 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering ZertoCon 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. This is theCUBE, I'm Paul Gillan. We're here at ZertoCon 2018, Heinz Convention Center in Boston. The final day of ZertoCon, and we're going to talk about partnership at this conference, and one of Zerto's key partners is IBM. Daniel Whitavine is the Vice President of Resiliency Services portfolio at IBM, and I guess the manager of the Zerto relationship from IBM's perspective, is that so? Yeah, so I have responsibility for IBM's resiliency portfolio which includes disaster recovery as a service, backup as a service, data migration services, as well as we do a lot around site and facilities, design, construction, and build. So specifically around DRAS and what you heard today going into the backup world, our backup as a service offering, Zerto's been a partner of ours since 2016. Now DRAS, I think certainly it's been around, disaster recovery's been around for a long time. How much of that business has moved into the cloud now and become a service? There's still a very large segment of the population that's doing traditional DR, but that is moving rapidly to a more automated function. Now the challenge our customers are faced with is not all workload is cloud ready. Right, so we have a partnership with Zerto for all that cloud ready workload using them, but we also combine the Zerto technology into our orchestration software which handles the full recovery of non-cloud workload IT. So think about multiple platforms, think about multiple clouds, think about multiple data movers and replicators. We can orchestrate that entire recovery process using Zerto for the virtual environment. Talking to executives here today, we don't hear a lot about recovery, we hear a lot about resilience. How many of your customers are really in that position where they're thinking resilience is never going down as opposed to recovering from failure? So the goal is to be as close to no outage as possible, but in lieu of recent cyber incidents and cyber related attacks, the conversation for our clients has shifted to true business resilience. So we have a business resilience conversation versus IT resilience conversation. Business resilience clearly includes IT, but when you talk about a malicious cyber related attack which will cause disruption, which will cause outage, which will cause data corruption, you're always on never be outage viewpoint changes a bit. Okay? So our clients are having a lot of discussions with us around changing the way we think about IT resilience in light of a cyber related incident. Well, security, the fastest growing business at IBM is security. How closely do you work with those people in that group? Very closely. So we've combined, if you're familiar with the NIST framework around cyber resiliency, you know that there's a lot of effort from our security services around identification and prevention. But what happens when it gets through all that and actually causes an outage? So we partner very close together on how do you recover and restore using technologies from resiliency services while you try to prevent and detect for true resiliency? Talk about the history of the relationship. It's only been a couple of years, but how did you first become aware of Zerto and why were they chosen as part of the portfolio? Yeah, it's a very good question. So Zerto started a relationship with IBM Cloud. I think at the time it was probably called Softlayer or Blu-Man. It was, probably. And that started as a mechanism to provide DRAS in a very simple version on IBM Cloud. And the benefits IBM Cloud provided at that time and still do today is true hypervisor access to Zerto. And that's been very attractive to Zerto clients because the version of Zerto on-prem is the same as in the cloud. And that's a unique capability for us. But also another value point was that the data replication between our data centers is free to the customer. So think about the cost structure when it comes to bandwidth. If the customer is moving production in one cloud, in one data center of IBM Cloud and wants to do recovery out of region another IBM data center, all that data transfer is included. That's an amazing value problem. But when we're having those discussions with our clients, it expanded to, well, that's nice. That answers this section of my workload. What about all this? And that's really where the relationship blossomed with our integration of orchestration to handle a full IT estate. Really focusing on hybrid IT. The, of course, IBM, hybrid IT is really kind of a sweet spot for IBM. It is. How does resilience fit into the, you know, the Swedish services that you're offering customers now? Is this sort of a core service? Resilience is a core service of the IBM hybrid solution? Yeah, absolutely. So within global technology services, it's one of three key plays, resiliency. And if you think of us as a very large outsourcing firm, clients are dependent on us providing these services to them. So it is very significant as the nature of all of our conversations. Any kind of managed service, the default expectation of our client is that it's resilient. And would you say that clients have understand and have really internalized this idea of resilience or are they still not quite sure what it all means? I would say there's clients very greatly. The regulatory clients and the clients that are most potentially exposed to negative publicity as a result of a cyber attack are much more aware and in tune. I will tell you, and also in lieu of cyber, and it was part of the conversation on the panel yesterday, you're talking about a very different way to respond to an outage, which is creating a lot of dialogue within our clients of what does it really mean to be resilient? So it's driving a conversation that used to be siloed, maybe in IT, maybe in the risk officer, maybe in the CISO, it is bringing them now all together and say we've got to work much stronger together to be resilient. We hear a lot of talk about multi-cloud. Is it mostly talk or are you seeing customers really adopt, are they excited about adopting multiple public clouds? I would probably draw a parallel to did a client ever use one platform, right? And they did. And so clients are very in tune to want to have multiple options. It is very rare today that I go into a client that's single-cloud oriented. They'll start single-cloud, but they're going to want the flexibility to be multi-cloud. And we want to make sure when we orchestrate their disaster recovery or even their backup or any of our other offerings, that that can be seamless. They can move from one cloud to another cloud for whatever reason, maybe it's financial, maybe it's location, maybe it's capability, but we want to be able to seamlessly provide that interaction. Now, AWS and Azure are never going to play nicely together. Where does IBM fit into that matrix? Are you a Switzerland between all these public clouds? Well, so we have our own. Yes, of course. And within IBM cloud, we'll talk about our strength and our size in the enterprise relative to those providers. But as a services entity, we will continue to be acoustic. As shareholders, great to be using IBM cloud, but certainly if a solution or a customer dictates another solution, we would be fine with that. What do your customers ask you about backup these days? Where is backup going? How can you do it for me, so I don't have to do it? Because it's so basic. That's our probably biggest use case, is customers recognize it's not a core competency, the data explosion has just, they can't handle it anymore. They're buying storage every day and they're going, there's got to be a better way. And our conversation with customers around backup is let us be your better way. We will provide the infrastructure, we'll provide the labor, we'll provide the software, we'll provide the architectural positioning and we'll focus on providing you the business outcome that you need relative to that offer. And would you say the backup is rapidly going to move to the cloud or do you think on-prem backup is going to be around for a long time? It's a good question and unfortunately as it depends on the answers. For the smaller companies and the remote offices, going directly to the cloud makes complete sense. When you have a high change rate and you have a lot of storage volume, your decision will become where do I need to recover or how do I need to access that data? And maybe that's best suited on-prem. What's the cost of storage in the cloud? Maybe that's suited in cloud. I think long-term, it will ultimately sit in the cloud, but there's still a massive amount of storage and customers prefer a massive amount of that to be on-prem. In a multi-cloud world, is resilience more difficult to ensure or is it easier? Way more complex, way more complex because if you think of a 10 years ago, you had site A and site B, site A went down, you worried about site B, very easy. One failure case. Now our clients have not only multi-cloud, they have multiple locations, remote offices, back offices, they have multiple software as a service providers. And so our view is you have to look at the business process resilience sense. So if you have one system that goes down in a software as a service provider, how does that impact your business process? Can it still work? And how do you make it work in the event that one of those components fail? So it's a lot more complex because you're not just thinking about A and B, you're thinking about 10 different failure scenarios, 20 different failure scenarios, and making sure that doesn't interrupt the business process. So the quest for simplicity, IT always seems to become more complex. What's interesting is every evolution of technology which increases redundancy, reliability, the first sense is, well then I don't need as much resiliency, and every change of technology consolidates that risk, and therefore, resiliency becomes that much more important. Good job, security. Daniel Whitavine, thanks very much for joining us from IBM. Excellent, as always, I appreciate being here. Thank you. I'm Paul Gillan, that's it for us here at ZirtleCon 2018. This is theCUBE, thanks for watching.