 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you by Veritas. Welcome back to theCUBE, this is Veritas Vision 2017. Hashtag VITAS at theCUBE, we'd like to go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stuart Miniman, my co-host for the week. Alex Sakaguchi is here as the Senior Director of Global Cloud Solutions Marketing at Veritas and he's joined by Ian Wood, who's the head of business practices, EMEA for Veritas. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Thank you, thanks for having us. So Ian, we were talking off camera, I've noticed a number of EMEA badges here at the event. Quite a presence to come a long way, maybe talk about that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely, I think we've got a great customer base out in EMEA, so EMEA for us is Europe, Middle East and Africa. I know some people get a bit confused with the acronym out there, so we've got a great deal of customers from Europe, Middle East and in fact a whole bunch of customers that made it all the way from South Africa and that's one heck of a flight. So showing some good commitment to come out here to our vision conference, so we're excited. That's excellent, so what's the narrative like in Europe and how does it compare to the US? Is it equivalent, is it different, maybe more of a focus on GDPR, maybe you could summarize. Absolutely, there's similarities, right? The similarities about multi-cloud is pretty much the same. But multi-cloud or cloud means different things to different countries, so there's a ton of diversity. So you can go into Germany, multi-cloud means something totally different out in the Middle East as opposed to the UK. So there's a lot of diversity in multi-cloud, but multi-cloud as a concept is resonating. Customers are understanding that they need a multi-cloud strategy and that's bubbling up. But for them, it's not going to be necessarily the big multi-cloud service providers, they'll have more local cloud providers that they'll look into, include, spices it up. And then as you mentioned, GDPR is just taking off. It's just one of the number one topics on any CIO's agenda right now is GDPR. What do I do, how do I get compliant, how do I make sure that by the 25th of May next year I'm ready for GDPR? All right, Alex, so what is a multi-cloud solution? What is it to you guys? Well, I think before you get to solution, it really takes some understanding and some discussion around what multi-cloud is, right? So I think, I mean, we do a lot of EBCs at headquarters having customers come in and we're kind of on the forefront of that whole multi-cloud discussion. But many of these customers, many enterprise customers have multi-cloud environments, meaning that they have lots of different cloud players, private cloud, public cloud, open-stack clouds. I mean, lots of different types of clouds, but they don't have strategies yet. They're in this situation where they've gotten here by virtue of circumstance, right? The fact that the dev team decided to deploy some resources somewhere, some other business unit somewhere else, or some other engineering team decided to spin up some resources somewhere else, and they find themselves in this situation where they have multiple clouds. Now they're trying to figure out what to do. How do I make a wrapper over that? How do I get some organization? How do I simplify the operations? How do I take a lot of this to production environments from your test dev labs? So it's really about enabling those customers, no matter the mix of infrastructure they have, no matter the mix of cloud providers that they decide to employ, giving them the data management capabilities that they need to stay in control, right? I think the same exact challenges have existed since the beginning of the data center, right? It's the same problem. Alex, you bring up some great points because multi-cloud for a lot of customers, it wasn't the strategy, it's where they are because they just kind of ended up there. Too often in IT, it was like, oh, I have an application, let's spin something up. And then I spin something else up, and I had my temples of excellence for each of them, things like that. And unfortunately, we've ended up with a lot of that in cloud. One of the messages I've really liked hearing this week is Veritas is helping customers kind of get their arms around it. Not only how do I manage pieces, but how do I understand what I have? How do I manage that good visibility into a lot of that? It actually goes back to one step before that, right? Because what you're talking about is how do I actually take care of these challenges? That assumes the customer even knows that they have challenges to take care of, right? What we found, and this is through research, this is through customer meetings, there are many common misconceptions about what a customer's responsibility is from a data management standpoint and what the cloud provider's responsibility is from an infrastructure as a service provider, right? And that disconnect is where things can go wrong, right? Where they're at increased risk, they think that the cloud provider is offering them some service or some protection or some level of compliance when really they're not, right? So part of it is educating the customer. And I go even further, not just infrastructure service, SaaS, a lot of customer roles. I don't need to worry about backup or security when I'm doing SaaS, right? That's all taken care of by the platform, no? Yeah, yeah, I had a, sorry to interrupt there, I had a CIO once come to me and there was a fantastic saying, he said, what I'm doing now is paying the bill for what shadow IT have created. And therefore there was a shift that shadow IT went rogue and deploying cloud like crazy, IT are now fitting back, trying to gain control and trying to sort out a lot of a mess that shadow IT created. We've been doing this cube since 2010 and we started, one of the key cloud shows was VMworld, it was where we started. I want to lay out a timeline and you guys, I'm sure I won't get it exactly right, but fill in the holes. My argument is we're entering the fifth phase of cloud, I mean, this is how fast things are moving. Phase one was like kick the tires, 2006, 2007 and then during the economic downturn, it was a cap X to op X thing. And then we came out of that and it was like speed, shadow IT, go, go, go, go, spend, spend, spend, we got to get to market fast. And it was like, there was a couple of years there, 2013, 14, maybe 15, where it was like, wow, IT said, okay, this is real, we got to get control. And now there's still a lot of that going on, to your point Ian. But it seems like the next phase that we're about to enter is a deeper level of business integration where cloud is a strategic capability and a platform for these organizations. So I mean, in seven years, that many phases and they seem to be somewhat distinct. What do you guys think about that? Is that a reasonable timeline and how would you adjust that? Yeah, so I mean, I would agree, generally speaking, the one difference is I think there are many organizations that still haven't even gone through stage one. There are other organizations that have gone through that same set of stages multiple times, right? You think about especially our core set of customers. These are large enterprise customers. Many of them grow by acquisition. They inherit the IT environments of whatever company they've acquired. That creates a whole new set of challenges. They might be using different platforms, different clouds, et cetera. So really they kind of go through that process over and over again. What I think is unique is in many cases, I think you articulated this in phase one, but also in the latter stages, many have looked at at least in terms of the public cloud. They've looked at the public cloud as a way to offset costs as a low-cost alternative. And I think what many people find is it's not, that's not where the value ends. It's not to the extent that they should be looking for value there either. It's really about data agility. It's really about agility of their organizations. It's really about how they can get more from their environments be more agile, meet their customers' needs better. And as they look to accomplish those types of goals, then they also realize that, hey, we need a different set, a different way to manage the resources, manage the applications, sit on those platforms, manage the data that's involved. And so I think in many cases, this cycle repeats itself. I think in many cases, they're starting to realize that they need to go beyond even what was typically just sort of a cost argument. I don't know what you're seeing with customers. I know you meet a lot with them. Yeah, I think what you mentioned made sense in the phases. I would actually rather look at this evolution, right? So I think what happens is that the beginning, buy or do I rent, was the cloud argument. So what happened with that is that's now incremental to I want to drive agility or more security, which is incremental to which workload should I go and put to the cloud. So I see it as an evolution, and I think they're gaining traction and gaining value as you go along, giving more option and more choice rather than distinct phases that kind of start, end, and reboot themselves to something else. Well, it's definitely incremental. To that point, though, in the earlier stages, there was all this fear about the cloud not being secure. And I think we're largely past that. In many cases, organizations realize that at least in terms of even SaaS players, but even public cloud providers, they're way more secure than you could possibly, you know, even build your own data center too. They meet all the regulations that you don't have the time to spin up and manage and adhere to on your own. Having said that, even a lot of the research that we see, security still comes up as the number one concern. Even though people recognize that the cloud is much more secure than in many cases what they could do on their own, I think we're largely past that for the most part. But some of the other areas, maybe not so much so. And part of that too is there's this realization that, and we've talked about this, Stu, a lot, not necessarily here, but on other shows, that CIOs realize they can't just reshape and reform their business and stick it into the public cloud. Rather, they got to bring the cloud model to their data. As a result, it creates discontinuities in security practices. I mean, Amazon, it's like, here's our security and it's good, but it may not be like your private cloud security. So you have to figure that out. And so that's a challenge for customers. Do you see that? Yeah, but it doesn't stop at security, right? It's really consistency across everything. All the edicts of the organization, absolutely. I mean, for us especially, things like service level agreements. When you're managing SLAs and as an IT organization, you expect to meet certain SLAs, but yet your architecture or your environment is one that's distributed, right? Where you have different pieces of that environment that sit in different platforms, different clouds, on-prem, different technologies. The level of SLA consistency across that is gone, right? So how do you ensure things like your business service uptime, like those SLAs are being met or that you're able to service that or adhere to when you have such a distributed environment? Those are challenges that Veritas aims to solve. Yeah, it was interesting. We talked to Mike Palmer earlier and he said a year ago, we thought maybe we could just kind of put a thin layer on top and make all the clouds look the same. And when you get into it, nope, that's not when it happened. There's very different reasons and different services. So some of those things, absolutely. We're going to have, it's heterogeneous. How do we focus on the data? How do we help customers through to get the best of why they're buying all these pieces yet get their arms around all of it? Yeah, there could be a world of maturity where customers look at a, I would say horses for courses in the English statement. So look, this cloud provider is going to be just as cheap as anything, let's go there. That cloud provides going to be fantastic analytics, right? We know who could be pretty good in analytics. That cloud provider be good in front office or back office applications. So it's going to be selecting the cloud providers that provide the best service. And that really I think will be the multi-cloud world. So we only have a few minutes left and I want to get into the why Veritas because multi-cloud is like a, there's a land grab going on. It's a big opportunity for the vendor community. Users are, it's complicated. People are trying to figure out why Veritas. So a number of reasons, especially in the enterprise, these are environments that quite frankly are too large for many of our closest competitors to even hope to address. These are very, very heterogeneous environments, lots and lots and lots of data, multiple types of platforms. And Veritas has always been sort of that middle, that heterogeneous layer, software-defined, software-driven provider that enables that sort of layer over all of that stuff, basically all of the disparity and sort of up level it up to a more simple management capability. So that's one. The second thing is, and probably this is equally if not more important, is the fact that we're proven to do that. Not just in the multi-cloud world that we're talking about now, but where the customers have come from. And what's happening is we're not seeing the customers eliminate the rest of their architecture. They're not eliminating the data centers, they're just adding to it. And so you can't just provide a solution that only addresses the new, forgets about the old. You have to provide a solution that covers the entirety of the customer's environment. And there's not many organizations that can do that. And Veritas is one of them that can, and that we've built up a level of trust with these enterprise organizations for having done that for many, many years. Okay, so you just knocked off the upstarts. Well done, check. But now you're head-to-head with guys like IBM, HPE, Dell, EMC. What's your advantage relative to those guys? Because they're big enough. They can, you know, they get money, they get breadth, why you over them? So I don't know if the appropriate question is why you over them, because all of them are here at this conference. And there are partners, right? IBM's a strategic partner for cloud guys, though. But there's other parts of, okay. Certainly, but I think, you know, we love these partners. They, we compete with them in many cases. They also use our technology in other cases. They also partner with us to deliver combined value to our customers, right? So I think it's not really about why us over them, they certainly see the value that we bring to the table, and we inevitably- Well, customers have choices, right? And so how about the evil machine company? You're going to press this, aren't you? I am, I'm going to press it. No, because, you know, people ask us all the time, well, why is a Veritas over a company with this, you know, large portfolio? I know you don't want to name them, but I mean, I have an answer, but I would- Yeah, well, I think, I mean, we look at it as data management, right? So ultimately, multi-cloud data management's where we sit. So that's kind of the category that I think we focus in on solving for customer problems. Then you go into perhaps the key competitors. And I think if I look at the breadth and scale of what we deliver, you narrow it down to a small set of organizations that compete with us. All of them, especially the EMCs of the world, right? They have a hardware agenda. Ultimately, at the end of the day, their business is backed on selling hardware, and they're going to struggle to get away from that. Whereas Veritas, what we've always solved for is a true software-defined or a data management layer, which is really what we're going to look at, which is cloud independent. And I would add, my analysis, I would add to that, that you wake up every day thinking about this problem. And that's what your company is. You know, the old Scott McNeely, all the wood behind one arrow. They got not only a hardware agenda, they got a financial agenda, you know, got to pay off the debt service agenda, a VMware agenda, a lot of different agendas. They're like the government. Now, there's some strengths. I can, on the positive side of the ledger, but it seems to me in this multi-cloud world, that the focus that you guys have is an advantage. Because you're designing for that. I think we're actually being helped in many regards. Interesting conversation I had a while back about IT. So we know information technology, right? What IT stands for. And what has become and evolved over many, many years to be almost like infrastructure technology. I think what we're seeing now is a revert back to the information first. Use any infrastructure you want. It's going to be a combination of a bunch of different things. Who's going to help me get the value out of the information? And to your point, that's where Veritas is focused. Now the other thing I'd add is, not only do you not have a hardware agenda, but you don't have a cloud agenda. No, yeah. Whereas, okay, IBM's a partner, you know, they've got a cloud, so that's cool. Take Dell EMC, they don't have a cloud. A clear agenda, even though they won't say it, is to keep stuff on-prem. You don't care. I mean, that is a clear message that I'm hearing here. So again, I see a number of advantages. And at the end of the day, it's, we've got the better product who could execute, who could service and deliver. And that's what's fun about our industry. And you guys have demonstrated that you can do that over a long period of time. So excellent, good. Thanks for getting into it with me. I appreciate it. Guys, I'll give you the last word on Vision 2017, each of you, a bumper sticker, as the trucks are pulling away. Vision 2017, I mean, it's been a fantastic event. And it's been true that we demonstrated that we can exercise in the multi-cloud world and look at all the cloud partners that are part of the veritas world that we're in. The Vision conference right here. Right, Alex. I think last thing is, you've seen a ton of innovation and product capabilities technology announced at this conference. What you should probably look forward to in the next six to 12 months before we get to our next Vision conference is a complete maniacal focus and attention given towards a positive and an improved user experience. And across all of the products, across all of the 360-day management technologies, you're really going to see the UX and in particular the UIs improve. Yeah, and I love the fact that you guys were transparent about that in the keynote, Mike Palmer. So, guys, got a spring in your step, the veritas, the old veritas Mojo. Looks like it's coming back. So congratulations and thanks for coming to theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're welcome. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCUBE. Veritas Vision 2017.