 Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.next 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. Hello everybody and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next here in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside Stu Miniman. We're joined by Ken Ringdahl. He is the Vice President, Global Alliance Architecture at Veeam. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to be here. It is your sixth time on theCUBE. Rebecca, where's the jacket? We don't bring out the special jacket for his time. And then a ring for his tent. We've got some stickers, but... Yeah, here you go. So, you're here to talk about the partnership with Nutanix and mine. So why don't you tell us a little bit about this partnership and the mine ecosystem and what you see for the future? Yeah, absolutely. So, Nutanix is a really strategic partner for us. I'd say we've been partners for quite a while, probably five, six years. But I would say the real tipping point for our partnership was when we committed to go integrate with AHV. We had supported VCR from the beginning. That's what Veeam was founded on. That's where the foundation of our success. We went and did Hyper-V in 2011, and we didn't do another hypervisor. We still haven't even done KVM yet, but we saw the value in the Nutanix partnership and we committed to doing AHV and delivered that middle of last year. And we've seen a good pickup on that, but that was really the tipping point. When we came in and wrapped our arms around the Nutanix ecosystem and really, if you want to embrace Nutanix, you're embraced AHV because that's the core, right? That's where they're going. That's their differentiation. And so that was the tipping point. And of course, we can certainly get into mine and everything else we're doing with them as well. Ken, first of all, it definitely was very much noticed in the industry. Veeam, I remember back when Hyper-V support was announced and kind of a ripple went through the virtualization industry on that. And Veeam stepping forward and supporting AHV was a real speaking to not only the partnership, but to the maturity of where Nutanix sits out there. We know that the data protection space is quite hot. And a question people have had from day one was, well, will Nutanix address that directly themselves? They had Veeam, Rubrik's here, other partners are here. So it's how they are addressing that space and mine that is pretty interesting and different from much of what we see out there. So bring us inside mine and Nutanix, it wants optionality to be there. So Veeam is one of the partners, but also they could likely the most important first one there. Yeah, so there's a lot of similarities between Nutanix and Veeam, especially when it comes to the general approach to partners. We're a pure software defines data protection platform. Nutanix, you're right, had an option, hey, maybe we go build this ourselves or we acquire and try to get that revenue. Maybe the data protection revenue and they've decided to partner just like we've decided to partner for secondary storage and everything else. And that really does lead us to mine because a lot of our competitors do ship their software on white box hardware. Some of the emerging startups are doing that and even some of the legacy players are all, whether it's a super micro box and Intel box, we've taken a different approach and said, hey, look, we know what we're good at and we know we want customer choice and even Dheeraj and others at the keynote today talked about no vendor lock in, we have very similar approaches. And so we got together over a year ago, year and a half ago and said, hey, look, as Veeam, we see some customers that are now asking for their data protection. Veeam was founded on being simple and easy and there's even ways to take that to another level, like mine, which is, hey, look, we want to now even simplify the day zero experience and even into the day one, day two ops in terms of an integrated UI and other ways to bring the infrastructure together with your data protection. And so it made perfect sense. We got together and it was like, boom, the light bulb went off, we got on a white board and we're like, yeah, we can do this. So it's going to require joint development and we've sort of made those commitments on both sides and it's been well received. Now it's not in the market yet, it will be soon, but the customer feedback has been incredible. We've done this very successful beta, we've got lots and lots of pent up customer demand. So it's like the sales teams are now saying, hey, when can we have, you've been talking about it for a while, when can we have this because we have customers ready to buy. So we're there now that we're ready to bring this to market and excited about the opportunity together. So talk a little bit about the ends of that partnership and you were just describing your ethos, which is making everything simple and easy, which is what we're hearing a lot here today at .next. So does that just mean that you attract the same kinds of employees so then therefore they work well together in the sandbox? I mean, how would you describe the cultures coming together in this joint development process? Yeah, I think we're similar companies, right? We're a similar size, we're a similar age, you know, we're similar, you know, just all around, you know, our culture of innovation. So, you know, when we got together, it was pretty simple. Now, doing development as two companies together is always hard, it's never easy. It's even hard to do it when it's one company on your own, right? And get a product to market. So I'd be lying if I said that weren't bumps along the way they're always are. But, you know, we've worked through and we're now, like I said, at that point, and I think just our similarities and our cultures and really we have alignment at the executive level and that's important, right, to get things done because, you know, all of us that are sort of working on this thing, maybe a level or two down, but when executive leadership is aligned, that's when things get done and we have that between Nutanix and Veeam. Yeah, and Ken, the messaging that I'm hearing from Nutanix now reminds me of what I was hearing a couple of years ago from Veeam, specifically when you talked to Cloud. So, a couple of years ago, Veeam on very much, I saw Microsoft up on stage, you know, living with AWS. What are you hearing from your customers and, you know, do you see those parallel journeys or will the, you know, AHV integration mean that as Nutanix goes along that journey that Veeam and Nutanix offerings will be able to live in these multiple cloud environments sometime too? Yeah, so I think a little bit of both, right? I think we definitely be able to live out there. I mean, you know, you see VMware now wrapping their arms around all the hyperscale public cloud vendors. I mean, we heard about ZY clusters and that was announced in Anaheim and we saw our demo of it today and, you know, our goal is to support those workloads wherever they are. You know, we've, as I said before, we sort of made our hay and we were founded on attaching to vSphere, then Hyper-V, then AHV and now AWS and Azure and all these other environments and really, you know, the roots of it, we follow our customers along their journey, right? So, you know, there's customers today that, you know, maybe smaller, newer companies that go straight to AWS, straight to Azure, they're born in the cloud and they're cloud only. You know, they may not be the best fit for Veeam, maybe a couple years from now. They may just buy point solutions. For the customers, the larger customers that have hybrid environments, that's what we're looking to attack. And, you know, whether that's with Nutanix and VMware and those workloads that go, we want to make sure we attach it and give our customers the best experience and the ability to burst to the cloud and move around and workload portability. You know, we built features into the product, we've changed our, revolutionized our licensing to make that easier. So, that's what we're after is those hybrid customers solving those problems and those challenges they have in building on our strength, which starts on prem but has moved into the cloud and spread quite a bit. What do you see as some of the trends on the horizon? I mean, as you said, you just described your dream customer, which there's a few of them out there. So, you'll be okay. So, to talk about some of the problems that you, that are keeping them up at night and how your solution solves them. You know, when it comes to data protection, it, you know, everyone can say, hey, my backups, they were 100% successful. It comes down to restore and reliability and security. Right, and we, you know, we've built a lot into our product to give customers the peace of mind that hey, you know, when that call comes at 11 o'clock at night and I need to recover a system, because it's down, you know, we need to have 100% confidence that that will be there. And oftentimes when, you know, when we're converting customers over from maybe a competitor's product, that's what we hear the most is, is hey, you know, it's the reliability and the confidence in the infrastructure. That's what we focus on most. And so, you know, we hear that a lot from customers. And that's really where our focus is. We've got, as I said, features built into the product, you know, that goes straight after that. Yeah, Ken, we've watched Nutanix really increase the breadth of what they're offering through their software. They've been talking a lot. Files is one of the, you know, strong growth areas there. Objects is another one that I expect would have some interaction with your environment. What are you hearing from customers? Where is Vee moving with the AHV support for some of these other solutions that Nutanix has? Yeah, so we've got a very big release coming, you know, in the next, call it a few months, quarter or so. That is called V10, you know, and if you guys were at VeeMon a couple years ago, we talked about V10 and there was a number of features in there. NAS is a big one for us. And it's one that is probably the most asked for feature that we currently don't have. And so, having support for files and we've already tested with the beta, you know, we know when we come out with that in a GA form that we're going to be successful with files. Object storage is another one. That was also part of the V10 umbrella when we announced it, you know, a while ago. And it's been hugely successful for us. It's revolutionized kind of the way that our customers look at long-term storages is, hey, I can move that to AWS S3 or Azure Blob or, you know, Cloudian or Swiss Stack or something else on Pram or Nutanix objects. You know, because again, customer choice, but we've, you know, we've embraced that because that's where customers are going. So you ask, you know, what are customers, that's where they're going. They say, hey, I want, you know, a lot of them want to get rid of tape, you know, and what's the best way to get in this is features of tape in object storage, right? There's object lock and ways to do, you know, right once, read many times. So we're, you know, we look at object storage a little bit as the next generation of tape. Now it's, you know, it's not exactly that. There's lots of different use cases, but for us and for our customers, they're looking to do the next generation data center. That includes having object storage as a long-term tier, you know, for cost reasons, for manageability reasons, you know, of the like. Can you talk a little bit about the partner ecosystem and the evolution of it, particularly because the technology industry is changing so fast. And you started this conversation by talking about how much your culture is aligned with Nutanix culture. How do you see with these fast changing companies, fast changing technologies, how do you see five, 10 years from now? What will the technology landscape look like? Yeah, certainly. I mean, obviously the push to cloud, that's big, right? We're making a lot of changes on our side. We're bringing out new products, we're bringing out new features that specifically take you to cloud. You know, we were on with you guys at VMworld and, you know, there was, you know, Project Tanzu and all this other stuff about Kubernetes. That was the Kubernetes conference, right? And, you know, I said earlier, you know, we want to move along at the pace that our customers want to go. So, you know, those sort of born in the cloud companies are going straight to Kubernetes. But we're moving along with our customers when it comes to Kubernetes and containers. So, yeah, we're paying attention to it. Do we have a product that can support every bit of, you know, Kubernetes and containers yet? No, but we're, you know, there's things that we're working on. And, you know, in the way that Veeam usually develops software, we're not usually first, but we usually come out with something that is rock solid, ready to go, customer ready. We have 355,000 customers. We can't afford to, and we're the stewards of their data. So, when we come out with something, yeah, we may take slightly longer to do it, but you can be sure that it's rock solid, stable, robust. And that's, you know, that's our general approach. And so, when you ask, you know, where are customers going? You know, they're definitely going to the cloud. They're going to Kubernetes. They're, you know, all these new technologies. And we sort of like step back and we ask our customers, hey, are you doing this? You know, what's your plan for this? Is it two years? Is it one year? Is it five years? And we adjust accordingly. Can anything particular for your European customers that you could share? Yeah, I think, you know, when you think European customers and uniqueness from the rest of the world, I mean, you start with GDPR, right? That was, you know, a huge thing that went into effect a year ago. And we've, you know, we've done things there, but they're very sensitive to, you know, that and being able to, you know, provide that capability for their customers. So I'd put that at the top of the list. I mean, cloud is a big one. You know, I think as we look at the hyperscalers in particular, AWS and Azure, you know, the US is a big country. You don't need a lot of data centers to cover the country. But now you look at GDPR and some things need to stay in the envelope of a country. And hey, there's, you know, lots of countries in Europe and so more and more data centers. So the support of those public cloud vendors and the sprawl of the data and the sprawl of the data centers is really important. So having that coverage and being able to provide customer choice is incredibly important to European customers. Well, Ken, thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE. We always have a fun time talking to you. Great, thank you. Next time will be your seventh. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next.