 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017, brought to you by Veritas. Welcome back to the Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stuart Miniman, who's my co-host for the week. Bob Swanson is here. He's the head of sales for DC Vast out of Chicago. Bob, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me, guys. So, well, first of all, the show, how's it going for you? We've now got enough data. It's been a couple of days, few days perhaps for you. What's the vibe like? What are the conversations like? Yeah, it's been a great week. This is the very tail end of the event, so a little exhausted, but it's been exciting. There's been a good buzz at the event, and we have a lot of our customers here, and just kind of seeing the buzz and the pace of innovation that's going on here with Veritas has been exciting. Tell us more about DC Vast, you focused on IT infrastructure services, but dig a little deeper. Right, yep, so we're headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and you're right, we do infrastructure and cloud services, so we do support-type services with a seven-by-24 call center, have different managed service offerings, different cloud offerings, and certainly do consulting and project work as well. So what does multi-cloud mean to your customers? You know, it's only natural that if they're not there today, that they're going to be multi-cloud at some point, so Veritas here is pretty uniquely positioned to be able to get customers there. It's all about flexibility and data portability, so I think where infrastructure and storage and data protection is sometimes not that exciting of a conversation, now kind of changing the conversation to data management, because everybody needs their data to become more productive for them, it changes the conversation, it has a little more sizzle. Okay, but your primary area of focus is infrastructure services, so that means, first and foremost, every year you have to help me lower my costs, you've been hearing that, I'm sure, for years and help me improve my operational efficiency, and you do that and really attack my labor problem, my tea labor problem, so I can focus on my business. Are those still the big overriding themes? Oh yeah, there's no question. I mean, I think the public cloud has been probably the most disruptive thing in our space, since the internet, and it's making customers reevaluate all costs and really how they're doing things and different consumption in financial models, so the technology is cool, and we like that conversation, but it naturally brings a big financial and cost savings and do more with less element to all the conversations. So what are the big trends that you're seeing in the marketplace, what are the conversations like with your customers? Yeah, and I'll give you an example, I think customers have different approaches to cloud, some cloud-first, everything's got to go, others maybe want to keep more of their workloads on premise, and in one customer example, where they said, hey, we want to move all non-production out to the cloud, and it was a single cloud provider, and they got about 40% of what they were looking to move out there, and they reached what they thought their estimated budget was going to be, so at that point, having that portability and having the tool sets to be able to move those workloads around becomes very important from a financial standpoint. So I wonder if we can unpack those, cloud-first and then the sort of guys on-prem. The motivation for cloud-first, and the type of company, they tend to be smaller companies, or do you see larger companies saying, hey, we're going all in, I mean, I've seen some stories in the press, large company, GE's going all to the cloud, okay, I'm sure there's still a lot of on-prem going on there. What are you seeing? Yeah, you're right, a lot of small businesses, certainly, makes sense for them, any startups too, are all pretty much born in the cloud now, you're not going to have too many financial backers that are going to want a startup to be spending too much money on data center or buying hardware, but the established large enterprises too are kind of all over the map, but there are even some of them that are taking this cloud-first approach, but the large enterprises and companies that have been around where it's not kind of a clean slate, naturally it's going to be hybrid, and ultimately there's probably a lot of predictable, static workloads that are, at the end of the day, going to be cheaper to run on-prem than they are out in public cloud. Public cloud is great for the stuff that's not predictable or very dynamic, so we're seeing, and I am from Chicago, and so they always say, most move faster maybe than the Midwest does as well, but yeah, we're seeing varying degrees of adoption and strategy. But in business, and the data center is good right now, I mean, it's kind of the market's sort of booming, but if you roll back a few years, you guys must have thought, and maybe you're still thinking it, okay, see this cloud is coming, like you said, it's one of the most disruptive, if not the most disruptive in a while, and it's going, aiming right at the heart of your business, infrastructure services. So how have you responded to that? You must be riding the wave now of data center growth and investment, but strategically, what are you thinking about in your firm? Yeah, I mean, there's no question, we've had to pivot, but it does create opportunity, and we do need to help our customers be able to be most cost-effectively managing their workloads, helping them with that. So where there's challenge and change, there's certainly opportunity, and we've seen it. Yeah, by my understanding, your firm also offers managed cloud offerings. Maybe it's been one of the things we've looked at is, the channel, can they get on board? Can they offer that? How is it working with the big cloud providers, and let's start there? Yeah, that's a good question, and a lot of people have a misperception that the cloud is kind of the easy button, you know? But at the end of the day. Maybe 10 years ago we thought that? Yeah, you're a hoodie. Right, but I mean, people need to realize that the same architecture and security considerations are there as they are for on-premise, so it's not the easy button, and you can just kind of set it and forget it. So some people that are underestimating that, still need help from a third party like ourselves to be able to help them manage it. Yeah, can you speak about kind of the maturation of your support services? Yeah, we started doing a lot of hardware support years ago when the business was founded in 1989, and at that time it was a lot of UNIX-based engineering workstations, and kind of morphed into servers and storage and other data center equipment, and then started doing a lot more software support, which all can be delivered remotely for the most part, from time to time you may need on-site for something, so that kind of changes the logistical model, and now with the cloud as well, we've just kind of evolved in that direction. And how about the Veritas relationship? What's happened like the Symantec sale, any comments on how that's evolved and where do you see it going? Yeah, we've been a long time Veritas partner, and really the reason why we first got started with them is because they were relatively platform agnostic and supported and endorsed heterogeneity, and in the old Foundation Suite days, which is now their info scale product, it's obviously had some name changes, didn't matter what operating system, didn't matter which array vendor you used, and it's good to have friends in the industry and alliances, but there's also some benefit of staying relatively agnostic like Veritas has, and that message resonates now more than ever with all the different cloud providers out there, and just being able to be interoperable with a lot of different technologies. Bob, what's your customer's reaction been to all the announcements that Veritas has been making here? Yeah, yeah, everyone's excited, now it's getting the word out, and I mentioned pace of innovation earlier, and it seems to have gone from zero to a hundred, really, really fast, so that's exciting, it shows commitment, I think, from the new executive leadership team at Veritas, and their backers at Carlisle as well, so I think it's an exciting time for Veritas and for us as a partner as well, and our customers. And anything, things you want to see out of those guys, from your perspective, from the partner standpoint, the voice of the customer, what's on their to-do list? Yeah, and I mean, the concept of data management, looking at holistically, is important. After people and intellectual property, I mean, data is the most valuable asset a company has, and a lot of that intellectual property resides in the form of data as well, so it's an exciting place to be as we kind of see the industry shift. Cubs or White Sox? Cubbies. All right, well congratulations on that. Yeah, it's been a really, really Cubbies, not just White Sox, I gave Cubbies one of, no. Cubbies all the way, in a die-hard, absolutely, yeah. Well, you're welcome for Theo Epstein. Well, we gave him, you know, we gave Theo, and Lester, you know, and Lackey. Theo seems to have the mightest touch, you know, and it's interesting too, you know, you can use sports analogies for a lot of things, and Theo's a guy that was a little disrupted by using data and analytics in his approach to, you know, managing a baseball team, so. Right, right, so, well good, that's great. We, it was an exciting World Series last year, hopefully it could be as exciting again. Must have been insane in Chicago. Absolutely, yeah, I'm getting ready for another run this year, hopefully. Excellent, well Bob, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. Thanks again, gentlemen. You're welcome, all right, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back. To wrap up Vision 2017, this is theCUBE.