 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you by Veritas. Welcome back to the aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Veritas Vision 2017. Hashtag Vitas Vision. Jyoti Swaroop is here. He's the vice president of product and solutions marketing at Veritas Jyoti. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, Dave. I'm officially in Alam now. theCUBE alone, absolutely, yeah. Two times, three more times, we'll give you a little VIP badge. You know, we'll give you the smoking jacket, all that kind of stuff. Five or six times, we'll be doing the interviews. Yeah, I'm going to be following you guys around and for the next three events. So good keynote this morning. Thank you. Meaty, a lot going on. Wasn't just high level concepts. It was a lot of high level messaging, but then here's what we've done behind it. You know, it's actually the opposite. It's a lot of real products that customers are using. You know, the world forgets that Veritas has only been out of semantic what, 20 months, right? Since we got out, we were kind of quiet the first year because that was because we were figuring our strategy out, investing in innovation and engineering, because that's what Carlisle, our board wants, right? For us to do is invest in innovation and engineering and build real products. So we took our time, right, 18 to 20 months to build these products out and we launched them and they're catching on like wildfire in the customer base. Jothi, Bill came on and talked about, he made a lot of changes in the company. Focusing on culture, innovation, something he's want. What brought you, a lot of places you could have gone. Why Veritas, why now? Well, Bill is one of the reasons, actually. I mean, if you look at his history and what he's done with different companies over the years and how the journey of the IT as he put it during his keynote, he wants to make that disruption happen again at Veritas. So that was one, two was just the strategy that they had. Veritas has a Switzerland approach to doing business. Look, it's granted that most Fortune 500 or even mid-market customers that have some sort of a cloud project going on. But what intrigued me the most, especially with my background coming from other larger companies is Veritas was not looking to tie them down or become a data hoarder. You know what I mean? It's just charged this massive dollar per terabyte and just keep hoarding them, lock them into a storage or lock them into a cloud technology. But we were facilitating their journey to whichever cloud they wanted to go. So it was refreshing and I still remember first interview with Veritas and they were talking about, oh, we want to help move customers data into Azure and AWS and Google. And my brain from previous storage vendors is going, hang on a minute, how are you going to make money? If you're just going to move all of this data to everyone else. But that's what is right for the customer. Okay, so how are you going to make money? Well, it's not just about the destination, right? Cloud's journey, it's not just the destination. So most customers are asking us, you know, on average, we adopt three clouds is what they're telling us. Whether it's public, private, on-prem, on average they have about three separate clouds. So what they say is, Jyothi, our struggle is to move an entire virtual business service from on-prem to the cloud. And once we've moved it, let's say cloud A is suddenly expensive or is not working out for them. To get out of that cloud and move it to cloud B is just so painful. It's going to cost me tons of money and I lost all of the agility that I was expecting from cloud A anyway. So if you have products like VRP from Veritas, for example, where we could move an entire cloud business service from cloud A to cloud B, and guess what? You can move it back on to on-prem, on the fly. You know, that's brilliant for the customers. Complete portability. So, let's see, the portfolio is large. Help us sort of boil it down. How should we think about it at a high level? We only have a few, you know, 20 minutes, so. Yeah. How do we think about, you know, that in 15, 20 minutes? So I'll focus on three tenets. So our 360 data management wheel, if you saw the keynote, has six tenets. The three tenets I'll focus on today are visibility, portability, and last but definitely not the least, you want to store it efficiently and cost-effectively. So visibility, most of our customers that are getting on their cloud journey are already on, you know, in the cloud somewhere. They have zero visibility almost into what applications did I move into the cloud? Right, if I've moved these applications, are they giving me the right value because I've invested heavily in the cloud to move these applications? They don't know. 52% of our customers have dark data. We've surveyed them. And all that dark data has now been moved into some cloud. Look, cloud is awesome. We're not, you know, we have partnered up with every cloud vendor out there. But if we're not making it easy for customers to identify what is the right data to move to the cloud, then, you know, they kind of lost half the battle even before they moved to the cloud. So that's one. So we're giving complete visibility with the InfoMap connectors that we just announced earlier on in the keynote. And that's matching the sort of workload characteristics with the right sort of platform characteristics. Is that right? Absolutely. You could be a VMware user. You're only interested in, you know, VM-based data that you want to move and you want role-based access into that data and you want to protect only that data and move it, back it up into the cloud. We give you that granularity. So it's one thing to provide visibility. It's quite another to give them the ability to, you know, have policy-driven actions on that data. Yeah. And Jothi, just take us inside the customers for that. Who owns this kind of initiative? The problem in IT, very heterogeneous, very siloed, you'd say that multi-cloud environment most customers we talk to, they've got a cloud strategy, the ink's still drying and it's usually because, well, that group needed this and somebody needed this and it's very tactical. So how do I focus on the information? Who drives that kind of, you know, need for visibility and manages across all of these environments? That's a great question, Stu. I mean, we pondered around the same question for about a year, right? Because we were going both top down and bottoms up in the customer's organization and trying to find where's our sweet spot, right? But what we've figured is it's not a one strategy thing, especially with the portfolio that we have. 80% of the time we are talking to the CIOs. We are talking to the CXOs and we're coming down with their digital transformation strategy or their cloud transformation strategy, they may call it whatever they want, right? We're coming top down with our products because when you talk visibility, a backup admin, you may not jump out of a seat the first thing out. Visibility is not what I care about, right? The ease of use of this backup job is what I care about day one. But if you talk to the CIO and I tell him, I'll give you end to invisibility of your entire infrastructure, I don't care which cloud you're in, I'll be like, I'm interested in that because I may not want to move 40% of this data that I'm moving to cloud A today. I want to keep it back or just delete it because GDPR in Europe gives the citizens the right to delete their data. It doesn't matter which company they, you know, the data is present in, the citizen can go to that company and say you have to delete my data. How will you delete the data if you just don't know where the data is? Or yeah, it's in 20 places and 15 different databases and okay, so that's one. You had said there were three sort of three areas that you wanted to go. Yes, so the second one is, again, all about workload data and application portability. So over the years we had storage lock-ins. You know, I'm not going to name names but historically there are lots of storage renders that tend to lock customers into a particular type of storage or to the company and they just keep, you know, it's just tech refresh every three years and you just keep doing that over and over again. We're seeing more and more of cloud lock-in start to happen, right? You start migrating all of this into one cloud service provider and you kind of get familiar with the tools and widgets that they give you around that data and then all of a sudden you realize this is not the right fit or I'm moving too much data into this place and it's costing me a lot more. I want to not do this anymore. I want to move it to another local service provider, for example. It's going to cost you twice as much as you did just to move the data into the cloud in the first place. So with VRP, Veritas Resiliency Platform, we give our customers literally a few mouse clicks. If you watch the demo on stage, literally with a few mouse clicks you identify the data that you want to move, including your virtual machines and your applications and you move them as a business service, not just as random data. You move it as an entire business service from cloud A to cloud B. Okay, and Jyothi, there's still physics involved in this. So there's many reasons why we've locked in. You mentioned kind of familiarity, but if I have a lot of data, moving it takes a lot of time as well as the money. How do we handle that? So it goes back to the original talk track here about visibility. So if you give the customer the right amount of visibility, they know exactly what to move. If the customer has 80 petabytes of data in their infrastructure, they don't have to move all 80 petabytes of it. If we are able to tell them these are the 10 petabytes that you need to move based on what information map is telling you. So they only move those 10 petabytes. So the workload kind of comes down drastically because they're able to visualize what they need to move. Third piece of storage. Third piece of storage, a lot of people don't know this, but Veritas was the first vendor that launched a software-defined storage solution back in the boss days, right? Veritas, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems. We had the first file system that would be this paper over rocks, if you will. It was just a software layer and it would work with literally sand as anything that's out there in the market. It would just be that file system that we were. And we've kept that DNA in our engineering team, right? For example, Abhijith, who leads up our engineering, he wrote the first cluster file system. And we are extending that beyond just a file system. So we're going file block an object just as any other storage vendor would. We are certifying on various commodity hardware so customers can choose the hardware of their choice. And not just that. The one thing we're doing very differently though is embedding intelligence close to the metadata. The reason we can do that is, unlike some of the classic storage renders, we wrote the storage ground up. We wrote the code ground up. So we could extract, if you look at an object, it has object data and metadata. So metadata is standard, it's about this long, right? It's got all these characters and it's hard to make sense of it unless you buy another tool to read that object and digest it for the customer. But what if you embed intelligence next to the metadata so storage is not dumb anymore? It's intelligent, so you avoid the number of layers before you actually get to a BI product, right? And I'll just give you a quick example in healthcare. We're all wearing Apple Watches and Fitbits. The data is getting streamed into some object store, whether it's in the cloud or on-prem. Billions of objects are getting stored even right now with all the Apple Watches and Fitbits out here. What if the storage could predictably, using machine learning and intelligence, tell you predictably, you might be experiencing a stroke right on your watch because your heartbeats are X and your pulse is Y, combining all of the data and your history based on the last month or last three months. I can tell you, Jyoti, you should probably go see the doctor or do something about it, right? So that's predictive and that can happen at the storage layer. It doesn't have to be this other superficial intelligence layer that you pay millions of dollars for. Okay, so that analytic capability is really a feature of your platform, right? I mean, others, too, have tried it and they tried to make it the product and it really isn't a product, right? It's a sort of a byproduct. And so, is that something that I can buy today? Is that something that's sort of roadmap or? So, what's the reaction been from customers? No, the reaction has been great. Both customers and analysts have just loved where we're going with this, right? So, obviously, we have two products that are on the truck today, which are InfoScale and Access. InfoScale is a block-based product and Access is a file-based product. We also have Hyperscale, which was designed specifically for modern workloads, containers, and OpenStack. And that has its own roadmap, right? You know how OpenStack and containers work. We have to think like a developer for those products. So, those are the products that are on the truck today. What you'll see announced tomorrow, I hope I'm not giving away too much, is because Mike already announced it, is Veritas Cloud Storage. That's going to be announced tomorrow and we're going to go deep into that. And Veritas Cloud Storage will be this on-prem object-based storage, which will eventually become a platform that will also support file and block. So, it's just one single software-defined, highly intelligent storage system for all use cases. Throw whatever data you want at it. And the line on Veritas is the billboards, no hardware agenda ironic where that came from. But sometimes you'll announce appliances. What is that all about? And when do you decide to do that? Great question. So, it's all about choice, right? It's the cliche thing to say I know, but Veritas, most people don't know, this has a heavy channel revenue element to what we do, right? We love our partners and channel. Now, if you go to the channel that's catering to mid-market customers or SMBs, they just want the easy button to storage. They're like, Jyothi, I don't have five people sitting around trying to piece all of this together with your software and Seagate's hardware and whatever else and piece this together. I just want a box, a pizza box that I can put in my infrastructure, turn it on and it just works. And I call Veritas if something goes wrong. I don't call three different people. So, this is for those people, right? Those customers that just want the easy button to storage or easy button to backup. To follow up on the flip side, when you're only selling software, the knock on software, of course, is I want to be fast. I want it to be simple. I need to be agile. How come Veritas can deliver these kind of solutions and not be behind all the people that have all the hardware and it's all fully baked in to start with? Well, that's because we've written these from the ground up, right? So, when you write software code from the ground up, I mean, I'm an engineer and I know how hard it is to take a piece of legacy code that's baked in for 10, 20 years and it's almost like adding lipstick, right? It just doesn't work, especially in today's cloud first world where people are in the DevOps situation where apps are being delivered in five, 10, 15 minutes. Every day, my app almost gets updated on the phone every day. That just doesn't work. So, we wrote these systems from the ground up to be able to easily be placed on to any hardware possible. Now, again, I won't mention the vendor, but in my previous lives, right? There were a lot of hardware boxes and the software was written specifically for those hardware configurations and when they tried to software define it forcefully, it became a huge challenge because it was never designed to do that. Whereas at Veritas, we write the software layer first, we test it on multiple hardware systems, right? And we keep fine tuning it and our ideal situation is to sell the software and the customer wants the hardware, we'll ship them the box. Well, one of the things that struck me in the keynote this morning was what I'll call your compatibility matrix, whether it was cloud, somebody's data store. I mean, that really is your focus and that is a differentiator, I think. Knocking those down so you can, that basically it's a TAM expansion strategy. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, a TAM expansion strategy as well as helping the customer choose what's best for them, right? We're not limiting their choices. We're literally saying we go from the box and drop boxes of the world all the way to the LEMC even with InfoMap, for example. We'll cover end-to-end spectrum because we don't have a dollar per terabyte or dollar per petabyte agenda to store this data within our own cloud situation. All right, Jyoti, we got to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming back in theCUBE. It's good to see you again. No, it's great to be here. All right, keep it right there, everybody, we're back. We're the next guest we're live from Veritas Vision 2017. This is theCUBE.