 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re-invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. Good morning from Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are coming to you live from AWS re-invent 19. This is theCUBE's second full day of coverage and Stu and I are pleased to welcome one of our CUBE alum back to the program. We have Greg Hughes, the CEO of Veritas. Greg, welcome back, good morning. It's great to be here, thank you, yeah, terrific. This is 10, 15 in the morning and this is already jam-packed, lots of buzz, lots of news yesterday. I think that's kind of an understatement. Give us a little bit of an overview of Veritas and AWS. What you guys got going on? It's an amazing show, first of all. And it was, the keynote yesterday was pretty incredible. Three hours long. I mean, that stamina involved in a three-hour keynote. I got to get hats off to Andy Jassy for doing that. One of the big announcements that was in that keynote was that Outpost has been, is now generally available. And Amazon Outpost is basically the Amazon web services that you can put within your data center, okay? So we talk a lot about this hybrid cloud model on-prem in your data center and private cloud all the way to the public cloud. And so that is Outpost announcement. And we're really excited to say that we are a partner with AWS on Amazon Outpost and we have a designed and tested and validated solution on AWS Outpost. So if you move your applications of customers, their applications onto Outposts, they have the peace of mind knowing that their data is protected by Veritas. All right, we're really excited about that. So Greg, everybody absolutely is very interested in Outposts. I've just spent a couple of days in meetings trying to dig in. It is the building block Amazon's using for things like AWS local zones, AWS wavelength for 5G. One of the questions I really have for the ecosystem because I've seen a lot of announcements is, this is, yes, it's the Nitro Chip and hardware and a subset of services that you would get from AWS and from a management standpoint, it looks like you've just put an AZ in your data center. But talk to us a little bit about what does it mean to actually integrate there? Because Veritas has been an AWS partner for a number of years. I understand what it means to use Veritas in the public cloud. Walk us through some of the nuance and detail of what this means. Yeah, no, we have a very, very close partnership with AWS. Our engineers work very closely together and we did preceding this announcement. And basically, in this specific case, it means if you have an application or data on Outposts, it will be automatically backed up to the cloud to S3 through Veritas NetBackup. And so you can manage your Outposts through Amazon, your Veritas estate through our NetBackup console, and the things work seamlessly together. Yeah, so just when I looked at it, it's there's things like ECS and EMR and RDS are in there. S3 is not yet a service available on Outposts. Not available on Outposts, but we can back it up to S3. So that's what I'm trying to understand is where does my data live and how do I protect it with Outposts? Well, you can manage that through Veritas, essentially. So that's primarily the use case is for backing up to make sure your data is protected when it's on Outposts. We see customers who want to experiment with Outposts. They want to try cloud services. They have certain applications and certain workloads that are low latency and need low latency. And so they're going to run those in their data centers. Those applications, those workloads can be protected through Veritas just like everything else is protected by Veritas. That's the idea. So for customers who have been with Veritas for a long time and they've got a cloud strategy that they're working on, walk us through maybe a, I don't want to use the word migration, but maybe an evolution. If they're saying, all right, there's workloads that we want to move to public cloud. What would that process be like for an existing Veritas customer? So we've actually spent a lot of time working with AWS on what that journey looks like. And we developed a set of what we call well architected review solutions that Amazon reviews and that we've invested in so that our customers can depend on these solutions working well together. It usually starts with backing up to the cloud, okay? Instead of using secondary storage or tape, backing up to the cloud. And so we have a customer put to furrow group. It's a financial services firm that was able to leverage our appliances for on-prem rapid restore, but tear off the data to S3. So that's usually the start. The second step is using the cloud as a DR site. A lot of companies, as you know, invest in data center capacity just for disaster recovery. It's not used all that often. And so that's an obvious thing. You can move to the cloud and have a data center on demand, so to speak. So we have a customer China Marine that is using our product Veritas Resiliency Platform to do that with AWS. And then finally, it's moving your whole application stack to the cloud in migrating your data to the cloud. It still needs to be protected, right? It's still a customer's responsibility to protect that data in the cloud. And in that case, the Veritas products work really well in AWS. We can protect the workloads in the cloud. We have an environmental services firm, Veya, that has moved their applications to the cloud, still using Veritas for data protection. So that's really how we think about it. So Greg, Veritas, one of your strengths, you have a very large install base, and therefore I expect you have a good visibility into what your customers are doing. Bring us on-site a little bit. When we talk about leveraging the cloud, its agility and modernizing my applications, we know changing my application stack is a long-term, challenging thing to do. But do you have any kind of business outcomes, any proof points as to what your customers, what do they get as they're maturing their cloud journey and evolution? As you talked about. Yeah, Veritas, so we work with, our customers are 86% of the Fortune 500. We work with the largest institutions on the planet the most, so what I like to say, the largest, most complicated, most highly regulated enterprises in the world, 10 of the top 10 financial services, 10 of the top 10 telco, healthcare, those are all our customers. And they're all moving towards a hybrid world to leverage the cloud, but also have on-prem data centers in a hybrid environment. And one of the things they really want to leverage is that cheap and deep storage in the cloud. And we're seeing a very easy thing for our customers to do is to migrate from backing up to disk and tape for long-term retention, to backing up to the cloud, leveraging S3 Glacier Deep Archive. Andy talked about it yesterday, it's lower than the price of tape. Many of our customers still using tape for long-term retention, and it's a very simple step to data protection modernization, leveraging the cloud to replace that secondary storage and tape with the cloud and the storage in the cloud. So for an organization that has thousands of endpoints, servers, virtual environments, SaaS applications, can they manage all of that in the cloud through a single Veritas dashboard? How do you allow that comprehensive data protection? That's our journey, essentially. And our value proposition is that end-to-end data management. We kind of think of ourselves as the Switzerland of the storage and data protection world. We work with everything. We work with 500 different workload types. We back up to 150 different storage targets, including many of the cloud service providers. So that's really our whole value proposition is that ability to give you that abstraction across all the complex storage silos you have, we can take care of availability protection and insights. That's what we do. So a few years ago, we saw a little bit of a bit flip when we talk about security and the cloud. It used to be, for the early days of the cloud, it was I can't do cloud because I'm worried about the security and now many thought security is an opportunity when I go to the cloud. The last year or two, it's a very nuanced discussion and the relationship between my data, my cloud providers, my information and data protection is something that we've been digging into a lot at the AWS Reinforce show, inaugural show this year. We had a lot of great conversations. CISOs have a challenge. It's a board-level discussion. What are you hearing from your customers and what's Veritas' role in this great discussion? It's a great question. Look, security is a board-level conversation. And when I go talk, I spend about 30 to 50% of my time talking to customers and the cyber threat is real, in particular ransomware. What the enterprise is worried about is that their data gets completely encrypted through a ransomware attack and they're dead in the water. They can't ship product, they can't bill, they can't run payroll and the challenge is that the malware is going to get in. Spear phishing works. When you get those emails that say, click on this link, you know, in many cases, people still click on the link and the bad stuff gets in. So what you need is you need a resilient infrastructure. And the foundation of that is to make sure you've got a protected copy of your data that you can depend on and roll back to that you know is good. And that's really driven a lot of our business in the last few years is making sure we can help our customers have that resilient data. It's true whether in the public cloud or on-prem, same challenge, right? Wondering though, from a ransomware perspective to help reduce spread, is data protection in the cloud and an enabler of mitigating the risk that ransomware provides in terms of data not traversing through a customer's network if it's protected in the cloud? A ransomware attack can occur in your cloud or on-prem. It really doesn't matter. They don't really care. The bad guys don't care. But what you need ultimately is a copy of your data that you can go back to and you can restore everything else you can create. But that data, that state of your business, that's really the crown jewels. And if they've corrupted that, you know, you're in trouble. Yeah, so related to security, governance of course has been a big discussion. Last year, every single show I went to was talking about GDPR. This year we're all waiting for the California law to roll out. And we expect more of this to happen. You know, what are the discussions you're having with your customers there? And what's the latest? The regulatory environment is really moving fast. A lot more regulations around data. I was talking, it's funny, I was talking to a customer in St. Louis and they said the California Data Privacy Act was going to be the death of them. And you don't think about that for a customer in St. Louis, a big customer. I was talking to a customer in Australia and she said she has to deal with 27 different regulatory regimes. So how do you do that when the dirty secret is you don't know where all your data is, you don't know what's important, what's not. You know, most of our customers have very difficult time assessing that. So where Veritas comes in is we have some solutions that provide insight into that to allow you to understand where is your data, what can be deleted, what's really important, what's PII, what's protected, what's not protected, to really give you some insight in that across all the different silos that Andy was talking about yesterday. Showing them really where some of the vulnerabilities are that they might be completely blind to. That's exactly the risks and vulnerabilities that they have that they don't know. And that's now becoming a board level topic. So we're getting pulled in, I was actually in Europe a couple of weeks ago and one of our customers said look, I need to present to the board the insights that Veritas is providing me on my infrastructure site so that they're aware. Last question for you, yesterday when everything kicked off and you're right, it was a marathon, a three hour keynote, it's very impressive, I have to say. There's a lot of news packed in there. One of the biggest themes is transformation. It's a word that we talk about all the transformation. We talk about security transformation, digital transformation, workforce transformation. It's used commonly, but yesterday it was really sort of like this sort of reinvention of AWS, but this transformation that Andy was saying, and it sounds like something that you're hearing that this has to come from the senior level of really understanding transformation. Not just do we go to the cloud, how, when, what, but also ultimately it's about data. And if you can't access the data, if you can't restore data quickly if there is, whether it's a human error or some sort of catastrophic event, you can't get to what you need, the business suffers, right? And there's going to be another competitor whose objects are closer than they appear in the mirror, right? Who is ready to come in and take over that business. Give me a little bit of a kind of an overview as we wrap up here about Veritas' transformation. As customers are having to pivot really quickly to use data as a competitive advantage. Yes, well look, we think about, our role in digital transformation is in the data transformation part of that. You can't have digital transformation without transforming your data. We talk a lot here about data has gravity. It kind of stands to stick where it is. We're trying to make that data mobile, flexible, protected, available, and visible. And that's really our role is in digital transformation to give you the freedom to use your data wherever you want to use it. That's what we do. One last question actually, on the data that has gravity, we talk about that a lot. Your last thoughts on Amazon moving towards where that gravity is, without post for an example. This is another example of, I think yesterday, and John Furrier even uncovered this and is exclusive with Andy Jassy. It's AWS everywhere, which is just like Amazon.com. And actually just to build on that, John Furrier and I, to Andy Jassy, like three years ago said, the next flywheel for Amazon is data. Is data, absolutely. Data's come up over and over again. I think we're working very closely together with AWS to help make this journey easy for our customers. We're both very customer obsessed. That came up a lot. We are customer obsessed as well. We're innovating step by step. We were the first launch partner with Glacier Deep Archive, so we attend to be at the forefront of allowing our customers to leverage AWS and know that they're protected by Veritas. Yeah, those demanding customers, right? Well, Greg, thank you for joining Stu and me on the program sharing what's new with Veritas and AWS and the transformation that you're both undergoing. We appreciate it. Thank you, Stu. Take care. Of course, Stu Miniman. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from day two of our coverage of AWS re-invent 19. Thanks for watching.