 Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019, brought to you by Commvault. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are at Commvault Go 19 in Colorado. Stu and I are pleased to welcome a couple of guests joining us in this next segment. We have Kevin Harrow, Infrastructure from Quad, and Matt Troyer, Senior Manager Solutions Marketing from Commvault. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. It's great to finally be here. Yeah, exciting stuff in the last couple of days. So Kevin, let's start with you. Give our audience an understanding of Quad, what kind of business you're in, what services and products you deliver. Quad is, first and foremost, a printer. So we do large-scale, long-run printing. We've got locations across the country and Latin America and Europe. So from data perspective, we have our own internal apps and stuff, obviously, but for the most part, our large chunks of data come straight from our customers. And what kind of customers are we talking about? Customers, magazines, books, anything of that nature. Anybody who needs long-run signs, do it all. Packaging. Okay, so talk to us about kind of your role and from a data perspective, how it's exploding. It seems to be growing every day, that's true. So the data that comes in from our customers we treat it, we improve it, we add to it, and then we have to get it back to them, make sure everything's okay, and then it goes to the printers, and then it needs to be saved. So you can imagine that piles up pretty quickly. Now, is it just that the actual images themselves are getting bigger, like the content that's coming towards it, or is it also that your customer base is growing and expanding too? So the individual customers are getting bigger, but also you're getting bigger as well from a quad perspective? Yes, both, all three actually. So you can imagine the amount of images that go into like a catalog, and how every single one of those came in, even though it might be an inch or two big on your page, it came in full res, so it adds up quick. All right, Kevin, why don't you walk us through what led you down the path to Commvault, if you can give us a little bit of the before and the process that led to choosing Commvault? The initial reason we came into Commvault was actually partially backup related, but we were actually in the middle of a site-life cycle, so we were looking to upgrade the hardware at 12 different sites, and we wanted to switch the hypervisors at those sites, and Commvault provided us the means to do that quickly and easily without us having to rebuild all of those systems. So that was our first introduction to it. That went very well for us. We're doing another round coming up here very soon, and so we've done all that, and now actually we're taking a step back and actually going with the Commvault backup solution. And what was the hypervisor before and now? We were going, those were VMware to hyper-view. Yeah, Matt, maybe walk us through. Is that a typical use case that you see out there? Migrations are often one of the most challenging things for infrastructure people. You say it was the four-letter word when you're told to migrate something, but yeah, take us inside. Well, I mean, you see it doesn't have to be just a hypervisor to hypervisor migration. You see it just every day with the people shifting workloads into the cloud, and in this case here, it's not a same-per-same movement necessarily, so it could be VMware in one site like what you guys were doing changing into Hyper-V, or it could be simply moving from VMware maybe on-premises to native AMIs in AWS. So you were seeing a lot of people kind of decoupling from that hypervisor layer, or at least abstracting it because it's more about the data itself and less where the data happens to reside. So I think that's going to continue to be something that we see more and more of as people continue to move into that multiple cloud environment. So I mean, did you guys also move into the cloud too as part of this, or this is just an on-prem? Huge on-cloud investment at this point in time, but the story that we've been hearing on the cloud, the multi-cloud, and the avoiding the lock-in holds true for us just at the hypervisor level. We don't want to be kept to decisions that were made five, 10 years ago just because it's hard to get off a specific hypervisor or piece of software. So it gives us the flexibility to do what we're looking to do. So you had, we talked a little bit about the proliferation of data both from the actual images and the files getting larger and larger and larger than growth in the quad customer base. Talk to us about what you were doing to back up data before because you were using somebody else before you decided to make them move over to Commvault. We have been using somebody else. We've actually been using for somebody else's. Can you tell us who those for somebody else's are? Our primary ones were EMC. But outside from that, at smaller offices, we had other solutions as well. So we've heard the complexity of Commvault as an issue and we were afraid of it as well. But that complexity really doesn't stand up to teaching someone how to restore off of four potentially different systems and four different architectures in general. So getting everything under that one pane of glass is an end goal for sure. Was that really the like the compelling event or was there maybe an issue like we were hearing on stage this morning with one of the Commvault customers saying, hey, we had a big failure. Was there a compelling event or was it, you know, we've got four different solutions in here. We need that single pane of glass because the data has so much value, but if we can't see it. It's really the single pane of glass. I mean, in order to maintain that interconnected web of backups, we actually had to homegrow our own system just to be able to look up where the backup was to begin with. And while that works, it's effective. It's an extra step that has to be taken in the middle of a recovery process. So Matt, you started your time at Commvault in the field. So, you know, bring us a little bit some of the competitive landscape that you see out there. You know, consolidating onto a single vendor obviously is something we see all the time when there's M&A activity or you've got branch offices and the like. Yeah, I mean, it's certainly not uncommon to come across customers in a quad situation that, you know, where they've got one product over here, one product over there. And I think a lot of it stems from, you know, IT was in such a reactive mode for so long that, you know, it was almost trying to play catch up. It's like, well, we have to address protecting the virtual machines. Okay, we'll drop a solution in for that. We have to protect the data at the remote side. Well, I can't get my enterprise solution there, so I'll drop another Band-Aid solution in out there. And, you know, we're finally getting to that maturity where people are able to go back and re-examine some of those infrastructure decisions made, you know, five, 10 years ago and starting to rectify it by being able to bring that data together and consolidate it. And so that's kind of what I've always liked about, from a Commvault perspective, is that comprehensive coverage, you know, pretty much whatever it is, wherever it is, you can get that single pane of glass. And, you know, there's a lot of stuff that we can do and, you know, data environments are certainly not getting less complex, so. Well, talk to us about the complexity, Kevin, because that's, you know, at all the shows that we go to, complexity is always a topic that we hear for every technology and every customer's looking to reduce complexity, increase of agility, all the buzzards, right? Flexibility, simplicity. You said very candidly that when you were looking at the hypervisor switch and when it came time to evaluate the backup solutions, you were concerned about Commvault's complexity. You've heard a lot in the last day and a half about simplicity and reduced complexity. How have you found this implementation in terms of the previous complexity concerns? And do you have that single pane of glass that you were looking for? The complexity, the problem didn't really occur to us. I mean, we were walked through by our vendor very nicely. They got us through, they got us our SOPs built. We've been able to rule it out successfully. You know, we started with some of our hardest sites after that migration product. We started with the ones that were behind double gnats and are actually at customer locations behind firewalls we don't own and the ones that have been a problem for us for years to insecure those backups and those where we started and that's where we've actually had some pretty decent success. I mean, there is obviously a lot of settings and stuff to be worked through and to have a guide that sit there and walk us through and get us to make sure that we're getting the backup and the retention that we need. At the end of the day, we've got the backups going and they're working well. And that's kind of what we were striving to do when we introduced the Commvault command center was for the customers that don't need to go to that level of detail, provide a much more streamlined interface with a lot of the heavy automation elements in it. So customers that don't need those deep controls and customizations can work within that command center but the ones that do and actually what's entertaining is a lot of our long-term customers prefer working in that deeper complexity because it's like, oh, I like how I can tune it like this or I can flip it like that. So it's nice that our customers have the option of working where they feel most comfortable. And Matt, I'd love to get your perspective. You've been with Commvault for 12 years. Almost, yeah. We feel like at the last day and a half and we'll say Sanjay really kicked this off yesterday by saying, hashtag new Commvault. And it does feel like that with the changes to the leadership, the changes to the partner organization and partner programs, the focus on mid-market with Metallic, the Hedvig acquisition. Your perspective on being at Commvault for quite a long time, how do you see the company now? Well, it's refreshing when you've been with a company for a long time just to see how we're able to shift how we're talking about ourselves. And it's almost like a brand new level of confidence. You see the smash of color everywhere in just the way that we talk about the solutions, the way we talk about the company as well. It's been a lot of change going on but it's been exciting to kind of see that next evolution of the company in terms of taking that company to the next step and see what the future holds. So I've been really excited to see all of these changes over the past year and continue to see. So Kevin, you walked us through from the migration that you did initially to the solutions you're using today. Where are you looking forward for what you might use with Commvault and any of the new things that were announced this week, catch your eye that you might want to be looking into further when you get back to the office? Obviously Kubernetes has been floating around for a while so there's solutions here that we've been looking at. But really we want to get our fundamental backup and retention system to the point where it is no longer consuming whole days of FTEs where there's a report that comes out, we can check it, we know that it's good, we don't know if to babysit that product and we can get on some other larger projects, things of that nature. We can get on to worrying about some of the bigger issues and making sure that we are ready for a cyber event, things of that nature. You did mention Kubernetes, just where are you as a company with that and data protection obviously you need to worry about even multi-cloud, I'll be a KubeCon, maybe see you there. The first ones have just been rolled out recently, they're in, they're up, that's about where that is. Just starting, baby steps, baby steps. But we'd like to do the baby steps correctly, so the technologies that make sense. That's great that you're kind of shifting or it looks like anyway to getting a lot more automated in terms of what you're doing within the Commvault. I met with, or I was manning a customer panel yesterday with just a bunch of customers sharing what they were doing from moving towards that self-driving backup or at least backup or managing by exception where the less hands on you can be the more time that you've got back into your data focus on other projects. Exactly, yeah. Right, so yeah, we're at a point right now where we are obviously switching, so we want to look ahead and make sure that we're set and ready to go for the future. So Kevin, last question for you, as in the last nine months there's been some pretty big changes at Commvault, the new leadership, new focus on routes to markets. What does that, how do you internalize that in terms of this direction, this Commvault 2.0, this new Commvault as an existing customer? Well we're a new customer to them, so to see the energy that's coming at us is refreshing. To see them placed in the upper quadrants obviously helps sell the product to us for management to back our decisions up. So in general, the whole range seems to be getting met and we're not having to say this does everything except X, Y, and Z. Excellent, well Kevin, Matt, thank you for joining Stu and me on the program this afternoon at Go. We appreciate your time. Thanks for having us. Our pleasure. Take care. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Commvault Go, 19.