 from Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York. It's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision solution day, brought to you by Veritas. We're back in the heart of Central Park. We're here at Tavern on the Green, beautiful location for the Veritas Vision Day. You're watching theCUBE, my name is Dave Vellante. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we get the CEO of Veritas here, Greg Hughes, newly minted. Nine months in, Greg, thanks for coming on theCUBE. It's great to be here, Dave, thank you. So let's talk about your night, what was your agenda, your first nine months? You were talking about the 100 day plan. What was your nine month plan? Yeah, well look, I've been here for nine months, but I'm a boomerang. So I was here from 2003 to 2010. I ran all of global services during that time and became the chief strategy officer after that, was here during the merger by Symantec, and then ran the enterprise product group. So had all the products and all the engineering teams for all the enterprise products. And really my starting point is the customer. I really like to hear directly from the customer. And so I've spent probably 50% of my time out and about meeting with customers. And at this point, I've met with 100 different accounts all around the world. And what I'm hearing is it just makes me even more excited to be here. Digital transformation is real. These customers are investing a lot in digitizing their companies, and that's driving an explosion of data. That data all needs to be available and recoverable, and that's where we step in. That's, we're the best at that. Okay, so that was sort of alluring to you just, you're right. Everybody's trying to get digital transformation right. It changes the whole data protection equation. It kind of reminds me in a much bigger scale of virtualization. You remember, everybody had to rethink their backup strategies because you now had less physical resources. This is a whole different set of pressures, isn't it? It's like you can't go down, you have to always have access to data. Data is increasingly valuable. So talk a little bit more about the importance of data, the role of data, and where Veritas fits in. Well, our customers are using new, they're driving new applications throughout the enterprise. So machine learning, AI, big data, internet of things. And that's all driving the use of new data management technologies. Cassandra, Hadoop, OpenSQL, MongoDB. You've heard all these, right? And then that's driving the use of new platforms. Hyperconverge, virtual machines, the cloud, right? And so all this data is popping up in all these different areas. And without Veritas, it can exist, it'll just be in silos, right? And that becomes very hard to manage and protect it. All that data needs to be protected. We're there to protect everything. And that's really how we think about it. And I think the big message we heard today was, you got a lot of different clouds. You don't want to have a different data protection strategy for each cloud. So you've got to simplify that for people. Sounds easy, but from an R&D perspective, you've got a large install base. You've been around for a long, long time. So you've got to put investments to actually see that through. Talk about your R&D and investment strategy. Well, our investment strategy is very simple. We are the market share leader in data protection and software-defined storage. And that scale gives us a tremendous advantage. We can use that scale to invest more aggressively than anybody else in those areas. So we can cover all the workloads. We can cover wherever our customers are putting their data. And we can help them standardize on one provider of data protection. And that's us. So they don't have to add the complexity of point products in their infrastructure. So I wonder if we could talk just a little veer here and talk about the private equity play. You guys are the private equity exit. And you're seeing a lot of high-profile PE companies. It used to be where companies would go to die. And now it's becoming a way for the PE guys to actually get step-ups and make a lot of money by investing in companies and building communities, investing in R&D. Some of the stuff we've covered, we've looked to follow Syncsort, BMC, Info, a really interesting company, which is kind of an exit from PE, right? Dell, the biggest one of all. Riverbed and of course Veritas. So there's like a new private equity playbook at something you know well from your Silver Lake days. Describe what that dynamic is like and how it's changed. Oh, look, private equity has been involved in software for 10 or 15 years. And it's been a very important area of investment in private equity. I've worked for private equity firms, worked for software companies, so I know it very well. And the basic idea is continue the investment, continue the investment in the core products and the core customers to make sure that there's continued enhancement and innovation of the core products. And with that, there'll be continuity in customer relationships and those customer relationships are very valuable, right? That's really the secret, if you will, of the private equity playbook. Well, and public markets are very fickle. I mean, they want growth now. They don't care about profits. You guys, very nice cash flow of you and some of the brethren that I mentioned. So that could be very attractive, particularly when public markets, they ebb and flow. So the key is value for customers and that's going to drive value for shareholders. That's absolutely right. So talk about the TAM. And part of a CEO's job is to continually find new ways to your strategy guys. So TAM expansion is part of the role. How do you look at the market? Where are the growth opportunities? We see our TAM or a total addressable market at being around $17 billion, cutting across all of our areas, probably growing in the high single digits, 8%. And that's kind of a big picture view of it. When I like to think about it, I like to think about it from the themes I'm hearing from customers, right? What are our customers doing? Well, they're trying to leverage the cloud. Most of our customers, which are large enterprises and enterprises, we work with the blue chip enterprises on the planet. They're going to move to a hybrid approach. They're going to have on-premise infrastructure and multiple cloud providers. So that's really what they're doing. The second thing our customers are worried about is ransomware and ransomware attacks. Spear fishing works. The bad guys are going to get in. They're going to put some bad malware in your environment. The key is to be resilient and to be able to restore at scale. That's another area of significant investment. The third, they're trying to automate. They're trying to make investments in automation to take out manual labor to reduce error rate. In this whole world, tape should go away. And so one of the things our customers are doing is trying to get rid of tape backup in their environment. Tape is a long-term retention strategy. And then finally, if you get rid of tape and you have all your secondary data on disk or in the cloud, what becomes really cool is you can analyze all that data out of bound from the primary storage. And that's one of the bigger changes I've seen since I've returned back to Veritas. Yeah, so $17 billion. Obviously, that transcends backup. And frankly, you could go back to the early days of Veritas. I always thought it was a data management company and sort of returned to those roots. Backup, software-defined storage, compliance, all those areas key to what we do. And you mentioned automation. When you think about cloud and digital transformation, automation is fundamental that we had NBC Universal on earlier. And the customer was talking about scripts and how scripts are fragile and they need to be maintained and it doesn't scale. And so he wants to drive automation into his processes as much as possible using a platform that's sort of API-based, modern, microservices, containers, kind of using all those terms. What does that mean for you guys in terms of your R&D roadmap and in terms of the investments that you're making in those types of software innovations? Well, actually, one of the things we're talking about today is our latest release of NetBackup 8.1.2, which had a significant investment in APIs. And that allow our customers to use the product and automate processes, tie it together with their infrastructure like ServiceNow or whatever they have. And we're going to continue full throttle on APIs. It's something, just having lunch with some customers who's just today, they want us to go even further in our APIs. So that's really core to what we're doing. So you guys are a little bit like the New England Patriots, right? You're the leader and everybody wants to take you down, right? Nobody's confused me for Tom Brady. Although my wife looks, I'll stack her up against Giselle any time, but I'm no Tom Brady. So okay, so how do you maintain your leadership and your relevance for customers a lot of VC money coming into the marketplace? Like I said, everybody wants to take the leader down. How do you maintain your leadership? Yeah, we've been around for 25 years and we're very honored to have 95% of the Fortune 100 our customers. And if you go to any large country in the world, it's very much like that. We work with the bluest of blue chips, the biggest companies, the most complex, the most demanding, the most highly regulated, those are our customers. And we steer the ship based on their input and that's why we're relevant, right? We're listening to them and our customers extremely relevant. We're going to help them protect, classify, archive their data wherever it is. So the first nine months was all about hearing from customers. So what's the next 12 to 18 months about for you? You know, we're continuing to invest, you know, delighted to talk about partnerships and where those are going as well. I think that's going to be a major emphasis of us to continue to drive our partnerships. We can't do this alone. Our customers use products from a variety of other players. Today we had Henry Axelrod from Amazon Web Services here talking about how we're working closely with Amazon. We announced a really cool partnership with Pure Storage where, you know, our customers that use Pure Storage's all flash arrays can just, you know, then know their data's backed up and protected with Veritas and with NetBackup. So, you know, it's continuing to make sure that across this ecosystem of partners, we are the one player that can help our large customers. Great, thank you for mentioning that. The ecosystem is a key part of it. The channel, that's how you continue to grow. You get a lot of leverage out of that. Well, Greg, thanks very much for coming to the queue. Congratulations on the new role. We are super excited for you guys and we'll be watching. I enjoyed it. Thank you. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante. We're here in Central Park, right back. Veritas vision, right back.