 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Veeamon 2019, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Peter Burris. We're wrapping up day two of Veeamon 2019. And so we've been talking about cloud, hybrid cloud, data protection, backup, evolving to more of an automated data management environment. Ken Ringdahl is here, and he is in charge of really building out the Veeam ecosystem. He's the Vice President of Global Alliance Architecture at Veeam. Ken, great to see you again, thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks Dave, appreciate it. So the ecosystem is evolving. You know, you're in a competitive marketplace, but one of the things that differentiates Veeam is, you know, billion dollar company, and people want to do business with your customers. And so the ecosystem keeps growing and growing, and you guys have some blue chip names at the top of your sponsor list. So good job, but you're not done yet, so. No, not at all. And I think Dave, you know, it's really great to see how Veeamon has evolved. And you know, in our partner ecosystem, you know, we have, you know, you talked about us hitting a billion dollars. You know, we, Ratmir announced, we hit 350,000 customers. That customer number is a huge asset for us. When we talk to our partners, you know, that is something that they're all trying to tap into, right? They love, you know, and our customers are really passionate. And we have partners that come to us and they say, hey, look, you know, and the bigger partners than us, and they're saying, hey, will you please work with us? Will you please, you know, we want to do deeper integration because our customers, you know, are saying we're Veeam customers and you, you know, you know, miss the partner, you have to go work with Veeam so that our solutions will work better together. So it's a great asset to us. Yeah, and it's evolved since, you know, so certainly since the first Veeam on I was at, the very first one I think was, we were talking was at the ARIA, whatever, it was five years ago. So, you know, ecosystem is a, I think Jason Buffington was quoting Archimedes today and, you know, Lever. And that ecosystem is, you know, a huge opportunity for growth. Okay, so let's get into it. Well, first of all, I want to ask you, the title is interesting. Global Alliance Architecture. Yes. So we're not talking technical architecture necessarily. We're talking about what? The architecture of the ecosystem or both? Yeah, so my, you know, my role, my responsibility and what my team looks after is everything technical related to our partners. So Veeam, we're 100% ISV and you know, Ratmir and Andrea, our two co-founders and leaders of the company, you know, that's something that they take to heart and it's something that's actually really valuable when we talk to our partners because we don't really overlap very much, especially with the infrastructure partners that we have. And so, you know, my job is to take the great product we have and make it work really well and go deep with our partners. So create value with these partners. There's sometimes their product integrations, storage snapshot integrations. We announced a with Veeam program. Two weeks ago, we were together at .next with the rest of your team talking about Nutanix Mine with Veeam which is a secondary storage integrated solution. So all of those, that's all part of my role. So solution architecture and product integrations, you know, through our partner ecosystem, which is very broad. It stretches from storage partners to platform partners to other ISVs like Oracle, SAP, even healthcare partners. Yeah, Peter, we were excited about the with Veeam stuff, the API. Very much so. Is with Veeam yours? With Veeam, yeah, so my team is responsible for the overall architecture with Veeam. It's really a joint collaboration within Veeam. So we have an R&D investment that's building the intellectual property that powers the, you know, the system under the covers. My team is responsible for the broader architecture, how we bring it together, how we bring it to market through the channel, right? And how we bring it to our customers and that whole experience. So my team is intimately involved in that. So a lot of people talk about inflection points in the industry and clearly we're in the middle of one. One way of describing it is that the first 50 years were known process, unknown technology. We knew we were going to do accounting, we knew we were going to do HR, we knew we were going to do blah, blah, blah, blah. And there was mainframe clients here with a lot of other stuff. But the whole notion of backup and restore and data protection grew up out of the complexity in the infrastructure. As we move forward, it's interesting because it's known technology. It's going to be cloud, relatively known. But what's interesting is we don't know what the processes are going to be. We don't know what we're going to automate. We don't know how we're going to change the business. It's all going to be data-driven, which places an enormous burden on IT and specifically how they use data within the business. So I'm going to ask you a question, it's a long preamble, but I'm going to ask you a question and I ask, we're out in here too. This is not the test. But the question is, look, as we move forward, as data is used to differentiate a business, it suggests that there's going to be greater specialization in how data is used, which could and should lead to greater specialization in the role that Veeam and related technologies will play within the business. And the question then is, is the with Veeam approach a way to allow innovation to bloom so that specialization can be accommodated and supported within the Veeam ecosystem? Yeah, so yeah, Peter, good question. And so I tell you, the short answer is yes. The longer answer is- I was the shorter answer too. The short answer is yes. The longer answer is it doesn't have to be with Veeam, but really our goal and what we want to empower our partners. And so really the goal of with Veeam is, hey, we're already working across our partner ecosystem and we work with the likes of NetApp and HP and Pure and Nutanix and all the platform providers as well, public clouds, our goal is to make Veeam ubiquitous and drive better value to our customers through our partners, right? We need partners, no matter what, when we're working with a customer, there's always a workload we're protecting and we need a place to land our backup. So no matter what, we're always working with one or two partners in a deal and sometimes it's multiple because then you tear out to cloud storage and other places. With Veeam, what we're trying to do is really simplify that process for customers and so make that process from the buying experience all the way through the delivery and the deployment and the management and the ongoing management, day one and day two operations. We want to make that all seamless and give them higher value. Now, one thing we're looking to enable and by adding APIs with Veeam is we want to leverage the strengths of the partners we have. And so I often end up in these discussions is we have a broad partner ecosystem. We've already announced two with Veeam solutions. We have a third that we did last year with Cisco that's in the market that's sort of similar in nature. And we're going to add more and the question our partners even ask us is you already got three of them. Why are you going to add another one? How am I going to differentiate? And the answer is, they differentiate with their own technology and the idea is we have these open APIs so that they can build their own solutions. They fit different markets, they fit different use cases. Some are small customer solutions, some are enterprise. But our goal is to enable them to be creative in how they build on top of Veeam but have Veeam be a core part of that solution. Got it. So it is that core part of the solution applied to specific customer parts? Absolutely. Okay. So the term seamless always triggers me in a way because seamless is like open. It's evolved over time. And so what was seamless 10 years ago wasn't really seamless in today's terms. So when you talk about seamless, we're talking about, if I understand it, deep engineering, right? Getting access to primitives through APIs and creating solutions that are differentiable as a function of your partner's core value proposition. And obviously integrating with Veeam which has 350,000 customers so you're now in the ball game with Veeam customers. So talk about the importance of APIs and how that actually gets done. And seamless to whom? To the partners, to the customer, to ultimately to the customer a bit. But there's got to be an ease of integration as well with the partners and I'd like to understand that better. Yeah, absolutely. So I'll give you an example of something we've done in the past that we're trying to model this with Veeam program after. So about a year and a half as part of our nine to five update three we introduced what we called Universal Storage API. And we've talked about our version 10. There were five core features of version 10 when we announced it two years ago in New Orleans. You're the first time you were with us at a Veeam on. And one of those was Universal Storage API. And what that means is we help our partners, we help our customers ultimately by way of our partners on the primary side of integrating storage snapshots with VMware vSphere. And so when we go to backup of Veeam we take a snapshot of that VM and with our storage snapshot integration we then take a storage snapshot of the volume that VM is on and we can release that VMware snapshot very quickly. So it's very low touch and low impact on the environment. Well, we introduced this API so that we could scale. We had done our own storage snapshot integration with call it five or six storage vendors over the previous seven years, eight years. In the last year and a half we've added seven. And that's the scale we're talking about and allowing our partners to build the storage snapshot plugin together. So we have a program, we invite them into that program, we collaborate on it, they develop the plugin, we jointly test it and we release it. And so we're trying to sort of take, and that's been very successful. As I said, eight years, five or six storage snapshot vendors, year and a half we've done like another seven or eight. So it's been very successful and we have more that are in queue. So we'll be talking about more of these as time goes on in the very near future. With the with Veeam program we're looking to do something very similar. It's going to be an invite only program. Realistically the secondary storage partners is the universe is probably 20. The logical universe for us is probably 10 to 12. So it's not going to be huge but it's going to be impactful for our partners. And so we'll invite them into the program. We'll have an agreement of us working together. We'll jointly develop and test it and we'll bring it to market together. At the end of the day, you know both our partner and Veeam, we have our name on it. And I'm sure you heard from Ratmayer and Danny and others, right? We have our MPS score, which we really, really value and it's really high. It's best in the industry. And if we're putting our name on a solution to market we also want to make sure that we're working on it together in it. You know, it really goes through the rigor of what it takes to bring a Veeam solution to market. Actually, you know what? Nobody's talked this week about the MPS score. If they maybe they have in the keynotes but I might have missed it. But while I was in the keynotes what is it today? Yeah, so an MPS score is basically, you know from zero to a hundred, it's, you know will a customer reference you or recommend you? Right, right. And so ours is 73, the industry, the general average in our space is about 28 to 30. So we're about two and a half times that score. You know, and that's in, Frank Slutman said to me one time, it's easy to have a high MPS score if you're a one product company. But you're not a one product company. No, no, we've evolved substantially. I mean, you know, we've added agents to cover physical workload. We've added cloud support. We've added other applications. We've added Veeam availability orchestrator. We've added Veeam backup for Office 365. We have VAC, which is Veeam availability console for our service providers, which has cloud connect. I mean, it's a very broad portfolio. Everything comes back to Veeam backup and replication as the flagship foundation. But we have all these other products that now help our customers solve their problems. Peter, the reason we're so excited about this with Veeam is this notion of cloud and hybrid cloud. And you talk about programmable infrastructure. You really have been pushing, just bringing the cloud experience to your data. You've been talking about that for a while. And part of that has to be infrastructure as code. And it can't really do that without open APIs and this sort of seamless integration. Well, the cloud is testing us with you as well. The cloud is really an architecture for how you're going to distribute work as opposed to how you're going to centralize it. I think for a long time we got it wrong. It's all presuming, it's all going to go to the center. Well, in fact, when you get that level of standardization and common conventions and the technologies are built to make IT that much easier, it allows you to distribute the work a lot more effectively and get the data closer to where the work's going to be done. And that is enormous implications for how we think about things. But it also means that we, when we talk about bringing the cloud to the data, that the data has to be there. The data services that make that data part of a broader fabric have to be there. It all has to be assured so that the system knows something about where the data is and what services can be applied to it in advance of actually moving the workloads. That suggests ultimately that the technology set that Veeam is offering is going to evolve relatively rapidly. So the whole notion of, you know, with Veeam today for secondary storage, but I could see that becoming something that you guys take to new classes of data service providers pretty quickly. I don't want you to pre-announce anything, but what do you think? Yeah, Peter, I think you're really onto something. And when we sort of look at the world, right? The infrastructure world we're in, you know, and certainly some of our partners would draw a slightly different picture, but we see Veeam as the common thread in the middle, right? Because at the end of the day, I think you mentioned it as you were just talking there, you know, when we talk about hybrid cloud, right? We see now our customers, especially commercial and enterprise and large enterprise customers, it is a very heterogeneous environment. It's multiple hypervisors, different storage platforms. It's multiple cloud providers because they're picking best of breed for the workload. And so they need a platform that's got really breadth and depth of coverage. And so the one common thread we weave between there is Veeam, right? So if we are that data protection layer, as I mentioned before, you know, we're in the middle, we're protecting a primary workload and we're writing our data to a secondary workload, but in the middle is Veeam. And so that workload we're protecting on-prem, cloud, secondary data centers, Veeam is the thread in between there. We can move that data around and wherever that is, we can make use of it. I'll give you a good example. Today, you know, let's say we're protecting a Veeam workload on-prem, right? We back that up to a system locally so we can have fast restore, but ultimately we tear that out. Veeam cloud tier, capacity tier, tear that to AWS. So we can actually recover workloads in AWS one or two ways. We have direct restore, which would take a backup from on-prem and directly move it there for DR or migration purposes, or we can simply consume that backup that's now up in the cloud because Veeam backups are self-describing. We can lose the system on-prem and recover it. So your point about making the data close to your workload with Veeam in the middle, we enable that for our customers, regardless of where they want to go. Yeah, so we think that that's going to change the mindset from protection to assurance. So assure your data is local and that it's the right data and it's integrity and all the other things and then ultimately move it and back it up to some other site. So it's a subtle switch. It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out. This has obviously been- Well, as we talked about, as you need to begin to protect things, like containers, like functions that come and go super quickly, assurance has more meaning because there's security threats and if you can help solve those problems through your partners, through automation, spinning containers up and down, making it harder for the bad guys to target a specific container, raising essentially the cost, so lowers their ROI, that is a new game. And I'll call out one thing, a rat mayor, I thought did a really good job on stage yesterday and his keynote, he popped the slide which talked about the universal storage API and with theme and it had all our partners sort of around that. You know, that, I think he illustrated our strategy which is, hey, we're focusing on the core parts of backup and replication and helping the core parts of data protection. We're going to partner with everything else that's adjacent to that. We're not going to go solve maybe some of the security problems ourselves. We're going to enable some hooks, secure restore maybe as an example. We've announced, you know, in the technology keynote yesterday, we announced a new API that allows partners to come in and crack open beam backups and take a look at them. One of the things could be deep inspection. So, you know, our strategy and our goal is really to be open to our partners so that they can come in and add value. And again, our goal for our customers is give them choice. So give them choice to choose best of breed solutions. Don't go do it and say, hey, you got to go use partner A. You know, hey, we're going to have an API that others can build to and you go choose your best of breed partner or your platform technology choice. Well, and with 350,000 customers, you got a big observation space. So, guys have always been customer driven. Ken, give you the last word on Veebond 2019. You're our last guest and we're going to wrap with a little analysis on our end but give us the bumper sticker. Yeah, I think the bumper sticker is, you know, we've, you know, from a business perspective, you know, we hit a billion dollars in bookings. We have hit 350,000 customers. The innovation train is really moving. Our Veeam cloud tier that we announced with update four earlier this year has gone way beyond our expectations and we're looking to continue to build on that momentum. So we're just super excited. You know, we, if I'm the closer, I'll say thanks to all of our sponsors. We have a lot of great sponsors on the cloud side, on the Alliance partner side, the channel side. You know, it's just, it's a testament to where we are as a company. Yeah, and you're building out a great ecosystem. Congratulations on that and good luck going forward. And we'll see you around at the shows. It's great, great to have you guys. Great, thank you. All right, you're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Peter and I went back to wrap right after this short. Break you watching theCUBE live from Veeamond 2019 from Miami. We'll be right back.