 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Commvault Future Ready 2020. Brought to you by Commvault. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Commvault's Future Ready event. Welcoming back to the program, fresh off the keynote stage, Sanjay Merchandani. He's the CEO of Commvault. Sanjay, nice job on the keynote and thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, Stu, good to see you again. Yeah, nice to see you too. So Sanjay, about a year and a half into your journey with Commvault as you took over and wow, it looks like you've almost completely refreshed the portfolio there. Let me start a little bit, Future Ready, tell us how you're getting Commvault and its customers ready to be prepared for what happens today as well as the future. Right, so we've been busy. The past 18 months have flown by and the past four or five even faster. The change that we've had to all deal with as organizations has been tremendous. We've been hard at work. When I came on board, I sort of talked about how we were setting out to simplify, innovate and execute all three of those pillars and Future Ready, which I love as a term, completely embodies what I think the work we've been up to and what the world leads today which is really getting it ready for whatever's next. And it's coming together of innovation, simplification and hopefully you'll agree some good execution to bring it all together. So we've been busy. Yeah, Sanjay, you talked a bit about just the moment at time that we are in. Wonder if you can bring us inside your customers. So there's certain things that we saw for a couple of months, people put a pause on, other things absolutely have been accelerated. We talked to customers about their adoption of cloud, digital transformation. It's one of those things that boy, I hope I'm through some of those or can be as agile as possible. But what are you hearing specifically from your customer base and how they're dealing with things? You know, Stu, I touched a little bit on that during my keynote and this time that we're in has really caused, I think, a couple of shifts. The first structural shift was, oh heck, this thing is here to stay and let's get our employees working and productive and keep the businesses running and keeping them safe and everything else. That first shift happened, you know, right on us and about what was it, that March, April and businesses small and big had to figure out how to take, go from their operating model into a remote model. With the remote model you re-prioritized and you thought through what was important at the time and what it was was really getting laptops into the hands of your employees, getting them safe into their working environment, making sure your business processes leaned in that direction. You could take care of your customers and so on. That was sort of the first structural phase. The second structural phase was, okay, how do we really drive productivity? What are the new priorities? What do we need to do? What do we want to invest in? What do we want to pull back from? And from our vantage point from a technology and data point of view, what we're hearing is the themes that if I had a paraphrase of conversations I have at CIOs, it's NCEOs, it's really around, hey, simplification. This is a great time to really simplify and make sure that you're working with a tried and tested. This is not the time to experiment. This is not the time for esoteric. This is really about simplifying and working with a tried and tested. The second is really about focusing on skills. This is, you need to be able to leverage and you need to be able to bring productivity from the people that you have in IT and really focus around that. That's sometimes forgotten. I like to call them the unsung heroes of technology have just been pushed into their homes. They're now doing their jobs longer hours, tougher scenarios, they have no access to their data centers, so on and so forth. So let's think about skills. And the third thing really that has been propelled into this conversation is cloud. So if you were on a journey, you're off the journey, you need to get there quickly, okay? And you need to really nearly leverage a light touch, low touch, remote sort of capability as fast as you can, call it digital transformation, call it whatever you'd like to say, but it is about truly leveraging the cloud in a way that was no longer a one year, two year, three year plan, you just have to bring it right in. Those are the kinds of things we're hearing and dealing with. Yeah, so important, Sanjay, especially that simplicity piece. I remember a few years ago, there were certain customers that were adopting cloud and it was the reminder, oh hey, your data protection and your security, you need to make sure you take care of that when you go to the cloud. And unfortunately, some of the people that are now accelerating things, have to quickly say, oh wait, I can't work this in a few months, I need to take care of this upfront. So help us understand a little bit the announcements that you've made, how are you making sure that you're ready for customers, the simplicity that they need to take advantage of the innovation and opportunity that cloud and solutions provide? Absolutely, and make no mistake. For me, simplification is not just, the technology is easy to use, even though that is a big part of what we're working on and working and delivering through these announcements. But we've also got to make sure that the partnerships that we have lend themselves to what customers need. Engineered better at source, not in the field. And then the ecosystem to make the technology available and consumed commercially in the way that customers would like to keep that simple too. But today, if I just focus on the portfolio, you know, we've, you could say we've completely rebuilt this incredible stack of technology that we've built this company on. And, you know, and we've, and in a nutshell, what we've done is announced a, we've taken our backup and recovery suite and we've saying we've got a new Commvault backup and recovery product. We've got a brand new Commvault disaster recovery product. You can get them together as a unit, as the complete backup and recovery suite, if you would. So that's one big set of offerings. The second, and you know, the second is, we bought HeadVig, sort of a next generation software defined storage technology company last year. And we've been feverishly at work, quietly at work integrating HeadVig into Commvault, not just as a company, but in the technology and our new hyperscale technology, hyperscale X, is the embodiment of those two things coming together. The best of data protection from Commvault and the best storage subsystem to drive that from HeadVig also from Commvault. So the two come together and all of this technology, whether it's the suite that I mentioned, or the hyperscaler, all of it, you can mix and match any way you want with a world-class user interface or user interfaces. If you want, you know, command lines, if you want APIs, we'll give it all of it to you. In addition, we've got announcements around Activate Suite and recently we talked about our partnership with Microsoft with the Metallic Azure sort of combination for customers. So it's a left to right set of announcements with simplification threaded right through it. Yeah, Sanjay, you mentioned partnerships a little bit before the show. You had, of course, the extended partnership with Microsoft with Metallic. Maybe give us just a little bit more color about, you know, how Commvault makes sure they're positioned and working closely with those hyperscalers. Yeah, you know, and we work with all hyperscalers. So, you know, we are probably the most prevalent data protection technology, if you would, in the public cloud. And most of, you know, we talk about over an exabyte that we've helped customers write to the cloud as just one data point. We've been, you know, seen as from the outside in as being the transport, the capability across hybrid cloud scenarios. The partnership with Microsoft and Microsoft Azure in particular is a coming together of these things because customers, when we talk to customers and Microsoft talks to the customers, we hear from them, they want the ability to be, you know, as they get more prevalent in the cloud, as their workloads get more pervasive in the cloud, they want to make sure they've got the same industrial strength data protection cloud in that they had while they were on-prem or primarily on-prem. Our solutions are completely hybrid. And so the partnership really brings together again, you know, technology that's engineered better together, our data protection and their cloud, best of class, our channels working together and making sure that it's easy for customers to work with us and we're available on the Azure marketplace. And our field forces also aligned around it. So it's again a 360 kind of conversation that we can have with customers as much of today's announcements are. Yeah, Sanjay, talk about the hyperscalers. You mentioned the integration of the Hedwig solution, work with DevOps and really the cloud native type solutions. Of course, one of the things everybody was looking at when you were hired to this job is you've got background in the automation and developer world. So, you know, how is that seen in the update to the portfolio? Really that embracing of, you know, cloud native and developer environments. But cloud without automation is not a cloud, right? It's just infrastructure that's put somewhere else. It's deep, deep degrees of automation that really bring cloud to life, right? And I was fortunate to have been in the DevOps world for a while with a marketing product and was very pleasantly surprised when I came to Commvault and saw the deep degrees of automation and workflows that our core technology had. With the Hedwig acquisition, being a platform layer, being the storage layer that is multi protocol and appeals incredibly to DevOps engineers because everything in the product, you know, is callable through an API or a set of APIs. It's rich, it's got workflows and it's multi protocol. So whether you're using, you know, VMs or you're building the next generation container applications or you're just using it object storage, it doesn't matter, we can mix and match it across, you know, private and public cloud environments and it's all callable and it's all programmable and it's all automated in as much as you want it. All right, so Sanjay, I know we can't talk too much about financial pieces where we are in the quarter but one of the things Dave Vellante and I were discussing and looking at Commvault, you know, there's some good data, you know, especially if you look at win rates against some of the newer players in the space, the data that we have from ETR was showing, you know, increased win rates for Commvault. Just could you give us a little bit of your competitive landscape view? You talked about customers don't want to take too much risk, you know, how do you balance between being, you know, a company with a large install base but you want to be, you know, more modern? Oh yeah, and you know, the use cases that we're talking about, the cloud that we're seen as leaders are today's use cases, not yesterday's use cases. And we're winning on the basis of the fact that we respect where customers are coming from. Okay, there's a lot of stuff that runs their business that is still good that isn't in the cloud, that they're working their plans to journey from that to something else as well as where we're leading in areas where they're headed in the public cloud. And we always like to stay one to two steps ahead of the hard problems our customers are going to encounter. So our portfolio is absolutely cloud ready. Our portfolio is rich in that capability and we're not slowing down, you know, we're winning because we have the breadth of technology that we support both, you know, source data that customers want to protect and target scenarios, be it the hyperscalers or anything else where customers want to take it and the flexibility. The second thing, and if you heard the interview I did with Ron from Johns Hopkins, it's the optimization of our technology around each of those cloud scenarios that gives our customers true value around the compute and storage decisions they have to make and we help them make through deep degrees of AI and ML built in. So it's not just about moving bits, it's about optimizing all of that and the entire lifecycle of that data from the point it's created to the point you archived. Excellent. Anjay, I want to let you have the final word. Give us what you want customers to have as the takeaway from today's future ready event. Sure. So first of all, I wanted to thank all our audience here, our customers for being with us. It's, you know, being with us as a customer, being with us and looking at us as a prospect for our technology. We are investing like, you know, we've invested over a billion dollars over a period of time as a company in data protection and we're taking that to a whole new level with the innovations that we're bringing to the table. So, you know, we truly believe that the journey as it pertains to data, the journey to the cloud requires you to be able to think through the lifecycle from storing, protecting, optimizing and using that data all the way through and our solutions can be used independently, best of class across each of them or together, better together. And, you know, I urge you to take a few minutes and look at some of the great innovations we've brought to the table and rest assured that everything we're doing is with the hybrid cloud in mind and is completely cloud optimized. All right. Well, Sanjay Merchandani, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations to you and the team on the work on the updates. Definitely look forward to hearing more in the future. Thanks, Stu. Good to be here. All right, stay tuned. We've got more from Commvault, future ready. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.