 Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to New Orleans, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman. Ratmir Timashev is here, he's the co-founder of Veeam and he's joined by Peter McKay, who's the co-CEO and president. Gentlemen, good to see you. Good to see you. Welcome to theCUBE, congratulations. I'm on the great keynote this morning. It seems like you guys are having fun out there. It is, it's a lot of fun, it's a great time. So Ratmir, I want to start with you. A lot of people in our audience may not be familiar with Veeam, we've been sort of sharing with them the rapid ascendancy of the company, but go back 10 years. Why did you start, you and your co-founder, to start the company? Yeah, the company's 10 years old. Last year we celebrated 10 years. It was started in 2006 by me and my partner, who is on the technology side. He's my technology genius. I'm on the sales and marketing. So we started the company with the simple idea to build a new version or new generation data protection for virtualized environments. Veeamware was getting hot back in 2005, 2006, 2007. It had more and more penetration within enterprise. Back then the cloud was like 10 or 20% penetrated, but we saw that it's going to be 90 eventually. So we wanted to write this big wave, technology revolution wave. And now I think we, looking back 10 years, I think we're in a very similar spot with the cloud. Cloud is where virtualization was 10 years ago. So and we want to write this new wave or the cloud wave the same way exactly that we wrote the Veeamware virtualization and Hyper-V wave. You know that's interesting. I was explaining to the audience this morning that your ascendancy coincided with Veeamware. And what happened was we consolidated resources and the one resource that was so precious was for backup. And everybody had to re-architect their backup and you guys were the were an answer and obviously one of the more popular answers. Now we're into this cloud era and you see a similar opportunity. Your messaging sort of focuses on that and there's an emergent strategy that you're waiting for. I think everybody's moving into a multi-cloud environment where there's going to be, their data is going to be all over the place. They're going to be on-premise or managed service providers or in AWS or Azure. And so and for us we need to be able to make it available and always on, right? And so that's our focus is to make it very easy for our customers to store their data and run their applications and always be available no matter what the environment is on-premise off no matter what the infrastructure is. So we talk about digital transformation a lot on theCUBE every event we go to is digital transformation. You guys had a little bit different spin on that digital life, always on availability, capabilities. You having fun with green? Yeah. Hell yeah. We always have fun with green. Green is go, a lot of things you can tell. A lot of things you can do with green is go, color of money. Veeam Celtics. Veeam Celtics. Veeam Veeam Celtics. Number one pick. Veeam green team. Veeam green machine. Veeam green machine, love it. So give us your perspective on this whole digital life. What is that all about? Yeah, so our message in the last 10 years I mean originally when we started our message was very simple. We are number one VMware backup. That message really resonated and we did deliver on the purpose of number one VMware backup. I remember first time when we introduced that concept our competitors look at us like, who knows them? It's like, but then we did in fact become the number one VMware backup. So, and our message has evolved over time. So from technical message to that is focused on our core customer which is IT pro, the person that really understands the modern technologies responsible for the modern data center understands the modern storage cloud technologies and virtualization technologies. But that message has evolved as we are growing and becoming bigger and we are going more into the enterprise and our solution become bigger and broader that covers cloud. So we had to evolve our message. So right now our message has become more consumer centric, more emotional touching our digital life because we believe that that's at the end of the day that's what we do. We enable our customers, our businesses to provide this seamless digital life experience for their users. That's what we do. So I love it when a successful company brings in a new leader because as opposed to things are bad and they have to make a change. We saw this last week. I mentioned I was at Service Now Knowledge, Frank Slubin, incredibly successful CEO, stepped aside, brought in a new, and part of that transition was about reaching a new constituency. So my question to you Peters, traditionally the Veeam audience is a hardcore operational people. Your messaging is much higher level than the organization. So how are you dealing with that sort of bifurcated personas? Who are you targeting in this sort of new messaging? So in the early days of Veeam, it started in kind of that SMB market or kind of expanded into commercial and now very focused on the enterprise. And so a lot of the enterprise are kind of working through this transition, right? The digital life and the new, staying relevant to the new users that are coming online. And so we found that our message needed to evolve as well. And it needs to be in the mind's business now or getting more involved in some of the decision-making. And so our message wasn't where it needed to be in terms of evolving it for that enterprise customer. And one that we think will foster that digital transformation for a lot of our company's customers. And so we viewed this was the right time, especially with version 10, version 9.5, which was very successful in version 10, which really expands our enterprise capability. But also we needed to, it broadens a lot of the applications now, the things that we could do in an enterprise. And we needed that message to also be kind of that enterprise in a broad strategic message. Yeah, right. Peter, when I talk to customers these days, it's a very fragmented market out there. I think as Ratmir said, you rode that VMware wave. Now customers dopped in lots of sass. They're doing multiple public clouds. They're trying to figure out how they modernize their private cloud. Before it was VMware, therefore I need backup. Now it's how much does their choice on where they put their data in their application drive to you? How much do you have kind of the brand of beam out there to kind of pull into those other environments and to customers turn to you for help and sorting out that kind of multi-cloud world? Yeah, actually, I was talking to a friend of mine who is a key analyst at ASG, Jason Buffington. You know Jason, he had a great point about the industry, the data industry or storage industry or data protection industry. He said that every new wave, that you go from mainframe to client server, from client server to virtualization, from virtualization to cloud, there is always a new backup leader because the technology changes so much and the people or the company that doesn't have this old baggage with the old technology, old agent-based supporting all these legacy platforms that can move much faster and that's what beam has demonstrated with virtualization. The only exception is the transition from virtualization to cloud because cloud is based on virtualization, right? So in based on the concept of the data mobility and that's the fundamental concept to virtualization. So we believe that we are very well set with our leadership position in virtualization to also dominate cloud market because our technologies are modern technologies specifically built for virtualization and cloud. And is the argument then that an Amazon or an Azure won't dominate that because essentially they are a cloud stovepipe? Is that right? Can you expand on that a little bit? That's the way we look at it. I mean, it's choice, right? People want to put, they should be able to put their data wherever they want or their applications and we should make it very easy for them to do that if they want to do it as, but it's not only just putting it in Azure, it's being able to get after it, get it and move it and transfer data no matter where you want it to. So for us, it's about providing the flexibility to move the data or run the apps no matter where you want at any time. Peter, you ran a company that VMware acquired that was an as a service. Veeam has some as a service solutions. Customers oftentimes are trying to switch from, there's no more shrink-wrapped software anymore, models for buying it. Where do you see customers in that adoption? Curious of your old role and kind of today what you're seeing. It's interesting. So Destone was very much of a platform for managed service providers and cloud providers. And so in coming to Veeam, a big part of our business, which is very different than I think a lot of the other people in the market is focusing on those cloud providers, not just Amazon, Azure, the public, but also we have 15, over 15,000 managed service providers and cloud providers that run our platform as a business. And so when we rolled out a number of features here that if unless you were a managed service provider or a cloud provider, you wouldn't get the multi-tenancy and the things that we built on scalability that are really changing the game, we believe, for the managed service providers. But it's also, what we saw at Destone that went into Veeam, it's, our customers are also doing it as a service within their organization. Things like multi-tenancy are things that they need and the scalability are things that they need as a business. So it's a lot of similarities between the world that I lived in and Destone and VMware to where we are today. One of the impressive stats you said, 2016, 231,000 customers that you have are all of those paying customers, you have the free version, can you give us any insight as to how many pay verses? It's actually over 245,000, that was at the end of the year. So we're adding 245,000 new customers every month and those are all paid. Those, we don't count the people who downloaded a free version of it. That's good to know, you could have millions of customers. We have millions of our other three products, yes. Millions of users. And another stat you put out in the keynote was an MPS of 73, which is really, really good. Can we talk about that a little bit? And Ratma, you were making the point off camera that it rose from the low 60s. What's going on there? Yeah, so last year it was 61, the year before it was 62, so we were kind of very high but flat. So, and this year it's actually jumped to 73. And the reason that I personally contribute that to is because we had extremely powerful release 9.5 and customer are extremely happy with the improvements and the easy of upgrade and using all these new capabilities. It was the most, the smoothest upgrade, the smoothest release and with the powerful features. The second reason I think our MPS, Night Promoter Score, rose that much is because Peter came out. So in the last 10 months, Peter really, really strengthened our team. I thought that we're moving very fast, but now we're, so we have the concept of beam speed that means moving really fast. But now we're actually with Peter, we're moving 10 times faster or with magnitude faster. I don't believe it's me, but I think what Veeam has always done is done a really good job of listening to our customers and communicating with our customers on a regular base. We built out a customer success business, part of our business that we're investing in, but we have a whole, a team of people who just solicit and communicate with our partners and our customers on a regular basis. So they know what we're doing. It's rare that they don't really get a good sense of where we're going and the vision and the strategy of Veeam. So I think that goes a long way in driving our MPS score. We got a break, but the last thing we really haven't double clicked on is the ecosystem. Maybe a quick word on that and then we'll wrap. Yeah, that's a big, obviously our partner community. We have 45,000 partners. We have 15, over 15,000 managed service providers in cloud. Probably the area that is impacting our business quite a bit now recently is a lot of the Alliance partnerships that we have. Today we had VMware, we have Cisco, very strong and successful. We announced HPE, which not only is a development partnership, but also a resell partnership and go-to-market, which is dramatically impacting our- Former competitor. Yes, yes, which has opened up a tremendous amount of opportunities for us. So we're going to continue to expand into other companies. We're, because 50% of this market is changing over in 2017 and 18, from legacy solutions to new, and the hardware is a piece of that. And we're trying to embed as much of that into one sales motion, one bundle for our customers, making it easy to try and buy Veeam. Okay, founder gets the last word. Bumper sticker when the buses are pulling away, the trucks are pulling away from New Orleans. What's the bumper sticker on Veeam on 2017? I see you in 2018. Well, let's have another great year and another stick with BIM. All right, we find out, I think, Thursday, where 2018 is going to happen, right? All right, so stay with us. All right, thanks, Jens, for coming to theCUBE. Great to see you. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest, theCUBEer Live from Veeam on in New Orleans. Right back.