 Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2018, brought to you by Commvault. I hear the train are coming, it's rolling around the bend and I ain't seen the sun sign since I don't know when. Oh, you're watching theCUBE and we're in Nashville, Tennessee. Yes, Johnny Cash, he played his last days here and I'm Stu Miniman with Keith Townsend helping us to round up the program. He's wearing a Heat War Black shirt. Yes I am. Which is a Johnny Cash tribute band and my only guest of the day, wearing cowboy boots. Friend of mine, happy to help us round things up. David Chapa, who's the founder of the CTO Group, also known as Mr. Recovery in the industry. David, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, CTE Group. CTE Group, I'm sorry. I haven't made the O level yet. I'm sorry, I'm confusing things with the CTO advisor here. Oh, you got an E, we have almost all of us. We got all these TLA's in the industry here but thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, so my first time at the Commvault show, I've known Commvault for a lot of years. Keith's been here twice. What's your experience been at the show so far? This is my first time to the show. So far it's been very impressive. This show and floor is huge. I like how they set it up. They want to set it up like it's a street and they were successful. You can walk down, you can stroll down the street, you can go and see different vendors. I thought it was, as far as the design, I thought it was really, really good. The information's great. Well, what I found engaging is what I'd say. That's what you want with a show floor. The booths did pretty well but there's little pavilions where they're having lots of sessions. Every time I went by there were people there. There's labs, people going away and there's media and podcasts and food and beverage and all that stuff there but a nice dynamic and really kept it going. And that's been the show itself I've found to be engaging. There's a lot going on, a lot of announcements. What's your take on Commvault? Well, I think that their transformation, what they've been talking about, transform the company. I heard a lot about people tag us as a legacy company, we're too expensive, we're this, we're that. I heard Bob say a couple of times, what 20-year-old company is not going to be called legacy? You know, there's some truth to that. But they've done, I think, a pretty good job of kind of laying out what it is they plan on doing. They've tried to simplify things. You know, I look at different companies and I often say this to clients. You know, there's four things you really want to worry about in life when you're running a business. You want to make money, that's one of them. You want to make sure you have good customer satisfaction. You want to make sure your people are happy. And you want to make sure you make it easy for people to do business with you. And I think Commvault's really taking a hard look at the how do we make it easy for them to do business with us? And so they've reduced the, they put all their products on one slide, which I thought was pretty impressive. They've also simplified the pricing, which I thought was pretty impressive. So I think what they're doing, they're trying to make some good strides to make those things happen. And you know, they're focusing on the customers as a result. So Keith, I'm going to let you ask some questions, but you know, we talked some in our opening analysis, but after talking to customers, talking to their execs, what are you walking away with from this show? You know what? Some companies are transformed because it's just the natural flow of business. They're forced into competition. They have to react. Commvault's transformation is not a fluke. From the top down, this is not silos. This is not individual product silos competing in their individual silo. We talked to Al Bond, the CEO, and he talked about doing the right thing by the customer because it's the right thing to do. And if you don't focus on money, money will come. I think we all like to have those idealistic views, but I think it's something that on the surface, at least from this show, is working for Commvault. They are transformed. This isn't, I ran a backup project. My first, one of my first major projects of my IT career, almost 20 years ago, and one of the big costs was Commvault. Needless to say, any technology, much, much different company dealing with today than I dealt with 20 years ago. And I think I go as far as say Commvault was a much different company than three years ago versus the first Commvault Go. You know, coming into the show, certain things I was looking for. How do they play in the cloud? Okay, are they actually doing things with AI or as I saw this joke on the internet, that was a zoo, took a donkey and painted stripes on it and said, typical AI startup, VC funded. You know, not actually a zebra and the like. And I tell you, the questions that I had, I think Commvault had a good, solid answer. And they opened this morning, we said, there wasn't anything that jumped out as like, wow, I've never heard of that or thought of it, but you know, good customer base, you know, strong brand in the industry and making a lot of the right moves to get there. The announcements this week, anything jump out at you? Anything surprise you? Nothing surprised me. But you know, things that jump out, because my focus with the CTE group is on really disaster recovery, business continuity, helping customers really understand the value of the data and how to recover that data. I shouldn't say the data, because it's about recovering the mission of the business, whatever that may be. And one of the things that I liked, what I heard yesterday and today was about their recovery readiness reports. I thought that was pretty interesting. Their interfaces is very clean and a customer can drill in to the RPL if they want. And I got a demo earlier from one of the developers and that was one thing that stood out, because for me, it's all about the recovery. Backup is great. I've been doing backup for a long time, but if you can't recover that stuff, man, they, you know, when someone said that a backup admin is a great job because no one knows your name until you can't restore the data. And then they know your first name, last name and middle initial. And my middle initial is A, so you can imagine the kind of names I was called when that stuff wasn't happening. When you can have a plan, and that's the idea, disaster recovery plan, and then you can respond and not react, that's where you want to be. And I think that's what Commvault needs to deliver to their customers to be successful in this transformation is how can they achieve that plan and how can they be responsive and not reactive? Because you're reactive is when you make mistakes. So I think one of the things that I tweeted earlier was that Commvault isn't asleep at the wheel. Now, and we asked Al a challenging question, which was how do you provide these new features that expected in the modern backup and data protection platform, but yet please your legacy customer. I mean, some customers don't want to change. If they didn't have to upgrade their backup software for three years, they prefer not to. So one of the things I thought is interesting is that they're walking a tightrope. And Dave, I'd like to hear from you on your thoughts around their ability to please their traditional legacy customer while attracting net new customers. There's that word again, legacy. Now it's with the customers. I think as you look at the market and you guys know this, I had a conversation with a healthcare customer months and months and months ago. Actually, I think it was about two years ago. And the CTO was really a legacy minded person. Why should we go to the cloud when everything is working? Why should we do this when everything is working? Well, the conversation I had with them was your business is going to be accelerating. Your competition will be accelerating. And you need to keep up with the competition by adopting some of these things that will help you move faster, smarter and make better decisions for your business. So those legacy customers at some point will have to make a decision that we need to be competitive in marketplace. And we're going to need new tools. Now for those customers that are using Commvault today, well Commvault's sitting there with their new platform, the transformative ideas they have to help them get there. So to try to answer your question, it's really hard. There will be legacy customers, of course. But those legacy customers need to survive. And you got to survive by responding to the market demands. It was interesting for me to look at this ecosystem here, talk about the partnerships, talk about how they're playing in multi-cloud. There's potentially a lot of threats to a Commvault out there. Not just the startups that are coming directly after this space that are well-funded, but the same people they're trying to partner with in the public cloud. Well, it's tough partnering with the public cloud. They are driving a lot of innovation in the industry in doing this. What does Commvault need to do to stay successful, grow their customer base, and accelerate through this transformation? Well, I saw the interview you did with Al. And the one thing he said was, listen to the customers. And that was one thing I would tell them too, is you have to listen to your customers. And you have to comprehend what they're saying. Not just understand what they're saying, there's two different things. When you can comprehend what someone's saying, that means you can repeat that with the same passion in your own words. So listen to your customers, really comprehend what their challenges are and how you can help them, either with the existing product or the features that you need to develop to help them get over that hump or that challenge they have. So that to me is the biggest thing, listening to the customers. That's going to drive the market. Yeah, David, I'm really taking it back about the amount of change, the amount of conversation around multi-cloud. We had a great conversation with the Tech Field Day guys a little bit earlier about data management. One of the things that I'd like to hear from you from your industry perspective from CTE and helping customers with data recovery, not just data recovery as you mentioned, business recovery, are customers hearing the message from the convuls of the world that your cloud strategy, your multi-cloud strategy starts with data, data management, data protection. Is that actually resonating with customers or is that a niche, I think, awareness? It depends on who you're talking to. So for me, I think any organization that wants to win the hearts and minds of the mid-market and the low-rent of enterprise, you have to really start thinking more business-centric. That's the focus of what we do. We look at business-centric IT. And what does that mean? Well, that means that you throw away the lexicon that we're so used to using in IT and you really start to try to use the terms that the business will understand and comprehend. And the way you do that is by asking a lot of questions of the business. What's important? Why is it important? What's the mission? In IT, we should not be the ones that own the data that own the application. We are the stewards of the custodian of that. And as the steward and custodian, we do know we have to protect it. We don't necessarily know why, but we need to understand that. And then when we have that conversation with the business, then we can start talking to them about recovering the mission of that particular business unit. It might be two servers. It might be 40 servers. So is that message resonating with companies? I think Commvault needs to do a better job at communicating at that business value level. And I think that this conference, this launching pad, if you will, is a starting point for them to do that. More companies want to understand how they can solve real business problems and challenges and not hear how fast your feature is or how cool this new widget is that you have in your product. They have real business challenges. They want to solve those challenges. Well, David, that critical analysis is one of the reasons that I asked you on the program. Keith, it's been a pleasure doing the show with you today, as always. But before I let you off the hook, David, this is our first time doing the show in Nashville. I've barely gotten to see much of the city. Keith and his wife are checking out a little bit of it. I did get some Nashville hot chicken. But for those of our audience that maybe haven't been to Nashville, what are they missing? They hear culturally, musically, and the like. Wow, what are you missing? Well, there's a lot of great music. You can't find a bad musician in Nashville. If you do, they're not in town very long. Run them out of town. Yeah, but Nashville is a very, very cool town. So downtown Nashville, you walk around there at 10 o'clock in the morning, you're hearing music. Live music and where you walk in. The countryside's beautiful. So from a Johnny Cash perspective, you can go to Hendersonville and you can drive by where Johnny Cash's house was at right on the Old Hickory Lake there. It's burned down, but the foundation's still there. So a lot of rich history in Nashville. You gotta come check it out. This is one of my favorite cities, man. And there's a reason why I changed my flight at the time of this show. I was already here in Nashville last week playing a music gig. I thought I could play the Commvault gig for a little while. I could do that. Excellent. So when you close the show, what was the closer for the Johnny Cash tribute band? For me, it's the man in black. All right, well, I appreciate you joining, David. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. For the whole crew here, thanks so much for joining us. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of the coverage from this show, all the shows that will be in the future. Feel free to hit us up through social media if you have any other questions. And once again, thanks so much for watching theCUBE.