 Live from Chicago, Illinois. It's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. Welcome to the windy city, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stuart Miniman-Stu. This is our second year of covering VeeamON. Although we have covered Veeam as a company since the early days of its ascendancy into the virtualization space, we really focus on it as a VMware specialist, virtualization only, now expanding dramatically into the enterprise. This is a company that has grown from, you know, very small to quite large. It's going to be probably close to a billion dollars in bookings this year, growing at 30 plus percent each year. A company that is moving beyond just the small business into the core of the enterprise with new executives, new messaging, renewed partnerships that seem to be really gaining traction. Veeam is a backup and data protection specialist that's now trying to rebrand itself as an always-on for the digital world, hyper-availability, intelligent data management, multi-cloud environment, throwing a few more buzzwords, Stu, and they're punching above their weight, as they always have, and it's a playbook that Veeam has used very, very successfully. Combine that with the branding, green everywhere. They've taken over Chicago. Veeam is famous for its parties, parties at VMworld and other big events like HPE Discover. And this is, I don't know, fifth, sixth Veeam on that they've had, and we've got how many people here, Stu? 2200. 2200, so what's your take? You saw the keynotes this morning. You were in the private analyst sessions today. Give us your analysis of Veeam. Yeah, Dave, you know, first of all, they did what most of the big companies do. They started out for the partner day. Veeam's all about their partners. Last year, you and I documented what they talked about is they were transitioning from the 10 years of virtualization to the next big wave, which is cloud. Doesn't mean that virtualization goes away. There's lots that they're doing in the multi-hypervisor world, but multi-hypervisor, multi-cloud, it's any data, any app, any cloud is the message. And Peter McKay started out, Dave, big hero numbers for the company. As you said, they've had over double digit growth. For now, it's 39 quarters. Hugely impressive, 827 million in 2017 bugging. The goal, absolutely, is to be over $1 billion this year. For me, the number that jumped out, really, is they have 300,000 customers. You and I were talking to Ratmir a little bit and said, okay, VMware has 500,000. He's like, well, 550,000 customers, and Veeam's in about 270,000 of those. So about half of all VMware customers are in there, that Veeam is in there, but they have lots of headroom for growth in those VMware environments, as you've heard Veeam say over and over, the growth opportunity for them is the enterprise. So while they're in a lot of the Fortune 100 and Fortune 1000 accounts, they haven't penetrated them nearly as deeply as, say, a VMware has, but when you look at 300,000 customers, Dave, they're adding 133 customers a day. That's about 10,000 a quarter. 133 a day, 10,000 a quarter. Say, comparing contrast against another Veeam partner, Nutanix is adding about 1,000 customers a quarter, which is great for Nutanix for their market, but as a software company in the cloud world, Veeam can stack themselves up against, against some of the largest software companies in the world, and they put out the plan in place is how they're going to get not only over a billion, but get to that $5 billion mark, which is some really rarefied area. So let's stay on that for a second. Two themes I want to cover. First, the customers, 300,000 customers, 90% are virtualized and using VMware. That was the roots of this company. But there's 500,000, 550,000, I think now, VMware customers, so there's some opportunity there. We're going to talk to Ratmir Tamashev, the founder, he was sharing with us before, that their mantra earlier on was no physical, just virtual, just virtual. Well, last year they announced physical, they're expanding, that's a TAM expansion move. Their TAM is much, much bigger than, just a couple of billion dollars in pure backup. It's in the $20, $30 billion range now. So that leads me to the second point, which is Veeam is an enterprise software, Veeam is a pure software company, first of all. So they are beginning to reach that rarefied air of a billion dollar plus companies. Obviously Oracle, SAP, Salesforce are there, but others have recently cracked a billion. ServiceNow, Workday, companies like that. Red Hat, obviously, is another one that's blown through that billion dollar figure, doing very, very well. Some would argue that Nutanix is a software company, could even argue sort of stretching it now, Pure is a software company, a lot of software innovation, but Veeam, there's no argument, they are a pure software company. The number of billion dollar software companies is few and far between, Veeam is about to crack that magic number, which is not trivial. Yeah, and Dave, we talk about going beyond virtualization to cloud. Last year, one of the big discussion points is they bought N2WS, which is really how they get back up into AWS, and they've got large growth, 153 growth a year over a year. Other one, Microsoft, big partner of theirs, both for virtualization, something that was kind of sent a ripple through the whole virtualization industry when Veeam got off of only VMware and added Hyper-V support, while Azure, they've got over 2,500 downloads of their Azure solution, so showing growth there, also supporting IBM Cloud, working with a lot of service providers, so the breadth of what they're offering and expanding beyond just the virtualization admin and some simple tools where Veeam had really cut their teeth, because Dave, that core business, there's a lot of competitors there now, and Veeam's trying to make sure that they fight off the competition and stay ahead in this multi-cloud world. So much to talk about, I want to talk about the competition, but before we get there, one of the critical factors for a company like Veeam, trying to attract enterprise customers, Veeam is a company who's known for their SMB heritage, and so partnerships, crucial, just some of the partnerships that they've signed and emphasized over the last year and a half, two years. HPE, my sources tell me, we heard Bill Philbin up on stage this morning, you got a keynote, my sources tell me that it's many, many tens of millions of dollars, so this is on its way to $100 million partnership. IBM, you mentioned IBM Cloud, Microsoft, the Azure and stuff, Pure Storage, Nutanix, VMware obviously has always been a partner. NetApp, Cisco, we heard up on stage today, so expanding the partner ecosystem, still explain why that's so important. Yeah, so first of all Dave, so many places, how does Veeam go to market? One of the more interesting things if you talk about the sales motion is HP and Cisco now have Veeam in their price books. So Veeam, great channel, customers that love them, over 300,000, but when you take the Cisco Salesforce and the HPE Salesforce and say, you guys can make money on this, that really hypercharges what they're doing. It was always nice that they partnered with VMware, but how do you get deeper into those environments? I know you want to touch on the competition, we'll make sure we cover, there's some critical hires that they've also had in recent times, but what's your take on the competition? Before we get to competition, I do want to talk about the talent, but I just want to mention HPE, the reason why HPE to me is so interesting is because when they sold their software business to Micro Focus, they jettisoned the old HP data protect, or HP protect software business, that opened up a huge opportunity in vacuum for Veeam to slide in. They were very aggressive with regard to partnering with HPE, smart move by Veeam, and I think smart move by HPE. Even though it's more of a reseller slash partnership agreement. Talent, this company has been able to attract talent. It started with Peter McKay, who was brought in to top level the messaging and the executive team. He's brought in a number of folks in sales and marketing, with new CMO is on as well. They've attracted a few, one in particular, analysts. So one of the kerfuffles before this show was Gartner announced that two of its analysts were leaving to go to Rubrik. Well, over the weekend, when this announcement came out, Veeam executives saw that, one of them was Dave Russell, who we've had in the queue before, a very sharp guy, very well known, respected. Veeam jumped on him on that weekend and said, no, you know us better than you know Rubrik. You got to come work for us. And so they stole Dave Russell away. We saw Dave Russell on stage today. He left Rubrik at the altar, which I'd rather see that than him going to work for Rubrik for, you know, four or five months. But what do you make of that? Yeah, so Dave, we've seen a lot of jumps recently from the analyst side. It's interesting. We actually, Jason Buffington, who we'd have on theCUBE many times, is also here at Veeam. So hot space, I know last year at Veeam World, we said kind of this whole backup secondary storage market is one of the hottest areas. There's a lot of money, there's a lot of growth. And what's the analyst's job is to really understand some of these trends here. So some of them, it's something that they're passionate on. They called Dave Russell the godfather of backup. So he said he wanted to be a builder. He wanted to get in. Heck, even a good friend of mine just announced he's joining Veeam, Mark Toomey, who was from the EMC side, worked on the backup stuff. Real strong technologist was one of the early bloggers. Really knows his stuff and, you know, based in Ireland. So Veeam's doing a real good job of attracting talent. Peter, okay, he's learning from his Patriots, how to bring in good talent. And we'll have him on and talk to you about that. As a lead into the competitive discussion, I want to give some analysis that we got from Peter Burris and David Floyer from the Wikibon team. They gave me a few points leading up to this conference that I want to share with our audience. Number one is data protection and orchestration are moving up the list on the level of CXO concerns. So we're seeing that very clearly in our research. The second point, this company talks a lot about the future and automation is being part of that. There's a dichotomy between the business and IT in terms of the expectations to the degrees of automation that exist. The business assumes there's a lot more automation there and there actually is. So you see executives up on stage talking about this automated world. The expectations in the business are that everything's going to be automated. It's not that simple yet today. That causes some friction potentially in the customer base. It means there's lots of room for churn. That's good news for a company like Veeam who's both an incumbent but a disruptor moving up market. The global 2000 according to David Floyer is leaving billions of dollars on the table in terms of lost revenue because they have inadequate data protection. If you look over three or four year period companies are losing money because of inadequate bolted on data protection strategies. The last point is all these vendors are vying for position. It's unclear who's going to win this game. You got no dominant player. You got the backup and recovery vendors. You got the storage companies like Dell and EMC. You got security companies that are in there. You got startups like Rubrik and Cohesity. You got Veeam who's an established. They're like a hybrid, both established and startups. So you've got this competitive dynamic which is really, really interesting. I want to flip it over to you. Last year at VMworld backup and recovery data protection was one of the hottest areas of topics of conversation and on the floor one of the most trafficked by customers. What's your take on that? Yeah, well Dave, you know, core to our research we've been talking about for, I can't even tell you how long. Data is at the center of it all. How do I not, it's not storing data. It's getting value from my data. It's unlocking data. It's not about big data. It's not about some cool new tooling that we have there. And what we've really found is if I've got, you know, good replicas. If I've got, you know, strong backup I can actually leverage my data more, get more value out of it. That's critical to what we're talking about here, Dave, which is why, you know, Veeam and others like them can get this. It's simplicity is something we hear over and over. The early days of VMware, that was why customers loved VMware and Veeam followed that trend a lot. It's really tough to be simple. That was that whole hyperconverged wave was supposed to be simple. Cloud is not simple today. It's multi-cloud. There's a lot of challenges there. So Veeam, their customers love them. The proof is in the numbers that they're putting in. I think that's great analysis. Let's close on that. The challenge, I think for Veeam, like some of the incumbents that you saw, Veritas, you know, IBM, when VMware's ascendancy occurred, Veeam stepped in and really disrupted and won that battle. Now, the others hung on. They hung on to their install base, but they're hanging on for dear life. You're seeing IBM now retooling its portfolio, Dell EMC retooling its backup portfolio, Veritas retooling its backup portfolio. So it's jump ball in that respect. Veeam's got to demonstrate that it can move from that virtualization specialist, small business specialist up into the enterprise, resonate with the CXOs and compete for its fair share. So we'll be watching that. We'll be covering that all week. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE live from Chicago. Veeam on 2018.