 Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2018, brought to you by Commvault. Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee. This is Commvault Go, and you're watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program, Lauren Nelson, who's a principal analyst with Forrester. Thanks so much for joining us. My pleasure. All right, our first time doing theCUBE in Nashville. Commvault goes third year at the show. Have you been to the Commvault shows in the past? I have, not last year, but the year prior, first year. So you skipped a year. From two years ago, just from my own knowledge, Commvault's changed quite a bit. I mean, they had some pressures on them. They've been going through a lot of pricing models. What's your take on what Commvault's been doing the last couple of years? Yeah, a lot of focus on the show, on pricing model changes, packages changes, emphasis on selling through partners, and how to try and foster that in the actual village space. So how do you bring partners into conversations early on in a smoother way, and just looking around, you've got whiteboards on tables, you've got spaces, very change in terms of collaborative space right in the middle of the booths, rather than around the perimeter. So very, very interesting layout. All right, so Lauren, your research, one of the things that you focus on is cloud and cloud migrations, which is, of course, one of the key messages Commvault talks about, when I talk to users, you know, the multi-cloud strategy that they're figuring out, as I say, usually the ink's still drying, and it's one of those things that gets revisited quite often. What are you hearing from customers? What's your research showing of kind of the state of cloud and how cloud migration fits into it? Yeah, so you've got two really big topics right now in the cloud space. You've got the migration side, and you've got the multi-cloud side, and they are the conversations going on right now. First of all, you've got migration, which is not SaaS migration, but migrating an app to an infrastructure as a service environment, and that is something that is difficult. And a lot of companies that are talking about cloud migration don't always recognize that. They sum it up to SaaS migration, and often find that they're going to have higher performance when they move. They don't look at the challenges with the architectural changes from moving to vertical scaling to horizontal scaling. And it's this conversation where, well, if we hear one company doing it, then maybe that should be our entire cloud strategy. And first, a number of organizations, it is. Especially if you look at small, mid-size organizations, they're looking at cloud migration as a data center replacement method. If you look at the average enterprise, that's not the typical story. Unless they're in a unique moment of change, typically what they're looking at is a few apps, typically driven by location or app-specific support, that they're planning to get from their service provider of choice. And they're moving this app for specific reasons. If you look holistically, our latest stats, survey taken in August, shows that 69% of enterprises in North America and Europe are actually migrating workloads to the cloud. If you then ask about how their methods are all over the map, the number of total apps they're moving is far less than what we're made to believe in some of the more sensationalized or exaggerated stories. We're kind of unique use cases. When you look at the other side of that, you've got the multi-cloud story, which is all of a sudden with this migration topic, you get organizations questioning, should I be multi-cloud? Am I doing this wrong? Am I adding needless complexity? And we saw a bit of a drop in 2016 after GE presented at Amazon Re-Event on associating with the term multi-cloud, that that was their specific strategy. And we've actually seen that come back in spades. In fact, we've seen a number of organizations actually say they are multi-cloud, and then they have various definitions of what multi-cloud means for them. Multi-cloud is either public and private, private and some public cloud usage, multiple public, non-cloud plus cloud. It's all over the map. And so I think organizations are starting to take a step back, starting to think about how does my cloud strategy map to my larger organizational values? Should seem obvious. That should have been done that way from the start. But for a lot of organizations, it's a unique step that they're doing this year of being more pragmatic on how they should approach cloud, not trying to force fit deployment models, and look at the real opportunities that are there. And that includes all of these things. It includes private cloud and your on-prem data center for using it for specific workloads, for use cases that it just does not make sense to have that much change at once, or to force the economics. The other side, you do see cloud migration. That is very much a real thing. It is not the most exciting use case to cloud. You're moving an app that you're not changing at all in terms of customer experience to an environment it's not built to handle it that may suffer from performance. So it tends to be the less sexy side of the cloud strategies that we see today, but very much a part. And it is the use of infrastructure as a service for just that cheap infrastructure rather than some of its more compelling past services. So it's an interesting time. All of those conversations are emerging. In fact, I mean, I can't tell you how many research reports we have on Q on these very topics around just the one-on-one level, which I think is what we've primarily covered, just the grazing the surface versus some of the latest conversations around how do we have cloud-neutral past services that are abstracted from the underlying platform? Who will deliver those? What technologies will be standardized beneath that? How will we leverage Kubernetes and the many different types? So it's an interesting thing that I'm pretty passionate about, as you can see. Laura, let's talk about kind of that step to when I'm out talking to customers about multi-cloud. One, multi-cloud or even cloud migration that you're absolutely right, I see the same thing. They need to answer the why question, like why are we even considering that? And for multi-cloud, I think customers are starting to look back and really wonder, do I need that complexity? Is it really worth the effort? But the second thing that I think customers underestimate the complexity of is having a data strategy unique to cloud versus their data strategy on-prem. Are you seeing the same that customers are realizing, wow, I can't just take wholesale my data strategy, my on-prem data strategy, and take that to the cloud? Yeah, and it's a very, you know, the classic analyst response is, it depends. There's some organizations that are literally creating two different data hubs where they are having different access levels and different apps that you're allowed to connect to based on what classification is that for that particular data. It's this theme of zero trust model of how do you secure from the data out and simply put some data sets are more valuable than others. Some have security requirements that are far more expensive to meet. And when you try and problem solve for this, some people try and think, well, is the easiest way just to completely segment the two and be able to have control of how you access these two? Or is it more complex than that? Do we need different databases that we're leveraging? Do we need to look at migrating some days or replicating some data to avoid data out fees from some of the major service providers? Do we leverage a third party like a co-location provider that can provide some ease for us in terms of movement of data? So I think that's one of the big topics in the upcoming year is if I'm going to multi-cloud, if I'm going to take on that effort, why am I doing that? You know, why am I taking on this as an important app? Is it because of fear of lock-in and flexibility long-term? And if I do that, what are the implications in terms of data, both security-wise and cost-wise? And a lot of organizations, the challenges is, you know, you write out your cloud security or your actual cloud strategy map and you don't really understand the proof points or where that strategy breaks until you start getting into the details, testing out and trying to do this to figure out what are the actual costs of this scenario? So it's a challenging problem, but it's one that I think organizations are going to be facing for the next few years. Yeah, it's interesting. And I'm thinking through some of this. A lot of what we're talking about is infrastructure. And it's like, okay, my private cloud, how do I modernize it? How do I simplify it? The reason we have infrastructure is to run my applications and the most important piece there is the data. How much does the cloud strategies that companies are working on look at data and how they're going to take advantage of data, even more in the future? Yeah, it's a great question. And there's so many different sides of this. There's one, you've got GDPR, which is making them think about data in a whole new level, just from a security and compliance perspective and how quickly they can react to requests that are put in by a particular citizen about their knowing what's on file for them, as well as requesting it to be deleted. And being held accountable for our ability to complete that. On the other hand, you've got organizations that are trying to draw insights, that are trying to change customer experience, design new products, market to their organizations more effectively, leveraging data that they don't know where it is, they don't know how to use it, or even how to start thinking about it together. They have a shortage of data scientists. They have a shortage of tools and solutions that can help them try and piece together this challenge. So I would say companies have done very little of this so far. It is something that's on the roadmap. It's, you get some organizations that are in the lead that are testing the waters right now, but if you look at the average organizations, they haven't even gotten to this. They're trying to use public cloud for very low end use cases at this point. All right, so I want to ask you, when you talk about your research, of course it depends the customer by customer, what they're having, but what differentiates a customer that can really start kind of moving up the stack, being more strategic, having IT really answering to the business and doing things with their data versus kind of the laggers up there. Is there anything that you're finding when in your research as to what separates those leaders from laggards? There's a few things and I'm not the first so a lot of vendors look for changes in executive boards. So typically new folks coming in, trying to change the way things are being done, kind of fresh innovative talent. That's a good flag that they're ready for it. Other organizations, there's a classic they're threatened by others in their industry or believe they'll be threatened soon. For some organizations, it happens to be the right place the right time. They have a leader that they can trust that they believe will lead ahead this cloud strategy and that can tackle some of these challenges. For a lot of organizations, there's a desire, there is some action, but oftentimes the action is delayed. They face very stagnant cloud strategies, they face very stagnant data problems because they're either missing cash, they're missing the ear of their executive board or they have the wrong individuals that are trying to take the torch forward. And so it takes a lot of critical self-reflection as an organization that isn't easy. So let's talk a little bit about that silently within organizations. A lot of times I'm seeing multi-cloud, cloud migration, cloud efforts being driven by not just IT, but infrastructure organizations within IT. Are you seeing successful efforts being driven from kind of that I call that bottom up versus whether if it's even some VP or above driving the effort from a business perspective? I think it varies. So there's some organizations where it's, our VP is bringing a cloud-first policy to our organization and then you have to figure out what that means to that particular executive. It may mean we are going to go AWS, completely all now. For a lot of organizations it's a progress of we're going to include all things that could be possibly labeled as cloud technologies, which doesn't really describe much. If it does anything it's to describe change is on the horizon. We are going to do things differently than we previously did. For a lot of companies they have been tasked by their executives of you need to tell me what to do for the cloud strategy. And so they're trying to figure out how do we problem solve for cloud from our perspective. And I think that's been one of the biggest problems of the cloud industry for the last seven years is this bottom-up approach or top-down approach with very little thinking about where's the value. So bottom-up, typically you get folks thinking about how do we have more efficient infrastructure? How do we modernize? How do we add in automation and build the best private cloud in the world? And oftentimes overspending, oftentimes delaying and having no self-service access for developers for five years into their strategy. And from that you see a lot of organizations trying to redesign their cloud strategies to deliver real business value up front early on and then look to see how do they modernize, how do they mature to help support and scale that effort. Whereas the top-down approaches are very fruity, high-level, shiny objects. And so I think a lot of organizations that are trying to change that are trying to get individuals in the same room together, figure out let's start from our business strategy and work our way into how cloud serves that greater purpose. All right, Lauren, when Forrester talks to customers, this space of data protection, secondary storage, whatever you call it, it's pretty crowded. Are there things that, specific things that customers are calling out or that Forrester gives advice as to how to differentiate in the marketplace or what they're looking for? And along those lines, what are customers looking for down the road to even expand more and get more value from vendors in the future? Yeah, so I tend to focus on the cloudy questions. So when I'm looking at data protection, I'm looking at it as a module of how you manage multiple clouds. And when you look at the hybrid cloud management space, it's a very busy space. It tends to focus on orchestration, template building, occasionally some compliance and policy, tags that can be applied, and then cost optimization. Very little has been done on the security side so far and very little has been done in the data protection side. So when you look at how do you differentiate, there's not a lot of players in this market yet. For as many security players as there are, it has not been aggressively tackled as heavily as the classic management providers have been attacking other management challenges. And you look at the cloud cost optimization space, it's done very well. It's the first cloud challenge that organizations are trying to solve is how much am I spending, who's spending it, how do I integrate with my billing system? The next challenge is how do I problem solve for data? They see that as a potential huge cost escalator if they don't get this under control. For many reasons, compliance from data out costs. So that's the next beach head. So I would actually argue that there's not a lot that's been done specifically around cloud in this space yet. All right, well, Laura Nelson, really appreciate you sharing your insights and customer views with us. My pleasure, thank you. All right, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage here from Commvault Go in Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks for watching theCUBE.