 Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019, brought to you by Commvault. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of Commvault Go 19 from Colorado. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we have a CUBE alumni back with us. Archana Ben-Katriman, you are the research manager for storage and data center for IDC. Welcome back. Thank you, always a pleasure. Likewise, so here we are, day one of Commvault Go. Lots of stuff, news, I shouldn't say stuff, coming out in the last day and a half or so, but also lots of momentum that really, kind of the dust kicked up when Sanjay Merchantani took over the home from Bob Hammer. Just about nine months ago, you've been covering Commvault for about three years. Just love to get your perspective on the last three years and what you've seen particularly in the last nine months. Yeah, yeah. Interesting, I've been tracking them for three years and they've been slowly making that pivot to the cloud world, to changing how they're pricing, to really break free from that perception that they're very traditional, they're very cumbersome, they're expensive, they're trying to break through that and hiring Sanjay was kind of validation that, hey, we are committed to the future and Sanjay comes from this very agile, devopsy, open source, containerized, puppeteer world, so he is new culture and Sanjay came in and I think he started making a lot more changes. We saw that their journey to the cloud was a lot more accelerated and they're starting to talk this new language that is attracting developers. So they talk about cloud-native technologies, they're talking about database and data as the bottleneck in development lifecycle, which is all music to developers ears and then that means you're going to bring in data management, which is a huge issue, right to the developer strategy, right to the boardroom strategy, that's where it needs to be because data is actually at the heart of what companies are doing and we keep talking about speed of development and speed of applications, I think it's time we start talking about speed of intelligence and speed of insights because that's what's going to give companies a competitive difference and that's what Sanjay brought in in the last nine months and I was tracking the Hedwig acquisition as well and a lot of companies, a lot of people who I spoke to here were extremely excited about what Hedwig brings into the table and there was a lot of interest in what they bring in. So I think Sanjay brought in a new culture to Commvault and he cemented that new culture with Hedwig because with Hedwig they acquired that new startup culture as well. So it's really coming together of a lot of new culture and that's going to overpower the old culture and going to bring a lot of transformation within. So Archana, I'd love to get your insights into how that changed and you said, Sanjay came from Puppet, we talked to him earlier today about moving faster and CI CD and all this wonderful things but how that aligns with customers. We talked to customers that are seven or 10 years working with Commvault and inside the organization, the person that owned the backup and recovery process, how familiar are they with their developer team and how that's coming together in organizations. So is Commvault meeting the customers where they are? Are they skating to the puck? How does that alignment match? Yeah, absolutely. It's imperative that Commvault moved and a lot of traditional data protection vendors moved because customers are moving as well and they're forced to move because they're seeing a lot of onslaught of data. Corporate data is growing 50 to 60% every year. That's just business data. So they're grappling with data growth and they're expected to do more with less and data is fragmented everywhere. So they are forced to make that change as well. So they are employing data protection officers but at the same time they're also employing data scientists and newer data model architects to do new things with data because they are under pressure to deliver that better customer experiences. So companies are going through that change and in August we did a research and asked organizations, are you happy with your existing data protection tools and are you going to change it? And interestingly 60% of those who are operating in multi-cloud environments want to change their data protection environment. And that shows because until now there was this huge power of incumbency, right? I will, I'm okay with this. I'll probably buy the next version of this and try and do iterative improvements but now companies realize that this data growth and fragmentation and multi-cloud environment represents a new frontier and they need to move from this thinking that they've had and they're willing to change and work with the newer kind of companies that provide them what they want around unification and simplification. Yeah, I think you brought up some great points there. We've found when we talk to customers they seem to be more open than ever to try something new. I kind of wonder if that's why Metallic almost has a separate brand, a separate website. It is a Commvault Venture because Commvault has incumbency and it has a pedigree but if I'm trying something new Commvault might not be the first one that I think of. So today was the first time I heard about Metallic and I love the branding and there's so much of gloss and shine so I need to get behind the gloss and shine but I've seen that was one of the busiest places that we've seen today in the exhibition and that shows Commvault's commitment to the cloud. It's that they're entering the SAS world and they're talking that cloud-like scalability and it's also modern applications they're talking about. The pricing is like consumption base so they're talking that cloud language and it's going to propel them a long way. In your perspective as customers that you talk to in any industry have so much choice you're saying hey the customers are recognizing in this multi-cloud world in which they find themselves operating we've got to be able to change our data protection strategy. I imagine things like the rise in cyber attacks or GDPR or the new law in California that's coming are some compelling events but when customers look at the landscape and Stu was saying they're so much more open to maybe trying new vendors for example how does Commvault, significant part and Commvault maybe new part with HeadVig and with Metallica as a sort of this startup within Commvault how did they elevate and differentiate themselves in your opinion in a competitive landscape? Interesting, yeah so when you look at startups they have a lot of agility but they're not able to bring that enterprise grade scale excuse me and if you look at a lot of traditional vendors they had that scale and enterprise grade guarantees but they don't have that agility but with this initiative they've done some clever things and brought agility and scale together that's their differentiator. Seen though, grab some water we'll talk for a second you probably even talk all day that's the hazard right of going to these events is your voice especially with the altitude but as we've seen other large incumbents do the same thing. Absolutely, everyone's pivoting to the same. It is but also integration of technologies is not easy and that sort of the table stakes is how are they for example going to integrate HeadVig such that one HeadVig's install base has a smooth seamless transition and this opens up more opportunity for them and vice versa that Commvault's install base now has more opportunity. Talk to us about what you've seen and I talked a little bit yesterday about some of the integration connections that they've made so far but that's really key because a lot of companies don't do integration as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There've been some big acquisitions and they do integrations for years and years right? It's been just 13 days since the acquisition closed so it's still early days but they need to keep that momentum up and I see a lot of synergy. So bringing storage and data management together is a good idea but at the same time I heard Sanjay allude to it on the stage as well where they're talking about application and data and moving away from that infrastructure and that view is very important because companies need to move from protecting data centers to protecting centers of data that's what they need to think about so they need to abstract from infrastructure. So which is why when you look at it although it's software-defined storage the language that they use is very clever they're talking about APIs, they're talking about newer workflows, they're talking about changing business processes, they're talking about enabling data, they're talking about controlling data and using data for insights so they're putting in a lot of newer perspective to this infrastructure view and taking a software-defined container-defined API-defined and that's kind of very, very modern I think and that's going to bring a huge amount of difference. So thinking about some of the customers that you've spoken to, we'll say in the last year that are either using Commvault or evaluating Commvault, some of the positioning that you just talked about too kind of very interesting but I presume quite strategic with how they're talking about protect, use, manage, control, data. Are you here, from Commvault, are you hearing and seeing this is what I've been hearing from customers? Is there an alignment? Are you hearing from customer, what you heard from customers all sort of like in the last year, what Commvault is now delivering and the messaging that they're articulating, are you now, are you seeing alignment? Like they're going in the direction that I'm hearing with what customers are wanting. Yeah, so customers are grappling with multi-cloud data services so it's not just data protection but they need to get visibility of data across there. All the data sets across the board, they're challenged not just with structured data but growth in unstructured and semi-structured data as well so they need to look at newer kinds of storage like object storage and all that so they are grappling with newer kinds of challenges and that's why this new language is going to be hugely useful and that's why this coming together of storage and data management can actually make a big difference because together they can paint a picture for the organization and tell them these are the challenges you're grappling. You don't need to buy in different solutions from different places and buy it and bring it all together. We have deeper level of integration and we can solve it and Commvault will be able to get to the customer at the storage level before the customer hits the data management problem and then starts hunting for a newer solution so they're getting in early before the problem actually becomes an operational issue and they're ready with the solution when the customer gets there. You mentioned data visibility a minute ago and that's critical, right? For organizations that are, whether it's a smaller organization or one that's heavily matrix, if you don't have and a lot of them don't have visibility into all of the data, something that you talked about in the very beginning of the interview that speed of intelligence and speed of insights they can't take advantage of that. Yeah, yeah. Yes, so companies are investing into a lot of data scientists but then, so I was talking to actually three, I was doing a CIO executive dinner on this whole topic about data driven and then some of organizations, some of the CIOs put their hands up and said, hey, we have actually employed new data scientists and these data engineers and data scientists don't come cheap, right? They're very heavily skilled, talented professionals so you employ them and now we're working backwards and now we are trying to do what we can do with the data models and there's so much problem we are facing. We don't know what data is good data to be analyzed, what data we can delete, what data is cold data that we can send to archives and what do we need to, what are the use cases that we need big data analytics for? So they're working backwards and they're not able to leverage and capitalize on all the resources that they've spent on hiring these kind of data scientists and data engineers. So I think they need to sort that, the organizations need to get a hygiene about their data first and then take the next step around analytics and hiring these kind of data scientists. So that's the first step. Sorry, go ahead. Arjun, I was curious if you could comment on a statement that Sanjay Merchandani made this morning says, we need to rethink the kind of the lines and then the definitions between primary and secondary storage. What do you think of that statement and where do you think Commvault ultimately will fit in the broader marketplace? That view is quite aligned with what I see when I talk to customers as well. So companies, so data is growing and it's fragmented but at the same time, the lines between primary storage and secondary storage are blurring as well. So the data that's cold today may be hot data tomorrow. So they need to understand, get visibility into data. Just 10% of data is hot data today. So that data needs to sit in the most expensive storage environment so they can leverage it. And the rest needs to go into tiered into other colder storage, cheaper alternatives. But at the same time, when you want to access that data, it should not be difficult because now when you push it to a cloud archive, you archive and be damned, right? You're not going to get that data back in the format you want, at the time you want, at the cost you want. So you need to make sure that you invest in storage technologies and you make that data tiering in such a way that when that cold data is suddenly becoming warm data or hot data, you need to have access to it instantly in the format you like. Well, Arjuna, thank you for sharing your insights and recommendations and just your view on the industry in Commvault. We appreciate your time. No problem at all. Thank you very much. This is Du Miniman. I am Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE from Commvault Go 19.