 Welcome back to Commvault Connections 2021. This is the CXO power panel. My name is Dave Vellante joined by Reza Mora-Kabadi, who's the CIO of Commvault. Isabel Geese is the CMO of Commvault and John Gallagher. He leads global enterprise infrastructure at Synchrion and folks, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Thank you. So John, we heard you this morning, great job. You guys are in the industrial logistics business. So supply chains are all a hot topic today. It's got to be challenging. Maybe you could talk about what you're seeing there, but specifically, how are you thinking about data management in the context of your overall IT strategy? Okay, thank you. So in terms of data management, Synchrion has 100 sites globally. So if we were to rewind by say 10 years, we had data residing a lot out at those remote sites. So over the last few years, we've basically consolidated a lot of that data and also centralized. So we brought that into our data centers that we now have, which is a very centralized model. So that makes it a lot easier to understand where all of that data resides. So in the decision pie, as it relates to data, it sounds like cost efficiency is pretty, ranks pretty highly. How does that impact your data management strategy and approach? I mean, is that like the number one consideration? Is it one of many factors? How should we think about that? I would say cost is one of many factors. So obviously cost is key, but you don't want to introduce unnecessary risks. So you've got to keep cost at the forefront, but that's just one of the factors. Obviously data protection is one of the factors, ensuring that data is protected and safe, and also understanding exactly where that data resides, making sure that data is encrypted. So I would say that cost is just one of the factors. So Isabel, good to see you again. I wonder if you could talk about how you're seeing your customers and what they're thinking about, how they're thinking differently about data management today. Are they changing the way they manage data, given the escalation of ransomware, the compressed, I call it the forced march to digital over the last 18, 19 months, but you've got new threats, new business dynamics. How is that affecting organizations? It does, it does affect them a lot. We see a lot more, actually I host a lot of virtual coffee talks with our customers so they can share best practices and a lot of CIOs now work end-in-end with CISOs. And they have a readiness plan because they know the question is not if they're gonna have an attack, but when, and how to recover from it is critical. So all the security team is really looking at the prevention, but they know that if they can't stop it all, then they have a plan of end-off to the data team for recovery. I see a lot more thoughtfulness because not all data is created equal. So which one is in the cloud and you can recover which one you need fast for minimum business, sorry, minimum business disruption and you keep on prime and which one you cannot lose and you have a boss. So we see a lot more planning, a lot more collaboration across all verticals. We have also new services to help customer before the attacks to design and plan and also helping them post-attack to recover. So very much end-to-end and as you see in the keynote right now, it's all about the people enabling them to do the business while de-risking the business too, so. All right, thank you for that. So Reza, I look at the fact that your CEO is CIO. So you must have some interesting conversations there, but and you could be sort of tap Sanjay's brain how did you handle this kind of thing? And that's a nice collaboration, I bet. But what advice can you give to other CIOs who are grappling with cyber threats, data volumes and just the ongoing pressure to do more with less that never changes, does it? It doesn't and you're absolutely right. And I obviously as part of my job, I tracked the benchmarks about the budgets and everything else before the pandemic used to track about like 3% growth year over year which is a hard to kind of do a whole lot with them. What I can tell you is not for a CIO, not two areas of the areas of investments are not created equal. From my perspective, the biggest areas of investment for somebody like me in my position should be data and protecting the data. So that means that you have to find ways of on the budget side, find ways of shifting money, whether you reallocate resources, whether you reform or reorganize differently, automate, simplify, et cetera. My background is operations. So when you talk about people process technology outside of things, I leave the technology to the people that are really good at it and I focus on people on process side. And for me, that's about, again, efficiencies and finding ways that you can reorganize. You probably have the people that do the work that you want them to do and you just have to think about reorganizing them differently. And the last thing I said is prioritize initiatives across the board and it's like part they're in crime in these things. And we don't always say yes to her and what she wants because we need to be transparent that's where we put our money. So, Reza, I want to stay with you for a minute. I want to talk about data sprawl. It was interesting, John, during your session this morning I was sort of laying down some of my thoughts because I feel like data sprawl, it's like social change. You can't fight it. You can maybe, you know, for a period of time control it but data is out of control. So how do you address data sprawl in an organization both from a management perspective? There's obviously risk somebody said this morning, we used to keep, I think it was the CIO New Jersey. We used to keep everything forever, but that's risky. So how do you deal with that, Reza, from an organizational and management perspective? Yeah, I mean, again, I'm going to have to agree with you. As I said in the morning session, I like it. It's a natural phenomenon for a company to go through it. I've seen it in companies that are 150% of people and I've seen it in companies that have tens of thousands of people. It's like a foundation onto what entropy is in thermodynamics. It's a natural order of events. If you don't apply structure or organization data is going to go haywire and everything else. The only way, the best way that I know when the pendulum is here and everybody's doing their own thing is to push the pendulum on the other side at least for a while to centralize, pick a few of your brightest people that know the data in and out, put them in a team and say you're responsible for making sense out of these things, identify sources of truth for us and architect them differently. But start with executive level metrics and board level metrics and push them down. So, I agree with that, that I think the people who have the data context are in the best position to add value as to whether it's data quality and how to get the most out of that data. But the problem is, John, I'd love to pick your brain on this, especially you're in EMEA, you got all these different regulations and data silos, which I believe are a byproduct of how we organize. But anyway, you have a lot of the considerations to deal with, whether it's GDPR or data sovereignty, et cetera. How do you approach that? So, one of the first approaches we took when we moved over to Convolt with our data protection was to reduce the number of products we use for the data protection. So, we had six products through various acquisitions that we've done over the last 10 to 15 years. We've now reduced that six products down to one single product. So, it means that all of your data is managed through a sort of single pane, which definitely gives you a much better insight. And also, just going back to the cost that you mentioned in the previous question, obviously going down from six products to one product, we managed to strip around $500,000 out of our costs over three years. We also moved data, like I said, into the center and it allowed us to also concentrate the teams. So, also the teams became more efficient because less people were dealing with that data as well. But yes, you are right around GDPR. There is definitely compliance to be considered and you just have to make sure you're up to date on all of those compliance regulations. So, it's interesting, Bresa, to hear you talk about, Isabel, she's got needs, but I would say, Isabel, that you probably know in your team, you know the marketing data better than anybody, but there's got to be federated governance. You've got to enforce policy in this data sprawl world. So, anyway, this is sort of a side, but Sanjay, Isabel talked today about as a service growing like crazy, and given your background, I wonder if you can share any insights about how and why you think customers are going to be looking towards SaaS. I mean, the whole world is becoming sassified. You had some data on that this morning from Gartner. What are your thoughts? Yeah, no, absolutely, you're right. I experienced this first sense coming from Salesforce. And yes, Sanjay mentioned in the keynote, by I think 2025, 85% of business will be delivered through SaaS apps. And that's very simple, look at the work today. The market dynamics, the business changes. You mentioned the supply chain issue. We're talking, you know, all the line of business people of the business executive have to change fast. And the fastest way to do that is SaaS because it has speed, agility, and you get the value faster. Problem being, then it becomes very complex for IT because you have workloads in multiple clouds, on-premise, multiple apps, and what Convo stands for and what everybody should look at is being able to enable all this innovation, but at the same time, removing the complexity for IT to protect this data to recover it. And that's really where we're focusing our attention. SaaS is unavoidable. It's all about business agility, but it doesn't mean that you should compromise on data management. And I think, you know, we have to wrap here, but I think the model, you know, again, Isabel, you're coming from Salesforce. We've contextualized our operational systems, whether it's, you know, the sales cloud, the logistics cloud, it's the lines of business actually have a good handle on this. And where I see the role of Convault is that notion of federated governance. You've got to have centralized policy, but you've got to programmatically automate that out to the lines of business. And I think that is kind of where the future is headed. And I think that's really kind of Convault strategy. I'm hearing a lot on automation, cloud-like services and pushing that out. And so I see a new era in data coming and you guys talked a lot about this, but Isabel, we'll give you the last word. Put a bumper sticker on the panel for us. Well, absolutely. I mean, you said it's not left for no workload. Sorry, it should be left behind. And that's why, you know, you need a single architecture. I think businesses is changing fast and it's exciting. And as long as, you know, you got a great IT team with a great plan to have your back as a business leader, every company should really embrace all the change and innovation. So thank you, Dave, for giving me the last word. Yeah, go thank you guys. I really appreciate you coming on the, theCUBE been a fun day. We got more here at Convault Connections. Keep it right there. We're going to come back right after this short break. I know you and I are going to wrap up and summarize the day.