 We're back at the Aria in Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Veeam on 2022 live in person. But there's a big hybrid event going on, close to 40,000 people watching online. This is the CEO segment. The newly minted CEO, Anand Esaron, is here. And it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on. First time on theCUBE. First time on theCUBE, excited to be here. Newly minted. Those words, I haven't heard those for a long time. But thank you for the warm introduction, Dave. So why Veeam? What did you see that attracted you to Veeam? You have a great career, awesome resume. Why Veeam? A lot of different things. It started with, I spent a good bit of time. I spent months with Insight, with Bill Largent, who is now the chair of the board. And for me, a few things. One, it started with the company culture. I absolutely loved, I spent time with our engineering team. That, it's an innovation-focused culture. It's an engineering-focused culture, which is so critical to any software company. And so that was the first place. And I spent a good bit of time with customers, reading, research, brilliant products, always innovating, even though it's a category you would think is fairly mature. When Veeam, for example, did instant recovery. And that was extreme innovation. And so that was the first thing which was appealing. The second thing was, yes, we've breached a billion, but it still has that feel of a startup. It still has that feel of Jeff Bezos says his best, day one culture, which is super critical. We scale, but you don't want to lose your soul and what made you special in the first place. And then you come down to the rest of the stuff. It's an execution machine. It's an absolutely interesting category, especially in the day and the world we live in right now. The proliferation of bad actors, security, backup, recovery, everything you ran somewhere is starting to become a meaningful threat to every company. So many different things coming together. This category is an interesting place, but that's not all. I feel that we're gonna see this category evolve and shape very differently. You're gonna see adjacencies come in and you're gonna see in a couple of years or three years, you're not gonna just look at this and say, hey, it's backup and recovery. And so it's an opportunity to shape what is going to be a very important inflection point in this whole space. So a whole bunch of things, excited about it. So, flip question, why Anand? What did Insight see and the board see? What do you see as your key skills that they wanted here? Go after that opportunity that just went in. You should also get insight on this, man, and you should ask them this question. I know Peter, shovel off. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know. I'll tell you where I think there's relevant experiences if I look at the future of Veeam. I think the first thing is we've got to think through what the next evolution of Veeam is. You know, there's a ton of work to do even in the path we are on on data protection. And the team is absolutely brilliant at that. But how do you start to think ahead? How do you think about data management? How do you think about, you know, where are the adjacencies and how does it, how do you shape and reshape the category? You know, and I have some experiences in that. As I look at growth, Veeam has done a phenomenal job, you know, 35,000 partners, an execution machine. I mean, just last year, we grew ARR, you know, 27%. We are sustaining that growth. But as I look ahead, you know, there's huge opportunities to further accelerate our share in the enterprise, to actually go work with creating multiple layers of partnerships beyond the very successful partnerships we already have. You know, how do you start to get GSIs in the mix? How do you start to get MSPs in the mix? How do you start to actually get to being a core part of the portfolio and platform of a primary storage partners, HPE, Pure Storage, and so on? So reinvigorating and creating a multi-dimensional partnership strategy is key as well. And then just my experience in, you know, I ran the enterprise for Microsoft. And so those sort of experiences sort of are very relevant to our next step of the journey as well. And finally, you know, I think the one thing which matters most for me, and yeah, you realize, again, I think you've forgotten what it means to have a microphone on. But culture, you know, I spent a lot of time in every company I've worked in contributing to the culture of what shapes and, you know, how do you create a purpose-led company and how do you get on that path? Which is a very, very important conversation inside Veeam. You know, and we already do that. You know, there's a huge focus on purpose. There's a huge focus on diversity. There's a huge focus on inclusion. But, you know, the cultural aspect of Veeam attracted me to it. And I think my work and my passion for it attracted me to Veeam as well. So just a few of those things. Yeah, you speak from the heart. You can sense that. Dave and I were talking with Zeus about platform versus product. Now, you've got some experience with platforms. Obviously, Microsoft, you know, the amazing platform, Ring Central, Zeus brought up. And then I brought up HP, which actually never could figure out its software platform. So you've seen some successes. You've seen some, you know, couldn't never get there. Do you see Veeam as a platform company? You know, the way I look at it is this. I mean, I may actually not answer your question directly, but I'll answer the question. Which is, if you look at the biggest successes in the industry, call it a Microsoft, Adobe, now Salesforce, eventually the path from a high growth startup to scale is platform and partners. That is the key. Ecosystems. So yeah, platform and the ecosystem. So it all comes together. And so yes, I mean, I think we already do that. I mean, we have a singular platform today for the multiple workloads we protect from, you know, physical to cloud to Kubernetes to the hybrid architectures, the ability to actually, you know, restore your data into any cloud, you know, backup from AWS restored into Azure or a physical data center. So we already have a robust platform in place, but the scale or the growth from where we are, a billion to the next set of milestones, two, three, five, 10 is going to be an absolute maturity and of platform partnerships ecosystem. It's a high wire act when you talk about platform and scaling, you know, think about moving forward when you have pressure to grow. Often the easiest thing to grow is to acquire and add adjacencies that might not be as core to your core value proposition as they could be. How do you navigate that as you move forward in a world where, look, Veeam was founded in an age when it was all about meantime between failure, recovery point, recovery time objectives. Now the big concern is malicious actors. So Veeam has been able to navigate that transition very well so far, but how do you do that? How do you balance that moving forward? This idea of platform is a desirous state to be in, but you don't want to be a fake platform where you just glue a bunch of things on. It all comes down to thinking through where we see the world going from this point in time. How do you see technology evolving? How do you see the outside influences evolving? And when I say influences, it's just a euphemism for all the bad actors we expect to see getting even more active. So the way I think about it is either platform or acquisitions are not things you do piecemeal or point in time. It all needs to accrue to a larger strategy of how you create the ability for all of your customers to own, protect, secure their data and eventually create intelligence from it so that they can actually be proactive about it. So if that's the thing, our ambition is starting to become how do we sort of secure the world's data and help companies create intelligence from it so they can be proactive about it. Everything else sort of accrues from there. The platform we evolve from the platform we already have stems from it. The acquisitions we may do, will do, evolves from it. It all, its piece is coming together to the overall puzzle framework we've already created. I have so many questions for you. And I want to get into a little bit of your philosophy but before we do it, I want to touch on the TAM a little bit more. You mentioned in the analyst discussion this morning that the market's fragmented. A lot of people think, oh, backup storage, we'll just put it together, Dell now or EMC, but they're just dramatically different markets. You're seeing some of your competitors, one in particular, is now kind of pivoting to security. It's an adjacency but I'm not sure you want to walk into that mess. But it's clearly part of a data protection strategy. And you said, you want your, my words, legacy to be a significant increase in market share, dominant position in the market. Even if it's number two, number one's nice, great, but much larger share than what is your 10, 12% today. How do you think about the TAM? It's so undercounted, I think. We used to look at purpose built backup appliances. Oh, it's a couple billion dollar market and there's a ceiling there. It reminds me of service management with service now. It's virtually unlimited TAM because it's data. How do you look at the TAM? How much time do you have? I know. I got so many questions. But I'll tell you this, right? You got to piece this question very carefully because I look at it in a variety of different ways. Number one, if you do nothing, if you just do nothing. I mean, today, as I shared in IDC's latest report last week, we were joined number one for the first time we actually got one. Congratulations. That's huge. That's exciting. And that's revenue, by the way. That's not. Yeah, that's in share. That's in share. But the thing is this, right? If you look at share, we are at 12%, you know, so 12% is not representative of how I think about number one. When you look at a market with a clear winner, you expect to see 40% to 60% market share. So doing nothing is an opportunity to actually continue the path we are on, which is taking share from every one of the top five significantly and growing as fast as we are. I mean, we are going to be on a path to doubling our market share in the next two to three years. That's so this share to gain, doing nothing. And this is the first and the most simplest aspect of TAM. Now, layer in other aspects of TAM, but just still stay in data protection. Talk about every single SaaS workload coming on. I mean, I shared 270 million Teams users right now, monthly active. The TAM, if you were able to secure every one of those Teams users and protect the data, I mean, that's close to $6 to $7 billion. It's not factored into any of the TAM numbers you see right now. Gartner talked about 13. Others talk about TAM being 40. But SaaS workloads, each of them are not factored in as much as it could be right now. So we're bringing in Salesforce, Microsoft 365. We secure 11 million paid users with Microsoft 365 backup. And so add all of them on. Execute. We see a path to taking share and getting from here 12 to 25 to 40 and being an outsize number one. And then you come down to what you said, which is how do you think about adjacencies? Now, at Weem, yeah, messaging is important. But unlike some of the competitors, we don't use words frivolously. If we say something, if we say something, data protection, modern data protection, ransomware attacks, we mean it and there's product truth behind it. We do not use frivolous security words to create a message and get attention and have no product truth behind it. That's where we are. We expect to see adjacencies come up. We expect Weem to be on execution and bringing in MOSAS workloads to look at the next layer of data management. We expect us to create partnerships, which allow us to go do that meaningfully. And as time goes, you should expect us to be the prime influencer in reshaping this category with other adjacencies coming in. But we talk about it and there's product truth behind it. I want to get into your philosophy of management a little bit. I went to your LinkedIn recently and I loved the little graphic that you had. I know a lot of people put up a picture of a pretty lake or mountains, I got the cube up there. You had a number of items, I wonder if I could read. You had a rocket ship, which was very cool. You had teamwork, you had innovation. I wrote down ABC, Always Be Closing, Alec Baldwin. But everybody sells I think is what it was and then keep it simple. I really liked that. I mean people are going to evaluate Weem, they're going to go to your LinkedIn page. So tell us where that came from. What your philosophy is as a manager? Yeah, no, so this is a few things. This is the philosophies which I put on is a meld of what I believe in and what Weem believes in and has believed in for a long time, which is life starts with a customer. For us, everything starts with a customer. Even the product creation philosophy 15 years back was, hey, let's not just create some check marks and create a feature because someone thought it's an important check mark to have. What is the value it creates for the customer? And is it different enough, unique enough, where it actually creates a moment where the customer sees that value impact their core business? That's where it all starts for us at Weem. And then everything we do relates back to is this moving the ball enough for our customers and for our partners and for our developers and users? Everything comes back to there. Are we easy enough to do business with? Are we keeping it simple, simple to use? A product should be really simple. It should be brain dead. Simple. Our processes such that it's easy for us to connect with our partners, connect with our customers, connect with the users. It all comes back to keeping it really simple. And then I come down to a set of personal philosophies, which matters as well, which is how do we make sure that we used to say everyone is in sales, but we've got to evolve it. Everyone is in customer success because we all know that it's not just the first sale which matters, which was true 15 years back. What matters today is, yeah, the sale matters. Everybody is there to sell, but what matters even more is the whole company rallies behind the customer's success at every step along the way because when you do that, you don't need to sell. You get in through BBR and then we have a world of workloads to actually create value for the customer with from Microsoft 365 backup or soon to come Salesforce backup, Castin. We see that our net retention, and it's manifested in numbers. It's manifested in growth. It's manifested in net retention. And it's manifested in NPS. I mean, Dave, I'm hugely excited about that, man. NPS of 80, where we are, I mean, you guys have been around for quite a bit. I mean, that's huge numbers. I mean, that's, that's- Apple's at. Apple was 76 or 77. And so eventually that is what matters more for me because it's, share is important. And I'm excited about, you know, IDC saying your joint number one, hugely important. But that is a consequence. Growth is important. 25% ARR growth in Q1, super important. But that is a consequence. What really matters is value for your customers. And the number one metric I look at is NPS, you know, and NPS at 80, all the other things start to happen. Pair it with the engineering culture, the innovation culture we have. Long road map ahead. The theme has made some, would appear to be from the outside anyway, pretty successful acquisitions. Castin is an obvious one. I remember, it wasn't the first time I met Ratmere. It was maybe the third or fourth time. We were like a late night Peter Bell party, this Highland Capital at VMware. And we were walking down Howard Street, I see Ratmere and some of his colleagues, we start chatting. You know, I got into a good conversation. I'm like, what about an IPO? He goes, we're not doing an IPO. We don't need to do an IPO. And then several years later on theCUBE, he's like, no, I'd be open to an IPO. And then of course the big acquisition happened. So you've got an opportunity here. M&A obviously is a possibility. But what about the IPO in your future? Presumably that's something Insight wants to do. What can you tell us about that? No, it's a great question. I was waiting when you were gonna ask me that question. But this is what I would say, which is, by the way, we at today's numbers, I mean, we shared numbers at the end of last year, 1.1 billion in ARR, 1.2 in revenues. 99.99% organic, right? You know, Castan was the only acquisition we shared how Castan is a blip at this point in time. And so the philosophy has always been organic. And as I look ahead, this is how I think about it. I think the pace of market change is gonna be extreme. And so we will be a lot more open-minded thinking about acquisitions for complimentary technologies which allow us to expand them and think about adjacencies. More to come there. IPO, see the good thing is this. A lot of companies want to enter the public markets to raise money, create liquidity. That's not the primary lens for us. And so the good news is that, you know, we are incredibly profitable. We shared 30% EBITDA for 2021. So money is not the issue. But we do think that entering the public markets is a good thing for a variety of other reasons because when you are public and it comes with the transparency, which we believe are already transparent, but it puts the focus on you. And that creates even better growth in petters, especially as you go work with large enterprise customers. They're a lot more amenable. And so we feel that it's a strategy of growth, not a strategy of liquidity for us. But stay tuned. And you know, I fully expect for something like that to happen sometime towards the middle of next year to the end of next year. I mean, I had a similar conversation with Frank Slutman. They obviously were able to raise money, but wow, what a change since the Snowflake IPO in terms of just the brand value. And again, so many questions. I thought your keynote was great, by the way. I love the focus on ransomware, of course. I thought the bot jokes were great. Keep them coming. I mean, I really didn't. It lightens things up. So thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. Absolutely appreciate it. Dave and Dave, by the way, I mean, it's funny. Dave and Dave. Dave and David reminded me of Thompson and Thompson. Guess which comic book they're from? Thompson and Thompson and Thompson. I don't know. I don't know. Tintin. So you got to go read up. You guys don't look anything like that, but Dave and Dave was an absolute pleasure. My first theCUBE and look forward to many more to come. Love to have you back. All right, thank you for watching. Keep it right there. theCUBE's coverage of Veeamon 2022, two days of wall-to-wall coverage here at the Aria in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.