 From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. Okay, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's coverage here in Miami Beach, Florida at the Fontainebleau Hotel for Acronises Global Cyber Summit 2019, it's an inaugural event with cyber protection, the new category that's emerging. It's been really exciting with platforms that really protect the data, protect cyber, data protection is evolving to cyber protection. This is part of the Cloud 2.0 coverage that we've been covering on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. Over the past year, we're seeing more and more modernization of IT and systems. We're here with Ryan Davis, Director of Enterprise Sales for Acronis. He's out on the front lines. This company has great platform and a great field team out pushing the envelope, educating customers, having great success. Thought it would be great to have you on Ryan. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. So one of the things that I've observed and noticed with you guys is that you have very strong field customer presence. You guys do a great job across the board on a direct touch basis, but also a huge channel operation. So you guys sell a lot through the channel, which is all good stuff, but you still got to talk to the big company, still got to go to large enterprises where you're having success, you're doing that. What are some of the things that you're seeing when you're out pitching clients on Acronis? What are some of the concerns that you're hearing? What are the patterns? What's going on in the general broader market that's teasing out the Acronis value proposition? Sure, absolutely. So really where a lot of the focus and a lot of the attention is is on the edge, right? So five years ago, all the data was generated, produced and analyzed in the core in the data centers, whereas now with the IoT devices, the proliferation of smart devices generating the data, they can't send it all to one central location. So networks are springing up out there in a distributed manner, and they have to be able to secure those smart devices and those edge networks, right? And that's where Acronis has a really compelling story, especially for enterprise, right? Because while they have a lot of consistency in the core, there's a lot of diversity on the edge, right? So it creates challenges for their IT teams to be able to manage it so we can work with their field teams to provide a platform that can actually secure the devices in place and then protect them as well. So what's the pitch? Give us the pitch on that problem that you just addressed because that is legit. The edge is springing up, you're seeing more and more edge cases and there's, the outer edge is wearables, right? But the industrial edge, the company's edge, where you guys have a solution, it's challenging. The surface area for attacks are high, you have data as a challenge, you move compute to the data, you move data across the network, these are all costs, so costs are going up too. So with that problem, what is the pitch? Sure, well it really depends on who you're talking to, but there's two levels to it, right? So when you talk in industrial networks, the cost of downtime is huge. You have 1200 employees at an automotive plant and you have a key industrial controller goes down and that plant stops production, right? The cost is enormous. At the plant level, they feel that pain, so they recognize the need for disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities. But when you start moving up a level at the executive level, it's what's really compelling and what's sexy for them and that's really enabling digital transformation. And so I mentioned the concept of diversity a little bit earlier today. It's really hard for IT teams to do things on the edge when they may have 20,000, 40,000 edge devices that are going to run from NT, XP, up to the most modern operating systems. It's difficult to implement a solution that's going to touch all of those devices. And backup and disaster recovery is critical for that because if you're going to touch that many devices, you need the rollback capability. So being able to communicate a path forward to digital transformation on the edge is what is really exciting a lot of our executive customers. All right, so pretend I'm a customer for a minute. I'm like, hey Ryan, so hey, love the pitch, but I had XYZ's data recovery company just came in earlier. They say they got an amazing platform. Why are you different? Why should I not go with them? Why should I go with you? Sure, absolutely. Well, all the competing vendors, all they know is the data center, right? So Acronis, part of our unique value proposition is not just the technology, it's really people processes and technology, right? So our experience working with industrial companies, pharmaceutical companies, working in compliant GXP, NERC SIP, right? This allowed us to develop expertise to come in not just with our product and the tech, but with people that know their environments and processes for successful implementation that other vendors can't bring. And our relationship with key automation vendors, we have our partners, Honeywell, Emerson, that embed our product. These are leading automation vendors that touch thousands of enterprises. And again, those experiences give us an understanding of these environments that other companies don't have. All right, so now I can come back and say, okay, well Ryan, I like what you're saying, but I don't want to boil the ocean over. Sure. How do I see, I don't see a path from what you're saying to execution. How can you help me figure this out? What do you offer me as a client, if I'm the client? How do I get started? Is there a methodology, land, adopt, expand? How do you guys do that? Absolutely. Well, again, every customer is going to be different, right? So, but we don't like to boil the ocean either. What we're talking about is a path to digital transformation. We're not talking about the end result, right? So the first piece, the land is always back up, right? That's when you back up the system, that provides a rollback mechanism. So that provides an opportunity for you to do a lot more things with the computer. But the first piece is always just an assessment, right? You have to do an assessment, take stock of what you have. And Acronis is building technologies around discovery to help customers wrap their arms around these environments to make decisions of what they should do. So what's in it for me when I hear a platform, I hear about maybe complexity. Is platform really going to be the silver bullet? How do you manage that concern? Sure, sure. Well, most enterprises have at least five to seven different data protection solutions out there, right? So when you start talking about platform, you start talking kind of jargon words like unifying, consolidating their data protection suite. And that's really what Acronis is trying to do, but not just in backup, but also offering more services through a single platform. So reducing the overall stack of tools that they're using to manage these environments. And again, going back to the edge, they don't have their big IT team that is versed in managing complex applications, right? You have controls engineers, plant engineers, scientists, right? That are interacting with these devices just enough to be dangerous. I think of it like a mechanic, right? So he's been working on cars his whole life, he's very familiar with carburetors and brakes, but now he gets a Tesla that's got sensors all over the place and infotainment systems and that run diagnostics. That doesn't make him an expert in that computer, right? So what Acronis is trying to do is provide you an easy-to-use platform that can solve multiple problems. So that way a non-IT expert can service their compute infrastructure. So you guys have a good story for the edge. Also, one story that's coming up here is ransomware. Correct. Ransomware is one of those disruptions that wasn't factored into the design of old school legacy data protection and recovery systems. Those disruptions were hurricane, floods, some sort of mechanical failure, not a logical vector. In this case, security was going up high frequency. More and more every day, ransomware, malware, zero day, others, incidents are on the rise. So more disruption. You guys are coming from that angle. Well, we're building security first into the platform, right? And that's a pivot that we made over the last 12 to 24 months. The first piece of that has already been released, which is called Active Protection, which is a module that actually monitors for changes and can prevent unauthorized changes to the file system like encryption, right? And so we're the only backup application that creates that proactive layer of protection. Everybody else is only going to be able to recover and be reactive. So we're trying to create a layered approach there and improve our customer security posture through an agent that's, they would need to do the backup anyways. All right, so final track I want to chat with you about is take us through the real life use case of an ideal sales process motion that encapsulates this modern era challenges and opportunities. You can, you don't have to name the customer's name, you can use an anonymized case, but take us through what is a typical motion for you guys, were you successful? And what does it look like? Sure, absolutely. So it's pretty consistent. And I would say a pretty simple sales motion, right? The first piece is you have to do an assessment and a basic inventory in terms of what platforms are you going to have out there, right? And then you're going to assess the sites that you have because you need to create a deployment plan and edge environments. It's not like the data center where you're just going to log into SCCM and push this out to your thousands of devices, right? They got to go to 40, 60 different plants, right? So you have to build typically a 12 month deployment plan where you're going to hit all of these different sites, build change windows, build maintenance windows. But before you can get to that, we do a POC onsite where you touch, make sure that you have compatibility with the automation vendors, make sure you have compatibility with these networks, which are, again, very diverse and customized at each plan. Once you have a validated deployment process, you build out a timeline where you go site to site to site to deploy it. Take us through a POC, what does that look like? What's a typical POC for you guys? Sure, it's very simple based on what the ultimate objectives are. Most of our customers on the edge are primarily interested in business continuity, which will be backup, system recovery, application restore, right? On the edge, it's not much about the data. It's about securing the application that's performing the work. And so we protect the system, allow them to roll it back. Once you validate that on the different platforms that they have, they're ready to move forward. And workloads are key criteria in all this. That's a key factor. Absolutely, distributed control systems, R&D systems, lab systems, right? They have a lot of different types of applications you're not going to see in the data center, and we just want to get validated. So you hit your number? Absolutely, every year. Over quota? Every year? Ryan, thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing stories from the field. Really appreciate it. Appreciate it, have a great one. Cube coverage here in Miami Beach, not a bad venue for a conference. This is the first conference that Acronis is putting on around cyber protection. Acronis is Global Cyber Summit 2019. Cyber protection, new category emerging from the data protection world. This is the big story here at the Cube's covering. Two days, we'll be back with more after this short break.