 From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York. It's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. Welcome back to the beautiful Tavern on the Green in the heart of Central Park. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. We're covering Veritas Solution Days, hashtag Vitas Vision. Veritas used to have the big single tent, big tent customer event and decided this year it's going to go belly to belly. Go out to 20 cities, intimate customer events where they can really sit down with customers across from the table. Certainly this beautiful venue is a perfect place to do that. Harish Venkat is here as a VP of marketing and global sales enablement at Veritas. Thanks for coming on Harish. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, so we're going to change it up a little bit. Let's hit the escape key a few times and talk about some of the big mega trends that you're seeing. You've spent a lot of time with customers. You've had some intimate conversations today. What do you see as the big trends driving the marketplace? So at my level, what I observe at the highest thing is simplicity, instant gratification is two things that customers love. Forget about customers, even we as individuals, we love simplicity and instant gratification. Examples around that, think about back in the days where you had to take a picture, process the film, and then realize, oh my god, the film's not even worth watching. Now you have digital photography, you take millions of pictures, and instantly you view the picture and keep whatever you want, delete whatever you don't want. A small example of how simplicity and instant gratification is changing the world. In fact, if you listen to Warren Buffett, he'll say invest in companies that is making your life a lot easier. So if I spread that across the entire industry, I can go on with examples like Netflix disrupting blockbuster because it made it easy for customers to watch movies at their time and making it easy for consumption. You look at a showrooming concept where you go to Best Buys of the World and many others and look at a product, but you don't buy it right there. You go to your phone and say, OK, do I do a price compare and then order it on the phone where someone delivers it to your house? So the list goes on and on, and the underpinning result as a result of this is disruption. You look at Fortune 500 companies just in the last decade, over 52% of those companies have been disrupted, and the underpinning phenomenon is all about instant gratification and simplicity. Amazon's another great example. I remember when my wife said to me, Dave, you've got to invest in this company, it was like 1997. You've got to invest in this company at Amazon. At the time it was mostly books, but they started to get into other retail. We missed that boat, didn't we? I actually did, but I sold. I never lost money making a profit. So at the same time, customers just can't get there overnight. So what are some of the challenges that they have in getting to that level of simplicity? So you look at IT spend, and when you look at the breakdown of IT spend, you'll see that about 87%. In many cases, even greater than 90% has spent just to keep the lights on. And these are well-established companies that I'm talking about. In fact, I was doing a keynote in Minneapolis one time, and a CIO came and said, Harish, I totally disagree. In my company, it's 96%, just to keep the lights on. So you're talking about less than 10% of your IT spend gone towards innovation. And then you look at emerging companies who are spending almost 100% all around innovation, leveraging the clouds of the world, leveraging the latest and the greatest technology, and then doing these disruptions and making things simple for consumption. And as a result, the disruption happens. So I think we have an opportunity to rebalance the equation in the enterprise space and making it more available for innovation than just keeping the lights on. So part of the equation of shifting that needle, moving that needle, if you will, is just eliminating non-value-producing activities that are expensive. We know still, IT is still very labor-intensive. So we got to take that equation down and shift it. Are you seeing companies have success in shifting, retraining people toward digital initiatives and removing some of the heavy lifting? And what's driving that? Yeah, so I think it's a journey, right? So I mean, the entire notion of journey to the cloud is one of the big initiatives to take out heavily manual-intensive, data-center-intensive, which is costing a lot of money. If I can just shift all of those workloads to the cloud, that will help me rebalance the equation. I view the concept of data intensity, which is really two variables to it. Back to your point. If I can take the non-core activity, rely on my partner ecosystem to say, what is best-in-class solutions that I can use as my foundation layer and then innovate on top of it, then yes, you got the perfect winning formula to really have a lot of market share and wallet share. If you're trying to do the entire stack by yourself, good luck. You'll be one of those guys who will be disrupted, there is no doubt. So okay, so that says partnerships are very important. You can't do it alone. Channel is very important. Yes. So what do you see in terms of the ebb and flow in the industry of partnerships, how those are forming here, a lot about co-opetition, which is kind of an interesting term that is now we're living. What's your observation about partnerships and how companies are able to leverage them? What's best practice there? Yeah, so just as Veritas, we're a data protection leader company. We have incredible market share and wallet share amongst the Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies, but even within our incredible standing, we have to rely on other partners. We don't do everything on our own. We have incredible relationship with our cloud service providers, with the hyper-converged systems of the world, like Nutanix, we just announced Pure Today. So when we combine those partnerships, we can offer incredible solutions for our customers who can then take care of the first variable that I talked about and then innovate on top of it. So I think partner ecosystem is extremely important for customers. It's very important that they pick the right players so they don't have to worry about the data and they can continually focus on innovation. We were talking to NBCUniversal today and one of the themes of my takeaways was he's trying to get to, there's basically a data protect backup administrator, essentially, but he's trying to get to the point where he can get the business lines to self-serve. And that seems to me to be part of the simplicity. Now, individual like that has got to reskill, move toward a digital transformation, move that needle so that it's not 90% keeping the lights on, it's maybe, it's a 50-50. What are you seeing in terms of training and reeducation of both existing people and maybe even how young people are being educated? Your thoughts? Yeah, I think the young people coming out of college, they're already tuned to this. So to me, those are the disruptors of the world. You got to keep an eye on those millennials of the world because you don't need to train them more because they're coming out of college. They don't have the legacy background. They don't have the data centers of the world. They're already in the cloud. They're born in the cloud sort of individuals. So I think the challenge is more about existing individuals who have the pedigree of all the journey that you and I, we have seen and how do you retune yourself to the modern world? And I think that presents an opportunity to say, okay, look, if you don't adapt real quick, you don't have a chance to survive in this limited amount of time that you have in the IT space. But having said that, we're also seeing that you have some time window and that time window will continue to shrink. So when we talk about this transformation journey, you can see year after year, the progress that's been made in the transformation is leap and bound. And that's all related to Moore's Law. You think about computer and storage, it's becoming a lot cheaper. And so the innovation rate is continuing to go up. So you have a very limited window, adapt or die. So Harish, we've talked about digital transformation, we're talking about simplifying, we're talking about agility, we're talking about shifting budget priorities, all very important initiatives, how is Veritas helping customers achieve these goals so that they can move the needle from 90, 80, 90% keep the lights on to maybe 50, 50 and put more into innovation. So four major themes, one is data protection. If you don't have your core enterprise asset, which is your data protected, then you can't really innovate anything on top of it. You'll constantly be worrying about what happens if I have a ransomware attack, what if I have a data outage. So Veritas takes care of it. Back to the notion that you pick the best players to take care of the fundamental layer, which is around the data. The second thing that I would say Veritas can help is the journey to the cloud. Cloud again is another instrument for you to take out cost out of your data center, your agile, your nimble, so you can focus on innovation. You see the trend. So again, Veritas helps you with that journey to the cloud. It allows you to move data and application to the cloud. When you're in the cloud, we protect your data in the cloud. The third thing I would say is doing more with less. I talked about the IT equation already. Software defined storage allows you to do that. And the last thing I would say is compliance. We can't get away from compliance. The fact that Veritas has solutions to have visibility around the data, you can classify the data, you can always be compliant working with Veritas. You take care of these four layers. You don't have to worry about your data asset. You can worry about innovation at that point. So to me, it's sort of a modern version of the rebirth of Veritas when Veritas first started. I always used to think of it as a data management company, not just a backup company, right? And that's really what we're talking about here today. Evolving toward a data-centric approach, that full life cycle of data management, simplifying that bringing the cloud experience to your data wherever it is could be on-prem, could be in the cloud, sort of this API-based architecture, microservices, containers, all the kind of interesting buzzwords today, but they enable agility and a cloud-like experience, that Netflix-like experience we talked about. Absolutely, right? So I mean, we're super excited. The one thing that I would also say is with our latest NetBackup 8.1.2, the other thing that I talked about which is simplicity and ease of use, we are addressing both of that in addition to the robust brand that we have around protecting data. So now you have simplicity, ease of use, instant gratification, all the basic ingredients, and Veritas is here to protect them. So it's been a great day. Thanks for helping me close out the segment here. This venue is really terrific. It's been a while since I've been at Tavern in the Green. Some of you guys, I don't think I've ever seen it before, sets down here. He's a city boy, but we country bumpkins up in Massachusetts. We love coming down here in the heart of Yankee countries. So thanks very much for helping me close out here. Great segment. All right, thanks for watching everybody. We're out here from New York City, Tavern in the Green. You've been watching theCUBE. I'm Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.