 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 coming to you live from Commvault Go 19. Pleased to welcome to theCUBE a gent from Microsoft Azure. We've got Ben DeQual, principal program manager, and welcome. Thank you, thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on. So, Microsoft, Commvault, what's going on with the partnership? Look, they're one of our great storage partners in data management space. We've been working with Commvault for 20 years now in Microsoft, and they've been working with us on Azure for about as long as I can remember. And I've been on the Azure business for about seven years now. So, just a long time in cloud terms, like dog years. And they've been doing a huge amount of their around getting customer data into the cloud, reducing cost, getting more resiliency, and then also letting them do more with the data. So, they're a pretty good partner to have, and they make it much easier for their customers to go and leverage cloud. So, Ben, in my career, I've had lots of interactions with the Microsoft storage team. Things have changed a little bit when you're now talking about Azure compared to more, it was the interaction with the operating system or the business suite I just had. So, maybe bring us up to date as those people that might not have followed where kind of the storage positioning inside of Microsoft is now that when we talk about Azure in your title. Yeah, we sort of, and just briefly, we work very heavily with our on-premises brethren. They're actually inside, the OS team is inside of the Azure engineering org now, which is kind of funny. But we do a lot of things there. If you start looking at, firstly, on that hybrid side, we have things like Azure files. It's a highly resilient Azure service, SMB and FS file share up to 100 terabytes. But that interacts directly with Windows Server to give you Azure file sync. So, there is sort of synergies there as well. What I'm doing, personally, my team, we work on scale storage. The big thing we have in there is our blob storage technology, which really is the underpinning technology for pretty much all storage in Azure, which is then including our SaaS offerings, which are hosted on Azure too. So, disk is on blob storage, our file is on blob storage, you look at Xbox Live, all this kind of stuff is a customer to us. So, we build that out and we're doing work there and that's really, really interesting in how we do it. And that's not looking at going, we're going to buy some compute, we're going to buy some storage, we're going to build it out, we're going to run Windows or Hyper-V, or maybe VMware with Windows running on the VMware, or whatever else. This is more a story about, we're going to provide you storage as a service. You're going to get a minimum of like 11 nines of durability and be able to have that scaled of petabytes of capacity in one logical namespace and give you multiple gigabytes, double digit gigabytes of throughput to that storage. And now we're even moving that about to multiple protocols. So, REST API centric today, we've got Azure storage, you have APIs you can go and use. But, we're giving that consistency of the actual backend storage and the objects and the data available via more than just one protocol. You can go and access that via HDFS APIs. We talk about data lakes all the time. For us, our blob storage is a data lake. We turn on hierarchical namespace and you can go and access that via other protocols like as I mentioned, HDFS as well. So, that is a big story about what we want to do. We want to make that data available at crazy scale, have no limits in the end to the capacity or throughput of performance and over any protocol. That's kind of our line in the hill about what we want to get to. Yeah, and we've been talking to the Commvault team about some of the solutions that they're putting in the cloud, the new offering metallic that came out. They said, if my customer has Azure storage or storage from that other cloud provider, you could just go ahead and use that. Maybe, how familiar and how much conversation you've been having about our metallic. We're working, we work pretty tightly with the product team over at Commvault around this and my team as well, around how do we design it? How do we make it work the best? And we're going to continue working to optimize as they get it beyond initial launch. They're going, wow, we've got data sets. We can analyze, we know how to, we want to know how to tune it now. Really, we love the solution, particularly more because the default, if you don't select the storage type where you want to go, it'll run on Azure. So really sort of big kudos to the relationship there. They chose us as the first place we'll go to, but they've also done the choice for customers. So some customers may want to take it to another cloud. That's fine, it's reasonable. I mean, we totally understand it's going to be a multi-cloud world and that's a reality for any large company. Our goal there is to make sure we're growing faster than the competitors, not to knock out the competitors altogether because that just won't happen. So they've got that ability to go and yeah, hey, we'll use Azure as default because they feel that we're offering the best support and the best solution there. But then if that same customer wants to turn around and use a competitor of ours, fine as well. And I see people talking about that today where they may want to mitigate risks and say, I'm going to do, I'm doing Office 365. I want to take an Office 365 backup. It's cool, use Metallic. It'll take it maybe to a different region in Azure and they're backing up and they're still going, well, I'm still all in on Microsoft. They may want to take it to another cloud or even take it back to on-premises. So that does happen too because just in case of that moment, we can get that data back in a different location if something happens. So Metallic talking about that is this new venture. It's right, it's a Commvault venture and saw that the other day and thought that's interesting. So we dug into it a little bit yesterday and it's like a startup operating within a 20 year old company, which is very interesting, not just from an incumbent customer perspective, but an incumbent partner perspective. How have you seen over the last few years and particularly been the last nine months with big leadership and GTM changes for Commvault? How has the partnership with Microsoft evolved as a result of those changes? It's always been interesting, I guess, when you start looking at adventure and everything since things change a little bit, priorities may change, just to be fair. But we've had that tight relationship for a long time. At a relationship level and the exact leadership level, nothing's really changed. But in the way they're building this platform, we sit down out of my team, out of the Azure engineering group and we'll sit down and do things like ideations, like here's what we see gaps in the markets, here's what we believe could happen. And well, back in July we had Inspire, which is our partner conference in Las Vegas, and we sat down with their LTE, our LTE in a room, we're talking about these kind of things. And this is, I think about two months after they may have started the initial development of Metallic from what I understand, but we're talking about exactly what they're doing with Metallic, offered as a service in Azure is, hey, how about we do this? So we think it's really cool. It opens up a new market to Convold, I think too. I mean, they're so strong in the enterprise, but they don't do much in the smaller businesses because with a full feature product, it also has inherent complexity around it. So by doing Metallic as a click, click next done thing, they're really opening, I think, new markets to them and also to us as a partner. I was going to kind of click on that because they developed this very quickly. This is something that I think what student I were hearing yesterday, Metallic, was kind of conceived, designed, built in about six months. So in terms of like acceleration, that's kind of a new area for Convold. Yeah, and I think they're really embracing the fact about, let's release that code in production for products which are sort of getting to the, hey, the product is at the viable stage now, not minimum viable, but viable. Let's release in production, let's find out how customers are using it, and then let's keep optimizing and doing that constant iteration. Take that DevOps approach to, let's get it out there, let's get it launched, and then let's do these small batches of changes based on customer need, based on telemetry, we can actually get in, we can't get the telemetry without having customers. So that's how it's going to keep working. So I think this initial product we see today, it's going to keep involving and improving as they get more data, as they get more information, more feedback, which is exactly what we want to see. Well, welcome to Cloud Air or something you've been living in for a number of years, Ben. Yeah. I'd love to hear, you've been meeting with customers, they've been asking you questions, give some of the things that, what's top of mind for some of the customers? What kind of things do they come into Microsoft on, and how's that all fit together? Yeah, it's a, there's many different conferences that have been to a late, many different conversations, and we will go from talking about Python machine learning, or AI if it's in PowerPoint, to things like, when are we going to do incremental snapshots on a managed disk? Get into the weeds and very infrastructure-centric stuff. We're seeing a range of conversations there. The big thing I think I see keep seeing people call out and make assumptions of is that they're not going to be relevant because Cloud, I don't know Cloud yet, I don't know this whole cube thing, containers, I don't really understand that as well as I think I need to, and AI, oh my gosh, what do we even do there? Because everyone's throwing the words and terms around, but to be honest, I think what's still really evident is Cloud is still a tiny fraction of enterprise workloads, let's be honest, it's growing at a huge rate because it is that small fraction. So again, there's plenty of time for people to learn, but they shouldn't go and try and, it's not like you go and learn everything in a technology stack from networking to development to database management to running a data center power and cooling. You learn the things that are applicable to what you're trying to do, and the same thing goes to Cloud. Any of these technologies, go and look at what you need to build for your business, take it at that step, and then go and find out the details and levels you want to know. And as someone who's been on Azure for like I said, almost seven years, which is crazy long, that was literally like being in a startup instead of Microsoft when I joined, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to join a licensing company. It's been very evident to me, I will not say I'm an Azure expert, and I've been seven years on the platform. There are too many things for me to be an expert in everything on, and I think people sort of just have to realize that anyone's saying that it's provado, nothing else. I mean, part of the goal is Microsoft as a platform provider. Hopefully, you've got the software and the solution to make a lot of this easier for the customer. So hopefully, they shouldn't need to become a Kubernetes expert because it's baked into your platform. They shouldn't have to worry about some of these offerings because it's SaaS. Most customers, are there some things you need to learn between going from exchange to go into O3, C5? Absolutely, there's some nuances in the GUI and things like that, but once you get over that initial hurdle, it should be a little easier. I don't think it's right, and I think going back to that sort of, going back to bare principles, going what is the highest level of distraction that's viable for your business, or that application, or this workload, has to always be done with everything. If it's like, well, cloud's not even viable. Run it on premises, don't need to apologize for not running in cloud. If I as is what's happening for you because of security, because of application architecture, run it that way, don't feel the need and the pressure to have to push it that way. I think too many people get caught up in the shiny stuff up here, which is what 1% of people are doing, versus the other 99%, which is still happening in a lot of the areas we work and have challenges in today. That's a great point that you bring up because there is all the buzzwords, right? AI, machine learning, cloud, you got to be cloud ready, you got to be data driven. To a customer, to your point going, I just need to make sure that what we have set up for our business is going to allow our business, one, to remain relevant, but to also be able to harness the power of the data that they have to extract new opportunities, new insights and not get caught up with, shoot, should we be using automation? Should we be using AI? Everybody's talking about it. I like that you brought up and I find it very respectful. You said, hey, I'm not an Azure expert. You've been there seven dog years, like you said. And I think that's what customers probably gain confidence in, is hearing the folks like you that they look to for that guidance and that leadership saying, no, we don't know everything to know. But giving them the confidence that they're trusting you with that data and also trusting you to help them make the right decisions for their business. Yeah, and we've got to do that. I mean, as a tech guy, it's like I've loved seeing the changes. When I joined Microsoft, I wasn't lying. I was almost there going, I don't know if I really want to join this company. I was going to go join a startup instead. And I got asked at one stage in an interview going, why do you want to join Microsoft? We see you've never applied, so I never wanted to. A friend told me to come in. And it's just been amazing to see those changes. And I'm pretty proud on that. So when we talk about those things we're doing, I mean, I think there is no shame going, I'm just going to lift and shift machines because Cloud's about flexibility. If you're doing it just on cost, you're probably doing it for the wrong reason. It's about that flexibility to go and do something, then change within months and slowly make steps to make things better and better as you find a need, as you find the ability, whatever it may be. And some of the big things that we focus on right now with customers is we've got a product called Azure Advisor. It'll go and tell people when one, you don't build things in a resilient manner. Go, hey, do you know this is not HA because of this and you can do this. It's like, great. Also, we'll tell you about security vulnerabilities that maybe should have a gateway here for security. Maybe you should do this or this is not patched. But the big thing in that, it also goes and tells you, hey, you're overspending. You don't need this much. You've provisioned like a Ferrari, you just need a Prius. Go and run a Prius because it's going to do what you need and you're going to pay a lot less. And that's part of that trust too. Absolutely. Like getting that understanding and it's counter-intuitive, but we're now like, it's coming out of my team a lot too, which is great. But seeing these guys were dropping contracts and licenses and basically once every three years, they may call a customer and go, hey, how about a renewal now? Go from that to now being focused on the customer's actual success and focused on their growth in Azure as a platform without services growth, like utilization, not in sales, has been a huge change. It's scared some people away, but it's brought a lot more people in. And that sort of counter-intuitive, spend less money thing actually leads in the long term to people using more. Absolutely. Ben, that's definitely not the shrinkwrap software company of Microsoft that I remember from the 90s. Yeah. That reminds me similar to, you know, just as to get Commvault of 2019 is not the same Commvault that many of us know from 10 or 15 years ago. And a good mutual friend of ours, sort of Simon and myself, before I took this job, he and I sat down, we're having a beer and discussing the merits of or not. In fact, the other things I've done, same with Commvault, they're changing such a great deal where, you know, what they're putting in the cloud, what they're doing with the data, what they're trying to achieve with things like HeadVig for data management across on-premises and cloud with microservices applications and stuff going, hey, this won't work like this anymore when you're now doing on-premises and with containers. It's pretty good to see. I'm interested to see how they take that even further to their current audience, which is predominantly, you know, the IT Pro, the data center admin, storage manager. It's funny when you talked about just the choice that customers have and those saying, we shouldn't be following the trends because they're the trends. We actually interviewed a couple of hours ago, one of Commvault's customers that is all on-prem, healthcare company, and said, he's like, I want to make a secret that says no cloud and proud. And I just thought that was, we don't normally hear from them. We always talk about cloud, but for a company to sit down and look at what's best for our business, whether it's, you know, FedRAMP certification challenges or HIPAA or GDPR or other compelling requirements to keep it on-prem. But was this refreshing to hear this customer say? Yeah, I mean, if it's appropriate for them, you do what's right for you. I mean, there's no shame in any of it. It's, I mean, you definitely don't get fans by shaming people about not doing something. And I mean, I'm personally very happy to see, you know, see sort of hype around things like blockchain die down a little bit. It's a slow database. Unless you're using for the specific case of that shared ledger. You know, things like that where people go, I have to know blockchain now. I have to know IoT. It's like, yeah. And that hype gets people there, but it also causes a lot of anxiety. And it's good to see someone actually not be ashamed of it. And they're going to be the ones when they do take a step and use cloud services and maybe in the business already, they're probably going to do it appropriately because have a reason, not just because we think this would be cool. Right. Well, and how much inherent complexity does that bring in if somebody's really feeling pressured to follow those trends? And maybe that's when you end up with this hodgepodge of technologies that don't work well together. You're spending way more. And as business IT folks are consumers, you know, consumers in their personal lives, they expect things to be accessible, visible, but also cost efficient because they have so much choice. Yeah, the choice, choice is hard. It's just the conversation I was having recently. For example, just we'll take the storage because of where we are, right? It's like, I'm running something on Azure. I'm using SUSE. I want an NFS mount point, which is available to me. NFS, great, perfect, POSIX. What do I use? It's like, well, you can use any one of these seven options, like, but what's the right choice? And that's the thing about being a platform company. We give you a lot of choices, but it's still up to you or up to our partners who can really help their customers as well to make the most appropriate choice. And I push back really hard on terms like best practices and things like, I hate it. Because again, it's making the assumption this is the best thing to do, it's not. It's always about, you know, what are the patents that have worked for other people? What are the anti-patents? And what's the appropriate path for me to take? And that's actually how we're building our docs now, too. So we keep focusing on our Azure technology and we're bringing out. Some of the biggest things we've done is how we manage our documentation. It's all open sourced. It's all in markdown on GitHub. So you can go in, read a document from someone like myself who's doing product management. Go in, this is how to use this product. You go, actually, this bit's wrong. This bit needs to be like this. And you can go in yourself. Even now, make a change. And we can go, oh, yeah. And take that, commit it in and do all this kind of stuff in that way. So we're constantly taking those documents in that way and getting real-time feedback from customers who are using it, not just ourself in an echo chamber. So you get this great insight and visibility that you never had before. Well, Ben, thank you for joining Stu and me on the queue this afternoon. Excited to hear what's coming up next for Azure. We appreciate your time. Thank you. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the queue from Convo Go, 19.