 Live from Chicago, Illinois. It's theCUBE, covering Veeamon 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. We're back at Veeamon 2018 in Chicago. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Paul Matys is here. He's the vice president of Global Cloud Business at Veeam. Cloud is where all the action is. Paul, thanks for coming back in the game. No, Dave, good to see you again. Stu, good to see you. So you guys have made a major push, obviously, into the cloud. We talked about, with Peter, that Veeam used to be a product company. Now you're a platform company. Platforms beat products, as we know, and cloud is a key part of that. It's a distribution channel. It's a technology. It's a disruptive force. What's your take on what's happening in cloud? So, I mean, we're loving what's going on in the cloud market space. I think, and I've talked with you guys about this before, the pace of innovation that's happening is absolutely remarkable. And it's all about delivering value for the customer, right? And customer, I heard Danny talk about business outcomes in the cloud. We see this again and again. The cloud is emerging as the platform, or series of platforms, that customers can drive innovation, can drive business agility. And we're excited about that, because as the customers are moving there now, we are evolving our platform to allow them to know that no matter what infrastructure, what platform they use, they've got an answer in Veeam, right? From a data protection, intelligent data management perspective, Veeam's got an answer. So, we see incredible market opportunity. We see accelerated innovation, and we see our platform evolving to take advantage of all that. So, as the head of cloud at Veeam, how does it work? Do you have product requirements? Obviously, you've got channel relationships that you're building. How do you spend your time architecting? And how did you architect the cloud plan for Veeam? Yeah, it's still a work in process. Obviously, we're constantly evolving it as the market changes. We have to continue to evolve our strategy. But I have a lot of internal partners. I partner really closely with Danny's organization from a product strategy. I partner very closely with Anton Gostev on product management. I partner really closely with Kerry Stanton on our alliance partners, because as you can imagine, all of them are moving towards the cloud and we have a cloud strategy. I work with people on pricing, licensing, sales and marketing, and it's just this great, wonderful ecosystem that we have internally where we assess where we want to be. We assess where the platform has to go and we try to evolve all those things together. It's not trivial. There's a lot of work, especially as we transition from a product company to a platform company to a solution company. But those are the kinds of problems that we like to solve. That's exciting stuff for us. Paul, I wonder if you could speak a little bit to that partner ecosystem. So we went through years of public cloud. Is the enemy or public cloud? So everything's going here to the cloud service providers and even the traditional bars and integrators. Many of them worked with Microsoft for years. Lots of them now working with Amazon in some way or another. Walk through a little bit that dynamic of what you're seeing. Of course, you play across all of them, so you've got a great vantage point. Yeah, sure. It's a great question. And it has, Stu, it's evolved in the last, I'd say 18 to 24 months. It used to be, when I first started at Veeam, I went to a partner conference and I was six weeks into my tenure at Veeam and I came from Microsoft to Azure. And the looks on the people's faces was, oh my God, you know, Veeam is going 100% Azure. Why is the Azure guy here? Public cloud is bad, right? And so it lit people up and I tried to and continued to rapidly assure them, no, that's not the enemy. That's not where we're going. We see an evolution now where we do see some cloud service providers saying, we have to understand that customers want to go there, so I need to be part of that market. That's why we're making the choices that we're making in terms of how we engineer the platform is that it's about customers having choice. And so it's not the easiest dynamic to manage as you might be aware, but there is value. You see firms that will now are starting to say, okay, I can differentiate based on maybe a vertical orientation that I have. I'm going to specialize by going after the enterprise or by going after healthcare, financial services. And they're saying, all right, those big players are here to stay. I better, I should figure out how to get along with them and how I can add value on top of them. Because from my perspective, those big hyperscaler public clouds, sometimes I call them a canvas. You can paint on them, but cloud and service providers can really help bring another level of intimacy to those platforms for their customer and drive value for their customer. So co-opting those large platforms is a good strategy. Yeah, all right, so Microsoft background, one of the things caught our eye is, I believe it was 2,500 downloads already of the Veeam solution for Azure, Broadadoc and the AWS. Get some color on what's happened in the public town. Yeah, sure, so we are super excited about what's happening with our cloud partners. We've had tremendous growth in our VCSP business. We have over 19,000 of them now globally, which is a huge ecosystem of partners. We've seen 58% year-over-year growth there. Fantastic growth in the number of machines that are protected by Veeam and Veeam-powered services. The AWS marketplace, the AWS market is one that we've now jumped into with our acquisition of N2WS. We've seen terrific, I don't know if you're talking with Ezra or anybody from the N2W side, but they've seen 153% year-over-year growth since coming on board with Veeam. We have Office 365 now, Danny talked a little bit about the new version of that that we're in private beta of right now. That market is taking off tremendously, we've seen 29,000 downloads of that, 29,000 different customers that have downloaded that. We're currently protecting around three million mailboxes of Office 365, so there's just a lot that's our work with the IBM cloud is terrific. They're here, they're a sponsor. Great things going on there, 1,000% growth in the VMs that are deployed using it on the IBM cloud, that now their resiliency services practice is building up around Veeam. So, there's just this tremendous momentum across all the dynamics of our cloud business right now. Well, customers have to place bets. We love sports analogies in theCUBE, Kentucky Derby just went down, we got the preakness coming up. And customers, I feel like they're placing bets on what's called the undercard, right? You got the big races, the Kentucky Derby. Well, there's a bunch of races leading up to that, they call that the undercard. People warm up, they make little bets here, little bets there, but then when it comes to the big race, that's when they put down their big money. And I feel like the cloud bets have largely been on the undercard to date. When you talk to customers, first of all, do you agree with that? And are they asking you, okay, which cloud should I use where? What bets should I place? Having run the Azure Group, you've got a perspective on this. What do you see customers doing and how do you advise them? Yeah, so that's a great question. What we, so let me take you back a little bit. We did see early on customers that sort of nibbled around the edges, around the undercard and made small bets on it. And then for whatever reason, made the decision to dive in big. And I think a number of them that didn't work out quite well because as they were going through the undercard and managing through that, they didn't learn as much as they needed to or the platforms evolved so that they ended up saying, wait a minute, hold on, we maybe shouldn't have made that, right? So customers now are, I think they're taking a little bit of a more smart approach towards it because they realize that, hey, going 100% in with one provider is going to be a challenge, right? They are worried about the old vendor lock-in and portability across clouds. We obviously will talk to customers about multi-cloud world. 81% that we surveyed said, I'm not going to have a single cloud provider. I'm going to try to figure out which workloads to put where and we're going to continue to help advise them and help figure out how they do that, how those different cloud infrastructures factor into their data protection and availability strategy. Yeah, so when you get to the database, the middleware on up and you take that approach, then obviously there's substantial skill sets that you're going to need, whether you're using, you know, Amazon's databases or Oracles or IBMs, et cetera. At the infrastructure level, however, and I think this is part of your strategy, you can potentially standardize, you know, you guys want to be the standard for the data protection platform, but you've got to earn their trust and the right to do that. Absolutely. But are we understanding that right? That is the strategy, right? To sort of take that stress away from them, let them worry about which database, which SaaS application, but from an infrastructure standpoint, you can rely on Veeam to be that data protection platform. That's exactly right. I think when you were talking with Danny earlier, is any app, any data, any cloud, regardless of where you want to go, bet on us, we've got the answer for you. Okay, so then the follow-up question is why you guys? You've got system vendors, you've got storage vendors, you know, to a certain extent, you've got quasi-security players, big established companies, startups, why Veeam? Well, I think because, a couple of reasons. First of all, the platform is extensive and continuing to grow. And I'm thrilled that we've got the platform elements of it. I think you said earlier, platform's always Trump products. I'm a firm believer in that, I love platforms. I think the second reason is, we're a partner-driven and customer-driven organization. I know that can sound like sort of mom and apple pie, but the reality is we are 100% channel focused. We don't compete with those channel partners. We don't compete with cloud service providers. We can enable all of them. And so you've got a great platform with a great organization that knows how to partner and wants to partner. Those two things come together and make us a great choice. How do you, I haven't asked anybody this, and I wonder if you'd give us your perspective. Because you're a pure channel, how do you, and at the same time, customer-driven, how do you get that feedback? Obviously you go in with channel partners, but how do you ensure that you're getting the high-fidelity feedback from the customers? So, get with the customer. We're 100% channel-driven, but we are arm-in-arm with our channel partners. It's not, in some areas of the business, yes, there's a lot that goes on that Veeam folks don't get involved with, but when it matters, when it counts, we're arm-in-arm with our channel partners. We go and visit together. We spend that time. We invest that time. We do partner advisory councils. We do customer advisory boards. We're not, it's not diffused through the channel. It's, I guess, what I want to say. It's very much a true partnership where we are engaged fully. Okay, let's get into it. You're a Philly fan. Your boss is a Patriots fan. I've heard that, yes. You got, I mean, listen, as a long-time Philly fan, it's like one of the best feelings in the world when your team wins the Super Bowl. First of all, having your team in the Super Bowl for two weeks, having that hype lead up is just the greatest thing in the world even though you just can't wait for kickoff. But I got to say congratulations. Thank you. I mean, you got to feel good about that. Thank you. We feel great about it. It took us a couple of days to catch our breath after the game and quite frankly, even during the game. Hey, listen, Tom Brady two minutes ago has the ball. We were all getting ready to leave the party because we said, hey, we've seen this movie before. We know what's going to happen. Go down the field, touchdown, we're out. I can't watch. Can't watch it. Can't watch it. I really didn't watch the last 30 seconds of the game because I just had my act. No, we were super happy about it. I will be honest and say it's been a source of ongoing rivalry inside of Veeam because we have quite the Boston contingent, but we've got the trophy. Well, pretty amazing that, well, because Philly had the really outstanding defense, which everybody tries to predict before the game, right? And nobody can predict the right. And then he shreds the Philly defense. Who would have known that Nick falls is going to score every single time he had the ball except the one fluke interception, right? It was really an unbelievable game. I mean, as a Pats fan, it was over a heartbroken, but wow, what a game. We loved it and honestly, the guys have been great about it and almost, I don't know if Peter falls into this category, but almost everyone has said, yeah, well, Philly was a better team, you know? We lost a great game to a better team. There's been no, oh, well, one of our guys tried to say, hey, that whole Philly special play that should have been called an illegal formation, but then I gave him a list of all the violations that the Patriots have had in the past five years and he's like, okay. You don't want to sound like the Ravens went there. They're calling the ineligible eligible. Look, Brady, they made that great call. Brady couldn't make the catch. He couldn't get the catch. Nick falls made the catch. Okay, that was came down to execution. They stared, you know, into the abyss and they didn't blink. I mean, you got to give him credit. And Villanova, I mean, that was awesome. They were just a machine. Sixers, what happened? Big favorite. I think young team. Young team, they're going to look, they're going to be good for a while. Should be a good rival. I think, I think Ben Simmons, you know, he's going to come up Joel Embiid is an absolute beast. But I got to hand it to your team and your coach. I mean, I think in some ways we got out coached a little bit. When Larry Bird came up and Dr. J, you know, was, was didn't want to relinquish the mantle. That was some of the best rivalries in the early 80s. Yeah. With sixers and Celtics. So hopefully that will be back. We get that going again. We love talking sports and we love talking sports with guys in tech that love sports both. Thanks very much. My pleasure, man. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Thanks guys. Keep right there. But go back with our next guest right after this short break.