 from Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York. It's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. Welcome to the heart of New York City. We're here in Central Park at Tavern on the Green. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here covering the Veritas Solution Days, hashtag VTAS, VTAS Day. So Scott Jeteros here as Executive Vice President at World Wide Field Ops for Veritas. Scott, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. So I love this location. A lot of our crew, they've never been here before. It's the way you see Tavern on the Green, it's sweet. Customers love it. So why this location? What are you guys doing with the Solution Days? Different than the big tent event? You guys have gone to a more intimate format. Explain that. Yeah, so last year we did the big event and we also did regional events. And it was interesting when we looked at the regional events the input from our customers was they loved the idea of doing something local, a little bigger, so they didn't have to travel. And it's just difficult to get somebody to come out, fly across the country to spend a week. And so we decided to do 20 of these around the world. We also found out last year that the number of people who were coming to the regional events was very, very large. I mean, some of our events we had four or 500 people coming. So it just made a lot more sense to us is how do we get closer to our customers, make sure they didn't have to travel and be able to touch them. So collectively you're probably hitting as many if not more people. A lot more. It's probably a different type of audience too when you go, so you're doing a bunch in the US and a bunch overseas, right? Correct, yeah, so we've got New York, Chicago, San Francisco, we've got one in Washington DC focused on the Fed and then we have one up in Toronto in North America. So, and then we've got them in Latin America. So you've been a kind of customer success exec all your life and spent a lot of time in New York City. A lot of customers down here, a lot of the more advanced and sophisticated customers here. So what are you hearing as you see digital transformation, big data, cloud, multi-cloud, people are changing the way in which they think about data and protecting data and getting more value out of data. What are they telling you here? The challenges that they're facing and where do they want to go with Veritas? Yeah, the exciting thing is, is that look, we're still the market leader, right? You know, people always say, oh, what's going on with Veritas? We're the market leader we have been for the last 15 plus years. And the people we're doing data protection for today are the largest of the largest. You know, 95% of the Fortune 100 use our technology. 85% of the Fortune 500 use our technology. So we get a lot of information, knowledge, experience from what you would argue, and I would too, the customers here, which are the toughest of the tough too, right? I mean, they're not always nice. They tell you what they think and they're thinking two, three years out of what we have to go do to support those environments. So it's interesting, you know, the big thing going into this year, there was a lot of conversation around compliance. You know, GDPR in Europe was huge. And really, I kind of narrowed down to PII, regardless if you're banking, healthcare or whoever. The whole question around how do you protect data? Where is my data located? Who's touching my data? Has just become a bigger and bigger issue. And then you throw in the word cloud. And as you said, multi-clouds, no one's using one cloud. All of a sudden your data is spread out all over the place. So how you focus on that, how do you have visibility on that, becomes more and more important. And obviously that makes data protection center of what's going on with customers now. So there are a couple of vectors there that I'd like to explore. One is the idea that we're now looking at data protection and back up to get more value out of it. You talked about GDPR, privacy, things of that nature. So I want to talk about that. But also, the last thing customers want that I talked to, they don't want yet another stovepipe of data protection. And as you go, every cloud has its own backup approach. So I'm curious as to what you guys are doing. Let's start there. Are you putting in some kind of abstraction layer to be able to service all those different multi-clouds? Which cloud companies are you working with? Yeah, so first of all, we support all the major cloud providers. For us, we're very agnostic in the sense of we don't care where your data is located. It can be behind your firewall. It can be in Amazon. It can be in Microsoft. It can be in Google. It can be in a pseudo what we would call more of a regional SaaS type cloud that you support based on something uniquely in your environment. So we don't really care on where it's located. And that's actually one of our big positives. But you're right. One of the big issues customers have today is, okay, they start out and they might use Amazon for test development. And Amazon has their own way of moving data into the cloud and what do you do and how do you protect it? And then you go all of a sudden to Office 365 because that's the Microsoft way of getting it into the cloud. And so now you've got two clouds. Oracle's pushing you to do cloud. So you've got an Oracle cloud probably, right? And, and, and, we can go down that whole list. So everyone's driving a cloud strategy. But the problem customers have today is, they don't want to have six or seven different ways of onboarding data and applications into the cloud. And they also do not want to have different ways of moving data or protecting data. And I think the, so for us, what we do that's very different is that we have software that allows you to move data and applications into any one of those clouds the exact same way. I mean, if you think about it today, when you think about data replication or protecting data, a lot of customers use hardware replication to move data. Well, the problem you run into today when you think about it is that the traditional cloud vendors, and we just listed who they were, they don't use traditional hardware. No one's using EMCSRDF in the Amazon cloud. No one's using, you know, Hitachi's products. So you need a software-based replication tool and a data mover, I'll call it, to be able to do that. That's an area we've invested a lot of time and money on to be able to do it. And more importantly, even though I don't hear this a lot from customers anymore, there was a fear for a wire-off cloud lock-in. I don't want to be too into one cloud. We can move data between clouds also. So, you know, you don't have to bring it back and bring it back forward. So that also makes customers at ease of how do you manage it? But it just creates a whole different environment of what to do and how to do it. So you're not in a technical role at the company, but when you're in this business and you talk to a lot of technology people, you have to be conversant in technology. So I'm curious. So you mentioned the high-speed data mover. That's something that's always been fundamental to the Veritas architecture, but you've done some other things. I've seen some of, I've got briefed and seen some of the videos you guys done on 8.1.2. There's components of that that are really different. I mean, modern software, microservices-based architecture that have allowed you to actually create this multi-cloud sort of affinity. Maybe talk about what's a conversation is like with customers with regard to modernizing your platform. Yeah, I think two things. You know, it's interesting. The two things customers have always asked us for is a new UI interface. You know, now it's interesting, like anything. Customers have used this for 10 years. There's customers who love the old interface, right? But today, when you think about cloud or think about particular workloads, which is probably more important, you know, it's no longer the backup administrator who might have to do everything. When it used to be just the backup person, you know, having the way we used to do it made a lot of sense. But now you're basically grabbing someone who could be the virtual machine administrator. It could be the cloud person administrator. It could be security. And those people don't have a background in data protection. So the question is, how do you give them an interface that makes it easy for them to understand and use to be able to administrate that? So now the backup administrator can actually create groups inside of NetBackup and, you know, allow those organizations to be able to look at their environments and be able to manage it very differently. So, and it's the same thing with workloads. You know, when you think about it today, most of the data growth that we're seeing, it's traditionally not, it's not the Oracle workloads, the SAP workloads. You know, 60, 70 plus percent of our largest customers are creating new database applications on non-SQL stuff. You know, it's Mongo, it's Cassandra. So the new 8.1.2 supports all those environments. We didn't do that before. So that's a great interface for us because those databases don't natively do backup well. Hadoop, you know, data analytics, huge amount of data being created there. It used to be, that used to be a sandbox, a playground, but those applications have gotten to become, you know, important in these customers. And so it used to be, you just used to take a snapshot of this stuff and you'd have about 20 copies of petabytes of data. Now you can do point in time backups using those types of products. So 8.1.2 has that type of support in it too. And we've done a lot of stuff around VMware, specifically focused around, you know, new innovative things that we needed to do to modernize the products. So those emerging workloads, like not only SQL, you know, Mongo, Hadoop, et cetera, that's now native to your stack. Is that correct? Okay, that's different because you've hardened that. A lot of companies in your business, maybe some of the newer guys have to go partner to find those capabilities. So that's, I think, big. The other thing I heard was cloud-like. I think I heard self-service, essentially, for some of the lines of business folks or whomever that you don't want to send them necessarily back to the backup admin. Do it on your own. Here's some policies that make it kindergarten proof. Okay, so that's a trend that you're seeing as well. Yes, yes, completely. Okay, I want to come back to something you said before, this other vector, which is other uses for backup or the backup data than just insurance, because people don't want to pay for insurance. And so you mentioned compliance, GDPR. I would imagine as well when you get things like ransomware, there's also analytics, you guys I knew were applying a lot of AI. You've got the corpus of data, it just so happens that the backup data contains the data of the company. So presumably we do other things with it. What are some of those other things that customers are doing and how are they getting additional value out of the investment that they're making in Veritas? Yeah, I think it's a couple of areas. Before we leave compliance, let me focus on one thing that's been really important is this whole question about where my data is located, this whole visual-ness of data, who's touched at last, all of that, has become a really, really important thing for customers because even in the natural cloud, sometimes you don't know that maybe one of the cloud providers moved your second copy of data into a data center that is a problem for you, right? So- Like physically is in a place that it shouldn't be. Yeah, it shouldn't be in a data center. It moved out of a country boundary for compliance reasons, right? So we've spent a lot of time and energy creating software technology that gives you that visibility. And not just with NetBackup. We also plug in all the cloud providers. We also plug in Oracle. We also plug in box.net. I mean, so a lot of these other companies are also plugged in. So back to your point, we've created this huge data repository of information that now allows us, when you look at our future, and we talked about a little this in the session earlier, you know, data analytics, some capabilities that we should be able to go do because we have the metadata to be able to give customers that visual capability. The other thing that's interesting about that visualization software is it also tells, it finally gives customers a proof point of what we've always known that probably roughly about 50% of their data, and I'm being kind when I say 50, probably hasn't been touched in three, five, four, 10 plus years, right? And we've always known that, but now we actually can show a customer, hey, using this visualization software that you're using for compliance has also now told you where the data located and who's touched it last, and by the way, it hasn't been touched forever. It allows a customer to have two conversations. One, do they need to save it? And if they do, do they move it into a glacier type environment? Or three, do they move it to a software to find storage on the customer's floor? And we can help the customer migrate it after we show them who hasn't touched it, but we also have a software to find storage solution that Gardner just came out and said, we're number one in this space, right? And so it's one of our fastest growing pieces of our business because customers all the time say to me, Scott, our data protection cost is going up. And the reality is it isn't. The reality is his data is growing dramatically, his storage is going up, and oh, by the way, I got to back up my data that sits on the storage, right? So it all kind of combines together. So data protection as a percentage of the spend is not necessarily increasing, but everything's growing. Everything's growing, yes. So the other thing, just a couple of points that you made me think of, the other cloud that you support is on-prem. Yes, it's still big, by the way. So that's another piece of it because you got the three laws of the cloud, right? It's the law of physics. You can't necessarily put everything into the public cloud. You got the law of economics and you got the law of the land, which you were talking about before, that if you're not supposed to leave Germany, you can't leave Germany. Okay, and then, so you're using analytics to help customers determine this. And the other thing is some of the general councils out there don't want to keep data forever. You know, I hear a lot from vendors, oh, you can now keep it forever. Well, the GC says no, we don't want to keep it forever. Okay, so you're using analytics to sort of sift through that data and then surface these clues and actions to customers. Yes, and a new thing also in 8.1.2 is we've come out with a smart meter type technology, which now will let customers know how much data they're using, where they're using the data, any hotspots in the data, and it's very file-based, you know, data focus. And so it obviously helps customers really understand who's using what, where, you know, and to be fair, they can use that to help go drive cost, figure out, you know, maybe someone's using something they shouldn't, maybe people are storing stuff that they don't want to store. It's not just a benefit to figure out what they're doing, but it also could help them drive cost out. So you've got a big customer base, obviously, probably the largest in the business. You've modernized the- Over 50,000. 50,000 customers. You modernize the software. Just wrap it up, the competitive differentiation. There's a lot of noise in the marketplace. How do you, where do you stand? What's your position relative to the competition? Why veritas? Yeah, well, so for us, when we walk into a large customer, as you can appreciate, they don't want three or four different products back to the cloud conversation. They don't want three or four ways of moving data into the cloud, right? They really want one. And the other issue they all run into is this compliance conversation. You know, not everybody does everything the same and they don't all talk together. So having a single platform to be able to give customers the capability of backing up everything from, you know, traditional workloads of, you know, Oracle, you know, and SAP, to, you know, MongoDB, to Cassandra, to Hadoop, to containers, to open source. We're the only company out there that can do all those workloads. There are startups and they might do one or two things really, really well or so they say they do. We don't think they do, but they say they do. And that's what they focus in on. But that's not what a large enterprise customer wants. They want capabilities to be able to scale, high performance, ease of use. And 8.1.2 gives that to them and we do more workloads than anybody else in the industry. Excellent. Well, Scott, thanks for coming on. We are here in the heart of New York City, at Tavern on the Green. A lot of customers are going to be talking to some of those customers today. Those customers, they're as tough as Yankee fans, I can tell you. So Scott, thanks again. Good to see you. All right, thank you. All right, keep it right there. Everybody, we're back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Veritas Solution Days in New York. Right back.