 From Chicago, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. Welcome back to Chicago everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. We're here covering the Veritas Vision Solution Day. Veritas last year had a big, you know, big tent event to the thousands and thousands of customers. They decided this year to go out to the customers, like us, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Jeff Crawth of the series, the manager of data management and analytics at Softchoice, which is a Veritas partner. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on, Jeff. Thanks for having me. So tell me more about Softchoice. What's your sort of niche and differentiation in the market? Sure, so Softchoice is about a $2 billion North American IT solution provider. We're actually the number three global mid-market managed service provider. You know, we provide the breadth and coverage across a variety of vendors, you know, helping our customers modernize their IT infrastructure. So mid-market is unique in that, you know, it's not big enough to have like thousands of people doing data protection, for example. They're generalists, typically, IT generalists, you know, they're not small, not like the CEO doing the backup. So talk a little bit about the unique aspects of mid-market from your perspective. Well, I think some of the things that we bring to the bearer to mid-market is, you know, helping customers who don't have that deep IT staff with our technology mentorship, with our, you know, skills transfer that we provide our customers. We have a managed service that we provide which really helps our customers do more with what they have. So data protection is like one of the hottest topics going here at VMworld in August. And for the last two years, it's been probably one of the hottest topics. That along with cloud and obviously the AWS partnership with VMware. Why is data protection so hot right now? What are the factors? I would say data protection and data management is hot. It actually comes back to the underlying data behind it. You know, they say Gardner says data is the new gold and the new natural resource. Well, if you don't have your data protected, available and modernized, you can't leverage things like data analytics to get the most out of your data. You know, our customers, we see customers use data as a competitive advantage. You know, go back, look at, you know, blockbustered in Netflix, they weren't able to take advantage of their data and understand that. So really to me, data protection is the foundation and building block to grow into an analytics environment where you're really taking advantage of the underlying data for that competitive advantage. And I want to do a little tangent here because when you hear things like data is the new oil, it's the new gold. It's actually, in our view, even more valuable. And here's why. Oil, you can put a quart of oil in your car or in your house but you can't put the same quart in both. Data, using the Netflix example, you can use the same data in a variety of different ways. So in some regards, it's even more valuable. So I guess the bottom line here is digital transformation, which is real, is all about how you use data and that has direct implications on how you protect data, doesn't it? It does. And so the other thing is cloud. You hear a lot of talk about cloud and multi-cloud and we're moving into this world of more distributed data. What kind of challenges does that present for customers? I mean, a ton. I mean, we are a big Microsoft partner and have a big partnership with Azure. Helping our customers on that cloud journey, I think is an important part. One of the things and one of the trends that we're finding is ensuring that you're modernizing your current data platform as you do that data migration to the cloud. One of the things we see as customers really struggle with cost containment as they make that cloud migration. So being able to understand what the data is and ensuring that you're only moving the right amount of data and the right workloads to the cloud to keep costs down, I think is one of the important things. One of the things we're helping our customers, you know, make sure they're getting real value out of the cloud and doing that cost containment. We heard this morning, Jolti was talking about sort of cloud repatriation. And you definitely are seeing it. He gave an example of a large company in Dubai who said, we're going all in on cloud and they went all in on cloud and said, wow, this is really expensive. Makes sense, right? Renting is oftentimes more expensive than owning. So I look at that as, you know, those that have had to repatriate, a lot of that is poor planning. So how do you help your customers plan which workloads should be in the cloud and follow those laws of economics and physics and governance, you know, a lot of the land? How do you help them? So it's really a couple of things. We have a couple of assessments that we use to help customers understand their existing workloads and what makes sense to move to the cloud and what makes sense to keep on premise. So, you know, that's an assessment that SoftChoice offers. The other things is, you know, aligning to Veritas's 360 data management, you know, strategy is really getting, you know, a deeper understanding of what that data is that you have. So you are aligning the right costs associated with that data to decide what you move to the cloud and what stays on-prem. And I think that's a big thing. It's really understanding what that data is and aligning it to what needs to be moved. When we talk to senior leaders in IT and business, they tell us that if you're going to move to the cloud, you really want to change the operating model. That's where you're going to get the biggest bang for the buck. What does that mean in terms of data protection? If you're going to go digital, go cloud, change your operating model, that's going to have implications on data protection. Isn't it? And what do you see? It is, and what I think we're seeing, SoftChoice is a whole, you know, we are a big proponent of cloud, but I think we see that we really don't think that customers are going to go fully cloud. It's really taking that hybrid approach and aligning what applications make sense to go to the cloud, what applications make sense to stay on-prem. So really having that full view of your environment so you can make intelligent decisions on what to move to the cloud and what to keep on-prem, aligning to the usage of that data. Now, what about your partnership with Veritas? Do you kind of exclusive Veritas? You work with other backup vendors and maybe talk about that a little bit. And then what do you see as Veritas's strengths and what's on their to-do list? Yeah, so we're a Veritas Gold partner, both in the US and Canada. We're not, you know, an exclusive to Veritas. We like to take a very agnostic approach and really help customers, you know, understand what their environment looks like and what makes sense for them. You know, Veritas is a key player as part of our data management strategy and going down the road of our analytics strategy, you know, helping customers really understand the value of their data. You can't get into the analytics world unless your data is in the right place. So, you know, again, we like to take an agnostic approach, but Veritas does align very well from a data management strategy for soft choice. Why? What is that? Is that their stack? They've just been around longer. They focus a lot on governance. And I heard things like, you know, categorization, throwing out federal rules of civil procedure today. I mean, that's a long history. So why? I would say it's the overall breadth of their portfolio. It's, you know, helping customers, you know, back up to cloud, back up for the cloud. It's helping customers, you know, do things like DR and replication. It's really getting that, you know, full 360 view. You know, one of the things that we're big on is things like info map and data insights and really helping customers, you know, understand what the underlying data is, associating the cost of that. So as they move workloads to the cloud, they get, you know, a full understanding of what they're moving. So they're just not blindly moving things to the cloud. You know, helping keep costs down. Again, you know, when customers like, as in the example we saw earlier today, a lot of customers are, you know, think the cloud is a logical strategy for them. But over time they see that it increases cost. So it's really about aligning, you know, the right sizing of your environment, moving the right applications, the right data to the cloud, and using that as part of your overall strategy. We really see customers really taking a hybrid approach. It's not ever going to be fully public cloud. It's not going to be fully private cloud. It's going to be a combination. I'm really going to ask you about the competitive landscape because you are sort of Switzerland here, even though you've got an affinity, seems to Veritas, but you've seen a lot of VC money move into this space. You're seeing a lot of specialists emerge. You've seen some startups come after the incumbents like Veritas, certainly, you know, Commvaults and other, IBMs and other, of course Dell EMC, you add those guys up, they probably have three quarters of the marketplace. So of course, you know, the startups are going to come after them. And they've got shiny new toys and probably developing in cloud native and probably talking all the right language. But how do you squint through the hype from the marketing side and sort of help customers figure out how they're going to have the greatest business impact? I mean, I think that's a good point. I think we're seeing a lot of small niche players that are born in the cloud or have, you know, the shiny new marketing collateral that they're going to market with. And I think what's important for us is, you know, making sure our customers understand, you know, the full roadmap on what they're trying to do. So, you know, we do see a lot of upstarts that are, you know, going after some of the Veritas, the IBM, the Dell EMC businesses of the world, but it's really, you know, making sure you're not taking a point solution and trying to go forward with that. It's understanding, you know, portfolio like Veritas is that has that depth and breadth and really has that history and background. You know, Veritas has been doing this forever and they really know their stuff. Yeah, so we've stressed that platforms are important to pay attention to, you know, an API based platform is going to beat a product every time and have some legs. It might be, it might have other implications in terms of complexities, but it can drive your business forward as opposed to your point being a point product. And I'm curious as to your thoughts, particularly as it relates to analytics, which is in your title. For years, people have looked at backup as just insurance. People are trying to get more out of it, but how are people using the corpus of backup data and analytics use cases? Why the affinity between data protection and analytics? I think data protection and data management, I'll kind of clump that into one category. If you don't have a modernized IT infrastructure and you don't have a good data management strategy, you know, it's impossible, you know, poor data in, poor data out. You can't make intelligent analytics decisions or have that data for your analytics team if the information isn't there and accessible and good data. So it's really having a very keen data management strategy enabling your analytics users to have the right data to make the right decisions. Because if you don't have the right data, you can't make the right decisions. And no analytics tool can go in and make informed decisions based off bad data. So data management is definitely part of the overall analytics strategy because it's really, you know, the first step. And why the backup corpus is because you've got visibility on that data and it's the logical place. The logical one place, even if it's virtual, to actually be able to do those analytics, right? Exactly. Okay, and then I'll give you the last word. Things that you're learning here today at the vision event, customers obviously Chicago, big customer center, you're based in Atlanta, another big customer center. We were just in New York a few weeks ago meeting some pretty senior level folks. What are you learning here? What's the conversation like? I mean, I think the one key thing I've taken out is that, you know, really customers aren't going full cloud. I think I saw a stat, 92% of customers are taking a hybrid approach and leveraging a really full data management policy to be able to handle on-prem, to be able to handle private cloud, public cloud and the combination and really having that tool set to give you visualizations across an entire, you know, hybrid IT infrastructure I think is important. And that's really one of the key takeaways. I would agree. I mean, we talked for quite some time now years actually how organizations can't just shove data into the cloud, they can't just put their business up into the public cloud, rather they need to move the cloud operating model to their business. It's very clearly, you know, that's the trend. You're seeing so many signs of that, AWS and VMware, you know, partnering up. You certainly saw Google do that in this summer with Istio on-prem, Microsoft obviously, with Azure Stack, huge presence in hybrid cloud. So those predictions are coming true. Jeff, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Great, great to see you. Thanks for having me. All right, you're very welcome. All right there everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We'll be back from Veritas Vision Day in Chicago at the Palmer House Hotel, you're watching theCUBE.