 from Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York. It's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. Welcome to New York City, everybody. We're here in the heart of Central Park at the beautiful location, Tavern on the Green. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. It is our special coverage of the Veritas Solutions Day. Hashtag is Vitas Vision. Veritas Vision last year was a big tent customer event, several thousand customers at that event. And Veritas decided this year to go out to the field. 20 of these solution days, very intimate events, a couple hundred customers, keynote presentations from Veritas, breakout sessions, getting deep into the product, but also talking strategy and intimate conversations with executives, CXOs, CIOs, backup admins. And of course, New York City is one of those places where you get very advanced customers, pushing the envelope, very demanding. I often joke there is demanding as New York sports fans. And so, they have high expectations and, but they also have a lot of money. And so, the vendor community loves to come to New York. They love to get intimate with these customers in New York, as do we at theCUBE. So we're going to be talking to customers today. We're going to be talking to executives of Veritas and partners. So I want to talk a little bit about what's going on in the marketplace in this backup and recovery space. It's transforming quite dramatically. For those of you who follow theCUBE, you know last year at VMworld, last two years actually, data protection was one of the hottest topics at the event. Of course, multi-cloud. Of course, there was a lot of AI talk and containers and Kubernetes, but stayed old backup. You know, old reliable data protection was one of the hottest topics. We're seeing VC money pour into the space. We're seeing upstarts like Cohesity and Rubrik trying to take aim at the incumbents, like Veritas and Commvault and IBM and Dell EMC. And so those traditional companies, those enterprise companies that have large install bases are trying to hold onto that install base and migrate their platforms to a modern, software-defined platform, API-based, using containers, using microservices, building on top of the code that they've developed, simplifying the UI, and at the same time, allowing for an abstraction layer across clouds and multi-clouds. So what are the big drivers that are really pushing the trends, the mega trends of this space? Well, certainly digital transformation is one of them. The last 10 years of big data, people have gathered all this data and now that data is in place and people are now applying machine intelligence to that data. They're doing a lot of this work in the cloud. So digital transformation, data, big data, cloud, multi-cloud, simplification, people want a much simpler experience. So bringing the cloud experience to their data wherever the data might live. Because of course you've got the three laws of cloud. You've got the law of physics, right? If physics says you can't just shove everything into the cloud, it just takes too long. If I have a big bog of data, if I have a petted byte of data, you know how long that's going to take to put into the cloud. So I may not just move it in there unless I stick it on a Chevy truck and cart it over on a bunch of tapes and nobody really wants to do that. So there's the law of physics. There's also the law of economics. It's very expensive to move that data. You need a lot of network bandwidth. So you might not necessarily put everything into the cloud. You might keep stuff on-prem. And then of course there's the law of the land. And the law of the land says, well, if I'm in country X, let's say Germany, that data can't leave that country. It's got to be physically proximate inside the boundaries, the borders of that country by local laws. So these three laws are something that was put forth to us by Pat Gelsinger on theCUBE at VMworld this year. We've evolved that thinking, but it's very true when we talk to customers about this. These are trends that are driving their decisions about cloud and multi-cloud and where to put it. We've talked in theCUBE about the stat that the average enterprise has eight clouds. Well, we're a small enterprise and we have eight clouds. So I think that number is actually much, much higher, especially when you include SAS. So lots of data, lots of copies of data. So you need a way to abstract all that complexity and have a single place to protect your data. Now a big part of this digital transformation is driving more intense requirements on recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives. RPO and RTO, what do those words mean? Recovery point objective, think about, ask a business person, how much data are you willing to lose? And they'll go, oh, what are you talking about? I don't want to lose any data. But if you think about it and you ask the next question, how much are you willing to spend so that you lose no data? And if they have to spend millions and millions of dollars to do that, they might relax that requirement a little bit. They might say, well, if I lose 15 minutes of data in any given time and have to recreate it, not the end of the world. So that's what RPO is, is essentially the point in time that you're going to recover and how much data loss you're exposed to. And the way this works is you take, let's say, snapshots to simplify the equation, you push those offsite away from any potential disaster. And it's that gap between when you actually capture the data and when that disaster might happen that you're exposed. So to make that as close as zero as possible, that gap as close as zero as possible, is very, very expensive. So a lot of companies don't want to do that. At the same time, digital transformations pushing them to get as close to zero as possible without breaking the bank. The other part of that equation is recovery time objective, how long it takes to get the application and the data back and running. And because of digital transformation, people want to make that virtually instantaneously. So because of digital transformation, people are re-architecting their data protection strategies to have near instantaneous recovery. This all fits into the mega trend of cloud. People want it to be simpler. They want it to mimic the cloud like experience, almost as if I'm on Amazon or I'm on Netflix. So simplifying the recovery process and the backup process is something that we're going to hear a lot more of. Automation is another big theme. People tend to automate through scripts. Well, scripts are fragile. Scripts tend to break. When changes are made in software, scripts tend to have to be rewritten and maintained. And so it's a very high maintenance type of activity to do scripts and over time they just fade away or they stop working. So automation through API is very, very important. Something that you're hearing is much more thematic in this world of data protection. The other is getting more out of the corpus of data in my data protection infrastructure because let's face it, backup and recovery, it's like insurance. I hope I never need it, but if I do need it, it's very valuable at that point in time that I do need it. But it's an expense. It's not driving bottom line revenue. It's not necessarily cutting cost. It is indirectly in the form of reducing the cost of downtime, but that's harder. That's kind of viewed oftentimes as a soft dollar benefit. So what you're hearing is a lot of the vendor community and the user community are talking about getting more out of the data that they have and out of the backup and recovery infrastructure by bringing analytics and machine intelligence or AI and machine learning to the equation. Studying analytics to identify anomalous behavior, maybe identifying security breaches, creating air gaps such that I can potentially thwart ransomware or other malware infections, analyzing the corpus of backup data because it's holds the call the company's corporate data, it's accessible. If you can analyze that data and look for anomalies, you might be able to thwart and attack. So getting more out of that data through analytics. Predictive maintenance is another example of data analytics that's driving some of these trends beyond just backup and recovery and also governance. So governance and privacy or security and privacy are two sides of the same coin. So with GDPR, the general data protection regulation that came out that went into effect in terms of fines going into effect this past May, very, very onerous and expensive fines. People are using their data protection corpus and the analytics around that to reduce their risk and to better govern their data. So these are some of the big trends that we're seeing. So Veritas is a leader here. We're going to be covering this all day. Veritas and some of its other brethren that have been around for decades are getting attacked by a lot of the upstarts, but they got the advantage that the installed vendors have the advantage of a large install base so the incumbent vendors have the advantage of a large install base. The upstarts have the advantage of their starting with a clean sheet of paper. We're going to talk to customers and find out, what are they thinking in terms of their backup approach? Industry data suggests that over half of the customers that you talk to are rethinking their backup strategies because of digital transformation. Well, we're going to talk to some customers. Are they thinking about sticking with Veritas? Are they thinking about migrating? Why or why not? What are some of the advantages and considerations there? So Veritas, a long rich story going back to the 80s when the company was founded was a hot IPO, really super hot company got sold to Symantec for about $13.5 billion and then Symantec spun it out to private equity several years ago and an $8 billion go private sale and subsequently Veritas got off the 90 day shot clock. We heard this from companies like Dell where they didn't have to report and get abused by the street for either missing a number or having one little metric that was off so they could write their own narrative, they could invest in R&D, they could have more patient capital. And so you saw this from the Carlisle group that took Veritas private and it's been sort of this march toward a new platform, spending money on R&D and now really going to market very aggressively. And the other thing you're going to hear about is partnerships, partnerships with AWS and some of the other cloud providers. There's a partnership that's being announced with the Flash Storage Company Pure today so we're going to dig into some of that. So we'll be here all day, tavern on the green. You're watching theCUBE and we're here in New York City. Keep it right there, we'll be right back. I'm Dave Vellante, back shortly.