 From Chicago, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day 2018. Brought to you by Veritas. Welcome back to the windy city, everybody. We're here covering the Veritas Solution Days in Chicago. I'm Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Robert Swanson is here, CUBE alum from DC Vast. He runs sales at the organization. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming back on. You as well. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. I'm from the Aria in Las Vegas. We talked a lot about cloud, the big tent event. Now Veritas is doing these solution days going out to where the customers are. It's probably good for you because you're Chicago based, right? Absolutely, yeah. It's good to have the event here in my hometown. So how was this for you today? What did you learn? What's the conversation been like? Yeah, no, it was a good morning. I like kind of the regional approach a little bit more of an intimate event. Had a variety of customers here and colleagues at Veritas as well. So it was definitely a great event this morning. A lot of hot stuff going on in data protection. Cloud, there's multi-cloud security and data protection are kind of coming together. The distributed data center on the edge. New ways, new modes of protecting data. What are you seeing in some of the big drivers out there as you talk to customers? Yeah, no, that's a great question and you really can't avoid the subject of cloud. And first I think you looked at data protection really as, excuse me, cloud as an enabler for data protection. So thinking about on-premise data and how the cloud can help protect that. So especially for mid-market companies, I really allowed them to do some really cool retention and disaster recovery things that they might not have been able to do before or afford to be able to do before. And now we're looking at it more about, all right, there's workloads in the cloud, there's cloud native data, what do you do with that? The cloud providers are guaranteeing you or providing you some SLAs or guidelines around availability, but that's not backup. So now what do we do with the cloud native data? And really though, as workloads start getting put out, not only into the big hyperscaler clouds, but into Office 365 and different file share services and SaaS applications, it truly is IT anywhere now, which really creates a challenge for data protection. I mean, I feel like data management and data protection, the complexity and challenge of it has just grown exponentially in the last few years because now there is important sensitive data everywhere that the companies have to figure out how to maintain and protect and secure and really work for them. What did you talk about just your business, the whole partner channel is just fascinating, something we've been tracking now for a while. Cloud was sort of a shot across the bow to a lot of business models. It used to be, hey, I'm going to take a bunch of margin and resell a product and buy a boat. But that's changed. I mean, you can't just be a quote unquote box seller, that's a metaphor just for reselling somebody else's technology, you have to be a solution provider. So Cloud was, in one regards, a threat, but it's become an opportunity. How have you guys responded? Talk about the shift toward a solution mindset. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. I mean, it really is the channels of a bit of an inflection point with the Cloud and contrary to some popular belief, it's not our mission as a channel company to resell hardware or some piece of software. So it's getting more and more important for our partners to be people that can be companies that can offer us technology to help kind of fit into our model and not necessarily vice versa. So now the Cloud providers have changed where the abstraction layer occurs and there's so much automation out there that some things that we might use to provide services or manage services around low level, assist admin type task, keep the lights on kind of things are done in an automated manner right now. So we really have to kind of redefine what we do for our customers and Cloud is important. So it's really helping customers identify where is the appropriate place to run a workload? What's better on-prem? What's better in the Cloud? Make sure you have that data portability. And we have to be able to provide them guidance and services and really help in that regard as they're navigating it with us. So helping them identify where to put things, how to protect things, how to manage the data and really how to optimize the spend as well as something that we've kind of pivoted towards. Well, it's becoming more complicated, right? Okay, it used to be I've got an application server. I'm going to bolt on some backup because I got to back up the data. Okay, done. And then of course virtualization changed things quite a bit, but now you've got Clouds, you've got multiple Clouds, you've got SaaS, you've got distributed data. You got to worry about, okay, as you were saying, where do I put that data? You're thinking about recovery. Well, how fast can I recovery? So where does that recovery data live? And then who's managing this whole thing? So I would think there's a huge opportunity for you guys to come in, consult with customers, architect solutions that actually address every customer's different, their unique situations. Maybe you could discuss that a little bit and how you're helping folks. Yeah, the lines are really starting to get blurred too on what you do with data, what's securing it versus protecting it, versus backing it up, versus replicating it, versus it being discoverable. So I think that's one of the areas where we're seeing Veritas really kind of evolve and they have the experience in data management. And now with some of the technologies that they're launching, kind of a platform with some of their different technologies kind of containerized and put onto a single platform, I think is really kind of seeing all of this whole concept of data management converging. So where do you see this whole thing going? Kind of last question, as you look out two, three, four, five years, you're going to have lots of clouds, you're going to have edge, you got all this data, digital transformation, specifically in the context of data protection. How do you see that evolving and what does it look like in the next four or five years? Yeah, I mean, I think I use the term already data portability and workload portability. And I like that and I really think that's where it's going. Because as the public cloud market and even on-prem private cloud market continue to evolve, it's really going to be about portability, right? Where is the most appropriate place to run a workload to have certain data? Is it in the public cloud, is it on-prem? And maybe that changes, right? Maybe the cost modeling changes, maybe the performance requirements change. So that needs to be portable, but with portability, we have to be able to follow that data and those workloads and be able to have some kind of consistent way to protect them. So I really think that's the evolution and that's kind of the arms race with a lot of the vendors in this space right now and what everybody's trying to do because that's where it's all heading. All right, Bob, great. Thanks very much for coming back in theCUBE. Really good to see you again. 85%, I think of Veritas' business goes through the channel. Your critical partners like you make it all happen. So really appreciate your perspectives. Thank you. Thanks again for having me. Thanks for coming to Chicago. Hope to see you here again. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there. Everybody will be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, we'll see you at Veritas Vision Solution Days from Chicago. Right back.