 Okay, we're back, this is Dave Vellante, day three live from EMC World 2013. I'm here with my co-host, David Floyer. David, it's just been an unbelievable event. Shovek Chaudhry is here, and he is with SunGuard, provider of data protection services. I love this spotlight, David, because you and I get to set it up. We get to go deep with Steven Manley. We had Federal Express on, talking about customer issues, and now we get to get with Shovek as a service provider perspective. So Shovek, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me here. Glad, really a pleasure. Yeah, so Cloud, obviously, has been a big theme of this event. I was at actually at the partner summit, and hosted a panel. SunGuard was actually on there. Michael, on Delatoria from SunGuard was there. So real themes around delivering IT as a service, but data protection as a service is something whose time has come. You guys have been doing it, kind of brute force, pre-Cloud for many years. So first of all, tell us about yourself, tell us about the part of SunGuard that you're involved in. So once again, thanks for having me here. It's a pleasure to talk to all of you. My name is Shovek, and I run product management for SunGuard data management services, which involves any managed services around protecting customers' data, using multiple technologies like backup, replication, snapshots, and more importantly, using those technologies to bring up the critical application the customers need to run their production systems and business processes. As you said, SunGuard has been in the data protection and application recovery business for many years, 25 plus years, right? So what we have seen is that the customer problems that we solved have not really changed. How we solve those problems are changing and will continue to change, right? And we use various technologies, AMC is predominant among them, to serve our primary targets, which is the CIOs and VPs of IT, to make sure they can keep their complex business applications up and running and optimize on the cost and the performance. So tell me more about your service. When do customers come to you and what are they looking for? So someone come to us in, let me do this, let me tell you a couple of stories that of customer interactions I had this week at AMC World and that would give you a perspective, right? So I was talking to a CIO of a major energy company earlier today, right? I cannot take the name of the gentleman, very smart guy, and he was telling me, right, you know, a mutual friend connected us and he was like, show me, I got a problem. I said, okay, how can I help you out? And the problem goes like this, right? That one of my primary initiatives from my CEO this year is that I need to refresh my SAP environment, right? I was like, that's great. I mean, it's an interesting project. Lots of people are working on it. You're like, absolutely right. I've got 250 developers writing up the SAP codes and we are going beta in Q3, Q4, and I need to put it on production Q1 January of next year. I said, okay, great. So how can I help you? And he was like, you know what? The biggest problem I face right now, I don't have an availability story. I'm running this huge SAP environment on V blocks, but you know, I am in a downtown location and I have like the worldwide companies, MPLS circuits coming into my basement and if that basement gets flooded, the SAP is down. I don't, and when my CEO and my board asked me that question, I don't have an answer. What can I do, right? And I said, okay, this is exactly the type of problems we can help you with, right? We can make sure, we can start with the data protection layer, make sure that your critical SAP data and the Oracle data that you are generating is in a location that is geographically disparate enough, right? And making sure it adds to all your corporate and laws of the land for the Data Privacy Act, right? We can make sure having the in-depth expertise on SAP and Oracle because we host those and run those in production, that if your stuff cannot actually come into work and the data is not around to bring up those applications, we can bring that up in a data center. And I was like, does that help you? And he was like, absolutely yes, right? I mean, now, let's continue the discussion and I have a story that I can go back to my board and see you and tell them I have a partner who can help me solve this, not only saving me a whole bunch of money, but more importantly, having the expertise and the assurance because people are looking at me and us as a partner for running a $10 billion business, right? So that's why CEOs and VPs of IT come to us, right? For that resiliency, the protection of the critical SAP and other business applications. So talk about your infrastructure, how it's evolved over the past several years. You know this business, you've been in the business for a while now, you understand data protection and the different products and you've seen it evolve. How has SunGuard's infrastructure evolved? Yeah, so over the last 10 to 15 years, right? SunGuard has matured a whole lot, right? And that has been driven completely by number one, what our customers' problems have, how our customers' problems have changed, and number two, the new technologies that have come into the market to help us solve those customers' problems. So we look at the customer, like, okay, how can I solve your problems? And then we look at our key vendors like EMC and talk to their product and engineering team, like, okay, guys, what do you have in your basket? Help me actually solve those problems, right? And as part of that, right, in a 15, 20 years back, the predominant method of protecting customers' applications was using tapes and hardware and stuff like that, right? So then that sort of- That's what you made your name in, isn't it? Yeah, that was made a name, that's where we made our money and was very relevant, right? But the story changed on us and that was completely, once again, not because we wanted to do some science fair projects with new technology, but customers' needs changed, the market changed, right? So we sort of transformed our business from a tape-based, very hardware-centric business to more of a disk-based backup, ETLs, data domains, business, right? And we have a huge number of customers doing that right now. But as we even look at this whole picture right now, we see that we are going through a third generation of transformation again, right? And that is driven by the need for customers for even higher application uptime, like previously, when the tape-based world down for 72 hours was okay. In a disk-based world, down for 24 hours was like, okay, sort of. Now, when I talk to the CIOs and VPs of IT, they are looking for two hours and four hours, right? And that is forcing a whole bunch of change in infrastructure, starting from our network infrastructure layer, the types of disks and compute and storage we want to buy, down to the type of people we hire and the type of application complexities we have to deal with, right? So it's a great question. I mean, we have, we were in one place, we went through a transformation and we are going through the transformation again, not only in the infrastructure stack, but the network, compute, the people and the storage and that whole package we need to do to deliver. I know, David, I know I sound like a broken record on this one, but we're entering the age of how do you back up a petabyte and the answer is you don't. You have to fundamentally protect the data. It's a whole new mindset as to how you approach data protection, so I want to also ask you, so I talked to Michael Delatory about this in the partner summit and I asked, how do you compete with Amazon? He said, well, we don't really, we compliment, but I always say, look, if you can't take Amazon head on, you have to specialize in it. You guys are a perfect example of that. So could you talk about that a little bit, just the whole Amazon effect because they have done a great service, I think, to the industry by forcing, you know, this notion of simplicity and speed. What effect has that had on Sun Guard? Yeah, so, okay, let me answer that question by playing the story of another conversation I had with the CI a few weeks back, right? So this guy is the CI of a major technology company based in the Bay Area, really smart guy, knows what's going on, and you know, I just sort of, in my road trips, I happened to meet him and said, okay, can we go and have lunch? And I was asking him that, what do you want to talk about, right? I have a few questions for you, but what do you want to do? And he was like, Shobik, I mean, my board keeps telling me that this is new thing called Amazon, right? That's going to solve all my problems and just, you know, write them a check. I'm not even sure what you are doing here, right? I can just move the whole business to Amazon. I'm like, how, how, are you, I mean, you talk. You don't even have to write them a check. You can just swipe the credit card. Yeah, you don't even have to write a check, right? And I was like, you know, Shobik, you talked to the CI, are you hearing the same thing, or am I just not getting it? Like, connect a few dots in my mind. And I was like, you know, there is a huge disconnect between reality and perception, right? So there is this perception. I mean, so here is this thing, right? When I go to my doctor for the yearly checkup, he always tells me, you're a technology guy, but I know more than you because I go to the best buy to pick up a hard disk for $100. So I am really great. And in a lot of ways, we have the similar problem with the board because they know they can go to Amazon and sign up for these things and they're, okay, I know more than you because I just, you know, I can swipe the great card and buy a computer, right? But it's only such small portion of the story, right? You need to be, protect the data. You need to have application, application, resiliency. You need to have security. You need to have privacy, right? And you need to be in a budget and a cheaper way, right? And then I said, okay, that's fine. I mean, everybody's getting the question and the answer is, right? Amazon is a great service. There are some use cases where they're extremely good, right? And for example, when Dell comes with a new server, which is really cheap, we don't say, oh, I'm really scared. Dell is like, you know, coming up with a new server, really cheap. We figured out how to use the Dell server to deliver a better service to the customer. Yes, you complimented, right? I mean, we do exactly the same with Amazon. We say like 50 petabytes of data, nobody's ever going to use. And it's mostly videos of personal collection, you know, hosted on customer data center. And they're like, okay, dump it on Amazon. Why do you care? You know, that's my advice to you. On the other hand, you have a complex SAP application or some other things like that. Yeah, we'll figure out how to use Amazon, but you should not. You cannot use it, right? Okay, that's good. So we're a little tight on time. I want to get into the EMC relationship a little bit, spend a little bit of time on that. So what are you doing with the EMC? You guys have had a partnership for a while. So products, partnerships, you know, relationship, talk about that a little bit. Yeah. And talk about what their vision do. Are you buying into their vision of where they're going? Yeah, so absolutely, right? Now let me start with that vision question for us. And then sort of walk down to what we are doing on the product side, right? So you should look at what EMC is doing, right? EMC has a great portfolio of technologies for application resiliency, data protection, martialization technologies, right? And what we do is we use those technologies to create services. And as service providers, we care about a couple of things. Item number one is solving customer's problem. Can we use the technologies in a vendor to solve the problem? If you cannot do that, there is no story, right? Second, what we do is that the more integrated and cohesive those solutions are, higher is the quality of service and easier it is for us to deliver, right? And the last one we do is that do we really trust? Do we buy into the roadmap and the vision? Can we work at a partner? Can we, you know, if you have a problem at like one o'clock at night, can I pick up the phone and call someone, right? But that's what we do as a service provider. That's what we need, right? And if I look at the EMC and how the relationship is and where it has matured over the last five, 10 years, we got all of those, right? We are integrated with them on the product roadmap side. I know the leadership product management side and the engineering side and the sales side on a first name basis. And it's the vision they have for their products in a lot of scenarios, actually in most scenarios is a joint vision because that is based on common customer problems we are seeing and we basically jointly design and build the products, right? And then we take those products out to the market jointly with us, you know, just like us, like we are talking as friends, like, you know, trying to solve a customer's problem in our sales guys, go out with the EMC sales guys and talk to the customer, say, we jointly can help you solve this problem, can we do it, right? And once you do that, everything falls in place, right? I strongly believe everything needs to be driven by the customer. And when we walk together, get in the front of the customer and we can have visible proof, right? We can actually solve their problems. It works great, right? For example, we launched our Avamar cloud-based, complex application recovery service with very tight recovery time objective last year. Tremendous market response, tremendous. I mean, EMC guys are pulling us into the deals. We are talking to the customers, we have a huge pipeline and it just like sort of, it's a great example of how multiple technologies and partners are coming together to solve real problems for our customers, right? What's on the to-do list and then we got a wrap? So, first of all, digest all the great information and the conversations I had, which we can get back for myself. Pay attention to Shabak. Yeah, second thing we need to do is we have some great exciting product launches and service launches, I think the Avamar cloud and we are very much excited to take it to more and more customers and actually really build it up a real service with many, many hundreds of customers, right? We look forward to doing it this year and then basically continue on our journey of helping our customers with complex application, up-time availability, working very jointly with EMC, right? That's the pretty simple three things and a simple person, three priorities. Shabak Chaudhary, thank you very much from SunGuard for coming on and wrapping up this spotlight on backup and recovery systems, data protection as a service. We really appreciate it, it's a pleasure meeting you. Thank you very much. All right, David, thank you for sitting in on me with us in this PRS spotlight. All right, everybody, keep it right there. We'll be back. We've got a couple more segments here. We're here live from EMC World 2013. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back.