 Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE. Covering dotnext conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to the French Riviera, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE and we're live. So every once in a while, things take a little bit longer or we slip on a thing or two. But really excited to have two guests from Veeam with me. Of course theCUBE was at Veeam on earlier this year and so I've got Nicholas Savites, who is the Senior Director of Alliances in EMEA and Michael Cade, who I've known from the virtualization community for a number of years, but first time also on the program, Global Technologist, also with Veeam. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. All right, Nicholas, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about your background, how long have you been at Veeam, what's your role there? So I'm in charge of follow alliances for the EMEA region so I've been at Veeam for six years now. And my mission is really to build full stack solution with our set of alliance partner to deliver the best possible solution on level of availability for customers. All right, and Michael, it's the same question for you. So I started at Veeam about two and a half, three years ago. I started off as a systems engineer with a data center background. So joined Veeam as an SE and then moved up into this Global Technology role and basically what I work very closely with product management within the product strategy team. So one of my key responsibilities is gaining feedback from our customer base and hopefully getting new features into the product that are going to help Veeam grow from a technology point of view. Awesome, good, excited. We get to talk about the ecosystem, we get to talk about the partners between the two. Nicholas, at your conference, heard your whole executive team talk about, Veeam had ridden that wave of virtualization, like many of us. I spent a lot of time in that ecosystem myself. Today, virtualization of course hasn't gone away and still majorly important, but it's really about a lot more than that. There's a lot of cloud going on now, a much broader ecosystem. I think for many years when I thought of Veeam, there was one partner that was critically important and there were a few others. Now, there's a lot more. Tell us, how's your role been changing in the last couple of years? I think our customer has asked us to think broader than we used to. So yes, we started on virtualization inside the data center and the needs expanded. So inside the data center, it became diverse, not only VMware but Hyper-V and then it went beyond the border of the data center, public clouds, Azure, Amazon and more and more coming. And our customer loved the level of simplicity and qualities that Veeam delivered inside and they wanted to keep that quality when they were expanding to a multi-cloud strategy. And that's how our job is changing today our product is evolving to take in charge that diverse world. And our mission today is to protect any app, any data in any cloud. And we've released a set of product to take that in account. So that's in a way something we share, in the vision we share with Nutanix here. Michael, I want you to take us into kind of the mind of your customers today. Of course, it's a great spectrum out there. If you talk about virtualization, I've still run across customers that are like still very early on that journey. When you talk about cloud, this week at the show, I've talked to some that, well, I've got regulations, especially certain countries here in Europe where I'm not doing it and others that are heavily, heavily, heavily, weighted toward the cloud. So give us a flavor for, you know, what are the big problems, the real reasons when you're engaging with customers? So I would say exactly that. Let's see, we've got people that are just beginning to go down that virtualization route. But then we've also got some big customers that are looking at how do we leverage AWS and other public cloud type offerings. I think that's, so 18 months ago we announced the availability platform, which as Nicola said, so any app, any data, any cloud, the ability to still, obviously, we've got a strong heritage in that virtualization space with vSphere and Hyper-V. I think with the extension of AHV on top of that, but also with our agents for those physical workloads, but not just physical workloads, think cloud instances, any virtual machine that we don't have access to the hypervisor up in AWS or Azure. We've got the ability to leverage our same tool sets to be able to manage and back those up and make them available, as well as software as a service. So we see a lot of net new customers coming in and actually where they don't necessarily use us for their virtualization environment, but they're looking to us to use us for Office 365 mail backup, bringing that back on premises rather than leaving it all down to Microsoft to look after that protection window. So you can see there's quite a lot. And then on top of that, we've got the ability, we're enabling our service provider, our reseller community to offer backup as a service, DR as a service with our cloud connect model. So you can see where 18 months, pre 18 months ago, we were backup and replication for virtualization. And now we've got this whole portfolio, this whole availability platform where we can hit a lot of the different aspects of up and coming infrastructures that are out there. Yeah, even when I listened to Nutanix talk, they talked about enterprise cloud and it was not just data center, but it's data center and cloud. And they were even talking a little bit about Edge and they don't talk about much, but you just brought up, I mean, Sass is a huge piece. I mean, from our numbers, it's about two thirds of the public, cloud numbers. Where does, give us from the customer standpoint the overlap between where you see Nutanix today in kind of that whole cloud discussion. So we're seeing quite a large number of Nutanix customers and teaming up with Beam to protect those virtualized workloads, especially in the vSphere and Hyper-V area. Obviously, we don't have the HV support just yet, but definitely seeing a lot of uptake. And even in the session yesterday that I did, we probably had half the room said that they were using vSphere on Nutanix with Beam, and then probably a quarter using Hyper-V and a quarter using HV. But then when I asked the question about to the audience of around 250, 300 people, we probably saw half the room say they were considering the movement to HV because of what Vima's are doing in that space as well. Yeah, we know that AHV, of course, is something. Nutanix has been beating the drum. I need to get the partner perspective on this. How much of this has partner, have customers been asking how much of it is from Nutanix? And yeah, give us the update. You know, it's how long is this going to take and how hard of a lift is this? So when we decided to go on to launch support for AHV, this was really a demand from our customer. And this was, we started from a statement that say, okay, we know as customers, we will have to go multi-cloud. Whether it's for resiliency, cloud, quality of service, whatever the reason, we'll have to go multi-cloud. And then the question who comes next is what's the best player to make it happen? And how do I guarantee the right level of SLAs, availability when I go that way? And we think Nutanix has a pretty good answer on how do I make the multi-cloud strategy happen? And we already partnered on the Hyper-V and VMware part and our customer was telling, I will go to the multi-cloud. I will use AHV eventually, growing slowly not overnight, but that will grow on I make a choice of data protection availability for the long run. So Veeam, please help us get into that direction. And that was making perfect sense for us getting with them into that multi-cloud direction on support acropolis. We've announced it a few months ago in .next in the US. We have made a first live demo yesterday during the session, so Michael was doing it. And we expect the product to be released in 2018. But we're already feeling a lot, a lot of demand on very positive feedback around it here at the show and on our booth. Great, okay. 2018, come in pretty quick. One of the things you hear from customers is they understand it's going to be multi-cloud, multi-hypervisor kind of ends up there managing across those different environments is tough. The biggest sin in IT is always you end up with a heterogeneous mess and then the poor admins have to deal with it. Veeam has a nice story, more than a story, but that's something that really you're trying to position and help customers across those environments. Maybe we can speak to that some. Yeah, so I think one of the really important things from us is making sure that that interface or that experience when just deploying Veeam is very easy to use, very usable. It's very important to keep that as we move forward and develop all of these new products. All of the new products use a very similar, easy to use, wizard-driven type approach, but with some extra functionality to allow things like RESTful API out the back so that people can customize that. But even when I showed the AHV demo yesterday, it's really aimed towards the Nutanix Acropolis Administrator. So it uses very much a prism-looking view of an interface, a web interface, but then it still links in and authenticates against VBR, so Veeam Backup and Replication, to leverage the repositories, still uses that native file format that we have, the VBKs, the VIBs. So then we can start to use the same functionality that we have within VBR to use backup copy jobs, send things to tape, use our Veeam Explorers for application, item level recovery, all of that good stuff that we have today that existing vSphere admins will know if they're using Veeam and vSphere, but we wanted to port that into and make it, remember this is a version one product and everything to your last question as well is around everything that Veeam do and develop is generally based on feedback from our customers. We listen to those and implement those changes where we see that it's going to help people to achieve what they need to achieve whilst still trying to keep that easy to use kind of mentality. Okay, so relative confidence, you can talk to customers and say, hey, you've got vSphere and you want to do vSphere and AHV. Your management of that environment isn't going to be horrific, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Nicholas, so we've talked about the AHV, what else would the partnership, where do the key engagements and anything kind of down the line beyond what we've talked about already that we should highlight? Really, where we'll go is we are both companies that work a lot with our channel, so resellers, integrators, so that's obviously the next step, getting our ecosystem ready jointly to deliver what we promise to our customer, make sure they're aware of how that works and what are the benefits. And of course, last step is really a collaboration around going together to the customer, making sure it's not only an alliance that is from a technology perspective of a product, but it's really something our customer can feel on the ground and can trust. We have one of our customers who is there today, manufacturer in the aeronautics industry. He's been using Nutanix on Veeam for a year now. He's very excited about the end result because he loves the flexibility we already offer. You know, when order comes in, comes out in that sector, on the scalability that was offering, but he know he will move progressively to Acropolis and he was very happy about us and we are together with him to go into his journey into digital transformation, multi-cloud strategy. Yeah, in talking to Nutanix leading up to the show, they actually said from a pre-registration standpoint, you know, your sessions were at the top of the list from a partner standpoint. Of course, Nutanix loves all their partners, but Michael, what is it that customers, usually if they want to learn something or something that's really going to help them in their job, you know, what's so exciting that's pulling the customers in? What are the types of questions they're coming? What are they taking away from a show like this from a joint, you know, Veeam Nutanix? So from our point of view, it was one thing that we didn't put in the abstract was around we want to show the HV thing, but because we announced something in June, we felt like we needed to have that at least something to show. So actually, we're close to having a landing page that will allow the interested parties to come in and look for that beta and we'll give them that information. But we split the session into two parts. So one was the vSphere and the Hyper-V that we have on the truck today. And secondly was the bit to keep everyone in their seats, right, to show them the HV stuff and how it looks from an interface point of view. And actually the methodology that we're using to take those backups and as well as the guest file restores. From a question point of view, so the architecture looks pretty simple and easy to use and that's exactly what we wanted to hear from a V1 feedback is, okay, that makes sense while you're doing that. So from that architecture point of view, it's going to look very simple. It's an HV proxy appliance that's going to sit on side the HV cluster and it's then going to authenticate to an existing or a new VBR server. So in terms of people who are interested about the beta, obviously that's generally what comes out but that was really the feedback that we got. They were asking about what's the what's next, when can we have this, that and that's important for us but it's also very positive for us because if people are already thinking about V2, V3 then that's a great roadmap or vision for what this needs to look like in the short term. Excellent, yeah, always love to hear kind of the customer excitement and engagement on that. I'm sure everybody will be looking for the beta code, will look to catch up with you at a future event when we can talk about the full GA. Nicholas, Michael, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix.next in the French Riviera. You're watching theCUBE.