 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, the digital version. I'm Lisa Martin, and I have a couple of CUBE alumni joining me from Veeam. We've got Danny Allen, it's CTO and SVP of Product Strategy, and Dave Russell, VP of Enterprise Strategy is here as well. Danny and Dave, welcome back to theCUBE. Hi, Lisa, great to be here. Hey, Lisa, great to be here. Love talking with this audience. And thankfully, because of technologies like this in the Zoom, we're still able to engage with that audience, even though we would all be gearing up to be spending five days in Vegas with what, 47,000 of our closest friends across, and walking a lot. But I wanted to Danny start with you, you guys had Veeam on virtually this summer. That's an event known for its energy. Talk to me about some of the things that you guys announced there, and how are your customers doing with this rapid change to work from home and this massive amount of uncertainty? Well, certainly no one would have predicted this the beginning of the year. There's been such transformation. There was a statement made earlier this year that we've gone through two years of transformation in just two months. And I would say that is definitely true if you look both internally at Veeam, our workforce, we have 4,400 employees, all of a sudden 3,000 of them that had been going into the office or working from home. And that is true of our customer base as well. There's a lot of remote employment, remote working. And so that has, you would think it would have impact on the digital systems, but what it's done is it's accelerated the transformation that organizations are going through. And that's been good in a number of different aspects. One, certainly cloud, adoption of clouds picked up, things like Microsoft Teams and collaboration software has certainly picked up. So it's certainly been a challenging year on many fronts, but on the other hand, it's also been very beneficial for us as well. Yeah, I've talked to so many folks in the last few months. There's silver linings everywhere. There's opportunity everywhere, but give our audience, Danny, an overview of who Veeam is, what you do and how you help customers secure their data. Sure, so Veeam has been in the backup business is what I'll say. We started right around when virtualization was taking off little before AWS and EC2, last computing services, and we would do backup of virtual environments. And over the last decade, we have grown into a $1 billion company doing backup solutions that enable cloud data management. What I mean by that is we do backup of all kinds of different infrastructures from virtual to cloud-based to SaaS-based to physical systems, you name it. And then when we ingest that data, what we do is we begin to manage it. So an example of this is we have 400,000 customers that are doing backup on premises. And one of the things that we've seen this year is this massive push of that backup data into S3, into the public cloud. And so this is something that we help our customers with as they go through this transformation. And so you've got a theme for AWS cloud-mated solution. Talk to me a little bit about that and how does that allow businesses to get that centralized view of virtual physical SaaS applications? Yeah, I think it all starts with architecture. And fundamentally, Veeam's architecture is based upon having a portable data format that's self-describing. So what does that mean? It means it reduces the friction from moving data that might have been born on premises to later be instantiated in, say the AWS cloud, or you can also imagine now new workloads being born in the cloud, especially towards the middle and end of this year. A lot of us, we couldn't get into our data center. We had to do everything remotely. So we had to try to keep those lights on operationally, but we also had to begin to lift and shift and accelerate. Your point about silver linings, if there is a silver lining, the very prepared really benefited. And I think those that were maybe a little more laggards, they caught up pretty quickly. Well, that's good to hear. Dave, sticking with you, I'd love to get your perspectives on IT challenges in the last nine months in particular, what things have changed, what remains the same and where is backup as a priority for the IT folks and really the business folks too? Yeah, I almost want to start with that last piece, where is backup? So backup obviously well understood as a concept. It's well funded. I mean, almost everybody in their right mind has a backup product, especially for critical data. But yet that all sounds very much the same. What's very, very different though, where are those workloads? Where do they need to be going forward? What are the service level agreements, meaning that access time is required for those workloads? And while we're arguably transitioning from certain types of applications to new applications, the vast majority of us are dead in the middle of that. So we've got to be able to embrace the new while also anchoring back to the past. Yeah, not so easily said and done professionally or personally. Danny, I'd love to get your perspective on how your customer conversations have changed, you know, where executives like you, both of you are so used to getting on planes and flying around and being able to engage with your customers, especially at events like Veeamon and re-invent. What's the change been like? And from a business perspective, are you having more conversations at that business level as the end of the day, if you can't recover the data? That's the whole point, right? Yeah, it is. I would say the conversations really have four segments to them. The first is, it always starts with the pandemic and the impact of the pandemic on the business. The second from there is it talks about resource. We talk about resource management. And that's resource management both from a cost perspective, customers trying to shift the costs from CAPEX models, typically on premises into OPEX cloud consumption models and also resource management as well. There's the shift from customers who are used to doing business one way and they're trying to shift the resources to make it effective in a new and better way. I'd say the third conversation actually pivots from there to things like security and governance. One of the interesting things this year we've seen a lot of is ransomware and malware and attacks, especially because the attack surface has increased with people working from home. There is more opportunity for organizations to be challenged. And then lastly, it always pivots where it ends up is digital transformation. How do I get from where I used to be to where I want to be? Yeah, the ransomware increase has been quite substantial. I've seen a number of big, of course you never want to be the brand. Garmin was head, Carnival Cruise Line, I think Canon cameras as well. And you're talking about, you're right, the attack surface is expanding with unprotected cloud databases. I think that was the Facebook, TikTok, Instagram hack. And also it's getting more personal, which you have more people from home, more distractions and that's a big challenge that organizations need to be prepared for. Because really it's not a matter of are we going to get ahead, but it's when and we need to make sure that we have that resiliency. Dave, talk to us about how theme enables customers to have that resiliency. Yeah, it's a multi-layered approach, like any good defensive mechanism, it's not one thing. It's trying to do all of the right things in advance, meaning passwords and perimeter security and ideally virtual private networks. But to your point, some of those things can fail, especially as we're all working remotely and there's more dependence on now suddenly, perhaps not so IT sophisticated people to now do the right things on a daily basis. And to your point about how personal it's getting, if we're all getting emails about click on this for helpful information on the pandemic, the likelihood of this goes up. So in addition to trying to do good things ahead of time, we've got some early warning detection capabilities where we can alert that something looks suspicious or anomalous and bears out better investigation to confirm that. But ultimately the couple of things that we do that are very interesting and unique to BMR, we can lock down copy of the backup data so that even internal employees, even someone at Amazon can't go if it's marked immutable and destroy it, remove it, alter it in any way before it's due to be modified or deleted or raced in any way. But one of the ones I'm most excited about is we can actually recover from an old backup and now we introduce updated virus signatures to ensure we don't reintroduce day zero threats in the production environments. Is that across all workloads, physical, virtual, things like Microsoft 365 Slack talked about those collaboration tools, that immutability? So immutability, we're expanding out into multiple platforms. Today we've got it on on-premises object storage through a variety of different partners, actually a couple dozen different partners now. And we have something very unique with AWS S3 object lock that we can really lock down that data and ensure that can't be compromised. That's excellent. Danny, over to you. In terms of cloud adoption, you've both talked about this acceleration of digital business transformation that we've all seen. I think everyone has whiplash from that and that this adoption of cloud has increased. We've seen a lot of that. Is being a facilitator, like are you working with clients who are sort of maybe Dave at that point you talked about in the beginning, like kind of on that brink in the beginning and we've got to transform, we've got to go to the cloud. How do you kind of help maybe facilitate their adoption of public health services like AWS with the technologies that the offers? Yeah, I'd say it's really two things. Everyone wants to say, hey, we're disrupting the market. We're changing everything about the world around us. You should come with us. Meme actually has a very different approach to this. One is we provide stability through the disruption around you. So as your business is changing and evolving and you're going through digital transformation, we can give you the stability through that and not only the stability through that change but we can help in that change. And what I mean by that is if you have a customer who's been on-premises and running the workloads on-premises for a long while and maybe they've been sending their backups into S3 and flagging that imutability but maybe now they want to actually migrate the workloads into EC2, we can do that. It's a three-step, three clicks in a workflow to hit a button and say, send it up into EC2. And then once it's in AWS, we can protect the workload when it's there. So we don't just give the stability in this changing environment around us but we actually help customers go through that transformation and help them move the workloads to the most appropriate business location for them. And how does that, Denny, continuing with you from a cost optimization perspective? Of course, we always talk about cost as a factor when I'm going to the cloud. How does that a facilitator, like being able to move some of those workloads like EC2 that you talked about, is that a facilitator of cost optimization, lower TCO? I would imagine at some point, yes. Yes, it is. So I have this saying the cloud is not a charity, right? They layer in margin and often people don't understand necessarily what it's going to cost them. So one of the fundamental things that we've had in being back up for AWS since the very beginning, since version one is we give cost forecasting. And it's not just a rudimentary cost forecasting. We look at the storage, we look at the compute, we look at the networking, we look at all of the different factors that go into a policy and we will tell them in advance what it's going to cost. That way you don't end up in a position where you're paying a lot more than you expected to pay. And so giving that transparency, giving the visibility into what the costs of the cloud migration and adoption are going to be is a critical motivator for customers actually to use our software. Awesome. And Dave, I'm curious if we look at some of the things trends-wise that have gone on, what are you seeing IT folks in terms of work from home, the remote workers? I imagine they're getting their hands on this, but do you expect that a good amount of certain types of folks from industries won't go back into the office because IT's realizing like more cost optimizations or hey, we don't need to be on site because we can leverage cloud capabilities? Yeah, I think it works actually in both directions, Lisa. I think we'll see employees continue to work remotely. So the notion of skyscrapers being filled with tens of thousands of people, knowledge workers as they were once called back in the day, that may not come to pass at least anytime soon, but conversely to your point, everybody getting back into the data center, from a business perspective, the vast majorities of CIOs, they don't want to be in the real estate business. They don't want to be in the brick and mortar and the power of cooling the facilities business. So that was a trend that was already directionally happening. And just as an accelerant, I think 2020 and probably 2021, at least the first half just continues that trend. Yeah, Silicon Valley is a bit lonely. The freeways are certainly empty here, which is one thing, but it is, it's one of those things that you think you can be, and now granted folks that worked from home, regardless of the function that they were in before, it's not the same. I think we all know that it's not the same working from home during a pandemic when there's just so much more going on, but at the same time, I think businesses are realizing where they can actually get more cost optimization since your point, not wanting to manage real estate, big data centers, things like that, that may be a positive spin on what this situation has demonstrated. Danny, last question to you. I always loved it to hear about successful customers. Talk to me about one of your favorite reference customers that really just articulates Veeam's value, especially in this time of helping customers with so many pivots. Well, the whole concept of digital transformation is clearly coming to the forefront with the pandemic. And so one of my favorite customers, for example, it ducks unlimited up in Canada. They have IoT sensors where they're collecting data about climate information, they put it into a repository and they keep it for 60 years. Why 60 years? Because who knows over the next 60 years when these sensors and the data that they're collecting may be able to solve problems like climate change. But if you look at it a broader sense, take that same concept of collection of data, I think we're in a fantastic period right now where things like telemedicine in the past, it was kind of in a slow roll, remote education and training was on kind of a slow roll, climate change, slow roll. But now the pandemic is accelerating a lot of that. Another customer, royal.shell, for example, traditionally in the oil and petrochemical industry, they're now taking the data that they have, they're going through this transformation faster than ever before and saying, how do I move to sustainable energy? And so a lot of people look at 2020 and say, I want this year or this is not the transformation I want. I actually take the reverse of that. The customers that we have right now are taking the data sets that they have and they're actually optimizing for a more sustainable future, a better future for us and for our children. And I think that's a fantastic thing and Veeam obviously helps in that transformation. That's excellent. And I agree with you, Dianne. Necessity is the mother of invention. And sometimes when all of these challenges are exposed, it's hard right away to see, what are the positive, right? What are the opportunities? But from business perspective, as you guys were talking about in the beginning of our statement, in the beginning with keeping the lights on, well now we've got to get from keeping the lights on to surviving, to pivoting well, to thriving. So that hopefully 2021 is as good as everybody hopes it's going to be, right Dave? Yeah, no, absolutely. It's all data driven and you're right. We have to move from keep the lights up and going to operational aspect to growing the business in new ways and ideally transforming the business in new ways. And you can see we hit on digital transformation a number of times. Why? Because it's data driven. Why do we intercept that with being? Well, because if it's important to you, it's probably backed up and held for long-term safekeeping. So we want to be able to better leverage the data. Like Danny mentioned with Ducks Unlimited. And of course, as we know, data volumes are only growing. So next time you're on Dave, you have to play us out with one of your guitars. Deal? Definitely, definitely well. Excellent. For Dave Russell and Danny Allen, I'm Lisa Martin. Guys, thank you so much for joining. You're watching theCUBE.