 Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you by Veritas. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our second day of Veritas Vision 2017. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Jason Buffington is here, good friend of theCUBE. Senior analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group, otherwise known as ESG. Jason, good to see you again. Thanks for having me back. You've been bumping into each other a lot lately. A lot of storage stuff going on, and you gave a panel discussion today. You had three of the four big cloud guys up there. No Amazons, Stu, they weren't up on the panel, but that was good. You had an interview with those guys, so congratulations on that, and welcome again. Yeah, everyone wants to talk about data protection, right? So there's- A lot of topic, isn't it? It is. Every time you go to a show, the last show that I was at seemed like over half the booths were talking about data protection. So to come here, Veritas kind of owns that as a name, and so it's been fun to just be part of the participants. So- Yeah, Jason, you cover the space, and you know Veritas well. There are people I talked to getting ready for this, and they said, we remember Veritas back in its heyday. Back pre-acquisition, during the virtualization era, kind of got quiet. I mean, they got acquired by Symantec, things went down, but now they're an independent company, and one of the shows that we've been at VMworld, absolutely, data protection's super hot. Product of the Year was one of those companies, whole lot of startups there, a lot of investment. What's your take on kind of the new Veritas, where they fit in that ecosystem with all those startups and everybody else? No, that's a good read. So let's talk about the market first, and then I'll put Veritas in it, right? So I think your spot on that when the virtualization wave came through, most of the really big established data protection vendors were not first to market, right? And in fact, every time that we see this, I've been doing this for 28 years, I've been backing stuff up, right? And for most of it, every time the platform shifts, the traditional dominant data protection vendors are not the first ones to jump on that new gear, right? Windows versus NetWare are now under virtualization, so we saw Veeam and PhD and VRanger and a few others that barely get an honorable mention in that line, right? We're in a really interesting time though, this time around, because every time in the past, when you moved off of the old platform, the presumption was you turned it off, right? This time around, we're on the, here's a fancy word, we're on the precipice of a new shift again, because we're looking at cloud as the new platform to move to. But here's the fun part, we're not leaving the old stuff behind, right? We're not turning off all the virtual servers and the physical servers on our way out the door as we go to cloud. We're embracing multi-cloud as the new destination, not this mid-step along the way. And I think that's really interesting, because just like in every time past, it means we're going to get a reset of the leaderboard when it comes to data protection. And just like in times past, the secret sauce that made you dominant on the last platform doesn't necessarily give you an edge technology-wise on the next platform, all it really does is give you momentum, right? So yeah, there's a few other folks that we could, you know, list that they've got some momentum going for one reason or another along the way, but from a marketplace, if physical and virtual and cloud are all going to be together, Veritas has been doing some of those for 20 some odd years. They've made some announcements around the rest of the suites. I think they're in a good place here. The thing I'm excited about from Veritas, and I do, I'm a fan, you want to root for them, right? I mean, 25 years on the bench, you want to see them keep going. I think the opportunity is that since the divesture from Symantec, they have a lot more focus, right? You know, it's really hard to tell a story that's everything from malware and cybersecurity all the way through to a breadth of data protection, but if you look at how they're talking about things now, and I really like the 360 narrative that kind of pulls it all together, every part of their portfolio kind of pulls the other parts together, right? It doesn't matter in data management whether you want to start with backup, or you want to start with storage, or you want to start with availability, anywhere you look on that circle, it's going to pull the rest of the line in. And these are all the things that folks are asking for from a customer base. So I like the tech that they've got, I like where the market is headed, and I think they've got a real shot to be one of those top three dominant names that we talk about moving forward. Yeah, so, I mean, it's 30 plus year history, and pretty amazing, I mean, this is an amazing story, this company. I mean, they came out, kind of a small company, and then there was that relationship with, say, bought Seagate, you know, Seagate's backup business, Seagate actually had a piece of the company for a while. You know, Al Shugart, when he sold that stock, basically saved Seagate with the cash infusion. So it was a long history, and then they kind of went dormant, whether for a while under the Symantec governance, and now, so the big question is, you know, Ken Veritas get its mojo back in the space and become that super hot company again. So by the way, sidebar, you talked about Seagate, I actually have a copy of Seagate back of execs sitting on a shelf in my office. One of these days, I will open up the Data Protection Museum, because I think I've got most of the pieces and parts laying around. So Ken Veritas get his mojo back. The thing that Veritas has to consistently remind people, one, we are not your daddies or your granddaddies' backup company more, right? So they're working on things like, they announced this week a new UI coming for NetBackup 8.1, and I thought they were going to crowd mob out of affirmation for that. People were so excited for, you know, finally we're going to get a contemporary UI that doesn't look like 1995 coming in NetBackup. So certainly some of the cosmetics, the standardization of that UI going across as many of those products as possible in order to provide more of a contemporary feel. That's an easy place to dig on, right? But I think what Veritas really needs to think about is they need to remind folks that while they are not the stodgy presumption of what people might think, this is not their first rodeo in any of these areas, right? We had new announcements on software-defined storage this week. Things like storage foundation and VCS, they've been doing that for 25 years, right? I mean, they've been doing software-defined storage before it was a thing, right? Availability, right? So we talk about, I like the VRP product. I think it's a cool architecture and something certainly that powers a lot of the cloud mobility type capabilities that are there. And I had the idea of a heterogeneous platform to enable higher levels of availability. I think the market's just now growing into that, right? So the trick is, we're not the old folks, but oh, by the way, we have reams of experience like you can't imagine. Let's put those things together and have an enterprise-level conversation. So let's lay the horses out on the track here. I mean, we were all at VMworld and we saw the, it was the hot, that in security, back up in security, like the two hottest spaces in the business right now, we saw the startups, the Cohesities, the Rubrics, the Zyrtos and sort of the upshots, the Veeams, a lot of action at their booths. Obviously Veritas getting its mojo back. Where's Commvault and all this? How do you lay out the horses on the track? What's the competitive landscape look like? Paint a picture for us. Yeah, so first and foremost, I always go back to what he or she calls the data protection spectrum, right? So the behaviors of archive, back up, snapshot, replication, availability, they are not interchangeable mechanisms. We call it a spectrum as a rainbow kind of feel. When it's last time you went outside, saw a rainbow in the sky and one of the colors was missing, right? These colors do not replace each other, snapshots and replication, et cetera. When you look at where the market's going, imagine a capital Y. In fact, if you go look up on your favorite blog site, I have a blog on why does data protection have to evolve. This is the answer to your question. The base of that why is just backup. Can you make copies of all your stuff? And even that, I think a lot of folks have a challenge with. Next step up is that idea of data protection. So backup plus snapshots, plus replication, single set of policies. Where the market's going and how it kind of lays out the horses is now we're at that fork in the road in that capital Y, right? And some of the folks are moving down the availability path, right? Think about that word for a second. You can remember the vendors who like to go that direction. Well, we're going from reactive recovery to proactive assured productivity, right? Because all the backup folks are just as down until somebody hits the restore button, right? That's the thing that no one really wants to talk about as opposed to if you have monitoring, if you have orchestration, if you have failover and rapid recovery mechanisms, now you really do have an availability story that comes out of that. And not all the vendors that you mentioned have that, right? Well, who are the leaders, right? So yeah, so certainly from a momentum and brand perspective, Veeam is definitely on the front line of that, you know, I think car racing is more easier for me. Because they got growth and they have momentum. They have certainly virtualizations to the sweet spot for the data center. Obviously Veritas is, they said 15 years in a row in the Gartner upper right. Okay, check. Dell EMC, broad portfolio there. Those are kind of the biggest three from who has all the check boxes they need to make sure they have a dialogue for the next conversation. And Commvault, you wouldn't put in that. So, well, I always think of three, you know, bronze, silver, gold, not in that order. It's like baseball playoffs. Who's going to get in? Who's the wild card, you know? So Commvault checks all the right boxes, right? They have all the right narratives along the way. I think the challenge is organizationally, they're a little siloed in how they tell the stories. And so sometimes it's hard to remember that they're actually the only ones to have a single code base. The ones that, you know, one set of tech that can check all the boxes. Everyone else actually has some myriad of pieces and parts that have to be assembled along the way. So that's both the strength and the weakness for Commvault, right? Yeah, the opportunities there to increase some marketing to tell one narrative. Kind of tivoli, same thing, right? Yes, same kind of idea there. And by the way, I don't count, let's call them Spectrum Protect now, but I don't count them out, right? So, Spectrum Protect took a facelift a couple years ago and really got virtualization savvy. They took the, they had the same gap that everyone else that you mentioned had, right? And what was it, six, four, a couple years back, they finally got around to that. And then they just announced Spectrum Protect Plus, which is really built for that VAD mineral. So certainly we've got good lens there. On the other side, just like in every other generation, you got some upstarts that are looking pretty good. Well-funded, some of it a hundred million. Some of them I think have kind of a little bit of a puffer fish, right? They feel bigger than they are, right? For the moment, and yet the tech looks really good. They want to have a dialogue that says, don't start with backup and try to grow forward, start over, right? Re-imagine what storage might look like in the broader range of things. And by the way, data protection is one of the outcomes for that. And so you put the Actifio, Cohesity, rubric kind of mix along the lines for that. You also get the catalogic stuff that goes into, that's OEM by IEBM kind of gets on the other side. I think that's going to be probably the coolest thing to watch in 2018. So here are the buzzwords of copy data management, right? Everybody wants to talk about some version of those three words. We think that the market's going to go either evolution versus revolution. So evolution is start with the data protection folks that you know, and those technologies are going to grow into data management type folks here at the show, right? So we saw Veritas Velocity is their first foray into that. CloudPoint starts to come into that mix as well, right? So the idea of keeping all you need, getting rid of it when you don't, and enabling, and here's the fun part, enabling those secondary use cases so that you can get more value out of that otherwise dormant data. Mike talked about that during the day one keynote. I thought he was spot on for that. So that's the evolution approach. Revolution, start over, better storage, get you the same results. Those other guys are old. And Bill Coleman saying it's ours to lose. He said that to us on theCUBE. They're obviously an evolution play. They've also heard, they've made the claim we've got the best engineering team in the business. Comments? So. Very competitive market. Yeah, it's hard to say best. I never like ultimate superlatives, but here's what I will say. I made an amazing number of engineers at Veritas who have been doing this 15, 20, 25 years. There's a lot of wonderful institutional knowledge that comes out of that that you don't get when you're three, five years, even if you come from multiple vendors and you kind of pop along the way, there are folks that their initials are still in the source code of Netbackup. And I think that gives them an edge from that perspective if they have a vision from an architecture and from a message perspective on carrying it forward and growing beyond just backup. Jason, I want to get your commentary on the customers. So one of the things we're trying to reconcile here is they've got a lot of Netbackup customers. Yeah. And then they're pitching this new cloud, hyperscale, distributed architecture world. Are the customers ready for that? Are they? Bill Coleman told us, five years, 10 years, maybe five years from now, every single product that's selling today will be obsolete. So are the Veritas customers today ready to make that move? What are you hearing? Or are they just going to, you know, go to Microsoft and Amazon and, you know, come in that way? How does this, you know, it goes to that kind of revolutionary, evolutionary discussion you were having. Good, so working backwards, I don't think the answer for better backup for the enterprise is cloud. Cloud managed, absolutely. Disaster recovery as a service, as a secondary tier for people who don't want to have dormant data centers. Yeah, probably. But we're still going to have a significant majority of infrastructure on-prem. That's going to demand for current SLAs to have recoverability on-prem as well. So I don't think it starts from a cloud angle. What I do think from the Veritas customer perspective is certainly, you know, Veritas's, their homies are the net backup admins. That role is evolving. Or maybe I should say it's devolving. You know, you're not going to have backup admins in the same way. Honestly, more and more we see that data protection should be part of a broader systems management, platform management conversation, right? Because if I'm an IT generalist, right? That means I don't have a PhD in backup and I don't want one. I'm an IT generalist and I'm the one who's responsible for provisioning servers and patching servers and providing access to servers. When those green lights turn red, I want to be able to be part of that process and not wait on somebody else. And if I want to be part of the recovery process, it means I'm very part of the protection process as well. So certainly Veritas is going to have to grow into some new personas of who they're going to be adding value to. IT ops is the big one, right? So the backup admin is starting to decline a little bit. The V admin from the virtualization role is starting to decline a little bit. That IT operations role is really taking a much more dominant share. That said, Veritas' best route to market is to go through the backup admin and not in spite of, right? Because you can turn that backup admin into a hero by saying, look, you know, you have a certain set of problems. Your adjacent peers have a wider set of problems and aren't you going to be the smart one to walk in somebody who can fix the rest of the problem while we're at it? And that's that 360. To your point, evolve or devolve that role. So we're out of time, but how about a plug for some recent research, what's hot, what's new? Anything you've worked on that you want to share with the audience? Yeah, so ESG, we just finished research on real-world SLAs and availability. So how are people doing that proactive lens as opposed to just reactive? Today, earlier today, I kicked off research with the research team on copy data management. So all that evolution revolution, we're in that right now. And then the next two projects we're working on, GDPR readiness and data protection drivers in Western Europe. Appliance form factors for data protection. So turnkey versus Ddupe is kind of the next one. And then we're going to refresh our cloud strategy data protection intersection. So BAS, DRAS, STAS, IaaS and SAS and how the protection strategy moves. Awesome, sounds like a good line of interest to see that GDPR readiness. We'll have to forecast that. That'll be fun. And then hit you up after that comes out because there's going to be some big gaps going on there. Hey, thanks very much for coming back in theCUBE. Good job. Thanks for having me. All right, you're welcome. Okay, keep it right there, everybody, Stu and I will be back. This is day two, Veritas Vision. You're watching theCUBE.