 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Veeamon 2019, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to Miami everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. This is day one of Veeamon 2019. The Cube's third year covering Veeam. First year we're in New Orleans, last year, Chicago. Very cool and hip location here at the Fontainebleau Hotel. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Peter Burris. Colin Châtellier is here, he's the manager of storage and compute for Europe at Rabobank. Colin, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Good to see you. Good to be here. So tell us about Rabobank. What are you guys all about? Okay, so Rabobank's obviously a bank. We have two main focuses. First of all, we're trying to be the biggest high street bank in the Netherlands, biggest retail bank in the Netherlands. And we've got, what, 7.3 million customers there in an adult population of 14 million. So that's not bad. And secondly, the Netherlands is only a certain size and we're not going to grow it that much. So the biggest part of our new business is international. And that's, the bank is all focused on providing food and agriculture expertise, loans, FX, spot work, anything that can help people or help businesses improve their efficiencies and get more food from spade to plate. So what are some of your, the drivers in your business that are affecting your technology strategy? Drivers in the business, I guess, again, we've got two different parts of the bank, I should probably explain. So two years ago, we brought the idea of those two different parts of the bank together. Now, that's the retail. The international. The retail, the international. And if you think about it, the international is all wholesale work, the retail is all high street banking. So the retail, those people really want to see their data. They want to see it on the web. They're checking balances, transferring pocket money to their kids. And if that doesn't happen, you know, that's a tragedy and embarrassing. So we can't be responsible for that. As a result, one of our watch words is always on. So we need to make sure that data is always available and we need to make sure that systems are always up for them. Part of that really is, you know, occasionally it won't always be on. So you need to be able to recover very quickly and getting a product that's simple to use for recovery and fast to recover was really part of that strategy. That's where Veeam came in. So when you had to merge those two sort of IT operations, obviously there was more than the data protection side of things, but talk generally about what the challenges were, but then specifically about the data protection piece. Okay, so bringing two IT departments together, of course, gives you a choice. Am I going to use product A or product B or sometimes product A and B and not C? That gave us an opportunity to really do something that's not that common, I think, in the backup world and introduce a bit of churn. Especially in retail environments, we have monthly backups. Sorry, especially in wholesale, I mean, we have monthly backups. And those monthly backups go for anything from one year to 10 years. So trying to get away from a backup product where there's 10 years worth of legacy there to recover, very tricky. But bringing the two banks together gave us that opportunity to say, okay, well, we'll invest in a move. And we really put a whole series of criteria together to try and figure out which one we were going to use. We moved from VMware and Hyper-V. We're moving everything to VMware. And we have a number of other backup products, which I won't name because we're moving away from them. And Veeam was the winner there. Now why? We needed something that would recover quickly. We needed something that would scale to the enterprise. We have 13,000 VMs being backed up today. We needed something that we could deploy reasonably quickly and without too much effort. And actually when we deployed Veeam, we started off in November last year. By the end of January, we were finished. Now there were a couple of 1,000 VMs already on. Oh, I'm sorry. So it took it two months to effectively move out an old backup infrastructure and move in a new one? Sort of correct, yes, for dailies. For monthlies, we haven't touched that yet. So we decided to just bite off one chunk at a time. Because you got 10 years of legacy with your monthlies. We have at least 10 years, yeah. Okay, so, all right, but still. That's pretty quick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now what about cloud, every conference you go to, you see the sign, cloud data management, it's everything's cloud, cloud, cloud. It used to be in your business, the financial services business cloud was an evil word. Is it still, what's your cloud strategy and how does data protection fit in? Well, we have a strategy of public cloud first. That's a lot easier to do for new applications than it is for existing applications, of course. So it tends to be that the existing applications are waiting for a technical refresh or waiting for an application rewrite. And new applications are going straight into the cloud. How we're protecting that, that's at the moment most of our data is held on-prem. Whereas a lot of our applications which can just be easily refreshed and republished is held in the cloud. So those guys, the DevOps teams are performing their own backup, their own recovery. And so, are you able to sort of, for the on-prem stuff, are you trying to sort of make that cloud like sort of substantially mimic the cloud so you're able to do that? Peter, you're always talking about bringing the cloud experience to your data. Is that something that you're able to do or is that just sort of good marketing taglines? It's something that we are just starting to do again. So a year ago, we had a private cloud that was just on the verge of being deployed. But we decided then that strategically we'd mothball that and encourage everybody to go to public cloud and not confuse them with two different choices. That's proving a little difficult. So one of the things that we find is that development teams who are currently in the cloud can develop things with software-defined infrastructure. But when they try and interface with the data or with some of the systems that are on-prem, then they come to a dramatic halt and they have to wait for the normal on-prem processes to kick through. So what we're looking at doing now is we just started a new process, a new project to create an on-prem proof of concept, on-prem cloud that will interact with the off-prem cloud and give the cloud-like experience. So we'll see. So you have that challenge of Agile meets waterfall and now you're trying to create some kind of equilibrium or really trying to modernize the on-prem? What's the strategy there? Well, I don't think it's Agile meets waterfall. I think it's DevOps meets traditional process. And yeah. Okay, but how are we going to do it, you say? Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess what I'm going to do is are you going to find sort of a common ground or are you really going to try to drive that sort of DevOps mentality into the legacy process? We'll continue to have a traditional or legacy depending on what you want to call it, environment there. But we'll also have a software-defined infrastructure environment on-prem. If this proof of concept works, it's being built at the moment or being designed at the moment based on a VMware stack. What role will containers and microservices play in terms of facilitating that transformation? At the moment, we have containers on-prem which are coming with applications, but we don't have a specific container platform which we're offering as a service on-prem. That's just where this container's off-prem, of course, in our Azure cloud. Right, right. So for the on-prem stuff, what does that do for you and where do you see that going? The containers? Yeah. At the moment, we have a policy of not providing a container service on-prem. Oh, sorry, I heard wrong, sorry. Yeah, okay, so that's not a direction that you're going currently. No, but it may be because we're feeling our way forward, I think. But as you think about, for example, banks and financial services companies have been at the vanguard of a lot of digital business practices because your core offering is data and how it gets used. So is your overall business starting to rethink this notion of backup and restore from something that's just there to make sure the data's available to becoming an essential strategic capability that can span between the two modes as you're describing, but a common approach to making sure the data assets aren't compromised by vendor relationships, by application development styles, by locations, is that, are you thinking in those terms of a federated approach to ensure the services on the data that you need? Okay, well that was a very long question. Yes. But it's quite a short answer. Yes, we're thinking about it. No, we haven't done it yet. But I think you're absolutely right. One of the problems could be, for example, we deploy in, I don't know, as your AWS Google and we fall out with one of those cloud providers and we try and move our backup data from provider A to provider B. Is it transportable? Have we got the same policy that's being deployed in each of them? Yeah, you don't want to, that whole thing needs to be. You want to recreate that problem that you got with those 10 years of monthly backups with the new stuff too. Exactly, yeah, yeah. We've already made that mistake. What are the other challenges? Well, but you made it for a good reason. That was the state of the technology at the time and you had to have hardened processes and that was how you did it 10, 15 years ago. One of the other problems, the challenges that you hear from when we talk to financial services organizations is if their data exists, their data companies, as Peter said, but their data exists in hardened silos, again, for good reason. You had to protect that data. It was mission-critical. Regulatory reasons. Family rules type of stuff. Now, as you transform it to the so-called digital business, everybody wants access to that data. And so you've got that tough balancing act. So is that obviously a challenge for you? How are you dealing with that challenge? And data protection generally was unique to each of those silos. So how are you thinking about data protection going forward in terms of busting those silos? Well, I don't think we've ever had silos of data protection. I think our data protection has been uniform. Across the two banks, of course. Yeah, right. So now we've brought them together again. We have, what, different retention characteristics, different ways of using a product. But over the last year and a half, two years, we've pretty much brought in the same processes. But I don't think that any application on-prem or any that will be on the private cloud or the on-prem cloud will have anything different. It will use the same product, the same processes, and perhaps have more access by the development teams, to be able to fire off their own backups at the right time. You're talking about from a data protection perspective. And then potentially other things, like microservices or containers over time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, what's happening at the show here? Things you've learned, anything you've seen that's exciting you? Anything announcements? Well, it's early days, isn't it? It's early days. So I think the best thing for the show so far was last night when it going on the boat, meeting some of the other execs and sharing some experiences with them. I think one of the things I always think is the best practice comes from worst experience. And I don't want to have all that worst experience myself. I want to mind it from everybody else. So I think you can learn more in an hour in a social situation. You can perhaps in two hours in the conference room. So what are you hearing from your peers? What are they doing? Some of the challenges that they're facing? This digital business stuff, is it real? How are they dealing with it? Okay, my peers. I think what they're feeling is that the traditional backup solution, the traditional backup providers are just not quick enough on their feet. Agile in a real sense rather than a... Quotes the marketing sense, yeah. And I think the traditional providers tend to be less grateful for the business, perhaps. You know, I heard about the number of new customers that Veeam are getting today. But they seem to give a lot of attention to those new customers. Now deploying 13,000 VMs in a relatively short period of time, we needed a lot of help from Veeam to overcome the obstacles as we hit them. And they were there when we needed them. And you know, that makes a difference I think because especially when you're protecting your data and you need to be able to restore that data, you need a partner, not a vendor. So it's as much the relationship as the technology is what I'm hearing. I don't think we would get into bed with a vendor who wasn't a partner as well. Oh, in many respects, it's almost like Veeam understands how to solve the problem and their technology is a way of doing it easily and cheaply and reliably. Exactly, yeah, yeah. I want to follow up on that because, you know, some of the large companies I can infer who you're talking about, they might have big established direct sales forces, meat-eating guys that are in the field that just go belly to belly. Veeam, all channel, all indirect, how are they successfully partnering with you in a ways that the other guys may not be? Would that type of go-to-market model? So we used a company called ProAct, a reseller, to buy into Veeam. I guess Veeam trained them up well because they had all the information at their fingertips and they represented us in the negotiation with Veeam. So it took away perhaps some of the conflict that you'll get in an early situation. And then when we needed the direct help from Veeam, Veeam stepped up to the board and started giving that direct help and not cut out the reseller, but the reseller wasn't needed anymore at that point. And that was help from a technology standpoint or a business term standpoint or both? Technology, yeah. Just overcoming the problems. A big organization has got a lot of networks, a lot of LANs, VLANs, and we need to be able to punch holes through those VLANs. So it's quite interesting to be able to be told up front where we need to punch. Make this work. Yeah, great. All right, Colin, well thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, it was great having you. Give you final thoughts on Miami, you're coming in from out of town and you got the tour last night on the boat, what'd you think and impressions of the conference? Well Miami, first of all, it looks like a nice place to live. As we cruised past all of those gigantic homes, I didn't notice anyone in them, so perhaps one's going cheap. The conference, it looks good. I'm always surprised by how big it is. It's my second event. And yeah, they've got a hell of a lot of customers and seem to be loyal customers as well. Nobody has a bad thing to say. Were you here in Chicago last year? I wasn't, I was here in New Orleans. New Orleans, yeah, two years ago. All right, great. Well thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, I appreciate it. All right, keep it right there, we'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Veeamon 2019. Right back.