 Live from Chicago, Illinois. It's theCUBE. Covering Veeamon 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to the Windy City, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events. We track the signal, extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. This is our second year at Veeamon. Hashtag Veeamon, simple enough. Kate Hutchinson is here. She's the CMO of Veeam. Welcome to theCUBE. Yes, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. You're very welcome. Thanks so much for taking time out of your busy schedule. Great show. You've painted the town in green. We certainly have. So, Veeam obviously didn't need your expert help in creating awareness at places like this and having a persona around the green team. Awesome. Your background, Riverbed, Polycom, Veeamware, Citrix, BEA, some rockstar companies that you've got a lot of experience here. Why did you come to Veeam and why now? Yes, so I was attracted to Veeam for many reasons. We have some, as you know, stellar attributes as a company. We've been talking a lot about our net promoter score of 73, which is three and a half times the industry average. And of course, the executive team themselves and meeting them and really wanting to be a part of that team. So that was a huge reason for me joining. But as it relates to my career and my background and what I thought I could bring to Veeam, very much about enterprise marketing. So I've spent about the last 20 years in the industry, as you mentioned, the company names, really helping those companies build a powerhouse brand. And so I just love helping a company who is known for one thing, and been very successful of that, be known for something that's even broader and more strategic. And that's why I wanted to join the company. So you mentioned the phrase powerhouse brand. What is a powerhouse brand? And how do you go about building it? Well, everybody probably has a different definition of a powerhouse brand, but having spent a good 15 years in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, when you're walking around Silicon Valley and you say who you work for and everyone recognizes it, you're working for a powerhouse brand. That hasn't been the case with Veeam. Now we're very strong and when we do our research, we come off pretty strong in Europe. But in terms of our brand awareness in North America, we have a ways to go there. So again, and I think because when it comes to building a brand and a powerhouse brand, enterprises really rely on customers to do that, to really leverage the voice of customers to get the word out and to have customers go on record to talk about the power and the value of Veeam. Because when customers go on record to talk about it, there really is no better marketing than you can do. One of the things I saw, Veeam started out with the geeks. And I say that in the most loving terms. People that did virtualization, Veeam solved the problem. It was simple, huge adoption in that market. But as we've been talking about all day here, data protection's going up the stack. It is. It's hitting the C-suite more. So maybe you've explained to a lot of our audience that the techies and they're like, I don't understand this brand and marketing thing. We just want the next little containers and things there. So what are the brand elevations? Yes, so first and foremost, we're known for one thing in the industry as it relates to our product. It just works, okay? And we're not leaving that behind certainly the enterprise cares a lot about the product. But as we go into the enterprise space, there's some things that an enterprise customer is going to look for that an SMB may not. So enterprises want to be assured that the company that they're doing business with has long-term viability. They want to be assured that there's plenty of addressable market and headroom for them to go far and above beyond their sights of a billion in our case. And the other thing is enterprise customers have a different way of engaging with that company as it relates to the selling motion. So whether it's our partners or our Alliance partners, our resellers, our sales teams directly, they want to be able to work with them as trusted advisors and they want our folks to be able to anticipate their needs well ahead of when they actually encounter them. So we're talking a lot about a journey for our customers. We've been talking about an intelligent data management and the five stages to getting to that. And so it's building on our core, which has been SMB and commercial, but also now up-leveling the story. And by the way, the technologists at all companies of all sizes want to be doing more to influence the outcome, the business outcomes. And so we're telling a story that we think will resonate with them. And there's always plenty of click-downs into the technology that if you want it. You guys are putting a lot of emphasis on the up-leveling. As Stu mentioned, CXO is becoming more aware of the data protection problem. It's becoming a board level topic. So I think I get the why now. My question is, why Veeam? And what is the brand promise that you're going to bring to that enterprise? Yes. So I think traditionally Veeam has been thought of as more of an SMB and commercial play. So the why now is we have a much broader portfolio than we had a few years ago, and yet we're still very much thought of as just backup and replication. Now we're building on what our reputation is in backup and replication. But we want to take customers to where we know the puck is going. So for example, as enterprise customers want to take advantage of public clouds, of managed clouds, of SaaS applications, they need to be able to get a control of all their data. I mean, that's the one thing we hear over and over. I don't know where all my data is, right? So they need to have a platform that can give them that visibility and that aggregated view, that single pane of glass, and then they're going to eventually want to take advantage of being able to move workloads into places where it makes more sense to have them in cases where there needs to be tighter protection or in the case of archive data that they don't need to spend a lot of money on primary storage. So it just depends on what our customers want to do. And then ultimately to be able to move to more of a behavior-based way of managing that data. So for example, if we see malware crossing the network, we can immediately respond and make sure that those workloads are secure. Could also happen as it relates to weather systems and being able to have the data be smart enough to sense and respond to where it needs to move to. We saw some slides this morning that Peter McKay was showing, I call it the platform slide, and I tweeted out that we learned years ago working with Eric Brynjalsen and Andy McAfee that platforms beat products. So talk about the importance of platforms to the enterprise. Yes, so first of all, you cannot be a platform provider without an ecosystem that's embracing and extending the value. And we're working with our ecosystem through the APIs, the application programming interfaces that we make available to them so that they can integrate with our products and actually allow our platform to be able to be the most complete platform for intelligent data management. That is not all coming from being. We are very heavily dependent on our ecosystem. And so that's really, I think the crux of how important a platform is because customers have a lot of technology already in their environments. They want to make sure that if I'm buying something from you, it'll integrate into my existing environment. So I don't have to do a complete rip and replace. That's a very expensive proposition. So we've been investing and we have thousands of technology partners that are embracing our APIs and again extending the value of our platform. So I know I'm going to jump in, but so that's really, I was going to ask you how you add value to those partners. And it's not just the product and the features and doing what you say you're going to do from a product standpoint. It's having that platform that makes it easy to integrate by creating that scale effect, that flyway effect. Absolutely. And a solution that is better together. So a customer's really like buying solutions that are already packaged and integrated as it might relate to Cisco and Veeam or HPE and Veeam or NetApp and Veeam. So that's what we've been doing with those partners in particular and really going to market together. And that is a preferred way for many customers to buy. Or IBM and Veeam and Microsoft and Veeam and Pure and Veeam and Mechanics and Veeam and VMware. You've got it. We don't want to leave anybody out there. We don't want to leave anybody out. Those three that I mentioned are all, we're on their price list and they are reselling. So that's the difference. That's really important point. Yes, yes, yes. So my question is, as you go up the stack a bit and talk about platforms and things like orchestration. Yes. The swim lanes get a little bit muddy. Because if you talk about those same partners, the VMware's, the Microsofts, the Nutanix of the world, they want to own a lot of those pieces in the multi-cloud world and they're all positioning. So maybe you can help explain that a bit. I think we're all probably saying some of the same words but defining them a little differently. So when we talk about orchestration, it's very much about allowing workloads to move seamlessly across multi-clouds to do that while the data's secure and protected. And eventually introduce, we have some partnerships today that allow us to leverage artificial intelligence so that those workloads can move seamlessly without any disruption to the business as they're moving to the right location. So yes, I think you hear a lot of the terms, but when you drill down into it and you double click on, what does that mean for you in your environment? It's a little different. So when Veeam decided to expand deeper into the enterprise, I mean, it's putting its money where its mouth is. I mean, we brought in Peter McKay. Yes. He's brought in the number of folks on the sales side with enterprise background, now yourself. Yes. Dave Russell up on stage today. So he's got some enterprise chops. So you're not just talking to talk, you're walking the walk, which is great to see. In thinking about the total available market, so it's a TAM expansion move, can you address that at all? I mean, I know you guys are very research oriented as a company, you've got relationships with all the big research houses. What do you see from a TAM standpoint? Yes. So remember that our proposition is to have the most complete platform for intelligent data management. By virtue of saying that, it means we have to really look at some of the adjacent markets for additional capabilities to put into our platform to ensure that we remain ahead of the competition as it relates to intelligent data management. So we're looking at various adjacent markets, whether that be through a build by or partner strategy. So one of the largest market opportunities in an adjacency is the cloud infrastructure as a service market. It's huge. It's $290 billion. It's got a very fast clip in terms of its compounded annual growth rate. And we've already made some really great progress there, both organically as well as through the acquisition of N2WS. So when we move into fast growing market segments like that, and we have many others that are adjacent as well, it's creating an addressable market of about $30 billion for us as we look out to 2022. And so we're pretty excited about that. And again, that gets back to making those investments so that an enterprise customer feels confident betting their business on us. We have that scalability, we have that market addressable market, and we are increasingly helping our folks on the front lines become trusted advisors to our customers. And in your estimation, I know some of this is art. When you're doing the TAM analysis, I used to do that for a living, so I know. In your estimation, is that sort of an approximation of spend or does it include what we look at as the money that's left on the table by the global 2000 because they have inadequate data protection? I presume it does not include that. Because if it did, the number would probably be a trillion. Right, right. But I wonder if you could add some color to that. Well, I think as we get into an era of compliance, we have GDPR coming down this month. I think companies are taking a new look at what does it really mean to ensure that I know where all my data is, that I ensure it's protected, that I'm assured that it's secure, and that it's in compliance. So I think you're seeing more attention, more money you mentioned earlier that this is becoming more of a sea level issue. And I think in an era of the compliance and regulations that are coming down, you're going to see that only increase. One of the interesting things that we saw about Veeam when we were looking at the show here, you're almost, how do I say a tweener? You're still kind of a startup, but you're one of the bigger companies in the space. There's a lot of buzz and energy and customer interest in this all marketplace. How do you look at yourself compared to kind of some of the legacy giants and some of the new startups? So we are a very fast growing company. I mean, we posted 48% growth in Q4. We were at 36% year over year. I mean, off very big numbers, right? I haven't seen these numbers since I was at VMware, okay? And so that is a rapid, that's rapid growth. Company grows up quickly when it's growing at that clip. So, you know, I think there's a part of us that's extremely paranoid about the competition and looking at some of the new entrants to make sure that we are really staying ahead and innovating, continuing to innovate. And then we look at some of the legacy companies that have been in this space and we see, you know, in some cases a downward trend in their revenue and in their investments in this area, in this area. So I think, again, I think it's a healthy balance of staying innovative and paranoid and then recognizing that customers want the solution that Veeam offers and they do want to be able to migrate off of some of the legacy systems that are out there. We're seeing that time and again, we just showed a, this morning in the general session, we showed a Royal Caribbean video. And that was a case where they abandoned their legacy system to go with Veeam. Well, it's quite a story. I mean, nearly a billion dollars, growing at 35 plus percent a year. You got to look to companies like ServiceNow, Workday. I mean, that's the, you're in that rarefied air. So, well, Kate, thanks so much for coming on to you. Absolutely, thank you. Congratulations on the new role. Thank you. Really excited to see you sort of take Veeam up into that new stratosphere. I'm very excited to be here. So thank you. And it's great to be part of Veeam on 2018. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest right after this short break.