 from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Veeamon 2019, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome to sunny Miami, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellantem. Here with Peter Burris, this is day one of Veeamon, theCUBE's third year covering Veeamon. First year was in Nola, last year was in Chicago. They chose Miami at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Bummer. For, yeah, which is a real bummer here. A lot of swankiness, a lot of fun people, a lot of big boats, Peter. And this morning we heard the keynotes. theCUBE is going to be covering wall to wall coverage. We'd like to go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. Peter and I have done a number of shows together. Peter, I love working with you because you bring great insights. And I want to start off with Veeam, the company, the host company here. We saw, when we started Wikibon, we saw the ascendancy of Veeam kind of coincide with virtualization. And it was all about making backup simpler and easier to use for small and medium-sized businesses. That's what Ratmir Temeshev, the co-founder, called Act One. Now they're trying to really ride the wave of cloud to create Act Two. Of course, they're not alone. You've got companies like Rubrik and Cohesity and then established players like Dell EMC and Veritas and IBM all trying to hang on and get a piece of that $15 billion business. But we're seeing the notion of backup and recovery move beyond just an insurance policy into this idea of data protection. What some people call data management, which you and I have talked about, means a lot of different things to a lot of different people in a concept that you've sort of coined called data assurance. I don't know if you've coined it but you certainly talk about it articulately. So I want to unpack some of those trends with you. You've been studying this market. You've written about this notion of data protection. Your take on the event here, 2,000 people, but more importantly what's going on in the marketplace. So let's make one single point about Veeam. 10 years ago, you remember the whole notion of backing up and restoring virtual machines was really hard and it's still something that we take for granted today but it's pretty amazing technology that we can actually do this. Take these software images of physical devices and actually generate backups that can be very, very quickly restored at very, very high fidelity. It still is something magical. The reason why I say that is because the degree of complexity and the direction that we're going as state gets associated with different parts of the computing system or not associated with different parts of the computing system is going to become that much more challenging. So we talk about Kubernetes clusters for example that are supposed to be stateless. Spin them up, spin them down, spin them up, spin them down. Minimize the amount of state. Places that much more pressure on how you handle your data and do data management. Where I like to start Dave as we talk about what's going to happen next is number one, that folks have gotten the cloud wrong. The cloud was not a strategy for centralizing computing. It really is a strategy for distributing computing with control, with services, with protection, with a common management experience. What do you mean by that? People think of cloud as putting everything into the public cloud in some kind of central location. Explain the distributed notion. Well the thing that's really interesting about the cloud is that these standards evolve and as the experience evolve and as the technology gets built and invented that we now can see that we can bring cloud services to where the data resides. And that's probably, well that's not probably, that's what's going to happen. The cloud is increasingly going to recognize the data, the cost of data state and the cost of data movement are two of the biggest costs in any computing system. And so we want to keep data proximate to the activity that it's going to support. Not just where it's created, but the activities that it's going to support. That's how you associate data and business value. But you're specifically talking about the services following the data in a consistent manner whether it's on-prem, in the cloud, or. Well that's what it has to be able to do. We have to just not keep the, put the data where it's located, but that data as an asset has certain services associated, certain metadata associated with it, and often certain code associated with it. And so the whole notion is to be able to assure that when I spin up one of these new modern applications that don't know a lot about state, that the data is there. The services that make that data integrus, secure, viable, backup and restoreable, et cetera, are resident. And very importantly that that metadata that describes policy and other types of things also is easily invoked and easily applied without an enormous amount of administrative headache. So ultimately we can get to greater distribution of data with greater automation, lower administration, and greater security. Okay so we talked at the top about Veeam is really trying to ride the wave of cloud just the same way it rode the wave of virtualization. There were three announcements today. The first was that Veeam hit a billion dollars in a trailing 12 month basis. That's big. So that's big for a pure play software company, traditionally in backup, billion dollars is quite a mile. Mid-range backup. Yeah really, really SMB backup. 350,000 customers. 350,000 customers, like 4,000 a month. They also announced Veeam Availability Orchestrator version two, which is all about fast recovery. We asked Danny Allen in the briefing this morning how they do that. And it's complicated. It's a function of architecture, metadata management, but essentially doing fast recovery without necessarily having to rely on replication. There are some other components of that automated testing, dynamic documentation. We're going to dig into that a little bit more. And then this notion of with Veeam, a set of open APIs, which is cloud-like. When you think of riding the cloud wave, what do you think of PD? You think of open, you think of, you mentioned Kubernetes and microservices. You think of an ecosystem. You think of simple. You think of cloud-like pricing. So can, in your opinion, Veeam take that success that it's had in virtualization and kind of replicate that in the cloud? Well you and I have been on the phone with customers where we've argued to the customer that there's going to be greater specialization of data services based on greater specialization of a customer's data needs. And some people argue with us a lot. Just as some people used to argue with us about the whole notion of hybrid cloud for a long time. You guys are crazy when you say that. The night when I saw that with Veeam, which I think is an especially important feature of today's announcements, it opens up the possibility that I can have a common platform for data sharing, state of protection, but allow an ecosystem to create value in response to different classes of needs because data protection is going to be a strategic capability within any digital business. If I'm a business that's now treating data as an asset as a basis for differentiating from my competitors, I have to protect that data in everything that it means and assure that it's available. That has now become a strategic business capability. And like every single strategic business capability, and I'm talking about it from an architectural sense here, there's going to be specialization and specificity to that business. And with Veeam creates an opportunity for an ecosystem to create additional layers of value and function on top of that core set of services to better map Veeam to specific customer needs. That's a good thing. Yeah, and when you talk about the ecosystem, I'm glad you brought that up. You got partners like HPE, Cisco, NetApp, Lenovo, Nutanix, those are sort of the top tier partners that these guys have mentioned and a number of other partners as well. And so Veeam has become that, you know, a billion dollar company and is now attracting and building out this ecosystem in a pretty big way. Ratmir put up a chart that the market's 15 billion. They're not alone. As I say, you've got established players like Dell EMC, certainly Veritas, IBM with the old Tivoli products and then some other new stuff. And then you've got Cohesity and Rubrik just announced maybe earlier this year, $250 million investments, actually late last year and earlier this year. Veeam countered that with a $500 million investment. It's a little unclear exactly where all that money's going. Private company, three private companies, but the point is- Big boats in Miami. Big boats in Miami. The point is there's a lot of money coming into this space. In the enterprise, data protection is a very, very hot. Why is that? You mentioned it, it's because of digital business and the need to protect data, assure data, be able to recover transparently and very quickly. And using some of these new modern application development styles that are intended to create as many options for the developer as possible. That's where you get the agility. And your point about Kubernetes and being stateless and some of the security challenges that we were talking about last night, this notion of data assurance being able to spin up and automatically spin down containers so that they're not a threat. Raising the bar, raising the cost for the bad guys to get in and hack your systems, making it more complex, making it less attractive because Kubernetes, microservices, containers, sometimes microservices, as one pundit once said, ain't so micro, it's some important stuff in there. Oh look, you can build really crappy applications with virtually any technology, right? But microservices, when you sit down with a senior guy in a development organization and you ask him about microservices or heard about microservices, it all starts with the observation that microservices is an approach to doing application development. Just as client servers started off as an approach to doing application development where you think about, well, I'm going to put all the application function here and we'll have all the database function here and we'll make database calls between the two, that's basically what microservices is. And if you think about it any other way, you're missing the starting point. So it's a way of thinking about how you break down a problem. And increasingly, business wants to break down problems into smaller parts that are more segmented, more compartmentalized, but also that don't necessarily persist for any number of different reasons. Resource consumption, change and the need to change, security, et cetera. And so the whole concept that over time, we're going to see applications being comprised of containers that thought through with a microservices approach built with languages that are supportive of containers and in utilizing container as the infrastructure. And the other thing is, virtually going back to the first point, virtual machines, virtualized hardware, containers, virtualized operating system. It's a really interesting technology when you come right down to it. And backing up and restoring all that, it's going to be challenging. But the real beauty of this is that ultimately, containers are going to reduce threat surface, not just by the dimensions of location, identity, but also time, because I can vary containers out. And so it's going to be a multi-dimensional approach to improving security, enhancing function, and getting greater productivity out of IT investments. And you've got to protect that stuff. So we're here Veeam on day one. We've got two days of wall-to-wall coverage with theCUBE, Veeam, a billion dollar company going after a 15 billion dollar pie. We're going to hear from Ratmir Timashiev, who's the co-founder of Veeam and a number of customers and partners. Keep it right there. You're watching theCUBE, Dave Vellante with Peter Burst. We'll be right back after this short break.