 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. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman. Angelo Sasha is here, big Tom Brady fan, Senior Vice President of NetX Information Systems from Brooklyn, New York. I don't think so, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Do you think it matters how much air is in a football? No, not at all, Tom Brady doesn't care about that. No, thanks for coming on, we have a great conversation. We love talking sports at theCUBE, so welcome. How's the show going for you so far? It's been fantastic, lots of great material. Veritas has been talking about 360 data management. Obviously we all know the benefits of that by now, so we have a lot of customers here, so I'm glad they got to see it from a senior leadership perspective, rather than sales guys and sales engineers going in there and talking to them and seeing Veritas executives really getting behind what we're talking about, so it backs up our story, and our customers are pretty excited about it actually. What's the nature of your relationship with Veritas? I know you had a relationship and maybe still do with Symantec, how's that all, how did it all evolve? Yeah, so we are a Veritas platinum partner. We would be what we consider a solution provider type partner. A lot of our business today is either directly or indirectly tied to Veritas, which is kind of funny because we started as a security company, right? So that's our roots, our systems management. That's where we were in 2005 when I joined NetEx. That's where we were for many, many years after Symantec acquired a company called Oterus. We just stayed in that vein, managing end points, securing end points, encrypting data. And then, so we're at 2013, we said, hey, you know, let's try to diversify the portfolio a little bit. And we used to manufacture end point management appliance for Oterus. So we said, hey, Symantec's got these things called net backup appliances, let's check it out. It's a form fact that we know how to sell and shoot four years later. It's been a great, great, great partnership for us, great partnership I'm sure for Veritas and for our customers. And that's a lot of our business today. So I mean, it's hot market, you know, data protection is exploding and security. Two of the sweet spots in the market right now. But so how do you approach the business with customers? Are you a specialist around data protection? You deliver services around that? Maybe you can explain on the model. You know, that's actually a good question because it's evolved quite a bit, right? So when you had a limited portfolio of just one or two products that you could sell to a customer, you're really doing a product sale, right? Which I would say that was probably the most difficult transition from the split from Symantec to Veritas because in Symantec we had thousands of products in the portfolio or hundreds of products in the portfolio that we could actually talk to. And for a little while, really, we had a handful, you know, we had the backup appliances, Enterprise Vault and ancillary things to bolt onto that, like Clearwell. I think one of the most exciting things for us as a reseller is to now be able to go have a discussion with our customers that we would never have before and rather than sit there and try to sell them a backup product or a storage solution. We could sell them a platform and solve many problems for them, right? Rather than sitting there and trying to sell one off. So our conversations are significantly more strategic now than they've ever been. And frankly, I speak for myself and my whole team. I know everyone enjoys the conversation more now that we have a portfolio to talk about than just a handful of products. Yeah, Angelo, you've got an interesting viewpoint on this split off of Veritas from Symantec. What have your customers said about it? What's been your interaction with the organization? What can you tell us about kind of the inside going on? Yeah, look, I've lived first hand on a Symantec acquisition of a company, okay? I was, we were not a Symantec partner when they acquired Veritas. Funny enough, I was actually doing Veritas consulting on my own on the side prior to Symantec purchasing Veritas. So I really, I made my career on two products, Veritas for backup and Ulterus for systems management, Symantec bought Veritas and I was like, hey, you know what, I'm just going to stay with Ulterus. Symantec bought Ulterus and here we are now, I'm talking to all of them. The thing I noticed was Symantec was always going to be a security company, right? And they weren't going to change that no matter how much they tried to integrate it. It's two radically different stories. And for many, many years, things that we look at as new products today were kind of already there in the Symantec portfolio but buried underneath other products that really never saw the light of day because when you have hundreds or thousands of products like I said earlier, you know, the ones that are going to move the most are the ones that are going to get the attention. So I think the benefit of the split is that it really allowed Veritas to focus on what they do well, which is managing data and Symantec to do what they do well which is securing your infrastructure and securing your data. From my perspective, our customers really appreciated that. Sure, a couple of them were a little annoyed that they had to now split contracts and deal with that kind of stuff but I think that was a momentary blip and for the most part, it's been well received from everyone we've spoken to. Angel, you said your conversations are evolving. Who are you talking to? And maybe take us inside some of those conversations. What are the big challenges they're having? A year ago, a year and a half ago, I was talking to either somebody who was on the messaging side and needed to archive emails or IMs or on the backup side and they just wanted to be able to meet their backup windows and maybe they get some better DDoB rates, right? Fun conversation to have, bit mundane. It's not really solving problems, it's just backing up data or archiving data. Today, we're having overarching conversations at a C level or a senior VP level or director level and talking about dramatic changes to the way they do business and how we can do business with them. Six months ago, NetExt, we weren't doing anything in the cloud. We were selling some customers DDoB space to the cloud and that's about it. We weren't talking cloud strategy with them. Today, we're talking to our customers about moving workloads to the cloud, doing it in a way that's predictable for them and doing it with Veritas. That's a really interesting point. Has that, I have to imagine that change who you're talking with inside the company, can you walk us through kind of a typical customer? It's, you know, and how that, you know, how you kind of move, you know, up into a more strategic discussion for cloud strategy. You know, so, if full transparency, that whole thing is still evolving, right? You know, 360 data management is still fairly new, right? So what we're seeing the conversations turn go from are, it would start, again, we're talking to somebody that we've been talking to historically in the backup side of the architecture side and we talked about wanting to do better things than what their backup is and started talking about, hey, this is what 360 data management is, what's relevant to that person, he's going to want to talk about, but then there's going to be things in there that are not relevant to him. So he'll make that introduction and he'll get other stakeholders in the boat with him. And that's something we've really appreciated because the people you used to talk to are now bringing in stakeholders to offset their own desires and own their own budgets to want to bring in other technology. And typically, when we get to that point where we're starting to talk about strategic pricing, is when you're getting that sea level person to really have that aha moment and say, wow, we're offsetting costs here, we're doing things like truly getting rid of tape or moving to the cloud and things like that. It's a conversation that really evolves and it still starts at the bottom, but we're figuring out ways to start it at a higher point. Well, those strategies are still evolving for most customers, the roles of those people that might've had one role, definitely are changing. I'm curious, one of the big transition points, especially for coming to Veritas, is going from licenses to some kind of more of a subscription model. Any commentary you have on your customers, their embrace or like-dislike of some of those transitions? I think the one thing the cloud has done is it's opened up a different avenue of how people consume my tape, right? Cloud is very much consumption-based billing, okay? And while that can complicate our lives from a reseller perspective in terms of having to collect and track monthly billing and things like that, they like it because they feel like, and it's the truth, they're only paying for what they're truly using, rather than paying for products or infrastructure that they're only using as part of the day or software that they're only using for a particular project. A lot of our healthcare systems might have a research project that they're going on and they might like to scale up for some backup licensing and then scale back down once that project is done. Consumption licensing allows that versus having to go to them and saying, hey, well, now you got to buy 200 terabytes of perpetual licensing and justify that capital expense rather than having an operational expense on just that one particular workload that you have to back up for that one period of time. Angelou, Stu and I are always interested in the human capital management aspects of things and you talked about, you went from sort of talking and having a conversation around email archiving or backup to one about cloud and cloud strategies from your internal organization perspective. How did you manage that? Are you re-skilling? Are you retraining? Is it just you got really super smart people that can adapt and fly? Well, I definitely have super smart people because they're all over there. That's right. So I definitely have super smart people but you know, it's a little bit of both. It's a little bit of, you know, you take, you know, one of our data protection practices Christian Murma, you know, he's been in the data center for God knows how many years he has seen technology evolve. He was a natural fit to look at cloud infrastructure. Started taking some classes, consumed it, all the information he could and now we're out there actively selling it. Some other respects we have to hire from outside and bring in some services ourselves to actually use maybe some third party partnerships to help us better understand how we price out cloud for our customers. So it's a little bit of everything. I think that that's what's exciting about it because I think for the first time in a long time everyone's learning something new at the same time because I don't care what anyone said about the cloud two years ago. It's different today. It's going to be different in six months. It's going to be different in nine months and I think that that's exciting. I've been in this industry since 1996. I've seen a lot of really cool things come and go. I just think that there's still the infancy in the cloud and I think it's exciting because everyone's still learning and anytime you can still learn I think that that's, I think an important part of your job, you know. So when you think about your sort of near term and midterm and long term plan for the company how do you sort of describe that? Where do you want to take this thing? Near term I want to have a solid end of the quarter, right? I mean. This is good, right? I mean market's booming right now. This is very good. It looks very good. Hopefully we will. Veritasa tell me it's not good enough but they're just never happy. No, business is very good. I think near term, near term for us you said, hey, how do we get our head around it? Near term for us is as we're absorbing all this information is start to really figure out what our path is going to be, right? So near term, I think we still have to identify other ancillary partners that we need to bring to the table. You know, we've got our partnerships with Azure, Microsoft Azure and our partnerships with AWS. We probably have to look at Google and IBM and see what they're doing. And then we have to look at other partnerships that are not related to Veritasa but still drive that home. You know, we maybe look at a different Kolo partnership or partnerships around outsourcing billing, things like that, so that we can make it where it's easier for our customers to consume the technology. So I think six to nine months from now if we would have the same conversation, everything that we're doing today was probably going to be somewhat different. But I just think that it's just still a lot of planning to do. Yeah, Angela, any feedback from your customers on what they're still on the to-do list from the vendors? We talked, you know, the strategy, clouds changing a lot. You know, what are some of the pain points that they said, you know, hey, if we could get, you know, this into, you know, the offering from Veritasa, some of the others, you know, would make our lives a lot easier. That's a, I mean, that's a tough question, right? Because we're going to them now when changing the conversation already, right? You know, obviously they're always asking for different features. But, you know, I don't like to get into a feature conversation with customers. I try to solve the problem. You're leading that conversation is what you're saying. Yeah, I don't want to get into the weeds of talking about, well, this widget does it at 50% and you do it at 48%. You know, I try to sit a little bit more macro. I think one of the things our customers have asked us to do a better job on is figure out better ways to make it easier to consume the technology from a budget perspective. So we're still trying to figure that out now. Pre-60 data management is a subscription. Veritas would like them, sold in three years. We're trying to figure out ways to get creative with our customers on that. What's the right bundle? What's not the right bundle? One thing that I've noticed, and Veritas has been great at it is if we have to have some flexibility in terms of adding things in and make it seem like it's all part of that bundle, there's been some flexibility. I think that because of that, we haven't hit that roadblock yet, where, well, you know, we really want this product in the bundle. Reality is that we'll work through that and try to add it in there in some way, shape, or form, even if it's behind the scenes. So the customer's CU is the experts. And what we often see is that technology is the technology. You know, it's pretty much understood. What's not understood by the customers is how to apply it to their business and their business is changing so fast. So it seems like they're looking to organizations like you're saying, okay, here's our business challenge. How can you help me? You tell me, and then the best answer is somebody I'm going to work with. Is that a valid premise? Yeah, it is, it certainly is. And I think we're uniquely positioned in the fact that, you know, we've got our partnership with Veritas and we're 100% focused to everything in the Veritas portfolio, so we don't compete from within. That's the same thing that we could say, basically, on Symantec and some of our traditional storage partners as well. That'll change most likely on our storage partners, especially because of what Veritas has been releasing with Access and some of the other software defined storage technology. When we're brought in, we're brought in as the experts in that finite area, right? So we're not brought in as a generalist type of reseller. We're brought in as, hey, I've got a data manager problem. I've got a data security problem or I'm trying to do some high performance workloads on storage. So yeah, we are the experts, but at the same time, we're being brought in for those handful of things. So we're not having these, hey, can you maximize my spend on antivirus software because I want to sell you commoditized software? It's just not us. It's not our thing. We're not adding any value to the customers for that. Or the partners for that. Angel, I'm curious, there's a lot of startups in the data protection space. What do you hear your customers asking you about them, you know, what's your thoughts there? No, I guess I got to be nice, right? Because I'm being streamed everywhere. They're not listening. Go ahead, be a New Yorker. You know, listen. I challenge Rubrik at any point in time. You know, those guys, Rubrik, Cohesity, those guys, they're new. They're the shiny new toy. The problem is they have them messaging out there. And the problem we have is that they're the shiny new toy. But when the rubber hits the road and when it's time to actually go and prove out what the technology can do, we'll win all the time. We will win 10 out of 10 times if we get the seat at the table, right? The problem is is because we were a limited portfolio, limited product, limited integration type of company before, we weren't getting that seat at the table. I think they see it now. I think they're starting to get a little concerned about, hey, you know what? If this 360 data management is what it's going to be and we all know it is, I think they're going to be concerned, you know? I mean, they're new and they're going to get attention. My honest opinion, I'm glad they came out. I'm glad that Rubrik and Cohesity and all these guys came out and did all these different ways to go to market because I think it really forced all of us to say, hey, we got some real tough decisions to make here. The competition has caught up in certain ways. Let's change the game. And 360 data management does that. And I think they should take as much business as they can right now because it's going to be short-lived. It makes you rethink your strengths. And like you said, change the game. Yeah, it changes the game. Okay, predictions on MLB. Yankees won their getaway game today. They put the pressure on the Red Sox. I don't know. Two and a half games back. You know, the Indians are looking good. My man, Terry Francona. What's your prediction? The Sox fans out number two to one here. So go ahead, you know. So I shouldn't say that the Yankees are going to win the World Series. Oh, he's a Yankee fan. I'm a Yankee fan too. Honestly, the Yankee fan, I think we all know that they weren't supposed to be this team. So I think this is, that's a team to look out for. You think this is their year? I think this is the year that they're going to challenge people. I mean, are they going to win? It's Cleveland. Do you really think Cleveland's going to win anything? They've won one thing in the last about 30 years. That's what they used to say about us in Boston. Angela, thanks so much for your time. Yeah, you're welcome guys. Really appreciate it. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live.