 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VeeamON 2020. Brought to you by Veeam. Everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of VeeamON 2020. VeeamON line 2020 and Danny Allen is here. He's the CTO and Senior Vice President of Product Strategy and he's joined by Anton Gostev, who's the Senior Vice President of Product Management. Gentlemen, good to see you again. Wish we were face to face, but thanks for coming on virtually. Thanks Dave for coming on. I always love being on with you. Thank you. So, Danny, I want to start with you. In your keynote, you talked to, you had a great quote by Satya Nadelli. He said we basically compressed two years of digital transformation in two months, right? And so I'm interested in what that meant for Veeam, but also specifically for your customers and how you help. Yeah, I think about that in two different ways. So digital transformation is obviously the word that he used, but I think of this a lot about being remote. So in two months, every organization in the world, ourselves included, has gone from in-person operations, going into the office, doing things to enabling remote operations. And so, you know, I'm working from home today, Anton's working from home today, we're all working from home today. And so remote operations is a big part of that. And it's not just working from home. It's how do I actually conduct my operations, my backup, my archiving, my hearing, all of those things remotely. It's actually changed the way organizations think about their data management. Not just operations from the sense of internal processes, but also external processes as well. So I think about this as remote offering. So organizations say, how can I take where we are today in the world and turn this into competitive advantage? How can I take the services that I offer today and help my customers to be more successful remotely? And so it has those two aspects to it, remote operations, remote offerings. And of course, all driven by data, which we need to protect. So Anton, you know, there's a saying, it's better to be lucky than good. And I say it's best to be lucky and good. So Danny was talking about some of the external processes. A lot of those processes were unknown. And people kind of making them up as they went along things that we've never seen before. So I wonder if you could talk about your product suite and how well you were able to adapt to some of these unknown. Well, it's more customers using our product in creative ways. But one feedback we got most recently in our annual user survey is the rear light. One of the customers was using a tape as they offsite backups. And they had the process where obviously someone had to physically come to the office, pick up the exported tapes and put them on the track and move them to some offsite location, right? And so this basically, the process was completely broken with COVID because of lockdown. And in that particular country, it was a stricter lockdown than the most, and they were physically unable to basically leave the home. So they basically looked at, luckily they agreed already to version 10 and they looked at what version 10 has to offer. And they were able to switch from using tape to fully automating this offsite backup and going directly to the public cloud to object storage, right? So they still have the same offsite backups that are effectively air-gapped because of the functionality you provide in version 10 for mutual backups. As soon as they created the automatic shift to object storage, completely replacing this manual offsite tape process. So I don't know how long it would take them if not COVID to move this process. Now they love it because it's so much better than what they did before. That's amazing. Yeah, I'll bet. And no doubt. That's interesting. That's an interesting use case. Do you see other use cases that popped up? Again, I was saying that these processes were new. I mean, and I'm interested in, and from a product standpoint, how you guys were able to adapt to that? Well, another use case that seems to be on the rise is that the ability for customers to deploy the new machines to procure new hardware is severely limited now, right? Not only there are supply chain issues, but also, again, to bring something into your data center, you have to physically be there and collaborate with other workers and do install whatever new hardware you purchase, right? So we see a significant pickup of the functionality that we had in the product for a while, which we call director store to cloud. So we support taking any backup physical virtual machine, right? And restoring director into a cloud machine. So we see really the big uptick of migration, maybe not the migrations, maybe not necessarily the permanent migrations, but when people want to, basically some of the applications start to struggle on the resources and they're unable to update the underlying hardware. So what they do is they schedule the downtime and then migrate, restore the latest backup into the cloud and continue using the machine in the cloud on much more powerful hardware. That's a lifesaver for them, obviously, in this situation. Yeah, so the cloud, Danny, is becoming a linchpin of these kind of new models. And your keynote, you talked about your vision and it's interesting to note, I mean, a beam on last year, you actually talked about what I call getting back to the basic, you know, backup. You kind of embrace backup where a lot of the new entrants are like, no, no, backup is just one small part. It's data management. And so I'd love to sort of get your thoughts on that. But the vision you laid out was, you know, backup in cloud data management. Maybe you could sort of unpack that a little bit. Yeah, the way to think about this is step one in every infrastructure, it doesn't matter whether you're talking about on-prem or in the cloud, step one is to protect your data. So this is ingesting the data, whether it be backup, whether it be replication, whether it be, you know, long-term retention. We have to do that. Not only do we have to do that, but as you go to new cycles of infrastructure, it happens all over again. So we, you know, we backed up physical first and then virtual and then we did, you know, cloud. And in some ways, you know, containers were going towards, we're not going backwards, but people are running containers on-prem. So we always go back to the starting point of protect the data. And then of course, after you protect it, then you want to effectively begin to manage it. And that's exactly what Anton said. How do you automate the operational procedures to be able to make this part of the DNA of the organization? So it doesn't matter whether it's on-prem or whether it's in the cloud, that protection of data and then the effect of management and integration with existing processes is fundamental for every infrastructure and will continue to be so into the future, including the cloud. And it's only then when you have this effective protection and management of it, can you begin to unleash the power of data as you look out into the future because you can reuse the data for additional purposes. You can move it to the optimal location, but we always start with protection and management of the data. So Anton, I want to sort of come back to you on this notion of cloud being a key portion of that. You know, when you talk about security, people say you layer. How do we, should we think about the cloud? Is it another layer of protection? And then Danny just said, you know, it doesn't really matter whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. Well, it doesn't matter if you can ensure the same experience. If it's a totally different experience, well, then it's problematic. So I wonder if you could address sort of both the layers as cloud, just another layer and is the management of that actually, you know, how do you make it quote unquote seamless? I know it's an overused word, but from a product standpoint. Well, for larger customers, it's not necessarily a new challenge because it's rare when the customer had a single data center, right? And they had this challenge for always, right? How do you manage my multiple data centers with a single pane of glass? And I would say public cloud is not necessarily at some new perspective in that sense, right? Yeah, maybe it's even makes it easier because you no longer have to manage the most important aspect of security, which is physical security, right? So someone else manages it for you and probably much better than most companies get ever afforded in terms of securing access with their data center, right? But as far as networking security and how those multiple data center interact with each other, that's essentially not a new challenge, right? It is a new challenge for smaller customers, for SMBs that are just starting so they had their own small data center, small world and now they're starting to move some workloads into the cloud. And I would say the biggest problem there is networking and we actually provide some free tools we call it VMPN to make it easier for them to make this first step of securing the networking aspect of the hybrid cloud that the hybrid cloud reality that they in now with these workloads move to the cloud but also keeping some workloads on-prem. You know, the other piece of cloud, Danny, is SaaS. You guys were, if you weren't the first you were one of the first to offer SaaS backup particularly for Office 365. And a lot of people just, I think, rely on the SaaS vendor. Hey, they've got me covered. They've got me backed up and maybe they do have them backed up but they might not have them recovered. How was that market shaping up? What are the trends that you're seeing there? Well, you're absolutely right, Dave, that the focus here is not just on backup but on recovery and it's one of the things that Veeam is known for. We don't just do the backup but we have an Explorer for Exchange and Explorer for SharePoint and Explorer for OneDrive you saw on stage today. We demoed the Explorer for Microsoft Teams. So it's not just about protecting the data but getting back the specific element of data that you need for operations. And that is critically important and our customers expect to need that. If you're depending on the SaaS vendor themselves to do that and I won't be derogatory or specific about any SaaS vendor but what they'll often do is take the entire data set from seven days ago, we'll say and merge it back into the current data set and that just results in a complete chaos of your inbox if that's what they're merging together. So having specific granularity to pull back that data, exactly the data you need when you need it is critical and that's why we're adding it. And the focus on Microsoft Teams now obviously is because as we have more intellectual property in collaboration tools for remote operations exactly what we're doing now that only becomes more critical for the business. So we think about SaaS for backup but we also think about it for recovery. And one thing that I'll credit Anton and the product management team for we build all of this in-house. We don't give this to a third party to build it on our behalf because you need it to work and not only need it work but need it to work well that completely integrated with the underlying cloud data management. So Anton, I wonder if I can ask you about that. So from a recovery standpoint, one thing is Dan was saying you've got to have the granularity. You've got to be able to have a really relatively simple way to recover but because it's the cloud there's latency involved and how are you from a product standpoint dealing with making that recovery as consistent and kind of predictable and reliable as you have for a decade on-prem. So you mean recovery in the cloud or back to on-prem? Yeah, so recovery from data that lives in the cloud. Okay, so basically the most important feature of any cloud is the cost is the price of whatever you do. So whenever we design anything we always look at the cost even more than anything else but it in turn always translates into better performance as well to give you example without functionality where we can take the on-prem backup and make a copy in the public object storage for disaster recovery purposes. So that for example, when a hacker or runs away, wipes out your entire data center you have those backups in the cloud and you can restore from them, right? So when you perform the restore from cloud backups we are actually smart enough to understand that we need to pull this and that block from the cloud backup but many of those blocks are actually shared with backups in another machines that in your on-prem backup repository. So we do this kind of on-the-fly analysis and we say, oh, instead of pulling the 10 terabyte of the type backup from the cloud we can actually pull only 100 gigabytes of unique blocks and the rest of the blocks we can take from on-prem repositories that still survived the disaster. So not only reduces the cost 20 times or whatever, right? The performance obviously of restoring from on-prem data versus pulling everything from the cloud through the internet links is dramatic, right? So again, we started from the cost how do we reduce the cost of restore because that's where cloud vendors won't get you, right? But in the end it resulted in much better performance as well. Excellent, as well in your keynote you talked about the Veeam availability suite gave a little sneak preview. You talked about continuous data protection, cloud tier, NAS recovery, which is oftentimes very challenging. What should we take away from that sneak peak? Three main directions, basically. The first is Veeam-CGP is we keep investing a lot in on-prem data protection disaster recovery. Veeam-Ware is a clear leader of on-prem virtualization. So we keep building this new ways to protect Veeam-Ware VMs with lower RPOs and RPOs that were never possible before with the classic snapshotting technologies. So that's one thing, we keep investing on-prem. Second thing, we do major investments in the cloud in an object store specifically. From that regards, again, to recover the keynote, we're adding Google Cloud support and we're adding the ability to work with coldest tier of object storage, which is Amazon Glacier Deep Archive or Microsoft Glacier Blob Storage Archive tier. So that's our second big area of investment. And third, instant recovery, Veeam has always been extremely well known for its instant recovery capabilities. And this is going to be the biggest in terms of instant recovery capabilities. And then we'll introduce as many as three new major capabilities there for instant recovery. So, Danny, I wonder if I could ask you, I'm interested in how you go from sort of product strategy to actual product management and bring things to market. I mean, you know, in the early days Veeam, very, very specific to virtualization, that of course with the bare metal, you've got a number of permutations and product capabilities. How do you guys work together in terms of assessing the market potential, the degree of difficulty, prioritizing, how does that all come to customer value? Well, first of all, Anton and I spend a lot of time together on the phone and collaborating just on a weekly basis about where we're going, what we're going to do. I always say there's kind of four directions that we look at for the product strategy and what we're building. Behind you, we have 375,000 customers and so those are the tailwinds that are pushing you forward. We talk to them on all segments, what is it that you want? I say we look left and right, the left to our alliance. We have a rich ecosystem of partners and channel that we look to collect feedback from. Look right, we look out at the competitors in the space, what are they doing? Make sure that we're not missing anything that we should be including and then look forward. Big focus of Avine has always been not just creating checkboxes and making sure that we have the required features but innovation and you saw that on stage today when Anton was showing the NAS instant recovery and the databases and recovery and the capabilities that we have. We have a big focus on not just checking a box but actually doing things better and differently than everyone else in the industry and that served us incredibly well. So I love that framework but so now when you think about this pandemic you look behind, your customers have obviously been affected, your partners have been affected. Let's put your competitors to the side for a minute. We'll see how they respond but then looking forward to the future as I've said many times we're not just going back to 2019, we're a new decade and really digital transformation is becoming real for real this time around. So as you think about the pandemic and looking at those four dimensions what initial conclusions are you drawing? Well, the first one would be that that beam is well positioned to win, continue to win and to win into the future. And the reason for that I would argue is that we're software defined. Our whole model is based on being simple to use obviously but software defined and because of the pandemic as Anton said, can't go into the office anymore to switch your tapes from one system to another. And so being software defined set this apart in positions as well for the future and so make it simple, make it flexible and ultimately what our customers care about is the reliability of this and to the credit of research and development and Anton's team is we have product that as everyone says it just works. Yeah, so Anton I wonder if I could ask you kind of a similar question. How has the pandemic affected your thinking along those dimensions and maybe some of your initial thinking on changes that you'll implement? Yeah, sorry, I wanted to add exactly on that. I would say the pandemic accelerated our vision becoming the reality, right? Basically the vision we had then I said a few years ago and one day you joined that beam will become the biggest storage vendor without selling a single storage box, right? And this is just becoming the reality, right? We support an infinite number of object storage providers today, right? Only a few of them actually track the consumption that is generated by different vendors and just for those few who do track that and report numbers to us, right? We're already managing over hundreds of gigabytes of data in the cloud, right? And we only just started a couple of years ago with object storage support. So that's the power of software defined, right? We don't need to sell any storage to be eventually the biggest storage player on the market, right? And the pandemic is clear, accelerate that in the last three months we see the adoption. It was already like a hockey stick, but it's accelerating further because of the issues customers are facing due to unable to actually physically go back to the office and do this back up handling the way they normally do it. Well, guys, it's been really fun. The last decade watching the ascendancy of Veeam, we've ordered on it and talked about it a lot. And as you guys have both said, things have been accelerated. It's actually very exciting to see a company with a rich legacy, but also very competitive with some of the new products and new companies that are hitting the market. So congratulations. I know you got a lot more to do here. You guys have been, you know, for a private company, pretty transparent, more transparent than most. And I have to say as an analyst, we appreciate that and appreciate the partnership with theCUBE. So thanks very much for coming on. Thank you, Dave. Always a pleasure. All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and our coverage of Veeamon 2020 Veeamon Line. Keep it right there, but right back.