 Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2018, brought to you by Commvault. Welcome to the Music City. You're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. This is Commvault Go, 20 year old company Commvault, the third year of their show and the first time we have theCUBE here and the first time we've been in Nashville, Tennessee. I'm Stu Miniman, your host for one day of coverage and joining me to help unlock the Commvault is the CTO advisor, Keith Townsend. Good to be back on theCUBE. Yeah, Keith, so you've actually been to this show before. It's my first time, I've known Commvault for a long time, but when we talk about companies, they're all going through some kind of digital transformation and Commvault is no exception. I love the energy that I'm seeing at the show. They've got great puns around data. Data is at the center of everything and really it comes to what we see. We know that data is so important. All the tropes out there, it's the new oil, it's the new currency. It is one of the most important things, not only in IT, but in business. So what's your experience been so far? So far, great. You know what, they did a great job. Second goal for me, last year they had Captain Sully. Great inspirational talk. This year they had a comedian, Cannell, on and did a fabulous job of fast-paced, multimedia session, talking about the connection of data, our everyday lives, lives as a technologist, really high-powered show, a lot of great conversation around data and its applicability. Yeah, I did love that. Steve Cannell, he's a poet and some humor, a lot of geeky things in there. Talking about how data fits into all of our lives and what we do, and that's one of the reasons why we're here, why the customers are here, and that's what it's about. You look at a company like Commvault, I mean they've got tens of thousands of customers, and as the big waves coming in, what is cloudmead? I like some of the messages, I know we're going to dig in both in our analysis as well as with the guests, how cloud is impacting this, as well as things like the wave of AI, how is that changing the product, how can I access the information? I hear things like ransomware and GDPR and hacking, it's a dangerous time in technology, whether you're talking social media or talking in business. So, give us a little bit of background, what you're hearing, Keith, you're talking to customers and your day job all the time, how important is data and things like backup and data recovery, where do they fit in their world? Well, you know what, customers are still learning this journey. I've talked to plenty of customers that have used Commvault, competing products, and a lot at the low level, a lot of these guys are still thinking about it as backup, but great, great testimony from one of the larger customers out there, Merck, who talked about using backup or data protection as part of their data management strategy, moving workloads from, working mobility, moving workloads from cloud to cloud, location to location. Every customer is dealing with multi-cloud challenges. Stu, we've talked about multi-cloud and the keys to multi-cloud data is absolutely the most important part of getting your multi-cloud strategy or even cloud strategy straight. So, I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation I've had out in the field which is customers challenged with how do I simply identify a data management strategy to hearing Commvault's message today and throughout the guests that we'll have on customers, partners, the entire ecosystem about how Commvault enables multi-cloud through data management. Yeah, I was curious what I would see coming in. Would this be kind of a hardcore, let's get into the product and understand things like backup and recoveries. Backup's important, but recovery is everything. We heard some of the customer stories about how fast they can recover. Those are great stories. How does cloud fit into it? You had the CEO and the COO on stage talking about do you go, when you go to the cloud, do you go simple or do you go smart? And there's some nuance there that you want to unpack as to understanding. As we look at cloud, it's not just take the way we were doing things and throw them up there. Let me keep, they talked about tape and virtual tape. I remember back when the VTLs were first being a thing, I was working at a storage company back then was a huge move. Backup, those processes are really hardened into an environment. What do the admins have to do? What do they have to change in the way they're doing things? Let's look at the news a little bit. So there was the, Commvault did a good job, I think of checking all the check boxes. While there was nothing that jumped out at me as like, wow, this is the first time I've heard it, it's what I'm hearing from customers. So moving to an as-a-service portfolio, they've got a full line of appliances, but it's not only hardware. If you'd like to buy the software from them, of course you could do that. Got a number of big partners. We're going to have HPE on the program. We're going to have Cisco on the program. NetApp is another big, big partner here. As well as, I think that the product that they're most excited to talk about is Commvault Activate, which is really looking a lot of the governance, which when you talk in a cloud world is one of the biggest challenges. By the way, if people in the background hear these cheering, that the Commvault employees are really excited. Everybody's starting to walk in the show floor. We're in the center of it all, Keith. So we got a preview yesterday. They actually announced it to the Tech Field Day crew, which you and I sat in with. So give me your thoughts as to what you saw in the product line. How does that line up with what you're hearing from customers in competitive nature? So I think I tweeted out yesterday doing the Tech Field Day session. Commvault is not sleep at the wheel. As you said, Stu, there's nothing amazingly new about what they announced, but a 20-year-old technology company is definitely keeping pace with the innovation that we've seen in the field. Customers want options when it comes to consuming backup and recovery. From a storage layer, they want the storage bricks. They want a hardware solution. They want to consume it via subscription or perpetual license. They want this cloud-type capability. More importantly, they want, and they talked about it on stage today, this analytics capability, the ability to extract intelligence out of your data. Commvault calls it 4D indexing. Other vendors just call it simply metadata, but taking advantage of 15, 20-year-old data to drive innovation in today's society. While keeping compliant with GDPR and other regulations that are coming up, sprouting up as it seems every other week. Yeah, I did like that terminology. They used the 4D innovation because, of course, the fourth dimension is time and we're using intelligence. The challenge we have, as we know, is we have so much data. And what do we use the analytics for? They said we can use the analytics, first of all, at compliance. I need to understand that I may take care of that. Secondly, what if I want to cull data? What data don't I need anymore? What can I get rid of? There's huge cost savings that I can have there. And lastly, what can I get from analytics? How can I get value out of that information? And more. So the use of analytics is something I was looking for. Obviously, we want to talk to some of the product people, some of the customers, but what I've heard so far in talking to people is people are excited. I was talking to one of the partners of Commvault. They said one of the reasons they partnered deeper and are looking to work with Commvault is they've got good tech. There's a reason they've been around for 20 years. They're a publicly traded stock. They've been doing well. They have been growing. Revenue-wise, I look, the last three years, I think they're about 700 million. They've been growing in the kind of eight to 9% year over year for the last couple of years, which as a software company, it's not taken the world by storm, but in the infrastructure space that is good growth. I do have to mention there was some activist investor activity that came on. We actually, we're going to have the CMO. We're going to have the CEO on the program. We won't have the CEO. They are in the midst of going through a change there. And look, say what you will about activist investors. The reason they're getting involved is because they believe that there's more value that can be unlocked in Commvault with some changes. And with the product line and the things happening, that's what we're starting to see here. And that's what we're excited to dig in and kind of understand. Yeah, and we can see that even in some of the customer testimonials, the state of Colorado net new customer. This is amazing in an area that we've seen 90 million, 250 million, easily a half a million dollars of investment in the data protection space. Commvault, 20 year old company still gaining traction with net new use cases. And if I was an activist investment, I'd look at that, I'd look at the, I'd look at the overall industry and thinking what can we do to unlock some of the potential of a fairly large customer base, pretty stable company, but a very, very exciting part of the industry. Yeah, and Keith, you brought up metadata. Metadata is something that in the industry we've been talking about for a long time. It's really that intelligence that's going to allow the systems to gather everything. I know when I get my brand new phone now, I could search my 4,000 photos by location, by date, everything like that. It's auto recognizing information. It's the same thing we're getting on the business side. It used to be, okay, well let's make sure when you put your file in there that you tag it. Come on, nobody can do this. Nobody's thinking when I'm doing my job, well I really need to think about the metadata because five years from now I might want to do it. Oh, I could search by person or project or things like that, but it's the intelligence in the system to be able to learn and grow and the more data we have, actually, the more that the intelligence can get there. And that's critically important for even compliance. Again, calling data, you know, Bill Nye got up on stage and talked about being able to use data, or I'm sorry, AstraZeneca got up on stage and talked about using data that was 15 years old to rerun through today's algorithms and trials. If you were to call the wrong data, then they could not have the innovation that they've created by having 15 year old data. So the metadata, the ability to go back again, search your repository for keywords, content, surface up that data and leverage that data. This is why we say data is the new currencies, the new oil is the most critical. I even heard on stage today, data is the new water. I don't know if I'd go quite that far. You know, I'd like my old fashioned glass of water, but this is why we hear these terms because companies are reinventing themselves with the data they've created. So Keith, what Dave Vellante would point out is water is a limited resources, data, we can reuse it. We can take or drink a data, we can share it. Data helps complete us. It's the shirts that they have at the show. We've got AstraZeneca, we've got the state of Colorado, we've got other users, the key partners, key executives. We're going to bring you the key data to help you extract the signal from the noise here at Commvault Go. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for joining theCUBE.