 from New Orleans, Louisiana, at theCUBE. Covering Dotnex Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. We're here in the Big Easy in New Orleans and last year, right at this time, it was Veeamon. Happy to have theCUBE there and right now we're at the Nutanix Dotnex Conference, but back with us the week before his conference, Veeamon, Peter McKay, president and co-CEO of Veeam. Peter, great to see you again. Thanks for joining us. It's always great to be in front. All right, a little bit less bright green than your show, but your second time at this show. Give us a good pair of contrast. You know, between the Nutanix show and yours. It's great to see the ecosystem is definitely expanding. It's great for us because a lot of the relationships we've had with Nutanix has really evolved over the past year and so part of that is the Nutanix ecosystem that we get together with and have a lot of great discussions over the two and a half days. So it's been much more impactful this year than last, but a lot of it comes from a lot tighter in the partnership with Nutanix as well. Sure, and that's something Keith and I heard from the user base, their ask is, you know, broaden and grow and mature that ecosystem. It was last year at the show that you made the announcement of AHV coming and now it's there. So yeah, to bring this inside your customers, what are you hearing from them? Why are they using it and why Veeam? You got a nice mention on the keynote stage this morning. It's good. I mean, the most important was the customers were asking for tighter integration between Veeam and Nutanix. And then, you know, this started probably two years ago when Deerish came to me and said, well, we got to make a big bet together. And so, you know, I remember we were in dinner in New York City. He said, you got to make a big bet on us and I'll make a big bet on you. And that kind of sparked the partnership that we had and now AHV was another one and we got two or three more coming down the road that is pretty exciting as well as we expand. But AHV is obviously an important component that the Nutanix and Veeam customers have been asking for. Yeah, any feedback from the customers as to why they're sliding that over to AHV? Most of them, you know, Veeam where customers, most customers we've talked to still have a mix, but what are some of those drivers that are pushing them that direction? You know, I think it's a lot of the workloads are kind of different, that's kind of conducive. I think a lot of people have tried AHV early on a year ago or so when it was still, you know, not as mature as it is. I've had a number of customers that came up and have used it for another, for a year, year and a half and so and now it's starting to expand. So I think they're getting more comfortable leveraging AHV and that's what's driving a lot of those customers to say, okay, I want to leverage Veeam to do that, to work together with that. So it's definitely had much more broad adoption than it's had a year ago. So Peter, let's see if we can tease out some of these future innovations between you and Nutanix a little bit by taking a broader look. Back up, super mature market, but there's an awful lot of excitement. There's rumors from M&A, there's plenty of investment money going around and not what I would call backup, not even what I would call data protection but I'm labeling this metadata infrastructure. Why is this market segment so important and so critical to customers in this day of digital transformation? Keith, that's a great question and a lot of it has to do with just the massive expansion of data, right? I mean, data is just becoming more critical. It's growing at exponential rate. It is sprawling to all endpoints, the edge in IoT, it's becoming a major issue. So just the sheer volume, the growth and criticality of data is changing. And then I think it's this, as companies are moving, kind of this digital transformation, moving more digital, that the need for it to be always on has become like a must have. So it's, before it was like, hey, I just need to back it up. And then it was, okay, now I got to recover fast. Now it's about I can never go down or if I do, I got to come back up fast. And so that's changed the dynamic for most of these companies that I can't go down, the cost of it. And you had on the keynote today where they said, look at it, if I go down, it's $750,000 a week when it goes down for one minute. So it's a lot of money, it's real dollars that now companies are looking at it saying, you know, I got to do something about it. I've has to be always on. That's what we call availability, now hyperavailability. It's that market, the market is changing and that's why you see a lot of investment going in. So let's talk about that, this critical relationship that you're building with the Nutanix folks. How are you guys offering a differentiated experience and value to this new era of data? Yeah, I think, you know, when you look at the success that Nutanix had, the work, the use cases, a lot of them are similar in that, you know, data is a big part of kind of their future and the part of that is this data up refreshing of the data centers that companies are kind of migrating to new and upgraded data center. I mean, a lot of where our business has come from is that updated the data center refreshers that all these companies are doing and a lot of them are moving off of legacy hardware, legacy backup and protection solutions that are moving to more kind of current day solutions which are Nutanix and Veeam. And so we found that we're going into the same companies having the same conversations and we realized that, why aren't we doing more together to do it? And so what you'll see going forward is a lot more tighter integration between the technologies and a lot more alignment on the use cases that we're going. VDI is, you know, backup as a service, DR as a service. Their cloud scenario, their cloud offering is also going to be a big part of our future as well. So let's talk about cloud in general. What's the important to your customers and shared experience? We've heard a lot from Nutanix this past week about cloud, whether it's XI, Com, but their opinionated view of cloud. What's the Veeam Nutanix cloud story? Yeah, I think, you know, as Deirdre said in the keynote today, it was the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud story. In every company that we go in, you have to go in and talk a multi-cloud story. Especially when you're backing up or DR, you know, the cloud is a great vehicle. It's a great way to kind of get started in the cloud. And so in every conversation we have, whether you're a large company, a medium or small, the cloud is always a component in that discussion. And Nutanix is, when you hear the story, the Veeam value proposition and the Nutanix value proposition relative to the cloud, they're similar messages. And so we believe that companies who want to back up in the cloud, back up from the cloud, or back up between the cloud is critical for our customers. And we said a year, two years ago, that this is going to be a major part of our success going forward, and we've invested a lot in it. Yeah, Peter, it's interesting, because on the one hand, there's some similarities between the Nutanix message and the Veeam. Multi-cloud world's going to play across them. The other thing, Nutanix is trying to position themselves as one of the platform players. Veeam's got a long partnership with VMware. Last year, you know, real bit broad as to what you're doing with Microsoft. How do you grade Nutanix? I know they're a good partner, but, you know, how are they doing in trying to be a platform a la Veeamware, Microsoft, or even in Amazon? I mean, Veeamware is a phenomenal partner of ours. As you know, we built our business on the backs of Veeamware and leveraging that ecosystem. And I think, look, Nutanix is doing a great job of driving what customer needs, focusing on customer success, and expanding that portfolio to the needs of what the customers are asking for. And, you know, that's kind of what we've done as well. And so we've aligned to focus on what the customers need to be successful. And, you know, things of simplicity, you know, good ROI, flexibility, agility, all the things that I think are what customers need and what we've been positioned, what we've been talking to our customers about for, you know, seven, eight years now. So I think the message is aligned, but I think they're doing a really good job of kind of laying out that platform in a way that it's a good journey. It's not all here today, but this is where we're going. And here's how you can follow. So it makes it easy to partner because you kind of know what's coming and where our roadmaps align. Yeah, so it sounds like aligned, there's always the concern. VMware started overlapping with the back of vendors a few years ago, but still a strong partnership. There's always that co-opetition angle. How do you address that? I mean, look at, I mean, that's kind of the world we live in, right? I mean, there's going to be, at times there's different conversations we're having every day with companies that on one hand we compete with, think Dell EMC, right? And companies that you can partner with, which is also Dell and EMC. I mean, HP, Cisco, NetApp, very strong partners of ours. And sometimes it makes sense for us to work together and sometimes it doesn't, or it makes sense for us to work with Nutanix versus Microsoft or someone else. So we try to be the best partner that we can. We've been able to navigate this world that's very, a lot of overlapping technologies. And so we became kind of hardware agnostic, cloud agnostic, and that served us well over the 11 years. And I think it's getting more challenging. I think we're definitely going deeper with fewer. So that'll change over the next year or two where we're going to go deeper with a number of companies because that's what our customers are asking for. Yes, I get that, but I need to go deeper in these certain technologies. Yeah, I'm a technologist. So I'm going to ask the question, what areas of technology are they asking for specifically? I mean, backup is, again, when you look at backup, can I store it? Can I restore it? Can I restore it granularly? And then we start to get into kind of where we differentiate between the, okay, we need to go look at AVM or a different backup solution beyond what vendors give us. Where's those deep integrations or deep capabilities that customers have asked for, as you've been at the show this week? Yeah, every vendor has their kind of differentiation. For us, we've always focused on the recovery time, right? That was always kind of the fastest recovery time of anybody. That's where we kind of built on our business on this availability up and running all the time. We also have kept it simple. We try to make it very easy to use, easy to run, easy to manage, easy to operate. And so that has been kind of the cornerstone of AVM since the beginning. And we tried to make sure the ROI was fast time to value, right? And so that continues to be our cornerstone. When we look at partnerships with the Nutanix and others, it is how do we leverage those value props with theirs? Every customer is asking for keep it simple. How do you get to value faster? And the more you can integrate with Nutanix, the easier it is that I can get one solution bundled together in my various locations. And so we've been able to do that with Nutanix and others and it's exactly what customers have been asking for. Peter, give us some of the highlights of the theme presence here at the show. You're telling us the sessions were overflowing, nice big booth here. Yeah, no, we're a platinum sponsor and as I said, an important partnership. Yeah, we have our event that's here that's on one of the shows. I think max capacity is 500, it's overflowed. So that's a good sign, but a lot of interest. You know, it's good because I actually went to the booth and hung out and answered a lot of questions for a couple of hours last night. Just a number of customers that most know Veeam, but they're asking for, okay, age Veeam, I want it. Where's it coming? What's next, what's next? And so there's a lot of interest here. This has been a very, very good show for us in not just just getting customer feedback or prospects and interest, but also in the partner ecosystem on how they want to leverage the Veeam-Nutanix relationship. So as well as executive meetings that we have, which is always a good. Yeah, well, I can address you. I saw you with the customers in the booth here. Good to have a little warmup. Next week, I don't think you're going to have a lot of time to be sitting in the booth. So Peter McKay, always a pleasure to catch up with you. We look forward to seeing you and the team next week in Chicago for Veeam. Same here. Make sure to check out thecube.net for of course all the shows we're at, all the ones we're going to be at and the thousands of interviews that we've done over the years for Keith Townsend. I'm Stu Miniman, back with watch more here. Thanks for watching theCUBE.