 Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2018, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to Chicago, everybody, VeeamON 2018. This is Dave Vellante, co-host Stu Miniman. So day two, they're breaking down the exhibit hall, but theCUBE keeps going. Ben O'Kipers here. He's a senior strategic product manager at Equinix. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. So Equinix is cranking. The data center is booming. The data center business is booming. You guys are at the heart of it. You're working with all the cloud providers. Obviously you're working with Veeam. Talk about your role and what your relationship is with Veeam. All right, I represent the managed service department in the Netherlands. So what we are doing on the beautiful platform we have with Equinix is provide managed services and then in the hybrid category. And what we provide our customers is, for example, data management platform. So we provide the ease of mind with data management and business continuity on backup and disaster recovery. So the enterprise is our customer. So you're both a Veeam customer and partner, right? Yeah, we are a platinum partner of Veeam, yeah. So we provide the backup services to our customers, yeah. Okay, so essentially you purchased their products, installed them, you got a relationship where you guys share their revenue somehow, somewhere. So in the Netherlands we service the enterprise market and also a big governmental companies. And we use Veeam for their disaster recovery services. What are the big trends you see in data protection these days? Of course, GDPR is very close. We see that especially in the Netherlands, for a lot of companies the data has to be stored in the Netherlands. But ambition to go to the public cloud and use the hyperscalers is still in the same trend. So what we try to do is to keep the data safe in the Netherlands, but make it possible for our customers to use the hyperscalers for compute. That's important strategy we see. Yeah, one of the things that's been interesting to watch here is Veeam's, they call it the hybrid, the multi-cloud strategy. Maybe give us some examples of what your customers, you said compliance is the reason they keep it, especially in say the Netherlands and their services. You have any examples you can give of things like that? Yeah, we service a few big customers that are obliged to be in the Netherlands with their data and all the service they provide to their customers for the Dutch citizens. And we have our own cloud platform for that, so they're not using public clouds. But the availability they need is very high. And that's what we provide. So what's driving that? Mabye talks about digital transformation. Yes. Is that the driver and what is that? I think that the digital transformation is not just about infrastructure. It's how companies are and how they want to be. And what we see is that they first want to have the data secured. And next to that, they want to experiment with hyperscale and the real cloud native environments. And providing both of those worlds in one package is what we see as a big trend. Ben, when I think about businesses like yours, simplicity, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, come to mind or those kind of the top three and if so, from what you need from a solution like Veeam. Yes. What we currently provide to our customers is more the disaster recovery part of the suite. And so when there's something wrong, we are there to help the customer to get back on track as soon as possible. And we're here in Veeam on 2018 to explore the whole suite because what we see is that like services as office backup, the customers are getting more mature about using cloud and SaaS solutions but still want to have the secure environment. Is your expertise specific to Veeam or is it more general? More general. Okay, so you're using other products as well? Yes. How do you decide what to use, where? With Aconex we have a policy to select the leaders in the market and also based on functionality and the services we want to provide repackaged to our customers. And that's why Veeam was one of our selected partners. Okay, so what do they do better than others? What's their sweet spot? Yeah, we chose Veeam a couple of years ago based on the functionality mainly. And there were my technical colleagues that gave the list of arguments to choose for Veeam. So. Okay, maybe when we look at your space SLAs or something that are important to your customers, how's that been changing your environment and how does Solution with Veeam help you meet that for customers? I think that the way we approach it, it's more like you first discuss with the customer what kind of availability they need and the performance they need. And then you design the architecture and that is also immediately the SLA instead of making a nice platform and then start discussion talking about SLAs. So we try to have the correct infrastructure with the architecture and solutions within to meet customers' demands. And that's another way to approach SLAs. So flexibility and granularity is part of that. So I mean, one of the problems in backup, we've been talking about it all day. And yesterday is many data protection approaches are one size fits all. Yes. You say, okay, here's our, back it up once a day, incremental, once a week, for whatever it is, that's it. This is your RPO, this is your RTO, take it or leave it. Are you able to these days provide more granularity for customers? There's always a field of tension between standardized products and customer specific solutions. And we try always to use the standards because then we are better in guaranteeing the service. But as the legacy of economics management service in the Netherlands, we tend to do a lot more for our customers. Whatever the customer wants. That's what our differentiator is at this moment. Yeah, okay. So that creates challenges just in terms of managing all these different templates and SLAs and can't you, I mean, I'm sure you do this. You have categories and sort of banding, if you will. I mean, is that how you're dealing with this problem? Gold, silver, bronze kind of thing, or no, it's. Yes, we have. Gold one, gold two, gold three, gold four, gold five. I see that we go from gold to platinum and it's also gold. But yes, the service levels are high. And that's why we are so successful, we can do that. Great. How about Veeamon 2018? What have you seen anything that's really particularly exciting? You said you wanted to come here to better understand the export portfolio presumably so you could exploit it. What have you learned? What's exciting you? Yeah, the timing of this conference was perfect because as you know, Acronix is at this time in the middle of the internet. So all the public clouds and all the tier one players are connecting on our platform. And we call it the Acronix Cloud Exchange Fabric. And right on that fabric, the best place for data management platform is there. So we are trying to enlarge the suite from data to archiving, so storage to archiving on that spot. So that we do that in the Netherlands, we are building a portfolio around that data platform to provide the customers a safe place for all of their data and it can be redundant within the Netherlands in 12 IBXs. And we are also strongly connected to those public cloud providers, so they can put the workload in the cloud and the data on Acronix. Go ahead. No, that wasn't... Who's your favorite public cloud provider? Ah, you don't have to answer that. That's okay. Yeah, the thing is they are both very good. But having control on where your data and your applications are is a bit less. So that's the market we are jumping in now. But, Beno, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was really a pleasure having you. Likewise. Thank you. Keep right there, everybody. theCUBE at Veeamon 2018, we're winding down day two, Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman. We'll be right back.