 Live from Chicago, Illinois. It's theCUBE. Covering VeeamON 2018, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to the windy city, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here covering VeeamON 2018, hashtag VeeamON. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Stu Miniman, my co-host. Brian Kuhn is here. He's the chief digital officer at OVH, U.S. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. Thank you very much for having me. Thanks to OVH, a lot of people might remember OVH, V-Cloud Air sort of. Yeah, that whole thing happened almost a year ago, actually. So the acquisition of V-Cloud Air happened May 8th of 2017. So we're just a little over a year since the acquisition has happened. All right, how's it going? It's going great. What it means is we've been running that business for about a year now. The European side of the business came a little bit later, but learning all about our customers, learning what they need, and finding new ways of making them happy. The epic nature of the return that VMware gave to its ecosystem is well documented. Todd Nielsen, the former COO of VMware, used to talk about how every dollar spent on a VMware license, $15 was spent in the ecosystem. Everybody was really freaked out that the cloud was going to destroy that ratio. It was going to decimate the ecosystem. Fast forward, I don't know, five, seven years later, VMware is certainly growing. The ecosystem seems to be thriving. What's your take? I'll agree with you, the ecosystem is thriving. We're here at a conference that's part of that ecosystem, right? So in terms of what we do, in terms of what OVH is, and as an infrastructure provider, we're thankful that it's thriving, right? Because we have other opportunities to serve customers' needs based on that VMware stack and based on the services that that ecosystem provides to the customers. Why is the data center booming right now in your view? Why is the data center, what do you mean by that? Well, the data center business, the enterprise business is cranking. Well, I think that's partially because you have that next wave of customers that are figuring out that being in the cloud is a better thing than being on-prem and having to need those resources to manage that type of activity. And the data. And the data. Brian, maybe expand a little bit. That ecosystem, because some people looked at the VMware stack and were like, oh, they're going to not close it, but we've done all these integrations, we've done all these things in the data center, and now when I put it in the OVH or the IBM or the AWS cloud, how many of our services can we move with them? What do you see? Veeam, obviously, is there partnering with you and with VMware heavily, but can you speak to kind of some of the breadth and depth of what did come along and anything that doesn't come along with that? What came along as part of the acquisition or comes along with the customer regression? The things that if I did vSphere in my data center versus going to the OVH cloud, I can do Veeam in either place. There's other parts of the ecosystem that I can, but there's some things. If I go to OVH, I'm not saying, hey, can I throw in my storage array with it? So that's where we're trying to understand what part of the ecosystem went. Yeah, let's go with the positive side first, right? Is certainly, as moving to a cloud provider and someone to host your private cloud or host your software-defined data center stack, you don't have to worry about power. You don't have to worry about, in our case, water, because we're water-cooled technology. You don't have to worry about the network. So the infrastructure piece of managing this great. You don't have to worry about, I would say, maybe some of the redundancy-type issues or having a data center that's available. OVH manages its own network, so we don't have to worry about capacity or throughput in that means. I think on your other flip side, you're saying, what can't I do because I'm in a hosted private cloud environment versus a Colo or on-prem? You're just saying that I was a part of my stack that I was building myself and now you take care of it or Amazon takes care of it or IBM takes care of it and maybe there's not a way for that software hardware to come along. Yeah, your point is it hollows out the value proposition of the traditional ecosystem and moves everything into the cloud, right? So somebody like me can make that transition well but not everyone has. But we haven't seen that. You see, well, you certainly see the cloud exploding, but maybe it's moderated some of the growth in the data center, but it still seems to be thriving for those companies that are well positioned. I don't disagree and I'm thankful for that it is because that gives us more opportunity to help those customers out. Why does a cloud service provider like yours, wrong question, what does a chief digital officer in a cloud service provider like yours do? Not sort of say why does it need one but everybody needs a CDO, but what's your role within the company? Great, so OVH US is a separate standalone company than OVH Group, partially because of how we want to make sure that the data sovereignty is covered and how we're protecting our European customers. So we are bringing up a standalone company. So Russ Reeder was here, you spoke with him at VMworld last year. He's the CEO, so he has his own staff and one of the people on his staff is me is the chief digital officer. Up until recently I managed marketing so that was part of my portfolio but we still have my title as chief digital officer so that we can serve strategy. So what are we going to do? How are we going to serve our customers? What are the segments that we're going to tackle and how are we going to take and go to market and take those service offerings forward and what is the market doing and how is it moving? And so I have a team that's working on strategy and that's a separate strategy than what Group has because we're tackling a different market segment. I also have a team of product managers so looking at, okay, this is our strategy. What are the offerings that we have at our disposal? What do customers, more importantly, what are their needs? How do I serve those needs and get those needs met? And how do I work then with the engineering teams to actually build those products? So I have a team of product managers. I also have a team of what I'll call the sales enablement team. So technical marketing managers or solutions architects to find a term for them. But these are the folks that are ensuring that we have good, strong handoff between product and sales to make sure that the sales team is trained, that they understand the value propositions not only at the marketing level, but at the technical level. And then they're also the ones that are really paying attention to everything it takes to get that product out into the market the right way. And you still have marketing under your? No, I do not have marketing anymore but that was a function I managed for a while. The strategy, product management, the specific offerings in the sales enablement, technical marketing. And I have one last thing, customer intelligence. So once we put that product out into the market, how do we know it's being accepted? How do we know it's being adopted? What new insights can we gain to feed back into the system? So we often say that the difference between a business and a digital business is the way in which a digital business leverages data. And so if I go through these four strategies, so I presume data is part of the strategy. I'm going to talk about the offerings. There's maybe not, well maybe there are data offerings but maybe how data contributes to the health of the offerings. Sales enablement, I don't know we talk about that but then customer intelligence obviously is a lot of data. It seems like data cuts orthogonally through each of these. Can you talk about the data? First of all, do you buy the premise about what a digital business is? And how do you leverage data? How do you as part of your strategy understand as the CDO, how much time do you spend how data affects monetization? Yeah, so let me take it to two angles. One, what data do I use through that process? So the strategy team is certainly looking at data from analysts, customer data. I like, I've seen an analogy of a school bus. You're looking forward, you're looking in your side view mirror, you're looking in your rear view mirror. So forward is where is everyone going? Where's the industry going? So that'll be your analyst reports. Sideways is, or your side view mirror is what's your competition doing? So what is the data about the competition and what movements will they be making? My rear view mirror is what are my customers doing? So that'll tie back into that, the customer intelligence team that I have is how do my customers actually behave and how do they stack up with where the industry is going? So there's just one set of data points and then of course my product team is taking the inputs of those strategies and having then one-to-one conversations with customers and finding out firsthand what their needs are. So as a product management professional there's no ifs, ands, or buts. You always want to hear at first hand from the customer what they have to say. And the role of marketing, that's the role of data in marketing. It's not your current purview, but it's your former one so you can speak to it, I presume. Can you talk about that a little bit? Sure, so also two different ways. So we can look at this from the perspective of an e-commerce business, or we can look at this as a V2B business and generating leads, right? And then there's the ecosystem of all the data around marketing beyond that. So in the e-commerce business, of course I'm looking at what's coming through the funnel and what traffic sources are feeding into it and what's my best conversion rates and those are all great data points for something like the e-commerce business. For transactions. For transactions. Similarly on the leads side of the business you're still looking at traffic, you're still looking at events or whatever feeds your funnel. So what are the sources, what are the channels of leads and how are they converting? And as I nurture the customer, how many touches does it take to bring them back? What exactly is bringing them back? So these are all further data points to feed something like the lead side of the story. If I think outside that ecosystem, you think of an event such as this is what are going to be the best traffic drivers and how do I know what reach I've hit? So all sorts of data points around brand and touch and things that'll affect that as well. I mean, definitely a lot of affinity between marketing and digital. Of course. In fact, if I were the head of marketing, I would come to you and say, hey, can you help me with my, whether it's lead gen, demand gen, are there new techniques I can use besides hitting the same old cookie approaches, et cetera? And do you guys have that discussion? And how do you- And I think that my head of marketing who's watching me here now is probably saying, yeah, and I've got some tricks that I need your help with because I've got new things up my sleeves that we need the product angle for, right? And the right product marketing spin. Right. Brian, talk to us a little bit about your customer set. There are certain geos or verticals that OVH targets a little bit more in any kind of use cases, customer success stories you might be able to share. Yeah, that's great. So as opposed to OVH group in France and the European business where they've really come from the web hosting industry up and they have a very specific way that they've encountered the market and penetrated, at least here in the US, we're coming into the market really from scratch and the acquisition is really what's bringing us in. So our prime market is the market that we first got from the acquisition. So these mid-size and enterprise companies, so defining who that demographic is, first as the type of customer. Second then, what need are we serving for them? So in the vCloud Air experience, vCloud Air was selling data center extension, data center replacement and disaster recovery and that is certainly what we keep selling because we have those thousand customers that still need that story. And that's an opportunity then to tackle more customers just like that, that have the same types of needs, that same perhaps niche need or common day every need because you were asking earlier, like why are all these customers, why are all these people moving to the cloud? It's because they're discovering that if they don't, they're going to be left behind or they've got some need inside their company that is forcing them to do that, whether it's to save cost or what have you. So in the case coming back to our customers is it is these mid and enterprise-sized companies we're still serving everything that is, will lead in with private cloud technology and bring to them those data center extension, data center replacement, disaster recovery stories and we'll augment that because what's different about us now is we're OVH and we have not only that hosted private cloud product but we also have dedicated servers, we also have public cloud and then we have this really fantastic backbone. We own our own network. We have this huge amount of capacity, 14 terabits per second with that. We have an anti-DDoS solution behind that and these are all things that we get to bring to those customers, introduce them to. So for a customer who's doing their digital transformation and migration to the cloud, it's not just, hey, we can bring you over on your VMware stack and migrate you in but it's, hey, we can do that plus a lot more that maybe you didn't know that we could do for you. Talk about that a lot more. Are those professional services or are there offerings that you have? Sure, so it's primarily first the offerings themselves, the services, so you asked me about customers so I'll give an example. We have a customer today that has come to us because of the data center consolidation need and they brought that in and also needed disaster recovery but what they're finding now is they have a large amount of data and what is best for them is an object storage solution. So augmenting the host of private cloud with our public cloud offerings to solve that need. And last question is, so how do you guys position relative to some of the other things that, for instance, VMware, it's got, we just had heard IBM on, IBM cloud, it's obviously they make a big deal out of AWS because there's such a hot company right now. How do you guys differentiate from those other offerings? So that's a really intriguing question, right? Because that's the key is like, how are we different? We want to come in and be your trusted cloud provider to help you do what we're going to be first really good at. So we're really good at that VMware stack. We're going to bring you and help you migrate to the cloud. We're going to run and manage that business for you or the operation of your data center and your infrastructure. But what goes around that then is, that is our core, infrastructure is our core business. So we build our own servers, we build our own data centers, we own our own network. So that is what we do best for you. But that's coupled with the fact that we're doing innovation with purpose. So we've learned how to do the building of those data centers and do water cooling to save on costs. We've learned how to do all of this at high capacity automation capabilities so that you have lightning speeds to get your provisioning up and running. Then we also have this concept where OVH is really about being open. So something that does differentiate since set us apart is the freedom for you to build your infrastructure and the freedom to choose your offerings and your providers. So OVH sponsors open cloud foundation and we believe in the opening of that. We use open source technology. We use open stack in a lot of our products. So that you have that there, we're believing that. And we have the interconnectivity with our pops to other networks if you so desire. That openness is something that kind of permeates through us. And then lastly it's our passion for our customers. We're serving 1.3 million customers around the world today from Fortune 500 companies to top tier educational institutions. And in the case in France with small, medium businesses and individuals. So we have a very wide range of customers that have trusted us to host their infrastructure and we like hearing feedback. We love operating on that feedback and we love solving the needs for our customers. All right, Brian, we'll leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. You're welcome. Okay, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from Veeamon 2018. Right back.