ransomware, and yes, Veeam has capabilities, but here's the logic, Dave. I like to explain it this way. Beating ransomware, and we had a breakout that I recorded here at the event and encourage everyone to watch that, I had two users share their story of how they beat ransomware with Veeam, two very different ways, too. Any product is or is not necessarily ransomware-resilient. It's like going through an audit. What I mean by that is people ask me all the time, is Veeam compliant to this standard or that standard? It's 100% dictated how the product's implemented, how the product's audited. Same with ransomware. It's 100% dictated on how Veeam is implemented and then what's the nature of the exploit. And so I break it down into three simple things. We have to educate. We have to know what threats are out there, we have to know who is accessing what data, and then the big part of it is the implementation. How have we implemented Veeam? Are we keeping data in immutable buckets in the cloud? Are we keeping data with an air gap? And then three, the remediation. When something does happen, how do we go about solving that problem? I talked to our tech support team who deals with it every day, and they have very good insights, very good feedback on this phenomena, and that they've helped me shape some of the recommendations I put in the paper. But yeah, it's a 30-page paper. I don't know if I can summarize it here. It's a long one for me, but the threat's real, and this is something we'll never be done with, right? I've done two other papers on it, and I'm going to have another one soon after that. But we're building stuff into the product, we're educating the market, and we're winning. We're seeing like I had the two customers beat ransomware, great stories. I think I learn so much hearing from someone who's gone through it, and that you can find that in the VeeamON broadcast for those attending here. >> Well, you touched on a couple. Take advantage of the cloud guys who have these immutable buckets that you can leverage. A lot of people don't even know about that. And then, like you say, create an air gap, and presumably there's best practice around how often you write to that bucket and how often you create that air gap. You maybe change up the patterns, I don't know, other thoughts on that. >> Well, I collectively put, I've created a term, and nobody's questioning me on it yet, so that's good, but I'm calling it ultra-resilient storage. And what I'm referring to is that immutable backup in the cloud. It becomes a math calculation. If you have one data point in there, that's good, but if you had a week's worth of data points, that's better. If you had a month's worth of data points, that's even better. But of course, those cost profiles are going to change. Same thing with tape, tape's an air gap, removable media, and I go back and forth on this, but some of the more resilient storage snapshot engines can do ultra-resilient techniques as well, such as like Pure Storage SafeMode and NetApp SnapVault. And then the last thing is actually a Veeam technology that's been out for, I don't know, three or four years now, insider protection, it's a completely out-of-band copy of backup data that Veeam Cloud Connect offers. So my thought here is that these ultra-resilient types, those are the best defense in these situations. It becomes a calculated risk of how much of it do I want to keep, because I want to have the most restore options available, I want to have no data loss. But I also don't want it old. There's a huge decline in value of taking your business back a year ago, because that's the last tape you had, for example. I want today's or yesterday's backup if I'm in that type of situation. So, I go through a lot of those points in my paper, but I hope that those out there fighting the war on ransomware have the tools. I know they have the tools to win with Veeam. >> Well, it's like we were talking about before, and ransomware is a really good example of the blurring lines between security and backup and recovery, of course. What role do analytics play in terms of providing transparency and identifying anomalous behavior in the whole ransomware equation? >> Well, the analytics are very important, and I have to be really kind of, be completely transparent. Veeam is a backup company. We're not a security tool. But it's getting awfully close. I don't want to say, the long form historical definition of IT security was something around this thing called a CIA triad, maintaining confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. So, security tools are really big on the confidentiality and integrity side of it, but on the availability side, that's where Veeam can come in. So the analytics come in to our play pretty naturally. Veeam has had for years now an alarm that detects abnormal behavior in regards to CPU usage and disk write IO. If there's both of those are abnormally high, that is what we call possible ransomware activity. Or if we have a incremental backup that is like 100% change rate, that's a bad sign, things like that. And then the other angle is, even on PC's desktops, like this computer I'm talking to you now on, we have just simple logic of once you take a backup, eject the drive so it's offline, right? So analyzing where the threats come from, what kind of behavior they're going to have, when we apply it to backup, Veeam can have these builtin analytic engines that are just transparently there for our customers. There's no deep re-education necessary to use these, but the thought is we want a very flexible model that's just going to provide simple ease of use and then allow that protection with the threatscape to help the customers where we can, because no two ransomware threats are the same. That's the other thing. They are so varied in what they do, everything from application specific to files, and now there's these new ones that upload data. The ransom is actually a data leak. They're not encrypting the data, the ransom is take down potentially huge amounts of data leakage. So all kinds of threat actors out there, for sure. >> You know, the last line of questioning here, Rick, is I've said a number of times, it's ironic that we're entering this new decade and this pandemic hits. Everybody talks about the acceleration of certain trends, but if you think about the trends, last decade, it's always performance and cost, we talked a lot of granularity, we talked about simplicity, you guys expanded your number of use cases, the support, the compatibility matrix if you will. All those things are sort of things that you've executed on. As you look forward to this coming decade, we talked about cloud. I mean, we were talking about cloud back in 2008, 2009 timeframe, but it was a relatively small portion of the business. Now everybody's talking cloud, so cloud, cloud native, the whole discussion on ransomware, and being broad, our business resiliency. Digital transformation, we've been given lip service in a lot of cases to digital transformation. All of a sudden, that's changed. So as you pull out the telescope and look forward to the trends that are going to drive your thinking and Veeam's decision making, what do you look toward? >> Well, I think that Veeam is laser-focused on four things. Backup solutions for cloud, workloads, and there's incredible opportunity there, right? So yes, we have a great Azure story, great Amazon story, and in the keynote we indicated the next cloud capability, but there's still more, there's more services in the cloud that we need to go after. There's also the SaaS market. We have a great Office 365 story, but there's other SaaS products that we could provide a story for. And then the physical and virtual platforms, I mean, I feel really confident there. We've got really good capabilities, but there's always the 1% and what's in the corner, and what's the 1% of the 1%? And those are workloads we can continue to go after. But my thought is, as long as we attack those four areas, we're going to be on a good trajectory to deliver on that promise of being that most trusted provider of cloud data management for backup solutions. So, my thought here is that we're going to just keep adding projects, and it's very important to make it sometimes a new product. We don't want to just bolt it on to Backup and Replication V11 or V10 for that matter, because it'll slow it down. The cloud native products are going to have to have their own cadence, their own independent development cycles, and they're going to move faster, 'cause they'll need to. So you'll see us continue to add new products, new capabilities, and sometimes it'll intermix, and that's the whole definition of a platform, when one product is talking to another, from a management side, a control plane, giving customer portability, all that stuff. So we're just going to go after cloud virtual/physical SaaS and new products and new capabilities to do it. >> Well, Rick, it's always a pleasure talking to you. Your home studio looks great, you look good, but nonetheless, hopefully we'll be able to see each other face-to-face here shortly. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. It's Dave Vellante and our continuous coverage of VeeamON 2020, the online version. We'll be right back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live on day one of IBM's inaugural Think 2018 event. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are at Mandalay Bay in Vegas and excited to welcome back to theCUBE a veteran from our very first series eight years ago, Rick Vanover, welcome back. >> Hey, thanks guys, happy to be back, it's been awhile. >> It has been awhile. You're now the director of product strategy at Veeam. So, Veeam, IBM, what's cookin'? >> You know, it's actually a result of a lot of work on the Veeam side, some great momentum that we've had over the years. And it actually works well with IBM because Veeam has transitioned into the enterprise and nobody needs to convince IBM that they're enterprised. So, we kind of earned a seat at the table here and we're really excited about that. It's come across, started as a business relationship and we added some technical capabilities, some integrations as well. Those are all really strong things that have gotten us to this point and this is our second year exhibiting, so, we're happy to be here. >> So Rick, what's happening in the space? I mean, you and I, we follow this stuff pretty closely. We've seen back up and recovery explode. The way in which people are talking about it is changing. You go to VM World and it's the hottest area. You guys have great tailwind, as you say, you're moving up market now with more partnerships like IBM and other enterprise companies. What's your perspective point of view on what's happening in your space? >> Well Dave and Lisa, I hate to drop a buzz word on it, but it's digital transformation. And the simple fact of that is businesses need their data. They need the services in their data center. They need their applications, even if things don't go as expected, simply put. This is historically an area of the data center that's not very interesting, back up and recovery. But we've up-leveled it into something that we call availability. And what I mean by that is, we're able to meet the expectations of organizations today, keep their workloads available, be ready for tomorrow, migrate change, know what's going to happen. There's a lot of threats today, all kinds of things underscored in the fact that the data services today need to be available. I mean, just think of any organization and if you didn't have the data center or you didn't have the cloud services, how effective would that many hundreds of thousands of people be for the company? Probably not very effective today. So, the result is digital transformation. These services are just basically required to be available. And it was really a good timing that we came in with this message, at the time that everybody had some amount of digital transformation, and it's working for us. >> When we did VeeamON last year in New Orleans, great show, and I was explaining to our audience that the ascendancy of Veeam, really it started with VMware admin when you changed from sort of physical servers to virtual servers. You had to change back up, you needed something that was simpler, more efficient, far more cost effective, and spoke the language of virtualization. And Veeam, boom, timed it perfectly. Your product fit very very nicely there. We're kind of venturing a new era. We're well into the cloud era, entering, as you point out, the digital transformation era. So, how has Veeam transformed to meet those customer demands? >> So it's actually interesting you bring that up, Dave, because a lot of people don't realize that oh, I'm drawing a blank on my memory here that if we start from the announcement phase to where we are today, so, just under four years, Veeam has released one, two, three back up products that don't require a virtual machine. >> Right. >> Two of which are for cloud native workloads. Actually, if you include an acquisition, there's a fourth product that we've added to our portfolio for native Amazon backups. But on premises workloads, whether they're Windows or Linux or in the hyperscale public cloud or on different hypervisors, we have options there. And then, we also added last year our first product into the SASS space, so our Microsoft Office 365 backup. These are things that people, I still have to educate to different organizations that these are capabilities that Veeam have in addition to that really strong VMware and Hyper-V story that kind of made us known in that regard. But, we realize that enterprises today have more than just virtual machines. And there's a need for that availability experience wherever they are. So that's one of the driving factors of some of our new product innovations in the form of additional products. Each one of them have their own market, persona, their different buyers, and they appeal in different ways. Telling the SASS story is different than the OnPrem story and that's been a really good thing for us to kind of get buy out across the board. When we've talked enterprises, everyone's kind of shaking their head and that's a good sign. >> Yeah, platform optionality is something that you guys have always done pretty well. You sort of addressed my other question was how are the buyers changing and how is the way that you go to market and converse with those buyers changing? >> Well the buyer persona, no matter which one they are, if they're cloud or the storage person or the traditional backup person, they all have a need for some key things. They want their data available. Everybody wants that, they get that. But they also want simplicity and ease of use. Even in the enterprise space, this is something that nobody's going to actively say no to. In fact, kind of a joke at Veeam is all this time just until late last year, we didn't even have a professional services group. And I hate to say, it was, dare I say, that easy, but we've actually gotten a lot of feedback from partners which is central to our business model that that's something that they want as an upsell option because you can put something in but then those extra increments of performance gains and efficiency, that's where the deep knowledge is going to come into play. So, there's huge opportunity there through our own partners and then we just launched an announcement around some of our IBM partnerships around services as well. >> I want to get to that IBM announcement in a minute, but I'm curious from a customer perspective, you talk to a lot of customers. Digital transformation, you're right, it's a buzz word, but it's also an essential survival of the fittest for any organization. When you talk with customers, some of the pin points around data, I imagine, that we hear are so much data, lots of silos, lots of control that resides within lines of business. How do you, first question, how do you help... Maybe I shouldn't say that. What are some of the trends that you're seeing within organizations as you're trying to help them really maximize the protection and make the data available? Trends that you're seeing, where is security as ransomware is going, psh, through the roof? >> You hit one of my favorite topics. And, you know, the long-term historical definition of IT security is to maintain confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data and services. And that's where Veeam comes in on the A part of the, it's called the C-I-A triad. And we think that there's an incredible opportunity for visibility, user education, resiliency, different types of storage can help. In fact, that's a really good one. We integrate with a lot of different IBM storages right now. The Spectrum Virtualize and Storewize Family including really established products in the data center like the SVC. But also, it is 2018 but there's a great use case for tape. Because tape storage like the TS Series from IBM for example, there's nothing more resilient against ransomware than offline storage. And the acquisition costs and the portability just can't be beat. So, we've talked to a lot of customers around preparedness. And what I mean by that is there's this balance of complexity and ease of use and security. And they all kind of have their own factors on where they sit, but I advocate that organizations need to be prepared for this type of thing today. And you can talk to anyone who's gone through it, anybody who's gone through a ransomware situation, they always end it with, "Thank goodness I had backup." Or, "Shame on me, I had to pay the ransom." I just want people to be on the right of that conversation. So, I advocate a lot. We've done a lot at Veeam about that. And our integrations with different storage systems is one of the best ways to be resilient against that type of stuff. We've put a lot of stuff on Veeam.com about that. It's a real threat today for sure. >> So, talk to me a little bit more about that. I mean, what's the prescription for ransomware? I mean, you talk about air gaps. Okay, that's fine. What about analytics? I mean, you as the source of data for backup, you have a lot of data that you can analyze. Where does that fit in to sort of maybe being more anticipatory about whether it's malware, you mentioned security, ransomware? Can you help, how do you help? >> I'll give you two answers, before and after. So on the before, like maybe if a ransomware incident is underway, we actually have this alarm that can detect the possible ransomware activity. It's somewhat prescriptive where you see a high amount of CPU, a high amount of disc rates, those types of sustained behaviors are possibly ransomware. So, we actually can alarm on that on the production side, not so much even on the backup side. But on the backup side, we can address how many different copies of data are where. And more importantly, who's accessing it? That's actually really something to think about. Because many organizations put a lot of security controls on their production data. I don't know if they have the same level of scrutiny on the backup data. So, we have a number of different tools in reporting solutions that can help people with that. I've tweeted a lot of that kind of stuff. But, it's one of those things that I love getting into real specific use cases there. I don't know, I don't know if this group can handle it here today, but, this is something that I have a lot of passion for for sure. >> Okay go on, go ahead, let's do it. >> Okay, yeah, who's accessing what data? Like, if Dave is one of my administrators and so is Lisa, maybe Dave's in charge of databases and Lisa's in charge of email. But what if I come in one day, and I see that Dave was restoring email and not just any old email, but maybe it was the CEO's email and you put it on your desktop, not back into the CEO's inbox. That's an incredible data breach, right? We can report on that type of stuff. So, I can tell you that Dave got into your email, just like that. >> So, I want to ask you about reporting. You know, it's sort of a not often talked about, certainly in the trade press, but it's pretty important. What's the state of reporting? What do you guys do with your products? How about visualization, where does that fit in to the reporting equation? >> Yeah, so that's actually one of the emerging opportunities. We have some existing capabilities, but we get a lot of feedback on that because people want a nice view of where their data is, who's accessing it, how busy is it. I mean, these are very expensive investments in the data center. And answering really specific questions like, why is this development team taking 80% of the production storage groupware? You know, those types of business problems can be solved through capabilities today and I feel that organizations need to look at that more than just a backup in use case. Because, sure, we move the data on behalf of the backup task, but we actually have a broader view. And actually the management products that we have, that's what really makes that come to life. So, the Veeam ONE and the Veeam Management Pack for enterprises and the system center space, those are products that could really give you nice specific heat maps, things like that, answer those types of questions around the resources. But I think it's important that organizations have that visibility because you can't really make your next step as an IT organization without knowing what your current state is. And the details don't go away. The IOPS don't lie, whatever type of buzz word I want to throw out at it, you've got to have this information today to be prepared for your next move. >> VeeamON >> Oh yeah. >> It's coming up in May. >> That is. In May. >> Chicago. >> Mid-May, I'm drawing a blank. It's the week after Mother's Day, I know that, here in the US. And theCUBE will be there. We're excited to have you guys back and we're targeting a great diary of content, a number of industry experts. I'm in charge of the breakouts for that event. I'm targeting 81 breakouts, so a lot of really good information for attendees to choose from. So, I'm really looking forward to that. >> Yeah, so we're excited. This will be our second VeeamON. It's a show with a lot of buzz, great ecosystem. You've got a lot of partners that will be there. As you say, great fun. The VeeamON Party is notorious. >> I heard it's legendary. >> It is. (laughing) >> Are you guys having a party here? >> No, not this week. >> Okay. >> Yeah, the party-- >> That's a first. >> The party will be pretty cool. I've seen the details on it. >> If you've never been to a Veeam party, >> Rick: You haven't been to a party. >> That's true, you haven't been to a party in tech. It's pretty good. >> The partner's are in our DNA. That's one of those things that we as a company everything from selling through the channel, alliance partners like IBM and other established brands, distribution partners, service provider partners that my colleague Matt will talk about here in a second, it's in our DNA for sure. >> Yeah, we're going to talk to Matt about those partnerships coming up next. So, we appreciate it. >> We are. So, we're at IBM Think, their inaugural Think event. We're at four campuses. You're speaking Wednesday-- >> I think so. >> About probably a lot of this stuff. What are some of the things that excite you and Veeam about some of the IBM announcements as we've talked about with them being a core partner? >> Yeah, I was really excited for this year in particular. We're coming off of a huge release last year. Our Update 3, for current release of a Veeam Availability Suite. We dropped an integration for a number of different IBM storages. So, an incredible, incredible use case if you've not heard of it, Veeam's integration for the Spectrum Virtualize and Storewize storage systems. I'd take the backup challenge with this, it can't be beat. It's great stuff. And we also have a huge cloud technology which Matt will talk about here in a second. But, it's a great time to be available with Veeam That's the take away for sure. And that's kind of the central theme of my presentation on Wednesday. Go into some specifics on how you can use it, where it makes sense, and then how it fits into a broader portfolio of availability for organizations today. >> Awesome, Rick, thanks so much for stopping by and coming back to theCUBE after all this time away. We look forward to it and we'll see you at VeeamON. >> Awesome, thanks guys. >> All right, thank you. >> For Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin. You are watching theCUBE live at the first day of IBM Think 2018. Head on over to theCUBE.net, watch all of the videos that we've done so far and check out Wikibon, see what our analysts are uncovering about all things cloud, machinery, AI, et cetera, et cetera. We will be right back after a short break with our next guest. We'll see you then. (upbeat music)