 Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE. Covering Veeam On 2017, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to New Orleans, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Frank Palombo was here as the Senior Vice President at Cisco Systems and Andy Vandeveld as the Vice President of Global Alliances at Veeam Software. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. How are we doing? It's great to be here. Good, Frank, hot off the keynote. It was great, Yankees fan, love it. The rivalry continues, of course. You guys know theCUBE, Red Sox fans. Some of us, Stu's not, so we love it. We love the action, it's always fun. But Frank, we had to cut out a little bit before your keynote because we had to get ready to do theCUBE, but you put up a slide that was awesome. I mean, we could do an hour on theCUBE on that, and it's all about the apps, I mean, really. But you had this great slide with apps and microservices and virtualization and bare metal and on-prem and really laying out the complexity today, and you guys are at the heart of that. So maybe give us a quick summary of sort of how you guys see the world. Well, when you're talking about these applications, the application profile, it's important that the network kind of brings this together because we do touch everything. And where people are in this kind of application history is some of them are on legacy, mainframe, some are on risk processors, but as a network provider, we have to bring those in too. I mean, even with the more modern application. So you look at what the platforms, the workloads are on, so move those in, and then you're looking at workload placement on-prem or in the cloud, and do we put data in a colo, do we put the application in the cloud, and there's different kind of hybrid mentalities to do that, and then you get into the systems management where, hey, there's just too much stuff out there and the humans can't manage anymore. So the machines and the software have to manage the machines and the software. And we'd like to think we're right in the middle of that because of the way we bring things together with the network. So Andy, I look at the, Stu and I walked the floor before we came in here. The ecosystem is really quite impressive for a relatively small company. I mean, that's small anymore, but it didn't just happen overnight. Maybe you could talk a little bit about Veeam's philosophy with partnerships and some of the things that you're doing with alliances generally, and then specifically get into the Cisco partnership. Well, I think partnerships have been in our DNA since the beginning of the company. We're 100% channel-led company. We don't have a direct sales force. So that's an important piece of the company's philosophy. But these alliances are really key for us because as we start to move into markets that are maybe a little bit higher than where we've been into the large enterprise and mid-end price, large enterprise, we really look at partnerships like the one with Cisco that are going to benefit Veeam and the customers by us being together, doing joint development, some of the things that Frank talked about in his keynote speech. Those are the sorts of things that create solutions for that level of customer where Cisco's been resident for many, many years. So we look at these partnerships as really kind of central to where Veeam wants to go as a company and where we think customers want Veeam to participate with the partners. So what's the specific nature of the partnership? Can you unpack that a little bit for us? Well, from my side, certainly we have, now we're robust, go-to-market relationship in terms of when we're positioning UCS or Hyperflex, our server and hyper-converged platforms, now we can bring to bear the Veeam value problem as we go forward with customers. And customers look to Cisco really to complete the story and offer an end-to-end solution. And we weren't able to complete it without the Veeam technology. And then on the development side, some of the things that we're doing, we've integrated, so now the Veeam software can work with our SNAP technology and hyper-converged. So you're starting to see it come together at the screen level with the bits and bytes in terms of the integration. Okay, so there's a greater degree of technical integration as well. It's not just, I mean, that's important because a lot of times backup data protection is kind of an afterthought, it's a bolt-on, but if you're going to be a complete solution provider, that's fundamental in this particular one. Well, I think, I was just mentioning to Frank back in the green room before we came out here. You know, I kind of look at the start of this partnership as really being about 18 months ago. Although we'd had a partnership for a while, really kind of started about 18 months ago in this meeting that we had at their partner conference in Maui, and Ratmir and I sat down with Frank and kind of explained why we thought data protection was a solution that Cisco could get behind, particularly now that they were coming out with their S-series devices. And, you know, but that's just the start of it. It has to come with integration as well. So, then we started with Hyperflex. It was a new product for them, 1.0 version. With the 2.0 version, we got integrated with Snapshot technology, like Frank mentioned. So, you know, I kind of look at this, kind of a short runway of time in this relationship that kicked off with our meeting with Frank and he got it right away. I mean, we didn't have to explain it. Oh, no question. We're very proud of our S-series storage server, but you know, the hardware is nice, the infrastructure piece is nice, but it really doesn't come together unless you've got the application that'll run with it. And that's, you know, where Veeam just jumps in and fills that gap perfectly for us. Yeah, Frank, I mean, I think back to, you know, when virtualization really took off, networking was one of the things that we had to fix. It put a lot of stress on the network. It's one of the reasons Cisco created UCS and backup also creates a lot of strain on the network. So, seems a natural fit. Can you talk about, you know, all the complexities that are coming and how, you know, you're going to be, what can we expect to see from jointly going forward? Well, I mean, you know, I think we've learned a lot from Veeam in terms of, they've been able to really attack complex issues in a very simple fashion. And, you know, simplicity is the game with customers right now. Things are moving so fast, if you can't be simple, you know, you're going to have a tough time out there. So I think, you know, that's where it's really, you know, come together for us in that vein. But, you know, when you look at, you know, the value of data and, you know, whether it's a second old or two years old or a year old, you know, there's so many different, you know, more power lines coming out about, you know, what you can do with this data and customers and even, you know, customers of customers have now found ways to use this data either to make better decisions, monetize it, to stay away from things. So, you know, that's why this whole life cycle for us is so important. And, you know, this is where Veeam and us can, I think really do some nice things for customers. Yeah, Andy, can you maybe build on that? I think about kind of the multi-cloud positioning that Veeam has, you know, how many of those, you know, touch what Cisco's doing here and how does the partnership help, you know, drive that value of data type offering? Well, you know, for Veeam, our message is all about availability. Availability of the data, which makes the applications available and which basically makes the business stay up and running. You know, one analogy we use as a cell phone, right? When your cell phone dies, right, you can't get access to your email, you can't get access to your instant messages, right? You freak. You feel like you're lost, right? I mean, think about if you're a... You're getting kind of pathetic. Yeah, it is pretty bad. So think about not being able to get access to your data or access to your applications because of some outage, not being able to back up and recover. Your business could go out of business. So, you know, working with Cisco on solutions that are on-premise, that are in the cloud, that are multi-cloud is really, you know, the value of the partnership that we have, that we bring together. And, you know, it's just at the beginning. I mean, we've got solutions that we're building now. We've got solutions that are on the horizon. We've got a very strong go-to-market partnership in a very short period of time that are targeting enterprise customers, service providers, the whole gamut. And it's really, you know, that sort of relationship that you find in an industry every so often. And when it comes together like it has with us in Cisco, it's really a very strong, strong value problem. Well, Veeam capitalized on the original, you know, virtualization trend with VMware. There was a big transformation and, you know, the server infrastructure. And you see a huge network transformation. Now, there are so many forces affecting the network that I wonder, Frank, if you could comment on. You got scale out. There's this flash. There's cloud. There's microservices. DevOps makes everything go faster. You know, the flattening of the network. You describe what's happening and then maybe you can talk about how your ecosystem's going to take advantage of that. Well, I mean, from what were the challenges the network has is exactly like you said. So you have, you know, certainly the virtualized workloads now that can, you know, the microservices containerized workloads. And then I think what people, the one people forget about is there's still a ton of bare metal out there, right? And then you look at the Hadoop workloads and such, a lot of these are bare metal oriented, right? And, you know, quite frankly, you know, moving a VM around a fabric is actually pretty easy to do. But when you got to move a bare metal workload around a fabric, and that's something we can do with UCS, the way we do it statelessly, you know, that's much harder. And, you know, that's why we have the extraction layer with, you know, what we call the fabric interconnects with UCS to do that kind of stuff. So I think that's sometimes, you know, lost in the translation in terms of, you know, how are you going to handle all these different workloads? And if I understand it, the link then to the opportunity for you guys, Andy, is that the stakes are just much higher now, right? You could do so much more around the network. Stakes are so much higher that increases the need for your products and services. Carry that through, if you would. Well, it is, I mean, you know, as we make our way up market into the enterprise, you know, the amount of data that businesses are spinning off of their infrastructure and their data center or from robo offices or wherever is, you know, growing immensely. And, you know, being able to have a partnership with an infrastructure provider like Cisco where we can put solutions together that really, you know, give the customers the rock solid base for backing up their data and making sure that it's available is really critical for us as we move into those larger enterprise and larger environments. So, you know, this is an essential relationship, I would say. And I think, too, if I could mention, this is something our channel wanted to see, too. So we're to say that we're about 98% of our business goes through the channel and so they're selling our full line of infrastructure products and this completes the story for them. So we got a lot of, you know, guides for them to say, hey, yes, Cisco, we'd like to see you come together with Veeam. So we could start bundling offers out there in the market and be that kind of end to end supplier, too. So, you know, that was a big impetus, especially, you know, from mid-market up to enterprise customers. Excellent, well, we got to wrap there, but, you know, the partnerships give you huge leverage as a, not, again, not so small company anymore. In fact, that you can get somebody like Frank to come down and talk about the partnership is, I think, a testament to what you guys have built. So congratulations, really appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE. Thank you. My pleasure, our pleasure. All right, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from New Orleans, Veeamon 2017, we'll be right back.