 from Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York. It's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. Hi everybody, welcome back to Tavern on the Green. We're here in the heart of Central Park in New York City. The big apple, my name is Dave Vellante. And you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at the Veritas Solution Days, hashtag Vitas Vision. Veritas used to have a big, main tent day where they brought in all the customers. Now they're going out belly to belly, 20 cities. Dave Raffo is here. He's editorial director for Tech Target Storage. Somebody who follows this space very closely. David, good to see you. Welcome to theCUBE. Yeah, it's great to be on theCUBE. I always hear and watch you guys, but never been on before. Well, you're now an alum. I got to get him a sticker. And so we were talking about VMworld just now. And that show, last two years, one of the hottest topics anyway. It was cloud, multi-cloud, Kubernetes, of course it was hot topic. But data protection was right up there. Why in your view is data protection such a hot topic right now? Well, there's a lot of changes going on. First of all, a couple of years ago it was backup. Nobody calls it backup anymore, right? The whole market is changing. The data protection, you have newer guys like Cohesity and Rubrik who comes out with architecture basically from scratch. They build scale out and that's changing the way people look at data protection. You have all of the data protection guys, Dell EMC, Commvault, Veeam, they're all kind of changing a little. Veritas, the old guys have been doing it forever. And now they're changing the way that they're reacting to the competition. The cloud is becoming a major force and where data lives and you have to protect that. So there's a lot of changes going on in the market. Yeah, I was talking to a Gartner analyst recently. He said their data suggests that about two-thirds of the customers that they talk to, within the next, I think 18 months are going to change their backup approach or reconsider how they do backup or data protection, as it were, as you just said. What do you think's driving that? I mean, people cite digital transformation, they cite cloud, they cite big data, all the buzzwords. Just, you know, there's smoke, there's fire, I guess, but what are your thoughts? Yeah, it's a little bit of all of those things because the IT infrastructure is changing, virtualization, containers, everything, you know, every architectural change changes the way you protect and manage your data, right? So we're seeing a lot of those changes and now people are reacting to it and, you know, everybody's figuring out still how to use the cloud and where the data's going to live, so then, you know, how do you protect that data? And of course, when you listen to the vendors talk, you know, data protection, backup, recovery, it's very sexy when you talk to the customers, they're just oftentimes drinking from the fire hose, right, just trying to solve the next problem that they have. But what are you hearing from the customers? Tech Target obviously has a big community, you guys do a lot of events, you talk personally to a lot of customers, particularly when there are new announcements and what does the landscape look like to you? So they're all, you know, like I said, everybody's looking at the cloud, they're looking at how they're going to use these things, they're not sure yet, but they want data protection, data management that will kind of fit in no matter which direction they go, it's kind of, you know, we know, we're looking at where we're going to be in five years and now we want to know how we're going to protect, how we're going to manage our data, how we're going to use it, move it from cloud to cloud. So, you know, it's kind of like every, it's a lot of positioning going on now, a lot of planning for the future and they're trying to figure out what's the best way they're going to be able to do all this stuff. Yeah, so the, you know, the hot thing, and it used to be, like you said, backup, and then of course people said backups, one thing, recovery is everything. So the old bromide, my friend Fred Moore, I think coined that term back in the old storage tech days. But when you think about the cloud and you think about the different cloud suppliers, they've all got different approaches, they've got different, you know, they're different walled gardens, essentially, and they've got different processes for at least replicating, backing up data. Where do you see customers in terms of having that sort of single abstraction layer, the single data protection philosophy or strategy and set of products for multi-cloud? Well, where they are is they're not there, and they're, you know, far from it, but that's where they want to be. So that's where, you know, a lot of the vendor positioning is going, a lot of the customers are looking to do that. But another thing that's changing it is, you know, people aren't using Oracle SQL databases all the time anymore either, they're using the NoSQL, MongoDB. So that change, you know, you need different products for that too. So the whole back, you know, almost every type of product, hyperconverge is changing back up. So, you know, all these new technologies are changing the way people are actually going to protect their data. So you look at the guys with the big install base, obviously Veritas is one, you know, guys like IBM, certainly, you know, Commvault and there are others that have large install bases and the new guys, the upstarts, they're licking their chops to go after them. What do you see as, let's take Veritas as an example, the vulnerabilities and the strengths of a company like that? So the vulnerabilities of an old company has been around forever is that, you know, the newer guys are coming with a clean sheet of paper and coming up and developing their products around technologies that didn't exist when NetBackup was created, right? So the strength is that for Veritas, they have huge install base. They have all the products, the technology they need. They have a lot of engineers so they can, you know, get to the board and drawing board and figure it out and add stuff. And what they're trying to do is build around NetBackup, saying all these companies are using NetBackup. So let's expand that, let's build archiving in, let's build data management into that, let's build encryption, all of that internet backup appliances, they're going farther and farther into appliances. Seems like nobody wants to just buy backup software and backup hardware as separate products which they wear forever. So, you know, we're seeing the integration there. Well, that brings up another good point is, you know, for years, backup's been kind of one size fits all. So that meant you're either over protected or under protected. It was maybe an afterthought, a bolt on, you put in an application, put in a server, an application on top of it, you know, install Linux, maybe some Oracle databases. I was like, oh, we got to back this thing up. And increasingly people are saying, hey, I don't want to just pay for insurance, I'd like to get more value. And so you're hearing a lot of talk about governance, certainly security, ransomware is now a big topic, analytics, what are you seeing in terms of some of those additional value, those value ads beyond, is it still just insurance or are we seeing incremental value to customers? Yeah, well, I think everybody wants incremental value. They have the data and that was not just, like you said, insurance was like, how is this gonna, how am I gonna use this data? How's it gonna help my business? So the analytics is a big thing that everybody's trying to get in, you know, primary and secondary storage, everybody's adding analytics, AI, you know, how we use AI, machine learning, you know, how we're gonna back up data from the edge, internet of things, what are we gonna do with those as data? How are we gonna collect it, centralize it, and then use it for, you know, our business purposes? So there's, you know, it's a wide open field. Remember, it used to be people would say backup, nobody ever changes their backup, nobody wants to change backup. Now surveys are saying within the next two years or so, you know, more than 50% of people look at the, either add a backup product or just change out their whole backup infrastructure. So that was the interesting thing about when, you know, the ascendancy of data domain, as you recall, you were following the company back then and the beauty of that architecture was, you don't have to change your backup processes. Right. Now, that's maybe a challenge for a company like that, where people are, because of digital, because of cloud, they're actually looking to change their backup processes. Not unlike, although there are differences, but a similar wave, remember the early days of virtualization, you had, you're losing physical resources, so you had to rethink backup. Are you seeing similar trends today with cloud and digital? Yeah, the cloud, containers, microservices, things like that, you know, how do you protect that data? You know, some people are still struggling with virtualization, you know, like, you know, there's so many more VMs being created so quickly and that, you know, a lot of the backup products still haven't caught up to that. So, I mean, Veeam has made an awful great business around dealing with VM backup, right? Right. Where was everybody else before that? Nobody else could do it. We storage guys, we're like the cockroaches of the industry, which is, this storage just doesn't seem to die, you know, the joke is 100 people in storage in 99 seats. When you've been following it for a long time, you know, you see all the hot topics like cloud and multicloud and digital transformation are you surprised at the amount of venture capital over the last, you know, four or five years that has flooded into storage, that continues to flood into storage? And you see some notable successes, sure, some failures, but even those failures, you're seeing, you know, the CEOs come out of stealth in new companies and you're seeing the rise of a lot of these startups and a lot of these unicorns. Does it surprise you or is that kind of your expectation? Well, I mean, like you said, that's the way it's always been in storage. When you look at storage compared to networking and compute how many startups are there in those other areas, very few, but storage keeps getting funded. A couple of years ago, I used to joke, if you said I do flash people, just throw hundreds of millions of dollars at you, then it was cloud. There's always seems to be like a hot topic, a hot spot that you can get money from VCs and there's always four or five, at least storage vendors who are in that space. Yeah, the cloud, the storage cloud AI blockchain company is really the next unicorn, right? To write buzzwords, you can get money. And there's never just one, right? There's always a couple who are in that same area and then one or two make it. Yeah, and or if you've done it before, right? You're seeing that a lot. I mean, you see what the guys, like for instance, at Daytream were doing, Brian Biles, he did it at Data Domain, now they just did a giant raise. Cumulow. Yeah, cumulow for sure. Obviously, the cohesities are sort of well known in terms of how they've done giant raises. So there's a massive amount of capital now pouring in. Much of which will go into innovation. It's kind of, it's engineering and it's go to market and marketing. So no doubt that that innovation curve will continue. I guess you can't bet against data growth. Right, you know, yeah, right. Everybody knows data is going to grow, what I say, it's the new oil, right? The data is the big thing. The interesting thing with the funding stuff now is not the new companies, but the companies that have been around a little bit and it's now time for them to start showing revenue. And we're in the past it was easier for them to get money now. It seems a little tougher for those guys. So, you know, we could see more companies go away without getting bored up or go public, but. Okay, great. Dave, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. All right, great to have you. Thanks for having me on. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from Veritas Vision in Central Park. Come right back.