 Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019, brought to you by Commvault. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are covering Commvault Go 19 in Colorado, day two of our coverage, and we're excited to welcome a successful Commvault customer to theCUBE. We have, from the main stage this morning, Matthew Magme, data center director of Sonic Healthcare, Matthew, welcome. Thank you for having me. This is so exciting. Oh, getting more excited to have you. So you got to, you are, as your pin says, a Commvault customer champion. I am a customer champion. I've kind of pride myself on that for the last few years. I like to get involved in the community and kind of help the other newcomers to Commvault as well as better my understanding and try to give the guys on the other end a support line of break. So before we dig into Sonic and what you guys are doing and how you're working with Commvault, give our audience an overview of Sonic Healthcare, what you guys do, where you're based, all that good background stuff. Okay, so I work for Sonic Healthcare USA, so that's obviously in the United States. We are an anatomical and clinical pathology laboratory company. We are based west coast, central, and east coast of the United States, and we work with hospital's doctor's office to provide quick and reliable laboratory results. So this is patient data. Yes. We think of data, as I'm sure you do as well, it's the lifeblood, it's the new oil, it's all the things right that you hear. It's the new bacon. It's the new bacon, is that, was that your quote? No, that was actually from Commvault last year. Yeah, they had teachers last year with that. You bacon. Yeah, data's the new bacon. Well, it's critical, you know, regardless of comparing it to bacon, I do like that. But it's also, the proliferation of it is really hard to manage. Tell us a little bit about the IT environment at Sonic. You guys have been using Commvault for about four years, but give us an overview of what you were working with before and how, what maybe some of the compelling events were. So coming on board with Sonic, the Commvault rollout was relatively new. We didn't, I didn't really come into a pre-existing environment. It was like, okay, this is what we're going to use. I need you to learn it, run with it, make sure that it works right. And, you know, coming from other companies that had different software applications, I was always in charge of the disaster curve. It's always been kind of like a beating heart for me. You're the DR guy. It is, and apparently it's really hard to find someone who's excited about backups. So, it's like, yes, please take it. So, coming in and being able to mold this application to kind of how I wanted it was a little, like touch and go at first, because we had people out of our overseas office that were handling already, and they kind of set the stage of how they wanted it to go. But, you know, things changed, and we got to kind of move things as we go. But, I kind of owe a lot to them to kind of really introducing me to Combo. So, Matthew, one of the things that we've really enjoyed talking about at this show is everybody's ready. They're born ready, they know what they're doing, but it's preparing for when things do fail. So, you talked a little bit on stage about some of those times when things fail, and how today you're able to be here, and you're, the other person in the DR group is here, and you're not worried about being away from the office, and, you know, having, you know, I guess it's not a pager anymore, but getting that call that they need to be there. I still have my cell phone, but, yeah. So, bring us through some of those, you know, failure scenarios. So, we are always trying different things. You know, Combo does offer a wide array of different solutions they have for plans, and one of them is their Active Directory plan, and I'm leaning towards this, because this is my most recent failure, is, you know, we were just, I've always had issues with Active Directory testing the failover, and my first attempt at it was a failure. But I learned so much off the bat that I'm actually comfortable now that there might be a few tweaks that we have to do, but worst case scenario, we'd definitely be able to get it back online without any issue. But, if we would have gone into it without testing, without that failure, who knows what could have happened. It could have been just a resume generating event, you know. Well, so you, Stu alluded to it, and what you mentioned in the keynote, is, hey, my other, only other DR guy is here in the audience. So, I actually, I have a team, a data center team, and we're all in charge, it's eight people, and we're in charge of the disaster recovery, but the other gentleman who's with me is the only other one who's done a lot of the Commvault training. He comes to, he's been to all three Commvaults, goes with me, and he's probably, if I'm not around, he's the next in line to take that. So, if there's a major issue, it would be one of us that they would contact, but we're both here. And you're both here, well that actually speaks volumes. It does, and we're comfortable, and we've been checking email for things, but everything's smooth sailing so far. I think I saw a quote from you, I think it was in a video where you said before it was like having a newborn baby. Absolutely, absolutely. I used to check, sign in, it's like 10 o'clock every single night, for the first year that I worked for signing, because I was petrified. Because I knew that I was backing stuff up, but I don't know, was it still running? Was it still being backed up? Did it pause? Was it causing performance issues on the other end? There were so many what ifs, and I was a mess. I was a nervous wreck constantly. Work until one or two in the morning, and then go to bed, and then eagerly get up, and start checking stuff, even before I left the house. I was like, oh, okay, that finished. But now it's like, yeah, I know it finished. Not worried about it. Matthew, I think back to early in my career, it was the dreaded backup window. When am I going to be able to get that in there? Can I finish the backup in the window that I have? And we've mostly gotten beyond that, but there's so many new things now. We were just talking with Sandy Hamilton, who was on stage before you, about some of that automation. And I'm like, automation sounds good, but there's got to be a little bit of fear. It's like talking about texting. I said, we've all texted the wrong thing, or the wrong person, or the wrong person. So tell us your thoughts about how automation is impacting your world, and how convoluted it is. Believe it or not, I actually have very little automation workflow running through Commvault right now. A lot of the stuff that we do automation-wise lies on the VMware side. So that's been good. I haven't really implemented it a lot, just because I personally am not comfortable with it yet. I'm not against it. It's just something that I haven't really trained myself enough to say, I'm going to leave and let this run by itself. I'm still like, oh, no, this could be better. This could be better. This could be better. So until I'm 100% comfortable with that, I think we'll just leave it at a semi-automated task. I'm just sorry, is that something down the road that you're looking at? Oh absolutely, like even sitting in Keynote yesterday and listening about the Alexa automation and SMS tax, I liked writing in a piece of paper to test that, because it's something that I've always wanted, and ever since Commvault go last year, when they were using Alexa, to check SLA and RPO and RTO, I'm like, I want to be able to do that. So it's definitely down the road, but it's on a back burner right now. So give us a landscape view, distributed organization, you talked about, you're based in the US, but all of the different clinics and organizations that you work with, are you living in this multi-cloud world? So we are pretty much a zero cloud initiative company. Really? Yeah, I'm actually trying to work on a slogan, no cloud, zero cloud and proud or something like that, but I'm not 100% sure. It's definitely not out of the question, but with FedRAMP compliancy and HIPAA, there's just a lot of regulation between the day that we have for the US that transmits back and forth, let's say Australia or Ireland or something like that. There's certain regulations that we have to deal with, and in the cloud, there's very few options of where you can actually have those servers. So right now, on-prem is kind of our jam. So as a lot of organizations are going through FedRAMP certification, I was just at one of Dell's events the other week, they're going through it, I know some other like e-signature companies are doing it, a lot of companies are. Are you paying attention to that? Is that something that you think in the future might provide more confidence? To be completely transparent, it's something I should be paying more attention to that I really haven't really done as much research as I should have, and I take full responsibility for that, but at the same time, there's a lot of other things going in the US until we implement something of that nature. I don't really think that I'm really too concerned about it, so yeah. Matthew, you've been to a few of these events. Yes, this is my third one. Last year, there was a lot of talk about the coming change, and this year, a lot of new faces, new products, headache, metallic. Yeah, so I want to get your impression on the executive changes, some of the, are you seeing any indications of organizational changes in the products? What I'm seeing is I'm seeing new life to a product that I've always been told is a dinosaur, which I kind of laugh because I'm like, well, this dinosaur is doing things that the latest and greatest things aren't really doing, so to see this new life, the new rebranding of the logo, the new leadership, the new acquisitions and everything, it's just like feeding fuel to the fire that is Commvaal, and I'm pretty excited. I will say that I'm a little bit more excited about the new additions to orchestrate and activate since stuff like Metallic won't really be implementing just because of our business practices, but. Let's talk about it in our last few minutes here, because I actually talked about some of the new technologies with orchestrate, activate yesterday and today, but in terms of support, we just had, as Stu mentioned, we just interviewed Sandy Hamilton, and she's come on board in the last, I think she said four and a half months, owning professional services, systems engineering, support, customer success throughout the entire life cycle. Tell us a little bit in our closing minute or so about the support and training that you've gotten from Commvaal that give you the confidence for you and one of your other guys to be here and not tied to your phone. I don't think I'd still be with Commvaal if it wasn't for their support. I owe so much to their support. They've brought me through some pretty dark times with deployment, with troubleshooting, with failures, where I thought that I had things right and it just didn't work. I've called in at one in the morning, got great support, I've called in at 10 in the morning, got great support. Phenomenal follow up, their community impact, like their forums and their customer champion, so much just additional information that helps you not have to call in, not make you feel like that, oh, that failure. So I owe a lot to their support and their training because without it, I wouldn't be on stage. Yeah, I'm wondering if you could put a point on the forums and your participation as a customer champion. You're spending your own time, you're working with your peers. I am. Why is that so important and how is the vibrancy of this community? Yeah, the information belongs to the world. The things that you learn, somebody taught me, so why shouldn't I teach somebody else? And if that makes someone else be able to go out and ride mountain bikes or cook with their daughter or do anything like that, then I'm all for it because it got me through all that. So, I mean, 10, 15 minutes on the customer forum to answer, oh yeah, I know that, I've seen that. I had a gentleman the first morning at breakfast, like I've had it taken open for two weeks and they can't figure it out and we worked together and actually got this problem solved. You know, and it was like the only reason is because I've seen that and I worked with Commvault and they showed me how to fix it and I retained that knowledge. That's awesome, Doug. Takes paying it forward to a whole new level. Absolutely. And it also speaks volumes about how you followed Jimmy Chin this morning and nailed it. I tried, it was very difficult, you know, I'm sure that, you know, why he was filming that solo climber, he was sweaty palms, that was definitely sweaty palm going out there. It was, well Matthew, what a pleasure to have you on the program. It was so much fun. Thank you, congratulations on your success and we look forward to hearing many more great things out of Sonic. Thank you. All right, first student minimum, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube from Commvault Go, 19.