 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. Well, and welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, VMworld 2019 coverage. Dave, 10 years of CUBE coverage. We've been started out 10 years ago. VMworld's the last show standing. Our next guest is Todd Forsythe, CMO of Veritas. Great to see you, first time on theCUBE. Thank you. It is inaugural. I can't deny that. After 25 years in the industry, it's crazy. With your talent, I think we're going to have a good segment here. I'm sure we'll. I'm entertaining. No, seriously, we've known each other. You were on an advisory board together and you're a prolific marketer. You do a lot of great things. You're progressively trying new things with startups, but also you got to run big operations. That's right. Mark TechStacks, you like to look at platforms. This is a replatforming of the internet we're seeing with Cloud 2.0. And I want to get your thoughts on this because you got a unique perspective at Veritas. You know, an older brand modernized in real time. New products refresh in a massively changing growth, still growth market. It's a data business. That's right, 100%. So what's your take on this? As you look at the landscape, you got the modern brand, you got to take it out there, new products. You know, it's interesting. I had a really fascinating conversation yesterday with a customer and the customer said, you know, I was walking through the expo hall and I saw Amazon, I saw Microsoft, I saw IBM, I saw Dell Technologies, I saw Kubernetes, I saw Pure, I saw Nutanix, I thought I was in my own data center. And it's interesting, I think about our business and in our business, data doesn't care. Like, you know, data doesn't care if you're running a modern architecture. Data doesn't care if you're running legacy. So what we're really focused on is helping companies manage data in highly complex and extremely demanding environments regardless of their infrastructure. And Cloud 2.0 speaks to the complexity of that because, you know, these, when we were talking earlier with VMware about these categories that used to exist, these Gartner Magic Quadrants, you know, you can't put something that's a silo, not a silo and a silo, you're horizontally disrupting and data does that, data has to move around and it's got to move everywhere. So there's no more silo boxes of categories. 100% agree, you know, it's interesting. We launched enterprise data services earlier this year and that was the precise reason why because we've re-looked at what data protection is. Data protection is no longer backing up your data from a cloud to a cloud, from your on-prem. It's a much broader category. It covers how your data becomes available, how resilient you are, understanding where your data is, how it's categorized so you can respond to ransomware attacks, manage regulations around the world. So our view of data protection is a platform that is horizontal and cuts across. Well, and you guys have, I mean, the heritage of Veritas was the original data management company, right? No hardware agenda and so my question for you Todd is what attracted you to Veritas? Ah, softball question. So the most amazing customers any company could possibly imagine, Global 2000, the top telecommunications companies, the top banks, top stock exchanges. Secondly, a product strategy that's really zoned in back to your point about this platform that cuts across all of these diverse technologies and solves problems for customers. It abstracts them from the complex environments that they're in so they could focus on outcomes and Greg has done an amazing job recruiting a top-notch leadership team. So it was really great product, good leaders. Okay, now follow up is you guys, number one, top anyway, right in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, everybody wants a piece of your hide. Whole industry's coming at you. So what's the sort of messaging strategy to keep top spot from both outward facing and also product development? So we look at two types of competitors. Competitors that are offering point solutions predominantly playing in the mid-market and when you're a large financial institution and you have a highly complex environment, you're in a multi-cloud world, you can't afford to have a siloed backup data. So you need to understand how your data is classified, where it's stored. So if you're responding to ransomware and that ransomware attack is targeted to a specific server, you need to know if you have PII there or if you have cat pictures there. If you have cat pictures there, then... Let them have it. Let them have it, exactly. So our platform cuts across protection, availability and insights, which categorizes your data. So the data gets categorized and net backup, extends to the analytics platform so you know where your data is and you could take action on your data. The hard question on Dave's instead of softball, I'll give you a hard one. You got to refresh the brand of Veritas, it's got a lot of pros and cons. The pros are well-known, a lot of customers. I got a customer question later, but the brand is important because you have the new modern platform products, platform end products. You got to get the name Veritas, it has old meaning. You have a lot of older customers, you have legacy customers. How are you going to go out there and refresh? What's the, is there any new plans there? We have a ton of plans. We have the product, we have the customers. The product, the platform product is amazing. We are a quiet company, so we need to be noisier in the marketplace and we need to insert ourselves into relevant conversations that are top of mind with CEOs and CIOs, whether it's ransomware. If you look at all of the ransomware attacks, I read like two weeks ago in the state of Texas, there were 10, 15 municipalities that were attacked. At the same time. At the same time. And we have a solution that can help customers recover from ransomware. So we have to insert ourselves in those dialogues because dialogues, because we have a very, very specific point of view that can help customers. Well, but to John's point, right? Everybody who you compete with, we'll say we have a solution that helps solve ransomware. So how do you separate from the pack? Like I said, everybody's trying to pick you off. We want a piece of that install base. You got to keep the install base and you got to keep growing, right? So. I'll lay down the gauntlet. I would love any competitor to showcase how they can support 500 workloads, 150 storage targets, 60 cloud providers at enterprise scale with a high degree of reliability. Our differentiator is we can cut across these very complex, very demanding IT environments at scale. I want to get your thoughts on the customer journey question, because I think you mentioned customer base, we've been following what you guys do. I mean, I ran, I was in Bahrain for regional Amazon event I was covering in the Middle East and in the exhibit with this baritoss. And they reckon, hey, they're the cube guy. I'm like, hey, thanks for watching. But seriously, you guys are everywhere. You got huge customers, but you probably have a lot of customers that are trying to go from here to there. VMware is talking more specifically around, you know, you got the enterprise scale world and they want that cloud nirvana. And then there's that messy middle in between. So you probably have a lot of transformational stories. What is the patterns of customer profile that you see, some of them making the journey, some of them are having a hard time? What's the state of the mind of the customer that you guys have? Are you a customer? We are definitely seeing a hybrid multi-cloud world as you've heard here this week. We 52% of our customers are running in a hybrid cloud environment. And we have a core relationship with their legacy infrastructure and our customers are asking our help to extend their data protection and their net backup environment into the cloud, to back up the cloud, and across new modern workloads. So our customers are pulling us into their environments to do more. And that's cloud and hybrid. Cloud and hybrid. Cloud and on-premises. And our customers are also realizing that they're responsible for backing up their own data in the cloud. There's this misperception in the industry that if I move to cloud provider, the cloud provider will manage my data when in actuality you are still responsible for your data. You know, Amazon with security has a shared responsibility model. They say, okay, we protect the EC2, the infrastructure for S3, et cetera. You're responsible for pretty much everything else. And I think that you could draft off that message. You guys two couple of years ago had a great event called Veritas Vision where everybody came in and then you changed that. Now you sort of go to where the customers are. And I'm wondering, how's that working? It predated you. I want to ask you why that decision was made, but you know, how's it working out? I mean, company like yours, it was like four or 5,000 people there. It was a really good event. So great question and a highly relevant question because we're just about to launch our series. So, you know, having run large, large, large user conferences, and you look at distribution of your customers and you typically find that 80% of your customers are coming from the US. You look at our customer base, global international customers. We have a high percentage of customers that are outside of the US. So our strategy is let's take our user conference. Let's take our message. Let's take our value proposition to the customer. So we are kicking off next month, an entire series around the world. Germany, Paris, Rome, Seoul, Bali, Singapore, Melbourne, our vision series where it's our anti-user conference. We're taking content directly to our customers. So is this regional or those cities based? How is it segmented? Like Amazon, it's just like Amazon Summit kind of thing you go to. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so as a follow-up, it says there was a seasoned pro in this space. What, why not, why either or? Why not do both? I mean, it's budget, obviously one thing is it's expensive to run these events. I get it, but. I would prefer to put more custom, more money to where the customer is. The field, kind of. Yeah, into the fields. You know, one of the life lessons being a marketer is go to where the customer is. Don't try to get the customer to come to you. Well, you head of sales, I love that message. We know them well. So our strategy is to go where the customer is. Yeah, that does help sales actually. So while you're on that point, you're a very progressive marketer for the folks that don't know you. I'll share with them that, you know, you like to try things and you love startups and you love to promote new things. The marketing stack I've set on theCUBE and I'd love to have these challenges if you want. Love to debate it. I said the market, the Martek stack just didn't pan out. I mean, it worked, it didn't work. Is it evolving? Is it siloed? Is cloud changing the Martek stack? So again, pretty aggressive statement, but my point is email marketing was great for that generation, still is. There's new organic flows. Maybe I'm biased, but I'd love to get your thoughts. How is the marketing tech world evolving with cloud computing? So I'm going to say something provocative here. All right, here we go. I think the CRN industry has gotten B2B marketing wrong. What I mean by that is you look at most CRN capabilities in B2B and they're focused on an individual. They're focused on a lead. They're focused on nurturing an individual, but if you look at our customers and enterprise, individuals don't buy. Buying groups, committees and accounts buy. So where we're focused is looking at accounts and understanding account company-based behavior that shows buying intent and triggers, which then initiate our marketing. So it's not built around a lead. It's built around the- So account-based marketing. Account-based marketing, but account-based insight and intelligence around is there a project or a buying opportunity? And our good friends at Minigo, that's what they do, which is AI-driven trigger-based marketing. And that's where I think the industry is going. I want just thoughts on organic marketing because one of the things that's hot and silly, we live this world with theCUBE and we've been kind of pioneering this new model where co-creating content together and pushing it out into these digital streams is an organic process. It's technically earned media and PR parlance, but we're seeing the evolution of the CMO-like action around storytelling, right? And so like community-based storytelling, it's an organic function, it's hard to control. You can't just buy it. It's got to be kind of nurtured or enabled. What's your view on that? Because this is an emerging trend. We're seeing VMware just reorganize. They have a whole storytelling integrated group of PR pros that are acting like the marketing, like in their marketing. One of the most active customer segments we have is our Vox community. And if you think to your point about co-creation of content in collaboration, our Vox community collaborates on solving problems that customers have. They collaborate. Can you explain what is Vox community? Vox is a community of our technical users where they help each other, share best practices, and solve problems. A lot of how-to. A lot of how-to. Not in Vox media. Not Vox media, correct, correct. I was just going to make sure to get that out there. Forums, there's videos. Is this your community? There's a third party. It's their Vox community, yeah. And then to your other point, John, the marketing world has changed. We've quickly moved into a world where we now have an anonymous relationship with our customer, with email, with direct mail. We're always driving to registration, to capture a name. That world is long gone. A Facebook show that's been weaponized, so it's a data business at the end of the day. The user experience is horrible, right? Everybody hates that. And so, yeah, there are other ways now. You can use data, you can infer. You can read the tea leaves, probably make a pretty high prediction, or a highly accurate prediction. What is the most under-reported trend that you think marketers should look at in terms of capabilities that are working out in the field for you? I would say the ability to leverage predictive analytics, call it AI or machine learning, understand what's happening at an account and whether there's a buying trigger. I think accessing that information, learning from that information in terms of how should you initiate a selling motion and then enabling the sales force with that intelligence, I think is wide open territory. So a couple other things, if I can, just to get it in. So you guys made a big platform enhancements a couple of years ago, and then big eight dot, whatever it was, eight dot something, two, three, five, I think it was eight dot two. Customer momentum, can you update us on that? Maybe even customer examples, and then I got a partner question. Yeah, so I talked about the value of a platform and we'll take Renault as an example. So Renault NetBackup customer, Renault wanted to make their virtualized SAP environment highly available and they looked at a variety of different solutions and they looked at some solutions that were homegrown and others and they realized that just extending the Veritas platform was faster time to market 60% cost savings. So there's a perfect example of a customer leveraging our platform play. And then a couple partner questions. So we're here at VMworld, so your VMware partnership obviously pretty important. And then we're a pure Accelerate next month. You guys are there, you've got a big presence there, I know you've got a tight partnership with them. Give us the partner update. Partner update, so we have very solid relationships with Amazon, Microsoft, VMware, Google, Nutanix, Pure, and that's what we're really doubling down in terms of technology integration, joint go to market. Right. And the community site is vox.veritas.com, I just was checking it out. Thank you for the plug. And there's other, there's a church one, there's a religious one, not to be confused with Vox Media, so just want to make sure everyone got that URL. We think community is super important. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing your insights. Thank you gentlemen. Todd Forsyth, CMO of Veritas, more live coverage from VMworld after this short break.