 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Commvault Future Ready 2020, brought to you by Commvault. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the CUBE's coverage of Commvault Future Ready to help me wrap up our coverage of the event. Happy to welcome back to the program. Traum Bharata, he is the vice president of strategy and chief of staff with Commvault. Tom, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks Stu, glad to be here. All right, so before we get into the news, Tom, I love when I get to talk to strategy people because you have your 90 day plans, you have your quarterly plans, you have your yearly plans, your year, year and a half into the new regime, of course Sanjay, your chief of staff for and yourself. So I'm sure coming into 2020, a few things probably hit in 2020 that weren't on your initial plan. So global pandemic and the like, tell us a little bit about how current events have been impacting both your plans and led to what we saw today. Yeah, sure, great Stu, good question. You know what's interesting is, obviously we're in a different world today than where we were last time we spoke at our Go conference in the fall. And like everyone else, we're dealing with this new reality and we're fortunate because we are a software company which means, from an operational standpoint, we're able to continue to build products, deliver in great software to our customers and the like, I'd say from a strategy perspective, we're still on course. We, as you saw at the Go conference last fall and as you see today, we've been building new products, new capabilities under the mantra of intelligent data management, which really is a new direction for the company or a new way that we're framing what we're bringing to our customers. And while we've had to make some tactical changes inside our business, the fundamental strategy is strong. In fact, I think in a lot of ways, it's actually sped up, sped things up. I think it was, as we talked about today, quite a bit, the digital transformation for organizations is happening even faster than them or people are saying, where I thought I might have had five, 10 years to on this journey, it's actually compressing quite a bit. And we feel like we're in a really good spot and we feel like we've been building towards delivering the kinds of capabilities that customers need. So fundamentally, things aren't changing for us. And I think we're in a good spot today and hopefully that is gonna resonate with the marketplace with this series of announcements that we're making today. Yeah, absolutely, Tom. Huge forcing function in the marketplace by what we're seeing today. You mentioned the user conference go from last year. One of the big themes at the show last year was the intelligent data management. So help us understand, connect the dots if you would between the vision and now really, it's a whole portfolio refresh that we're seeing from Commvault today. Yeah, so we're building off of 20 years of development in the space. It's so much more than backup. And I think traditionally Commvault may have gotten a little bit pigeonholed as a backup provider. But really when you look under the covers and you look at our platform, it provides true data awareness, automation, agility across your entire estate. And we have almost a thousand patents in the space. So what that platform offers for us is the ability to support lots of different data management services that can be consumed in different ways. And so when we think about intelligent data management, it's data management services that are delivered in that intelligent way through that awareness, automation, and agility. Obviously too, the way that we deliver it to customers is either it's flexible, traditional software, downloadable software, or as an integrated appliance, and now even as software as a service through our Metallic offering. Because when you look at it, that foundation that Metallic is built upon is that same core platform that our current customers know and enjoy. So when we talk about intelligent data management, that frames the whole story for us. So when we think about our roadmap going forward as well, it's about what are the new types of data management services that customers are demanding and how can we build that right on that platform, that core platform that we've already had developed for so many years. Tom, I'm glad you brought up some of those different models, the way that people can consume and purchase these solutions. If we look at the overhaul to the portfolio there, one of the pieces I'd like to understand from you is if you look at pricing, if you look at licensing, obviously Commvault has been going along this journey from to be more in the subscription model, if you will. So help us understand how the updates fit there. Yeah, I'll tell you, it starts with, if you had a chance to see, I'm sure you did, see Sanjay's presentation today. A lot of what we're talking about here is simplification and simplifying not just the user experience, but also the commercial experience, right? So simplifying the usage of the product, but also simplifying the usage. So when we think about it, and customers are demanding this more than ever right now, obviously this goes back to the new world that we're living in. And if you take that and also consider our expanding portfolio, we need to make sure that we're doing it in a way that makes it easy for customers to consume the different elements of it. So we've taken an approach that makes licensing simple. So first, we're aligning licensing to the workload that's being either protected or managed in some other way. So for instance, if it's a virtual machine workload, the licensing is by virtual machine. If it's mailbox oriented, it's by user. It's aligned to the workload and the procurement methodology that organizations are used to buying for that particular workload. I think in the past, things that might've gotten a little bit convoluted. Is this terabyte based? Is it VM based? Is it user based? Is it instance based? Is it right? And what we've done is we've taken a drastic simplification approach and looking at that. So that as organizations think about their workloads, they don't have to do like math derivatives to figure out what their cost is gonna be. The second thing is we wanted to make it more predictable. And so, we've had subscription licensing as an option for a few years now. But it's really just been an option. And now we're gonna be more aggressive in terms of how we're offering that. We wanna incentivize subscriptions even further. If a customer wants a one year term, we'll provide a one year term. If they want a multi year term, we'll provide a multi year term. It's up to them. But whatever it is, it's gonna help them buy what they need rather than be forced to make some sort of massive upfront perpetual license decision. We'll incentivize that sort of predictability. And then lastly, we wanna make sure that we're being aggressive and flexible in how we're providing these options to customers. So, if you go back to the intelligent data management comments and being able to deliver different data management services, we wanna make sure that we're aggressive when it comes to the solitary use case. If I wanna back up the thing, I'm gonna be very aggressive, right? Commvault's gonna have aggressive pricing for that particular use case. But then what we also wanna do is we wanna make it attractive to customers to bring their data environment even further with other types of data management capabilities. So we're gonna make it easier for customers to do that. And you see that through the portfolio approach that we've announced today. We've really rebuilt our portfolio, I think for the more modern enterprise. And we're incentivizing and making it worth customers' while to really look at all the different offerings that we have. So, Tom, I wonder if you could speak a little bit to the ripple effect of that change that you have to the pricing and the like. Thinking about go-to-market, your channel and compensation for everyone along the value chain there. How does that happen? So, obviously, as we make any kind of change to our portfolio, be it adding products or changing the licensing, there's a lot of work that has to go into it behind the scenes. And this, frankly, is a big part of what we've changed about Commvault in the last 18 months. We talked about this a little bit last time you and I spoke. It's hard to get an organization to be aligned and even harder when you think about all the downstream effects of that, when you've got distribution layers and, of course, your customer base. How do you get everybody in sync and aligned with what it is that we're doing? And we've made sure that throughout this process, as we've been leading to today, which is really a culmination of a lot of this effort, that the folks in the organization, both internally and externally, that need to be up to speed and need to be aligned to what it is that we're doing are there. So it's part of that process. We've been working on this for months to make sure that we're in a good place. I have a saying inside the company, which is sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. And it actually relates to motorcycle racing. A motorcycle race isn't won on the straightaways when everybody has their throttle wide open. It's won before they enter the turns as they're slowing down. Because the whole idea is you slow down, you get the bike settled, you enter the curve at the right trajectory so that you can hit the apex and accelerate out. So when it comes to aligning a big organization in our distribution and channel infrastructure behind that, going slow means making sure everybody's aligned upfront in the process. And then we can build the plans going forward to make sure that we've got the right information in the right place at the right time so that the customer can have a great experience at the end of the line. All right, Tom, you've now been with Commvault a little over a year. Bring us inside a little bit. Some of the cultural changes, what surprises you've seen, and help us bring a close to the Commvault future ready. Yeah, I'll tell you, Stu. So I've been with Commvault now a little bit over a year, about a year and a quarter. And it has been a tremendous experience. Obviously, we've transformed the company. And if you look at the leadership team, it's a mixture of new folks and folks that have a lot of experience with the company. And you look throughout the organization between how we operate, as I was just talking about, and the kind of innovation that we're delivering to the marketplace. It's founded on a really simple ideal. We wanted to simplify the business. We wanted to drive innovation and we want to make sure that we're executing. And we've been able to rally the company around those three components. And I'll tell you, the biggest pleasant surprise that I've had inside the organization is the attitude of our people and the openness of the Commvault teams to the kinds of change that we've been making. It's been tremendous because without their support, there's no way that we would have been able to do this. From employee one to employee 2,500, we're all rowing in the same direction to use another analogy. And without that, it would be impossible to make the kinds of changes that we were making. Now, I'd also say it takes time. And that's one of the things that we've all needed to make sure that we had. Getting the whole company aligned and then having the patience to make sure that we've got a nice follow-through has been really important. And I think today is a great example of how far we've taken things at Commvault and where we think things are headed going forward. And I expect lots more great things as we move forward through the rest of our calendar and fiscal year and into the out years as well. All right, Tom, one more final word. What do you want really the customers to have as their takeaway from Commvault Future Ready? Well, I mean, I hope customers see the kind of positive change and momentum that we're making between what we're trying to deliver in terms of value for our customers and how much they can derive out of that. You know, when you're hammer everything looks like a nail. So for us, it all comes down to the data. And data is so fundamental to any organization and how they derive value from it. And we play, I think, an important part in that landscape. And it's our hope that we're delivering the types of services to customers that allow them to extract the value of the data to make them successful. And at the end of the day, that's what we're all about. And I hope that this has been a good experience for customers to see this and that they can see from it that we've got momentum behind us and that we're just going to continue to move this forward. All right, well, Tom, thank you so much. Data, absolutely huge opportunity for customers as well as Commvault for you and all of your ecosystem there. Tom Broderick, thanks so much. Pleasure catching up with you. Thank you, Stu, really appreciate it. All right, and that brings to a close. The Cube's coverage of Commvault Future Ready. Check out thecube.net for lots more. You can go back and see the Commvault Go that Tom and I referenced and stay tuned for lots more events that we have coming up. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching The Cube.