 Hi, Lisa Martin here with theCUBE's coverage of Veeamon 2021. I've got two alumni joining me. Please welcome back to theCUBE, Danny Allen, Veeam's CTO. Danny, it's great to see you. Yeah, I'm delighted to be here, Lisa. Excellent. Brian Schwartz is here as well, Google director outbound product management. Brian, welcome back to the program. Thanks for having me again. Excited to be here. Excited to be here. Yes, definitely. We're going to be talking all about what Veeamon and Google are doing today, but let's go ahead and start, Danny, with you. Veeam's vision is to be the number one trusted provider of backup and recovery solutions for modern data protection. Unpack that for me. Trust is absolutely critical, but when you're talking about modern data protection to your customers, what does that mean? Yeah, so I always tell our customers there's three things in there that are really important. Trust is obviously number one, and Google knows this. You've been the most trusted search provider forever. And so we have 400,000 customers. We need to make sure that our products work. We need to make sure that they do data protection, but we need to do it in a modern way. And so it's not just backup and recovery. That's clearly important. It's also all of the automation and orchestration to move workloads across infrastructures, move it from on-premises to the Google Cloud, for example. It also includes things like governance and compliance because we're faced with ransomware and malware and security threats. And so modern data protection is far more than just backup. It's the automation, it's the monitoring, it's the governance and compliance, it's the ability to move workloads. But everything that we look at within our platform, we focus on all of those different characteristics and to make sure that it works for our customers. One of the things that we've seen in the last year, Danny, big uptick in a ransom, we're obviously the one that everyone is the most familiar with right now, the colonial pipeline. Talk to me about some of the things that Veeam has seen, what your 400,000 customers have seen in the last 12 months of such a dynamic market, a massive shift to work from home and to supporting SaaS workloads and things like that. What have you seen? Well, certainly the employees working from home, there's a massive increase in the attack surface for organizations because now instead of having three offices, they have hundreds of locations for their end users. And so it's all about protecting their data at the same time as well. There's been this explosion in malware and ransomware attacks. So we really see customers focusing on three different areas. The first is making sure that when they take a copy of their data, that it is actually secure and we can get into immutability and keeping things offline, but really taking the data, making sure it's secure. Second thing that we see customers doing is monitoring their environment. So this is both inspection of the compute environment and of the data itself, because when ransomware hits, for example, you'll see change rates on data explode. So secure your data, monitor the environment. And then lastly, make sure that you can recover intelligently is what I'll say, because the last thing that you want to do if you're hit by ransomware is to bring the ransomware back online from a backup. And so we call this secure recover or secure restore. We really see customers focusing on those three areas. And that restoration is critical there. Because as we know these days, it's not if we get hit with ransomware, it's really a matter of when. Let's go ahead now and go into the Beam Google partnership. Jenny, talk to me about it from your perspective, the history of it, the strength of the partnership, all that good stuff. Yeah, so we have a very deep and long and lengthy relationship with Google on a number of different areas. So for example, we have 400,000 customers, where do they send their backups? Most customers don't want to continue to invest in storage solutions on their premises. And so they'll send their data from on premises and tear it into Google Cloud storage. So that's one integration point. The second is when they're running workloads within the clouds, so this is now cloud native, if you're running on top of the Google Cloud platform, we are inside the Google marketplace and we can protect those workloads. A third area is around the Google VMware engine. There's customers that have a hybrid model where they have some capacity on premises and some in Google using the VMware infrastructure. And we support that as well, that's a third area. And then a fourth and perhaps the longest running, Google is synonymous with containers and especially Kubernetes. They were very instrumental in the foundations of Kubernetes and so our K10 product, which does data protection for Kubernetes, is also in the Google marketplace. So a very long and deep relationship with them and it's to the benefit of our customers. Absolutely and I think I just saw the other day that Google celebrated the search engine, it's 15th birthday and I thought, what did we do 16 years ago when we couldn't just find anything we wanted? Bryan, talk to me about it from Google's perspective of the Beam partnership. Yeah, so as Danny mentioned, it's really multifaceted. It really starts with a hybrid scenario. There's still a lot of customers that are on their journey into the cloud and protecting those on-premises workloads and in some senses even using Beam's capabilities to move data to help migrate into the cloud is I'd say a great pillar of the relationship. But as Danny mentioned, increasingly, more and more primary applications are running in the cloud and the ability to protect those and have the great features and capabilities that Beam provides, whether it be for GCBE or VMware, capability in Google Cloud or things like GKE or Kubernetes offering, which as mentioned, we've been deep and wide in Kubernetes, we really birthed it many, many years ago and have a huge successful business in managing and hosting containers that having Beam's capabilities to add to those, it really adds to our ecosystem. So we're super excited about the partnership. We're happy to have this great foundation to build together with Beam into the future. And Danny, Beam launched just been in February a couple of months ago, Beam backup for Google Cloud platform. Talk to us about that technology and what you're announcing at Beam on this year. Yeah, sure. So back in February, we released the first version of the Beam backup for GCP product in the marketplace. And that's really intended to protect, of course, IaaS, infrastructure as a service workloads, running on top of GCP. And it's been very, very successful. It has integration with the core platform. And what I mean by that is if you do a backup in GCP, you can copy that backup on-premises and vice versa. So it has a light integration at the data level. What we're about to release later on this summer is version two of that product that has a deep integration with the Beam platform via what we call the Beam service platform APIs themselves. And that allows a rich bi-directional interaction between the two products that you can do not just day one operations, but also day two operations. So you can update the software, you can harmonize schedules between on-premises and in the cloud. It really allows customers to be more successful in a hybrid model where they're moving from on-premises to the cloud. And that seems to be really critically important. As we talk about hybrid cloud all the time, customers are in hybrid, they're living in the hybrid cloud for many reasons, whether it's acquisition or just the nature of lines of business leveraging their cloud vendor of choice. So being able to support the hybrid cloud environment for customers and ensure that that data is recoverable is table stakes these days. Does that give Beam an advantage over your competition, Danny? It does, absolutely. So customers want the hybrid cloud experience. What we find over time is they do trend towards the cloud. There's no question. So if you have the hybrid experience, if they're sending their data there, for example, a step one, a step two, of course, is just to move the workload into the cloud. And then step three, they really start to be able to unleash their data. If you think about what Google is known for, they have incredible capabilities around machine learning and artificial intelligence. And they've been doing that for a very long time. So you can imagine customers after they start putting their data there, they start putting their workloads there, they want to unlock it and to leverage the insights from the data that they're storing. And that's really exciting about where we're going. Let's say we're early days for most customers, they're still kind of moving and transitioning into the cloud. But if you think of the capabilities that are unlocked with that massive platform in Google, it just opens up the ability to address big challenges of today, like climate change and sustainability and all the healthcare challenges that we're faced with. It really is an exciting time to be partnered with Google. Brian, let's dig into the infrastructure and the architecture from your perspective. Help us unpack that and what customers are coming to you for help with. Yeah, so Danny mentioned the prowess that Google has with data and analytics and AI. I think we're pretty well known for that. There's a tremendous opportunity for people in the future. The thing that people get just right out of the box is the access to the technology that we built to build Google Cloud itself, just the scale and technology. It's just incredible. It's a fact that we have eight products here at Google that have a billion users. And when you have, most people know these search and maps and Gmail and all these things. When you have that kind of infrastructure, you build a platform like Google Cloud Platform and the network as a perfect example, the network endpoints, they're actually close to your house. There's a reason our technology is so fast because you get onto the Google private network, someplace really close to where you actually live. We have thousands and thousands of points of presence spread throughout the world. And from that point forward, you're riding on our internal network, you get better quality of service. The other thing I like to mention is the Google Cloud storage that Veeam is built on, our object storage, it's the same technology that underpins YouTube and other things that most people are familiar with. And you just think about that for a minute. You can find the most obscure YouTube video and it's gonna load really fast. You're not gonna sit there waiting for like two minutes, waiting for something to load. And that same underlying technology underpins GCS. So when you're gonna go and go back to an old restore, to do a restore, it's gonna load fast, even if you're on one of the more inexpensive storage classes. So it's a really nice experience for data protection. It has this global network properties you could restore to a different region if there was ever a disaster. There's just the scale of our foundation of infrastructure. And also, Danny mentioned it, we're super proud about the investments that Google has made for sustainability. Our cloud runs on 100% renewable energy at the cloud at our scale. That's a lot of green energy. We're happy to be one of the largest consumers of green energy out there. And make continued investments in sustainability. So we think we have some of the greenest data centers in the world. And it's just one more benefit that people have when they come to run on Google Cloud. I don't know what any of us would do without Google Cloud platform or Google Cloud storage. I mean, you just mentioned all of the enterprise things as well as the at home. I got to find this really crazy obscure YouTube video. But as demanding customers as we are, we want things ASAP and it's the same thing if an employee can't find a file or a calendar has been deleted or whatnot. Let's go into finish our time here with some joint customer use case examples. Let's talk about backing up on-prem workloads to Google Cloud storage using existing Veeam licensing. Danny, tell us about that. Yeah, so one of the things that we've introduced at Veeam is this Veeam universal licensing. And it's a completely portable license. You can be running your workloads on-premises now and on a physical system. And then you can make that portable to go to a virtual system. And then if you want to go to the cloud, you can send that data up to the workload up to the cloud. One of the neat things about this transition for customers from a storage perspective, we don't charge for that. If you're backing up a physical system and sending your backup on-premises, we don't charge for that. If you want to move it to the cloud, we don't charge for that. And so as they go through this, there's a predictability. And customers want that predictability so much that it's a big differentiating factor for us. They don't want to be surprised by a bill. And so we just make it simple and seamless. They have a single licensing model and it's future-proof. As they move forward on the cloud journey, they don't have to change anything. Tell me what you mean by future-proof. As a marketer, I know that term very well, but it doesn't mean different things to different people. So for Veeam's customers, in the context of the expansion of the partnership with Google, the opportunities, the choices that you're giving customers, to your customers, what does future-proof actually deliver to them? It means that they're not locked into where they are today. If you think about a customer right now that's running a workload on-premises, maybe because they have to. They need to be close to the data that's being generated or feeding into that application system. Maybe they're locked into that on-premises model. Now, they have one of two choices when their hardware gets to the end of life. They can either buy more hardware, which locks them into where they are today for the next three years or the next four years, or they can say, you know what, I don't want to lock into that. I want to model a license that is portable that maybe 12 months from now, 18 months from now, I can move to the cloud. And so at future-proof, and it doesn't give them another reason to stay on-premises, it allows them the flexibility that licensing is taken off the table because it moves with you that there's zero thought or consideration that locks you into where you are today. And that's exciting because it unlocks the capabilities of the cloud without being handicapped, if you will, by what you have on-premises. Excellent, let's go into the second use case, lift and shift in that portability. Brian, talk to us about it from your perspective. Yeah, so we obviously constantly are in discussions with our customers about moving more applications to the cloud. And there's really two different kind of approaches. So lift and shift and modernization. Do you want to change and run on Kubernetes when you come to the cloud as you move it in? In some cases, people want to do that or they're going to obviously build a new application in the cloud. But increasingly, we see a lot of customers wanting to do lift and shift. They want to move into the cloud relatively quickly. As Danny said, there's like compelling events on like refreshes. And in many cases, we've had a number of customers come to us and say, look, we're going to just exit our data centers. We did a big announcement with Nokia. They're going to exit 50 data centers in the coming years around the world and just move that into the cloud. In many cases, you want to lift and shift that application to do the migration with as little change as possible. And that's one of the reasons we've really invested in a lot of enterprise, more classic enterprise support type technologies. And also we're super excited to have a really wide set of partners and ecosystem like the folks here at Veeam. So the customers can really preserve those technologies, preserve that operational experience that they're already familiar with on prem and use that in the cloud. It just makes it easier for them to move to the cloud faster without having to rebuild as much stuff on the way in. And that's critical. Let's talk about one more use case. And that is native protection of workloads that run on GCP. Danny, what are you enabling customers to do there? Well, so we actually merge the capabilities of two different things. One is we leverage the native APIs of GCP to take a snapshot. And we merge that with our ability to put it in a portable data format. Now, why is that important? Because you want to use the native capabilities of GCP. You want to leverage those native snapshots. The fastest way to recover a file or the fastest way to recover a VM is from the GCP snapshot. However, if you want to take a copy of that and move it into another locale or you want to pull it back on-premises for compliance reasons or put it in a long-term storage format, you probably want to put it in GCS or in our portable storage format. And so we merge those two capabilities, the snapshot and backup into a single product. And in addition to that, one of the things that we do, again, I talked about predictability, we tell customers what that policy is going to cost them. Because if, for example, a customer said, well, I like the idea of doing my backups in the cloud, but I want to store it on-premises, we'll tell them, well, if you're copying that data continually, what do the network charges look like? What do the CPU and compute charges look like? What do the storage costs look like? So we give them the forecast of what the cost model looks like, even before they do a single backup. That forecasting has got to be key, as you said, with so much things that we can't predict going on in this world, the last year has taught us that with a massive shift to the acceleration of digital business and digital transformation, it's really critical that customers have an idea of what their costs are going to be, so that they can make adjustments and be agile as they need the technology to be. Last question, Brian, is for you. Give us a view and all the beam-on attendees, what can we expect from the partnership in the next 12 months? You know, we're excited about the foundation of the partnership across hybrid and in-cloud for both VMs and containers. I think this is the real beginning of a long-standing relationship, and it's really about a marriage of technology. You think about all the great data protection and orchestration, all the things that Danny mentioned, married with the cloud foundation that we have at scale, this tremendous network. We just signed a deal with SpaceX in the last couple of days to hook their satellite network up to the Google Cloud network, chosen again, because we just have this foundational capability to push large amounts of data around the world. And that's, for YouTube, we signed a deal with Univision, same type of thing, just massive media being pushed around the world. And if you think about it, that same foundation is used for data protection. Data protection, there's a lot of data, and moving large sets of data is hard. We have just this incredible prowess, and we're excited about the future of how our technology and Veeam's technology is going to evolve over time. Veeam and Google, a marriage of technology. Guys, thank you so much for joining me, sharing what's new, the opportunities that Veeam and Google are doing me delivering to your joint customers. Lots of great stuff. We appreciate your time. Thanks, Lisa. Thank you, Lisa. For Danny Allen and Brian Schwartz, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Veeam on 2021.