 Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019, brought to you by Commvault. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are covering Commvault Go 19 from Colorado. And Stu and I are pleased to welcome a couple of guys back to theCUBE. We've got David Wigglesworth, a VP, now VP of Global Sales and Emerging Technologies at Commvault for what, a couple weeks now, David? About a month and a few days. About a month. And look who's back. It's Don Foster, VP of Storage Solutions from the keynote stage. Welcome back, Don. Thank you very much. Don, and we appreciate you bringing your own personal makeup artist, Sunday Merton Donnie, he's a man of many skills. Indeed. He really is. So if this whole CEO thing doesn't work, he's clearly got a career in touch-up makeup. In makeup, yeah. Yeah, all right, so Wigs will start with you. You got a cool nickname, so I got to use it. You've been here for about a month or so. This is a new Commvault. We've heard a lot in the last two days. A lot of news, a lot of leadership changes, obviously. Go-to-market changes, new partner offerings, lots of stuff. Tell us first before we dig in, what attracted you to Commvault? That's a pretty easy question to answer. It's a leadership. So obviously very familiar with Commvault. I've competed with them in my past career. Always been a very formidable competitor. When you walked into an account in my previous life and they said they had Commvault, you usually kind of wiped your brow and thought, oh, okay, I've got to find something else here to talk about. But in all seriousness, for me, it was, when I first noticed in the news that Sanjay had come on board, I piqued my interest because obviously I knew Sanjay in my previous life at EMC and at VMware. And then when I watched Ricardo join the company, I was like, okay, this is something I really need to dig into. And so when I had the opportunity to meet with them and understand the direction of where they want to take the company, which was also already just a phenomenal IT organization, just a pillar in the IT community with what the founders were able to do, in relatively short amount of time, I was really excited to be able to come over and be a part of it. Well, Wigs, you've got emerging tech under your purview. Tell us a little bit about what that's going to mean in your role. Right now it means head big, right? So by now everyone's heard of the acquisition that was made. That was the other thing also that really interested me, was that technology, because I really think that's where the market is going. And I just felt like it was a great addition to the CommBall family of products. But it's a different technology. It's calling on a different set of folks within side of an account. And it's primarily an enterprise play. It can be a go down market a little bit. And enterprise is kind of where I've spent the last several years of my career, the last 20 or so. And so what we've decided to do is because it's so different, we've decided for the time being that we were going to create a specialty organization globally to go sell that solution so that our existing core sellers can focus on our existing set of products, right? That we can be a specialist organization that can help them with their customers, sell all the additional emerging tech, right? And so here at the show, we've obviously spent time talking about HeadVig. Metallic is another new technology for us. Now Metallic is going to be handled differently. But as we continue to go, our emerging technologies from the traditional core family of products, CommBall family of products, that's what I'm going to be focused on. So it'll begin with HeadVig. So for the role that you're in now, you said about a month or so, are you bringing in a brand new sales overlay team? Are you guys hiring like crazy or are some of the CommBall OG sales guys and girls shifting up, we'll say? Yeah, for the most part, we're bringing in new talent. We're looking for people that have, you know, a broad spectrum of the experience, right? Obviously someone with strong storage background, but also people that know virtualization, cold, people that understand containers. Those skill sets are really important to us. And so we're busy building out both a America sales team and also building out an Amia sales team. And then my partner, I call him my partner in crime, Adiz, Adiz is building out our SE organization for the same two theaters. We'll start in those two theaters. And then once we get the product fully integrated, which is part of what this guy is doing, once we get the product fully integrated, then I think you'll see us start to move into some other theaters. But right now we're going to focus on those. So yes, we're hiring, right now my LinkedIn says, David Wiggles-Earth, we're hiring. I think I saw that actually. Don, we got to dig into some of the technology with you and Avinash yesterday. So we're now getting most of the way through the conference. Bring us inside some of the conversations you're having. I know it was one of the biggest questions we had coming in was, all right, the head big that we knew what's going to change, how does that fit, blurring the lines between primary and secondary and all the discussions we had with Sanjay. So take us as to how people are, are they kind of getting it at this point? And we know it's a journey for the integration and where it will ultimately end. Here's the real interesting thing, is probably in the first, I don't know, maybe 24 hours of having conversations with people from partner exchange, all the way through to basically day one of actual Commvault Go. I probably had about four, maybe five, if you count one of the service providers from customer's partners come up and say, okay, look, we look at this tech about 18, 12 months ago. And it was top of our list for what we wanted to do for building out this initiative. But there was a little bit too much risk going, okay, do we really want to invest that much on a company that is maybe not the largest, most, you know, I wouldn't want to say reputable, but substantial in the marketplace, will they be there in the future? And they're like, now that we know that you've legitimized that business and you want to keep that technology going forward, this is fantastic. We're totally want to go and take a relook back at this and see how we can apply that back into our infrastructure. So that's a great feedback to hear. It only serves as a validation that when we look at the tech and say this is good stuff, that we know it's good stuff. And then of course the next piece is always, all right, so now when can I start using this for Commvault and? And that's when we start getting into the conversations of all right, we've got some integration work to do, the partners are asking when they can start to get access to sell it, and again, we've got some work to do just to industrialize what we're doing and make the experience similar, and then we'll start to roll it out in a considered fashion. I'm curious about the education piece. One of the customers that was on stage this morning, Sonic Healthcare, one of the things he said on main stage and then when he stopped by theCUBE a couple hours ago was, he said I wouldn't be in my job when he runs disaster recovery and business continuity for Sonic Healthcare. I wouldn't be in my job without Commvault support. And I really appreciated and respected how he talked about some of the failures that they had. I always think failure is a good F word. If you leverage it in that way, failure can mean success, right? If you learn from it. But the support organization and the training he talked about have been instrumental. Talk to us guys about how you're going to be partnering together to not just enable the partners, the big partners for those large enterprise accounts, but maybe even the new sales guys and girls that are coming, David, to your team to help everybody really understand how best to deliver a really stellar customer experience with something as exciting now as how big it is. You want to start? So you've been working on the integration? Absolutely. So I mean, first and foremost, I've been working with Avinash and his brother Srinivas and a lot of their engineering team to really start to lock in things that are repeatable and scalable in nature, right? So that we can, okay, if we're going to open this up to more people, we do need to have repeatable nature of the building blocks for different use cases. So there's some core work we're doing on outlining positioning, criteria, success, what the outcome needs to be, how that ties back into hardware, making sure as well that we understand how the messaging really does resonate and make sure that we're following and being focused on what our core targets are. Because I mean, a solution like what Hedvig offers, you could quickly start talking about a lot of different things that could be all things to many people. And we know that that's probably the worst decision to make because you go super wide and don't go very deep at all and you end up losing the value prop. So identifying what the real core use cases are, getting deep in how it works, when what the structure of it looks like, making it repeatable, and that's the first and foremost thing I think for how we can help both Adise and Wigs of Sales team and on the support side doing very similar things, but also doing some of the programmatic work of the integration and the experience. I talk about experience like the sending of logs, things that Matthew Magby from Sonic Helter is talking about how we really helped him. We want that same level of experience tied into the way the software, or the software storage platform works as well. So there's some work to be done there, but as we get it done, the enablement and support side, and as you know, we deal with storage every day anyway, so it's not like it's a big leap, but we do have to bring them into the mix of how the actual technology works, where it breaks, why it breaks, and those are all the things that we're really focused on in the next 90 days. Yeah, I think the real key for me as we talk to customers and also employees is I want them all to have the same experience with the new Hedvick solution that they experience with Commvault, right? And that goes from training our employees, really getting our SES up to speed so they can have a meaningful conversation to be able to get a customer to say, yeah, I think I'd like to speak with the specialty team, please have them give me a call, and then also on the enablement for the clients, right? And having a customer understand that, you know, you can dial 1-800 number for support, you can talk to somebody that can lead you down a path and give you the same quality support you've been used to, whether you're calling about a Hedvick solution or whether you're calling about a Commvault solution. Yeah, I just, we've talked about it a little bit yesterday, but the scale of the offering is a little bit different, and therefore that has some challenges on the support, and something that I'm sure Commvault's going to work on making that, you know, it's not identical for every customer, but a little bit more repeatable to be able to scale out that offering. I would agree, I would agree. There's, the hardest thing to do is when you have a product that has so much functionality as Hedvick, is to not lose focus and try to talk way too broad. What you really've got to do is you've got to drill down with the client, try to understand where their pain points are, and because, quite frankly, the Hedvick product can do a lot of things. You can, you can. Who are the ideal target customers? We talked about the theaters in which you're going to be launching first enterprise. We talked about that. Commvault has a significant presence in the Fortune 500. I think I read about three quarters of Commvault's revenue today comes from the Fortune 500, and Stu was saying yesterday about 80% of the revenue comes from the channel. So we look at Hedvick and the Enterprise for a second. Customers that are not new to Commvault, those existing enterprise customers. GTM, both? Yeah, I would say the primary focus is going to be calling on the Exister customer set, right? It's much easier to have a conversation with someone who knows who you are, even though you may be selling a new solution, at least they know who you are and they have a positive experience with us. So that number one, we're going to focus on probably our top 300 global accounts, as well as our top enterprise accounts. So there's probably, I would say in the two theaters I mentioned earlier, there's probably about 3,500 accounts that we're really going to focus on and really try to make sure that we get in front of as many of them as we can and tell the story. I think that's where we have to start. Now, will there be Greenfield opportunities? Yeah, I think quite frankly that the Hedvick offer didn't get as different enough that it will enable us to go call on some of the accounts that aren't doing business with Commvault today, maybe doing business with some of our competitors. So hopefully we can use that to actually win more traditional Commvault business. That's the plan. And the region, the enterprise really makes sense. The global accounts is, you know, most larger companies have figured out how to try to solve the CapEx problem, right? Yeah. They've figured out just the kind of scale and how they grow and move. They can kind of handle that. What really still becomes a very challenging piece is the operational efficiency. So can I get the right solution, the right cost, but do it in a way that I'm actually making things more simplified? I'm not actually exploding more complexity in my environment. And that's really where the Commvault data management platform and then the Hedvick solution together really make a really solid story. So WigsDance teams got their work cut out for them with all the integration work and know they've got a cadence and a roadmap. For you, obviously new logos, there's got to be revenue goals. What are some of the key KPIs to measure how this becomes a successful acquisition? Well, if my CEO is sitting close by, so he may be in earshot of this, right now it's trying to drive as much revenue as we can. But we also have to realize that we also have to build to pipeline, right? So right now my main focus areas are I got to get a team in place that can go articulate the value of this solution to a client, right? Number one, both technically and then working with the DEs to get the SC team in place. So that's number one. Number two, while we're doing that, we need to build pipeline, right? I mean, when you make an investment, as you guys know, you're expected to start getting a return on that pretty quickly. And we, you know, it's nice. We inherited some nice pipeline with the acquisition, but, you know, with opportunity comes responsibility. And so we've got to build that pipeline up and really get out in front of customers and find some opportunities that we can not only try to finish for the second half, so we can hit all of our financial metrics, but really build pipeline for FY21 for us which starts in April. So the voice of the customer is really, can be really powerful. We've heard from a number of Commvault customers on our program yesterday, today, on main stage. Is there a plan, Wigs, from your perspective, to, you know, get customers into some sort of beta so that you have proof in the pudding to show those large enterprises and those theaters to help build that pipeline, look at someone who's been an existing Commvault customer for five, 10 years or so. Here's the, I don't want to say migration path, but maybe upgrade path to expand footprint in there. Here's how we did it. Here's why this was ideal for this customer. Plans to get those early adopters to help you dial up the pipeline. So have you been reading my go-to-market strategy? Because you basically just read it. So yes, I mean, listen, we are inheriting some nice accounts, right, with Hedvig. They have some nice logos out there, which is really good and it's a good foundation for us to build upon. But we're very fortunate in that our core sellers have some really good relationships with some pretty large customers, really in all different industries, right? And so what we're doing right now is we're trying to identify probably about 10 accounts that make sense that are really strong partners. They don't have to necessarily be really big customers, but just really strong partners that want to work together with us and exactly what you just said. Let's get in front of them. Let's give them an opportunity to play with the technology and have them help us figure out. We think we have a pretty good idea what the go-to-market messaging should be for our existing customer base, but certainly don't assume that we know everything. So have them help us build that strategy. So that is absolutely the plan. We've been hearing a lot of that the last couple of days of just the openness of Commvault, whether it's, I really thought it was cool with Metallic that the telemetry that partners can get to help customers, maybe even before a customer knows of an issue or an opportunity, but this telemetry that's let's learn from our customers couldn't agree as a marketer with you more about, we might think we have a great tagline, great messaging, but it's the users who need to validate that. And what I'm hearing a lot over the last day and a half is how receptive Commvault is. We're listening to our customers, whether it's existing and Commvault customers that Sandy's team are dealing with or even through partners. That message is loud and clear and that's pretty important. Yeah, I couldn't agree more and I'll be honest with you, what it's also been able to give us an opportunity to do is where we've had some relationships quite frankly that maybe we need to work a little harder on. Hedvig has given us that opportunity to kind of start those conversations as well. So I think there's a lot of value both on the existing opportunities as well as growing the business overall. Guys, nothing short of a lot of work ahead but pretty exciting stuff. We thank you both. Wigs, welcome again to Commvault. Kelly for next year, going to bring some cool customers on the program. Absolutely. We're looking for it. The buzz is so amazing this year. So many customers have said, I know you weren't here last year but wow. And so, you know, and that's what they've said. I can't wait to see what this is going to be like next year. So thank you for having us on. All right, you've got to come back. Absolutely. We will. All right guys, thank you for joining Stu and me tonight. Thank you both very much. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE from Commvault Go 19.