 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're wrapping up, close, wrapping up our coverage of two days at Commvault Go in Colorado, and we're excited to welcome a new guest to theCUBE. We have Tim Carbon, principal systems engineer for storage and data protection at Mitchell, a Commvault customer. Tim, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. First question, are you ready for the interview? I came ready. You're born ready. Yes. So for those of you who weren't here, the get ready be ready is a big theme of the event. So Tim, first of all, before we get into what Mitchell is doing with Commvault, tell our audience who Mitchell is, what types of products and services do you deliver? Well, Mitchell is a little known name, but we are a technology company that provides smart solutions or smart insurance solutions. I'm sorry. We provide smart technology solutions for insurance companies in the area of property and casualty. Okay. It is a mouthful. It is a mouthful, but you did really well. So based here in the US. Yes, in San Diego. Oh, that's right, sunny San Diego. We were just talking about the scooter problem. How could I forget? So you came on board there, you said around five or so years ago. Yes, about five and a half years. Insurance, ah, the data volume growing, right? Must be, you're wincing exponential. Talk to us about the data strategy and the importance of data to Mitchell and what you're doing with Commvault to protect it, get that visibility and use it to deliver stellar services. Well, that's exactly it. We see growth and year over year and making sure that we keep that data protected is the most important thing. We have to be able to provide that back to our customers in an instant and keep it available. That's number one is keeping everything available. So of course I'm going to choose Commvault. I always look into everything that's in the market and I talk with everyone. I mean, I've had conversations with everyone from Rubrik to Veritas and I agree with Forester in saying that Commvault's the best product for the data protection. Why? Mainly because we're seeing them move forward faster than anyone else. They're able to, or I'm able to I guess I should say, utilizing Commvault, micro tune my environment to be able to provide the fastest level of backup and recovery rather than buying blocks and putting these blocks together. And even when it comes to the hyperscale product, it's a Red Hat server cluster. So it's not a black box you can't see inside of. You understand what's going on underneath it. And it is a tried and true methodology for doing what you're trying to do. And it's, I guess for lack of better words, just really resilient. I love it. Great. So Tim, you said you've looked at a lot of solutions. You've been on Commvault for quite a while. Talk to us a little bit about that usability of the product. Some of the questions we have is, how simple it actually is to use, how much your team needs to study up and get on it. And just kind of the cadence of change that you're seeing coming from Commvault. Now my team's really good. They've been with Commvault since version six. They know how to use the Java console. So it's not so much as they are learning something new. But what's happening and what I've noticed with Commvault from within the Java console to the command center is they're making everything else a lot easier. So they're not changing the way I'm doing my mature backups of say Oracle or file system, things like that. But they are making it a lot easier for me to start and recover and I guess change configuration of the VMware backups. They're making it easier for me to manage my storage. And with the command center or with the web console, I should say, they're making it so much easier to report. Anyone that's utilized the comnet from back in the day, the old reporting tool versus the new centralized metrics reporting tool knows that there's no comparison whatsoever. And I can point all of my com cells to one reporting system and provide reports that go over everything from storage utilization to just resource utilization all the way down to charge back based upon any given criteria I want. You have full visibility. Full visibility. You mentioned so that you've been a Commvault customer for a while, not just at Mitchell, but your previous company. You also said before we started that you've done a lot of speaking on behalf of Commvault, your use case, the challenges that you had, the business outcomes. I would love to get your perspective on being one of those customer champions. What are some of the things that you're hearing from prospective Commvault customers? Are they asking you for your advice like, hey, we had this kind of compelling event, Tim, what would your recommendation be? A lot of it is specifics. And I think that's, they'll be asking questions based upon who they're talking to. And I'm the guy that you talk to when you want to talk the details. So they'll come to me and say, hey, what about this hyperscale configuration? And I'll say, well, rather than go with the larger environment and go with the smaller nodes and spread it wider, that way you can transfer more data in. But it's a lot of just how is it working for you? And even into the newer environments where we're looking at the, you know, O365 being backed up by SAS is how easy it is to configure. And that is quite possibly the easiest thing to configure that I've ever run across. Wow, ever. Ever. Well, like I said, they keep making things better. And in the past I've used, you know, Veritas backup exec as everyone has back in the day. I mean, we've done data transfer on tapes. I've used TSM for seven years. So everything's going to be easier than that. And even a lot of testing of different backup applications. And when you look at what we're doing with cloud configuration and Commvault SAS model, Commvault really takes a lot of the configuration out that you would need to do. And they have their own Commcell administrator that takes care of it. I was talking with Justin not too long back. He's here. I was so happy to get to meet him. And he manages all that for us. We enter in the specifics as far as configuration and it's done. So you guys, oh, go ahead, Steve. Tim, you know, what I'm curious about is the feedback loop that you have with Commvault. Obviously you're quite happy with the product. You've seen the maturation over time. Are there things you're asking for or things that you're seeing on their roadmap or maybe things that were announced this week that are exciting you or things that you would love to help do with things even better than what you're doing today? I don't know. This may be the thing that the sales people don't like about me is I don't hold back when I see something that I want to see different. And I've done this with different storage manufacturers that I've worked with as well as of course with Commvault and the one thing that I always come back to and this is one thing I joked with my previous sales person on is if you're going to call it Commvault complete, why doesn't it include orchestrate and activate? You can just call it Commvault and then give us another Commvault complete that actually contains everything in it because I wish I could run the activate in-house. The problem is as I priced it out, I've provided that data to my upper management and they just will not buy off on it. And what was Commvault's response to that feedback? Because they're very pro-listening to their customers. We've heard that resoundingly. They are and there really wasn't anything. They said their hand things up the channel and what's interesting about it is in talking to the activate people today or yes, either way, during the show, I found out that they added another plan that it would allow you to by activate by the terabyte and not by the user. So that may be something that could help drop the price if we isolate specific environments to what we would use the activate for and that would be workable, I guess I should say. So speaking of activate data governance insights, the California Consumer Privacy Act, CCPA is around the corner. You're based in San Diego. Where is Mitchell in terms of its readiness for that and how is Commvault, are they part of that solution to get ready? As far as I can speak to the data protection side of it because that's where I'm at. And I have everything in place for us to be ready by the time everything comes through. And it is utilizing Commvault. I mean, that's the backbone of being able to keep us protected at that level and all levels, I should say. Tim, as we mentioned before, you've been speaking. You've been quite busy at the show. Give us some of the highlights that you've had and what brings you to go? How many of them have you been to? Well, I went to the first two, Florida and DC. I skipped out on the last one. I wanted to send my coworkers there. So my coworkers that I work with, I made it a point. I said, I'm staying at the office. I'll take care of everything, go. And no pun intended. I was going to say that was good. Yes. And then I came back to this one. The big thing is learning. This is an opportunity for me to talk to industry experts, to talk to customers who have done things that I'm planning on doing in the future to help out customers who haven't done things that I've already done and let them know, hey, look out for this or look out for that. But with this one, a big part of it is looking at the workflows, looking at the automation, utilizing or being able to utilize all the other features that I have available to me that I'm not using right now. Last question in the last few seconds of the time we have left, lots of announcements from Combo in the last nine months, a lot of change, a lot of leadership change, reps to market change, new ventures. Some of your perspective of what you're seeing with this new Commvault? Well, it's exciting when you look at it. At first I wondered about the Hedvig acquisition. I mean, it's a step into the primary storage market and some people say that a lot of the companies that are partners with Commvault could see that as overstepping boundaries. But when I learn what they're doing and what they're planning on doing and utilizing it as more of a data protection multi-cloud strategy, that's really could push them a little bit further along than anyone else in the data protection market is. So the changes look to be, for lack of better words, really good for the company. And in turn really good for us, the consumer, and making sure that we can do everything that we need to do, and we're ready to move forward. Of course you are, you have the shirt. That's right, we're ready. Tim, thank you for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon, sharing with us what's going on at Mitchell and your perspectives on knowing Commvault as long as you have, we appreciate your time. Thank you for having me. Our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE from Commvault Go 19.