 Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019, brought to you by Commvault. Hey, good morning. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Commvault Go 19. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm with Stu Miniman. Hey, Stu. Hey, Lisa, are you ready for day two? I was going to ask you, yes, are you ready? I believe the statement this morning was we're born ready for this. We are born ready. Yes, that was a big theme this morning. It's a theme of the event here at Commvault Go 19 in Colorado, and great parody this morning of all these old video clips of all these actors, including the Lego movie stars, from saying, I'm ready, even SpongeBob. That one got me. So we had a great day yesterday, Stu. Lots of news came out Monday and Tuesday, so lots of great stuff to talk about. We had a lot of their C-level execs, so a lot of new changes at Commvault yesterday really got the vibe of, hey, this is a new Commvault. Yeah, and it's interesting, Lisa, because one of the things we've been talking about is the 20 years of pedigree that the company has, as Sanjay Merchandani said. Yet, they're doing some new items. I was talking to some of the partners, and they're like, how come metallics, like a separate brand, don't you worry about brand spread? We know a thing about having too many brands on the program, so it is the history, the experience, the lessons learned, the war chest, as they said, of all of the things that have gone wrong over the years, and I sure know that from my time living on the vendor side is, there's no compression algorithm for all the experience you've had, and like, oh, we fixed something, and that stays in the code as opposed to something brand new might need to work through things over time, but metallic, a separate brand, but leveraging the partnerships and the go-to-market and the experience of Commvault overall. So, if you want, my quick take is metallic. Definitely, I think coming out of here is the thing we will be talking the most about. They're SAS plus model. I want to see how that plays in the marketplace. As I probed Rob when we interviewed him, customers, when you think about SAS, it should just be, I worry about my data and I get up and running, and they said, they have a very fast up and running, less than 15 minutes, that's great, but some of that optionality that they built in, oh, well, I can bring this along or I can add this and do this, it's always worried that, oh, wait, do I have to remember my thing and as it changes down the road, do I have everything set up right? Those are some of the things that we're trying to get away from when we go to a SAS or cloud model. And to your point, another theme of the show has been about operational simplification, not just what Commvault is doing internally to simplify their operations, but what they need to deliver to customers. Customers want simplicity, right? So we talk about that at every show, regardless of industry, but there is this line and maybe it's blurring, like we talked a lot about blurred lines yesterday of too much choice versus simplification, where's the line there? Yeah, and a great point, Lisa, so one of the items Sanjay Merchantani said yesterday in his keynote was that blurring line between primary and secondary storage, and I probed him on our interview. Is Commvault going into the primary storage market with Hedvig? Hedvig's got a nice offering, strong IP, good engineering team. I think they want to make sure that customers that have bought Hedvig or want to keep buying Hedvig will do it, but really, I think two years from now, when you look back at is that core IP, how does that get baked into the solution, that's why they bought it, that's where it's going to be there. I don't think we're going to be looking two years from now and saying, oh wow, Commvault there, going up against all the storage, Starwalt and competing a bit against HCI and everything, they have a strong partnership. So I think I got clarity on that for the most part, even though the messaging will move over time on that. It will move over time on that, that's a good point. The song Blurred Lines kept popping into my head yesterday as we were talking about that, but one of the things that was clear was when we spoke with Rob Kalustin about Metallic, we spoke with Avinash Gokshaman about Hedvig Sanjay as well as Don Foster, they're already working on the technical integration of the solutions and we even spoke with their VP of pricing. So from a customer, from a current Hedvig customer perspective, there is focus on that from Commvault's perspective. It's not just about integrating the technologies and obviously that has to be done really well, but it's also about giving customers the consistency and really for Commvault kind of a new era of transparency with respect to pricing. Yeah, and another thing we talked about some of that transformation of the channel and Mercer Rowe came on board only a couple of days officially on the job. He's helped a number of companies get ready for multi-cloud and absolutely we've seen that change in the channel over the last five to 10 years. Back in his days when he was at VMware, the channel was oh my gosh, when Amazon wins we all lose and today we understand it is much more nuanced there. The channel that is successful partners with the hyperscale cloud environments, they have practices built around it. The Office 365 and Microsoft practices are an area that Commvault and their partners should be able to do well with and that Metallic will tie into, as well as of course AWS, the 800 pound girl in the space will be there, Commvault plays into that. And setting the channel up for that next generation with SaaS, with the software and living in a broader multi-cloud environment is definitely something to watch. There's a lot of news about the channel not just from a leadership standpoint, but also so Metallic for the mid-market really delivered exclusively through the channel, but also the new initiative that they have. We talked a little bit about this yesterday about going after and really a big focus with global systems integrators on the largest global enterprises. And when we spoke with their GTM chief of staff yesterday along with Mercer, with Carmen, what they're doing, because I said, you know, channel partners, all the channel partners that they work with work with their competitors, so you have to really deliver differentiation and it can't just be about pricing or marketing messaging goes all the way into getting those feet on the street. And that's another area in which we heard yesterday Commvault making strategic improvements on more feet on the street, co-selling with partners, really pulling them deeper into enablement and trainings. And to them, that is one of the key differentiators that they are delivering to their partners. And Lisa, we've got to speak to a couple of customers. We have more coming on today. It's a little bit telling that, you know, the average customer you talk to, they have, you know, five, 10 years of experience there. They are excited about some of the new offerings, but as we've said many times, you know, Metallic, the new HeadVig, we want to talk to the new logos that they're going to get on board. That is something that for the partners has been an incentive. There were new incentives put in place to help capture those new logos because, as we know, revenue was actually down the last fiscal year a bit and Commvault feels that they have turned the corner. They're all ready to go. And one other note I'd like to make, the analogy I used last year, is we knew a CEO was new CEO, search was happening. A lot of things were in motion and it's almost as if you were getting the body ready for an organ transplant and you make sure that the antibodies aren't going to reject it. In conversation with Sanjay, he was very cognizant of that. His background is DevOps, and he was a CIO for IT, he was the CEO of Puppet, so he's going to make things move even faster and the pace of change over the last nine months is just the beginning of the change. And for the most part, I'm not hearing grumbling underneath. The customers seem fully on board. The employees are energized and definitely there was good energy last year, but a raise of the enthusiasm this year. Well, Stu, first of all, you have just been on fire the last two days comparing their CEO transition to getting a body ready for a transplant. It's probably one of the best things I've heard in a long time. That was awesome. But you're right, we've heard a lot of positivity. Cultural change is incredibly difficult. You talked a minute ago about, this is a 20 year old company and as we all have all experience and the industries in which we're in, one of the things that's important is messaging that experience and talking about the things that worked well, but also the things that didn't work well that they've learned from. That message was carried through during the keynote this morning. The three customers on stage that we saw before we had to come to the set. And my favorite was from Sonic Healthcare, Matthew McAvuse coming on and shortly with us. And I always appreciate, I think the voice of the customer is the best brand validation that you can get. However, what's even better is a customer talking about when the technologies that they're using fail because it does happen. How are they positioned with the support and the training and the education that Commvault is giving them to make those repairs quickly to ensure business continuity and ensure disaster recovery. I think that to me, that speaks volumes about the legacy, the 20 years of experience that Commvault has. No, Lisa, you're absolutely right. There's certain products out there that we talk about uptime in 100% in this space. I believe the stat was about 94% success rate. And we had NASA in the keynote yesterday talking about success versus partial success versus failures and Commvault really embraces that and has customers that will talk about that because there are times that things will happen and there are things that you need to be able to recover from with ransomware. Often it is not a question of if but when it is going to be happened. At least the other thing I want to get your comment on, Jimmy Chin, who is the director and one of the cameraman of the free solo Oscar winning free solo documentary, definitely gave me a little bit of, oh my gosh, look at some of the heights. And I was nervous just looking at some of the stuff they're doing. I like a little bit of lightweight hiking. I'm not a mountain climber or anything like that. But he talked about when the camera goes on, there's that added pressure and that goes on and it's sitting there. It's like, yeah, we sit here live all day doing that. There's that energy to perform. But we all appreciate that everybody watching and understanding that we're all human here. And every time, every once in a while, a word or a mistake gets in there, but we keep going. Free Solo Summit. Yeah, that's life, but also Jimmy Chin, phenomenal. I think in 2018 they just won the Oscar just earlier this year for free solo. I have to watch that this weekend. But a couple of things that he talked about is that failure is a huge part of preparation. Couldn't agree more. What a simplified statement for somebody that not only has skied Everest, the Climbed Meru, I think they call it the shark fin of India, but what you talked about with what he documented with Free Solo and all of the thousands of sequences that he talked about that Alex, I'm forgetting his last name, that the guy who free soloed El Capitan, all of these different failure scenarios that he pre-hurst over and over again, in case he encountered any of them, he would immediately be able to remedy that situation and get himself back on track. I thought that message, to me, failure is a good f-word. If you use it properly, NASA you mentioned yesterday and NASA was famous for coining. In the 60s, failure is not an option. And I always say on to that because I used to work for NASA, but it's a distinct possibility. And so what Jenny Chin shared this morning was electrifying, but it also was a great understatement of what Commvault is helping their customers. We have to help you prepare for this. We can't help you prepare for all of it. As you mentioned ransomware, it's not if, but when. Well, right, and both NASA and when the climbing is understanding where something could go wrong and therefore what the failure scenarios are. So, you know, rockets today, you can't have a failure. And by failure, they mean, look, if the rocket isn't going to work or something goes wrong, we need to make sure we don't have loss of life. You know, that is something that if you look at Blue Origin and SpaceX, that is preeminent in there is we can't have another challenger disaster. We can't have some of these environments where we have the loss of human life. So that is number one. Some of the other ones, sometimes we know that the unknown happens or things don't go quite right. So, being prepared to understand if something goes wrong, how do we recover from that? And that brings us back to the whole data protection and recovery of the environment because the best laid architecture, eventually something will happen and therefore we need to make sure that that data, the lifeblood of the company, is able to be recovered and used and that the business can go forward even if some piece of infrastructure or some attack got through. And there's inherent risk in every industry, whether you're talking about healthcare data, we talked with AstraZeneca yesterday, you know, genetics, clinical data, or you're talking about a retailer, doesn't matter, there's inherent risk with every business. And one of the most important things that I got out of the NASA talk yesterday, Jimmy Chin's talk today, some of the customers is that preparation is, you can't be over-prepared. You really can't, in fact he said that, you can't be over-prepared in his line of work. So I think it applies to the inherent risk that any business has, managing data. As we talk about, it's you all the time, it's the lifeblood, it's the new oil, it is. It has to be available, accessible 24 by seven. If it is and can't be, businesses are at massive risk of in this day and age, competitive competitors who have maybe a better risk fault tolerance scenario in play, so that risk that they have to mitigate comes to preparation. We're going to be talking with Sandra Hamilton in just a few minutes about who leads customer success for Commvault, really want to dig into the training, the support, we've heard that articulated from customers on stage that I don't wake up in the middle of the night anymore because I have the support from my trusted vendor, Commvault, and that is critical to any business staying up. Yeah, absolutely, we're going to hear from a number of customers, I'm sure they're ready and we are ready for day two. We are ready Stu, let's have a great day, yeah? Thanks. So Stu and I will be right back with our first guest on day two of our coverage of Commvault Go. For Stu, I'm Lisa Martin, we'll be right back.