 Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2018, brought to you by Commvault. Welcome back to theCUBE's first time in Nashville, Tennessee here at Commvault Go. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, Keith Townsend and happy to welcome back to the program, Dave Klemkin, who's the Global Sales Director with Cisco. Dave, thanks so much for joining us. Appreciate the opportunity to be here, this is great. All right, so we've been talking this morning with some of the Commvault executives and ecosystem and partnerships are, of course, really important. Where they sit, they're a software company, they work with partners to do appliances, and they've had a partnership with Cisco for a while now, but been some updates, so maybe give us your viewpoint about the partnership itself and give us the news that was announced this week of the show. Yeah, so Commvault is kind of a critical partner for us, so it leads to us doing more of a portfolio sales approach, which is important when we're out competing in the marketplace. And if you look at, from a Cisco perspective, we sell converged infrastructure solutions, we sell hyper-converged solutions, they run companies mission critical business applications. And in the past, we hadn't really participated in that data management part of the business, and that's really one of our key core pillars going forward, and Commvault is a key partner, especially in the enterprise space, is where we think we can really be successful. Yeah, Dave, drill us in a little bit more. I think at Cisco, I mean Cisco really drove that converged infrastructure marketplace when you talk about the partnerships with IBM, with the VCE, Dell EMC activity, and many other storage partnerships. I mean, this is billions and billions of dollars of the foundational layer for lots of enterprises around the globe, so data, of course, a critical component of that. What about Commvault and other partners like that? What do they mean to that overall solution? What are you hearing from your customers? So, in this part of the converged infrastructure business, I mean, we have a lot of key partnerships, and from a Cisco perspective, we own about 60% of the server part of that business, so we're really the market leader in that area of the business, and what we're seeing, though, is our customers are looking for more than just that, so they're looking for us to expand into other areas, so it could be analytics, it could be data management, it could be IOT, and those are all really critical. When you think about probably the past decade or so, I would say we see an infrastructure-led kind of part of the business where customers stored vast amounts of data, but they didn't really use it, and today what we're seeing is really the applications and data are king, we're seeing that customers want to gain valuable business insights, they're looking to gain competitive advantage, they have to protect the privacy of that data, so you think about things like GDPR and other global regulations, you think about big data, but now artificial intelligence is really taking off, the intelligent edge with IOT and analytics, again to use that data competitively, so again we think it's more of an infrastructure-led world where really data is kind of that new oil. All right, so we know Cisco has a lot of partners, Commvault has a lot of partners, the branding that you have together, if I understand it, Scale Protect? It is. Just give us the thumbnail, one plus one Scale Protect equal more than the sum of the parts. Yeah, so with Scale Protect, I mean there's a couple things, it's Cisco and Commvault going in to offer a complete data management solution. It provides that seamless scalability, it also, what it does is it provides us the ability to kind of scale and simplify the customer experience. If you look at kind of legacy kind of data protection or data management solutions, you have lots of touch points, lots of activities, lots of configuration, lots of room for error to go on, so if we can use best practices and really optimize that performance to scale seamlessly, that really provides a customer, I think with a much better solution than you're going to get in kind of the old legacy or even if people are selling things differently. So Dave, let's talk about some of the drivers behind the deepening of the partnership and Cisco bringing a complete data management solution with both Commvault and Cisco to customers. You mentioned obviously compliance, data recovery, DR are important things, but what about this data movement theme that we heard this morning on the show floor where customers want this flexibility between on-prem and off-prem public cloud, private cloud? So we see lots of customers talking about moving data, moving workloads, even moving data centers to the public cloud and what we see at Cisco and what we even see IDC kind of supporting is that 90% of our customers are really in a multi-cloud world and when you talk to a customer, you're probably going to hear them talk about two or three private clouds, they're going to talk about, we have customers that have three public cloud vendors, hybrid cloud, SaaS environments. So when you look at that, we see what we call as the new normal or distributed data center where you have applications and workloads spread across all these different environments and platforms and some of the key things that, from a Cisco perspective is what ties all that together? It's the network, it's foundational, obviously that's a core competency of Cisco, it's where we excel. They talked about performance today and it's where performance is critical. So being able to get data in and out of those environments is just really important. So we have data and we have data, we have the transported data, which Cisco is obviously an expert in helping you get data from point A to point B. Then we have the data, the storing of the bits. So talk to us about how customers have benefited from that complete Cisco story coming from using Commvault to help at that storage layer and then Cisco at that both compute in the data center and the network layer, that connection between the data center and the public cloud. What unique value is Cisco bringing to customers? So we have the ability to do a number of things. Customers are going to look at, what are the two key things that customers are looking at? It's data and applications. And when they look at data, they have to kind of decide where and how do I want to store it? They have to understand how am I going to manage all the growth? How am I going to protect it across all these environments? So we have the ability with Cisco to go ahead with primary storage to manage that. With secondary storage, we can manage it on-prem. And we obviously have the network that can connect people to their various private and public clouds as well. And so that's really our key, I think our key value proposition. Yeah, so you're director of sales. Who are you having this conversation with the customer? Is this the director of infrastructure, the networking group, the storage group? As we see the consolidation of activities, who's the audience? So I think it depends on what the kind of the story is, obviously, I'm going to give you the, it depends the answer. So when you look at, you know, when you look at probably data protection, it could be storage or backup type folks. When you look at servers and hyperconvergence and things like that, it could be server or virtualization teams. When you look at a multi-cloud environment, you start to go up that stack. So I think from a Cisco perspective, our ability to go up to, you know, and talk to various levels and various groups in a company is really why we're successful. So all the way up to that CXO level. Yeah, Dave, when you talk about customers having a multi-cloud environment, what we find is they want to have that really cloud experience wherever they are. It's really more about that operating model than it is about the destination of it. And when I think back to hyperconverged infrastructure, that really was some of the ideas. I want to have some of the same, you know, flexibility. You know, we, Commvault this week, expand there as a service offerings, which get to kind of the purchasing models. Bring us inside what Cisco's doing with HyperFlex, with Commvault and, you know, what you would call kind of the, you know, my own data center that might be in my own data. Absolutely. So when we look at kind of data center modernization or that new normal hyperconvergence is one of the key disruptors in the data center architecture today. And customers are looking for, you know, three or four things. They're looking for simplicity. They're looking for consolidation. How do I consolidate compute network and storage? And then how do I have that more cloud-like experience that can reduce the complexity of the data center? So what we're seeing is, you know, that hyperconvergence market is pretty hot. It's growing at 80% per year. And our versions of that is called HyperFlex. And it's focused on running mission-critical business applications and that agile provisioning that can reduce the complexity. But the nice thing is, is in the next, I think in mid-December, we'll have integration with Commvaults and Telesnap built into HyperFlex. So you could do snapshotting from HyperFlex. So those are some of the, you know, some of the new things that are going to be coming in the next, you know, next couple of months. And then we always like to talk about day two operations. What are the concerns customers are having when we start to expand out these relationships, these alliances? What are some of the concerns and answers to that concerns that customers are having when it comes to this kind of split-mold support? Yeah, so yeah, so it does introduce a little some complexity into the discussion. But the things that Cisco does really well is, we have a couple of different offers that we can provide to customers, you know. One is, you know, we'll take the first call. So we can take the first call on a lot of our third-party relationships, which is important. And we can also sell a much more detailed solution support, kind of a contract, where we'll take, you know, second and even third calls, you know, on the whole stack, basically. So those are some of the things that we offer. I mean, we have a global, you know, TAC or call center. It's, you know, it follows the sun. You know, it's first, you know, it's first in class. And so when we're able to take those first calls or even do additional kind of services on top of that, that's pretty significant. The other thing is, you know, we work with partners. I mean, partners are, you know, probably 90% of our business, and partners provide a lot of services and bring, you know, they're really the glue that brings a lot of these different solutions and vendors together as well. So I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about one of, you know, one of the key, you know, kind of key value propositions of Cisco right now. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love you to, you know, with Cisco, just the go-to-market power that Cisco and the Cisco channel have are, you know, one of the leaders in the industry out there. May it give us a little more color as we talk to how you get these solutions, joint solutions out to the marketplace. So I handle actually the whole solutions business for the data center part of the business and we have lots of partnerships and we do it a number of different ways. You know, we, from an engineering perspective, we do what we call validated designs where we basically insert best practices and we can help partners and customers with step-by-step on how to, you know, how to install and implement a solution, you know, with the best practices to ensure optimal performance. You know, we do all kinds of, you know, reference architectures, white papers. I mean, there's, you know, a myriad of, you know, engineering work we do. And then from a sales perspective, you know, we obviously work very closely with our partner sales organizations and, you know, we're going to go ahead and put together, you know, programs and initiatives and, you know, to go out in the market. It might be a competitive takeout. It might be, you know, it might be broader than that. And then we also, you know, we'll probably choose, you know, a certain number of channel partners that we want to work with together jointly to go ahead and put programs together and drive that go-to-market out into the customer basis. Well, Dave, really appreciate all the updates on what you've got here. Congratulations on the updates with Commvault. And Keith and I will be back with more coverage here from Commvault Go 2018 in Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks for watching theCUBE.