 We're seeing green here at Veeamon 2022. You're watching theCUBE, Dave Vellante and David Nicholson. Wrapping up our second day of coverage. Dave, good show, good to be back. This is our third show in a row. We're at CubeCon as well. So theCUBE is out there, but same. Every show we go to so far has been, most of the people here haven't been out in two plus years and they're like, hey, let's go, let's hug, let's shake. I got my red band on because we've been on a lot of shows and just being careful. You know, hey, but it's great to see people back. Absolutely. It's such a different vibe than virtual. Virtual sucks, everybody hates it now, but now it's going hybrid. People trying to figure that out. In your view, what's different? What's the same? In terms of in-person versus hybrid, kind of what's happened since. What's different being here now versus say 2019, not that you were here in 2019, but a show in 2019? I think right now there's a certain sense of appreciation for the ability to come and do this. As opposed to on we or another show, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And a personal opinion is that I think that the hybrid model moving forward is going to end up being additive. I don't know that, you know, people say we'll never go back to having in-person the way we did before. I'm holding out hope that that's not the case because I think there's so much value to the kinds of conversations that we have not only here on the set with folks in-person, but just the hallway conversations, the dinner conversations, those are so critical. Not only with between vendors and customers, but between different business units. You know, I came into this thinking, you know, I know Veeam very well, I've known them since the beginning, but you think I'm going to a conference to talk about backup software, and it wasn't like that at all. I mean, this is an overarching, very, very interesting subject to cover. So how is it different? I think people are appreciative. I wouldn't say we're back full throttle 100% back in the game yet, but we're getting there. Some of the highlights. Veeam now number one statistical tie for first place in revenue. There aren't a lot of segments, especially in storage where Dell is not number one. I guess technically Dell is like, I don't know, half a percentage point ahead, but Veeam's going to blow by that unless Dell gets its data- Veeam has a luxury of focus. They can focus like a laser on it. We saw this in the PC era, where we saw Dell's ascendancy because they were focused on PCs. We saw Seagate on disk drives, Intel on microprocessors, Oracle on databases, and Veeam applied that model to what they call modern data protection. So the reason why we think they're going to go past is they're growing at 20 plus percent each year and I can almost guarantee Dell's data protection business isn't, although it's been in a, I sense a downward slope lately. They don't divulge that data but if they were growing nicely, they would be talking about it. So I think they've been kind of hiding that ball, but Dell, you can't count those guys out. They're big. No, you can't and they don't like to lose. They got that EMC DNA still in them. Yeah, you might take your eye off the ball for a little while to focus on other things, but I think it'll be healthy for the industry at large as Veeam continues to take market share. There's definitely going to be pushback from others in the field. But the pure software play and that no hardware agenda thing and all that I think is clearly in Veeam's favor. But we'll see. Dell's got other strengths as do others. I mean, let's not forget, this market is crowded and getting kind of, you got other players, new entrants like Cohesity and Rubik. Rubik, by the way, is the one I was kind of referring to that seems to be, you go to their LinkedIn, they seem to be pivoting to security. I was shocked when I saw that. I'm like, wow, is that just like a desperation move? Is that a way to get your valuation up? Is there something I'm missing? I don't know. I haven't talked to those guys in a little bit, need to get there. But Cohesity and Rubik couldn't get to IPO prior to, you know, the tech sell off, the tech clash, if you will. Veeam didn't need to. Veeam's got 30% EBITDA and has had it for a while. So they've been, they caught lightning in a bottle years ago and then now they got the insight capital behind them. You got new entrants like Clumio, you got Commvault, is out there. You still got, you know, Veritas is still out there competing and, you know, a number of other you got is, wherever HP software landed in the micro strategy. No, not micro strategy. Anyway, in that portfolio of companies that HP sold its software business to, you know, they're still out there. So, you know, a lot of ways to buy backup and recovery software, but these guys being the leaders, no surprise. Yeah, you know, it's, I have to say it, to me, it's a classic story of discipline. Micro focus, sorry. Micro focus, yeah, that's right, that's right. You know, it's funny, I could see that logo on it. I know I've got a notebook at home. But Veeam is a classic example of well-disciplined growth where you're not playing the latest buzzword game and trying to create adjacent businesses that are really, that might sound sexy, but have nothing to do with your core. They've been very, very disciplined about their approach, starting with, you know, looking at VMFS and saying, this is what we're gonna do. And then branching out from there in a logical way. So, they're not out ahead of the tips of their skis in a way that some others have gotten. And those, you know, sometimes swinging for the fence is great, but you can strike out that way also. They've been hitting, you know, you could say they've been hitting singles and doubles just over and over and over again for years now. That's been a great strategy. You've seen this a lot. I mean, I think you watched this at EMC when you were there. It was acquisitions to try to keep the growth up. It was great marketing. I mean, unbelievable marketing. Cloud meets big data. Oh! Yeah. And you'd hear on CNBC, EMC is the cloud company. You're like, eh, I can have a cloud. So, you've seen companies do that to your point about getting ahead of your skis. Veeam's never done that. Veeam's is like, eh, this is the product that works great. Customers love it. They buy it. You know, we got the distribution channel set up. And so that's always been part of their DNA. And I think the other piece is putting meat on the bone of the tagline of modern data protection. When I first heard that, I'm like, hmm, okay. But then when you peel the onion on that, the core is back up in recovery. A lot of focus on recovery. And then the way they, I remember, it was there in the audience when they announced, you know, support for bare metal. People went crazy. I'm like, wow, okay. Because they used to say, never, virtualization forever. Okay, so they beat that drum. And you never say never in this business, do you? And then moving on to cloud and hybrid and containers. And we're hearing about SuperCloud now. And maybe there'll be an edge use case there. It's still unclear what that pattern is. We talked about that with ZEUS, but it's not clear to me where you put your muscle yet in edge. But really being able to manage all that data, that is people talk about data management. That starts to be data management. They've got a footprint that enables them to do that. Yeah, and I'd like to see that same discipline approach that's gotten them here to continue. No need to get on board a hype cycle. What I really love from a business execution perspective from Veeam is the fact that they know their place in terms of their strategic advisory role for end user customers. And their place is largely in partnership with folks in the channel, partners large and small. In a couple of the conversations we had over the last few days, we talked about this idea that there are fewer and fewer seats at the table working with customers. Customers can't have 25 strategic vendor partners and a lot of smaller niche players that focus on something even as important as backup will pretend that they hold the same sort of strategic weight as a hyperscale cloud provider does. They pretend that they're gonna be there in the CXO meetings when they're not. Veeam knows exactly how to best leverage what they do with customers and that's through partners in the channel. Another thing is, new CEO, Anan Eswaran, the fifth CEO, I think I'm correct. Is that right? Ed Veeam, yes. So, two founders and then when Peter McKay came on, he was co-CEO and then, yep, let's see, I think, yep, you're the fifth, okay. So, each of the CEOs kind of had their own mark, right? We asked Anan and the analysts think, what do you want your legacy to be? And I loved his answer. He's like, this is a fragmented business with a lot of adjacencies and we are the leader in revenue but we only have 12% revenue share. I want to take that to 25%, 40%. That's like EMC at 30 plus percent of the storage market. Cisco, 60% of the networking market. Wow, if anybody could ever get there. But so, 25 to 30% of a market, that's big. I liked his demeanor. Thought he had a really good style, philosophy, well-spoken, so new leadership. Obviously, insight brought him in to take them to the next level and really drive, I got to believe, get ready for IPO. We kind of admitted that. Yeah, and IPO for them, one thing he mentioned is that in this case, this is not an IPO, let's high five and go to Vegas and to get table service because now we finally have money. They're not doing, obviously, an injection in capital from an IPO is always a good thing or should be a good thing if handled properly, but that's not their primary driver. So, it'll be very interesting to see if they can hit the timing right, how that works out. Well, and Bill Largent is his predecessor. He took over once the company, excuse me, went private. You have that phone backed up? That's still good in the mic. Once the company went private, well, no, they were always private. Once they got acquired for five plus billion dollars from inside capital, they put Bill in charge. Perfect choice for the transition. And it was like, okay, Bill, it's like when my brother's a sailor. He says, hey, take the wheel, see that lighthouse or see that tree, go for it. Keep it on track, and that's what Bill did. Perfect, and he knew the company, knew where all the skeletons were buried and it was perfect, perfect transition for that. Now they're bringing in somebody who they feel can take it to the next level. They're at a billion. He said he could see five billion and beyond. So that's kind of cool. The other thing was ecosystem. This company's got a really robust ecosystem. All the storage array vendors came on. The backup appliance companies came on to theCUBE and had a presence here. Why? Because this is where all the customers are. This is the leader in backup and recovery. They all want to partner with that leader. Now the other shows as well for the Veeam competitors, but frankly, Veeam competitors, they don't have, like you said, their pure play. Many of them don't have a show like this or it's a smaller event and so they got to be here. And I think the other thing was the ransomware study. What I really liked about Veeam is they not only just talked about it, they not only talked about their solution, they did deep dive surveys and shared a ton of data with guys that knew data. Dave Russell and Jason Buffington, both former analysts. Russell was at Gartner, very well respected, top Gartner analysts for years. Jason Buffington at ESG, who those guys did, always did some really good, still do, deep research. So he had them representing that data but sharing it with the community. Of course it's going to be somewhat self-serving, but it wasn't as blatant, it wasn't nearly as blatant as I often see with these surveys. Gender surveys, I'll look at them. I can tell within like seconds, whether it's just a bunch of marketing, you know what, or just real substance. And this one had real substance to it. Yeah, and it's okay when substance supports your business model. Yeah, cool. It's great. Good marketing. Yeah, that's the best marketing. As an independent, I'm not going to use it. The whole industry can use this and build on it. There were a lot of unanswered questions. What I love about Veeam is they're going back and they did it in February. They updated it just recently. Now they're going back and doing more because they want to get it by country. So they're making investments and then they're sharing that with the industry. I love that. It'll be interesting to see if they continue it over time how things change, if things change. One of the things that we really didn't talk a lot about is I know it's talked about behind closed doors. This idea of stockpiling day zero exploits and the fact that a lot of these things. A lot of these problems arguably could have been headed off had our taxpayer funded organizations shared information with private industry in a more timely fashion. Was it Gina from AWS who gave the example of the not Petya experience in the hospital environment? And that came directly out of, frankly, a day zero exploit that the NSA had identified years earlier within Microsoft's operating system. And somehow others got ahold of that and used it for nefarious means. So the intent to stockpile and hang onto these things is always noble but sometimes the result is less than desirable. So it'll be an interesting conversation. We'd be remiss if we didn't mention the cast and acquisition, the container data protection, small piece of the business today, but strategic in the sense that if you want to appeal to developers, if you want to be in the cloud you better be able to talk containers generally in Kubernetes specifically. So maybe they got to play there as well. They hit virtualization, cloud, containers. Maybe I'm missing something in between but they seem to be catching waves effectively, ransomware, catching waves effectively, again, not in an artificial buzzword driven way but in a legitimate disciplined business growth approach. That's impressive. And I think Danny mentioned this. He said we've been a PLG product led growth company and I think they're evolving now maybe we talk about platforms versus product. It's still a product company but they really wants to build out a super cloud. So we're watching that very closely. I think it is a thing. Got a lot of grief for the term super cloud. Some people wince at it but it's something brewing, there's something different that's not just cloud, public cloud, not hybrid cloud, not private cloud. It's a cross cloud, it's super cloud. All right, Dave, hey, it was a pleasure working with you this week. Always. I mean, the crew was out in Valencia, Spain. Yeah. In fact, they'll be broadcasting, I believe all the way through Friday. That's an early morning thing for the West Coast and but East Coast should be able to catch that easily. Of course you can all check out all the replays on thecube.net. Also YouTube, youtube.com slash Silicon angle. Go to wikibon.com, there's some research there I publish every week and others do as well, maybe not as frequently but we have a great relationship with ETR. I'm going to poke into some data protection stuff in their surveys, see if I can find some interesting data there. And don't forget to go to siliconangle.com which is all the news. This is theCUBE, our flagship production. We're out at Veeamon 2022, thanks for watching.