 Live from Chicago, Illinois. It's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. We're back in Chicago at VeeamON 2018. Hashtag VeeamON, my name is Dave Vellante. With my co-host Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE, our exclusive live coverage of VeeamON. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Cube alum Dave Russell is here. He's the newly minted VP of enterprise strategy at Veeam. Dave, it's great to see you again. Thanks for coming back on. Thanks for having me, guys. What a difference the year makes. Yeah, so newly minted last year, we had you on as a Gartner analyst. We've followed you work for years. I personally followed you for actually many decades going back to your IBM days. So, you know, let's start. How'd you end up at Veeam? Unexpectedly, very similar to IBM to Gartner transition, wasn't looking to make a change. Opportunity came literally out of the blue. So this transition was also equally out of the blue. Some emails, phone calls started taking place over one weekend, actually on a Sunday. So towards the end of a weekend. And, you know, after a little bit of discussion, a couple of opportunities and kind of looking at where I thought I might be the best fit and realizing that I really didn't think I was in a position to relocate, you know, me and move the family. Even though no one else said that I had to do that, I just felt like to do another position justice. You really have to be there. And in the situation of the Veeam, I didn't think that was the case. I also think I thought I could jump in there and they've got lots of other great people. I mean, Danny Allen is one of many examples. So ultimately from Sunday morning to, I guess, the following Saturday evening, some things were sort of in flight and they landed where they did. So California, of course, as you know, doesn't have non-competes. People leave companies all the time. You were in a position of gardener. You saw everything from everybody. You did the magic quadrants for years and years and years. You had, you know, visibility on companies' plans and now you hear many of the folks that were customers or people that you were advising are now competitors. How do you, as an analyst and now a professional at Veeam, draw that line between what you can and cannot share? I don't want to make it sound too simple, but it's actually not that hard. And what I mean by that is, you know, it's not hard, I think, for anyone that does an analyst job well, a role to understand how to compartmentalize, right? You know, you can't go and talk to a three-letter company and then talk to a two-letter company and mix the two conversations. And the same, you know, with your transition jobs. And when I came from IBM for 15 plus years to Gartner, there were a lot of things I knew, of course, a lot of things that I knew about even the backup space that I was focused on, I was the technical strategist for that product, development manager for that product, even in adjacent areas like storage, meaning storage arrays, you know, my colleagues, new colleagues at Gartner would say, I wonder what the roadmap is for that. I'm like, well, you know, I know what the roadmap is for that, but you know, I'm not going to say anything. And no one asked me to, you know, it was never that kind of situation. And the same I think is true, you know, right now, is that no one's asked me, so what do you know? In fact, I probably overrotated in that I literally shredded everything that I had and took pictures of me shredding documents that I had. I literally took every drive that I have and overrode it, not just deleted it, but overrode it with multiple patterns and took pictures of that. Semi-ironically, I guess I'll just give this example but kind of leave it at a high level. For a couple of days, it looks like I was going to the West Coast. And so I shredded everything, but their magic quadrant response. And then when I realized that wasn't the case, I shredded that magic quadrant response. So I had to reach out to Veeam and said, hey, you know the thing I just shredded? Your marketing plan that you gave me in person two weeks ago, the magic quadrant response that I had already printed off and highlighted and done notes on, can you re-send that to me again and I need to re-read that. It's okay. So now you clearly had a choice of places to go. You're sought after, you've had an impact on the roadmap and strategy of many, many of these companies. Why Veeam? Well, you know, I don't know if Veeam is going to let me say this, but I thought there were two great opportunities and I'm not kidding, I only looked at two. There were a couple more, but I looked only seriously at two and for very different reasons. The reason that I really liked Veeam was that their problem set or what I thought I could offer was really different. It wasn't, hey, we need someone to really focus on strategy and to navigate through going through a financial, you know, transaction or an IPO situation and what happens after that. It was more operational, it's more we already are in the enterprise, but we need to go big in the enterprise. We already have some strategy people, but we need enterprise strategy. So it was more of an augmentation play and I thought that was really interesting. I thought where Veeam is in it's life cycle was interesting, not that a younger startup isn't also equally as compelling, but when I looked at where I thought I could be of value and ultimately what was right for the family, I thought the best decision. Dave, you've been covering backup for a long time, but would it be safe to say that it's one of the hottest times in this space that you've seen and why is that? I'm a Homer, right? So I'm going to say, I think I've been saying for 28 years there's never been a time like this in backup, but I actually think there's evidence to support that that's true. So let me give you a couple of examples, case in points. Every year I ask the question, are you more or less willing to switch backup vendors? Is essentially the gist of it and that was through my Gartner days and there's kind of a scale. Are you somewhat more willing to augment the solution? Are you far more willing to augment the solution? All the way to are you somewhat more willing to completely replace it or far more willing to completely replace it? Long story short, the heat index or I'm far more willing to completely replace the solution is on the rise. And that kind of flies in the face of the myth that people don't switch backup solutions. The other thing I think was interesting is also drawing from my Gartner heritage last December that a conference did on stage polling and you could ask people questions and one of them was one year from now, who do you think will be your strategic backup vendor? The top response is we won't have a strategic backup vendor. That was 23% of the audience. 22% said it would be Veeam. And then you went down the list for organizations or vendors that have far more market share than Veeam. So if the fact that majority of people say, basically out with everybody and then the second highest response is we're going to choose number four in market based on market share. That's a pretty, I don't want to say, can we say damming? Is that okay to say on here? Okay, that's a pretty damming indictment of the state of the industry. So I know you don't see the stuff or maybe you do with some of it but the stuff that the Wikibon research guys do and they've just done some work and I want to run up by you and just sort of stake test it if you will. Clearly we've been talking about all day that data protection is moving up in the minds of CXOs. I mean that's kind of well known. But they discovered a dichotomy between the business and IT with respect to the degrees of automation. In other words, the business expects that there's far more automation than actually exists. And that's leading in their conclusion to what you were saying before is a lot of opportunities for customer churn. It seems to be a very churn ripe environment. And then the other piece that I'd love your comment on is the global 2000 generally, specifically really the Fortune 1000, is leaving billions of dollars on the table over let's say a three or four year period in either inadequate data protection or poorly architected data protection. So some of those findings sort of jive with your experience and your knowledge of the marketplace. Yeah they really do because the last three years at Gartner one of the fun things I got to do was a little more horizontal was participate in CIO level research. Notice when there's like 415 AM phone calls for me but it was so fun to do because there was I think 3,700 CIOs participated from around the world. So if you look at the big takeaways from there the short story is CIOs think that they're much further along on their journey than they actually are. And I don't think it's because these men and women are blind it's just they're thinking that we've been talking about this for so long haven't we automated more? Aren't we more virtualized? Aren't we more into the cloud? And haven't we done more of our objectives that we set out to do? The sad reality is the cases often no. And if you look at backup and recovery in particular I totally agree with you. I mean for the amount of money that's being spent in this industry our rate of return is not so great. It's not a spending problem to your point you're spending billions and billions of dollars you know on software and then you're spending even more billions on hardware and you're obviously spending human capital to go and manage this stuff and professional services what have you so how can we can't restore the file? Right and essentially many parts of that business are failing so we can do better at your point. I wanted to ask you about the value of data one of your former colleagues at Gartner Doug Laney wrote a great book I got an advanced copy Doug's been on the Cube many times Infonomics is the name of the book really talking about a methodology to understand the value of data. Do you feel like organizations especially in this digital world have a good understanding of the value of their data and if not how does that affect their data protection decisions? I'll give you the short not so great answer which is no I don't think that they do but to elaborate on that I think someone or some people do I don't think that's distributed around the whole enterprise. So for example if I'm the backup person I think I know what I need to go and protect. You might be the Cassandra administrator and you say no this is the future of our business that I'm actually instancing in this new application right here. Meanwhile I'm not doing anything to protect that whatsoever. So if I'm operating under independent view that doesn't align with the business then we're in trouble and I'm fortunate I think that's too typically the case that all parts of the business aren't interlocked. Yeah back to your point about some of the transitions happening in the market there's a number of players that are putting forth primary appliances even though they are software based and Veeam is 100% pure software. How do you see that dynamic playing in the market right now? Well I don't think there are any wrong answers. I know that sounds like a weasel cop out so let me double click on that. You're no over an analyst you can't say it depends. There you go yeah there's 16 shades of gray actually. So the part that I think is very positive on appliance delivery model is that solves initial deployment challenges that solves proof of concept challenges. That's a wonderful thing to be able to say Dave I want you to go take this box and just try it and then you say you know what I do like that great you can actually keep the car you just test drove. We can cut a PO for you right now. So there's actually a value in my mind for that hardware delivery model. Then you get other customers that they're on the other end of the spectrum right. I don't want to spend more money on your server that you're going to charge me for when I actually have more buying power if I'm a large size organization right. I can go to name your server company and buy it for cheaper than you can. And what I've found is when I used to do a Gartner ask questions of what is your purchasing attention around backup and recovery. It literally became kind of right down the middle. Some people were moving away from appliances towards software based. Some people were doing the opposite and others were kind of of open mind somewhere in the middle. So net net I think anyone whether you're a startup like so it's just name names Rubik and Cohesity. They're today primarily a sales motion of a hardware appliance but obviously they offer a virtual appliance as well. You take the other end of the spectrum someone like Veeam where Ratmir has made it very clear we are not in the hardware business and you look around and you see there are a lot of hardware partners. So at the end of the day whether you own it or enable it I'm not convinced as 100% the point I think it's really operating the choice and but more importantly what's the experience of that choice? People don't want to be integrators so that favors appliances you would think but maybe people don't want to be integrators and if they have a tightly coupled solution where they don't feel like they're assembling it but they also don't have to just buy whatever Veeam says is going to be the controller this year then maybe that's positive too. What's your point of view and it may not be Veeam's sweet spot but I wanted to get your thoughts on this when you look at an Oracle environment and you see how Oracle approaches data protection obviously there's Armand in there but it seems like the database and the application take more responsibility for recovery in particular and it seems to work quite well but it's expensive and it's probably overkill for most applications. Did you see that as a trend or is that sort of an isolated tip of the pyramid? I would have said years ago that I thought it was a trend because the notion of either a hypervisor or an application being more aware of recoverability or availability would make a lot of sense to me because they understand more about what's going on in that particular system. The reality is and Oracle does a number of great things Armand is wonderful, ASM is wonderful they have a couple of different appliances but I'll just leave it at the fact that's not the predominant Oracle protection mechanism today even for Fortune 500 means that there's some sort of feeling that maybe that's not answering all of the issues. Is that, you feel like that's an opportunity for Veeam but I infer from the response? I do and to be honest, to be fair I think it's an opportunity for others besides Veeam but absolutely I think it's an opportunity for Veeam because Veeam is trying to go in and further penetrate that space Oracle is forever going to be vitally important you know I don't think we're ever going to see a day where SAP running on Oracle on on-prem server goes to zero. Dave on the keynote stage this morning you said you want to be a builder again what do we expect to see from you just for the next coming year? Well yeah I think the big thing is I have had the luxury of being able to listen to and advise people and that's kind of, I was going to say blessing that sounds corny but it's a privilege but I miss the direct connect I want to be great to be able to really go to product groups and say here's what I think we need to do in the next rev of the solution or here's my rationale from talking to either Veeam customers or Veeam prospects about why they're not choosing us for some workloads maybe it's high-end work Oracle and be able to affect change I really was serious on stage when I said I view this as my last stop this is my third switch or second switch and third company so hopefully I'm here for 10 or 12 years otherwise that's a little premature of a switch Well Dave congratulations on the move and the new role at Veeam your reputation is impeccable and really appreciate you coming on the queue Always good to see you guys thanks for having me You're welcome Alright keep it right there everybody Stu and I are back with our next guest this is theCUBE we're live from Veeamon 2018 in Chicago we'll be right back