 Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019, brought to you by Commvault. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Go 19 from Colorado. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We've got a couple of guys joining us with some really cool stuff to talk about. We've got Rob Calusti in the SVP and GM of Metallic, a Commvault venture. And we've got Michael Stem, principal architect from Sirius Computer Solutions. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Well, thank you. Thanks for having us. Yeah, so some big stuff came out yesterday, Metallic. Rob, you are a Commvault OG. I worked with you back like 10 years ago, which can't even believe it's been that long since I was there, but a lot of change in Commvault in the last nine months alone, Metallic came out yesterday. We're seeing a lot of momentum, excitement around what Commvault's doing strategically. Talk to us about Metallic. What is it besides a cool name? And why is this so exciting? It's exciting for me for two reasons, specifically what we're doing with innovation. We've been an innovator and leader for two decades, but focusing on things have changed. People have moved to cloud. People are looking at hybrid solutions and with that come SAS. So to me, it's completing, I don't want to say completing, but getting to that choice that menu of options, the right ones, not too confusing, but the right ones. And so with Metallic, we brought a SAS portfolio to market around Backman Recovery, aimed at some of the more common use cases. And the thing that was really exciting for me about this was we had this IP from the last two decades, yet Sanjay empowered us and said, look, I really want you to innovate quickly. You've got all this IP, put together a startup in the company, marketing people working with engineering, and that's critical with a SAS offer because it's all about experience. All right, so Rob, you've got all this IP. We just had Sanjay on talking about all the patents they have. Kind of going through my head. I'm like, well, if you had all of these pieces, we've been talking about SAS now for quite a few years. Why now? What has changed or what was the enabling piece other than Sanjay, say, and go that made Metallic come to fruition now rather than it hadn't before? Yeah, that's a good one. We've been working with partners and customers. In fact, I just talked to one and said, Rob, I've wanted this for a while. I think a lot of things came together. One, putting together the startup approach to get the teams working cross-functionally, that wasn't something we were accustomed to. So it wasn't just Sanjay saying go. It was kind of doing things a little differently. I think the other thing, looking at the market opportunity that we validated with our customers and analysts, there's a $1.6 billion target addressable market. Many customers are busy. Many customers are accustomed to consuming lots of products, SAS, or cloud. And this just makes sense. So that's why we did it now. All right, well, so Michael, Sirius is a launch partner for Metallic. My understanding, this is 100% built for the channel. Tell us what this means for your world and your customers. Well, we're really excited because this opens up the world of Commvault to a whole group of customers that we wouldn't focus on before with. So we're able to go in with our inside sales teams and with customers that maybe don't have full-time employees for backup to spend multiple hours every day, care and feeding for a larger, more advanced system. So this way, you can offload a lot of that, maybe not the ownership of backup, but at least the management of the infrastructure for you. It takes a lot of the overhead away. They don't have to worry about, okay, what about two sites? How do I manage that? That's a lot of complex stuff. So we're bringing in a company now that has 20 years experience. There's been a lot of new startups in the SAS area, but they don't have 20 years experience of knowing what the customers are looking for in backup and how they do it. And to be honest, you learn a lot from your mistakes. And after 20 years, you made some mistakes. Everybody does, and they still have those mistakes to make. And these guys can all bring that to the customer and then they don't have to worry about it. Yeah, I'd like to add to that in a bit. So that's been the hardest thing is we have 20 years of innovation. We've got the, I'll call it a war chest, 812 patents who has that. And now it's like, okay, SAS customers want this unique experience. There's temptation to dip into the war chest. So we kind of moved everything out of the way and said, let's take a fresh approach. Let's do a whole customer journey map. Let's worry about the experience. So the reason why we're able to innovate so quickly because we had this chest of patents and it enabled us to really focus on the customer and the partner experience to get it right. Can you talk a little bit about the Commvault Ventures? When I saw that, I thought, that's interesting. Is this kind of like what you're talking about, like a startup within Commvault? Yes. Why was that important? It was important to us for two reasons. One, the brand, brand's about experience, right? And we needed to signal that internally. I mean, we're traditionally executing really well in the enterprise space. Yes, we have mid-market and some smaller customers, but we're known for handling big multi-pedabyte customers and we're known for maybe traditional approaches. So the brand allowed us to redefine and attach to that in experience. The Commvault Venture part signaled the stability and the trust in a vendor that's been there for two decades with innovation. That's why we did that. Michael, being a SaaS offering, the go-to-market has to be a little bit different. My understanding, there's also like a 45-day trial, like full-blown, not just some test version of it. How will this change the way, or will it change the way you go to market? It does change it quite drastically because the customer can get involved, they can start playing with it, they can ask for our assistance during any time during that, but the nice thing is, is after that 45 days, you don't lose what you did. It wasn't a, I'm going to download this, I'm going to test it in my own little lab. You can be testing it with real-world scenarios and then flip a switch, you're active, you're going. And what's nice is as that grows, right? I mean, launch day, we're covering 90% of the workloads people are doing and then immediately we're growing it. Where they're going to take this in the future, we'll be able to tie in to some of the old ways with the old Commvault and bring in the new. Do you have an O365 practice that this ties into? We do and we actually have been, we were so excited for this because we were, we've been looking for a way to package not only Office 365, which Commvault has done so well in the past but really touch those other customers that we weren't normally getting into with it and everybody, especially the smaller companies are using Office 365 nowadays. Nobody has exchange on site. So being able to reach those and have that holistic message ease of use, the user interface, as you were saying, is just, it takes what other companies were doing and it just makes it so much simpler. When I saw the trial at 45 days, I don't normally see that. Often it's a 15 day trial and maybe you can extend up to 30 days and one of the things I heard during your keynote this morning was no POCs. Talk to me about that as a differentiator. Yeah, maybe we'll both handle this. So there's two things. One, in this next six months we'll be learning a bit. We're going to evolve just like a SaaS product does, being fresh, so that may change. But what we found in our talk was many of the customers, many of the other SaaS products that don't even have a, you're up in 15 minutes. That's pretty fast. Right, it is. And some of them, they have 30 day trials, but they let you to extend it forever. And so what we found is many customers want to try and end a month back up. So tying it to 15 days isn't enough time to look. I think the unique differentiator in what we did because we remapped all our business systems is if Michael has a customer that he's brought into this trial, he's going to be informed where they are in the trial. He's going to see they did a backup. So just because it is 45 days, we've got all this communication flowing back to the partner so they can immediately say, hey, you've already done a backup, you've done a restore, what else do you need? And we absolutely certainly hope that Michael or someone else that's serious can close it quicker. I don't know. Too many times people with POCs, they download the code and they immediately get pulled onto something else. So now we have a checks and balances. We can communicate with Commvault. We know where they are. If something's stagnating, they've had it for a couple of days, they've moved on to another project, they take a week's vacation, they can come back to it, we can know that, we can engage with them and say, hey, can we help out in some way? And is this, sorry, Stu, starting with Office 365, is that kind of door opener to end point servers, VMs for Metallic? For those mid-market customers? So right now we have three offers, I didn't cover that, so we've got three separate offers, but they're all the same thing, but you can consume VM file SQL. You can buy that separately. If you want to buy Office 365 separately, you can. Or Metallic endpoint backup and recovery. So we have all three of those in the suite and we do anticipate some customers will come in and buy one. We've seen some trial activity already since launch where there's customers trying two or three. So there's a lot of incentive for them to go with multiple products in this. All right, so Rob, Commvault already has its core product releasing on a 90-day cadence, but bring us inside from a development standpoint, Metallic, because now it's a SaaS product, how does that need to change your methodology? What can customers expect from kind of a release cadence and give us a little bit as to what you might expect kind of over the next six months? Sure. So I have my own engineering team, like I said, it's a startup. So we're using a DevOps agile approach. We have two week sprints. And so if there is something critical that we think's either going to be a differentiator, maybe add value to the partner experience on the business system side or make it just that much easier for the customer that much more secure. We absolutely have worked out how to bring fresh features in that don't disrupt our customers. Like all modern SaaS products do. So it'll be a little bit different experience with a SaaS product than say a perpetual product because the touch that we have into the product ourselves. You know, when you talked about the customer experience a few minutes ago, Rob, in terms of even the design of Commvault Ventures, we can't go to any event. Whatever technology we're talking about, customer experience is table stakes, right? And as customers, if you're an IT consumer or whatnot, you are a consumer in your regular life. And so there's all these expectations that come from, I can go on Amazon and get anything that I want in 16 hours or 24 hours. And when we go in to buy software as business folks, that same expectation presents. So the user experience, I'm glad that you brought that up. That's like I said, it's table stakes for any organization, it's make or break. Right, I think for us, that was like most of our focus. And I think to your point, since they can kind of go anywhere now, they can go to Amazon, try something, and they jump and go to Azure, we thought it was really important to connect with the partners. Because the partners are the ones that have usually solved what, five to 10 different IT or business problems. And so we thought it was a smart thing to not only do that quick trial, but really go to market 100% with partners, because they're the ones that help the customer kind of make sense of it all. People get in there, they get frustrated trying 10 different things. So we kind of wanted to have that balance with this sort of offer. Well, and what we love out of this, which is so unique in the industry is, if we have that relationship with them, we know where they're consuming data and storage in the cloud. And with Combo, with Metallic, we can bring our own storage that the customer already has. But there's a lot of customers that don't have that yet. Maybe they just have Office 365, they're dabbling in cloud, make it easy, I can use their storage right away. So having both those options makes our value add here perfect. Rob, maybe it's been called SaaS Plus up on the keynote. So in my mind, one of the beauties of SaaS is, I don't want to worry about anything. I care about my data and everything below that in the stack. It's like ordering delivery pizza. You're taking care of everything there. So snapping a copy onto my own data center stuff, leveraging storage from AWS and Azure. I understand you want flexibility and choice, but how do I get concerned that, why you've just added a whole level of complexity that my customer shouldn't have to worry about? Oh, that's a great question. So it's SaaS out of the box. So all the data, all the control plane in the cloud. The option to be SaaS Plus, what we found in talking and hearing from hundreds of people was, and we thought, they'd say the same thing you did. And there were a variety of them that did. But if some said, hey, I've got a physics issue. I've got 200 terabytes on prem. I like the simplicity of this, or my company's cloud vendor A, or cloud vendor B. I don't like having a copy in that cloud. I've already got my largest, so some people are buying this for a department. They've got the enterprise on one cloud vendor. So back rolling back out of the box SaaS, SaaS Plus are for those unique requirements. And that's why we talk about flexible and on the customer's own terms, we don't force them all with the cloud. If there's compliance or other needs, GDPR, whatever, they can go to that use case for that workload. That makes sense? So yeah, so the news, you know, yesterday, just Michael from you, what's some of the feedback within some of the customers that have been doing the trial? What are some of the things that you're hearing that you're already taking in and gleaning insights from how they're using it? Well, to be honest, what they found with some other SaaS offerings was they were kind of pigeonholed into exactly what they offered and nothing more, nothing less. And having the option of having a transport method on-prem, having your own cloud, all of these options, they were extremely happy to have. They were like, we're no longer being forced, yet it was presented in a way that they don't feel overwhelmed with the different options. As you were saying, by default, you have the storage, one button check, I enter in my credentials, now I'm using my own storage. They make it very simple, works you through the entire thing. The wizards, the way they have really simplified the program, I was really surprised from Commvault because I think the command center, the UI within traditional Commvault, did very good on simplifying things. And they took, I'm like, how can you make it easier? And the UI for Metallic is way, it really talks to the SaaS customers. What are some of the expected business outcomes? I'm thinking like lower TCO, eliminated or lower storage hardware costs, big improvements to like FTE time. What are some of the things that you're expecting customers to gain? To be honest, I think the most exciting thing that I've heard from my customers is that they're able to do more. So they weren't backing up everything that they needed to back up because they didn't have time, they didn't have the expertise. And so now they're going to be able to protect things they've never been able to do in the past just because of those limitations. And hopefully be able to actually see the data and extract insights from that. And I think from the value perspective, what was already mentioned, if they already have infrastructure that they want to leverage, they don't have to go buy something else. A lot of the other offers in the market kind of make you buy, assuming you want to go there. That's one. The other one is, if you look at the market, there's a lot of point products out there. So they start using one, maybe it's not Metallic, that happens. And then it has a scale issue, then they're buying something else. So I think having a portfolio that matches a lot of use cases versus just today, if we're launching a point product, I wouldn't be so excited. But being able to handle the most common workloads across the market, I think that's goodness for them from a complexity and ROI TCO type perspective. Exciting stuff, guys. Well, congratulations on the launch and the expansion of the market. So next year, you got to bring some Metallic customers and we can really dig into it with them and see what's really going on. Yes, we're excited about that. Rob, Michael, thank you for joining us with me on the program today. We appreciate it. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Commvault Go 19.