 Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019, brought to you by Commvault. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are live on the show floor of Commvault Go 2019, fourth annual event, a couple thousand customers here. And Stu and I are welcoming back the CMO of Commvault, Chris Powell. Chris, welcome back. Thank you, thanks. Great to be here. We're excited to be here. We just came out of the keynote. Some interesting news to talk about, but let's kind of talk about what's happened. Commvault is a 20 year young company. Tremendous amount of acceleration. In the last nine months, a lot of leadership changes. You must be kind of hold on to the table because you got like the whip last, right? It's been exciting. It's been exciting. So tell us, here we are at the fourth annual Go. News in terms of sales leadership changes. Go to market opportunities with Metallic, with new partner programs for the enterprise. Tell us what are some of the things that are exciting to you and how Commvault is really in FY 2020 position. Hey, we're listening to our customers and partners. Yeah, yeah. Well, a lot of the things that you're seeing here at this show is just that. It's market driven. It's us responding to what we're seeing in the market, working with our partners. And a show like this is all about working with partners, our customers. And the announcements that we're making here are really releasing a completely new Commvault. The brand refresh that we've done just over the last month or so is been tied to a lot of the things that are changing with regard to the product portfolio, the head VGAC position, and a lot of the different leadership changes that you're seeing. And the leadership changes are really driving a lot of this shift of focus and really, I shouldn't say shift, really extended focus for the organization from a technological standpoint as well as from working with our partners. Yeah, it's interesting. The news ahead of the show of Metallic, Commvault now a SaaS provider. So it's interesting to give us your view as a marketer. On the one hand, you need to be the trusted enterprise supplier with a lot of customers. And the other one, you know, they've got cloud microservices, all the latest buzzwords. And, you know, SaaS is the model that a lot of customers want to be able to consume their software standpoint. So I know you have Rob Colussin who's going to be coming on. So I'll steal some of his thunder. And I'll try not to steal too much. So don't tell him the, what excites me so much about the Metallic product when we first started down this path, it was, we really started looking at the market and the challenge that came from Sanjay when he just first entered the building really was, we have industry leading technology. A lot of folks will talk about how we have industry leading technology. But if you really took a step back, you would have to have an honest view and say sometimes they would say, well, look, if it's a really straightforward installation, maybe Commvault might be bringing too much to the party. So why don't you look at some of the other solutions? And as we were talking to different customers out there, they were looking for SaaS solutions. And, but they, at the same time, they didn't want to make any compromises. And so much of the research that Rob and team working with Janet and with David know we're seeing is that as they were going out there, the solutions that were available today, and this sounds like marketing spin, right? But it's really what we were hearing back. They weren't very good. They weren't SaaS solutions are supposed to be easy. The customers really didn't see them as easy. They were running into scale issues. They were running into flexibility issues. So from the standpoint of building the solution, what we quickly realized is if we could reach Sanjay's challenge to us, which is bringing this fundamentally solid technology to a broader audience with a simplified use cases, that there's a great opportunity for us to bring value to more companies. So that's where this went. And the beginning reviews of this, as we brought this into beta and different people were seeing it, different customers, different partners, they even came into the conversation a little bit pessimistic, and they all left excited about what they were seeing. It's really good. It's really good. So targeted towards mid-market companies with around 2,500 or 2,500 employees. Give me just a little bit of a perspective on the choice that Komal is now offering the mid-market with complete backup and recovery, that's one of your flagship, and metallic. So the metallic offerings are meant for some of the most common use cases they're out there. Like Office 365 backup. And what we're trying to inject into the market, and the target of 500 to 2,500 employees is really just where we see the sweet spot of most of the customers of those sizes are the ones that are looking at SaaS solutions right now. But that's not to say as we've talked to larger enterprises, many of them are considering the addition of metallic as into their either subsidiaries or other areas of their business. And what Sanjay talks about, he sort of refers to as the data brain, is really bringing this together where you can add SaaS solutions onto your existing on-prem solution. So if you're running Komal complete, you can also be running metallic across other aspects of your business. So that's one of the things that makes it powerful up-market, but then we're also targeting the more common use cases that are more turnkey down-market. Chris, let's switch gears a little bit. So your team had a little bit of fun opening up the keynote. You had some of the stunt doubles for Thor from Starwood, and the woman has done both Star Wars and Marvel. And talking about the unsung heroes behind the scenes, kind of like your customers here. But there was another connection because they were Avengers and Commvault is, I believe it's the global business Avengers and it has to do with sustainability, which I know is something near and dear to your heart. So explain a little bit about why that's important and what it is. So it's definitely a passion of mine and something that we at Commvault are looking to, every company as we're driving this should try to stand for something bigger than themselves. And as we look at, this all started two years ago when we sponsored and I joined Robert Swan's expedition to the South Pole. We were the data sponsor for that expedition and it was the first expedition to rely solely on renewable energy. And what has evolved from that, from different conversations, we started having discussions about the carbon footprint of data. And with 5G, the internet of things coming and more and more data on the horizon, the people that we're speaking with and the reality I think that tech has come to is that we can't be part of the problem and we have to be part of the solution. So through a series of connections, we ended up speaking with the folks who were responsible for the UN Global Goals. It's the 17 global goals around the world that we're endorsed by all of the UN countries five years ago. There's 10 more years of it. And Commvault is extremely proud to be joining some of the largest companies in the world. Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, many in our industry and outside obviously to sponsor one of the global goals. But the way the program works is it's 17 global goals and there's one company for each one of them in order to try to represent it and drive it forward. Chris, you actually took a few of us around the show floor before it opened last night. We know conferences can have a bit of an impact from a negative standpoint. So tell us some of what Commvault's doing to make sure that this conference doesn't have such an impact. So as you mentioned before it's about 2,000 people that are here and I was shocked to learn and a lot of this is all in education as you go through life. An event of this size typically will generate 25,000 pounds of rubbish, of trash. So what we've done is partner with our good customer which is the Gaylord Hotel Systems and we've put together a model where we're trying to minimize the overall footprint. So we donate a lot of what you see around here construction materials are donated to schools and local organizations. We're using all the natural plants that will go back into the environment after this. No plastic, I'm trying and then the cups you see here on the table are all plant-based so we're trying to be very conscientious about everything that we're doing here at the show and minimize the footprint. When you're talking with customers, as I'm sure as CMO, you are doing a lot, we often, Stu and I and the rest of the CUBE crew, sustainability is a topic that comes up at every event. Where is that? When you're talking with customers in any industry, whether it's healthcare or oil and gas, where is sustainability in terms of conversation? Is that one of the key things that comes up that was also really important for CMO to say, hey, we want to be able to make sure that the technologies we're delivering are going to help our customers meet their sustainability goals? Absolutely and it's increasingly part of some, a number of RFPs that will come in for a convolt, so their companies are looking to have us be able to really represent what our sustainability, what our corporate social responsibility systems are and what we put in place and so we look at this through the lens of what do we do within our facilities, what do we do in events like this and then also what can we do with our customers? So it's increasingly relevant and there's tons of research I'm sure you guys have seen that as the millennial generation becomes more and more part of either significant influencers or decision makers, they're looking for companies that have a mission and that stand for something. All right, so Chris, talking about sustainability is something you're passionate about. How does that tie into the broader brand discussion of convolt, companies going through, we talked about the executive changes, you've got a lot of new products, so when people leave convolt go 2019, how do you want them to think of convolt? That's a great question. I think what we're hoping that we were really using convolt go as a culmination of so many of the things that have been happening over the last couple of quarters and certainly as I look through what we're representing now, it's what are we as an organization, what's the story we're trying to tell? So we launched just in the last few weeks a new tagline, which is be ready and that whole concept of data readiness is something that we're having within this show and it'll be in a lot of our messaging as we move forward. So this thinking of convolt as the organization that enables you to be ready and then extending that, sort of saying what does that mean and that's around how we protect the data, help you control where it resides, help you manage it for compliance and different regulatory needs and then help you use it and get value from it. So that's the big takeaway we're hoping that people have. The other piece of this that we have each year is we expose people to such expertise here at the show. This is not convolt talking about convolt, 70% of our sessions in the breakout theaters are partners or customers or other influencers. So we want people to come here and really see convolt as data experts as the people who are willing to work with them. Yeah, one little nugget you shared also, you've been growing how many developers you bring from internal to the show. I have to think that Sanjay has a little bit of push from that based on his last role. Yeah, certainly, the DevOps community is increasingly, especially with some of the moves we've made and Hedvig, the DevOps communities going to be increasingly an audience for us to engage with, but we bring 45 developers to the show this year. It's about 40 from convolt and five more that have joined with Hedvig and they have 30 or 60 minute whiteboard sessions and they're completely jam-packed. There's, I think last year there was over 150 whiteboard sessions over two days with customers just coming in and going through the details of this because a lot of organizations, they're faced with right now and in Sanjay's words, they have to move from something to something and they need people to be able to sit down and have honest conversations with them. I joke with people sometimes that one of the terrible things that has happened to marketing with the advent of technology is we have to be truthful now. You can't just spin things and so we're stuck having to tell the truth but convolt has a great truth. We've got a really solid truth to tell, we just need to tell it. Well, and I love how marketing is so scientific these days. You're right, you have to tell the truth but you also have, if you have the right foundation within your organization, the ability to access data, actually glean insights from it, develop, you know, whether it's a new partner program or new technologies, new routes to market, that's the power that having visibility and access to the data can deliver to any type of organization. When you talk with customers who've been, we've got some on the show today. Hey, we've been using convolt for 10 years. When you talk to them today, the theme of be ready, more than ready, how are they perceiving their foundation with convolt and all of the changes that you've made, not just in the last 10 years but in the last nine months alone, what's that customer feedback? Yeah, the customer feedback has been tremendous. I think they, so many customers are, and something that's so great about convolt is our customers want us to succeed. They see this market shifting tremendously. They've been with us for a while and they want us to succeed. When they look at the changes that they're having to overcome, they're excited about really beginning to learn that as they move from something to something, that we can help them on that journey, that they don't have to go somewhere else for that journey. So whether that's looking into SaaS areas, whether it's modernizing their infrastructure, whether it's moving to multi-cloud and those environments, we have the right solutions and the right way for them to be able to make this transition for their company. So Chris, we're relatively early still in the show, so I hate to ask, but give us a little bit of a go forward. A lot of change in the last nine months. What should your customers be expecting from convolt through the rest of the year and by the time we come back to convolt, go 2020? Well, I think when you talk to Sanjay, he always puts me back on my heels a little bit and tells me that there's more coming, there's more coming and we're going to keep going. So Sanjay is a very dynamic leader and he's looking to make sure that the company isn't just driving to convolt go and then it's going to sort of be smooth sailing with these things. I think this is an exciting time to be here at convolt. It's an exciting time to be in the industry. As we look forward, the new leadership that's come in and some of the things they'll be able to do in terms of our go to market, I think we're going to be exciting. Avinash coming into this organization and his expertise, his skill set and all of the brilliant engineers he's brought in to sort of join our industry leading engineering team. It's going to be, I can't wait to see what they come up with from a marketing standpoint. We had a solid product for a number of years, but it's always challenging to sort of continue to tell a story and come up with new ways to tell it. As you get new things in your box to be able to talk about, it's great to be here. Well, Chris, we want to thank you for joining us on theCUBE today. We're excited about the next two days of all of the folks, leaders, new leaders, customers, partners that we're going to be talking to and really unpacking what being ready means to them. So we thank you for your time and we look forward to a great event. Great, thanks very much. For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Commvault Go 19.