 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re-invent 2022 live from the Venetian Expo in Las Vegas. We're happy to be back. This is first full day of coverage over here last night. We've got three full days of coverage in addition to last night. And there's about 50,000 people here. This event is ready. People are ready to be back, which is so exciting. Lisa Martin here with Paul Gillin. Paul, it's great to be back in person. Great to be hosting with you. And likewise with you, Lisa, I think the first time we've hosted together. It is our first time, exactly. And we come here to the biggest event that theCUBE ever does during the year. It's the Super Bowl of theCUBE. It's elbow to elbow out there. It's full tackle football. Totally. On the floor of re-invent. And very exciting. You know, I've been to a lot of conferences going back 40 years, long as I can remember going to tech conferences. This one, the intensity, the excitement around this is really unusual. People are jazzed, they're excited to be here. And that's great to see, particularly coming back from two years of isolation. Absolutely. The energy is so palpable. Even yesterday evening, afternoon when I was walking in, you just feel it with all the people here. You know, we talk to so many different companies on theCUBE, Paul. Every company these days has to be a data company. The most important thing about data is making sure that it's backed up, that it's protected, that it's secure, that it can be recovered if anything happens. So we're going to be having a great conversation about data resiliency with one of our alumni. And that would be Rick Scott, Rick, excuse me, Rick Scott. Rick Clark. Rick Clark. SEP Cloud Sales Veritas. Rick, welcome back to the program. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure being here. Thank you so much. I'm definitely very excited to myself and 40,000 of my closest cousins and friends all in one place. If I could possibly go wrong, right? Nothing, absolutely nothing. So Veritas has made some exciting announcements. Talk to us about some of the new things that you've unveiled. Yeah, we've been incredibly busy. And the journey that we've been on, one of the big announcements that we made about three or four weeks ago is the introduction really of a brand new cloud native data management platform that we call Veritas Alter. And this is a journey that we've been on for the better part of seven years. We actually started it with our flex appliances. We continued, that was a containerization of our traditional net backup business into a highly secured appliance that was loved by our customers. And we continued that theme and that investment into what we call a scale out and scale up form factor appliance as well, what we called flex scale. And then we continued on that investment theme, basically spending over a billion dollars over that seven year journey in our cloud native. And we call that basically the Veritas Alter platform with our cloud native platform. And I think if you really look at what that is, it truly is a data management platform and I emphasize the term cloud native. And so our traditional technologies around data protection, obviously application resiliency and digital compliance with data compliance and governance we're the only, the first and only company in the world to provide really a cloud optimized cloud native platform really that addresses that. So it's been fun. It's been a fun journey. Talk a little bit about the customer experience. I see over 85% of the Fortune 100 trust Veritas with their data management. That's a great number. Yeah, it is incredible actually. And it really comes back to the Veritas Alter platform. We sort of built that with four tenants in mind all driving back to this very similar to AWS's customer obsession. Everything we do each and every day of our waiting moments as a Veritas employee is really surrounds the customer. So it starts with the customer experience on how do they find us, to how do they procure our solutions through things like AWS marketplace and how do they deploy it. And the second thing is around really cost optimization as we know, to say that companies are going through a digital transformation and moving workloads to the cloud. I mean, I've got customers that literally were 20% in cloud a year ago and 80% a year later. We've never seen that kind of velocity. And so we've doubled down on this notion of cost optimization. You can only do that with these huge investments that I talked about. And so we're a very profitable company. We've been around, got a great heritage of over 30 years. And we've really taken those investments in R&D to provide that sort of cloud native technology to ultimately make it elastic. And so everything from, we'll spin up and spin down services to optimize the cloud bill for our customers. But we'll also provide the greatest workload support. Obviously on-prem workloads are very different from cloud workloads. And it's almost like turning the clock back 20 years to see all of those new systems. There's no standard API like SNMP on the network. And so we have to talk to every single PaaS service, every single DB PaaS, and we capture that information and protect it. So it really has been a phenomenal journey. It's been great. You said that Alta represents a shift from clouds, from flex scale to cloud native. What is the difference there? The main difference really is we took, obviously our traditional product that you've known for many, many years, NetBackup. It's got tens of millions of lines of code in that. And we knew if we lifted and shifted it up into the cloud into an IAES infrastructure, it's just, it obviously would perform extremely well, but it wasn't cost optimized for our customers. Too expensive to run. And so what we did is we rewrote with microservices and containerization Kubernetes, huge parts of that particular product to really optimize it for the cloud. And not only have we done it for that technology, what we now call Alta Data Protection, but we've done it across our entire portfolio. That was really the main change that we made as part of this particular transition. And what have you done to prepare customers for that shift? Is this going to be a drop in simple upgrade for them? Absolutely, yeah. In fact, one of the things that we introduced is we invest still very heavily with regards to our on-prem solutions. We're certainly not abandoning. We're still innovating. There's a lot of data still on-prem that needs to move to the cloud. And so we have a unique advantage of all of the different workload supports that we provide on-prem. We continue that expansion into the cloud. So we created as part of the Veritas Alta vision, a technology we call an Alta View. So it's a single pane of glass across both on-prem and cloud for our customers. And so now they can actually see all of their data protection, all their application availability, single click all through that single unified interface which is really game-changing in the industry. It's game-changing for customers too because customers have what? Generally, six to seven different backup technologies in their environment that they're having to individually manage and provision. So the workforce productivity improvements, I can imagine, are huge with Veritas. Yeah, you nailed it, right? You must have seen my script. No. But absolutely. I mean, I look at the analogy, if you think about airlines, what's one of the first things airlines do with efficiency? Southwest Airlines was the best example. They standardized on the 737, right? And so all of their pilots, all of their mechanics, all know how to operate the 737. So we are doing the same thing with enterprise data protection. So whether you're on-prem at the edge or in the cloud or even multi-cloud, we can provide that single pane of glass. We've done it for our customers for 30 plus years. We'll continue it to do another 30 something years. And so it's really the first time with Veritas Alta that we're coming out with something that we've invested for so long and put such a huge investment on that can create those changes and that compelling solution for our customers. So as you can see, we're pretty pumped and excited about it. Yes, I can. You used the term data management to describe Alta, and I want to ask about that term because I hear it a lot these days. Data management used to be database. Now data management is being applied to all kinds of different functions across the spectrum. How do you define data management in Veritas' perspective? We see it as really three main pillars across the environment. So one is protection. We'll talk a little bit about this notion of ransomware is probably the number one use case. So the ability to take the most complex and the biggest, most vast applications, SAP is an example with hundreds of different moving parts to it and being able to protect that. The second is application resiliency. If you look at the cloud, there's this notion of responsibility, shared responsibility in the cloud. You've heard it, right? Every single one of the cloud service providers, certainly AWS has up on their website. This is what we protect. There's the demarcation line, the line in the sand, and you, the customer are responsible for that at the level. And so we've had a technology you previously knew it as infascale. We now call it Alta application resiliency, and it can provide availability zone to availability zone real time replication, high availability of your mission critical applications. So not only do we do the traditional backups, but we can also provide application resiliency for mission critical. And then the third thing really from a data management standpoint is all around governance and compliance. A lot of our customers need to keep data for five, 10 years or forever. They're audited. There's regulations and different geographies around the world. And those regulations require them to be able to really take control of their cloud, take control of their data. And so we have a whole portfolio of solutions under that data compliance data governance. So back to your question, Paul, it's really the integration and the intersection of those three main pillars. We're not a one trick pony. We've been at this for a long time and they're not just new products that we invented a couple of months ago and brought to market. They're tried and tested with 80,000 customers and the most complex really solutions on the planet that we've been supporting. Got to ask you, you know, talked about those three pillars and you talked about the shared responsibility model and think of that for mentioned AWS, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, whatnot. Are you finding that most customers aren't aware of that and haven't been protecting those workloads and then come to you and saying, hey guys, guess what? This is what they're responsible for. The data is you. Yeah, it's our probably biggest challenge is there's one of awareness, you know, with the cloud. I mean, how many times have you spoken to someone and you just put it in the cloud, your applications, the cloud providers like AWS will protect everything, nothing will ever go down. And it's kind of like unless your house was ever broken into, you're probably not going to install that burglar alarm or that fire alarm, right? Hopefully that won't be an event that you guys have to suffer through. So, yeah, it's definitely, it wasn't until the last year or so that the cloud service providers really published jointly as to where is their responsibility, right? So a great example is an attack vector for a lot of corporations is their SaaS applications. So, you know, whether it's your traditional SaaS applications that is available, it's available on the web to their customers as a SaaS. And so it's certainly available to the bad actors. They're going to, where there's going to be a point they're going to try to get in. And so, no matter what your resiliency plan is, at the end of the day, you really need to protect it. And protection isn't just, for example, with M365 having a snapshot or a recycle bin. That's just not good enough. And so we actually have some pretty compelling technology, what we call ultra SaaS protection, which covers pretty much the gamut of the major SaaS technologies to protect those and make it available for our customers. So, yeah, certainly it's a big part of it as awareness. Well, I understand the shared responsibility model. I realize there's a lot of confusion about that still. But in the SaaS world, that's somewhat different. The responsibility of the SaaS provider for protecting it is somewhat different. How's your customers know about that? I think, you know, related to that, if you look at on-prem, you know, approximately 35 to 40% of on-prem enterprise data is protected. It's kind of been a long traditional problem. Everyone's aware of it. You know, I remember going to a presentation from IBM 20-something years ago and someone held their hand up in the room about the disk drives and says, you need to back it up. And the IBM sales guy said, no, IBM disk drives never crash, right? And so fast forward to here we are today. Things have changed. So we're going through almost the similar sort of changes in culture in the cloud. 8% of the data in the cloud is protected today. 8%. That's incredible. Meaning that there is independent backup devoted to that data. In some cases, not at all. In some, in many cases, the customer just assumes that it's in the cloud. Therefore, it's always available. I never have to worry about protecting it, right? And so that's a big problem that we're obviously trying to solve. And we do that all under the umbrella of ransomware. That's a huge theme, a huge investment that Veritas does with regards to providing that resiliency for our customers. Ransomware is scary. It is becoming so prolific. The bad actors have access to technologies. Obviously, companies are fighting that. But now ransomware has evolved into no longer, are we going to get hit? It's when, it's how often, it's what's the damage going to be. So the ability to help customers recover from ransomware, that resiliency, it's table stakes for businesses in any industry these days. Is that one of the primary pain points that your customers are coming to you with? It's the number one pain point. Yeah, it's incredible. I mean, there's not a single briefing that our teams are doing, customer meetings where that term ransomware doesn't come up as their number one use case. Just to give you a couple of statistics, there's a ransomware attack that happens 11 times a second around the globe. And this isn't just minor stuff, right? I've got friends that are executives at large company that have been hit that some multimillion dollar ransom attack. So our play on this is when you think about it, is data protection is the last line at the fence. And so if they break through, it's not a case, Lisa, as you mentioned, of if it's a case of when. And so it's going to happen. So one of the most important things is knowing how do you know you have a gold copy, a clean copy and you can recover at speed? In some cases, we're talking about tens of thousands of systems to do that at speed. That's in our DNA. We've been doing it for many, many years. And we spoke through a lot of the cyber insurance companies on this particular topic as well. And what really came back from that is that they're actually now demanding things like immutable storage, malware detection, air gapping, right? Anomaly detection is sort of core technologies tick the box that they literally won't ensure you unless you have those core components. And so what we've done is we've doubled down on that investment. We use AI and ML technologies, particularly around the anomaly detection. One of the unique differentiators that Veritas provides is a ransomware resiliency scorecard. Imagine the ability to save your own corporation. We can come in and run our analytics on your environment and kind of give you a grade, right? Wouldn't you prefer that than waiting for the event to take place to see where the vulnerability really is? And so these are some of the advantages that we can actually provide for our customers. Just a final quick question. There is a common perception, I believe, that ransomware is an on-premise problem. In fact, it is also a cloud problem. Is that not right? Oh, absolutely. I think probably the biggest attack vector is in the cloud. If it's on-prem, you've certainly got a certain line of defense that's trying to break through, but you're in the open world. They're obviously with SaaS applications in the cloud. It's not a case of if, but when, and it's going to continue to get, you know, more and more prevalent within corporations, there's always going to be those attack vectors that they find the flash wounds that they can attack and break through. What we're concentrating on is that resiliency, that ability for customers to recover ad speed. We've done that with our traditional appliances from our heritage on-prem. We continue to do that with regards to resiliency ad speed with our customers in the cloud with partners like AWS for sure. Almost done. Give me your 30 seconds on AWS and Veritas. We've had a partnership for the better part of 10 years. It's incredible. When you think about AWS where they released the Elastic Compute back in 2006, right? We've been delivering data protection and data management solutions for the better part of 30 years, right? So we're juggernauts in our space. We're the leader in data protection and enterprise data protection. We were on-prem. We continue to be in the cloud as AWS was with the cloud service provided. So the synergies are incredible. About 80 to 85% of our joint customers are the same. We take core unique superpowers of AWS, like AWS Outposts and AWS Glacier Instant Retrieval for example, those core technologies and incorporate them into our products as we go to market. And so we released a core technology a few months ago. We call it Ultra Recovery Vault. And it's an air-gapped, immutable storage, worm storage right once, right? You can't change it even when the bad actors try to get in there. Independent from the customer's tenant in AWS. So we manage it as a managed backup service for our customers. And so our customers are using that to really help them with their ransomware. So it's been a tremendous partnership with AWS. 10 years of counting. Last question for you, Rick. You got a billboard on the 101 in Santa Clara right by the fancy Veritas building, right? Well, there's no traffic. What does that billboard say? What's that bumper sticker about Veritas? I think the billboard would say, welcome to the new Veritas. This is not your grandfather's oldsmobile. We've done a phenomenal job in the last, particularly the last three or four years to really reinvent ourselves in the cloud and the investments that we made are really paying off for our customers today. So I'm excited to be part of this journey and excited to talk to you guys today. Love it, not your grandfather's Veritas. Rick, thank you so much for joining Paul and me on the program. Thank you. Talking about what you guys are doing, how you're helping customers really establish that cyber resiliency, which is absolutely critical these days. We appreciate your time. My pleasure, thank you so much. All right, for our guest and Paul Gillan, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, which as you know is the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.