 Cube, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and the Cube's ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the Cube's coverage, wait, we're surrounded by green. I've got two gentlemen from Veeam here. No, but we're not at Veeam on. We're at Cisco Live 2018 here in Orlando. Happy to welcome back to the program. Carrie Stanton and Rob Emsley, gentlemen. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks too. All right, yeah, so I was with you guys not too long ago at the Veeamon conference. Had a lot of fun, and Chicago brought back some of the famous popcorn for my family, but we're here in Orlando. So way bigger convention center, 26,000 people. We're all walking a lot, talking a lot about networking and multi-cloud and everything there. Tell us a little bit about your experience here at the show and what you've taken. Yeah, yeah, it's great, thanks Stu. We have, as you may know, a tier one partnership with Cisco. We're a platinum sponsor at this event, and we're here all around our relationships with them on their data protection with their HyperFlex and their 3260 and S240 relationships, and we continue to see rapid growth in the channel, and we have a direct dedicated team selling with them on a global basis. So here, making a lot of new connections across their other business units. Rob, I see the green Veeam booth at almost every show I go to. Absolutely. How's Cisco different from some of the other ones that we go to? Well, one of the things that Chuck Robbins talked about in his keynote yesterday was how they summarized the focus of the company. There's two specific areas that Veeam works very closely with Cisco on. One is the powering the multi-cloud and unlocking the power of data. Those are two big focuses for us. You remember in Chicago, we're all about multi-cloud. On-premises, managed cloud, software as a service, the public cloud, that's the reality of where data lives. So we're very much in lockstep with Cisco. We've been working with Cisco for several years. We last year became available through their global price list. So we're actually finding that Cisco in the data center, especially when you think about conversion infrastructure and hyper-coverage infrastructure, it's an area where we can really complement what they're doing with their opportunities. Yeah. Kerry, it's interesting because we go to a lot of shows and we're hearing a lot of similar themes. Even, you know, I think last time I'd come to the Cisco Live USO it was 2009. Applications and data, it's like, come on, those are just bits running through our pipes. It's not really a big deal. Well, we're here in the DevNet zone. We're talking about how Cisco's been moving up the stacks, how they're enabling companies to build new applications, do cool things with wireless and SD-WAN and everything like that. I'm sure you must be seeing big change in a lot of your infrastructure partners that fits as Rob said, that power of data and where that fits. Yes. Yeah, I mean, we're seeing it across the board and what we like about the relationship we have with Cisco is they look to us as their, you know, data availability experts, right? That we go into the data center conversation and they bring us in as their subject matter experts and that's where I think, you know, they want to expand their footprint and their TAM with their product lines, whether it's UCS or HyperFlex and they're bringing us into those discussions because we solve, you know, a unique problem that they otherwise wouldn't be able to solve. Yeah. Rob, you saw the keynote yesterday. We were a little surprised. Diane Greene comes walking out. There's, you know, Cisco, of course, you know, big push in cloud. I've actually interviewed a number of Cisco executives at things like, you know, AWS re-invent and the like. Does the Veeam partnership with Cisco, do you touch on some of the public cloud pieces as well as? Yeah, very much so. One of the things that Cisco is very focused on is their service provider, you know, right to market. So that's an area where we've been, you know, very focused over the last probably three to four years, you know, building out and enabling often our resellers to become managed service providers themselves. But the reality is, is that, you know, you're starting to look at that public cloud tie-in, whether it be Microsoft Azure, whether it be AWS or IBM cloud. So these are really all areas where, you know, we can provide an on-ramp to connect any Cisco data center environment and provide a relationship with the public cloud, provide that data management level layer. Yeah, you know, I think back, you know, Cisco really helped a lot of the channel community mature their market. Went from being, you know, the silo network to building data center businesses back, you know, eight years ago when we started talking about converged infrastructure. Today, you know, this week, I've interviewed Presidio and WWT. They're talking a lot about how they're helping customers enabling that cloud. Love to hear your perspectives on, you know, the maturation of the channel and how they fit in this multi-cloud world, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you look at Veeam with our 55,000 channel partners, our brand promises remain channel, you know, at 100% channel-driven company. But having these relationships that are primary Cisco predominant partners like a WWT, Presidio, E-plus, I think it's just opening up discussions that we otherwise wouldn't have had. And, you know, we're seeing 50% of the opportunities that we're closing in the field are Cisco-led opportunities that are being driven from these new channel partners. And so again, I think this is the one plus one equals three story that we talk a lot about that we're bringing a lot to the table and 50% of the opportunities for them and vice versa for us. Yeah, one of the things that we really like about Cisco is their focus on their partner community is extremely high. Both from an enablement perspective and an education perspective, you know, they have a fully resourced partner marketing team and we've been doing a lot of work with them. You know, one of the things that Cisco has been transitioning to sort of fits into your space is the whole move to marketing in a digital world, you know, and the whole need to change the type of content, you know, and this type of content, you can think about, you know, the video sort of assets becomes so much more important. So we've been working very closely with them to do joint digital marketing. You know, it's very easy sometimes to do joint event-based marketing, but when you start getting into digital, you really have to think outside the box about how you bring two companies together to meet kind of in the digital world. So we've been really doing that to drive joint opportunities. And that's been something that, you know, we've really, you know, got some success with from our relationship with Cisco. In fact, you were just in Barcelona and... Yeah, yeah, we, you know, every year they run a marketing summit for their channel partners and existing partners. And we actually won the Cisco Marketing Innovation Award for a digital marketing always-on campaign site, which is full of assets for joint digital, for joint Cisco and Veeam customers. Yeah, congratulations. I did see some of that on some of the social media. Yeah, it's interesting to look at how, you know, marketing changes in this new digital world, something, you know, I ask every CMO I talk to these days as to, you know, how is digital changing the way things happen? And I find, you know, you mentioned our other infrastructure partners that there's no other partner that we've worked with at the size of Cisco than Embrace at day one. So they look to Veeam as, okay, we're going to work with Veeam, we're going to go deeper, we're going to bring them on our global crisis. And day one, they were, how can we, you know, kind of get intertwined into what Veeam does extremely well as our digital marketing machine. And just from the get-go, they've just continued to accelerate through that process. Yeah, one of the things I know every partner loves when they come to a event like this, there's a lot of customers here. Yes, there is. It gives a little insight if you can either specific examples or give us some of the themes you're hearing from customers at the show. What's top of mind? What are some of the biggest challenges that they're facing today? Yeah, I mean, I think what they're looking at doing is, you know, from a refresh of legacy backup solutions and replication solutions into modernizing their data center. And so they're looking to Cisco as their experts, you know, through the last decade plus. And now that Veeam is, you know, kind of tied directly in with Cisco and some of those relationships. So it's from a refresh standpoint, from a modernizing their data center to the hybrid cloud strategies that it's intertwined. You know, we fit very well into those discussions and we're seeing our customers come to us in these, you know, large ELAs where Cisco is bringing us in as part of those discussions. So again, we're otherwise, we would have had a hard time getting into it. Their customers are coming and saying, what is the relevancy? Should I really be looking at this? And Cisco's backing up those discussions. I don't know. I mean, certainly to tap down on the data center, converge infrastructure and hyper-coverage infrastructure is top of mind for a lot of the customers that are coming by the booth. You know, certainly, you know, which works well for us because, you know, some of our relationships with, you know, our other storage alliance partners, whether it be Pure or NetApp, you know, big partners of Cisco. You know, so, you know, rather than, you know, one plus one equals three, you know, it's one plus one plus one equals five. You know, quite often, you know, we're kind of going together as a kind of a group in order to go after opportunities. So that's definitely an area. If you think about conversion, hyper-converge, it's always highly virtualized. So that plays very well to where we've, you know, built the company from. A big focus on virtual machine availability, you know, but really gets more moving that now to sort of the whole concept of data management across a multi-clad world. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things, you know, we talk at all the shows is that, you know, the pace of change and how receptive our customers to making changes. What are you hearing from the customers here? You know, the storage market has long been, long been, you know, it's sticky. It's a little bit entrenched, you know, making changes. Networking, we used to measure in decades as to, you know, you roll this out and then, you know, I'll wait for the next, you know, major speed bump before we'll do that and you roll that out over years. Today, you know, we think things are moving faster but we'd love to hear, you know, points or counterpoints that you're hearing. Well, I think that the customers are looking to Cisco indirectly to Veeam from removing complexity. And I think what they've seen in the past is they've deployed solutions that have bogged down their process. You know, they look to the cloud as an agile environment and they look back with their legacy systems that they know they can't continue. And so, you know, from my standpoint, the customers that we talk to consistently is, are you going to be the platform that's going to allow me to embrace a hybrid cloud and, you know, to remove the complexity that I have and to be agile? And so, you know, that's constantly what the Veeam messaging is solving, right? Mission critical, backup and recovery workloads and doing it with, you know, at a fraction of the cost and accelerating that Veeam speed. Yeah, I mean, if you just take the legacy backup market or legacy backup installed base, you know, it seems that the openness to change is greater now than I've ever seen it. You know, I've been, you know, playing around in this space for, you know, quite a few years, but certainly recently, you know, we've found the openness to people to look for something new. You know, the, you know, our friends at Gartner always used to say, you know, the three things that people worry about, the three Cs, cost complexity and capabilities, you know, and those are still very much top of mind around what causes a customer to say, hey, what I've been doing for the last several years, it hasn't quite been getting it done for me. I think the big change is that backup as an insurance policy is no longer good enough. I think the ability to leverage your backup infrastructure and the data contained within it is really driving people to think about, you know, that's more of a value to me than simply having an insurance policy. Yeah, absolutely, you know, backup was never enough. We only do backup, I need to restore, but it's about that data. I want to give you the opportunity, you know, Veeam is, I think we said kind of a tweener. You're not, you know, what I would consider an old company, you've always been a software company born in the virtual days of age, but you know, there's a bunch of newer, you know, developer focused and cloud native, you know, how does Veeam stay, you know, in fight and compete against some of the new ones coming after this, you know, multi-billion dollar market? Let's take that. Yeah. Well, I think that we pride ourselves on innovation. We pride ourselves on iterating very quickly and we pride ourselves on, you know, adhering to our NPS score of 73, right? Whether it's 300,000 customers and what we, you know, we are going to continue on our path on what's made us successful and we know that there's always competition. There's lots of VC money out there and you know, it's not that we're looking away from what the competition is doing is that we believe with our 4,000 customers a month or 133 customers that we close on a daily basis across all segments of SMB, commercial and enterprise is indicative that our strategy is working. We're not going to stray away. We're just going to look to partners like Cisco and others to expand our target market but stay true to the solution that we've provided in that virtualization environment and we've made, you know, you were at V-Mon, you saw the announcements that we're making to support, you know, additional workloads and additional environments in the days to come. Yeah, I think our ability to evolve and adapt is second to none. You know, I think the, and some of that is just based upon kind of the structure of the company, you know, we're still private, you know, still pretty much, you know, we're driving our own growth. You know, and I think that allows us to make decisions quickly and very strategically to allow us to go into the areas that I think people instinctively know what is needed to evolve in this space around supporting multi-cloud, supporting data as an asset, leveraging it as an asset. And I think that's where we've been fueling both in an engineering perspective and a capacity to meet with customers and grow. And that's, you know, certainly what's going to, I think, sustain us as we keep going forward. All right, gentlemen, I want to give you the final word as to, you know, key takeaways you see here from Cisco Live 2018. The, that we will be here for the duration of the time and our relationship with Cisco will continue to expand and that we look forward to meeting everyone at the Veeam booth and walking through our product solutions and meeting the Veeam team and answering any questions they may have. But we're thrilled to be part of the Cisco family and hopefully, you know, again, in the years to come that we'll just continue to expand our relationship. And I'll leave you with an African proverb. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Absolutely. Rob Emsley, Kerry Stanton, always a pleasure to catch up with you. I'll leave it with the final aphorism of my own, which is, you know, never confuse activity with progress. Ben Franklin. So I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE.