 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back, we're here at Moscone North for IBM Think 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, happy to welcome back to the program a CUBE alum, Dave Russell, who is the Vice President of Enterprise Strategy with Veeam and IBM partner. Dave, thanks so much for joining us. Hey, thank you for having me again, Stu. All right, so, you know, the big thing we're talking about here at the show, it's hybrid cloud, it's multi-cloud, IBM's spent big money to make acquisitions in the space to be there, multi-cloud's something I've been hearing from Veeam for a number of years. Talk to us about kind of the relevance, why Veeam's here at this show and we'll get into it from there. Yeah, absolutely. So I've been traveling the world really, you mentioned Barcelona just a moment ago, been Barcelona, Vegas, a number of other cities, really pitching Veeam's multi-cloud capabilities and story and the short version of it is we believe that all organizations are really multi-cloud today, whether they realize it or not and they're going to be more multi-cloud in the future. And what I mean by that is if you think about availability, backup and recovery and replication, you know, it's Azure, it's Azure Stack, it's AWS, it's private cloud, it's obviously what you have on premise and it's the stuff you haven't even thought about tomorrow and if you want to make a little adjacent stretch you can put software as a service I think in there too. So it's about really offering protection but also portability. Yeah, absolutely. When you have that multi-cloud world of course, data is one of the most important things and how do I protect and secure my data and leverage that data is critically important. IBM has a lot of different pieces. Where's the intersection between Veeam and IBM? Yeah, it's actually pretty exhaustive. So I'm a former IBMer for 15 plus years, still live in Tucson where IBM Storage has a big presence so it's everything from tape, we still believe tape has a role to play by the way, actually just released some new tape capabilities. It's of course the servers that they offer and as well as GTS global services and IBM cloud of course we interact with but their storage arrays, their virtualization solutions, all of that we have hooks and integration into today. Yeah, IBM has a pretty broad and deep portfolio so lots of places for Veeam to play. Dave, Veeam had an announcement recently updated. You were just alluding to some of the functionality. Why do you walk us through what the latest is? Yeah, it's actually the largest in company's history which is now 11 year shipping product. As of today, which is three weeks ago today we released the product but as of today there's 64,000 downloads and that's against the base of 330,000ish customers might be 332,000 but 64,000 downloads in exactly three weeks. A couple of capabilities from a cloud perspective alone we've got this kind of cloud mobility that we spoke about. Take any workload on-premises or physical, virtual that's running in your shop and to be able to move it somewhere else. Really two click restores to be able to get to Azure Azure Stack AWS. From an IBM perspective we can definitely support IBM cloud in that we've got Veeam availability suite for AWS where we can take instances running in AWS like MongoDB, Cassandra and bring that back. You may want to bring that back for safekeeping or even transformation on-prem to a Veeam instance. We've got other kinds of interesting things too not least of which is called cloud tier. It sounds like an archive solution, it's really not. We underneath the covers take what's on running on-premises for you. Let's say you're a Veeam shop today and we can take out those unused blocks unbeknownst to you and stage those off to object storage and we can optimize how we do that. So we can make sure you avoid egress charges. We essentially short version of that is enact a source side deduplication of optimizing the blocks in the cloud and then we leave uninterrupted access to it on-prem. You don't ever have to know what's in the cloud, change your behavior, change the application to update it. Those are just a couple of the many things that we introduced. Well yeah, quite a few things there. Dave, in a multi-cloud world, can you bring us inside the customers? Who is it that Veeam's working with there? Cloud Architect seems like it would be different than the traditional storage or system administrator there. One of the things we worry about in a multi-cloud world is I've got different skill sets I need for all of these and how do organizations manage that and how's the organization shaping up? Well today you're right, it can be disperse people, disparate folks. It could be the software as a service person. It could be someone that's used to thinking, say AWS and I know when we go as a company to ignite their conference, when we go there because of a company we acquired called N2WS that specializes in that, the people that come up to that desk don't even know who Veeam is. So reinvent your saying for Amazon. My bad, yes. So they don't even know the on-premise, right? They only know what their specific focus is. And so we interact with the multitude of different roles where they tend to unite as vice president of infrastructure, but it could be many different touch points. And I think as an organization, if you're especially a CIO, you're probably a little bit worried about how many different things are going on there. Can we have a common management playing? Yeah, one of the areas that's really interesting, we talk about the public clouds. IBM has a long tradition with kind of the CSPs and MSPs, the service providers as you will. Where does Veeam interact at that layer of the ecosystem? Yeah, well we have really 21,000 different Veeam cloud service providers today, some of which manage over one million different machine instances just themselves. So we did a number of actually updates for them as well. And that's actually one of the tape integration points. We now offer tenant to tape if you're a cloud service provider to offer an additional capability. But we offer the engine, if you will, that people can build a backup as a service, disaster recovery as a service solution around. Okay, excellent. And this new release, what was it called? Yeah, it's a long name. It's version 9.5 update four. That screams major release. Yeah, well the importance of it belies the nomenclature. But the reality is it's the biggest in our history. Yeah, so Dave, give us a little insight. You're doing a presentation here at IBM Think. Give us some of the Veeam presence. Where are we going to be seeing the bright green throughout the show? Yeah, yeah. So there's been a couple different things taking place already. I'm really going to hit multi-cloud very, very hard. And really from how you should think about it. I'm not really intended to be so much a Veeam commercial. Well I'll talk about unabashedly what Veeam capabilities are, but really set up a thought process, a framework. I get to kind of play a little bit of my analyst role about how much you want to approach this. Yeah, Dave, I'm glad you brought it up. I love when you get to, we put your analyst hat roll on. We can talk as analysts here. When I look at multi-cloud, networking, management, and security have just been this challenge we've been looking at. We've made progress as a whole, but there's still a lot of concerns and multi-cloud sure isn't simple for the enterprise today. Where are we doing well as an industry? I know there's some areas that Veeam has specific expertise to help and solutions, but I want to give a critical eye as to what we need to do as an industry as a whole to make things better for customers. You know the number one thing I would say is have a design, have a plan. Don't fall into this haphazard. And one of the reasons I assert that just about every organization is multi-cloud is because no matter what size you are, somebody somewhere has deployed something in a cloud or two or more. And again, if you throw software as a service into that, now this is just geometrically expanded, but it hasn't been like a conscious design strategy. Yeah, in many ways, we used to talk about shadow IT and many, the old IT was, we used to call it either silos or cylinders of excellence, depending on the organization that you lived into. The concern I have is we're kind of rebuilding these in the cloud. So have we learned from the past, our customers, the CIOs, the organizations getting a better handle around their environment today or are we failed to doom what was done in the past? I think we're getting incrementally better. Obviously some organizations are accelerating faster than others. I think initially when people thought, oh, I can lift and shift and life will be better. I can just, it's like I introduced server virtualization, now everything's cheaper and I'm going to spend a lot of money to do that. Well, I'm going to go to the cloud and it's going to be cheaper and I just doing the same exact capabilities, instances and deployment that I was doing before never really worked out. So I think if you're approaching something fresh and new and trying to actually take advantage of those capabilities, you're in a better position. Yeah, so I had a really interesting discussion early today. I had the heads of VMware's cloud group and IBM cloud. And of course one of the things that comes up is, are we just lifting and shifting? Are we transforming? And how do developers fit into it? So I'd love to hear from a Veeam standpoint, as that application maturity and modernization happens, what does that mean to the Veeam portfolio? Well, it'd be really exciting if we do see more of a development base because I think really then you can add on extensions to what today Veeam is a data capture retention engine. It's best known for backup and recovery, disaster recovery, but it can be so much more than that. So just as a quick commercial, but an integration to answer your question of, we can now stand up ad hoc isolated instances of machines. And you can run things on that like GDPR scrubbing, you can also do what we call a secure restore. You can understand whether or not it has a virus associated with it before populated back into the environment. But as an application community, you may want to say, tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. I want these 10 servers stood up with fresh data so my team can go in there and now generate faster applications for the business. It's really a business transformation statement. And that's why I think we need more developers. Yeah, I remember one of the Veeamons I attended, the CTO of Microsoft came and you handed out his book, which I read recently and it was kind of, they called it, it's not like science fact, but you know, it talked a lot about cybersecurity and the challenge we faced and you know, okay, the global terrorists are going to come, you know, wipe out the entire infrastructure and it hits a little bit close to home, because you kind of understand the security threat. Where does Veeam fit into the security picture when it comes to multi-cloud, things like ransomware and the like? Yeah, unfortunately, things are going to happen and we know this because things are already happening to a number of organizations. It doesn't really take too long to find somebody that's been affected by this already. And so when that happens, you need some first level step of remediation. You need to get back as fast as you can to a known good copy of your data. You know, certainly that's where Veeam comes in, but being able to also have portability. What if we could go and take your Azure instance data, do the BIOS conversion for you automatically and send that to Amazon or vice versa so you can have another offline bulkheaded copy? Or you know, in that ransomware notion that I presented to you, you know, what if you have to go back to backups but ransomware typically lies dormant before it actually deploys the payload so you don't know exactly how far back you need to go. So with this capability, you could go back only so far as you need to, meaning because you could verify exactly when the vulnerability was introduced, but do that in a way that's sandbox, isolated off the network and not putting you at risk. All right, Dave, give us a little look forward. What would be it we'd be expecting to see from Veeam through 2019? Yeah, well, we're focused a lot on increasing scale. We believe that we're a very easy to use solution. People say, you know, simple, flexible, reliable. We want to keep enhancing that. But we're looking at additional workloads to protect all the time, cloud capabilities to expand upon, new ways though to take what has always been a data protection company and make it a data management company. You know, things that we were just speaking about from a developer angle. You're going to see this go a lot harder on that. We have a significant amount of investment. We got the largest, we believe, storage software investment history of 500 million ended last year with a rich cash reserve. So now, instead of busy trying to do stuff and we're also looking at busy, what else do we need to acquire potentially? All right, well, Dave, the Cube is really excited to be back here in the redone Moscone, a little bit more glass, a little bit more light, a little bit more space. Veeam is having its annual user conference at a facility we really like to, the Fontainebleu in Miami, for people that are going or thinking about going to tell them what they should be expected if they attended. Yeah, well, you'll get to see live demonstrations of everything I've been speaking about and more. You know, seeing is believing, right? It's one thing to have PowerPoint. It's another thing to actually see someone demo it. And some of our folks, they actually demo this live on stage, I mean, they're not canned demos. They're actually going into real servers and doing things like having a virus infiltrate and then remediating from that. So you'll get to see that. You'll get to see more of roadmap. You'll get to see more customer success stories and our partner ecosystem. We have a huge number of partners, of course, IBM being one of them, but we'll have a whole ecosystem of people there as well that have built a business around Veeam. All right, Dave, want to give you the final word, takeaways as to the importance of what's happening here at IBM Think, the partnership and beyond? Well, IBM, like you mentioned, I mean, they're probably the last major portfolio vendor on the planet in IT, right? And they do just about everything you can imagine. And so from a partnership perspective, there's no geography, there's no vertical, there's practically no company size, and there's almost no technology that's untouched. So the opportunity to interact and partner is huge. We believe we can offer some advantages in terms of simplicity, in terms of cloud mobility and exploitation of IBM infrastructure. And we're just happy to be here and view them as a very strong partner. All right, well, Dave Russell, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, and we'll be back with more coverage here from IBM Think 2019. Of course, the Cube will also be at Veeam on May 20th through 22nd at the Fontainebleu in Miami, Florida. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching the Cube.