 From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBE Conversation from our wonderful studios in beautiful Palo Alto, California. One of the biggest challenges that every enterprises face is how to attend to the volumes of data that are being generated by applications, but more importantly, that the business is now requiring because they want to find new derivative sources of value in their digital business transformations. This is going to require a significant retooling and rethinking of how we use data as an asset and the directions that infrastructure, data management and business are going to move together over the course of the next few years. Now to have that conversation, we've got a couple of great guests here. Jyothi Swaroop is a VP of Marketing at Veritas. Welcome to the CUBE, or back to the CUBE, Jyothi. Yeah, thanks, Peter. And Rick Clark is the CEO of Optar. Rick, welcome to the CUBE for the first time. Great to be here. So let me start here, Jyothi. Why don't we start with you? Give us a quick update on Veritas and where your customers are indicating the direction needs to go. We've just had a record breaking financial year for us, which ended in end of March. So since divestiture from Symantec, as you know, Veritas has been through a transformation and then on a path to growth. So our core businesses are humming. We've just, like I said, the second half of the year specifically was great for us. What we're hearing from customers, Peter, is that they want to elevate their business problems away from infrastructure to business outcomes. What they ask Veritas to do is, can you abstract away some of those infrastructure plumbing problems, storage, security, data protection, and focus on what the applications can give us? That's number one. Number two is, can we standardize? I mean, the example of Southwest comes to mind, right? They have the same plane, so they can reroute those planes anytime they have the same pilots flying those planes. So they can just standardize so they can abstract better. And then lastly, to your point, value of data over volume. Everybody talks about the volume. What about the value of data? What does Veritas do for me as a customer in order to extract value of that data, which is growing day by day? Well, one of the most interesting things about this challenge that businesses face as they try to attend to these things is that data is often characterized as the new oil. And we push back against that because data is a new kind of asset. It's an asset that's easily copied. It's an asset that's easily shared. You can easily integrate it. You can apply it to multiple uses with zero loss of fidelity in what it does currently. And so the whole notion of creating new options and the value of data is intrinsic to the questions of digital business. So that suggests that we need to start thinking more about data protection, not just from the standpoint of protecting data once it's been created and is sitting there so that we can recover it, but new types of utilization, new ways of thinking about data, data as it's going to be used, understanding more about data and protecting that. Rick, would you kind of, does that resonate with you? Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we've sort of seen in the marketplace is certainly over the last 10 years the data center has become so complex. There's this massive fragmentation of data across highly virtualized infrastructures. And then when public clouds came along, customers didn't really know what workloads they should move up into those clouds. And so what we saw as a huge problem is areas of cost inefficiencies, massive problems of risk, and then obviously the amount of money that companies are spending on compliance. And so what we were really focusing on is the gaps. What do you not know about? And so we would really measure- About your data. About your data, exactly. So we'd really measure the heartbeat of the data protection environment. And from that, we could actually see where are your risk, where are your exposure, where are you spending too much money? And where's your opportunities? Where's your opportunities? So we've got a notion of the solution that folks are looking for is something that provides greater visibility into their end-to-end data from a risk exposure, opportunity, new sources of utilization standpoint. Now talk a little bit about how Aptar rounds out the Veritas portfolio as it pertains to these things that you're seeing customers ask for. Taking data closer to outcomes and away from a device orientation. Absolutely. So Veritas has always been known to be a leader in data protection. We've done that for over 20 years. We also were the first pioneers in software-defined storage and we are number one in market share according to IDC and Gardner as well. But again, to my earlier point, customers have been asking, so what? Yeah, we've done the plumbing really well and you've scaled. How do you take this to the next level and extract value from all that data you're sitting on top of and you're protecting? And that's where Aptar comes into the picture. We've built some tools natively within Veritas of the last three or four years where we try to go and classify the data on ingest, identify things like PII information, sensitive data, rock data, redundant, obsolete, trivial data that we can delete. There was a customer who recently deleted 30 million files. Just press the delete button and this is in a highly regulated environment. I bet you they were still pretty darn anxious when you pressed that button. They definitely were, but we were able to give them that visualization and information that they required. Now the question those customers are asking us or were asking us before Aptar came into the picture was at the infrastructure level, how do I know how much I'm spending on my data protection environments? Do I know where the growth is? Is it all in the traditional workloads of Oracle SAP or is it in virtual or is it in the cloud? Am I putting too much data on tape? Is it costing me enough? Can I extract the value from that data? So they were asking us infrastructure, visualization and IT analytics questions which only Aptar could answer and we have some joint customers that were actually using Aptar already not just to monitor the Veritas ecosystem but even some of our competitors and the broader IT ecosystem on a single plane of glass and that's where I think Aptar really shines is the agnostic approach they take beyond just Veritas or beyond just another storage vendor. Well, so we certainly subscribe to this notion that data protection is going to, and it's going to be extended, but it's going to become a strategic digital business capability that does have to be rethunk around the concept of data value and sounds like that's the direction you're taking and you guys have clearly seen that as well but obviously some of your customers have seen it. So talk to us a little bit about how customers helped knit you two guys together. Rick? Yeah, that's a great question. It was interesting actually we had some of the largest companies in the globe actually using our software. Many of the Fortune 10 are using our software JP Morgan Chase, Qualcomm, Western Digital and they came to us with these very precise problems around how to optimize my risk within the environment and how to streamline obviously the costs and compliance and we found that they were very common questions and so we actually created this agnostic intelligence built into the software, a rules engine that would be able to correlate data from all of these disparate data sources whether it's on-prem or in the cloud tying that together would provide impactful insights to our customers that could solve real world problems and we do it with kind of what we call the easy button. One of the big problems with a lot of software products out there today is there are point solutions to manage parts of the infrastructure. So companies wanted a single pane of glass where I could see everything across all of my storage, all of my data protection on-prem and cloud and that's really what we bring to the table that single pane of glass and we do it very simply at scale for the largest customers and that's in many ways was the synergy obviously with the partnership with Veritas. So give us some sense of how customers will see the benefits of this from a rollout standpoint over the next six to 18 months. Right, so step one in this journey for us is to ensure that our customers understand that we're going to continue to have that open and agnostic approach. Aptar suddenly is not going to become a proprietary Veritas product. It's going to continue on its mission to be agnostic across various storage, data protection and cloud environments. That's number one. Number two is we're going to bring the artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that we have in-house with Veritas, combine that with some of the things that Rick just talked about with the AI capabilities that Aptar has, combine it so our customers can gain added value, the one plus one equals three approach there as well. So those are like the two key pillars for us going forward and eventually we'll extend Aptar to an end to end data analytics platform, not just ID analytics, where we're looking at infrastructure, but an end to end data plus IT analytics platform that spans Veritas as well as the proprietary IT ecosystem. Well, so it's good to hear that you're going to let Aptar continue to focus on data value as opposed to Veritas value. But talk to me a little bit about what does that analytics piece really mean? How are customers going to use it? How are they using it today? How are they going to use it? Yeah, let me count that. There's roughly 30,000 unique metrics that we actually gather across the whole IT infrastructure. And we'll look at a classic use case as one of exposure. A lot of companies spend an enormous amount of money on their data protection infrastructure. They're using disparate tools and technologies. They don't always go with one platform like NetBackup as an example rate. And so with that come challenges because there's going to be gaps. They might be backing up a Windows server where the backup policy says they're just backing up the C drive. We'll interrogate VMware or the hypervisor. We'll look at the network and see that there's a D drive attached to that volume as well. And there's no backup data protection policy. So enormous amount of exposure if they try to do a restore obviously from the D drive where there's no protection, right? From a cost perspective, there's an enormous amount of white space problem in the storage industry. More and more companies are moving from spinning disk to all flash arrays. A lot of companies are struggling with how do I protect those all flash arrays? They're using snapshots. They're using cloud. They're tearing to the cloud. They're using different backup products. Obviously, we'd prefer that they use NetBackup. But with our software, we can provide that insight across the entire data protection framework and storage and show you where is your risk? Where is your inefficiency? Where are you double protecting things and spending too much money? This whole notion of data protection is transactional. A lot of people do what's called disk to disk to take, still being vaulted offsite. How do you know that all those transactions are successful? How do you know you can restore based on those SLAs and tying that into your CMDB? That's what Aptar does. So I'm going to throw a little bit of a curve ball here. So having worked within an IT or worked within IT organizations, it can be, IT historically has been relatively compartmentalized and segmented. You had administrators for servers, administrators for storage, people who were administrating applications and subsystems. And the cloud is munging a fair amount of that together. But one of the places that has always required coordination, collaboration, and even more important, practice, has been in the area of restore. Firms or shops that did not practice how they would restore, hopefully they never had a problem, but if they did have a problem, if they hadn't practiced that process, they would likely were not going to be successful at bringing the business up. It gets even more important in digital business. Can you give us a little bit of visibility into how this combination, taking the metadata, the metrics, the visibility, taking the high quality services, bringing them together is going to streamline, restore within enterprises. So first let me address the first point you made, which is what I call the rise of the versatile list. So there are no more specialists in certain jobs. The versatile list in the cloud or in virtual tend to do three or four jobs, whether it's backup or storage or virtualization itself. And what these versatile list want is to respond an easy button to restore their VM environment or their big data environment or their Hadoop environment. They're not really worried as a central IT team that hey, what am I going to do with the entire data estate and how do I restore that? So that's the first step. Second step, as the world of IT gets more and more complicated and the rise of the versatile list continues to happen, these folks want to be able to have a resiliency plan. They want to be able to rehearse these restores, right? And if they don't have a resiliency plan built in, if the data protection is so siloed and does not help them build a resiliency plan end to end, that restore is not going to be successful, likely, right? And that's where Veritas and companies like Veritas come in to help them build those resiliency plans end to end. But let me take you back to, so the financial industry, for example, there are rules about how fast you have to be able to restore. I got to believe that visibility into data as a value level can help set priorities because sometimes you want to bring up this application or this class of applications or this class of users or functions before you bring up those. So does Aptar, is Aptar going to provide even greater clarity in the crucial restore, set of practices and that kind of thing? One of the biggest challenges for a lot of companies with restores is actually finding the data. We had a classic use case with a large Fortune 10 company where they had a bunch of servers that were being backed up, they were bolted off to tape, and then it was obviously a different backup product they were using, they actually lost their catalog. The data was still there on tape. They had millions of tapes in their vaults and they used Aptar to identify the barcodes and recover that data literally within a matter of hours. And so not only can we find you your freshest copy, your most recent copy if that's what you want, but we can find where is your data, because in a lot of cases there's multiple replications, multiple copies of the data across all sorts of assets within your infrastructure. Interesting. So last thoughts, when we have you back in theCUBE in a year, where are you guys going to be? Hey listen, the two things that I talked about, we're going to continue to expand the support of the ecosystem, the world of IT, whether it's on-prem, virtual, or in the cloud with Aptar, we're going to continue to invest in the artificial intelligence and ML capabilities, so not just Aptar, but all of Veritas's ecosystem, and you'll see a more integrated approach and a platform-based approach around standardization when we come here next. Guys, thank you very much. Great conversation. Thanks for being here on theCUBE to talk about this important relationship between data, tooling, and sources of business value. Rick Clark is the vice president of the Aptar business unit. Used to be the CEO of Aptar, but now the vice president of the Aptar business unit at Veritas. Jyothi Swaroop is the vice president of marketing at Veritas. Once again, guys, thanks very much for being here. Thank you so much, Pete. Thanks for having us. And once again, I'm Peter Burris. You've been listening to another CUBE conversation. Until next time.