 Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019, brought to you by Commvault. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE, day two of our coverage of Commvault Go 19. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, we are in Colorado. Please welcome to theCUBE, Sandy Hamilton, the VP of Customer Success. Been at Commvault four and a half months, so welcome to theCUBE, welcome to Commvault Sandy. Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to sit here with you this morning and share a little bit about what's going on at Commvault. And it's been great, you guys are here. It's been fantastic. We had a great day yesterday. We got to speak with Sanjay, with Rob, Don Foster, Mercer, a whole bunch of your customers as well, exactly. The vibe, the positivity from the channel to the customer to the course, even the OG Commvault guys that I worked at Commvault 10 years ago that are still here, it does really feel like a new Commvault. And you're part of that, Sanjay probably brought you in in the spring of 2019. And we've seen a lot of progress and a lot of momentum from Commvault in terms of leadership changes, sales structure, new programs for channel, exciting stuff. You kicked off this morning's keynote and you had the opportunity to introduce Jimmy Chen, who if you haven't seen Free Solo, I haven't seen it, I'm watching it as soon as I got home from us. Amazing, but what a great way to introduce failure and why it's so important to be prepared because it is going to happen. I just thought that was a great tone, especially talking with you, who leads customer success. Yeah, absolutely, thank you Lisa very much and good morning Stu, appreciate it. You know, it's interesting, because when I think about customer success here at Commvault, there's so many different facets to it, there really is, all about engaging with our customers across everything that they do. And we want to make sure our customers are prepared for something that will likely happen to them someday, right? We have one of our customers talking about a cyber attack on their environment and how we were actually able to help them recover. So it's also that preparedness that Jimmy talked about, right? And making sure that you are training as much as you can, being prepared for what may come and knowing how to recover from that as he talked about. I'd also think one of the things that we do really well is we listen to our customers when they give us feedback. So it's about how did those customers use what we did differently or how did they try it? And it wasn't exactly what they thought. And so how do we continue to innovate with the feedback from our customers? And Sandy, one of the things we're hearing loud and clear from your customers is they're not alone, they're ready. I love we have Matthew who's coming on a little bit later talking about it. He's like, I'm here and my other person that does disaster recovery, he's here too. So I'm doing my own free solo. We've been talking about in tech, it's the technology and the people working together. You talked a little bit in your keynote about automated workflows, machine learning. Talk about some of those pieces as to how the innovation that Commvault's bringing out is going to enable and simplify the lives of your customers. Yeah, I think it does come down to how are we really taking care of the backend if you will from a technology perspective and what can we make more automated, more secure? You think about things like I was even talking about new automated workflows around scheduling even your backup windows, right? And if you think about the complexity that goes into scheduling all of that across all of your environments, we have the ability to actually have you just set what your window should be and we'll manage all the complexities in the background which allows you to go do things like this for customers to come to do things like this. So Sandy, I tell you, some of us, there's that little bit of nervousness around automation and even customers talking about, oh well I can just do it over techs and I'm just thinking back to the how many times have I responded to the wrong techs thread and oh my gosh, what if that was my data that I did the wrong thing with? Yeah, I mean one of the things that I love about this company and again I've been here for a short period of time but our worldwide customer support organization is just one of the hallmarks I think of this company, right? And how we're actually there for those customers at any point in time whenever they need any type of help and support and it isn't just when you actually need that when something goes wrong, it's also proactively. We have professional services people. We have all kinds of folks in between. Our partners play a huge role in making sure that our customers are successful with what they have going on. Let's dig into and dissect the customer lifecycle. Help us understand what that's like for one, an existing Commvault customer because we talked to a couple yesterday who've been Commvault customers for a decade. So walk us through a customer lifecycle for an incumbent customer as well as a new customer who is like Sanjay said yesterday, one of the things that surprised him is that a lot of customers don't know Commvault. So what's the lifecycle like for the existing customers and those new ones? Yeah, so our fantastic install base of customers that we have today, one of the things that we are striving to continue to do is to make sure we're engaged with them from the beginning to the end and the end isn't when they end. It's when we're then fully deployed helping them do what they need to go in their environment. I think one of the great things about where we are with Commvault right now is we actually have new products, new technologies, if you guys have been exposed to. How are we making sure that the customers that we've had for a while are truly understanding what those new capabilities are? So if you think about it for us, it's how are we helping them to actually do more with their existing Commvault investment and potentially leverage us in other ways across their environment. So we have our team of great sales reps as well as our fantastic sales engineers all the way through again, PS and support. Those people are always in contact with our customers helping them to understand what we can really do across that lifecycle and if they need to make changes along the way, we're here to help them do that as well. For a newer customer, one of the things that we're really focused on right now is that initial sort of onboarding for them and what's that experience like for those customers. So having more of a programmatic touch with those customers to make sure that we're more consistent in what we're doing. So they are actually receiving a lot of the same information at the same time and we're able to actually help them actually be frankly in a more accelerated fashion, which is I think really important for them to get up and running as well. And when we talked about Metallic yesterday with Rob and some other folks and I think a gentleman from Sirius, one of your launch partners, yes, Michael Stem. And the fact that that technology has the ability for partners to evaluate exactly what is going on with their customers so that they can potentially be even predictive to customers in terms of whether they're backing up Endpoints or O365. I thought that was a really interesting capability that Commvault now has, it's giving that insights and the intelligence even to the partners to be able to help those customers make better decisions before they even know what to do maybe. That's exactly, and our partners are such a key part here to everything that we're really trying to do and especially with the Metallic, it's all through partners, right? And so we're really trying to drive that behavior and that means we really have to ensure that we are bringing all of those partners into the same fold. They should have the same capabilities that we do. It's one of the, one of the also things that I'm trying to work on right now is how are we making sure our partners are better enabled around the things that we have and the capabilities. So we're working on as part of those partner programs that you mentioned is do they have the right tools if you will and knowledge to go do what they need to go do to help our customers as well because it really is a partnership. So Sandy, we've been looking at various different aspects of the change required to deliver Metallic which is now a SaaS offering from a services and from a support standpoint. I think of a different experience from SaaS as opposed to enterprise software. So bring us to your perspective. This comes back a little bit to the onboarding experience where it's got to be much more digital touch. It's got to be much more hands off because that's the way the customers are thinking about buying Metallic in the first place, right? They don't have to have a sales rep. They can go buy Metallic, frankly, on their website right now, metallic.io. You can go there. You can get everything you need to get started. And so we want to make sure that the customers have different ways of engaging. And so some of that could very much be digital. Some of that can be different avenues of how they're wanting to work with us. But when you also then think about that type of a model, you start to think about consumption matters, right? And how much they're using and are they using everything that they purchased? And so we actually have a small team of customer success managers right now in the organization that are working with all of the new customers that we have in the SaaS world to say, how are you doing? How's that going? You know, how's your touch? Is there anything that's presenting a challenge for you? Making sure they really do fully understand the capabilities end-to-end of that technology so that we can really get them onboarded super quick. As you probably know from talking to those guys, we're not having any services really around Metallic because it's not designed to need those services, which is huge, you know, I think in not only a SaaS space but for Commvault as well, I think it's a new era and it also provides frankly an opportunity for our partners to continue to engage with those customers going forward as well. One of the first things that I reacted to when I saw Metallic at Commvault Venture was a Commvault Venture. I wanted to understand that. And so as we were talking yesterday with some of the gentlemen I mentioned, it's a startup within Commvault. So coming from Puppet, which you did and which Sanjay Merchandani ran very successfully, got Puppet Global, your take on going from a startup like Puppet to an incumbent like Commvault and now having this venture within it. Yeah, you know, I think it's one of the brilliant things that Sanjay and the team did very early on to recognize what Rob Kalushian and the rest of the folks were doing around this idea of what is now Metallic. And they had been noodling it. And Sanjay's like, that's got a really good opportunity. However, we got to go capitalize on that now and bring that to market for our customers now. And if we had continued on in the way that we were, which is where it was night jobs and we didn't necessarily have all the dedicated people to go do it, we may not have Metallic right now. And so it was really a great thing within the company to really go pull those resources out of what they were doing and say, you guys are a little startup, you know, here you go do it. And, you know, we actually had a little celebratory toast the other night with that team because of what just a fantastic job that they've done. And one of the common threads and something everybody said was the collaboration that it really brought not only within that team, but across Commvault because there's a singular goal in bringing this to market for our customers. So it's been a great experience. I think we're going to leverage it and do more. So, Sandy, before we let you go, need to talk a little bit about the puppies. Fabulous. If I had one here, I would, but I don't. So a couple of months ago at VMworld, I don't know if you guys were there, you guys were probably there. We actually started this thing called the data therapy dog park. And there we had a number of puppies and they were outside, folks came by, you know, visited, they stopped, they distressed, they got to pet a puppy. I mean, the social media was just out of this world, right? And we had San Francisco policemen there. It was great. Even competitors, I will say, even competitors were there, it was pretty funny. But by the end of it, over 50% of the dogs that were there actually got adopted out, you know, into homes where they, you know, otherwise wouldn't have. Since then, there have been a couple of people that have actually copied this little idea and, you know, places are springing up. So we have what we call a data therapy dog park here where you can go in, get your puppy fix, you know, sit with the dogs and relax for a bit. But, you know, we're super excited about it as well because, you know, it's sort of a fun play on what we do, but it's also, I think, you know, a great thing for the community and something that is near and dear to my heart. I have four dogs. And so I'm not planning on taking another one home, but I'm doing my best to get some of these adopted. So if anybody out there is interested, just let me know. Uh-oh. Are those adoptable? Oh yeah, all of them. Cheese. I'm picking up a new puppy in about eight days. So other- He needs a friend. He needs two. I've got to have- If he says two dogs enough for you, he needs a third. Oh! I have a friend that has two puppies at the same time and said it's not that much more than having one. Oh, I've had it. I've had it before. You're good to go. We can hook you up. Uh-oh. Oh, no! But one of the great things is it also, first of all, imitation is the highest form of flattery for other competitors that are doing something similar. But you also just speak to the fact that we're all people. Right, we are. We're traveling, especially for people that go to a lot of conferences, and it's just one of those nice human elements that, similar with the stories that customers share about, hey, this is a failure that we had and this is how Commva helped us to recover from that. It's the same thing with, you can't be in a bad mood with, I think, puppies, cupcakes, and balloons. So if there were cupcakes there, I don't know that I could finish the show today. So, okay. That's fantastic. I took one of the little puppies rehearsing yesterday on main stage. I took one of them with me up there and I was just holding it the whole time. You know, it was really, it was, it was, it was great. So that's a good experience. Uh-oh, I'm afraid to venture back into the data therapy don't work without taking another one home. Hmm. Well, Sandy, it's been a pleasure to have you. Thank you both very much. I appreciate it. Appreciate the time. Thank you. And I hope you have a great rest of the event. If you need anything, let us know. I'm sure we will. And I can't wait to talk to you next year when you've been a Commva for a whole, like, 16 months. Yay! And hearing some great stories. Forward to it, thank you. We do as well. All right, take care. First Stu Miniman, Sandy Hamilton, the puppies. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Commva Go 19. Thanks for watching.