 Live from Chicago, Illinois. It's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to Chicago, everybody. The Windy City, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here day two at VeeamON 2018, theCUBE's second year doing VeeamON. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. Patrick Osborn is here. The newly minted VP and GM of Big Data and Secondary Storage. And CUBE alumni. HPE and many time CUBE alum, did you get a sticker? Yeah, it's already on my laptop. Awesome, great to see you again. Good to see you guys. Thanks so much for coming on. Always fun at VeeamON. Yep. They have a big presence at your show, HPE Discover. They painted the Chai Town green. Yep. What's going on at the show for you guys? So a huge partner for us in our ecosystem. As you guys know, HPE and the world of virtualized workloads, like, you know, we definitely own the space. In terms of the number of VMs sitting on our infrastructure, and they are a great partner. They have, you know, we've got thousands of customers. And I think what we're seeing too is that as Veeam grows up into the mid-size and enterprise space, that is, you know, that's where our wheelhouse is. And so we're getting a lot of customer interactions in that space. And then with some of our offerings around Nimble and SimpliVity, where they play very well in the commercial segments. That's a great way for us to go grab new logos, be present in the channel. So it's a really good partnership for us on both ends. I definitely want to understand what's going on in big data. But before we get there, let's talk a little bit about secondary storage and your point of view there. We know that data protection is moving way up on the list of CXO priorities. We also know there's a dissonance in the customer base between the expectations of how much automation is actually there from the line of business versus what IT can deliver. So there's this gap. And now you have multi-cloud coming on in a big way, digital transformation. So it feels like backup and recovery and data protection is transforming. Throw in security and it'll even complicate it further. What's your point of view on what's going on in this mix? Well, certainly the sands are shifting in the secondary storage market. I think because of a heightened customer expectation in this area, whether it's, you know, I want to do more with my data running, you know, things that we do at Veeam, like test dab, automation, sandboxing, security, ransomware, all those are higher level data services than just what people were doing in the past around backup and recovery. So for us, we're really focused a lot on automation in this space. The death of backup and recovery in that traditional space is essentially caused by complexity. So automate or die in this space. Nobody wants to deal with backup. What you want is outcomes. And what we're doing is for our product line, we've got sort of this three tiered mantra of predictive, cloud ready and timeless. So we want to be able to through platforms like InfoSight, be able to heavily, heavily automate that all those activities, cloud ready because, you know, as we talked before, it's a hybrid world. People, especially especially in secondary storage want to have some data on-prem and certainly a lot of it for archival and retention off-prem. And then timeless is sort of this scenario around even though I'm operating a data center, I want the purchasing experience to be elastic and like you get in the cloud, right? So consumption based as a service. So that's what we're trying to bring to the market for secondary storage and storage in general. Pet Patrick, as I look at this space, you talk about that hybrid, multi-cloud world that we're talking about. The two main things are data and my application. So you talked a bit about the data, connect for us kind of the application I think cloud native and 12 factor micro services versus traditional applications. You've got that whole spectrum. What do you see from your customers? How you helping them? Yeah, so we're definitely seeing a lot of the tech leading customers in the enterprise from HPE and the big logos, right? They're out there disrupting themselves, disrupting industry are massively betting on analytics, right? So they're moved from certainly from databases to batch now it's all what, you know, I think people call it fast data, streaming analytics, Kafka, Spark. So we're seeing that part of our business that HPE is growing like non sequentially, right? So it's really good business for us. But what's going on right now is that the customers who are doing this, these are all net new apps, Kubernetes, you know, new styles of application and it's not a rip and replace, it's more of an augmentation scenario where you're providing new services on top of existing apps. So that is very new and I think one of the things we'll see over the next couple of years is how do I protect those workloads? How do I provide multi-cloud for them? So it's an interesting space, it's very nascent, a lot of tech, you know, heavy investment going on for the, you know, the big players in the market. But that's going to tail, that's going to have a long tail into the mid-range. How will the data protection architecture sort of change for those new emerging applications? You know, maybe IoT, you know, is another piece of that. And maybe where does your partnership with Veeam fit into that? Yeah, so we are having a number of strategy discussions on that this morning, you know, and I think in that space is, you know, there's a lot of identification that has to go on. Do I want to back it up? Do I care? Right, are those persistent streams or that IoT data that's coming in? Do I really have to back it up at the end of the day or can I back up the results? So a lot of it is not just an availability issue, it's certainly a data management issue. But a lot of the tools that we would need to do that, today they're focused on bare metal, VMware, virtualization. A lot of stuff hasn't been written yet, right? So I think there's a lot of actual tech development that has to go on in this space. And I think we're kind of poised together as partners to deliver in that area the next couple of years. You guys have this tagline, we make hybrid IT simple. Yes. IT, you know, very quantifiable. Ain't simple. So where does storage fit into that equation? Yeah, the thing, the stats that blow my mind was, I think IDC came out with this is that there's essentially around 500 million apps in the data center today. And then, you know, they're in any sort of spectrum of bare metal, being virtualized, maybe being containerized. In the next four years, there's going to be 500 million net new apps, right? So it's like, it's mind blowing in terms of most people have a flat budget, maybe a little increase. So you're thinking you're doubling the amount of apps you have and all the services around it. So for us, the automation piece is absolutely key, right? So anything we can do with InfoSight as a platform, we're going to be extending that to other products you've seen, we've done it for three par. We'll be printing that experience, but anything we can do around automation, analytics, that's going to take a lot of the mystery and complexity out of managing these apps and services, I think is a win for the customers. And that's why they're going to buy into the platforms. Yeah, imagine if you're a young family, you got two kids and you have twins. Yeah. Uh-oh. Yeah. Or you decide to have two more, like I did. Patrick, we've been talking about intelligence in the storage world for decades. Yes. Why is it real and more real and different now than it was in some of the previous generations? Yeah, I think some of the techniques, like so we've had systems that have called home and brought telemetry home forever, right? But I think what's going on is that as you take the tools that we've developed and a lot of them are new, right? That are allowing you to do this, it's the practitioners of the data science which is like the key at the end of the day. So InfoSight is an amazing piece of technology. A lot of the magic is in the way that you set up your teams to be able to take that on, right? So it's no longer a product manager, an engineering guy, support person in a different organization, right? What we have is what we call a peak team, right? Which is takes all the functions, brings them together with a data scientist to be able to take a look at how can I do machine learning, AI, a more predictive model to actually take use of this data, right? And I think the techniques and the organizational design is the big change that's happened over the last couple years. Data has always been there, right? But now we know what to do with it. Yeah, and like you said before, the curve is reshaping. It's not this linear Moore's law curve anymore. It's this exponential curve. Exactly. I can't even draw it anymore. I don't know what you, you know, it used to be easy. Oh, just put the dotted line straight out. Now it's twisting. So that increases the need obviously for automation. Talk about how HPE's automation play is differentiable in the marketplace. So I think a couple of things from a differentiated perspective. Obviously we talked a lot about InfoSight as a platform. As a portfolio company, we're definitely trying to take out the friction in terms of the deployment and automation of some of these big data environments. So our mission is to be able to, like you would stand up, some analytic workloads in the public cloud to provide that same experience on-prem. And essentially be the broker for that user experience. So that's an area that we're going to differentiate. And then in general, there's not that many mega portfolio companies anymore. And I feel like that we are exploiting that for our customers, bringing together compute networking and storage, and certainly on the automation side. So for us, I really feel that you're no longer going to be buying on horizontal lines anymore. Best of breed servers, best of breed networking, best of breed storage, but bringing together a complete vetted stack for a set of workloads from a vendor like HPE. So. Yeah, and it was just announced, the deal's not closed yet, but just to mention the audience, HPE has made an acquisition of Plexi, the networking specialist. Our good friends Rich Napolitano and Desville Ford. Just this week, which is interesting because that brings cloud scale to some of the hyper-converged infrastructure. It's essentially hyper-converged networking. So really interested to see how that plays out. HPE has made a number of really effective acquisitions over the last several years. Starting really with 3PAR was the one, clearly Aruba, the Nimble acquisition, SimpliVity, so SGI. So some really strong, both tactical and strategic move for HPE. Really interested to see how Plexi sorts out. Okay, we got to talk sports. Yes. For a minute. I asked Peter McKay this question, and I asked these Boston sports fans. If you were Robert Kraft, would you have traded Tom Brady? No. No way. No way, no way. Okay, that's consistent with Peter McKay. That's like trading Montana, that didn't work out. It did work out, right? Yeah, but I mean. Trading Montana, then they wanted a Superbowl. Yeah, I know, but I mean, I think it's, for me, he's an icon, and then he's still operating at maximum efficiency, which is amazing, but I think he's got a lot of legs in him. What do you think of the, he's got to, hopefully he stays, hopefully he does play the 45. What do you think of the Garoppolo trade, though? Are you disappointed that they didn't get more? Or do you think it was the right move to hang on just in case Brady went down again? I think it's the right move at the end of the day, right? You're not going to get much from him anyways, and they're certainly not going to pay him out as a backup quarterback. What I don't like, though, is the fact that he's gone to the 49ers, and that's where most of my engineering team is in the Bay Area, so to have to deal with the Yahoo 49ers fans for the next couple of years is going to be painful, but it's good. It's a good renewed rivalry. So you're not a... Celtics, Warriors, Patriots, Niners. You're not an instant transplanted 49ers fan because of Garoppolo, right? No, absolutely not. He's a carpet bagger, so. He's off the team. Yeah, he's out of the house. Okay, Bruins were a big disappointment this year. You know, the Celtics were super exciting. Let's go there. I mean, you watch the Celtics early in the year because you're like, after Hayward went down, you're like, we were all walking around like this. And then you saw these kids. I feel like it's like where Kennedy was shot, right? I know exactly where I was, right? And you had people blaming Danny Ainge for making the move. I'm like, come on, guys. And then you see what happened with the young players. And then they sort of tailed off a little bit. They were struggling. Kai was trying to find his way, and now they're the exciting team. Up 2-0 on Cleveland. I mean, you got to believe that LeBron is going to step up this game with a little home cooking. But let's assume for a second that they get by Cleveland, which will be a huge task. I mean, I don't think there's anybody in the NBA who can stop Kevin Durant, but I'd love to see Marcus Smartry. So yeah, so two things in that scenario. One is that who needs Kyrie Irvingmore right now, Cleveland or Boston, right? Which is amazing. Can you imagine being and saying that a couple of months ago, which blows my mind. And then for me, it's a revamping of the NBA, right? If you get the Celtics versus the Warriors in that style of play, I mean, it's definitely, it's changed the whole game, right? Shooting guards, ballers. I just, I think it's fantastic to see, you know, a whole new style of play in the NBA. It's so exciting to see the Celtics back here. Team basketball, defense, passing, all of it. And ESPN is losing their minds. You don't know what to do. Stephen A. Smith doesn't know what to say. ESPN lies. He's actually pissed. Yeah. So now, Stu, you know, Yankees fan, of course, and you know my line on the Yankees. Stu's kind of a weekend Yankees fan. But my line on the Yankees is, Red Sox, you can't beat us in April. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Here it is in May. Dave, I'm just quiet around you because, you know, I know where my paycheck comes from. I appreciate that respect there, Stu. Patriots were in agreement. But think about all these renewed rivalries. It's great. It is great. Celtics Sixers. Celtics Sixers could be great. Red Sox Yankees, it's unbelievable. Love it. And like you said, San Francisco and Philly. And the Pats. Pats, you know. Patrick, always a pleasure to see you. Thanks for making time out here. Thanks, yeah, absolutely. We're coming on theCUBE. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. Right after this brief break, you're watching theCUBE live from Veeamon 2018.