 theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, HPE Discover 2022 from the Venetian in Las Vegas, the first Discover since 2019. I think this, I really think this is my 14th Discover when you include HP, when you include Europe. And I got to say, this Discover, I think it has more energy than anyone that I've ever seen, about 8,000 people here. Really excited to have one of HPE's longstanding partners, Veeam, CTO, Danny Allen is here, and joined by David Harvey, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam. Guys, good to see you again. It was just earlier, let's see, last month, we were together out here. Yeah, just a few weeks ago, it's fantastic to be back in what it's telling us, technology industry's coming back. Yeah, I mean, definitely in the events business, of course it's coming back, which we love. I think the expectations were cautious. You saw it at Veeam on, a little more than you expected, a lot of great energy. A lot of people, because it was last month, it was their first time out in two years. Here, I think people have started to go out more, but still an energy that's palpable. Yeah, you can definitely feel it. At last night, I think I went to four consecutive events and everyone's out having those discussions and having conversations. It's good to be back. Well, you guys hosted the storage party last night, which is epic. I left at midnight. I took a picture, it was still packed. I said, okay, time to go. Nothing good happens after midnight, kids. David, talk about the alliance with HPE, how it's evolved and where you see it going. Yeah, I appreciate it. And certainly this, as you said, is being a big alliance for us. Over 10 years or so, fantastic integrations across the board. And you touched on 2019 Discover. We launched with GreenLake at that event. We were one of the launch partners and we've seen fantastic growth. Overall, what we're excited about is that continuation of the movement of the customers buying patterns in line with HPE's portfolio and in line with Veeam. We continue to be with all their primary, secondary storage. We continue to be a spearhead position with GreenLake, which we're really excited about. And we're also really excited to hear from HPE, unfortunately under NDA, some of their future stuff they're investing in, which is a really nice invigoration for what they're doing for their portfolio. And we see that being a big deal for us over the next 24 months. Your relationship with HPE predates the HPE-HPE split, but it was weird because they had data protector and that was a quasi competitor, really not, but it was a competitor, a legacy competitor of what you guys have, kind of modern data protection, I think is the tagline if I got it right. But so, post the split, that was like an S-curve moment, wasn't it, in terms of the partnership? It really was. So we had, if you go back 10 years, we did our first integration sending data to Store Ones and we had some blueprints around that, but now if you look what we have, we have integrations on the primary side, so three power, Primera, Nimble, all their top tier storage, we can manage the snapshots, we have integration on the target side, so we integrate with catalyst and the movement of data and the management of data, and as David alluded to, we integrate with GreenLake, so customers who want to take this as a consumption model, we integrate with that and so it's been, like he said, the strongest relationship that we have on the technology alliance side. So V12, you announced at Vmon, and so what does that mean for HPE, customers, the relationship? Maybe you guys could both talk about that. Technology side, touched on a few things that we're doing with them. Ransomware has been a huge issue. I mean, security's been a big theme, obviously, at the conference. And one of the things we're doing in V12 is adding immutability for both Store Ones and Store Ever. So we take the features that our partners have, immutability being big in the security space and we integrate that fully into the product, so a customer checks the box and says, hey, I want to make sure that the data is secure. Yeah, and also it's another signification about the relationship. Every single release we've done has had HPE at the heart of it, and the same thing is being said with V12. And it shows to our customers the continual commitment. You know, relationships come and go. They're hard and the great news is 10 years has proven that we get through good times and tricky situations and we both continue to invest, et cetera. And I think there's a lot of peace of mind and the revenue figures prove that, which is what we're really excited about. Yeah, I want to come back to that, but just to follow up, Dany, on that immutability. That's a feature that you sort of check is a service within GreenLake or within Veeam. How does that all work? Yeah, so we have immutability now depending on the target. So we introduce the ability to send data, for example, into S3 two years ago and make it immutable when you send it to an S3 or S3-compatible environment. We added in version 11 the ability to take a Linux repository and make it, and harden it, essentially make it immutable. But what we're doing now is taking our partner systems, like StoreOnce, like StoreEverum, when we send data there, we take advantage of an API flag or whatever it happens to be that it makes the data when it's written to that system, can't be deleted, can't be encrypted. Now, what does that mean for a customer? While we do all the hard work in the backend, it's just a checkbox. They say I want to make it immutable and we manage how long it's immutable because if you made everything immutable forever, that's hugely expensive, right? So it's all about how long is that immutable before you age it out and make sure that the new data coming in is immutable. It's like an insurance policy. You have that overlap, right? Okay. And then, David, you mentioned the revenue bears that out. I got the IDC guys coming on later on today. I'll ask them about that if that's their swim lane, but you guys are basically a statistical tie with Dell for number one. Am I getting that right? And you're growing at a faster rate. I believe it's hard to tell because I don't think Dell reports on the pace of its growth within data protection. You guys obviously do, but is that right? It's a statistical tie, is it? Yeah, 100% Yeah, statistical tie for first place, which we're super excited about. When I joined Veeam, I think we're in fifth place, but we've been in the leader squadron of the Gartner Magic Club. Causing effect there? No, I don't think so. I think maybe. We've been on a great trajectory, but statistical tie for first place, greatest growth sequentially and year over year of all of the data protection vendors. And that's a testament not just to the technology that we're doing, but partnerships with HPE because you never do this. The value of a technology is not that technology alone, it's the value of that technology within the ecosystem. And so that's why we're here at HPE Discover. It's our joint technology solutions that we're delivering. What are your thoughts, what are you seeing in the field on as a service? Because of course, the messaging is all about as a service, you'd think, oh, 100% of everything is going to be as a service. A lot of customers, they don't mind CapEx. They've got good balance sheet and they're like, hey, we'll take care of this and we're going to build our own little internal cloud. But what are you seeing in the market in terms of as a service versus just sort of traditional licensing models? Certainly there's a mix between the two. What I'd say is that sources that are already as a service, think Microsoft 365, think AWS, Azure, GCP, the cloud providers. There's a natural tendency for the customer to want the data protection as a service as well for those. But if you talk about what's on-premises, customers who have big data centers deployed, they're not yet, the pendulum has not shifted for that to be data protection as a service. But we were early to this game ourselves. I mean, we have 10,000, what we call Veeam cloud service providers that are offering data protection as a service, whether it be on-premises, so they're remotely managing it, or cloud hosted doing data protection for that. So you don't care, you're providing the technology and then your customers are actually choosing the delivery model, is that correct? 100%. And if you think about what GreenLake is doing, for example, that started off as being a financial model, but now they're getting into that services delivery and what we want to do is enable them to deliver it as a service, not just the financial model, but the outcome for the customer. And so our technology, it's not just do backup, it's do backup for a multi-tenant, multi-customer environment that does all of the multi-tenancy and billing and charge back as part of that service. Okay, so you guys don't report on this. I'm going to ask the question anyway. So you're number one now, let's call you, let's declare number one, because we're well past that last reporting and you're growing faster, so go another quarter, now we're number one. So you're the largest. Do you spend more on R&D and data protection than any other company? Yes, I'm quite certain that we do. Now we have an unfair advantage because we have 450,000 customers. I don't think there's any other data protection company out there the size and scope and scale that we have, but we've been expanding our largest R&D operation centers in Prague, it's in Czech Republic, but we've been expanding that. Last year it grew 40% year on year in R&D, so big investments in that space. And you can see this just through our product space. Five years ago we did data protection of VMware only, and now we do all the virtual environments, all the physical environments, all the major cloud environments, Kubernetes, Microsoft 365, we're launching Salesforce. That's, we announced that at Veeamon last month and it will be coming out in Q3. So, you know, all of that is coming from our R&D investments. A lot of people expect that when a company like Insight, a PE company purchases a company like Veeam, that one of the things they'll dial down is R&D, that did not happen in this case. No, they very much treat us as a growth company. We had 22% year-over-year growth in 2020 and 25% year-over-year last year. So, I mean, the growth has been tremendous. They continue to give us the freedom. Now I expect Bullwant returns like that continuously, but we have been delivering, they have been investing. One of my favorite conversations of the year was our super cloud conversation, which was awesome. Thank you for doing that with me, but that's clearly an area of focus what we call super cloud and you don't use that term, I know, so you do sometimes, but it's not your marketing, I get that. But that is an R&D intensive effort. Is it not to create that common experience and you see HPE attempting to do that as well across all these different estates? 100%. We focus on three things, I always say, our differentiator, simplicity, flexibility and reliability. Making it simple for the customers is not an easy thing to do. Making that checkbox for immutability, we have to do a lot behind the scenes to make it simple. Same thing on flexibility. So we don't care if they're using three power, Primera, Nimble, whatever you want to choose as the primary storage, we will take that out of your hands and make it really easy. You mentioned super cloud. We don't care what the cloud infrastructure can be on GreenLake, it can be on AWS, can be on Azure, it can be on GCP, it can be on IBM cloud. It is a lot of effort on our part to abstract the cloud infrastructure, but we do that on behalf of our customers to take away that complexity and it's part of our platform. Quick follow-up and then I want to ask a question to David. I like talking to you guys because you don't care where it is, right? You're truly agnostic to it all. Do you see, I'm trying to figure out this repatriation thing, is I hear a lot of, hey, Dave, you should look into repatriation that's happened all over the place and I see pockets of it. What are you seeing in terms of repatriation? Have customers over-rotated to the cloud and now they're pulling back a little bit? Or is it just sort of, as I'm claiming in pockets, what's your visibility on that? Three things I see happening. So there's the customers who lifted up their data center, moved it into the cloud and they get the first bill. And they will repatriate, there's no question. If I talk to those customers who simply lifted up and moved it over because the CIO told them to, they're moving it back on premises. But a second thing that we see is people moving it over with tweaks. So they'll take their SQL server database and they'll move it into RDS. Change some things. And then you have people who are building cloud native. They're never coming back on premises. They are building it for the cloud environment. So we see all three of those. We only really see repatriation on that first scenario when they get that first bill. And when you look at the numbers, I think it gets lost because you see the cloud is growing so fast. So David, what are the conversations like? We had several events last night, the Veeam party slash storage party for HPE. What are you hearing from your alliance partners and the customers at the event? Yeah, and I think Danny touched on our point. It's about philosophy of evolution. And I think at the end of the day, whether we're seeing it with our GSI alliances, we've got out there all with the big enterprise conversations we're having with HPE. It's about understanding which workloads they want to move. And they're getting, in our mind, the customers are getting much smarter in making that decision rather than experimenting. They're really taking a really solid look. And the work we're doing with the GSI is on workplace modernization, data center transformation. They're really having that investment work up front on the workloads to be able to say, this works for me, for my personality and my company. And so to the point about movement, it's more about decisive decision at the start and not feeling like the remit is I have to do one thing or another. It's about looking at that workflow position. And that's what we've seen with the revenue part as well. We've seen our movement to Green Lake tremendously grow in the last 18 months to two years. And from our GSI work as well, we're seeing the types of conversations really focus on that workload compared to, hey, I just need a backup solution. And that's really exciting. Are you having specific conversations about security or is it a data protection conversation still that's in the adjacency to security? That's a great question. And I think it's a complex one because if you come to a company like Veeam, we're there and you touched on it before. We provide a solution when something is happening with security. We're not doing intrusion detection. We're not doing that barrier position at the end of it. But it's part of an end to end assumption. And I don't think that at this particular point, I mean, I started in security with RSA and checkpoint. It was about layers of protection. Now it's layers of protection and the inevitability that at some point something will happen so about the recovery. So the exciting conversations we're having, especially with the big enterprises is not about the fear factor. It's about at some point something is going to occur, speed of recovery is the conversation. And so for us and your question is, are they talking to us about security or more the continuity position? And that's where the synergy is getting a lot simpler rather than a hard D mark between security and backup. Yeah, I mean, when you look at the stock market, everything's been hit, but security with the exception of Octa because it got that weird benign hack, but security generally is an area that CIOs have said, hey, we can't really dial that back. We can maybe some other discretionary stuff we'll steal and prioritize, but security seems to be, and I think data protection is now part of that discussion. You're not a security company. We've seen some of your competitors actually sort of pivot to become security companies. You're not doing that, but it's very clearly an adjacency, don't you think? It's an adjacency and it's a new conversation that we're having with the Chief Information Security Officer. I had a meeting an hour ago with a customer who was hit by ransomware and they got the call at 2 a.m. in the morning after the ransomware. They recovered their entire portfolio within 36 hours from backups. Didn't even contact Veeam. I found out during this meeting, but that is clearly something that the Chief Information Security Officer wants to know about. It's part of his purview is the recovery of that data. And they didn't pay the ransom. And they did not pay the ransom, not a day. We love those stories. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on all the success. Love when you guys come on and it was such a fun event at Veeamon. Great event here and your presence is seen. The Veeam green is everywhere, so appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks, Dave. Okay, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and Lisa Martin. We'll be back right after this short break. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HPE Discover 2022 from Las Vegas.