 From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Acronis' Global Cyber Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier here in Miami Beach. Our next guest is Pat Hurley, Vice President General Manager of the Americas in Sales and Customer Relationship. Get to have you on. Hey, thanks for having me. Welcome to Miami Beach, lovely place to have an event. So I hear you got a lot of competition going on between the US, Americas, and EMEA teams. It was a very competitive group here. The European team is very confident. I think we'll show them tomorrow what we're made of. We've been recruiting very hard for some players that are Latin American. I think we'll show them a thing or two. You got a big soccer story there. We do, yeah. We've got a few sports partnerships that we have across the globe. Some of the first partnerships we have were actually within Formula One, and we really try to correlate the story of the importance of data protection and cyber protection in the sporting industry because a lot of people don't think about the amount of data that's actually being generated in the space. A Formula One car generates between, you know, two and three gigabytes of data on every lap. There's tons of telemetry devices that are collecting information from the car, from the road service, from the general environment. They're taking that data and then sending it back to the headquarter, analyzing it and making very small improvements to the car to make sure that they can qualify faster, run a faster lap, make the right type of angle into a turn, which can really differentiate them from being, you know, first, second, third, tenth in a qualifying session. On the soccer side, we do have some partnerships with Arsenal, Manchester City, Inter Milan, and we just signed a partnership as well with Liverpool. So we are very popular in that space here in the US. We have some other sports that we're big fans of. I'm personally a big boss at Red Sox today. I'm being a Boston native and we do have a sports partnership with the Red Sox which has been an unbelievable partnership with them and learning more about the use cases that they saw and using our technology has been really cool. You know, Pat, you bring up the sports thing and we were kidding before we were on camera around the trading, you know, how people do sports deals and they trade, you know, emerging diets for consumer benefit or customer benefits. But really what is happening is sports teams encapsulate really the digital transformation in a nutshell because most sports franchises are, have been traditionally behind but now with the consumerization of IT and digital and we go back to 2007 since the mobile phone really. I mean, it's iPhone. Since that time, sports encapsulates every aspect of it, consumer, business, fan experience. It really has every, every, almost every element of what we see now as a global IoT problem, opportunity. So really encapsulates the use case of an integrated and needed solution. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about the amount of data that's out there today and the fast way that it's growing, you know, the explosion of data in the world today, sports team have different unique challenges. Obviously they have large fan bases that need to be able to access the data and understand what's going on with their favorite sports teams. For us, it's really, you know, these technology partnerships that we have with these guys, it runs through all these different areas that, you know, in many cases we didn't really understand that they were using it for. So, you know, the Red Sox, for example, they've got Fenway Park, an iconic stadium, you know, Mecca Baseball. If you haven't been there yet, I suggest all your viewers that they go and check it out. Give me a call, we'll try to get you set up there. But, you know, the experience that the fans have there is all around their data experience there, right? And it's not just baseball games. It could be hockey games at Fenway Park. It could be a concert that they're having at Fenway Park. There's a lot of different events. These stadiums are open year round and the ability to move, share, access, protect the data in that stadium is really important to how they're functioning as an organization. We talk to their I team quite regularly about how they're using our solutions. They're talking about different aspects of artificial intelligence, different ways they can use our products and machine learning. Obviously, with the new solutions that we have in the market today around cybersecurity are helping them to address other challenges that they face as an organization. These are real time challenges. And they have physical locations, national security issues, terrorist attacks that could happen, their venues, their public gathering places too. Absolutely, we announced our partnership with them back in May and I was shocked to hear them on the main stage announcing that they had this great partnership with the Chronos was talking about their unique cyber security needs. And he started talking about drone technology. And I'm thinking, all right, a drone flies into the stadium, maybe it breaks and it falls on a player and we're paying $20 million for one of these pictures to be out there on the hill or it injures a fan or maybe they're collecting some video data to then share it out and that's Red Sox IP. No, they're talking about cyber security threats in the sense that a drone, a remotely controlled device could come in and lighten and send the area device in the stadium. And that to them is a real security serum and that's frontline for the IT guys. That's what keeps them up at night. Yeah, and that's really an attack big time. Oh yeah, absolutely. What are the use cases that are coming out of some of your customers? Because you guys have a unique integrated solution with a platform that's an end to end component to it. You have a holistic view on data, which is interesting and unique. People are kind of figuring this out but you guys are ahead of the game. What are some of the use cases that you're seeing in the field with customers that highlight the benefits of taking a holistic view over the data? Yeah, absolutely. So we look at it as kind of backup's dead, right? We have combined the old world of backup and disaster recovery with the new world, of cyber security and we combine that to a term we're calling cyber protection because it really requires an end to end solution and a lot of different things need to be working properly to prevent these attacks from happening. You need to be very proactive in how you're going about that. We address it with what we call the Acronis cyber platform. And what this is is a unique, multi-tier, multi-tenant offering that's designed specifically for service providers. We have just under 6,000 service providers actively selling our cyber protection solutions today and they use this for multiple different aspects. Usually the beachhead is something like backup. Every company needs backup. It's more of a commodity type solution. There's a lot of different players in the game out there. But they take it a step further. They use that same backup technology to then do disaster recovery. They can do file-saking share. They can do monitoring. We have notary solutions based on blockchain technologies. Now this whole suite of cyber security solutions. All of this is within a single pane of glass. One platform that a service provider can go in and work with their customers in, make sure that their data is protected, make sure that their physical machines their virtual machines, their PCs, their Macs are all protected. That data is protected, it's secure, but it's also accessible, which is an important part of it. You can take your data, wrap it in a nice bow, bury it 100 feet underground but then you can't use it, right? So you want to be able to make sure that you can actually leverage the technology there. We've seen explosive growth, especially in my market. I think the numbers are pretty crazy. It's something like 90% of the market today in the US is served in some capacity by a service provider. And this could be a small to medium-sized business that's served by a local service provider to those really big guys that are out there. Let's unpack your target audience. You've mentioned service providers multiple times. When you're out selling your target persona, your target audience that you're trying to reach, is who? So we touch everybody. You equate it to kind of what we do with the Red Sox, right? You walk into that city and there's 38,000 people there. Well, some of those people are just regular joes, right? They go to work every day. They have a computer at home. They have a mobile device. They probably have multiple mobile devices. We protect that for them. We call them consumers slash prosumers. We work in a lot of very large retail organizations. If you walk into some of those shops today, you'll be able to see our software on a shelf there. You work with one of those tech squads where they're starting to attach services to it. And you get more of a complete offering there. We then scale up a little bit further to some OEM providers. We work with companies like Honeywell and Emerson that are manufacturing devices that embed our software on there. They white label it and deliver it out. These are connected devices. You think about the explosion of IoT devices in the market today. We're protecting that stuff as well. We work with very large enterprises. So some of the major players that you see in the manufacturing space are standardizing on Acronis. Process control, process automation vendors are using Acronis. And we can deliver the solution because of the way it's so flexible in a very consumable way for them. Those enterprises can actually act as a service provider for their employees. So we can actually take our technology, deploy the layer in their infrastructure where they have complete control. They might not want to be in an Uber cloud. They might not want to work with an Acronis data center. They want to have and hold that data. They want to make sure it's on site. We enable that type of functionality. And then the fastest growing area for us is what I hit on earlier within the service provider community. We're recruiting hundreds of service providers every quarter. We've got some great partners here. Give an example of a service provider. You mentioned the Red Sox. I'm assuming that's a vendor that might be working within that organization. But it sounds like that's a supplier to the Red Sox. How broad is that definition? Give us some examples. Yeah, it's a really good point. So we work with hosting providers. They're going to be regional hosting providers to multinational hosting providers. Some of the very big names that you're probably familiar with. We work with telco providers. We work with ISV providers. There's our ISP providers. Kind of regional telco providers that provide a myriad of different services. All the way down to your kind of local mom and pop type service providers where you've got a small business. Maybe they've got 30 to 50 employees. They're servicing probably 200 to 300 customers. And they want to provide a very secure, safe, easy to use, complete solution for their customers. Those could be focused on certain verticals so they could be focused on healthcare, financial services, construction, et cetera. We have some that are very niche within like dental services or chiropractice offices, small regional doctors' offices. And the beauty of that, and I was getting to the partners earlier, we have partnerships with companies like Connectlize where those are tools that service providers are using on a very daily basis. So essentially the platform gives you that range and that's typical of platforms. You have that broad horizontally scalable capability and the domain expertise either be what solution from you guys or an ISV or someone within your ecosystem. Do they get that right? Absolutely, and that's what really differentiates us is our ability to integrate into that, our platform into their platform and make those connections. So you don't need to learn 12, 14, 15 different technologies. You've got a small suite of offerings in a single pane of glass, very easy to use, very intuitive. The integrations that we have with these partners like Connectlize, like your micro, really differentiates because what they do is they provide open API capabilities. They provide software development kits where these partners can go ahead and build it the way they want to sell it. You know, it's interesting when the cloud came out and as on-premises changed to a much more agile DevOps kind of mindset, that's forced IT to think like a service provider and think like an operating system. It's an operating environment basically. So that service provides an interesting angle and I want to get your thoughts on this because I think this is where you guys have such a unique opportunity with this integrated solution because you could get into anything and you got ISVs to back that up. So I guess the question I would have is for that enterprise that's out there that's looking to refactor and replatform their entire operation or it could be a large enterprise that has a huge IoT opportunity or a challenge or a service provider that's looking to have a solution. What's the pitch that you would give me if I'm one of those customers say, hey, Pat, what's the pitch? So you need a trusted provider that's been in the business for a number of years that understands the data protection and security markets and Cronus has that brand. We've been doing this for about 16 years. We were founded in Singapore, we're headquartered out of Switzerland and we've got a lot of really smart guys in the back rooms building good technologies that our partners are able to use. We look at it a lot of different ways and I mentioned our go-to-market across a lot of different verticals and a lot of different kind of routes. For those, the way we deliver our solution provides the flexibility for an enterprise to a classic reseller to a VAR or a service provider that's delivering service today. It can be delivered to those guys how they want to consume it. So as an example, we may work with a smaller service provider that doesn't have any co-loc capabilities. We provide data centers so they can have a very quick turnkey solution that allows them to get up and running with their business selling backup within minutes to their customers. We can also work with very large enterprises. We can deliver the complete platform to them and then they have complete control over it. We sprinkle in some professional services to make sure that we're giving them the support that they need and then they're running the service for themselves. What we've really seen in terms of a trend is that a lot of these VARs, we have about 4,500 of them in North America, they're starting to look at their businesses and therefore they say, I got to adapt or die here. I got to figure out what my next business model is. How am I going to be the next one that's in the newsflash that says, hey, they've been acquired or hey, Tomo Bravo made a big investment in me, right? They need to convert to the services business. Acronis enables that transformation to happen. I mean, I can see you guys really making money for channel partners because they want solutions. They want to touch the customer. They want to maybe add something that they could bring into it or have high service, gross profits around services. Absolutely, so yeah, our solution is unique in the sense that it allows partners to sell multiple offerings to you're getting an additional layer of stickiness providing multiple solutions to a customer. You're using the same technology, so your IT team is very familiar with what they're using on a daily basis. You're reducing the amount of term for your customers because you're selling so much additional there that they're really stuck with you and that's a good thing. And then beyond that, you're increasing our revenue. Average revenue per user is a key metric that all of our partners are looking at and these guys are owner operators, right? They're business owners. They're looking at the bottom line. I mean, it's interesting the operating leverage around the consistent platform just lowers, gives them software economic model. They can get more profit over time as they make that investment. Look, at the end of the day, channel partners care about a couple things. Money, profit, and customer happiness. Absolutely. And it helps them. They don't want to have a lot of one-offs and a lot of training. Anything complicated, anything confusing, anything that requires a lot of resources they're not going to like. It's also great to have events like this where you're able to press the flesh with these guys and meet them face to face to understand their real-world challenges with it being well on a daily basis. How has the sports solution set that you've been involved in, how has that changed the culture of Acronis? Has that changed as it's, you know, sports is fun, people love sports. They have real problems. It's a real great use case as well. How has that changed the culture? It's been amazing. So one, from a branding perspective, we're a lot more recognized, right? The most important thing about these partnerships for us is that they're actually using the technology. So we've got the Red Sox here with us today. We've got Arsenal represented. We've got Williams. We've got Rouch Racing. We've got a NASCAR car back here. They use our technology on a daily basis. And for each one of them, we solve different types of use cases, whether it's sending a large amount of video data from a Nessan studio over to Fenway Park, or if it's a scout out in the field that needs to send information back and their laptop crashes, how do they recover? A lot of these different use cases, you can correlate them right back to a small business order. You don't have to be a multi-billion dollar sports organization on the same channel. Well, I'm smiling because we've been called the ESPN of Tech to be bringing our set to do like the game day thing. We certainly could love to come join you at all these marquee events that you have. We'd love to have it. Yeah, so if you follow us on social, we're out there. And that's a big part of it. You mentioned what are VARs looking for, what are partners looking for. They want a personal relationship too. A lot of that goes away with technology nowadays and being able to really generate that type of a personal relationship. These partnerships enable that to happen. And they're very unique things. I don't know anything about cars. We started partnering with Formula One. All of a sudden I know everything about Formula One. I go to these races. I tell everybody I don't know anything about cars. And I end up being the subject matter export forum over the weekend. So we'd love to have you guys join us. We love all of our partners. They get more engaged in the sports aspect of it because for us it really is something that, again, they're using us in real life scenarios. We're not paying to put a sticker on a car that's going 300 miles around track. It's not just promotions, it's a real partnership. Exactly. Pat, congratulations on your success and good luck on people blowing away the numbers. Congratulations. Thank you very much. It's theCUBE coverage here at the Cronus Global Cyber Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier. Thank you for your coverage and for this short break.