 from Miami Beach, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2019. Brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to Miami, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day two of VeeamON 2019. It's theCUBE's third year at VeeamON. We did New Orleans, we did Chicago last year. Of course, here at the Fontainebleau in Miami, a great venue for an event like this. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Peter Burris. Abba Azadi is here. He's the head of IT at Charles Russell Speechleys, a London-based law firm. Abba, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. So tell us about this interesting name, Charles Russell, Speechleys. It was a merger of two firms, right? Tell us how it came about. Back in 2014, Charles Russell Speechleys were formed through a merger between two different companies, Charles Russell and Speechley Bircham. From an IT perspective, that was very interesting for the two IT departments coming together. So we had a limited time period where we had to merge these two companies, two different systems, different data centers, different data sets. So it was formed by a merger back in 2014 and four or five years on, we're here today. Yeah, we see this a lot. M&A goes down. The acquiring company, although this sounds like it was a merger, they sort of battle, okay, which framework is going to win? You guys, I'm sure, had that conversation, but sort of take us through that merger, what it entailed, what the scenario looked like and how you planned for it. Sure, so I was part of the Charles Russell, legacy Charles Russell team, and then obviously Speechley Bircham had their own team as well. So initially, when we first found out about the merger, it was essential for the two teams to get together to work out, okay, what systems do you have for email? What systems do you have for document management system? It's playing trump cards, who's got the best system and which way do we want to move forward? Yeah, it's doing a lot of this, a lot of that. Yeah. So, but being a law firm, most law firms around the world and in the UK especially use the same types of software. So essentially, from that perspective, it was quite simple. But then we had to work out, how do we go forward with this? Because two different headquarters in the London area, which office do we move into? So the logistics around that, can we fit in? Pre-merger, Charles Russell had roughly 600 people. Speechley Bircham had roughly 500 people. So pretty comparable. Yeah, so working out, the space logistics was an issue itself. Yeah, making that even more complicated, right? Yeah, yeah. Look, one of the things that's interesting about a law firm, right? Versus a traditional manufacturer or a financial services firm that has a lot of very fast writing systems and have to scale on those lines. There's a law firm's feature, very complex docs, very complex information. A lot of files. A lot of files that are written, but at the same time, you have to be repurposed to a lot of different workflows, very sensitive to external contingent regulatory change. And so you have all of that happening, especially, I mean, two years ago, if I'm not mistaken, you're getting into Brexit stuff too. So that also had to be a source of uncertainty. So how has it been combining external regulatory issues, the way that technology is being used in law firms and some of the new workflows that you guys are trying to support and then adding on top of that the complexity of bringing these two firms into a little GDPR. Well, GDPR itself was a year old project for us. Yeah, a lot. And obviously we've got offices in the Middle East, we've got offices in the Far East and in Central Europe as well. So data, the districts of where it sits is an issue for us as well. So GDPR has been a big project for us. In terms of the merger itself, it was very, very difficult for the two IT departments to come together and actually work out how do we go to one unified systems, essentially one docker management system, one email system. All of that took a lot of planning, a lot of project management and essentially within the legal press itself, we got doubted in the time frames that we had that we can achieve it. And within, I think it was an 18 month period, we had merged all the different systems and the various offices, because Beachley-Bircham at the time as well had offices in, let's say Zurich and Geneva, we had to merge the different offices together as well. So it was a big, big task for the IT department and the firm itself. They're very tight migration deadlines. And as you started to approach those deadlines, you had to worry about, okay, when we're going to cut over, how do we avoid downtime? How do we make sure that we don't have bad data, data corruption and the like? So how did you plan for that? And how did it go? So we're here at Veeam-On and Veeam was a big part of our migration process. So where we had two different parts of the business, different storage systems, different virtualization systems, we used Veeam as the middleman basically to migrate data from one data center to another using SwingKit. So where there was largest amount of terabytes and terabytes amount of data, we had SwingKit available to us. Using Veeam, we were able to V2V essentially a lot of the environments into the SwingKit and then bring them over to the other side of the business. And Veeam was essentially part of that. And on top of that, making sure that the data that we were bringing across is true and not corrupt. And that using some of their technologies, short backups and stuff like that, really, really was essential to the migration going well. And was Veeam installed in both organizations at the time or was that something that you had to sort of redeploy? Yeah, so legacy Charles Russell had Veeam. We, it was actually myself, going back to probably eight years ago, version four. At a time, I think Veeam had 20,000 customers. So to here they've got... We're at what, version 10 now, 350,000? 150,000, 4,000 a month. And that makes me proud that we invested in Veeam when we did. A good call. So yeah, it was a good call from us. And essentially, the other side of the business did not have Veeam, but then we just expanded our Veeam estate to look at both sides and then bring them across. And then ever since then, we've grown our Veeam estate across the world, across all of our offices. So how did you do that? Was that sort of another migration that had to occur? And did you kind of do those simultaneously? Did you do the Veeam migration first and then bring the two systems together? Did you use Veeam to do, for special sauce in the migration? Yeah, so Veeam was essentially the tool that we used to migrate data sensors from one data center to another. Using their backup technology, using their replication technology, we were able to replicate all of one side's virtual machines to the other. And then that gave us the flexibility as well. When we had the limited downtime periods that we had, that gave us the flexibility to actually say, okay, the business is, during these particular hours, we're not going to be able to, you're not going to have access to these systems because we're going to bring up the systems from point A to point B. So Veeam was essential to that, yeah. If you had to do it over again, if you had a mulligan, what would you have done differently? What advice might you give to somebody who's trying to go through a similar migration? I would say, give your partners and lawyers a more realistic time frame. Then the time frames that we were given. Or don't let them give you an unrealistic time frame. Exactly, yeah. So it's essential, the amount of work, it's not just data itself, we're talking networking, we're talking security, we're talking two similar-sized companies coming together with a very, very limited time frame, consolidating all of their systems into one, which is essential for the two parts of the business to collaborate together. Because we could have taken our time, we could have taken us three, four years, as far as we're concerned. But the fact that we did do it in such a quick time frame meant that the two parts of the business, from day one, can collaborate much better with each other. We talk a lot about digital business transformation and our approach or our observations on it is that digital business transformation is a process by which you alter and change your firm to re-institutionalize the work, change your game model, your overall governance model, as you use data as an asset. So that's affecting every firm everywhere. How is it affecting a law firm and your law firm specifically and how is that going to change your stance and your approach to data protection? Data is incredibly important to a law firm, as it is to most organizations. But in terms of, you know, one of the things that's quite important in terms of law firms, we work with the financial institutions. So we hold information about that, we hold personal data, we hold all types of information. Charles Officer of Speech Leads works with all areas of law, apart from criminal. So the areas of law that they work with is vast in terms of the amount of data that we hold. And essentially, I mean, for us, data is the most important thing that runs the firm and having visibility to our data, how do we work that data? How do we then market, based on the data that we have, how do we market ourselves from that data? There might be one area of the business that's dealing with a family issue, family law, but then, you know, that could correspond with a litigation issue, or, you know, how do we work that data to be an advantage to our business is extremely important to us. What do you think of the announcements this week? I'm kind of curious, I always like to ask the practitioners sort of what they think about, you know, what was announced. You had, well, you had the beam at a billion dollars, that's kind of just fun and cool, but you had the with Veeam program, which was kind of interesting, the whole API thing. I really liked that. And then the Veeam availability orchestrator, where they're really talking about recovering from backups as opposed to needing to recover from a replicated instance. Yeah. You know, some of the automated testing stuff was kind of interesting. They talked about dynamic documentation. Things you saw this week that you'll actually go back and say, hey, I can apply that to solve a problem. Sure. So essentially, I think, I mean, that's a really good question, and it's very relevant to us. Many of, not just us as law firm, but many of the other law firms around the world are now looking at cloud-based services. Now, for us, I mean, this was the big thing five years ago where, you know, everyone was talking about public clouds, AWS, Azure. We're now looking at clouds, and we're basically, we're being pushed by the vendors themselves to go towards cloud, like Citrix, for example, their licensing model is based around cloud services. So is Microsoft. You know, Microsoft, you don't really have, you know, exchange anymore within premises. You have Office 365. So a lot of the SaaS applications are moving towards the cloud. And what Ratmir had to say during this keynote in regards to Act 2, and how Veeam are trying to be the visionaries in terms of looking at cloud as their next big thing for the next 10 years, I think that is crucial. And for businesses like ours who have limited exposure to cloud technologies, limited understanding, essentially, having a tool that could migrate from one cloud to another is fantastic. You know, we've, I've heard of, you know, I've spoken to obviously ours and IT directors around the other law firms where one or two have gone to the public cloud, they don't know how to come back in. And having a tool that essentially gives you that flexibility to bring it back in-house, to go from AWS to Azure. Or if there's a particular SaaS application, for example, that peers better with AWS, but you've got your other application that peers with that particular application in Azure, why would you want to have it in Azure? You probably want to move it into AWS. So for us, I think what the message coming out of Veeam on this year has been really, really helpful for us. So when you started with Veeam, they had, I think you said 20,000 customers, you were like the 20,000 and first customer. And it was coincided with the virtualization craze. Do you feel like Veeam, knowing what you know about them, you got a lot of experience with them, can sort of replicate that success in this- Point of intended. In act two. I think when I first looked at Veeam, I thought, wow, this is really, really simple. It's a bit like an iPhone. You give an iPhone to your grandmother or to your children and they know how to play with it. And I see Veeam as an intuitive piece of software that's easy for IT professionals to get on with. As their slogan said a few years ago, it just works, it does just work. We're great advocates of Veeam. It's worked wonders for us. We've acquired smaller businesses using Veeam. We've merged companies using Veeam. And when I see, you know, when you go to these sessions and you see the intelligence behind their thinking, I think, going back to your question, I think we see Veeam as a strategic partner for us and we see their vision and we believe in their vision. And I think what they're doing in terms of what they're working on the next few years, I think we're all in favor of that. And I think, you know, essentially, that's where most of their business is going to come from. When you sit down with, you know, Rattmare over a vodka, and he says, Abba, tell me the one thing I could do to make your life, you know, easier, better. You can't say cut prices, that's a hell of a hard bet. But what would you advise him? To make my life better. Other than gin instead of vodka. Yeah. Because that would make you crazy. Yeah. Well, in terms of Veeam as a technology partner, product or business relationship or something you'd like to see them do that would improve. I think in terms of mergers and acquiring companies, seeing license rentals will be a good thing. I know they give you evaluation license keys and that's something that you can use. So for example, if we were to acquire a company that has hundreds of servers and VMs, having license rentals for a period of time. Ah, being able to spin it up and spin it down like a true cloud experience. Exactly, yeah, so that will be an advantage. I think in terms of what they're doing in the marketplace and a lot of law firms use Veeam, I think they can't do any more than they are doing now. And in all the years that we've used Veeam, I think it's been eight years now, but we've only had one serious problem and the way they dealt with that problem, you know, the way they communicated with us, all the different teams across the Europe and the US got involved. I think in terms of service, in terms of software, in terms of what they do for us, I don't think there is anything more to add to Ratmere's vision for their customers. Well, Abbas, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. You're welcome, all right, keep it right there, everybody, Peter and I'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live from Miami at the Fontainebleau Hotel. You're watching theCUBE from Veeamon 2019. We'll be right back.