 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live, 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to day two of live coverage with theCUBE here at Cisco Live, 2018 in Europe, we're in Barcelona, Spain. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Coast theCUBE. Let's do many, many analysts at wikibon.com as well as CUBE co-hosts, many events. Certainly Stu, not a stranger to Cisco, open source, and overall the disruption that digital is having on the enterprise. Our next guest is Michael Cade, global technologist and product strategy at Veeam Software. Michael, great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Hi John, hi Sue. So, we guys are here with Cisco Veeam. You guys have been a big success story we've covered on theCUBE many times. Europe, Cisco, what's the vibe here? What's going on the show? So, so back in mid 2017, October 2017, we announced that we were gonna be on the global price list and so obviously that, this is different from last year in that we're having more conversations. People know what we're doing for starters. They're not asking how do we protect the network? How do we protect the ASAs and the firewalls and et cetera, so it's very good to have those conversations with the enterprise guys and they now understand that we're able to protect their workload, their data. So, I imagine it'll be exactly the same when we go over to Cisco live in the US but this is obviously the first show that we've had where we are talking about availability with Cisco as a joint partner on their global price list. One of the things that we always see with you guys is that your logo's everywhere, they've got the green Veeam. What's the relationship that you guys have with customers? You're playing a lot of great spaces. What's the main relationship and brand promise that Veeam has? So I guess, so from our point of view is that we come from an SMB route, if you like, but over the years, over that last 10 years we've developed that scalable product that allows us to protect the larger workloads within the enterprise, we also have cloud offerings to enable our service provider partners. So we've got exactly that. We want to be able to play and protect data in whatever facet that needs to be. So whether it be cloud, whether it be on-premises, SMB, commercial, enterprise, we want to be able to protect all of those workloads. So Michael, one of the things we've been talking about here at the show, you go look at the world of solutions. It's a big ecosystem and it's been changing. Cisco's got a lot of different pieces, big moving software, what's happening in cloud, and data center, they have dozens of storage relationships and that's where I think Veeam ties in a lot, maybe gives a little bit of an overview kind of the breadth and depth of the relationship where you play in relation to UCS converge, hyper-converged all those pieces. Yeah, so I guess converge first, if we look at the majority of the data center and the customers that we speak to, there's still very much, there's a large footprint of converged infrastructure, whether that be flex pod versus stack, Pure's flash stack, or Vblock from a Dell EMC point of view. And the good thing where we come in is that we have storage integration into all of them. So regardless of that compute, however, it brings a nice simplicity model to the customer from that stack, but for us to just slot into that and be able to leverage the storage integrations and be able to take an efficient snapshot of those virtual machines and push them onto a, maybe a Cisco S3260 that's that modular scalable server or both compute and high density storage, really gives us the best of both worlds in terms of plugging into that fabric interconnect and making that converged backup story or converged availability story. Yeah, so you mentioned there's a lot of options out there, still most customers, there's more customers that aren't doing some flavor of converge or hyperconverge than are. There's a lot of buzz around the hyperconverge piece of it. What are you hearing from customers? You said there's a lot of kind of CI versus HCI, still numbers show that out. I mean, there's a lot more solutions out there. Been on the market a lot longer, but where are the customers? What are some of the decision points and how's your organization held? So I guess where we're seeing things like the Hyperflex where we also have storage integration there from a protection point of view, seeing many of them feed into that major, that main data center. So we're protecting the data, we're using our replication engine to push data into that larger data center for hot DR or that high availability type solution. And I think that's why we're seeing it. We are also seeing more Hyperflex or more HCI come into that main data center for some certain verticals from that point of view. Okay, so if I could just unpack what you're saying there. Most of the HCI's have been kind of the robo, smaller environments where traditional, just three tier or CI has been there, but we're starting to see that blurring of the lines between what's there. Yeah, people are definitely bringing that HCI, that simplicity, that scalable simplicity model into their main data center as it kind of merges with that converged offering, right? So, yeah, the other thing, you know, very clear at the Veeam show last year when we covered, really customers trying to bake out their cloud strategy. You know, how does that tie into all of this discussion here, Cisco's talking a lot about multi-cloud, a lot of that's really the management plane. How do you see that from an availability solution? Yeah, so yesterday I was sat in the keynote reading some of the stuff. We had our sales kickoff last week and some of the stuff really resonates with our message as well that's out there. So the whole multi-cloud, our tagline is around any app, any data, any cloud. So it kind of resonates with what Cisco is saying and that's obviously a good thing, but so whether that be the public cloud, whether it's enabling our service providers to leverage the Cisco technologies plus Veeam to offer a service out to our existing Veeam customers, the on-premises solution, or whether it just be that on-premises, that data center that we just talked about with a converged or HCI type play. What's the big thing that you guys learned at your sales kickoff because, you know, we always wonder what goes on at these sales kickoffs. People like cheering, they're making their quota, business is good, but they listen to customers. What's the big use cases that you guys are really doing well with Cisco on? I mean, that's ultimately the patterns kind of emerge. It's always the best product. What's the hot use case for you guys with Cisco? So I think one of our biggest things is about how do we partner with the likes of Cisco? How do we leverage that relationship to bring more Cisco-validated designs, reference architectures from a technical point of view up? It's all good, all the numbers being rar rar as you're in the sales kickoff, but ultimately it's about the vision. How do we go forward with that partnership? Being on that price list is really gonna help us getting into some of those accounts from that point of view. But also, from a technical point of view, I know that we've got the design, we've got the model behind us that will... When did you guys get on the price list? Recently? I believe it was October 2016. Okay, so just recently. So really recently. So the deal's going to start flying in. Hopefully. Hopefully, right. What's the biggest challenge you find with Veeam's customers? You guys certainly done really well. Again, we've covered your success on theCUBE many times at other events like VMworld and others. What's the aha moment for the customers with Veeam? Just easy solution, is it a technical pain point or what's that moment where the customer really gets it? So I think the simplicity that easy to use, that easy to deploy, regardless whether you're a three ESXi host shot or whether you're a multi 10,000 VM type enterprise estate is being able to use that same tool set to protect all the way through. It's really simple. We want to keep that user interface really easy to consume and use and scale. So that's one of the key areas that I see that we're playing in. All right, so it's 2018 now. We've got a looming headwind that a lot of customers, we are concerned about, haven't heard a lot about it yet at this show, but GDPR, definitely something on everybody's mind. Is this another Y2K that's really going to slow down IT buying or are there engagements? How does Veeam work with customers and what's it going to do to the landscape of IT this year? So we've been looking at the GDPR compliance and our messaging has been, we've been really working on how we start mentioning this and marketing this out from a Veeam perspective. So we're not going to get anyone GDPR compliant, but what we are going to do is help you understand where that data is, how long it's been kept for, where it is kept, where it's stored, et cetera. So in update three that we released just before Christmas, it was around location tagging. So if that backup comes into a certain geo then we want to be able to tag that and that tag stays with that backup data wherever it goes. So, and then we've got Veeam one that monitors and reports against that. So you know whether you're violating your GDPR compliance or a violation of where that data should be located. But it's one of the things that, so we're seeing it's not a day kind of that goes by at the moment where I'm not speaking to someone about GDPR and obviously it's really, it's coming around very fast. What we've made this year is when it comes into force. Are people shaking in their boots? I mean I'm hearing like a lot of people really nervous. I mean it's kind of not been played out, but certainly the press has been covering it, but I mean the Y2K problem, remember the Dough Glory days too, the millennial, that bug never really happened, but GDPR is a freaking hardcore enforcement and the penalties are stiff. I mean it's ridiculous. That's a big percentage of your gross income, right? The people that I speak to are definitely aware and concerned that they need to be in this particular state by the time we get to May. It's not about waiting until that date in May, either it's about how do we do it now and start understanding a bit more about our data. Cisco yesterday on the main stage, they said it's all about data and absolutely resonates exactly with what we want to do. We want to be able to do more with that, but also we need to understand what that data is, how long we keeping for, why we keeping it and all ask those questions to these new data protection officers, data, data. Well I mean people are having more data driven strategies and we were commenting yesterday, we didn't hear much here about that, Cisco's not using that data driven because it's not a little big data show or not a lot of AI here yet, but if you got data driven you better have data protection, right? I mean you can't have both. They kind of go hand in hand, right? And I think that's another thing where we're coming into the fold is that we've got features in our tool set that allow us to spin up that data in an isolated network, be able to run tests against them, run compliance checks against them to make sure one the backup comes up. So when you're not waiting until that problem hits, so you can bring it up, but also be able to test against updates, et cetera. All right, so here's a question for you. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, okay? Well, you know, I really am on premises, on-prem Stu, pretend how you want to argue that point with Stu and I were yesterday about on-prem versus on-premises. I'm on-premises, I'm getting my cloud operation, I got my data protection, but I really got to get in the cloud, I got some stuff in the cloud now. Cloud is my mission, I'm going to be moving to the cloud in a very big way. How does Veean help me? So we want to bring the technology that you've been using on-premises hopefully maybe Veean, and we want to take that same easy to use concept, that same UI that you've been using and really hopefully you've seen it as a simplistic approach to your data, taking the headache out of the data protection story, but if you are pushing into those public clouds, being able to give you a seamless way of being still be able to protect. So same dashboard, same mechanism. Similar tool sets, exactly that, and be able to protect that. Across multiple clouds as well, because multi-cloud is hot. Yeah, exactly. We want to be able to be, like we are within virtualization, be able to protect any workload on VMware, Hyper-V, et cetera. We also want to be able to protect any of those public clouds using the same tool set to be able to protect that same file format that we're backing up to, same fundamentals that we have. Yeah, Michael, want to get your view on Cisco Live here. You were in the keynote. You go to a number of shows. This show used to be, I mean, it was hardcore networking. It was all networking, CCIEs and everything. We're sitting here in the DevNet zone. They've got developers. Got good storage ecosystem here. How do you look at the audience here compared to, say, a VM world or some of the other partner activities that you go to? So I think a couple of years ago, they were kind of saying that you need to broaden your knowledge. As an IT consultant, IT person within a company, you have to expand your technologies. You can't just be the networking guy. You can't just be the storage guy. And I think, I don't know if you guys see it, but definitely seeing more broadened people, again, like I said, the people, the conversations that I'm having at the booth, they're all aware of what we do now. So they've clearly broadened their knowledge away from that networking, but also with the likes of the DevNet, so being able to code and all of the API-driven type stories that we hear is also being able to leverage that and push that into whatever that data center needs to be from an automation orchestration point of view. And everyone plays a part in that, whether it's the storage, whether it's the availability vendors, whether it's the compute vendors, whether it's the virtualization, everyone has a part to play in that automation orchestration piece. Awesome. Well, how's your experience, the show been, how's the European flavor here? What's your takeaway? I guess, so just- Good customer action, good partners. Yeah, I mean, so speaking to your Cisco reps, go and see us from a beam point of view in your region, understand a bit more about around GDPR. GDPR's coming, there's no way of getting around that. Understand what tools can actually help you be more compliant. Also look at, I've spoken to a number of people around that converged and HCI piece, and they weren't aware around the integration. So go away and see if we do fit in that integration piece. Existing customers go away and find out that information. And yeah, and- All right, so what's the difference between the North America customer and the European customer? They have little nuances, they obviously have regional issues, obviously by sovereignty countries. Is there a buyer behavior and from a beam customer standpoint, difference between customer in North America versus Europe? So I'm mostly over in Europe, but from the customers that we speak to over in the US, they're still, that's the most concerning part around that GDPR piece, they still need to have that understanding of what GDPR is doing if they're holding data, especially the larger enterprises, they're going to be holding data for those European countries. So they need to be compliant that way. And I think that's the misunderstanding maybe from some of the people or- So Europeans are more savvy on the compliance side. From the people that I've spoken to, they know that it affects them because they're in country and they're holding that data. However, it affects everyone. It's a global compliance. If you're holding data from anywhere. I mean, in North America, they kind of kick the can down the road and they're like, oh wow, GDPR is upon you. Yeah. All right, Europeans are very savvy on compliance. Obviously a huge issue, data-driven data protection. We're here inside the queue with Veeam Software. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman live from Barcelona for Cisco Live 2018 Europe. More coverage after the short break.