 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you by Veritas. Welcome back to the Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here covering Veritas Vision, hashtag VITAS Vision. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Bill Coleman is here, he's the CEO of Veritas. Bill, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Good to see you. My pleasure, thank you for hosting us. Well, you're very welcome, and so hot off the keynote. How do you feel? How's the show going for you so far? Well, I'll tell you what, I feel Veritasum. Veritasum is the watchword here, the crowd talking Veritasum. I loved that you started out with a little retrospective from last year, you used the term digital twin. We love that term, and you said it's sort of growing up now. I like to think that digital twins are sort of in their adolescent or even teenage years. The data is sort of out of control. We're not hearing today a message of legacy backup. We're hearing a vision of the future. Talk about that and what that vision looks like. Our customers obviously need data protection, they need resiliency, everything they've needed in the past, but that's not what they're interested in. That's a Zoom, that has to work. What they're interested in is the power of information. We like to say that our mission is to harness the power of information. And it's what's called digital transformation. Being able to use all that data out on the internet with all of their data to change how they do business, to change what their products are, to change their supply chain. It's all about machine learning, predictive analytics, and the power of information. So I started in this business the same year that Veritas was born. And so I saw the ascendancy of Veritas in the many different forms that the company had taken, but I used to use Veritas as an example. You want to be like Veritas with no hardware agenda, you want to be the glue that brings things together. And I saw in the conversation today a little bit of sort of a little bit of BEA like thinking. The binder, if you will, binding clouds together. Give me a my term, you guys didn't use that term. But to us, that's a critical value add. And it's all around the data. You guys talked about digital business. To us, digital business means data. And it seems like we sort of share that common belief. Absolutely. We've called this the information age for 50 years, but it's not been about information. It's been about technology. We finally have the ability to address that information and do it over the internet, everywhere and everything. That's really what our vision is. At BEA, we saw the internet emerging and the world had to distribute and take advantage of all that power across the whole world. And we invented that, but the key was when I came up with the first concept of BEA in 93, I said, you know, by the year 2000, the network is going to be the computer. The network needs an operating system to make it all work. Well, the concept here and the reason that I actually took this job is looking ahead 10 years. Everything's going about information. No organization's going to be able to exist without leveraging the power of that information because that's the only way they'll bring their customer the value they need. That's the only way they compete. Without it, their business are just going to go down. Bill, how are customers going to leverage data? You mentioned it about the information. It's not about the technology, but you know, I'd look at customers. They've had storage people. They have network people. You know, oh, I'm excited about containers. We spent the last 15 years focused on virtualization. Is it chief data officer? Is it, you know, some other structure that customers, how are some of the leading customers that are going to be able to adopt this? How are they changing to be able to leverage that data and information? Well, first you have to understand the technology has been complex, hard to use, hard to manage. You know, as we saw earlier in the keynotes, it's like building a Rube Goldberg device with 27 different software products and 14 different hardware products to sort of work together. Well, that's all disappearing. With cloud and the internet, it's becoming like a utility. You just subscribe to it. So that goes away. Now what you have to do, what we have to do is we have to give them the tools that they can easily, visually look at that data, determine what's in that data, be maneuvering it, move it around like in the movie. Minority report. Minority report. And literally, the things we talked about today, the demos we showed can lead to that. With machine learning proofs of analytics, our biggest customers are already investing billions of dollars to do that because they know if they don't jump ahead, their competition's going to do it. It's the power of information. So one of the things I might take away today was not only is Veritas hardware agnostic, but in many respects, your workload agnostic. In other words, what I mean by that is a lot of the events that Stu and I and theCUBE goes to, the enterprise companies are talking about On-Prem, and that's where their business is, and much of your business, of course, is On-Prem, but we heard a message today of we really don't care where it lives. We want to be the innovator to help you get value out of your data no matter where it lives. A lot of people will say that, but you really don't care where it lives. Is that true? And we can't. Look at, data's not just in an enterprise as data centers anymore. They're using clouds. We've surveyed our customers. Our average enterprise customers using three public clouds already, and they have dozens of SaaS applications like Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow. There are data's in there too. That's really complex. What we've done is we've taped and built the products that run in the cloud, across the cloud, to and from the cloud, all by one policy orchestration. So you don't have to think about any of that. You can discover the data, categorize the data, manage the data, and analyze the data all from one interface, end to end. So the obvious hard question follow-up is what gives you confidence that the cloud guys, once they get that workload, aren't going to just sort of usurp that agenda. What do you have to do to maintain that customer delight? Well, the first thing is the cloud, the public cloud providers are very close partners. You know, the first month we started this, Bill Voss who heads storage for AWS, and I worked with him at Sun, you know, came down to us and said, look, our customers need backup. You know, snapshots are great, but if somebody deletes a snapshot, it's gone. Your data's gone. How are you going to protect that? How are you going to analyze that data? And we want to partner with you. So we've partnered with him. But the other thing he said was, and if we do it exclusively, the enterprises aren't going to use us. I had the CIO of one of the top five banks in the world tell me right after I started this, we've got to be using three cloud simultaneous and we never want to be stuck in a cloud. So the cloud service providers know that the enterprise customers want and need that and demand that portability. And we become there. We're the premier partner for Amazon, for Microsoft, for Google, and for IBM. So it's relationships, but it's also innovation. Absolutely. So talk about where you are with R&D. You're purchased by a private equity company. You probably might have heard the narrative beforehand a lot of the old private equity models that suck all the cash out. Kind of the new private equity models to invest, grow the valuation of the company. I think that's where I see you guys going. But talk about how you're able to innovate. Talk about the R&D mojo that you guys have. You had several questions there, but let me start with that with the last one. When we carved this company out 19 months ago, it became apparent that we weren't a real player in the cloud. We weren't in some of the more modern workloads, and we had to change rapidly. So we create a strategy that led to this whole 360 data management integrated platform, software-defined storage, integrating it with a restful API interface. And then in one year, we built seven new products from scratch that operate in the cloud, on-prem, or across-cloud. Automated that entire thing. We literally took the startup mentality. Now I've been a startup guy most of my life. I spent the last five and a half years before this, funding early-stage startups, and the thing is being agile and moving fast. We can move faster than anyone around now. We're a big company. Let's take CloudPoint. We just introduced our Cloud Snapshot. That was a thought in somebody's eye in February. We defined what we needed to do, working with our customers. We put together the team. We built a microservice end-to-end architecture, and we shipped it supporting all the major cloud snapshot capability in five months, end-to-end, totally new product. Now that is a startup mentality. Yeah, Bill, can you explain to us a little bit some of the internal plumbing, how you manage that? On the one hand, Veritas, Trusted Company, strong engineering culture, product like NetBackup, 15 years, leader in its space, versus brand new stuff, whole new spaces. What's staying the same? What's changing? How do you manage some of those transitions? Because typical company, it's like you got 7,500 employees. It's like, well, I've got revenue streams and product lines that I know how to do and can keep jugging, but I've got the new stuff too. So how do you manage that? I have a very simple philosophy of what it takes to lead a major company. You got to have a direction to go in. You'll have to hire great people and you have to organize around the first two. But the key is where are you going? Where's the puck going to be in five to 10 years? And I call that the three Bs. What's the vision of where the market's going to be and number two, what's the value that brings to customer? The value that will justify their switching costs and the third is, what are the values that you build your company on that customers and partners will be able to trust and account on? So when you start with that, we created the vision. It has to be a compelling and urgent vision. 10 years from now, all of our products are going to be obsolete. They're going to mostly be obsolete in five years. All of our traditional products. It's all going to be a microservice change on the fly. Customers never have to upgrade kind of environment, right? There's an urgency there and customers want to transform. There's an urgency there. The key is based on your values, you have to develop a culture that embodies the norms to execute your strategy. And then you keep those things in balances. The cultural change has been the most profound and the most important thing we've done in this company. And this company now has a startup winning the marketplace customer first culture. So you laid out the vision. In terms of the value to customers, you said when you talk to your CIO customers and other customers, three things came out. Cut costs, deal with governance and compliance and then help us with the digital transformation. Help us become a digital business essentially. So those two are pretty clear. Talk about the values that you espouse. What are they? So when you start with, values have to be built around what you're providing to a customer. And there's sort of three aspects to that. I'm going to be given the best possible products. I'm going to give them the lowest possible price. I'm going to give them the best possible service that they can count on. I'm asking our customers to bet their future. So it has to be the third. So it starts with we produce customer value, right? Then the next aspect of it is they have to believe that what you're doing is going to be there for them. That it's going to really work. So our next one is we're going to do that by inventing the future to bring them the customer value. We're not going to look back and try to add features and functions to where we are. We need to help them jump ahead to where they need to be. The third part of that, the pyramid there, is customers are going to rely on you. So trust, accountability, ethics, integrity. Those three things come together. Then we're all about employees, right? So how do you empower employees to succeed, grow, and be accountable, right? And you put these values together and the values will never change. The culture will evolve as strategy moves and keeping in balance means you're going to have to reorganize on a continual basis around where you are in your strategy. I told this company, we're going to be reorganizing continuously at least once a year. We're about to do a pretty fundamental reorganization in parts of our company. And this is the second time in six months. But you have to be an agile organization. Bill, the venture community thinks that this is a hot space. There's a whole number of startups, highly focused. Obviously they're smaller than you don't have the breadth of products. How do you look at the marketplace? What do you say about kind of that aspect? Well, as I said, I spent five and a half years in early stage venture. We had the highest return fund for our first fund of multiple of any venture capital company. I really love that world. Venture capital is the center of invention, the center of innovation in this country. In the world, you know, back in the 40s, 50s and 60s, you have to have these big corporate labs, you know, Bell Labs, Sarnoff Labs, et cetera. They don't exist anymore. It's all done by these. So they're inventing the future. Now, the difference between the pre.com era and after is the vast majority of startups are acquired. Well, the vast majority fail. The vast majority what's left are acquired and a few go public, right? So to me, number one, they are the laboratory. They're in the areas that we that are emerging and that we don't necessarily have a core competence. We want to look on how to do that. At BEA, in six years, I did 24 acquisitions to build the company. I never acquired anything that came to us. It was all, here's part of our strategy. We need this competency. We need this time to market. How do we make it work, right? Matter of fact, it was a joke. BEA stood for built entirely on acquisitions..(laughing loudly in background.) Well, people used to, Larry Ellison himself used to denigrate people for writing checks, not code. And then he, of course, he changed the software business. It's a big check. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the team. So when you took over here at Veritas, you mentioned off camera, you started with the team. How did you go about that? Maybe describe, add some color to the team. You know, like I said, one of the three pillars of my management is higher grade people. And if you're going to transform a company, if you're going to do a turnaround, it has to start with the leadership team, period. You can't start anywhere else, but you have to have a leadership team that shares the vision, shares the drive, knows how to work hard together. And when they walk in that room, there's not one thought about my organization or my career or my compensation because they all know if we make this work, all the rest of you take care of itself. Now, when you're doing these sort of things, there are certain times in certain organizations that people skills are optimal. The group that was managing this as part of Symantec, they weren't necessarily the best people to manage it as a change in culture, change in strategy. So I had to go out and I brought in a couple of folks that I've worked with before. We brought in some real amazing people. Mike Palmer is just unbelievable at all dimensions of product development. Scott Gennaro, he knows sales back forward. He knows every customer out there by name. And he knows how to really motivate a sales force. Well, every member of my leadership team, except Todd Hochman, the CIO, has come in with the same vision and the same, and of course that works down the organization as you're building, and that's how you change the culture. With that, here's the vision of wherever we're going, here's the values, what we are going to do, this is how we're going to lead it. So major objectives, obviously you want to keep moving fast, I presume you're reorganizing frequently to support that, but what are the main objectives that we should be looking for as sort of outside observers over the next six, nine, 12, 18 months? We are changing the agenda of the information management industry. The first place is for digital transformation, corporations have to switch. They have to get off what they're doing today ultimately and go to something new. And in an enterprise, that can only be one platform. You can't have two platforms deleting, moving data asynchronously. So it's going to be a major transformation. Now, that has to be a platform. We've put the stake in the ground, we have that platform. Now, this is our battle to lose because the incumbents in a transformation get to win if they're good enough. In the disruption, only a startup can win. That's how I want to be a, how we want its son, but this isn't a disruption. Nobody's going to throw away all their data centers and jump into somebody before who said, oh, I've managed a hundred terabytes. Give me a 50 petabytes, you know? And no customer's going to trust them. So this is our battle to win. We're changing the entire agenda with 360 data management. What we, our challenge, our number one challenge is we have to change the positioning in our own customer's minds because they know us as the 30 years of that legacy backup recovery and archiving company. And it's really working, but that's number one. That's my number one objective because the rest will take care of itself. And as a private company, do you feel like you're in a more advantageous position to do that and why? Well, I don't think I could do this as other than a private company because it changes the economics dramatically. Also, at the same time, we're switching from mostly licensed revenue to mostly rateable revenues to move to subscription. In a public company, that's a, oh, our revenue's going to go down for a while, so it's our profits, but trust me. Hang with us. Yeah, hang with us. There are companies like Adobe that did that flawlessly, but it's not an easy thing to do. And I'll tell you, I have the best partner in the world. When we started this whole carve-out and I figured out, whoa, we don't have the right products, we got to build this whole thing, I went to Carlisle with the strategy and the vision of what we need to do. And I said, look, because pricing pressure is so high, we're not going to be able to grow based on your plan, how you invest it. But if you want me to do that, I can do it and you need to invest this much more. But I recommend that we invest as fast as we can to get to digital transformation. They chose the third. They chose to, and we're spending 99 million more dollars in R&D and go to market this year than was in the original plan. I wouldn't be able to do that in the public markets. But they are the perfect partner. They build for growth. They stay in two to four years after an IPO. Their return is based on multiples of growth. And that's what, so our goals are totally aligned and aligned with what the customers are going to need. Bill, great story. I know you're super busy, a lot of customers to meet. But so thanks very much for taking time out and joining us on theCUBE. This has been a pleasure, thank you. You got me all stimulated. All right, good deal. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. It's theCUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. We'll be right back.