 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partner. Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live on day one of VMworld 2017, our eighth year here. Really excited to be here, I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Dave Vellante. We're very excited to be joined by our guest, Matt Waxman, CUBE alumni. You are the VP of Product Management at Dell EMC. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thanks very much. And another CUBE alumni, Jason Buffington, principal analyst, but we're calling you the expert extraordinaire, the vintage expert extraordinaire in data production. I love that, that's so cool. The Vdeveli, you'll have to change your business cards. I want it. So guys, Dell EMC was just named in 2017, a leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for data center backup and recovery. How is the backup and recovery market changing as customers are moving from virtualization to the cloud? It's a great question. I think data protection has never been hotter as a market. You really, you talk to customers, whether they're on a cloud journey, whether they're trying to simplify their infrastructure, whether they're trying to go to a converged and hyper-converged, data protection is at the center of all of that. And I think we see that reflected in the way that we've evolved our product lines, our use cases are all tilting more and more towards how do we integrate data protection into the stack, into the flow? And you just had a big announcement this morning following along the VMware cloud for AWS. Tell us a little bit more about the data production element of that announcement. Yeah, we were extremely happy to be part of that announcement and partnering really closely with VMware. It's been in the works for a long time, so it's been hard to keep it quiet. But everyone that's moving their workloads to the cloud, if they're going to move production apps, they need to have protection. And so we worked very closely to integrate the solution in. It's leveraging our data protection software as well as our data domain and recover point capabilities in there. And it's integrated right into the management stack. So it's super easy for customers to just turn on, pay by the drip and go. So Jason Buffett, maybe you could set the context for us. You've been monitoring this market for a long time as we just established. When you look back at the virtualization trend, it exploded onto the scene and it dramatically changed the backup requirements. Customers said, whoa, I have to change what I do, how I back up my resources, rethinking backup. And you seem to see that again now with cloud. So maybe take us back and take us through this journey as to where we came from, where we are today and what's changing in data protection as a result. The journey is actually pretty similar. Each time we've had a major platform shift, the first things that people typically do with the new platform is not go jump on one of their most mission critical applications. It typically starts with data protection, right? Even in Vert 15 years ago, the first things to go on were not my mission critical databases. It was, I'm not sure I want to run a production VMs yet, but I wouldn't mind failing over to it. Or I wouldn't mind putting test dev into it. I wouldn't mind backing up to it, right? And then what happened was people started running in VMs and they said, you know what? This stuff runs pretty well. They're in a recovered state. Maybe I don't want to go back. Maybe I could run production apps in that virtualized state. I think we're seeing the same thing in cloud. It's just happening at a much faster rate, where again, data protection using cloud infrastructure is a great way to kind of test the waters and dip your toe in. And people are saying, yeah, this stuff runs pretty well in a cloud. Maybe I could run production. And so that's kind of the context of where we are. I like what you said, Matt, about every time that people have made those other changes, data protection's always been there, the way we try to describe it is every time that you modernize production, you must also modernize protection, right? So whether it's going to cloud, whether it's Endpoint or Robo or SAS or IaaS, every time that your production infrastructure takes a leap up, protection has to be right behind that. And so this is just following that same curve. So one of the things that I found interesting, Jason and some of the stuff I read about you over the weekend was your research shows that availability and data production are not IT's problem. It's a business problem. How do you as a trusted advisor work with companies to help align business and IT with respect to that? As Pat Gelsinger said this morning, as companies are moving from data centers to centers of data, what's that IT business alignment conversation like and how do you facilitate that? So it starts with everything turns into numbers, right? So if you think about head versus heart, right? The heart is that IT implementer, a lot of the folks that are here this week and they're thinking about technologies and widgets and features. But if you want to have a data protection conversation and all you're talking about is RTO and RPO and those kind of things, that doesn't move upstream. That's not a business level conversation. So when you can convert that into what is my cost of downtime? What is my cost of lost productivity? Think about the availability issues with lost customer confidence and lost brand recognition. When you convert downtime and business impact into actually something that's quantifiable from a head level, from that executive level, okay, now this is a problem to be solved. Then we can have an honest conversation at what are the myriad technologies you should be using to address that? But it starts with get out of the weeds, get out of the system logs, and let's talk about the user experience and the mandates around data. Then you can have a business level conversation. So Matt, you're talking about data protection being a fundamental part of the infrastructure solution as opposed to what I like to say bolt on, right? For years, data protection, Jason, you know this well. It was an afterthought. Oh, hey, we got to protect this app now. Let's bolt on some backup software or some other infrastructure. EMC, and now Dell EMC as a company has a very vast portfolio. You acquired a lot of companies. So how did you go from, convince us, how did you go from that bespoke set of products to kind of this seamless, not a bolt on, but integrated part of the business? Maybe we'll discuss that a little bit. It's a great question. And what I think it all starts with and ends with is back to Jason's point about the business. It's the application, right? And so getting closest to the data source, whether that is an off the shelf application, a mission critical app, whether it's a homegrown app, whether it's a cloud native app, on and on and on and on, you go. Getting really tight with that data source, I think, is the linchpin to a integrated data protection strategy. So that's where we spent a lot of our time, is getting a lot of IP, a lot of automation, a lot of integration into the application stack. And that's where we've been able to really build a transformative approach to data protection. Another question I had is you kind of have the incumbents dilemma. You've got the big install base, and yet as these new waves come in, you have to adapt to them. You walk around the floor and you see, everybody's now talking about cloud and multi-cloud and all these new startups coming in. How do you keep pace with them from a both technology and a brand standpoint? Yeah, I mean, I think one of both the opportunities and the challenges in the data protection space is the breadth of it, right? Because there's new applications that pop up every day. There's new infrastructure components. And from a protection standpoint, we got to enable our customers to protect all of that. So how do you do that in a simplistic way? Having appliances, right? We introduced an appliance back at Dell EMC World in May, which has been fantastic for us. Customers wanting to consume an outcome as opposed to building it themselves. Delivering a cloud service, like the VMware cloud on Amazon, where I can go to a service catalog and just pick that protection level. I think that's the way that we see customers wanting to take all of the technology components and start to consume them in ways that's a lot more aligned with their business needs. Agile, right? Scalable, so forth. How long did that one? I think one of the big challenges we're going to see when we talk about cloud and data protection, this evolution moving forward from your evolution, I think it's the right way to think about that, is every time we saw a platform shift in the past, there was always the presumption that you would mostly leave that last platform of IT behind and you'd move to this new scenario, right? So for the last 10 years, the question has been around how virtualized in your data center can you get, right? And so there were two major problems to solve. How fast can you get the VM back up and running again? And how efficient can you hold that data? And so certainly from a Dell EMC perspective, data domain was part of that hero scenario from a data center-centric virtualization story. The challenge with the cloud story that we're moving towards is it's not so much we're going to leave the data center behind and move to the cloud, right? There's not one cloud. You're not going to leave the data center behind. So there's not a single hero scenario like there was last time, right? So some data is going to be in IaaS. We saw that this morning in the AWS announcements. Someday it's going to be in SaaS and that's totally okay, right? Some data will still live in one or more data centers. And so that means you have to have a data protection answer. Actually, you need to have a data protection answer to each and every one of those scenarios. How are you going to protect Office 365? How are you going to protect IaaS hosted VMs? How are you going to do the best on data center? How are you going to do it on Robo? I mean, each one of those requires different arrows and the quiver. And I think that's the interesting challenge. What we've seen in the past is every time that there's been this major platform shift, it kind of forces a reset of the leaderboard on the data protection vendors, right? Because typically the secret sauce that you use last time doesn't propel you forward. I think this time what you've got is you've got, or WMC has momentum, right? Because they're the dominator from the last generation. And because we're not leaving the data center behind, that's a position of strength to build from. That's opposed to in the past, you always leave the old guys behind and some new startups always seem to take over. You've always been on the leaderboard, you know? I mean, data domain at 90, whatever. Two-thirds of the purpose-built backup appliance with your data protection software. You're always up there in the Gartner Magic Quadrants. What gives you confidence that you can ride this next wave and stay there? Yeah, I mean, from an innovation standpoint, these are areas we've been working on for literally years, right? So Cloud for us is not something that's brand new. We've been working and had solutions out there for a number of years now. The same thing with hyper-converged, right? When VxRail came to market, we were there day one with data protection. So we've had a really strong pipeline, I think, of innovation in these spaces. I think, honestly, if I look at the next major wave of trend here, if you take the Cloud trend at a macro level, it's really about decentralization. How do you scale IT? Well, you start to push the ownership and to a self-service model, right? To the end user. And data protection's going to go the same way. Dave, you used the integrated word. Well, if I'm an end user, I want to trigger my own protection copies. I want to recover them on my own. Self-service is the way to really scale IT. Data protection's following the same path. Excellent. Well, guys, speaking of momentum, we wish you a very exciting event here. We thank you so much for joining. Congratulations on the announcement. Thanks very much. Thanks for sharing your insight. And we want to thank you for watching for my co-host, Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. Stick around. We'll be right back from VMworld 2017.