 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hi, Lisa Martin with theCUBE here, covering some news from Dell Technologies. I'm pleased to welcome one of its customers, Liam Furlong, the IT manager from Revelation Software. Liam, great to see you today. Thanks, Lisa. It's fantastic to be with you. And we're socially distant. California, you're done in Australia. I know it's early morning for you, but we're pleased to be chatting with you. So give our audience an overview of Revelation Software. Who are you and what do you do? Yeah, sure. Revelation Software is a software development company. No surprises there. And our primary product is a tool called RevTrack. And for all those SAP users out there, we help you get your changes navigated safely through the wide landscapes and the open seas of your SAP environment. So we're all about change management and delivering certainty in what is really rapidly changing landscapes in the IT world. So customers can go to you for all of their challenges with all their SAP data and sort of offload that, basically. I'm kidding. Yeah, I mean, that sounds lovely. I'm sure many of them would take that. So talk to me about your IT manager. Talk to me about your IT environment. I know you're highly virtualized. Just give us an overview of what your data environment looks like. Like a lot of software companies, we give our development teams a lot of freedom. And so over the years, a lot has definitely built into our environment. We have hundreds of VMs and even more SAP landscapes. We are committed to our customers to provide a lot of previous version compatibility, both in our products, but also in SAP, we support more of SAP's old versions than they do. We just wanna make sure that everyone is able to do their job and focus on what they're trying to do rather than worrying about, do I have to upgrade? Am I gonna be forced ahead in especially in a change management landscape? And so we have a lot of history, a lot of old environments. And we've managed that by using a lot of on-prem. We have local data centers like everyone, I guess. But also we've got a great multi-cloud environment now and it helps us to really provide an excellent environment for our teams to develop in the way that they want to, support our customers in an efficient way, but also without us having to over-commit to hardware and so on. So you have highly virtualized environment, about 150 VMs, nearly 500 SAP landscapes, so big administrative overhead. Talk to me about how you were protecting your data, I'm assuming VMs, maybe some SAP databases and servers. How are you protecting that before using Dell's new integrated approach? Yeah, we used a targeted appliance style, I guess. We built up what we thought was the right solution. We had a lot of legacy thinking, really, but tools. We used a lot of scripts previously. We used the Veeam platform. And that presented an ever-increasing set of challenges. As you can imagine with S3, S4, HANA rolling along, the environment just had to change. Our backup load was increasing. Our backup windows weren't getting any larger. And our backup targets weren't getting any larger. So we really needed to ask some hard questions about what we were doing and whether it was working for us. We had absolutely no cloud integration. Our off-site copies were completely inadequate. And so as an IT manager, who is the guy at the end of the road when it comes to RPO and RTO and certainty of restorability, I was not sleeping well, it's fair to say. Well, and that's something that obviously, you look to a company like Dell Technologies to help with sleep as a sleep aid. But you guys, I saw that after 20 years, you were testing a hosted version of your rev-track insights product and needed CloudDR and you kind of talked about meeting customer SLAs. And I was reading your case study and there was some big challenges there with respect to the SLA front. Yeah, definitely. I guess actually we were really fortunate to have started a conversation with Dell even before we were bringing our cloud platform online. We knew we were going to need to be able to address CloudDR. It was on the horizon for us. And so being able to talk with a vendor that had everything wrapped in, the idea of an integrated appliance was really quite foreign to me. The thought that I could trust Dell Technologies to actually do this better than me, I may that sounds a bit arrogant, but the truth is, I knew my environment and they didn't. But what was really a standout for us in the process is Dell knew that too. And they climbed into our environment and worked really hard. They really actually wanted to understand, well, what were our challenges? And what were our loads? What was our environment really like? And then work with us on a strong solution. And I was amazed. It felt really like the cavalry had arrived and they knew exactly what they were doing. And then they worked overtime to help us find a great solution. And it has been a fantastic solution, not only solving the challenges we faced at that time of deployment, but knowing what was on the horizon, going into the cloud and having a SaaS platform, we were future-proofed in a way that I was hopeful about, but now that we're using it in that way, I'm confident every day, I know that it's working properly for us. That confidence is absolutely critical, but you used a term that we hear so often in technology, future-proofed. Talk to me about, when you hear that as an IT manager, what does that mean to you and how is Dell Tech with the integrated approach delivering that? Yeah, I think, I mean, if I'm just being honest, I generally dismiss that when I hear anyone say that they're future-proofed because no one knows what's coming. I mean, here we are living this year out, right? And we knew 2020 was gonna be a big year, but not in the ways that it has been. I think that even though we wanted to believe that this backup tool would cover us, we weren't sure. What it has meant is there are two real standout things. One, there's a suite of functionality in the integrated appliance, which we didn't need them, but it was standing by and it was easy to turn on. It wasn't like, oh, and now you'll have to pay this extra fee or now you'll have to deploy these extra tools. It was all ready to go. And so they've brought their years of experience and forecasting and built in a bunch of functions, which no one is gonna need all of the tools out of the box, but over time you can deploy it. And the other really big one for us is all of the extra storage that we might need is our backup requirements grow shipped in the box, which is a huge cost to the vendor, but it's just sitting there ready for us to consume as we need, which is absolutely fantastic for me. I don't need to take our backup system offline to upgrade. I don't need to consume more rack space. I don't need to use more power. It's already doing everything it needs to and it's just about rolling forward easily as we move forward as a company. So walk us through what the environment looks like now. We mentioned 150 VMs, a big SAP landscape. Give us a picture of the technologies and what Dell is helping to protect in your environment. Yeah, so Dell covers everything. The integrated appliance we're using, actually it meets all of our needs. I'm a paranoid in my job, so we have extra bits and pieces kicking around, but the power protect device is our go-to. We know that it's going to be there. It's going to be online. It's going to have covered everything from our on-prem. So we use a VMware environment locally and we're backing up all of those VMs every night, about 54 terabytes of data. And we knock that out in about a 90-minute window, which is absolutely fantastic. So that backs up to local and then it ships up to our cloud environment. So we've got our off-site covered in that same night. Then we've also got environment, I guess using the Amazon example. We have a multi-cloud, so we've got things in a couple of different cloud providers, but to use Amazon as an example, we have production systems running up there, we have our SaaS environment running up there, and we capture that also with our power protect device and bring everything back down. And so now we've got that covered as well. And so no matter what our problem is, I've just got one place to go to to say, I need to restore this and I need to do it fast and we can get that done straight away. It's fantastic. And that's what I've been hearing. I've spoken with a number of folks already, including the VP of Product Marketing, Caitlin Gordon, and we're hearing a lot of that one-stop-shop sort of description for the integrated appliance. I'm wondering if you could give us a compare and contrast power protect, the integrated appliance, as you said, and described the benefits that you've already achieved versus the targeted approach with the theme that you had before. Yeah, sure. What we came from was only being able to back up mission-critical systems nightly and everything else had to be backed up weekly to achieve our backup windows. Even still, Monday morning was a nerve-wracking few hours while the weekend backup kind of crawled through and finished and people are like, oh, systems are a bit slow this morning. Like, oh, yeah, we're looking at that, you know. We came from that to getting, as I said earlier, everything done every night, which is a complete transformation for us. It means that we don't need to worry about, we used to have to supplement our Veeam backup with scripts because we could get the scripted backup done much faster. And so we would go, oh, we'll restore with Veeam and then we'll lay a script over the top to recover everything up to last night. But now it's just all covered through that one appliance. Again, in our cloud environments, we use the local tools to provide a local backup. And that's great to have. Previously, that was mission-critical. We had to have that working. And we had to have our technicians up to speed with four or five different tool sets. But now it's great that they are aware of those tools, but really it's just about understanding one application. In regards to a targeted solution, you end up having really all these building blocks that only one person really knows how they all string together. But now not only do our whole team understand how it works together, but it's one phone number to find a whole group of people who know how it works together and they can help us from upgrades, deployments, restores, anything we need. If I'm on leave, then I know that someone else from Dell Tech can step in and cover me for any of the questions that might normally bubble up to my level. One of my favorite numbers, I'm sorry, I feel like I'm ranting, but one of my favorite numbers is we came from using a different hardware vendors, SAN, and we were getting compression maybe of three to six times on data. We get compression from a month view of 150 to 200 times. And if we expand that out to an annual view, we get compression rates of 300 times on our data, which means instead of having literally 15 RU of storage, we have two RU of storage. The cost per terabyte is down by hundreds of dollars. It makes me look really good. And I haven't had to do anything. All I did was just go, yep, you guys do it. You guys deploy your solutions. Those are huge deduplication numbers. I know Caitlyn, Gordon shared with me on average 65 to one, but you basically at least double that. And in terms of making you look good, that's something that's actually quite important in terms of IT and the business, making sure that what you can deliver to the business is the confidence and you and your team that their data is protected. Can you share a little bit about maybe the IT business relations and how this technology has helped them just have that confidence? Yeah, definitely. I mean, as you say, every part of the business sees a different thing. Our development team are paying attention to very different things to our accounting team. These numbers definitely helped me to make friends in both teams. As an IT manager, if the backups do their job properly, if this all works, no one notices. If this goes wrong, I break the business. So the stakes are pretty high with backup. But even though that's true and we know that's true, committing a big financial investment is still hard. It's still a moment where you hold your breath and ask, was it worth it? But now that we've been able to show the numbers to our executive teams and they can see how much money they're saving, how much money we would normally be reinvesting at this point, but we can now make that available for other projects. We can put that into further development. We can put that into improving our SaaS platform. That really works for us as a business. We want to serve our customers better. We don't want to waste our time and money on stuff that affects just our day to day. We want to be really focused where our people are with what they care about. So by putting money back in the pockets, that's a big win. And by making our infrastructure teams more free, their time is freer because they're not spending, we do restores every week, pardon me, every week, because those restores now run more smoothly and they are faster and there's less hunting around to try and find the backup that actually worked, then that means our infrastructure teams are free to also now do other upgrades, to work alongside, say, our developers. They want to be running the current versions of the Atlassian suite, not a version from a year ago, but we've got more time to do that work now. So it makes a big difference. Well, that workforce productivity that you're alluding to, it can be hugely impactful across the business. It's not just that now you've got one solution, one phone number to call it, there's issues. You've got more time back to be more innovative, more strategic, and so do the rest of the folks on your team. So the business overall, that workforce productivity can really be very widespread in a good way. Absolutely. And it's well felt. I think one of the things that it's really hard to put a dollar value on, but it is really key is people don't like doing rework and backup recovery feels like rework. You're like, I've been here before. And so by mitigating, particularly this aspect of our roles, our teams are happier. They generally are enjoying their work more because they're, as I say, they've got more time to work on things that are energizing and rewarding. And across the business, people feel better as well. There are a lot of complications in anyone's job, but certainly from the direction that hardware and storage and backup is being concerned, we've taken away a big stress. For me, for example, it's important that we test our DR scenario. Obviously everyone says that, but now we can actually do it. Now we can actually do a full DR production outage and go, okay, great. Let's shut it down and see what happens. And we were able to do that a couple of times a year. We don't have to pay for a cold DC or a warm DC in the wings. We can recover to the cloud. Our DR site is VMware Cloud on Amazon. So we can spin it up and do the whole DR scenario. Our DR is engaged within about three hours from a full building loss. And not only is that great piece of mine, but also, again, it puts great data into the hands of my CIO. He's able to present on business continuity issues to the executive team and show that we're actually caring about the business and caring about the things that people do worry about. And again, makes people look good, which is always helpful. It is absolutely. And as you said, it's really, if you can't restore the data, you're kind of stuck. So now I know why you look so rested because you have the solution. You're sleeping better at night. Liam, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. Great work. And we look forward to hearing more great stories to come from Revelation Software. Thanks so much, Lisa. It's been a wonderful time. For Liam Furlong, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.