 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Veeamon 2019, brought to you by Veeam. Hi everybody, welcome back to Miami. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Veeamon Day One 2019 at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. Danny Allen is here. He's the vice president of product strategy at Veeam. Welcome. Good to see you. Thank you, I always love being here with you. Fresh off the keynote, we were joking that you're up against South Beach and you had a packed room, nonetheless people were into it. It was like the Kool-Aid injection of the fire hose of feature announcements. Eight demos in about an hour, hour and a half. So congratulations for getting that done. Thank you. It feels like a weight off your shoulders. I'm sure you've been working on that for a long, long time as have your engineers. But okay, well let's get into it. Where do you want to start? Veeam product strategy. I mean, it's an exciting time for you guys. You know, dial back several years ago, there were a lot of nice incremental improvements, but there's a lot of like really sea changing things that are going on, your take. So I would argue the last 10 years is all about modernizing the data center. Even though people have been talking about cloud significantly over the last 10 years, the adoption hasn't really been there. So now we're at this inflection point where all these organizations are saying, okay, now I really have to do something about cloud. And the fight for dominance in the cloud management era is only really beginning now and we'll unfold over the next few years. Well that's some interesting competitive dynamics going on. There's a lot of money pouring into the space. Why do you think Veeam is in such a good position to be as what Ratmir called the dominant player in cloud data management? So two things really. So we have this maniacal focus on make it simple, make it reliable, make it flexible. But one of the other things that I think really drives this is so that those are our differentiator, simplicity, reliability, flexibility. But we have an unfair advantage in that we have 350,000 customers that are giving us guidance on how to make it simple, how to make it reliable, how to be flexible. You know, one of the other things that, so you've been at this, like I said, since 7 a.m. this morning, we're at the analyst and the media briefing. You just did the keynote. You talked about the five stages, the Veeam availability platform. And it was refreshing to actually hear a company who's traditionally a backup software company say, start with backup. Everybody sort of running away from the term and you're saying start there, backup, cloud mobility, visibility, orchestration, automation. So you sort of laid out this journey, but the core of it is backup because that's kind of what you guys are all about, right? That's how you get your data. Everyone wants to talk about artificial intelligence in PowerPoints and machine learning. More real, of course. And they want to talk about where we're going, but we're not there today. I mean, we have customers that struggle with backup and they struggle with backup in their data center and in the cloud. And so I always highlight to customers, yes, we want to go there and we'll help you get there, but start with backup because that's about aggregating your data into one place. So you talk about the customers being just sort of starting really there to really dig into the cloud. I mean, obviously, I don't know what the stat is. It's like 20% of workloads are in the cloud, 80% to go, depending on whose data that you're looking at. And typically you would think the vendor community leads, the user adoption, okay, that makes sense. But so what are the specific things now that we're, I guess, let's see, 2006, it all started. 2010, we started really paying attention to it. So now that we're decade and change in, what are the learnings on, how is that affecting your product strategy? So one of the things, the initial thought, 2010 to 2015 maybe, people thought, well, I'll just pick up my data center, move it over here and drop it in the cloud. And what they quickly learned is, I always say the cloud is not a charity, right? They layer in margin. And so just picking up infrastructure, moving it somewhere else, doesn't necessarily leverage the cloud for what it's good at. And so sometimes we actually see repatriotization, like the data goes back on premises after it moves to the cloud. But we are beginning to see cloud native applications that are designed for cloud. And that's where I think it's really interesting. Looking at Kubernetes, looking at functions as a service, that is where I think the cloud is really going to find its legs over the next few years. Yeah, you talked about that in your keynote, that you're going to need backup for things like Lambda and functions in the service. You're going to need backup for containers. And that's a whole new world. And it's not just backup, as we were talking earlier about data assurance, spinning down containers, spinning them up, making it harder for the bad guys to sort of figure out where the vulnerabilities are. So that's clearly part of the, I don't want to say roadmap, because Rattmer said, well, we don't really have these strict roadmap, but part of the vision. Yes, absolutely part of the vision and strategy. So what we do is we keep our finger in the pulse of what is happening. Like I say, we have an unfair advantage, 350,000 customers. How many of them are actually moving to the cloud? What are they moving to the cloud? Are they building in the cloud? So having that visibility into how this cloud adoption is taking place is giving us an advantage that frankly other companies don't have. So we invest in understanding that and then being ready when the scale actually tips. So one of the things that I find particularly interesting is that backup and restore, we've said it a couple of times today, has historically been a bolt-on. It's something that you do as an afterthought. It's something you do once a system's been built. But as this transformation, this move to digital business, puts data at the center of a company strategy and value proposition. It means that now this whole notion, this whole what backup does and why it is now important is because it becomes for the first time central to what a company's strategic business capabilities are. How is that shifting as a product guy? How's that shifting? How you balance and how you get information about features and functions and no roadmaps, but what you do next? We always look at how we can enable that next generation of activity. So you made an interesting comment there. You said people always bolt-on backup after the fact. And I look back, I come out of the security industry. People have bolted security on after they built the system. And we only really became better as an industry when we built security into the applications rather than bolted down. And we're still learning to do. Yes, and we're only now, so people are still bolting on backup. I would argue that we're now going through this phase of building data management into our platforms. And building data management in is more than just backup. It's ensuring that all of the data, you have the visibility across it that you can unlock it, that you can distribute it. Because if we're only looking at data in a reactive way, we're missing the greater opportunity to make our businesses run faster. Yeah, well, faster and better. We're diminishing the value of the options that we have on how we use our data. And that's not what you want to do in a digital business setting. We talk about assurance, data assurance. So data protection is one thing, but that seems kind of like what's already happened where data assurance is, ensure that your data is in the right place at the right time with the right set of services and the right set of metadata so that you can spin up that Kubernetes cluster if that's where you need it. How does that notion, that kind of forward reaching, turning data in an asset, generating new strategic value streams out of your data from a platform like Veeam, how does that comport with this notion of assurance? Good question. And a challenge that we have, frankly, as Veeam, is that our typical buyer has been the backup data center assurance buyer. And as you begin to look at how do we expand beyond this to unlock data and build systems in, all of a sudden there's a new constituent in play. It's not the IT administrator anymore, it's the compliance team, it's the security team, it's whatever team happens to be involved. So we operate this in a few different ways. One is certainly at a marketing level, just the messaging around ransomware, the messaging around compliance and GDPR, the messaging around how you can do more with data. But frankly, one of the big things that we do is events like this, we have CIOs and administrators of IT. I was speaking with CIO last night, he started out as an administrator of Veeam, sorry, Veeamware 10 years ago, now he's a CIO. And so these events are what enables to get the message out about what Veeam is actually capable of. It's not an uncommon profile, by the way. One more question, if I may, that you've got a strong security background and now you're in data protection. Those two groups are looking at many of the same problems. And if you think about where the security guys are going, they're increasingly looking at what they can do with data from a services standpoint that goes beyond security. And you look at what data protection is doing, you're looking at how you can start to add more data security attributes to the platform that you have. Where does this, where does security and data protection intersect and come together? And when do you think? Well, frankly, I believe that Veeam is at the intersection of that now. And to take it one step further, I think it's not only data protection, data security, but also data privacy. So the advent of GDPR and regulatory around users' ownership of data. And I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. I'll be honest on that because we have this patchwork of regulations with no central model. And if I was a CIO, I'd be pulling my hair out. But I believe that Veeam is well positioned because we're at the intersection and we can see all of this data. That's why visibility is the center stage in that five stage journey because you move from being reactive to being proactive with the data and proactive in terms of security and proactive in terms of data privacy. You know, it's like a three sided coin. That's even such a thing. But you know, we've talked about security has shifted from one of pure defensive to responsive. How do I respond? How quickly can I respond? You know, data protection has always been about recovery. I mean, I think two of your fire hose demos today were about fast recovery from backups and then recovery to vSphere. And I feel like I kind of agree. It could get worse before it gets better when you think about privacy. It sort of reminds me of the early days of the federal rules of civil procedure and you're trying to plug holes with email archiving and it was just a bandaid. You mentioned GDPR a couple of times. How have you seen GDPR sort of affect the way in which people think about data protection and data management? Has it been a real uptick in awareness? Is it still sort of like the email archiving, plugging the finger in the dike? What's your take? Well, I just wrote an article on this actually because May 25th is one year anniversary of the implementation of GDPR. But it's done a few different things. One is it's raised user awareness and organizational awareness of the issue of data privacy as opposed to security, that the users have some ownership over their data. So if nothing else, it's just raised awareness for the users and the organizations. The second thing though that it's done is it's actually put, there's legal teeth to this. There's been hefty fines associated with it. And I think those are only going to increase, that the market is only really getting started. We're going to see how it plays out over the next five years, but I expect to see more GDPR compliance issues and more fines associated with it. But ultimately it's better for the end user because they get the ownership that frankly they deserve with their data. So this right to be forgotten is sort of central to GDPR. So how can the backup corpus be a linchpin of the right to be forgotten or potentially the smoking gun if it's not found? Thoughts on that? So we've introduced specific capabilities for this. So around GDPR we have simple things, when I say simple things, complex, but we've made it simple for customers to tag data. Does this belong in this country versus this country, this country? Because actually when you recover, forget about whether it's privacy data. Are you even allowed to do that? But secondly, we introduced a step in update four, this was back in January, that when you recover data, you can actually say I want to run the script to eliminate that user's data from being recovered because if they exercise the right to be forgotten after the database is in archive and then you recover it, their data is back all of a sudden. So we introduced a sandbox environment where you could run all of the same GDPR right to be forgotten scripts and when it's recovered, that's eliminated. And our focus has always been to just make those types of processes really simple for our end customers. So I got excited this morning when you were talking about the fast recovery from backup and you talked about replication and where that fits, but being able to have the architecture and the metadata access to be able to do a fast recovery from backup is pretty profound. It seems like your architecture is designed in a way that it's not a do-over as a product guy that's probably quite helpful. But I wonder if you could just describe sort of the tenets of the architecture just in terms of what it means for Veeam's future, future-proofing, however, buzzword we want to throw at it. But there's an architectural component that was my takeaway from this morning's conversation that's fundamental. Yeah, one of the fundamental components is our data is self-describing. If you've win zip and I have seven zip, I can send you a file and you can open it. And we did that with different programs entirely. So when we do a backup, there's no dependency on a central server, a central management environment. And that's really important when you move things from the cloud to on-premises to another cloud to different environments because otherwise they all need to talk to one another in order to understand what the data is that they receive. Another problem with that model is that if that central management environment goes down, you've lost everything. And with a self-describing format, what it means is even if the Veeam software blows up and goes away, if I have that VBK file, I can recover all of the data in it. And that is very unique to us because if you do your data protection in the cloud, you just need to move the data on-premises and I can open it on-premises with a completely different software stack, if you will. If you acquire a new company, I can open their backups even, assuming I have the keys and permissions and security and all of that, even though it was managed or backed up with completely different management stack. So you're saying if a competitor loses their catalog, they're screwed? Yes. And that's not the case for you guys? We actually had this happen just recently in Amia. A customer had both a competitor and our software and they were hit with ransomware and the ransomware hit the metadata catalog and they lost everything in the competitor's software. Now, because they were following the 321 rule and they had one data off-site with Veeam, they were able to recover 100% of the Veeam backups and 0% of the competitor's backups. Well, that's a story. Yeah, I'll say, yeah. Case study in the making. That is actually, it's fundamental to the model and it's not only fundamental for block storage backups, but also the way we introduce object storage and cloud object storage models as well that it's completely self-describing even if your Veeam software goes away and you're 10 years down the road, you can still get that data back. Okay, we've got to give you the final word here. Day one, we're wrapping up day one with Danny Allen, head of product strategy at Veeam. Your keynote, the analyst feedback, customer feedback, summarize it all into a bumper sticker. You know, take as much time as you like. Well, this is an exciting year for us. So we have a really strong focus on cloud. You've probably seen that all over cloud data management we're talking about over and over again. It's on the wall. It's on the wall. It's on the pins that we wear, it's everywhere. So cloud data management, another thing that you, I don't know whether people have noticed, but we've put the focus back on our buyer who is the technical decision maker. So rather than talking about, you know, the environment 10 years from now in artificial intelligence and machine learning, well, we get excited about those things. We've brought it back to our core buyer because the budget today is for backup. The budget is not for artificial intelligence. There's a budget for backup. And so we've done two things, focus on cloud and focus on that technical decision maker. And it seems to be resonating customers all day long. Great, great conversations. Well, it's pragmatic. You guys are a pragmatic company. I always have been Danny Allen. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to see you. Thank you very much. All right, thank you. That's a wrap for day one. Peter Burris and I will be back tomorrow. Again, wall to wall coverage. This is theCUBE and we're here at Veeamon 2019 in Miami. We'll see you tomorrow.