 Hello and welcome to theCUBE, a really special conversation from Convalt Shift, where we've been really hearing about the announcement of Convalt Cloud. I'm just so excited to be joined here by Sanjay, CEO of Convalt and Rajiv, Chief Product Officer for Convalt, and we're going to continue that conversation. I think, again, sitting here and feeling the energy that is out there and there's a lot of people here, a lot of partners, a lot of collaborators, a lot of convolting, if that's what you call yourself. Vultures. Vultures. Very nice. I think one of the things I want to say is, first off, congratulations, because I think, really, when I take a step back from an analyst perspective and look at it, you guys are skating to where the puck is going. You're really taking initiative with this, and I think it's a really exciting announcement. Why don't you kind of give us an overview of what has brought you to Shift today? Sounds good. Well, thank you personally for following us, and we're a company that prides itself in some ways of listening to customers and partners, analysts, people that are smart and know where things are going, and we try to bring all that input into how we build products. Rajiv probably spends more time with customers than he does with his senior team, because what they tell us matters. And what we're announcing today at Combo Shift is a new platform. We started by calling it a solution, but it's much more than that. It's a platform because it allows partners to collaborate. It allows us to really deliver mission-critical capabilities that haven't been. It's a unified interface, not having to do artificial separation of SaaS versus software. It's extensible with APIs. It's got AI wired right through it. So it's an amazing new platform and you said Combo Cloud. And I'd say it's Combo Cloud powered by Metallic AI. So we're very excited. A lot of work's gotten into this. It's a brand new platform. It's been rigged and ground up to be cloud-native, and it's all about resilience. Yeah, I think that's, we'll kind of jump off of that, because I think cyber resilience, we just got out of October with Cyber Resilience Month, and which used to be called Backup Month, which is, so I'm glad that that's evolving as well, because it really is about being prepared for these cyber attacks. And you spent a lot of time talking about ransomware and other threats that are out there. You know, we'll start with Rajiv. What are you hearing from those customers as you go out about their preparedness? Because you're talking to a ton of them. You're surveying them. There was some data that you had there. How do I, as a backup administrator, exercise my recovery strategy to ensure that when the business comes to me to recover, how do we automatically do that? So that was the key pain point that I've been hearing from all our customers, and that's what we try to automate here. And to do that, you need ability to spin up infrastructure on the fly. You should be able to use some kind of automation, some kind of intelligence to make sure that you're bringing up the right set of application, and more importantly, predictability. How long will the recovery take? So those are the three major things, and I think that's what Palm World Cloud brings together today. I mean, it is about RPO and RTO, and true RTO and recovery time objective, because I think sometimes organizations look at it, and they have a number there that's artificial, just a number that's... It's theoretical. Yeah, and they really want to, I think, overachieve or underachieve, depending on the business that is driving them, especially, I mean, you would know, being a public company, they have certain requirements if they're in a financial institution, which I actually ran storage in DR for Maylife Financial and John Hancock, actually used Commvault back in that day as well, a number of companies, but I think when you look at it, you have certain things, you can't be out for a certain number of days because financial systems don't like that, and SEC doesn't like that. Rob, I was a CIO for a very large company, and you would think that anywhere in a tech company, it's not like getting access to technology was hard, but here's the reality. When you grow over 25 years, when you've acquired 80-odd companies or whatever your format is, every time you make an acquisition, you get a footprint of IT, then you have that long tail that you have to deal with, and it's not easy. These things are not easy, so if I'm trying to restore to Rajiv's point or test a tabletop exercise, my Oracle Core Supply Chain application or HR application, I need redundant infrastructure to be able to do that if you did it the old way. When I said this is a completely revolutionary way of doing it, we're breaking the shackles that IT has had to deal with, which is I need infrastructure to be able to tell you if I can recover something. What we're saying is why? You've got home ground advantage. Use this, we'll spin it up, you can test every workload as often as you want, develop your runbooks based on that, and when God forbid, you're going to have to call it, you know how to do it. Yeah, I think that's the key. We're breaking all the old boundaries of how it's done and how better to do it than the cloud. I mean, yeah. So Rajiv, I think again, some really exciting announcements that kind of tie into what we were just talking about. Why don't we launch into that and you give everybody a high level of what was going on? Cool. So a couple of announcements. The most exciting announcement for me, number one is clean room recovery. To me, that is the most important thing as a backup admin. The ability to test my recovery, test my recovery plans, automate it so that it can bring up the applications in the right order and in the right predictable time every single time and without need for having infrastructure spun up. So that is number one. Two is the use of AI to be able to automate some of this capability. And three is the use of AI to make my life as a backup administrator easy. The operational automation, the ability to do root cause analysis and solve those problems. Those were some of the key things in my head as key functionality. Now, also the platinum resiliency that we announced today. That is very critical to a lot of our customers because many of our customers are on a path to the cloud. They have started their journey to the cloud, but cloud is not easy. Trust me, I mean, I'm pretty knowledgeable about cloud, but even I'm nervous. Am I creating cloud with the wrong settings? Am I gonna expose something, right? So with platinum resiliency, what we offer is cloud like simplicity, but we take care of everything. We automate it out the way you want it. So that is very key. And more importantly, bringing this all together using Combo Cloud. One single cloud-based platform that can manage everything for you on-prem or SaaS. SaaS for SaaS, on-premise for on-premise. That is key. One single policy engine that manages all your data. And as an aging CIO, I'll tell you this, as an ex-CIO, you're always in a transition of something. You were going from mainframe to something. You were going from open systems to something. You were going from VMware to something. You're going from something, private cloud. You're going to cloud. You're always transitioning. You're never static. And when you're transitioning, you don't want point solutions for points in time. Oh, I'm gonna use this for this, but all of this is done this way. And in this, I've got this chunked up by two. Every one of those variations is a point of light the bad actors can exploit. So having, he's very modest, but the way we've designed the architecture, the way we've built this technology, it's built like he showed in his presentation, we've abstracted the control plane from the data plane from the storage layer. And so we can bubble wrap. Every one of those things at a level of resiliency that was not possible. So as you're journeying, you can use the same technology instead of writing to your filer, you're writing to S3 in the cloud, and then tomorrow you want to switch the order, you can do that too. And we're the only ones, probably the only ones who can do that. He's very modest, but he's the only ones that can do that. Yeah, and I thought, again, back to that whole CIO perspective, I think the cloud burst recovery and being able to get back to, I know we hadn't talked about it before, but being able to spin it up like you were saying. On demand. Automatically, I think it's huge because that allows me to preserve capital for when I need it. I pay as I go, which will hopefully encourage people to do it more often and be able to have that minimally viable company. They know they can recover that minimally viable. Absolutely, and these aren't bit parts. We've taken everything we've learned over the past couple of decades under recovery. We've taken metallic and what we've learned is that being the forefront of security and resilience as we've noted, we've taken the fact that software versus SaaS is an artificial divide created by folks that don't have both working the way they should. We've always had that. And then we've separated the layers to make it even more secure by design. And now when you put all of that together in Commvault Cloud, as a customer, you're not on a one-way dead-end street where you can't get out. We will let you make all the U-turns you want, okay? You can make all the U-turns you want because that's how business operates. You buy companies, you sell companies, you come into new areas, you go to a new country, you set up a new factory. You can't build forever and IT sort of thinks about the long-term institutional resilience, but really the business needs you to duck and weave a little bit. And that's what we're bringing to market. No, I think it's excellent. I think, again, being able to be flexible, always being there for the customer and it's the customer's choice. I know that's a big theme around Commvault. I think also you've more or less had a proof of concept of this going with Metallic. And I think there was some really impressive stats that you had with Metallic when you talked us through. Sure, hopefully more than a proof of concept. It's a real product. We've been in the market for about three years. We've had over 4,000 customers. We've crossed 130 million an annual recurring revenue and it has exceeded all our expectations and it's delighted customers because if you look at our net dollar retention rate that we talk about publicly, it's world-class and that doesn't happen by chance that happens by choice. Customers get to choose whether they want to stay with your platform. We are introducing more capabilities on that platform at a rapid pace. We're not governed by releases and installs. I mean, it just shows up. You slipstream it and that stuff just shows up for customers. We're taking the beauty of that, the magic of all that and we've always had the ability of bringing those softwares ass together but now with Commvault Cloud where we've made Metallic the platform, we've hardwired AI right through it all over it. It's not fake, it's not a bolt-on, it's not something that's coming. It's infused, it's available and it powers all of it. So we didn't have to go back to the drawing board. We had it all running and then we put all the security wrappers and isolated the control plane being able to do the things that we want in the data plane, being able to segregate the storage layer and all of that's now available to come up. Yeah, no, I think that is one of the keys that you had it and you've had the technology. Another thing you've had the technology and maybe it just wasn't, the covers weren't pulled back a little bit. To see it's given the light of day is really AI. I mean, you've been using AI in the product for years. Long time. So why don't we, if we don't say AI, they'll kick us off the internet. So we need to delve in a little bit to understand how are you using AI and you're even using, you know, gen AI in the new product as well. Yeah, so there are two types of AI that I would say exist in the product. One is pure machine learning based capabilities. This is purely focused on operational automation. So for example, a backup environment always has some form of failures happening. A lot of events being generated. So a lot of noise. So as a backup administrator, it's very difficult to weed out the noise and actually pay attention to what is happening in your environment. So we use AI for doing machine learning to find those kinds of events that you as humans should pay attention to. The rest can be ignored. The second part that is fairly new is we built a platform on metallic which uses some of the capabilities on Azure Open AI and other AI tools to be able to take a look at everything that we are doing in our environment, whether it is recovery, understand the patterns of recovery or to make the sequence of recovery. It's an example of what we are doing. Or for example, typical failures that happen in a customer's environment. So we've taken that, compared it against all the historic failures and tickets that have happened from all our customers and using that knowledge to generate responses for you so that you can take corrective action without calling a human being. But the most interesting thing that we have done is on the fly walkthroughs. So typically to navigate a product, you read documentation or you go to Pendo and you try to build wizards in Pendo so that when somebody logs into the UI, you do a walkthrough using Pendo. But what we have done here is used AI to actually crawl through every link in our product and automatically generate walkthroughs. So you can just naturally talk to AI and say, hey, how can I do a Salesforce backup? And we'll just automatically walk you through the steps required to do a Salesforce backup. And that I believe is ground breaking. And finally, code assistant, right? That was not easy. I mean, people say, yeah, I can generate code, but trust me, it is not easy to get into generate code. We spent several months teaching the models to learn our APIs. And now we are able to successfully, not only do simple one step task, but nested. Nested steps of APIs. And that is the most complex thing. I want to achieve A, B, C and D and that process I have to call 15 different APIs. Well, the AI code can go through and generate all that for you. Makes it damn easy to integrate with Commodore. Yeah, no, I think one of the loudest collapse came with the API discussion as well, which I think code assistant and getting into that and being able to do those integrations, I think is a great way to kind of bring it home to, you have a lot of partners on stage, on video, very exciting from hyperscalers to security to some of the traditional ones who've been with you, you know, like Dell for quite some time. Tell me about that. And there's so much also part and other partners on the value out of resellers are here and distribution. So what are you hearing from them about this? Well, first off, I'd probably say, collaborating has been in our DNA for a long time. The reason we do what we do is because we support the broadest breadth of where things are coming from and where things are going to. And we don't just pick and choose what we think is cool. You know, some of the stuff we do is what runs mission critical workloads for our customers. It may not be cool, but it's reliable. They need it to work. They need us to be there for them. So the breadth of what we do has always been valued by customers and also where the partner ecosystem. And so when we reached out to them as part of this, the partners that knew us were very happy that we were creating something different and something new and they had this platform to plug into. And then we said with security, it's an ecosystem. Anyone who thinks they can do all of it themselves, that's not true. It's just not true. And so we started reaching out to new partners like the list you saw. And they were quite interested because whether you're shifting left or you're shifting right, you have to work together. And then we didn't just say, okay, let's sign an agreement to be good friends. We made some deep integrations because when customers get a signal from us to the Sim, it matters. If they send us a signal that's really strong, high fidelity signal, it matters. And we need to act on it. And then he can apply his AI based policy engine to say, you can do this or this or this if you see this. And it's real time. So we're scanning and doing threat detection when we're writing data, we're scanning, we're doing threat detection when we're restoring data. So there's this back forth between the ecosystem and ourselves because we don't do some of that. And we don't want customers to have to go engineer that. So what we're hearing from them is exactly what we wanna hear and we wanna support which is it's an ecosystem and let's, you've got your part, I'm not messing with that. What we've got ours, what we do is pretty hard. We solved really hard problems and we've done it for many years. So let's bring it better together. And I think there's a better understanding of that. And our simple approach, at least that's what my partner team knows I believe is partnerships when both sides win and the customer wins. And that's what's important. Yeah, I mean keeping the eye on the customer is always the right thing to do to make a good business to put it mildly. And I think again it was really exciting because I think again, you know, as everybody is all hyped up about AI, really what underpins the AI and is the intellectual property of the companies, these organizations, is their data. So having faith in that data, being able to recover that data so that your AI can actually run or you can train your models is just super kick. And something if you go back and look at our claims and our launches over the years, something I learned when I came in five years ago was we don't make outlandish claims. We don't AI wash or cloud wash or whatever the flavor of the day wash is until we don't have it and it doesn't actually solve a hard problem for our customers, it's noise. It's distracting, okay? It doesn't salt anything. So as much as some of the folks in our industry will go off and make these big announcements, there's nothing there. But what we're telling you, what we showed you was real. You can go outside and go talk to Arli yourself and Arli will do work for you. Okay. I'm planning on that. Yeah, you should. And for us, this is just the start on the journey. There's so much more that because the platform's extensible that partners will tuck into it and we will continue to expand our capabilities using partners. We talked about partnerships with Oracle today. We talked about partnership with Azure today. We talked about a partnership on some of these services with AWS today. We've got deep integrations with Google. We're not doing it because we have a flavor of the month. We're doing it because customers want this. These are the conversations we have with customers. So it's a start. It's a very nice start, but it's a start. You'll see more coming there. Yeah, and I thought again, because it's cyber resilience and you start to look at all the XDR products that are out there and stuff that and the integration with the APIs. I mean, that just gets you to that next level because I think part of it is AI is great, especially when you have limited skill sets and people aren't there and going through and using the AI to help extend your customers so that they can be more productive. Of course, that's cute. Of course, and it has to be natural. I said it about three times today, right? I said it was built in, not bolted on. Whether it's security, it's natural. It has to be built in. Whether it's AI, it has to be built in. If you make it an afterthought, it is an afterthought. And we work with mission critical data. We can't afford to be sloppy on that. It has to be an integral part of what we do. Yeah, no, I think that's a great place to end on. And I really want to thank you for having us here at Commvault Shift. I think this and the announcement of Commvault Cloud powered by Metallic AI, it's fantastic. And like you said, it's just building on top of that same core software, but taking it to the next level where your customers want to be. So thank you. Thank you for being with us. Yeah, and thank you for watching theCUBE. The leader in enterprise tech analysis and news. Stay tuned and we'll be covering Commvault more in the future and appreciate you watching.