 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VeeamON 2020. Brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2020. Online this year, we've done the event for many years and just being able to reach the Veeam executives, some of their partners and the like, where they are around the globe. Really excited to be able to dig in and we're kind of going to talk some numbers and analysis. And to help me do that, I've got two Veeam CUBE alumni. We've had them on theCUBE before they were on Veeam, always excited to get to talk to them and dig into the numbers with them now that they are at Veeam. Dave Russell is the Vice President of Enterprise Strategy and Jason Buffington is the Vice President of Solution Strategy, both with Veeam. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu. Thanks for having us. All right, first, I guess, you know, let me ask how are you guys doing? You know, we were having a little bit of a discussion before we came on here as to, you know, everyone is now inundated with data and numbers and the like with this global pandemic. You know, Dave, how things are doing in your neck of the woods and then we'll go to Jason. Yeah, well, you know, I literally cannot complain personally, Veeam itself is doing incredibly well as an organization, we'll double click on that here. But, you know, in terms of data particularly as it relates to this space that we're in backup and recovery availability, cloud data management, the recent data for first half 2020 is actually fascinating. We're going to double click on that a little bit more, right, Jason? We are. Now, as far as how we're doing, you know, I've been at every Veeam on that we've had. The first three as an analyst, the last two as a VP. I've never gotten to do one in my pajama bottoms though. So that's kind of a nice change just to kind of mix it up a little bit. But yeah, the other thing which has been kind of fun is that because we haven't been traveling, it really gave Dave and I a chance to kind of get back to our roots a little bit and really dig into research and how do you apply research to product direction and go to market. And so it's been a fun project that we're culminating with Veeam on. Yeah, Jason, please don't be giving out secrets. I'm not saying if you look up Dave Vellante's Twitter handle that you'll find the suit on the top, shorts on the bottom look. What I refer to as cube casual for doing some of these remote events. But, you know, you too have a breakout that you're doing really looking at digital transformation and IT modernization. You know, digital transformation, I'm sure you know, both of you from the analyst standpoint, for a while it was a bit of a buzzword, you know, today, when you just with the backdrop of the global pandemic, it's like, well, if you have had the chance to go through the digital transformation, hopefully, you know, you get things put to the test. You're relying on data, you should be more agile. And those are all things that I think help the remote workforce and what they're doing. But if you hadn't finished that or either started or in the middle of that journey, you know, a big question is, you know, what are you doing? Will this accelerate it? Will it slow it down? So excited to dig into your CXO research. Why don't you give us a little bit of the background? You know, how long has this been going on? Who you're talking to as part of this research? Sure, well, as far as the research itself goes, so Veeam went to an outside panel and said, hey, don't tell anybody who it's from, but we need you to interview these kinds of personas and these kinds of folks. We did 1,550 enterprises by that definition, meaning 1,000 users and up across 18 different countries around the world. And then we even asked some questions around not only what country are you in, but in what countries do you influence data protection strategy and architecture? Everyone from IT architects all the way through CXOs were part of that survey. And we got some great data back, not only from an executive perspective of what are the expectations of IT, but also from the IT implementer, IT architects perspective on what are their real world challenges today? And that's some of the things that we were at being really keen to understand more to make sure that we're building the right things and saying the right things for our customers and our prospects. Excellent, and Dave, maybe give us a little bit of a backdrop. You know, when I think about enterprises, you know, we all talk about these mega waves. You know, the things that I talk about is, you know, when I talk to the CXO suite, it's not that they have, well, you know, I've got a multicloud strategy, no, I'm figuring out how cloud changes what I'm doing. Digital transformation is one of those things that brings together, you know, the business and the IT. And hopefully, you know, something I know we've all been talking about for quite a long time, IT just can't be a separate thing or say, you know, a cost center, but needs to really respond to the business. What's that backdrop of digital transformation and, you know, bring us inside a little bit of what your learnings were? Yeah, to me, I think I like the notion of digital transformation because it's very specific to every business, maybe even every business unit. Meaning it's not a case of a vendor saying, here's what your project should be. Rather, it's more the notion of whatever initiative you have to try to increase customer intimacy to be able to contain costs, expand your reach. That's really what digital transformation's here to support. Excellent, and Jason, give us a little bit of color as to, you know, some of the findings. Yeah, so I mean, I think the big ones that we looked at were, you know, what were the major IT challenges you had overall, and maybe not to so much of a surprise, but staffing and legacy infrastructure were still some of the biggest things that were holding back IT organizations. Which I think is especially interesting in the landscape that we're in right now, right? Because your staff can't be in the places where they used to be. And from a legacy perspective, Stu, I know you love data as much as we do. If organizations are spending between 68 and 82% of their money and their dollars on the status quo, that doesn't leave a whole lot left for the things that you'd like to do, like improving customer experience, like accelerating the employees of your business. So things like digital transformation tend to get hindered by the same stuff that hinders IT modernization and just get rid of the buzzword, just trying to do better in IT for the sake of the business. But really, those have been kind of the big gaps. Yeah, and I think Jason hit a key point there, Stu, of, you know, the issue right now is a lot of us are just trying to run the business, like literally keep the lights on, you know, and Jason mentioned the stats of high 60s, low 70s, just, you know, trying to keep status quo. But digital transformation in my mind is about obviously trying to run the business while you're seeking to grow the business and aspirationally hoping to transform your business to really improve customer intimacy and success of end customers as well as partners. So if done right, pursuing digital transformation can help you with tactical needs as well as strategic outcome. Yeah, you know, it's a little sad, I think, from an industry standpoint, when you talk about how much money and time is spent on keeping the lights on, I feel like 10, 15 years ago, it was the, you know, the 80 to 85% if you're saying, you know, oh, we've whittled away a little bit, it's now in the low 70s, some really good companies, it's getting to 60%, but we haven't flipped things yet. I'm curious, you know, you have this position, they don't know that it was sponsored by Veeam, so how do cloud as a general technology and then, you know, data protection and availability specifically, you know, fit into overall priorities for that IT modernization. So there were two questions that we really focused on that they're my two favorite slides in the whole deck. The first one that I thought was really interesting is when we asked organizations, what does modern data protection look like or innovative? And I think we use a few different buzzwords along the way and we asked them, check all of these capabilities that might apply and then, which one is the most definitive? And we actually got two different sets of answers depending on how you pivot that data. If you ask most common responses, modern data protection looks cloudy. And what I mean by that is the top choices scored work, the ability to do DR as a service, the ability to integrate on-premise and cloud-based as part of your data protection architecture and then the ability to move data from one cloud to another which certainly reinforces the fact that you're not only in a hybrid world but in a multi hybrid world as well. So if you're looking for most common answers, modern data protection looks cloudy. But if you flip it over and you say, what is the most definitive feature? You actually get something very different. You find out that the ability to leverage orchestration and workflow, the ability to manage via APIs and systems management, the ability to be part of a cybersecurity strategy. So what you see is that modern data protection in general has to be cloudy, but more importantly, backup should not sit on an island of its own. It should be a cohesive part of a broader IT experience that's managed by something broader that's part of the provisioning and systems framework. So those two answers kind of tell us what should we not only be making sure that we're continuing to build on but also making sure that we're communicating as far as, does Veeam meet the bar for what organizations are looking for in a modern or innovative data protection strategy? Yeah, that's really interesting. I guess one of the big things I've seen over the last 12 to 18 months is maturation of things like a real hybrid strategy. So if I look at Veeam, the most critical partnerships of course are VMware from a historical standpoint and things like Microsoft going forward and both of them have made big strides over the last couple of years as to not just on-premises versus public cloud but how do all of these things work together? The discussions that we've been having about cloud is not necessarily a destination but it's more of an operating model and as people build out their architectures to all the things you mentioned there, it's not a place or a destination but it's more of that architectural view and can live across lots of different environments. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's a cross. It's a horizontal play really. It's not moving from point A to point B. It's really embracing expanded choices. So what we found when we did this survey is directionally where organizations are at the day with on-prem physical, on-prem virtual, going towards cloud and then how they responded their intention two years later, there weren't major surprises there meaning the shift was increasingly more towards cloud but it also wasn't a case that on-prem physical goes to zero. So any more than it's a case of an organization goes 100% all in on one hyperscaler public cloud provider. So it's really about supporting a mix and it's about offering choice because every business or maybe more specifically every workload within a business might have their own natural migration associated with what they need to do, what's appropriate given their business realities and their desires. So if we double click on what's really important from backup, the number one thing that came back from our global survey which is a little incriminating on the state of the industry was the number one thing that would make us wanna change our backup provider is so that the application would back up. That is an amazing shocking statement. That's like saying, Sue, if you were to change cars, automobiles, what would you look for first and foremost and your response as an automobile that started? Yeah. That is really scary, right? In 2020, so Dave and I have each been in backup almost exclusively for 30 years each, right? And, and Stu, you've been able to spell backup for almost the same length of time and we've been doing this a really long time. And in 2020, when IT pros were asked what would get them to change, it's they'd like it to work the way they thought it would when they bought it. I mean, that's just a really damning statement. And then beyond that, then the next drivers certainly economics came into play. So the number two answers were reducing hardware and software costs and improving TCO and ROI were two and three. And then capabilities around improving RPO, RTOS, SLAs and then ease of use. I mean, that kind of rounds out the top five with cloud coming in right behind that. So not a whole lot of surprise there, but what a terrible statement for the industry that we just like it to work. All right, how about some good news? What recommendations or guidance? Is there anything that you got out of it that best practices or leaders in the space or what peers would recommend to each other? So I think the two things that I took away that I thought was really interesting from best practices and moving forward, data reuse scored really, really high. So the interest in leveraging and the survey actually asked several different scenarios for what folks were either doing or aspiring to do around data use. And you can call it copy data management. You can call it secondary storage use cases. You can pick whatever marketing buzz where you want, but the bottom line is don't just put your data in a backup repository and wait for bad things to happen. Do something with that data. DevOps acceleration, patch testing, or risk mitigation, quarantine for forensics for cyber. But there was a lot of yes, we're starting to do and also yes, we're aspiring over the next 12 months. So I think data reuse was a really big thing that I was so glad that folks were getting along the way. And then also the recognition that with the intolerance of downtime and the intolerance of data loss that was measured in the survey, it was really obvious that a lot more organizations understand they have to be combining not only backups, but also snapshots and replication in a consistent way. Because you can't meet the SLAs that most organizations have today. If the only thing you're doing is just nightly backup. Now Veeam, we would say, great, you ought to do snapshots, you ought to do replication, you ought to do backup. Please don't use three different tools times each one of those times each workload. It's not economically or operationally viable. Certainly and that's good news for us because we manage all three, but those were kind of the two big drivers that I was most excited about. Yeah, and if I take what we got from the data protection report and then couple that with recent industry analysis reports from like IDC and Gartner, if I merge that together, I think one of the reasons why Veeam has been very successful, literally knocked on wood, but Veeam is up as a company 10% year over year, October to October, I'm sorry, April to April, and that's been true for all 12 years that Veeam has been shipping backup product. So in a tough time, actually doing extremely well, still hiring, still expanding, Gartner has Veeam for calendar year 2019, moving from number four market globally to number three, IDC maintains Veeam as number one in market in Europe, and of the top five vendors, three of the five were negative year over year, Veeam was the highest sequentially positive year over year positive, and I think the reasons why now going back to the survey in my mind was due to the software-defined nature of the solution. And what I mean by that in particular, why that has customer value, especially now in a current pandemic situation is you can leverage the existing infrastructure that you've got. We have been around and remember the macroeconomic issue of 2008, organizations held onto their assets much, much longer, refresh cycles slowed down. So the ability to leverage the infrastructure that you have to scale out horizontally to be able to ingest more data, to have a horizontal management plane to be able to have a service repository that could include cloud and object storage, just allows you to better leverage the investments you've made, but deflects appropriately for workloads and to be able to expand into things like public cloud and object storage as you see fit. Excellent, well, Dave and Jason, thank you so much for the updates. Real pleasure to catch up with you. Always, always great to dig into the data with both of you. Thank you, Sue. Good to see you. All right, stay tuned for more coverage from VeeamOn 2020 online. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.