 Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019, brought to you by Commvault. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Go 19 from Colorado. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. Stu and I are pleased to welcome somebody new to theCUBE and to Commvault. We've got Tom Broderick, VP of Strategy and Chief of Staff at the CEO of Commvault. Tom, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. So, I like your on-brand, the new Commvault Venture metallic, very nice. That's right, I had the head of the jacket on yesterday. Wow, all right. So, lots of change at Commvault. You're new as well. You came, you know, you've worked with Sanjay. Now, this is your third different company working with Sanjay Burjandani, the CEO. Talk to us a little bit about your short time here at Commvault, there's been so much change that he's driving, cultural change, metallic was something that was conceived, designed, built in a very short time period. Lot of acceleration. Your first few months here, what's it been like? Yeah, it's been obviously a ton of activity, right? And, you know, one of the things that we know and I think it's obvious, Commvault as a company has been in this, you know, state of transition, right? This is, you know, you bring a new CEO on and we've got a new leadership team that is merging well with the core leadership team of people that have a lot of experience at the company and it's working really well. You know, from the beginning, we knew we needed to focus on three areas, inside the company and outside. So, it's really around, as we talk to folks, around simplifying our business. And when we say that, you know, normally in an event like this, it goes towards how do we simplify working with our partners? How do we simplify working with our customers? How do we simplify our products, that kind of thing? But, you know, from my perspective, one of the things that I focus on is also how we focus on simplifying ourselves on the inside, right? Because this is an area where we can be much more efficient in how we bring our technology to the marketplace. And so, I'm focused on breaking down silos. I'm focused on driving effective communication in the business so that we can deliver that technology to our partners and to our customers. So, simplifying the business. Innovation is the next big key, right? So, obviously, our technology, and this is one of the things before coming on, I did a lot of research on Commvault technology. I'd been out of this part of the market for quite some time. And, you know, the core technology, super solid. But we needed to innovate further, right? And shoulder out into different areas. And that's where you see things like Metallic come into play, the acquisition of Hedvig, right, where we're using our balance sheet in a way that's very different for the company. This is our first acquisition as a company, right? And then, of course, all the new features and functions that we put into SB17, which is just released in the core product. And then lastly, it's around execution, right? And so, simplify, innovate, execute. And when we talk about execution, a lot of that falls on the go-to-market side, right? And so, this feeds right into some of those leadership changes that we announced this week and that we announced earlier, bringing folks like Ricardo de Blasio on. And that's how we think about things. So, that's been a structure that's allowed us to do so much change in such a little amount of time. So, Tom, I'd love to dig into that a little bit. So, you know, we've talked to, Commvault Traditiony has done a decent job of trying to move a little faster. So, if you talk about the core product, it's on a 90-day release cycle. It's better than it's not the, you know, nine to 18 months train that many of us that have been in the industry a long time is like, okay, we got to get on the train, jam everything into it, hope we get to the end that we actually release something that we're happy with and it's supported and it works. Your last stop with Sanjay was at Puppet. Very different mindset. I'm curious what you learned there and how that is really permeating the whole industry and therefore, and what changes need to happen into Commvault to live in this new SAS world like Metallics going to offer and, you know, if you're not delivering code, you know, what are you doing? Yeah, so it's a great question, Stu. And, you know, the thing is, obviously we're living in a different world than what we were 20 years ago, right? Agile methodologies have, you know, sped everything up and people are used to faster release cycles and, you know, how do we get new features out to customers in a much more expeditious way? The challenge, though, and I'll bet, you know, if folks are watching this, you know, the challenge internally is how you do that effectively, right? So one of the things that we did at Puppet was we had to get better at bringing the technology to the market end-to-end across the business, right? So inside the business. It's not enough for the developers to say, okay, code's ready and just throw it out there, right? Or is the field enabled, right? Is the pricing right? Is the packaging right? Is the documentation right? Are the marketing, you know, is marketing activated? All those elements of it. And so this is, again, this is a little bit inside baseball from a conval perspective. We're institutionalizing this as one of the core processes that helps us operate the business. I talk a lot about inside, I talk about how sometimes you have to go slow to go fast, right? And what I mean by that is the cross-functional elements of the business need to get together sooner in the process to make sure that everybody's on the same page aligned, they know the key dependencies and they know when they can make their deliverables so that when we're ready to go to market with a new technology or a new product or a new service pack release that everybody is ready to go with that because it does nobody any good. If the code's ready, you throw it over the wall and then it just kind of falls down because people outside weren't ready. But operational simplification, as you're describing, that's really challenging to do. Number one, number two, doing it at a company that's been in business for 20 years where you have different functions, you probably have some incumbent folks in there. Lot of change, how have you been able to accomplish that in such a short time period? It seems like one of the things that Stu and I have been hearing is that there was a lot of receptiveness within the incumbency internally at Combo, but that's a big operational simplification is no simple feat. No, it's really easy when you write it down on a piece of paper. It is, right? Once you get the humans involved, right? But the thing is, and this is one of the things that I've noticed at Combo that's been tremendously refreshing to me is that we have about 2,500 people in the organization. And if I was going to just give a massive generalization, we have 2,500 people that want to do the right thing. And they truly want to do the right thing for our customers. The issue in the past is that they haven't been aligned in all the same direction or set of directions. And so we were a little bit haphazard in certain ways. But people want to do the right thing. Once I started talking about these concepts and once we started implementing them and now that we're actually seeing results, it's amazing. I have so many people coming up to me saying, wow, this is, it's so, I didn't really get it at first. And, but now that we're actually implementing these kinds of processes inside the company, it's amazing the transformation that we're seeing and we're so glad that we're doing it. Can you talk to us about the decisions for the Commvault Ventures? It's one of the things that struck me when I saw some of the press releases earlier in the week, Metallic, a Commvault Venture, the Hedvig Acquisition, a Commvault Venture. It's some of the conversations that Stu and I have had this week. It's like a startup mentality within Commvault. Talk to us about the strategic decision to go that venture inside Commvault route. Yeah, sure, absolutely. So obviously Hedvig is indeed a venture, right? I mean, by acquiring a company, they were a startup. But as we looked at bringing them into the Commvault fold, internally, inside the company, we had some guiding principles that we created straight away. And number one guiding principle was don't break the business. Meaning we're not going to come in and overwhelm them with Commvault, right? Because they created a successful entity amongst themselves, right? And a great technology that we think fits really well into the family, into our portfolio. But we do want to create some sort of, some degree of separation because, you know, A, we might be talking to different customers, right? This is why I think I saw David Wigglesworth on a little bit earlier, right? And he's setting up the emerging technologies sales unit, because they're going to be taking this to market in a little bit different way, right? The development team is not being merged right into our core development team, right? They're remaining a unit amongst themselves reporting into Sanjay, right, directly into Sanjay. On the metallic side, we did take the startup approach from the beginning. And we said, look, it's easy for organizations to say, hey, we want to build this new thing to serve this new part of the market, and we're going to invest resources into it. Let's put the plans together and go get it done. But especially for public companies too, it's easy on your 90 day cycles to all of a sudden say, you know what, we have to rebalance or take those funds that we were going to put there and move them elsewhere. And we said, no, we can't do this. This is super strategic to us. We have to ring fence it and we have to let them do, build this product in a different way. And so I was talking about business readiness before in terms of the process that we institute. They were actually the first group to implement it within their small team and it created a great proof point for the rest of the organization to see how it works. So, Tom, we've had some great conversations with a lot of the new leadership this week. You mentioned we had the conversation with Wigs. He's starting to hire some of those sales people. Are we, we know there's always change and going on in the environment, but is Commvault mostly through with the strategic leadership hires? And now it's kind of down to the next layer as to things like the overlays and some of the new initiatives or is there still more work to be done on kind of the structural piece of things? Good question, Stu. Our work is never done. I think it's the same with any organization, right? I think most of the major parts and pieces are put in place like where we want them. One of the things that you mentioned earlier that I've, this is my third tour of duty with Sanjay and I'll say one of the really powerful things that he brings to an organization is the ability to build a strong, well-functioning leadership team. And I say well-functioning, right? And he did it at EMC, he did it at Puppet, and he's doing it here. And we now have, we've got that senior leadership team in place that is going to be continuing down this path of positive momentum that we've got. Yeah, one of the challenges making through this big move, we said that the team definitely was receptive. We know that they're ready, but clear communication. Any, just without getting into too many proprietary things that you've done, what tips can you have to make sure that an organization of this experience and this size isn't just going to get like, oh my God, whiplash, they're changing management, I don't know where I fit or anything like that. How do we make sure that you get everybody pointing towards the true north and ready is, I think the word we've heard over and over, so make sure that everybody in Commvault is ready to move forward? It's hard and it takes a lot of discipline, right? I do think you need to be as transparent as you can be with the workforce and with your employees. They need to understand where we're going with this because if it's just a bunch of change for change's sake, that's a difficult environment to live in. And we're certainly not that, right? We have objectives and goals and we know what we want to get to. Obviously there are strategic elements of it that we can't necessarily discuss all the time, but at least directionally, we have to be able to explain the moves that we're making in such a way that makes sense to people, right? And if we believe it, right, and we've done our diligence, then it should be transferable and we should be able to make it so that it's clear to everybody on the Commvault team. And so we are focused on making that happen. Internally, we do a lot of communication, right? Sanjay writes a lot of blogs internally. Sandy Hamilton writes a lot of blogs. Ricardo is constantly talking to the teams, right? And that just permeates down. We need to continue to get better at it. It's hard, right? Organizational communications are hard, but we need to lead from the top as well, make sure that as we demonstrate what it means to communicate that all throughout the organization, we're creating that sort of culture. In the last few seconds here, Tom, I would just love to get your perspectives. What's one of the biggest thing that you're going to take away at the last three days of your first Commvault Go? Wow. Two minute account? It's exciting. I'll say that. Very specifically, walking through the metallic booth and the head big booth is inspiring to me. I mean, the amount of traffic going through those two booths. That's exactly. That's probably what that applause is for right now. In fact, it is. I see it. It is. They invited me over at four o'clock. I said, I couldn't make it. It's been truly inspiring. And I think people are excited. And for me, obviously you want your customers excited. You want your partners to be excited. But for me too, it's just as important to have our employees excited. And that's a major takeaway that I'm bringing from this conference. I think we would echo that. We've heard a lot of excited folks. Well, Tom, thank you for joining Stu and me on the program. We look forward to Commvault Go 2020 already. Thank you. Thank you very much. Excellent. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Commvault Go 19.