 Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you by Veritas. Veritas Vision 2017 everybody. We're here at the Aria Hotel. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of VTAS, hashtag VTAS vision. And this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stuart Miniman, who is my co-host for the week. We heard Richard Branson this morning. The world-renowned entrepreneur, Sir Richard Branson, came up from the British Virgin Islands where he lives in the Caribbean. And evidently he was holed out during the hurricane in his wine cellar, but he was able to make it up here for the keynote, we saw on Twitter, so great keynote, we'll talk about that a little bit. We saw on Twitter that he actually stopped by the Hitachi event, Hitachi Next for women in tech. A little mini event that they had over there. So a pretty cool guy, some of the takeaways, I mean he talked a lot about, well first of all, welcome to day two. Thanks Dave. Yeah, and people are pretty excited, sometimes they bring in kind of those marquee guests, someone that's going to get everybody to say, okay, wait, it's day two, I want to get up early, get in the groove, and some really interesting topics. I mean talking about, thinking about the community at large, one of the things I loved he talked about, I've got all of these, I've got hotels, I've got different things, we draw a circle around it, think about the community, think about the schools that are there, think about, if there's people that don't have homes, all these things to giving back to the community says we can all do our piece there, and talking about sustainable business. I mean as far as, I mean we do a lot of these as you know, and as far as the keynote speakers go, I thought he was one of the better ones, certainly one of the bigger names. I mean some of the ones that we've seen in the past that I think are comparable, Bill Clinton at Dell World 2012 was pretty epic. There's a reason that Bill Clinton is known as the orator that he is. Yeah, and so he was quite good, and then Robert Gates, both at ServiceNow and Nutanix, Condi Rice at Nutanix, both very impressive, Malcolm Gladwell who's been on theCUBE, and Nate Silver who's also been on theCUBE, again very impressive, Thomas Friedman we've seen at the IBM shows, the author, the guy who wrote the Jobs book, very very strong. Oh yeah, yeah. Come on, help me. Walter Isaacson. Walter Isaacson was at Tableau, so you've seen some. Yeah, I've seen Elon Musk, you know also at the Dell show. Oh I didn't see Elon, okay. I think that was the year you didn't come, so. So I'd say Branson from the ones I've seen, I don't know how he compared to Musk, was probably the best I think I've ever seen. Very inspirational, talking about the disaster, they had really well thought out and well produced videos that he sort of laid in. The first one was sort of a commercial for Richard Branson and who he was and how he was passionate for changing the world and which was so genuine. And then a lot of stuff on the disaster in the British Virgin Islands, I mean the total devastation, and then he sort of went into his passion for entrepreneurism, what he sees as an entrepreneur, he sort of defined it as somebody who wants to make the world a better place, innovations, disruptive innovations to make the world a better place. And then had a sort of interesting Q&A session with Lynn Lucas. One of the lines he said, people you don't go out with the idea that I'm going to be a business man, I want to build something, I want to create something. I love one of the early anecdotes he said when he was in school and he had, what was it, a newsletter or something he was writing against the Vietnam War and the school said well you can either stay in school or you can keep doing your thing. He said well that choice is easy, bye bye. And when he's leaving they said well you're either going to end up in jail or be a millionaire, we're not sure. And he said well what do you know, I ended up doing both. You know so. So he is quite a character and just, you know very understated but he's got this aura that allows him to be understated and still appear as a sort of mega personality. You know so he talked about, actually some of the interesting things he said about, you know rebuilding after Irma, obviously got to build stronger homes and he really sort of pounded reducing the reliance on fossil fuels and you know can't be the same old, same old, basically calling for a Marshall Plan for the Caribbean. One of the things that struck me and he got, you know it's a tech audience, generally a more liberal audience, he got you know some fund, you know applause for that. But he said you know you guys are about data and you don't just ignore data and one of the data points that he threw out was that the Atlantic Ocean, some points during Irma was 86 degrees which is quite astounding. So you know he's basically saying time to make a commitment to not retreat from the Paris Agreement. And then, you know he also talked about from an entrepreneurial standpoint and building a company that, you know taking note of the little things he said makes a big difference and talking about open cultures, letting people work from home, letting people take you know unpaid sabbaticals. He did say unpaid. And then he you know touted his new book Finding My Virginity which is the sequel to losing my virginity. So it was all very good, you know some of the things to be successful you need to learn, to learn, you need to listen. You know sort of an age old bromide but somehow it seemed to have more impact coming from Branson. And then actually then Lucas asked one of the questions that I put forth was what's his relationship with Musk and Bezos. And he said he actually is very quite friendly with Elon and of course they are sort of birds of a feather with the all three of them with the rocket ships. And he said we don't talk much about that. We just sort of specifically in reference to Bezos. But overall I thought it was very strong. Yeah Dave what was the line I think he said is you want to be friends with your competitors but you know fight hard against them all day. You know go drinking with them at night. Fight like crazy during the day, right? So that was sort of the setup. And again I thought Lynn Lucas did a very good job. I mean he's, I guess in one respect he's an easy interview cause he's such you know when you interview these dynamic figures they just sort of talk and they're good. But she kept the conversation going and asked some good questions and wasn't you know intimidated which you can be sometimes by those big personalities. So I thought that was all good. And then we turned into, which I was also surprised you know and appreciative that they put Branson on first. I mean a lot of companies would have held him to the end. That all right let's get everybody in the room and we'll force them to listen to our product stuff and then we can you know get the highlight, the headliner. Veritas chose to do it differently. Now maybe it was a scheduling thing. I don't know. But that was kind of cool. Go you know go right to where the action. It's not like when you even watch 60 minutes you want to see the headline show right away and that's what they did so from a content standpoint I was appreciative of that. Yeah absolutely and then of course they brought on David Noy who we're going to have on in a little while and went through really the update. So really it's the expansion Dave of their software defined storage. The family of products called InfoScale. Yesterday we talked a bit about Veritas HyperScale. So that is they've got the HyperScale for OpenStack. They've got the HyperScale for containers and then filling out the product line is the Veritas Access which really their scale up NAS solution including they did one of the classic unveils of Veritas software company. It was a little odd to me to be like oh and here's an appliance for the Veritas bezel. Partnership with Seagate. So you know they said very clearly look if you really want it simple and you want it to come just from us and that's what you'd like. Great here's an appliance trusted supplier. We've put the whole thing together but that's not going to be our primary business. That's not the main way we want to do things. We want to offer the software and you can choose your hardware piece. Once again knocking on some of those integrated hardware suppliers with the 70 points of margin and then the last one one of the bigger announcements to the show is the Veritas cloud storage which they're calling is object storage with brains and one thing we want to dig into those brains you know what is that functionality because object storage from day one always had a little bit more intelligence than the traditional storage. Metadata is usually built in so where is the artificial intelligence, machine learning, you know what is that knowledge that's kind of built into it because you know I find Dave on the consumer side I'm amazed these days is how much extra metadata and knowledge gets built into things. So on my phone I'll start searching for things and it'll just have things appear. I know you're not fond of the automated assistance but I've got a couple of them in my house so I can ask them questions and they are getting smarter and smarter over time and they already know everything we're doing anyways. You know I like the automated assistance. We have, well my kid has an echo but what concerns me Stu is when I am speaking to those automated assistants about hey maybe we should take a trip to this place or that place and then all of a sudden the next day on my laptop I start to see ads for trips to that place I start to think about wow this is strange that I worry about the privacy of those systems they're going to, they already know more about me than I know about me but I want to come back to those three announcements we're going to have David and Noyan. Hyperscale access and cloud objects so some of the things we want to ask that we don't really know is the hyperscale is it block, is it file, is it open stack specific? But it's generally. They have the two flavors one for open stack and of course open stack has a number of projects so I would think you could be able to do block and file but we'd definitely love that clarification and then they have a different one for containers. And so yeah. So I kind of don't understand that right because is it open stack containers or is it Linux containers? Well containers are always going to be on Linux and containers can fit with open stack but we've got their chief product officer and we've got David and Noyan so we'll dig into all of those. And then yeah the access piece. You know after the apocalypse there are going to be three things left in this world. Cockroaches, mainframes and Dothill Raider Rays. So you know Seagate was up on stage. Seagate bought this company called Dothill which has been around longer than I have and so like you said that was kind of strange seeing an appliance unveil from the software company but hey they need boxes to run on this stuff. It was interesting too the engineer Abhijit came out and he talked about software defined and we've been doing software defined is what he said before the term way before the term ever came out. It's true Veritas was if not the first one of the first software defined storage companies. Oh yeah. And you know the problem back then was there were always scaling issues. There were performance issues and now with the advancements in microprocessor and DRAM and flash technologies. You know software defined is plenty of horsepower. Well Dave 15 years ago the fud from every storage company was you can't trust storage functionality just on some generic server. Minds me back you know I go back 20 years it was like oh you wouldn't run some mission critical thing on Windows. You know it's always that's not ready for primetime it's not enterprise grade and now of course everybody's on the software defined bandwagon. Well and of course when you talk to the hardware companies and you call them hardware companies specifically HPE and Dell EMC as examples and you know Lenovo et cetera. Lenovo not so much the Chinese sort of embrace hardware. And even Hitachi is trying to rebrand themselves you know very much a hardware company but they've got software assets. Well so when you and when you work at EMC I mean you know when you sat down and talked to the guys like Brian Gallagher he would stress oh all my guys all my engineers are software engineers you know we don't we're not a hardware company. So there's a nuance there right. It's sort of more of the delivery and the culture and the ethos which I think defines the software culture and of course the gross margins and then of course the cloud object piece. We want to understand what's different from you know object storage embeds metadata in the data and obviously is a lower cost sort of option think of S3 as the sort of poster child for cloud object storage. And so Veritas as an arms dealer is putting their hat in the ring kind of late right. I mean there's a lot of object going on out there but it's not really taken off other than with the cloud guys. So I mean you got a few object guys around there CleverSafe got bought up by IBM Scalely still around you know doing some stuff with HPE. So it really hasn't even taken off yet so maybe the timing's not so bad. Yeah absolutely and you know love to hear some of the use cases what their customers are doing. Yeah I mean Dave if you poke one critique saw a lot of partners up on stage but not as many customers as you usually expect a few more customers to be out there. Part of it is they're launching some new products not talking about you know very much the products that have had in there. I know in the breakouts there are a lot of customers here but you know would it like to see a few more early customers front and center. Well I think that's the key issue for this company still is that we talked about this at the close yesterday is how do they transition that legacy install base to the new platform. You know Bill Coleman said it's ours to lose and I think that's right and so the answer for a company like that and the playbook is clear. Go private so you don't have to you know get exposed to the 90 day shot clock. Invest, build out a modern platform you talked about microservices and you know modern development platform and you know create products that people want and migrate people over you're in a position to do that so but you're right when you talk to the customers here it's they're net backup customers. I mean that's really what they're doing and they're here to sort of learn learn about best practice and see where they're going net backup I think eight dot one was announced this week so you know people are glomming onto that but you know the vast majority of the revenue of this company is from their in existing legacy enterprise business. That's a transition that has to take place. Luckily it doesn't have to take place in the public eye from a financial standpoint. So they can you know have some patient capital and work through it. All right Stu line up today. A lot of product stuff. We got Jason Buffington coming on forget the analyst perspective. So we'll be here all day at last word. Yeah and end of the day with foreigner. It feels like the first time we're here. Veritas feels hot-blooded. We'll keep rolling. All right luckily we're not seeing double vision. All right keep right there everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE we're live from Veritas vision 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.