 Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2018, brought to you by Commvault. Welcome back. We're a few miles down the road from the Jack Daniels distillery. I believe there's some whiskey flowing on the Joe floor here, but we're going to finish a couple more interviews. You're watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman. This is Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome back to the program. Don Foster is the Senior Director of Solutions Marketing with Commvault. Don, great to see you. Great, thanks for the invite. All right, so been really good energy at the show. Keith's second time at the program. It's my first. You've got 2,000 of the loyal supporters here. Lots of breakouts. You know, the pavilion's been hopping, labs and everything. How's the show been for you so far? So I think it's been incredible. I mean, first hats off to our partners and customers for coming. The buzz is great. Now, this year we tried to do something that may be a little bit different than years past and really make it all about the partner ecosystem and about how solutions are more than just Commvault software. It's Commvault together with our partners really get the outcomes that the customers want. So we've really integrated everything in as best we possibly can from the content and the theaters and who's doing presentations and even how we do some of the collaboration. Yeah, one of the themes we've been poking at a bit is like, okay, what's the same and what's different about Commvault? You've got obviously, you know, trusted brand. Got a lot of existing customers, but you know, this is not the Commvault of five years ago. It was a really broad set of announcements this week. I want you to say, what's been anything surprised you as to kind of what is resonating? Which things people are getting most excited about? I'm sure yesterday when you showed off that bezel and a bunch of people were oohing an eye, you're like, really the bezel? But it's a bunch of geeks here. So you know, sometimes the flashy lights still, you know, get us going. For sure, there's always a few things that kind of surprise you and some things that really don't. I mean, you say what's same, what's different. You know, there's a few terms that we use, one of them being powerful simplicity. The fact that the power that Commvault offers for customers from technology perspective, you know, that's always a mainstay. And I think our customers know that. Our partners absolutely know that. And the fact that we can deliver these solutions for our customers in a really interesting and integrated way is always powerful. The simplicity side, I don't know, even listening to Al not too long ago, talking about, hey, we need to make things more simplified. That's really resonating well. And it's not just a dashboard or an interface, but it's all the automation that's coming behind the scenes. That's really starting to change people's idea and their minds. And I mean, we know, we know the customers are expecting more. I mean, Bob and Al talked about it on the keynote stage. Our partners are expecting more. So we need to deliver more as well. So I mean, those are some really interesting things on the bezel. You know, it's interesting. Appliances, you never think it's like, people don't want to see the equipment. I mean, that people see servers and there are server racks every day, but you bring a piece of equipment and you stick it on a podium and everyone wants to touch it, take a selfie with it, it's the new appliance. Look, I applaud your team for not, you know, smoke and music and everything. And you know, here's the unveiling, your software company. And therefore, one of the deployment models might be, we make it nice and easy. Here it is, that's great and everything. You have little design people do their thing, but at the end of the day, I don't want to think about it. It's most of the stuff sticking in racks in my data center or in the cloud aren't things that I need to worry about, right? Right. And not only that, I mean, appliance is cool, but guess what? What we're doing with partners like HP and Cisco on building even larger-scale appliance, that's just as cool, if not maybe cooler. So I mean, it's great to kind of showcase that sort of a spectrum of what we can do for our customers. So let's talk about the party ecosystem. For the size show, you guys have a really big show floor. Great announcements with Cisco, HPE, but 500 partners doing a partner portion of the show. What are some of the under the radar announcements or even trends that you've seen that customers are excited about? Yeah, sure. So actually, just before I came out here, I was in an EBC with one of our large worldwide partners. And one of the things we were talking about, they're super excited about the Convault Activate product and the portfolio of applications that we're launching. And they basically said, look, you guys absolutely nailed it. It's kind of the dumb moment. In fact, the partners said, three years ago, we were trying to tell our customers, it's the data stupid. Like the data, that's what's most important. Gear is cool, but it's the data. And when they heard this came out, it's a whole nother route for them to talk to customers about how they can do things smarter around their data without trying to sell them on necessarily swapping out back and recovery first. Let's really understand what your environment looks like. And I'm hearing a lot of buzz from our partner community just on how cool and what this might be able to do for them and how they're building their business. But more importantly, the customers are starting to realize, hey, GDPR just isn't an EU thing. California just brought their own regulations. We're going to see that probably come to a state near a year before you know it. So you're going to have to have a need to act and really maintain and control that data. That's really what Activate does, right? Going beyond just metadata and giving companies a chance to really understand what they have and how they might need to act against it, either to meet their compliance requirements or maybe just be smarter with data. Yeah, I love that, be smarter with data. I think I was saying, you know, half the customers, they're starting with compliance because that's something we have to do. But then there's the opportunities as to what can I do with the data? Great example in the keynote, it was like, oh well, I can actually use intelligence to how do I call the data? Yes, you want to save a lot of data but I don't necessarily need to save all the data and that could save me millions of dollars when I do that. So yeah, I mean, the power of data, I think we are still in the early days of, you know, how does Commvault help customers through that? Yeah, so I mean, it's really kind of in the breadth of how we crawl information and what we sort of unlock as we do that, right? So you probably saw, we talk about the four-dimensional index, the 4D index. And it's, we call it 4D just to try to make it sound super technical, but there really are multiple dimensions that we pull together from information. And the metadata information and where it comes from and whatnot, that's all super important from a starting point. But once you start working through a review process, you've inventoried it, you want to be able to start adding in some tags, maybe some entity detail on where and how that fits the organization. And then from that, you can get deeper into context and content. So the content indexing, adding in those attributes, being able to really start to align different sets of data against one another. And then the next piece, where we do a little bit ourselves and we also work with partners like Lucidworks, like folks like Brainspace, we can start driving context from that information. So before we even talked about moving or storing data, we're crawling this information and really giving customers the chance to solve what really is probably a top three issue for CIOs. And that's what data do I have, where is it? And is there value in it or is there risk in it or is what I don't know about my data bigger than I realize? And that's really what this helps to unlock and solve for. So I think now we're at the beginning of, just the beginning of where infrastructure, traditional infrastructure companies like Commvault are bleeding into data management, specifically with the 4D indexing, where we're providing data outside of the traditional, oh, what's the file size, the data was created, centered on backing up and recovering the data, to actually providing business context and value that application ISVs can pick up. Are you starting to see any movement in ISV space to leveraging the data that's provided by index 40? So we're definitely seeing interest. So when people think about data, they tend to go down this idea of a data lake. And I've talked, I'm sure you guys have heard this. Oh yeah, we just throw in the data lake. We throw in the data lake. Well, what are you throwing in the data lake? Yeah, that's a good question. We don't know what's in the data lake anymore. And it becomes a data swamp. You probably heard those level of stories, right? Well, if you don't know what's in there, if the integrity of the information, then it becomes a major challenge. Well, a lot of the partners, the ISVs, the folks that want to build and work on solutions outside of, you know, on top of the data, they need to know that they have a good source of truth from what they're working from. So being able to showcase that we have sort of that virtual data layer, the fact that we can crawl data that's not even under our own management, and then being able to offer that information back up to another partner, that really starts to, you know, sparks some ideas on maybe what could be next. So action, we're still working through that. We still have some things to do around software development kits and make it easier for our partners to build and get that ecosystem going. But it's absolutely right down the alley where we want to take this. All right, so Don, I hear your data lake and the data swamp. And when we go to the world of multi-cloud and edge components, really what we get into is the data ocean because there are currents and weather patterns and, you know, challenges unforeseen, the edge of the map, you know, don't go there, things like that. One of the things, you know, I've been looking at for the last couple of years is when I look at companies like Commvault, you know, how do you play in the multi-cloud world? We had a good chat with AWS. I stopped by the Microsoft Azure booth here as things like multi-cloud and edge computing fit in, you know, where does Commvault fit? So on the cloud space, I mean, it really starts with how you're actually leveraging or moving data or using data in the cloud, right? And it seems minor, but if you're not really using the cloud natively, if you're not storing data in a way that an S3 blob expects it and you don't have the index behind it, if you're just passing it out in containers and you're not really putting that rigor to what that information is, then you start to lose a lot of the downstream capabilities of taking advantage of all these different services that are inside of the cloud. So, I mean, this is back in 2008, you know, 2007 when AWS was starting to really hit cloud computing, you started hearing about Microsoft and Microsoft Azure starting up, we realized that we wanted to work with these blob-based storage devices. And from there, we realized, all right, if we're going to let customers go to the cloud, we want to make sure that once their data goes there, there's never a reason for them necessarily to have to pull it back. Let's be able to help them orchestrate the resource utilization and in order for us to do that, that data has to be natively accessible, really easy right there in that cloud. So that's kind of been our vision. So as we supported AWS and their many services, as we supported Microsoft Azure and their many services, as we're working through and supporting Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, we're tying into those back-end services to make sure that that native access is always available. And the red thread there is really the way Commvault indexes it, very similar to what the 40 index is from an activate perspective. That red thread is how we can help manage that information across those clouds. So it gives customers an ability to know, all right, it can be in cold storage, but I still know where it is, what it's meant for, and at any point in time, I can use it to drive more insight or pull it up into a production compute resource in the cloud. All right, Don, want to give you the final word as we're coming towards the end of our broadcast year, Commvault Go, what main takeaway you want customers to have when they think about Commvault and think about this event? Great, so I want them to walk away and realize, okay, the Commvault maybe they thought we were five years ago, or the Commvault that maybe they're hearing from other people that isn't from us, give us a chance and really take a look, the things we're doing around AI, the way we're working natively with cloud environments, the fact that we have that reliability, that dependability, and all the modern technologies that you're looking for. I bet they will be surprised and if they just give us a chance, they'll see that the power in our software has become something that's really simple and will actually help them get faster to achieve their outcomes than if they looked at buying point solutions and tried to piece it together on their own. So that's really what we're looking for, is start to learn and understand what the new Commvault is, I bet we'll surprise them. All right, Don Foster, really appreciate you giving us the update, we appreciate the opportunity to be able to dig in with your customers and this broad ecosystem. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be doing a wrap up here in a second and thanks so much for watching theCUBE.