 Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2018, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to Chicago, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm joined by my co-host, Stuart Miniman. Ratmir Tamashev is here. He's the co-founder of Veeam, and in my opinion, the man who brought Veeam into the modern era created the persona of Veeam, allowed it to punch above its weight. Ratmir, thanks for coming back in theCUBE. It's great to see you again. Thanks, Stuart. So congratulations on another kickoff to another great event. You painted Chicago green, love it. First of all, how do you feel? Fantastic, awesome. It's a great venue, great city. The weather is finally nice, so spring is here finally, so great time. Yeah, we had a little trouble getting in, but everybody's here, everybody's here safely, which is the most important thing. I want you to talk about the evolution of Veeam. You started out as a virtualization specialist, generally VMware specialists, especially focusing on small business. We used to see you everywhere. Now you're extending into the enterprise. What's that all about? What's the vision? Give us your perspective. Dave, you're absolutely right. So Veeam started with a single focus to be the best for VMware. For VMware, data protection, backup, replication. And we started as the easy to use, simple, powerful solution for SMB, moved into mid-enterprise. And now we're adding lots of enterprise features and moving into the large enterprise. And last year was really the most important and most successful year, 2017, in the history of Veeam. So we finally admitted that we've been lying to our customers for 10 years. Yeah, we've been lying. What do you mean by that? For 10 years we've been saying Veeam is VMware only. Veeam is Hyper-V only. We will never do physical. So last year we introduced a comprehensive end-to-end platform to do everything, virtual, physical, and cloud. So we integrated our agent-based technology into our flagship product to provide a single pane of glass to manage all your data across the cloud end-to-end. Why lie for a decade? Ah, that's a good question. You know, when you deal with salespeople, smart salespeople, that constantly ask you, hey, when are we gonna do physical? Are we gonna do physical? You have to tell them, no, never. Because once you say, yeah, we will do physical. The next question is? Yeah, when can I sell it? When, when can I sell it, right? So we didn't want to give our salespeople an excuse to lose a deal because we've got the best virtual, go and sell the best virtual and make our customers happy. Yeah, and you don't want to head fake the customers either. Yeah, right, maybe explain what were the core principles back from the early days that are still holding true. What was the same and what's different now that you're doing cloud and virtual? Again, the core principle. It's called physical, I should say, yeah. Core principle, again, in terms of the product design, or where think customer first. Make it easy for the customer and really stick to your core customer, that customer that is using your product every day. So make it easy, powerful, and affordable. That was our core principles in designing the product and the whole business model behind Veeam. Talk about the metrics a little bit. Stu and I were talking at the open, 820 some-odd million in bookings. You're on, you can see a billion dollars. We said software companies that are a billion dollars are few and far between. So that's a huge milestone if and when you hit that. But talk about that and the growth. Share with us whatever metrics you can. Again, 2017 was one of the most successful years in our history, yeah, like you mentioned. We recorded bookings revenue of 830 million and that was 36% growth. Actually, our growth is accelerating as we become bigger. So we have, we just celebrated 300,000 customers we're adding 4,000 new customers every day. And Peter McKay, our president and co-CEO, mentioned this morning at the keynote that we're adding 133 customers every single day. So that's very impressive. Yeah, it's awesome. So yeah, we just to give you a sense, 300,000 customers VMware, who basically owns the enterprise has slightly over half a million customers. So we probably are on 50% of VMware. So we own 50% of VMware market in terms of data protection. So one of the challenges that we mentioned up front was okay, so you drove a truck through the opportunity when virtualization VMware came in and a lot of the incumbents were caught flat footed. They didn't have the architecture, they didn't have the go to market, et cetera. Now things are changing, moving to cloud, moving to this digital world. How does Veeam retain its edge in that new world? That's an excellent question. So that's the big opportunity that we see for the next five years. So we won the first battle, the battle of on-prem, highly virtualized mode of data center. We are the leader, we are number one data protection and availability for that market, right? So the next battle, the next opportunity that we see for the next five years is to dominate what we call intelligent data management market in the multi-cloud world. So we have to think how we approach that. Once you win the market, like there is a saying, the winner takes it all. Once you win the market, you are going to dominate that. So for us, the next two, three years are the most critical in dominating this multi-cloud world for the next decade. Yes, Ratmir, I'd love to hear, you wrote that virtualization wave, which really was about creating the virtualization admin, huge shift going from silos to admins. And we're seeing that change from architects in the cloud and the like. Talk to, who are you selling to that in the partners they have to grow, there's just so much change happening in that kind of environment. Yeah, we see the change as we are moving from VMware administrator, so originally the product was designed for VMware administrator. Now we are moving to the infrastructure person that is responsible not just for private part of your infrastructure, but for the multi-cloud strategy, which includes the public cloud, SAS, physical servers, everything that modern enterprise has as part of the infrastructure. Okay, so I want to go through just a couple of things that we talked about earlier and get your reaction to this. So some of the things that we've seen in our research is that data protection and orchestration are becoming much, much more important on the list of CXO concerns. And that's something that your messaging is going after. But there's a dissonance between the business expects out of data protection and what IT is actually delivering. And I wonder if you could comment on that. Yeah, sure. So yeah, we are introducing our new message. So our previous message was focused on VMware administrator. Now we are moving more into the enterprise and our message is about the importance of data. We see the three characteristics of the modern data. Hyper critical, hyper sprawl and hyper growth. So this leads to the need of creating a new type of solution. What we call is intelligent data management solution to manage the hyper available enterprise. So we're using the word hyper a lot because the data is now hyper critical. It's over distributed, hyper distributed and is growing exponentially. That's part of our new message that we're delivering to the C level people about how important this data. And with all the things that are going on in terms of the security compliance and how we are gonna extend this platform to solve other business issues and provide more value, more business outcomes of using your data. Seems important has grown within this enterprise customers. However, as we mentioned, we are moving further. We are not standing still. So we have added lots of capabilities in terms of protecting cloud, native cloud, AWS, Azure as well as physical servers. So we are moving more into the end to end strategic data management platform provider from being just a niche point solution. I want to give you another stat that came out of our research which I think you'll love is that our David Floyer calculated that on average a Fortune 1000 company over, I think of three or a four year period loses about a billion and a half dollars in value because of poorly architected data protection approaches. Whether it's either not end to end or they're not protecting their cloud data properly or they're not doing, whether it's backup or disaster recovery properly, well over a billion dollars over a four year period. Your thoughts? Yeah, that's similar to what our research shows as well. So we do annual research and ask our customers how much downtime and data loss costs them annually or per hour and that research shows that average enterprise can lose as much as over 10 million dollars per hour. So if you add it up over four years that might be close to that number. But with all the compliance and new security risks and security threat and ransomware, this is becoming more and more of a critical, business critical problem to solve. So this is a huge opportunity for Veeam because when you think about your total available market what a lot of time analysts will do is they'll add up all the spending on let's say data protection solutions but to me your TAM is actually quite a bit larger because of this lost revenue opportunity. Yeah, I don't know, it's many tens of billions, maybe 30 to 50 billion. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, definitely. So data protection is just part of that core market. So the data management is much bigger and by data management we mean not just the protecting the data but using this data to help businesses to accelerate the innovation. So to reduce risk to comply with the new regulation. So all these challenges are much bigger part of the not just the data backup and recovery. It's overall data management market which is much bigger and probably is measured in 20, 30 billion range. So okay, so you have 2,500, 3,000 of your favorite people here gathered this week. As always I expect you're going to have a big send off, a big party. What can we expect this week? As always that's part of the Veeam culture is work hard, play hard, and so Veeam is known for having the best parties. Yeah, now Peter runs the company day to day but culturally we still remain a young entrepreneurial spirited company, right? So we like party and we like to work hard. Well, if you've never been to a Veeam party you're missing it. I don't usually stay for these things. I get out of here, we do so many cubes but we'll be at the Veeam party this week. Awesome. All right, Ratmir, thanks very much. Always a pleasure seeing you and congratulations on all your success. Thank you very much. All right, you're welcome. Keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from VeeamON 2018. We're in the Windy City and we'll be right back.