 Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. We're here at Veritas Vision, hashtag Vitas Vision, the truth in information. This is a company that was founded in 1983 and has gone through a very interesting history acquired by Symantec for around 15 or 16 billion dollars and then spun back out and purchased by Private Equity Carlyle Group in 2005 for about seven billion net of cash, about a two and a half billion dollar company with a really interesting growth plan. One that involves transforming from what many consider to be a legacy backup company into a multi-cloud, hyper scale, data protection, value of information organization. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. Stu, good to see you. Great to be here with you, Dave, it's interesting. Yeah, Veritas Company, I've known for, gosh, about 20 years and they kind of went under the radar a little bit under the Symantec piece and now back at it, but gosh, felt like a time warp hearing about net backup, a product that well entrenched in the market, has lots of customers, so talking to people here, people on board, Veritas, some very veteran in the company, a lot of new faces, though, and they say it's energy, innovation, bringing as Bill Coleman who we're going to have on shortly, it's about the software-defined, multi-cloud, hyper scale word, so A for hitting all the buzzwords and excited in the next two days to kind of dig in and see where the reality is. Yeah, and you know, Stu, I like to look at the sort of structure and the organizational structure and the market caps and things like that, but I always felt like, you know, Veritas kind of disappeared under Symantec's governance and now it is breaking out, I love the new private equity play, I want to hear from Bill Coleman about that, what the relationship is with Carlisle. You know, it used to be that private equity would come in and they would just suck all the cash out of a company. I mean, the classic example was, you know, CA, right? They would maybe do some acquiring companies, they would maybe buy cashflow positive companies, take on more debt, suck all the cash out and leave the carcass, that's not the new private equity way. We see that with Riverbed, we see that with Infor, BMC, and many, many others have said, all right, you know what, the public markets aren't going to give us the love that we need, we're going to go private, we're going to get a deal on the company, we're going to invest in that company, invest in R&D, build the asset value of that company, maybe even in some cases do acquisitions, grow it, and then maybe do another exit, and that is a great way, a better way, in fact, for these private equity firms to really cash in, and I think Veritas is an interesting asset from that regard. Yeah, absolutely, I think back, Dave, you know, when I worked at EMC, you know, Veritas was one of those competitors that EMC was like, oh, we got to keep an eye on them, Veritas would put out, you know, build boards and have people running around in shirts with said no hardware agenda. One of the reasons I think that Veritas also disappeared a little bit under Symantec, is while they were great for loss of environments, they didn't really hit hard of that wave of virtualization. Interesting thing is that, you know, EMC bought VMware, everybody knows, but the company that almost bought VMware was Symantec, and lots of us say, what if? What if Symantec had bought, you know, VMware would, they as a software company really kind of squashed that, you know, could Veritas have then, you know, kind of really integrated very deep here, and now as Dave, you know, you and I were at like the Veeam show earlier this year, and they said Veeam had written, you know, the 10 years of virtualization and now hopping on multi-cloud. Well, you know, a lot of that message, I hear from companies like Veeam, companies like NetApp, you know, software-based storage companies, if you're not living in that multi-cloud world, you know, what is your future? So great to see, you know, Microsoft and Google and Amazon and how those all fit. But to your point, with no hardware agenda, Veritas was always viewed as the company with that sort of open software glue to bring together the data management piece, and as I said, it sort of, you know, got lost over the last several years under Symantec. When you hear the keynotes this morning, you hear a story of information, information value, leveraging that information, information governance, a lot of talk about GDPR, obviously a lot of talk about backup, multi-cloud, really an entirely new vision from the brand that has frankly become Veritas over the last decade, and new management really trying to affect that brand and send a message to customers that we hear you. They were self-deprecating, talking about their UX, not being, you know, what it should be, listening to customers and putting forth a vision around, not just backup, but data management. Now, that's always been the holy grail. Can you use that sort of data protection backup corpus of data to really leverage that, to churn information into an asset? That's something that we're going to be unpacking all week with executives, partners, customers, analysts and the like. Last stop before we get to our next guest. Dave, absolutely, you know, bunch of new products are out there. It's that balance of how do they build off their brand, all of their customer adoption, and now they have a lot of new things going on. So how do they fit in that environment? How do they differentiate? Because everyone's trying to partner with the mega clouds and it's not just the big three that we talk about. IBM and Oracle are two big partners that Veritas is talking about here. And something like hyper-converged infrastructure. Veritas has a play there. They came out with an object store. I know you're asking me like, wait, is this an array? Or, well, no, it's Veritas, it's software. It's always going to be software. Jyothi Swaroop, who's giving one of the super sessions, we're going to have him on, say your infrastructure does not differentiate you. It is your data, and that's what they want to highlight to the top. I think a message that we in general agree with and looking forward to digging into it. Okay, so we'll be here for the next two days. And what we like to do in theCUBE is what we hear is the messaging and then we like to test that messaging. Poke out a little bit with the executives, talk to the customers about it, see how well it aligns, and then opine on where we think this is going. But if you were at VMworld, you knew that data protection was the hottest category. It's an exploding area, a lot of dynamism, because it's all about the data. So we'll be talking about that, digital business. Keep it right there, everybody. This is theCUBE, Veritas Vision. Hashtag, Vitas Vision. We'll be right back with our next guest right after this short break.