 Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamOn 2017, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to New Orleans, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. A lot of noise on cloud, a lot of signal on cloud. And we've been unpacking that. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Alexander Kozlyev is here. He's the head of IT architecture at MTS. And he's joined by Konstantin Yakovlev, who is the lead system architect at MTS, a telecommunications company in Ukraine. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, thank you for coming on. Thank you. Okay, no, not Ukraine, we're in Russia. It's not Ukraine. Oh, sorry, it says here, Ukraine. Okay, not always. We had some bad data, we make sure to clean that up. Yeah, yeah, we have a data quality problem here. Sorry about that. Okay, yes, my apologies. Okay, let's start with Alexander. Maybe you could describe MTS and tell us a little bit about the company. Yeah, surely. MTS is one of the largest mobile operator in Russia. It's represented on a Russian market more than 20, roughly 23 years. So currently, our subscribers in Russia only may be counted by a number of 80 millions. And we have subsidiaries in different countries like Belarus, like Armenia, like, and other countries. So we are putting forward our digital services, cellular services, and others. And me personally, working roughly from the first day of the MTS, so I'm roughly 20 years in MTS, I'm starting as system administrator. Okay, so you've seen the evolution of the various backup, and we'll come back to that, but I wanted to ask Konstantin, it's a long way to come to a show like this. How are you enjoying the show and what has it been like for you? It's a nice conference, but the main thing for us, I think it's a backup of physical servers. Because now we have different systems for backup physical servers and virtual servers. And maybe we hope in the future to join these systems and have only one backup for all our services. So it's a good step from VIN to make a physical backup also. I think it's main goal for us here in this conference. Right, so that was one of the big announcements this week. And of course VIM is oftentimes been pointing out that VIM up until this point has not backed up bare metal servers, physical servers as you say, and now that happens. So that allows you to consolidate your backup architecture, is that right? Maybe, maybe. It's the first step, it's the first step. So now we have to look how VIM will backup bare metal servers. We would like to harmonize our backup software because currently we have three or more backup software featuring like Semantec, like NetWorker. So we would like to join them and to choose best of breed of them. And currently the VIM software now can play this role as being the big player like them. Alexander, you have the history of MTS and you've seen the backup systems evolve from before virtualization all the way through. Can you share with us the MTS backup and data protection journey? Backup and data protection journey. Surely it started from very simple tape drives staying on top of the table. And I personally was who repairing them from jammed tapes and so on. Then there are tape outloaders and others and others. But nowadays we have a huge amount of data about, okay, it's a very big amount of data, so simple tapes cannot appear properly. So we have historically different software solutions which were acquired with different companies which were merged with us. So currently we would like to harmonize all this sort of software features. So how big way was passed by? So from an IT architecture perspective, Constantine, what are the big challenges in the telecommunications industry in terms of high availability? We hear a lot about always on. What does that mean to your business? I think it's maybe always on. It's not a first main goal today. Maybe for us, main goal is NFE, if you heard about it. It's a virtualization of network part of telecommunication company. This is the first and main question. And after that we can talk about always on and data protection because in telecommunication world it's very important part of our business. So NFE is really about being able to deliver software services to your users, yes? I would like to say NFE to being as a tool. But a real goal is agility of the business because we are challenging very different range of tasks and we need to react very fast. So the only way to withstand such threats is to react very fast by means of very flexible infrastructure. So the only way is to build NFE infrastructure and NFE radius, so it's a shift in mind. Yeah, I think back, I worked in telecommunications 20 years ago and I mean it was lots of big gear and cabling and it's a software work now. And NFE is just part of, right, it's a term to help you deliver and agility sounds absolutely right. Just through all of the style oriented solutions that are built everywhere. I've talked to many of the large telecommunication vendors over the years and that the whole cloud wave, some telecommunication providers tried to be a cloud provider. Most of them, NFE is an exciting thing that they're looking at. How does cloud impact your journey? Yes, it does impact us very, very, how to say. Okay, so currently what do impact us most of all is the need to reorganize our internal processes. Currently we are not cloud oriented in our minds and our process, I have already mentioned that our company is more than 50 years old and all the processes are from the very beginning. So most of them should be re-entered completely and build up from scratch. So currently it's a big, big task and we are trying to work with that. We are talking without tops in order to, for example, to state the tasks in different ways and to work in different things, different as they probably have. And where does Veeam fit in? You mentioned you have a lot of different flavors of backup software because you have to support both physical servers and virtual servers. Where does Veeam fit in and where do you see it going? Veeam is our main solution for backup and virtualized systems. And in IT, we already virtualized most part of our systems, but now we start this NFE process in telecommunication part. So Veeam will play more and more important role in our life because we start to transform our telecommunication part and to move it to IT-like world. And in IT, the Veeam is the main solution for backup virtual machines. So in all other parts of our company, Veeam will start to play this role as the main solution of data protection for the virtual machines. So when more and more virtual servers will appear in our life, Veeam will play more and more important role. So this is a Veeam role in our life. This is the main solution for backup virtual machines. Yeah, it's gonna be more and more reliant on that platform to support your future. So less and less physical servers, but still as head of one of the division and Veeam said, we cannot virtualize 100%. So always would be some small part of physical servers. Okay, good. Well, we're out of time. Thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. I appreciate it. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you very much. All right, keep it right there, buddy. Stu and I will be back to wrap right after this short break. Right back.