 Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome to New Orleans, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. And this is VeeamON 2017. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my co-host, Stuart Miniman. Stuart, it's always a pleasure to be working with you. Great to be here with you, Dave. Second time, I think we've done theCUBE in New Orleans. My first time, I've been at a conference here in over a decade. It's hard to believe, a lot's changed. Been back since Katrina a couple of times, but first time we're here, I'm excited. A lot of people we know here, about 3,000 people in attendance, very international audience, just like Veeam's customer. Well, I think it's a good venue for VeeamON. Veeam is a company, for those of you who don't know, $600 million in bookings last year, growing at almost 30% a year, penetrating the Fortune 500 very deeply. About 70% of the Fortune 500 purchases. Some products and services from Veeam. Global 2000, the penetration is a little bit lower, around 50%. But this is a company that has been on a meteoric rise. We saw today that one of the most telling slides from a business standpoint that I saw was that Peter McKay put up a slide showing companies that have ascended to 800 million, which is where Veeam is on the track to get to, very shortly. We're talking about Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, the leaders in the software business, and here's this infrastructure company that started really in VMware backup, very focused on VMware backup, and now becoming the availability platform for what they're calling the always-on digital enterprise. Now let's talk about that for a second. The strategy is quite interesting, Stu. I mean, you think about this for a second, you say, okay, well, everybody's going to do backup in the cloud, everybody's going to AWS, they're going to backup on AWS. But the use cases that are emerging for Veeam are actually quite substantial. Let's talk about them. One is on-prem, so if you can have the best availability solution on-prem, obviously that's of interest to you, and that's really what Veeam has done historically with VMware in particular, but now growing out. Then there's the use case of, well, I have my data in the cloud, but I kind of don't think it's, I trust the cloud so much. I'd like to have some security, and maybe I'd like to backup from the cloud on-prem. There's another use case, which is cloud to cloud. I want to go from AWS to Azure. And that's a use case that's emerging within this infrastructure. So you've really got a diverse set of use cases that are emerging, and this company's trying to position as the strategic partner for always-on availability for the digital enterprise. Powerful messaging, but simple. Yeah, and Dave, I want to add on that a little bit. If you follow the data, where do people have their data? As you said, right, on-premises, where Veeam started, VMware specific, expanded out to Hyper-V, great adoption. One of the, a lot of things I want to dig into this week, one of them, they've got, what was it, 231,000 customers last year. How many of those pay? How many are free? But look at VMware has 500,000 customers worldwide. That's pretty good penetration into those environments. But SaaS applications, where I have lots of data there. How do I back it up? How do I pull that into all of my environments? Third piece, public cloud, as you said. How do I manage all of those environments when I've got a hybrid or multi-cloud? We heard some announcements today, something I know we're going to be digging into a lot this week. But how do all those pieces go together? We heard, with VMware, there's the VAIO integration. Well, if I'm doing that and I'm doing Amazon, how do those play together? How do things like VMware support in AWS work for a company like Veeam? I was really impressed. We went to the media session this morning. Some of it's still embargoed. But really broad partnerships that Veeam has built had VMware and Cisco on as some of the big elite people on stage, the expo is right off to the side where we are. Here at the show, Dave, lots of partners, lots of big companies, many legacy companies, but also lots of new, interesting companies that are helping to push to kind of the cloud native, multi-hybrid cloud world that we live in today. Yeah, so again, the ascendancy of Veeam really came about as a focus company on VMware backup. Now, if you think about VMware in the early days, what was happening is you were consolidating physical servers. So you were taking underutilized physical servers and then consolidating them and getting much more efficiency out of your IT. And there was an agility aspect as well. There's certainly availability components, but the key challenge, one key challenge that customers had when they consolidated all those services is that yes, the servers were underutilized, but the one application that wasn't underutilized was backup, that you used a lot of your server to do a backup in a big stream of data. And so a lot of customers had to re-architect their backup. They had to simplify their backup and that's really where Veeam came in. And then you started to see this company explode. And now you're hearing going from backup to replication, we heard that sort of second journey. There was a lot of that going on, but now it's really the center of availability, the availability console. And I think you nailed it when you talked about the ecosystem. They have 45,000 partners. That's a tremendous number. So obviously the channel is very important. We're going to be unpacking that this week. The business driver is to shrink RPO, Recovery Point Objective. That is the amount of data that you can afford to lose. And RTO, Recovery Time Objective, the speed at which you can get your applications back up and running. Those are really the two metrics that translate into business terms, like I don't want to lose data, I don't want to be down. And that's a challenge that every backup software company and every company generally has to face. Yeah, Dave, absolutely. And that was highlighted in one of the announcements that Vee made this morning. Their continuous data protection or CDP announcement, not using snapshots. It really allows them to dial down to rather than 15 minute RPO, it's down to 15 seconds. But is that something now that's going to compete against some of what many of their partners have? So there is that give and take. There's a large TAM that Veeam has, but as they expand just to sweep every software company, you've got that ecosystem. What products do you put out there that might compete against some of the other offerings that you have there? Good energetic group, partners, I know we're excited. Multi-year they've been doing this show, real good energy and lots of good announcements. Sometimes you go to the shows and it's like, oh okay, couple of yawn things up on stage, but crowd was really excited for some of the demos. A lot of good pieces in that we're going to have full slate of guests to be able to dig into for this week. Yeah, just to geek out on one of those points for a minute. So you were talking about is the CDP continuous data protection. The granularity historically of that has been 15 minutes using snapshots, snapshots are great, even though snapshots are space efficient, they're still less efficient than doing things directly to the kernel through deep integration. Now VAAIO, it's the VSphere API for ISP, VAAIO, come on, help me. Anyway, it's these geeky things that VMware, they publish these specs and you got to get the SDK, so I'm interested how long have they had the SDK? And by the way, Dave, I checked the, there's a compatibility guide for VMware and there's about 10 partners that are listed on there and Veeam isn't there yet, probably because they just announced version 10 here of Veeam availability suite that supports that. So one of the first questions is going to be all right, when's this fully GA, when's it supported? These are key things, it's VeeSphere API for IO filtering, by the way. Okay, so these are key things that partners have to get a hold of through the SDK. Now it's interesting, right? Because VMware used to be owned by EMC, now it's owned by Dell. Do Dell and EMC have the inside track on this stuff? Does VMware sub-optimize its business and its ecosystem to stack the deck for Dell EMC? Historically no, but this is something that we have to watch. So we're going to be asking some of those tough questions on the queue today. Veeam, David Floyer had a great quote in a SiliconANGLE article, he said, look, VMware would be better off in my opinion, integrating with Veeam and giving Veeam a piece of that market because it'll serve customers better and ultimately will lower costs, which is what the software company, VMware in this case, should be doing. So that was an interesting perspective from Floyer, but we're going to be going wall-to-wall coverage two days to last point. Yeah, so Dave, I got a question for you actually. There's been some management chain, Peter McKay is now co-CEO. There are rumors of acquisition, they're now over 600 million going towards a billion dollars. When did the IPO, or does one of the big players out there decide to grab them because they've got some clear IP, they've got a loyal and excited customer base. There's many companies that would love to have that in the portfolio. Companies cash flow positive since the early days. Yeah, that doesn't happen, cash flow positive. No outside money taken in. So there were rumors that they would go for a billion dollars. The company's worth much more than a billion dollars right now. So I mean, I guess that's the dilemma for Veeam, a nice problem to have. But if you look at software, even revenue multiples and just do the simple back of the napkin math, a billion dollars in my opinion wouldn't get it done. So that's why that deal, one of the reasons probably why it never happened. Okay, this is theCUBE, we're live from New Orleans, Veeamon 2017, I say wall to wall coverage for two days, we got three shows going on this week, we got SAP Sapphire, we got Informatica and Stu and I are here at Veeamon. Keep right there, everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.