 From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2019, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris. We're here at day one at VeeamON 2019. This is theCUBE's third year of doing VeeamON. We started in New Orleans, it was a great show. Last year was Chicago, and here, Miami at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Mark Crespius here, he's the Vice President of Sales Engineering for the Americas at Exigrid Systems, CUBE along. Mark, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. So, give us the update. What's happening with Exigrid? You guys got new headquarters in Marlboro. Marlboro's happening these days, right? We got the new shopping spot, and the mayor's going crazy, so give us the update on Exigrid. Yes, so we just moved into a beautiful new headquarters in Marlboro, share it with some great other companies. The company continues to grow rapidly, double digit growth year over year. One of the few companies in this category that's growing that quickly. So, everything's great. What's driving the growth? Well, customers are looking to fix the economics of backup. They've been spending too much money on it for a lot of years, so they look at products now, they want them to be simple, easy to use, and very cost effective, and we drive that trend very hard. Yeah, I mean, that doesn't really describe, what you just described, simple, easy to use, and cost effective, really doesn't describe backup for the past 20 years. So, what are you doing specifically to make it simple, cost effective, and easy to use? Well, first of all, by working with companies like Veeam. You know, Veeam is a very easy to use product, it's very intuitive, and then our product integrates very well with it, so the products work together very well and makes just a very simple solution. What are you seeing as the big, other big trends in backup? It was your rat mayor's show to slide today, $15 billion, a big chunk of that, maybe close to half of it was backup and recovery. There's all kinds of other stuff, data management, analytics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What are you seeing, obviously cloud, you talked about the big superpowers. What are the big trends that are driving your business, and more importantly, your customers' transformations? Well, customers are looking to reduce the amount of data that they actually have to move. So, incremental technologies are really big, themes of pioneering that, obviously doing incremental backups, and that saves time and effort, saves space, along with data deduplication, it really makes for a cost-effective storage solution. Talk a little bit more about why you're growing, how you sort of uniquely compete in the marketplace with some of the big whales. Sure, so our most unique feature is our architecture, and it has both technical aspects and economic aspects. Because we're a scale-out architecture, meaning that with every capacity increase of your data, we're not just adding storage, we're adding compute power, network, memory, et cetera, so that we keep the backup times very, very, very low. That also makes for a very cost-effective architecture, because what we've done is you can scale out pretty much infinitely, and we've also eliminated the concept of the end-of-lifing of products. So we never force our customers into mandatory refreshes, so their economics are very predictable over a long period of time. What are you seeing as the big use cases today that are driving your business? I mean, obviously, backup and recovery, but I talked earlier about some of these emerging data management, a cloud, obviously, is this big tailwind edge, are you seeing much going on there? What are some of those workloads and use cases that you see? I think probably one of the biggest use cases these days is what I would call instant recoveries, meaning that rather than doing a traditional restore, which could take a long number of minutes to hours, customers will actually run production workloads off of the backup target, as a way to get users back productive more quickly than would have been done in the past. Yeah, and that's key because you're seeing RPO and RTOs, sort of putting more companies, putting more and more pressure on the IT groups to shrink those times. I presume you're seeing that in conjunction with digital, digital business, digital transformation. You talked about architecture before. What about your architecture and maybe with your partnership with Veeam, allows customers to shrink those RPO and RTO times? I think the other aspect of our architecture that's very unique is what we call adaptive deduplication. One of the things we looked at when we architected the product was, deduplication's obviously a very effective technology, but what are potential cons? Things that would make it less effective in backup. And one of the things we realized was, if you put deduplication in the middle of the backup window and do the deduplication while the backups are running, then you could interfere with the speed of disk. So we do something called adaptive deduplication, which means that we allow the objects from the backup software to land, and then we deduplicate and replicate them in parallel, but we make sure that we're not throttling the backups. So we provide disk speeds even though we use deduplication. Okay, so that's an example of one of the things that you're doing to sort of improve it. How about Veeam integration? Is there anything specific there that you're doing that we should know about? Well, part of it is because of adaptive deduplication and because we maintain complete copies of backups, we uniquely support instant VM recovery like no other vendor can. Furthermore, we run what's called the Veeam data mover, which is actually Veeam technology runs inside of our appliance and sets up a optimized communication protocol with the Veeam software that allows us to do a number of great things. Wait, double click on that. So it's just an efficient protocol? Is there other sort of accelerators that you've got in there? Yeah, the protocol's optimized and then we do some other acceleration around how you do synthetic foals and things of that sort that are unique to the data mover. And you got news with Veeam this week, do you not? Yes, we do. We're announcing something called Execred Backup with Veeam and what it is in a nutshell is the ability for a customer to purchase both technologies from their preferred reseller by just ordering one part number. So it dramatically simplifies the acquisition of the two technologies and allows customers to simplify the buying process. So Veeam, I know is all channel sales. How about you guys? How do you go to market? We also are, yes. So talk more about your go-to-market. What do you have? Like an overlay sales force that helps facilitate? You got partners, maybe you could talk more about your ecosystem. Well, we have a worldwide sales force and our sales people, the people that do the selling work directly with our partners. So we don't have a specialized channel workforce, but we have a specialized channel strategy. And our entire sales team is very well trained on the channel, how to work with the channel and make them happy and successful. So backup for a long time was kind of an afterthought. It was non-differentiated. You just did what you needed to make sure the devices could be recovered. Yeah, you bolted it on. You bolted it on. Increasingly, it's becoming recognized as a central capability to any digital business. Because if your data goes away or your data is no longer available, your digital business is gone. That suggests that we're going to get a greater degree of differentiation in the types of devices, in the types of systems, et cetera, that are going to become part of a full backup solution. First of all, do you agree with that? And then secondly, go back to the use cases. Where do you guys see yourselves fitting into that increasingly federated backup capability? Well, I certainly do agree with it. I mean, it's always been a necessity, but now with the advent of things like ransomware and the crypto viruses and things of that sort, it's even more important than it's ever been. It's no longer just data loss, et cetera. So we fit into that trend, and we'll continue to fit into that trend by continuing to drive the economics through the floor. Customers want that level of protection. It's a little bit like insurance. You need the protection, but you don't want to pay a dollar more than you have to. So you want to put it on an economic diet, and by the way our technology evolves, we come out with denser, faster systems at a lower cost per terabyte, just about every year. And we'll continue to do that. Sorry, do you anticipate then that there's going to be specialized use cases? Are you just going after taking cost out of the equation? It's not so specialized because it's very horizontal. Everybody does it, and everybody backs up all their data. So we don't specialize in any one area of the data center like databases or anything of that sort. We go wherever the customer needs us to go inside their data center. But it's in the data center. Sorry, Dave, it's in the data center. In the data center, we also have a cloud offering. We have partners that will offer disaster recovery as a service, so they'll have data centers that manage on behalf of the customers, and we also have an offering that goes into Amazon Web Services, and shortly we'll be coming out with one for Azure. And that is what, a software-based offering that uses the cloud as a target? Correct, it's a virtual appliance that you can replicate into the cloud. All right, we don't have much time left, and I have a really important topic to cover, which is, we talked about it last year, but I want to bring it up again, which is sports. Yep. We can talk Boston sports. We can talk about Warriors. I got a question for you, but Mark, you- I'll watch. I asked you last year, and it was, I think it was May, we were in Chicago. I said, would you have traded Tom Brady at a time when the sentiment was he was done? And you said no way. Absolutely not. You, Peter McKay, and Patrick Osborne all said emphatically, no, you made the right call. So good job. Thank you. Your thoughts? Would never trade him. He can play to at least 100 for all I care. As long as he keeps performing at such a high level, why would you lose him? And then, of course, the Red Sox, 108 wins. That was an amazing gift that they gave us. Yep. So I don't know if you're a baseball fan. I am. I got to ask you, Peter. Are the Warriors the greatest basketball team in the history of basketball? Well, let's see. Brandon says yes. They are the best basketball team at a time of the most competitive NBA. Certainly the rules have changed, but the athletes are better. They're more conditioned. They are more knowledgeable about how to play this game. And they are the best team in basketball without Kevin Durant and without Boogie Cousins. Yeah. So, hard argue. They're sweeping Portland without Durant, which is pretty amazing. So, Brandon, for years, has been trying to tell me that, you know, Brandon knows our local basketball genius. So, I don't know. Now, would the Warriors have beaten, say, a Bill Russell Celtics team with the Celtics, Bill Russell Celtics team rules? Maybe not. I don't know. I would say, I'm starting to come around to Brandon's way of thinking. But, Mark, we'll give you the last word here. Veeamon 2019, great venue here in Miami. Very hip, hip company, hip venue. Exigrid growing, double digit growth rate. So, congratulations on that. Your final thoughts? Just great to be here. I always like coming to Veeam events. They're always very well attended. I get to meet a lot of customers and really enjoy it. Mark Crespi, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It's great to see you again. Thank you. All right, take care. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Peter and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is Veeamon 2019 and you're watching theCUBE.