 From Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering Dotnext Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix.next here in Nice, France. Happy to welcome to the program Peter Grimman, who is the EMEA CTO at Veritas. Peter, thanks so much for joining us. You're welcome, it's great to be here. All right, so we had theCUBE at Veritas Vision earlier this year. My co-CEO, Dave Vellante and I, did a whole bunch of interviews, really reintroducing to a lot of people. I remember Veritas and back in the day, but through the semantic acquisition now, back out, it's a lot of interesting things coming. Obviously a company that's always been a software company, at its core, as opposed to in the infrastructure world, it's a company like Nutanix. It's like, wait, wait, do you sell appliances or are you software, what's your mix there? Veritas, you're a software company. Why don't you start off with just a little bit about your role, how long you've been at Veritas and what brings you here to this show? Yeah, by all means. Well, so I've been at Veritas forever. I actually started with a company in 1994, believe it or not, so yeah, I've been here a long time, I've had a lot of time in consulting, working with our customers, installing, configuring backup solutions and delivering, consulting around the data center, and then most recently moved into leading teams and acting as the CTO for the business here in Amir. Wow, yeah, 94, that's many lifetimes in the tech world. Everybody thinks of Veritas back in the day, it was like net backup, is what people know. What products are you involved with, what are you meeting with customers, what are kind of the key things you're focused on? Yeah, so our portfolio has grown substantially over those years, especially actually in the last year or so, so we've actually launched seven new offerings in the last year, really expanding our reach to cover enterprise data management very broadly, and extending also out from the data center to really cover the multi-cloud, so we can now provide pretty much end-to-end data management capability across the multi-cloud. Okay, great, and when you say multi-cloud, you're working with the public cloud providers, as well as many of the infrastructure providers. Give us a little bit of the scope, what you do and don't do when it comes to multi-cloud. So when I talk to my customers about what they're doing with cloud, almost all of them have what we describe as a multi-cloud approach, so that means multiple public clouds plus their own private cloud, and in some cases, more than one private cloud that they're working with as well. So our mission to deliver enterprise data management services to those customers has to also have that reach. So we're working with a number of the large cloud service providers, such as Amazon and Google and Microsoft, IBM as well, and indeed Oracle, as well as working with private cloud providers such as Nutanix. Excellent, so let's connect to Nutanix there. Nutanix talks about enterprise cloud. Most of their solutions today deployed in customers' data center. Talking about edge deployments, talking about how they extend public clouds, like for example, partnerships with Google, with Microsoft, they've always had. Tell us how Veritas and Nutanix, what's the boundaries, how do they connect? Yeah, so ultimately as customers move their workloads onto hyper-converged platforms, and a lot of our customers are doing that, they need to find ways to protect that data. Now, for those customers who are using a hypervisor such as VMware on Nutanix, we've been able to back up that data for them for a while, and we can back up data that's been on the Acropolis hypervisor in-guest, but what we've done with Nutanix recently is to integrate NetBackup with AHV so we can now back up at a VMware level from Nutanix systems. Peter, take us in that, because it's been a discussion with a lot of the ecosystem is like, okay, how much work is it to certify AHV? Is this a Nutanix push, or is it a customer pull? Take us inside a little bit as to what led to this work, how easy or hard was it, and what's kind of the customer demand for it? So the customer demand is high, customers are looking, those that have had Nutanix deployed for some time are now interested in moving to AHV, they want to use that as a platform, there are some good benefits to them in doing that, and one of the things that's potentially been stopping them from doing that is the ability to protect their data properly in those environments. So having the ability to do those backups in AHVs is important to them, so they've certainly been asking us for that, I believe they've been asking Nutanix for it as well, and that's why we're partnering together. In terms of how complex it is, in the world of RESTful APIs, it actually becomes relatively straightforward. Net backup has a RESTful API which allows you to back up parallel workloads, Nutanix has a RESTful API that allows you to access their backup API, and we hook those two together and get a solution reasonably quickly, actually. Awesome, I would assume most of your customers, they're doing multiple hypervisors though, so Veritas, you play well in that environment, I've got Veritas and AHV, or you know that much. So we've had support for hypervisors such as VMware and Hyper-V for some time, AHV's one that we haven't supported, and so this integration was overdue, and we've now done it, so customers can protect their data whichever hypervisor they're using. Yeah, I guess the question was, if a customer has a multi-hypervisor environment, are there any complications, or is it, it doesn't matter how many of the hypervisors they support, if you support them all, it's pretty straightforward. Yep, that's the case. So we can deploy backup solutions across all of them and manage all of those from a central management point, so it helps to take the complexity out of it. Okay, I want to switch a little bit to hear about kind of customers, I know Veritas vision, and especially here at a European Geo, GDPR is a hot topic of the conversation. I've heard some of the Veritas, does Veritas and Nutanix, is there a play jointly on there, or is that more of a separate initiative? Look, I think we're both hearing the same thing from our customers, right, which is that GDPR is something that's exercising them. I just come from the executive track, actually, where that was a topic of conversation. And I think customers are definitely at different stages of maturity on that, so when we talk to our customers, there are a lot of them at very early stages in thinking about GDPR, and there are others that have already pointed at a data privacy officer and are working through a program to get that done. So it's at different stages, but I think generally speaking, enterprises are still looking for help to get that problem solved. Okay, what else are you hearing from customers, kind of, you know, big pain points or areas where they're looking to modernize that Veritas can help? Well, so look, I think the big thing that we're hearing from customers is this move to the cloud, and the thing that's really driving that move to the cloud is digital transformation. So, you know, all enterprises are looking to leverage a more digital model. They see cloud as a way of accelerating that, and so they are looking to move aggressively to the cloud. One of the things that potentially makes that harder than it might otherwise be is assuring the proper management of your data, making sure it's secure and protected and available and performant, and that's where Veritas comes in. So we're helping, we believe, to make it easier for customers to adopt a multi-cloud approach by giving them access to their data wherever they need it, by protecting that data and giving them good visibility into that data wherever it sits, whether that be in Azure or in Office 365 or on-premise. All right, so Peter, now that Veritas is supporting HV, what should we look for, you know, really for the next year? Certain go-to-market initiatives or other, you know, integration and engineering work that we should be looking for. Yeah, so as you probably heard, when we were at Vision together, our approach around data management is what we call 360 data management, which is a suite of tools that we've put together to solve the data management problem. You know, our aim, certainly, is to extend the 360 data management approach to Nutanix, so rather than just covering data protection, we're also covering other areas of data management such as data access, disaster recovery, data visibility, those kind of areas. Okay, great. Peter, I want to give you the final word. At Veritas Show, we talked about the truth and information. What have you been hearing from customers here? What would you want them to take away from the Nutanix show from a Veritas standpoint? Well, I think the key message is that, you know, customers get great value from Nutanix HCI platform. Many of those same customers get great value from Veritas. Now they've got that value combined. All right, well, Peter Griman, really appreciate you joining us. We'll be back with more coverage here from the Nutanix.NEXT conference in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching The Cube.