 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you by Veritas. Welcome back to the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, everybody. We are covering Veritas Vision 2017, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Mike Palmer is here, he's the executive vice president and chief product officer at Veritas. Mike, thanks for coming to theCUBE. Thank you for having me here. Great keynote yesterday. We see hundreds, if not thousands of these discussions and talking head presentations, and yours was hilarious. I mean, let's set up for the people who didn't see yesterday. Mike gets up there and he's talking about the, there's a video that's playing about the end of the world. And the basic theme is that you didn't take care of your data and how the world's coming to an end. Las Vegas was in shambles and they were waterfalls running through the hotels, drones attacking people, and then you picked it up from there and then took it into just a really funny soliloquy, but where'd you come up with that idea and how do you think it, I thought it went great, but how'd you feel afterwards? Well, I can take only partial credit. I have an amazing creative team. And when you work at a company that's been doing, large scale enterprise data center stuff, we know that part of our obligation for our audience is kind of making it more palpable for them, making it feel a little bit more, bringing the emotion to it. So we want to have a little bit of excitement in there, but at the same time, we have a real message, and hopefully that came across too. It did, but again, a lot of good humor, the megabytes, gigabytes, up the zettabytes, yottabytes, Mike Tyson bytes, so very clever, congratulations on that. And we really enjoyed it, mixed things up a little bit. So, and again, very transparent, sort of talked about the UX, not the best, you're not happy with it. Again, very transparent about that. I think that's a theme of many successful companies today. But so, let's start with sort of, what does it take as the Chief Product Officer to transform a company from, somebody's been around since 1983, into a modern, cloud-like, hyper-scale set of service and software offerings? That's a big question, but I can tell you the first thing that it takes, and the most important thing that it takes, is the best engineering team in the world. You can do a lot of things around the outside. We need to fix our UX, we know that. I often consider that to be the kitchens and bathrooms of our house-free model, but if your foundation's broken, if your framing isn't there, you really don't have much of an asset to put on the market. We have a great engineering team. We are releasing products at a velocity that is incomparable in the enterprise ISV space, and we're super proud of that. So I think that's the number one thing. I think number two is the other thing that we're the envy of the industry for, and that is an amazing install base of customers. Very hard to name a Fortune 2000 company that isn't a significant customer of Veritas, so we have a great basis to collaborate and innovate. The rest, we know we have some work to do as we bring it into the modern age. We talked a lot about the fact that workloads are changing in data centers, architectures are changing, we're establishing new partnerships with some of the sponsors that you see here today, like Microsoft, like Google, like IBM, and Oracle, and others, and it takes a village and they're helping us move into the next 10 years. Mike, talk a little bit about the transition from software that lived on servers to now, well, cloud isn't somebody else's servers, I think's the word for that. Definitely, we've talked many times this week, Veritas was software defined before there was such a thing. It used to be the fud from the traditional players that it was like, oh, you can't trust stuff like that, and now, of course, they're all software defined and talking about that too, so what does that mean going to kind of being completely agnostic for where things lived and some of the intricacies of trying to work with some of the big and small cloud players? Yeah, and there are a lot of questions in there, and I think David Noy, who I know you guys are going to talk to later, is going to talk a bit more specifically about this, but one of the first things you have to keep in mind is if you're building software to be software defined, then you have to build it without considering the hardware platform that you may deliver it on. And I think that's where some of our competitors get it wrong. They can say that they're software defined, but the litmus test is can I really pick up this software without modification and go run it in one of those hyperscalers, or put it on one of the white boxes that I went to the market and procured and integrated myself? Veritas been doing that for a long time, in fact, if you really look at Veritas' core, we're an integrator. We've been an integrator of applications through the protection space in our file system and our infoscale technologies. We are integrators of operating systems. When you look at hyperscalers, they're just the next operating system, someone else's hardware, as you said. So we look to protect our customers in terms of their choices, make flexibility a real part of the multi-cloud architecture they're putting together. Still do the things we do well with protection, and ultimately lay on that last little bit when we're talking software defined, that is not just focus on the infrastructure, but really aspire to this, how do I better manage data and get value from data? You know, Mike, I want to dig one level deeper on that. So the cloud providers, it's all well and good to say, yeah, I'm agnostic, but each of them have their own little nuances. It's at least today, it's not like, oh, well, I choose today to wake up and this one has cheaper prices. It's not a commodity, it's not a utility. Each one of them have services that they want you to integrate with, have to have deeper. How do you balance that, you know, integration, how much work's done, where the customers are pulling you out? How does that product portfolio get put together? You know, it's an excellent question and I will be fully honest that a year ago we thought about the answer to that question very differently than we do today. You know, a year ago, I think we were somewhat naive and thought, hey, we're going to throw a thin layer of capability on top of the clouds and in effect commoditize them ourselves and help our customers just move around as if there were no underlying services. And obviously if you're a cloud provider, that is not an approach that you're a big fan of. And frankly, it's a disservice to the customers because they are building some really valuable services and they are differentiating themselves. Our approach has changed. Our approach today is a very deep level integration with each cloud provider and the specialization they're bringing to the market without sacrificing the portability, without sacrificing the built-in protections that the cloud providers aren't putting on their platforms and don't want to put on their platforms. And again, going back to this idea of data, ultimately, if it's someone else's hardware and in effect in some cases, someone else's application, it's always your data and how are we servicing that data is really the key. So that's really hard work. I mean, in a lot of cases, you have to interface with very low level primitive sort of APIs from the cloud service providers. How do you sort of balance your resources or apportion your resources between doing that because you guys, I call it the compatibility matrix. All kinds of data stores, all kinds of clouds, every one of those is engineering resources. And it seems like that's a key part of your strategy, but you've got to be sacrificing something which is maybe the next widget on your existing products. How do you think about apportioning those? You know, at Veritas in a way, the emergence of the cloud ecosystem actually improves that situation for us. We're carrying 30 years of operating systems that have come and gone, that have incremented versions, and our customers often strand or isolate single examples of those boxes from 20 years ago and that they expect us to test all of our software against on their behalf. So when they're, for example, right? You know, and so when you look at where we are today, if there are five or 10 cloud providers versus hundreds of operating system versions and application, we have no problem supporting the proliferation in cloud. We actually welcome the ability to support those. You're much happier with the one version of Azure as opposed to the old Patch Monday. Exactly right, you know, and they upgrade the whole thing at once. They issue a couple of new services, we adopt them. So am I thinking about it the wrong way because that while that's true, when I understand that, but within an individual cloud, you could have 15 data services. So I think about AWS data services, their data pipeline is increasingly complex. So doesn't that complexity scale in a different direction? It scales differently for sure, but I would give a lot of credit to the cloud providers because they're taking a lot of the regression testing that we used to have to do. For example, with application providers and operating system providers who didn't think about us when they were building their products. The cloud providers take accountability for regression testing all of the things that they released to their customers. So when we adopt an API, we're fully confident that that API works in the context of that cloud environment. So that's off our plate. It really isolates the need for us to simply test that API against our environment. Okay, so much more stable and predictable environment for you. I want to ask you, I've heard the term modern data protection a lot. What is modern data protection? Everybody wants to be next gen. How do you define modern data protection? And this is something we're super passionate about because our industry has been around for quite a long time. And you get terms thrown out there like legacy or modern and everyone's fighting for brand recognition into the growth spaces in the market. For us, it actually is very simple. We recognize there are a lot of different techniques to protect data. We think of these protection schemes like lots of different insurance policies and lots of different tools in your toolbox where Veritas is going to win and continues to win is that we can offer our customers all of those techniques. We're not trying to convince them that one technique is so much more special than another one that they need to diversify and create complexity in their environment. So we talk about modern data protection as the ability to choose snapshots or backups or copy data management or workload migration. In the future, there will be other ways to do this. Continuous data protection or scale out platforms for cloud providers. These are just techniques inside of a Veritas portfolio as opposed to standalone companies that create complexity for our customers. So modernization is choice. Okay, so you have this awesome install base. Bill Coleman said to us yesterday in response to a similar related question that it's ours to lose and the question we have is as you look at that install base you've got to get them onto this modern data platform. How do you do that? Do you write some abstraction layer? You talked about that thin layer in the cloud. You must have thought about doing that. Is that what you're doing? How is that going? What does that journey look like? Yeah, that is one of the most fundamental strategy questions for Veritas and one of the things that we recognized early on is that while we do have an amazing install base of customers and those customers are hyperskilled themselves, you're talking about customers with tens of thousands of servers running our software both on the storage and the protection side. So the thing that we cannot ask them to do is continuously upgrade their environment to take advantage of new features. We will put out one to two major releases of our software particularly on the protection side annually but we're innovating at a far greater pace than that. So we've made some conscious choices to create new architectures for our customer that are workload specific. So CloudPoint being a great example coming out in July. Our object store announcements underpinning our next generation data protection solutions so they have modern storage capabilities. Our second example, but pulling them together is where only Veritas can offer customer a complete catalog of that data. So combining your NetBackup catalog with CloudPoint, for example, with your storage, with what you've put into cloud provides a customer for the first time kind of a complete view of the secondary estate. And so as long as we get that right we don't have to upgrade, we don't have to seed. What we have to do is enable our customers through simple adoption of new tools, provide that visibility over the top and I think that they'll be good to go. So that's kind of like, I think that the term backward compatibility is essentially what you're providing for your install base, is that right? That's exactly right, providing, and this is where API based infrastructure and service driven architectures help us a lot. We don't have to fully instantiate a code base every time that we want to offer a service to a customer. There aren't many independent, in fact there aren't any independent as one, two and a half billion dollar software companies in your space. But there are many emerging guys that are getting a lot of attention, well funded. Some hitting that kind of a hundred million dollar revenue mark, at least it appears that way. How do you look at those guys? What do you learn from them? Branson said today, you learn by listening and watching in this case. That's right. You're watching the market obviously. What are you seeing there? I mean it's the hottest space in the infrastructure market right now is your space and security or the two smoking hot spaces. What are you observing and what are you learning? And I think the direct answer to your question is follow the user. You know and I think that's the lesson of the industry even over the last 15 years is that when a new workload arises it's creating a new user inside the enterprise IT department. And that user often gets to determine all the services that they need to make themselves successful. If that is a cloud workload and they need availability services or they need protection services, they want that to integrate in the same place that they buy and provision their cloud workload. If it's a container workload, it's the same. We saw the rise of some of our competitors that got to multi-hundred million dollar revenue streams by focusing on a single user and a single type of transaction with a single type of interface. And Veritas kind of lost its way I think a little bit back in that time. So what we are watching today is who are our users? What workloads are emerging? What sort of interfaces do we need to develop for those users? Which is why we made our UX statements as strongly as we did. We're committed to those. That is going to be the future of Veritas. It's serving the broadening user base inside of enterprise. You're seeing a lot of discussion in the industry around design thinking. I know we're out of time here, but you see companies like for instance Charles Phillips company Infor bought a company called Hook and Loop and they're all about design. How is design thinking fitting into your sort of UX UI plans? I mean the parlance that we use internally is jobs to be done, right? We clearly want to create a very consistent user experience and look and feel. We want our customers to be proud to be Veritas customers. But we have to be super cognizant of what is the job they're trying to get accomplished and allow the system to be designed around accommodating that. If that is I want three workflows and three steps or less, can I do that? It could be I have very complicated job and I want the ability to control very granular things. Do I have an interface to do that? So if we know the user and the job to be done, we can create a consistent look and feel. I think that we are, we're going to not only ride the wave of change inside of our particular industry, but I think we're going to wind up in a consolidation space where we're a big winner. All right, last question. The bumper sticker on Vision 2017 is the trucks are pulling away from the area. What's the bumper sticker? Secondary data is your most underutilized asset and a platform provider is what you need to take advantage of it. All right, Mike, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Congratulations and good luck. Thank you for having me. All right, you're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. TheCube are live from Veritas Vision 2017. Be right back.